On a Dark, Grimy Night

"When you follow two separate chains of thoughts, Watson, you will find some point of intersection which should approximate to the truth."

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur C. Doyle's "The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax," from His Last Bow: Some Later Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes, 1917) 

Lenore Glen Offord wrote only eight mystery novels during her lifetime, but amassed a bulky body of work as a critic and served as a reviewer on the staff of the San Francisco Chronicler for over thirty years – a gig which landed her an Edgar Award for Outstanding Criticism in 1952. Nonetheless, it would be a capital mistake to overlook Offord as a mystery novelist.

The Glass Mask (1944) successfully employed a "perfect murder" ploy and refused to fall back on a cop-out for a happy ending, which firmly anchored the book on my list of all-time favorite detective stories. It's also one of the better village mysteries I have read. My True Love Lies (1947) revealed it self as a wonderful, artistically themed standalone novel with an equally wondrous, double-twisted ending and provided a clever answer as to why a murderer would hide a body inside a clay model.

So I was glad to learn Felony & Mayhem had reissued Skeleton Key (1943), which offered an avenue for further exploration of her work and introduced her series-characters – Georgine Wyeth and pulp-writer Todd McKinnon. Georgine Wyeth was introduced to the reader as a strikingly modern character: a workingwoman and widowed mother of a seven-year-old girl, which left her barely with any time for a personal life. It's during one of her ungrateful jobs that the reader catches a first glimpse of her.

Georgine is roaming a cul-de-sac in Berkeley, California, called Grettry Road, carrying a miniature briefcase full of magazine-subscriptions, but they so far remained blank. Nobody seemed interested and there even appeared to be "a sudden wave of sales resistance," which lead to the reflection that she couldn't "sell water to a desert tank corpse," but an opportunity presents itself when a case of mistaken identity gains her entrance to the home of an eccentric professor – who, according to "the consensus of the neighborhood," is perfecting "a Death Ray" in his laboratory!

In actuality, the suspiciously minded scientist, Alexis Paev, is looking for a scientific-illiterate typist to convert his large collection of notes into typescript. It's a job worth a hundred bucks. Luckily, Georgine is fabulously ignorant of such subjects as chemistry, physics and bacteriology. So why not paunch on the opportunity to earn some extra money?

However, the job requires her to be a temporary resident of the dead-end street, because the professor is adamant that not a single page is carried off the premise.

As a new resident, Georgine "noted with amusement" how much Grettry Road "resembled a village," in its semi-isolation, but without the public knowledge of everyone’s private affairs and the inhabitants viewed her as "a fresh mind on which everyone was eager to stamp his own impressions" – which positioned her in the role of social observer. It's in this position that she involuntarily amasses an astonishing amount of knowledge about the locals.

A wealth of information that proved its worth when the local air-raid warden, Roy Hollister, is killed during a blackout in what appears to have been a freak accident, which occurred when "a driverless car plunged downhill" and "struck him as he was going on his rounds." Georgine had noticed during a block meeting Hollister "wardened harder" than anyone she ever saw and how "he had sort of impact on people" that she "couldn’t define or explain." Obviously, there are one or two potential motives hidden just beneath the surface.

The semi-isolation, village-esque quality of Grettry Road begs for a comparison with the English village mysteries of Agatha Christie, but what truly gave the book a British twang was the blackout angle. It's a part of World War II that's seldom played up in American mysteries from the period and therefore became closely associated with English mysteries, which was used by practically every writer active at the time. But the only other American mystery novel I can think of (from the top of my head) using/mentioning blackouts was Frances Crane's The Pink Umbrella (1943).

A well-drawn backdrop, affected by America's entry into the war, coupled with an interesting, somewhat original motive lifted the plot slightly above average, which was a nice result since the book was evidently a vehicle to introduce and establish the new series-characters – by bringing Georgine and Todd together. The only part of the book I found truly disappointing was how the disappearance of one of the characters was presented as an impossible problem,  someone was heard running up a flight of stairs and "at the top had vanished into thin air," but the magic was quickly dispelled and revealed as merely a misundertood situation on the part of Georgine. Oh well.

All in all, it was still a nicely written mixture of plot and characters that resulted in a good, but not outstanding, detective novel with an interesting WWII background.

Well, that's the best I could do with this review and I'm not if I can squeeze in another review before the end of the year, but there will be a best-of/worst-of list. I just haven't decided yet if they're going to be separate lists or simply merge them into one long, rambling blog-post. So stay tuned.

The Art of Deception

"For in the long run, either through a lie, or through truth, people were bound to give themselves away..." 

- Agatha Christie's After the Funeral (1953)

After a brief, unannounced leave-of-absence from this blog, I've been slowly picking up my normal reading pace and managed to finish My True Love Lies (1947) by Lenore Glen Offord in just a few days. And no, contrary to the title, it's not a sugary, one-note romance novel, in which true love stands as the sole survivor, but a bone-fide detective story by a writer who served as the mystery critic for the San Francisco Globe for three decades – and stood-in for Anthony Boucher whenever he was unavailable during World War II.

My True Love Lies is set in the year following Allied victories over the Axis powers in Europe and the Pacific, but civilian and military life is still entwined in the San Francisco of 1946. The streets are filled with navy uniforms and the story's protagonist, Noel Bruce, has a job as a government job as a paid driver while she studies (line-) drawing at the Sherwin Art School. Noel is also friends with a charming and good humored Navy commander, named Miles Coree, who came back to San Francisco to find his fiancée married to another man.

A great detective once observed artistic blood is liable to take the strangest forms and the body found inside an unfinished war sculpture, a clay model called "Woman at the Grave," can attest to that statement!

Offord is represented on my best-of list with The Glass Mask (1944), because it’s an excellent treatment of the "perfect murder" ploy without a cop-out ending and an example of the kind of detective stories American's weren't suppose to be writing at the time: the kind set in a small and sleepy country-side town in which time has crept forward instead of marched. My True Love Lies doesn't bat in the same league as The Glass Mask, but the writing plainly shows Offord knew her way around a plot.

The reader is constantly kept busy with mysterious developments and analysis's of the crime. There are crimes from the past lingering in the present and unknown pursuers are harassing Noel and the relationship between the different characters become more, and more, entangled. There are the "Five Scared Artists:" Noel, Anna Tannehill (it was her sculpture in which the body was discovered), Will Rome, Rita Steffany and Paul Watkins – who's inseparable from his cousin, Daisy. This lot is rounded out by the head of the art school, Eugene "Papa Gene" Fenmer, a brash reporter from the Eagle, Red Hobart, a derelict known as "Old Dad" and the ex-wife of the murdered man. And they all gravitate towards the scene of the crime.

Offord actually came up with a clever solution as to why the corpse was hidden in the clay model (other than dramatic effect) and there was a nifty double-twist at the end, which made My True Love Lies an above average mystery novel. It missed that special spark to make it really great, but it's definitely better than similar artsy-themed detective stories such as Dorothy L. Sayers' Five Red Herrings (1931) and Ngiao Marsh's Artists in Crime (1938).

In parting, here's a nugget of wisdom tugged away in the opening of the second chapter of My True Love Lies and reflects on the news playing up the Bohemian angle of the murder case: "Like many journalistic implications, these were partly true and mostly a long way from accuracy." We're almost a century removed from the publication of this book, but I'm afraid this little quote still holds some truth today considering you could make a special-edition DVD box-set for 3D home entertainment systems of the recent news coverage of the missing Flight 370 with downloadable content of Jesse Ventura taking the viewer through all the conspiracy theories.  

Well, enough filler writing for one review and I'll probably grab a good, old-fashioned locked room mystery from the shelves for my next read.

 

The One-Man Book-Club

"To read of a detective’s daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy."

- Rex Stout.

Until a few years ago, the message board of the John Dickson Carr collector website was not entirely unlike a disreputable alleyway, tugged away in an obscure gas-lit street of Sherlock Holmes' Victorian London, where the fugitive shadows of the city gathered to tell and boost of tales of haunting crimes and murder most foul. However, crime has the tendency to spread and soon we were absorbed by the blogosphere, which provided us with the tools necessary to brainwash the masses indoctrinate your children promote classically-styled mysteries, but it turned the JDC forum into a ghost town – and one thing I do miss, from time to time, are the one-man book-clubs.

A One-Man Book-Club is exactly what its name implies: you read a book and post your thoughts and theories as you go through the story. This resulted in some interesting "reviews," at least I think so, and because I have nothing else at the moment I decided to revisit a few of them.

One month before I began blogging, I read Lenore Glen Offord's The Glass Mask (1944) for one of these One-Man Book-Club threads and the first thing I noted that it was the kind of detective story that American mystery writers reputedly never wrote – set in a remote small-town unaffected by the passage of time and echoes the sleepy, country-side village of Miss Marple's St. Mary Mead. The problem is also one that could have been torn from the pages of an Agatha Christie novel: was an ailing and inoffensive matriarch murdered by her grandson to inherit her property and an opportunity to get married? According to the local gossip machine, he did, but it's impossible to proof as the remains were cremated and there are many other unanswered questions.

Offord's main characters, however, are not stock-in-trade and even ahead of their time. Georgina Wyeth is a single mother of an eight-year-old girl and has relation with her semi-official fiancé, pulp writer Todd McKinnon, but she's not your quintessential dunderheaded heroine entering dark cellars or abandoned houses on her own – and the book has its "Had-I-But-Known" moments. But the biggest triumph of this book is how the solution to the "perfect murder" is handled.

S.S. van Dine's The Dragon Murder Case (1934) was a disaster of a story that I had to abandon midway through, but not before taking a peek at Vance's explanation and discovered not only that I was partially correct but also that I was being to logical. If you’re curious, you have to read the original post where my observations are hidden behind proper spoiler-tags.

Darwin Teilhet was one of the first writers to address the atrocities committed by the nazi's, when Hitler rose to power, and used the detective story as his vehicle. The Talking Sparrow Murders (1934), set against the rise of the Third Reich, opens with the unlikely sight of a talking sparrow, imploring an elderly man to help him, moments before the man himself is shot. A cover-blurb pointed out that the book, atmosphere-wise, suggests the work of another American mystery writer, John Dickson Carr, and I agree. The story has a few nice touches of the macabre, the sparrow that spoke like a human and nazi officials going out of their way to bow to a lone pine-tree, but also a young American hero who's caught between a blitzkrieg of crime and the efficient Schutzmännen of the German police force.

Unfortunately, The Talking Sparrow Murders merges the spy-thriller with elements of the detective story, which left me in two minds, where I wanted more from the plot, but was nonetheless intrigued that it was published years before Hitler began WWII. This makes me want to give less weight to its shortcomings as a mystery. I mean, it's not an historical novel – it was written in 1934, and it turned out to be a glimpse of things yet to come!

My fall as a snobbish, cynical purist began to pick up momentum after reading William DeAndrea’s The HOG Murders (1979), which has a wonderfully conceived plot that connected the past with the present. A serial killer is bumping people off at random in a small town and sends taunting messages to the police, who turn to the famous criminologist Nicolo Benedetti, who I described at the time as a cross between Hercule Poirot and a hand tame Hannibal Lecter, and Ronald Gentry – a private-eye Benedetti personally trained. The plot has an original take on the serial killer story and I was on the right track, before DeAndrea effectively pulled the wool over my eyes.

It's follow-up, The Werewolf Murders (1992), was also subject of discussion in a One-Man Book-Club thread. The book was written and set during the waning years of the Twentieth Century and a French baron has organized the first Olympique Scientifique Internationale, a year-long gathering of the world's most prominent scientists, in preparation of the new and hopefully more enlightened millennium at the ski resort of Mont-st.-Denis. But then an astronomer is murdered and his body is draped across the eternal flame, situated in the town square, another scientist is brutally attacked, and before long, logic and reason begins to dissipate among the scientific community as the rumors of the Werewolf of Mont-st.-Denis begins to leave footprints on their nerves.

When the local authority with the assistance of a detective from the famous Sûreté fails to turn up any leads or even a viable suspect, everyone, once again, turns to that philosopher of crime and human evil, Professor Niccolo Benedetti, who also shows Nero Wolfe how to collect an enormous fee and still come across as the embodiment of generosity and patriotism. 

I was able to grasp the most significant parts of the solution, only missing out on some of the finer details and motive, and missed one very obvious clue.

Well, that’s it for this week’s filler and hope to back soon with a regular review. And beware, I have stocked up on locked room mysteries... again.