"Never hate your enemies, it affects your judgement"

"You're new at lawbreaking, I gather, so maybe I should tell you how the game is played. It's actually a combination of musical chairs and blind man's buff."

- Friedman (Twospot, 1978)

Bill Pronzini has a well established reputation for experimenting with innovative ways in which he, as a writer with an aversion to the idea of becoming a series scribbler who continuously regurgitates the same books over and over again, could approach the private eye story and developed a penchant for concocting hybrid-like stories – in which he roams the boundaries of the genre. Hoodwink (1981), for example, is a classic locked room mystery, which pays homage to the ghost of John Dickson Carr, while Shackles (1988) is an exceedingly dark, character-driven thriller exploring the darkest nooks and niches in the psyche of his nameless investigator. 

The collaborative team effort by Bill Pronzini and Collin Wilcox, Twospot (1978), in which their series characters, The Nameless Detective and Lt. Frank Hastings, cooperate with one another on the same murder case, lets itself not as easily asserted as the aforementioned books. In the first place, it's a crossover, which is a sub-category of fiction all by itself, but also a convergence of two distinct branches of crime fiction in which both authors specialized themselves – consequently intertwining the private eye novel with a police procedural.

Twospot comprises of four alternating, novella-length chapters and a epilogue that shifts perspectives from nameless to the police lieutenant, in which they deal with the problems facing them on their own terms – making the book an interesting contrast between the writing styles of Pronzini and Wilcox.

Pronzini kicks off the story by sending his lone wolf op down to the winery of the Cappellani family to report on a background check he run on one of their employees – suspected by one of the sons, Alex Cappellani, to be an opportunistic gold digger who wants to usurp the distinguished distillery by trapping his widowed mother into a marriage. At this early stage in the story, I fully expected him to chance upon the body of one of the men at the winery and the plot turning into an old fashioned, but hardboiled, whodunit with a family business as a backdrop – but the crimes confronting him were limited to merely an attempted murder and a forced, midnight wrestling match in the shrubberies. He's had worse days.

The chapters, narrated by Nameless, are unmistakably Pronzini's – tough and hard-headed when the situation calls for it, but humane when he needs to be and this early incarnation of his personage, that of the solitudinarian investigator, shows how consistent his basic personality has been over the past four decades. Fundamentally, he has remained the same person, however, you only have to glance at the stories that came after this one to see how life continued building on that fundament – turning an einzelgänger into a family guy with a senior partnership in a successful private investigation firm. And his endearing fanboyism concerning his favorite pulp writers also makes him one of the most relatable characters in the genre, because you can connect with him on a basic level as one fan to another and his thoughts on the subject can be eerily recognizable. Heck, he even described a dream, in which he and a bunch of detectives, from the brittle pages of his treasured pulp magazines, joined forces to clean up a gang of Prohibition era rum-runners. Hey! I had dreams like that!

But let us return to the story, as Wilcox has taken over from Pronzini when the subject of Nameless' enquiry turned up dead and a note with an incomprehensible term, "twospot," scrawled across its surface is found near the body – and here the plot takes a definitive turn away from a possible crossbreed between the private eye and a conventional detective story and morphs into a police thriller. Honesty compels me to say that I was less then thrilled with Wilcox's contribution to the book. The narrative voice of his protagonist, Lt. Frank Hastings, also has a hardboiled edge to it, but, somehow, it didn't ring true with me and impressed me as artificial – nor did I find his character particular enthralling. As a matter of fact, I think his subordinate, Canelli, who acts like a walking good-luck-charm to his team and made a significant contribution to resolving the case and preventing more bloodshed, eclipsed his overall appearance. 

Needless to say, a modern police thriller will not entirely adhere to the orthodox rules of fair-play, nonetheless, there were still parts of the solution that were foreshadowed and could be anticipated – but don't expect to find clues that will help you fill in the finer details (e.g. the exact meaning of "twospot"). However, the problem the solution suffers from the most is that parts of it are a bit dated and haven't aged with same grace as a Cappellani vintage wine, but I can't say any more without spilling too much crucial information regarding the solution. 

In conclusion, this is not a prime candidate for a future short-list of favorite entries in this long-running series, which is mainly due to the chapters penned by Collin Wilcox, who simply failed to grab and hold my attention, and the plot was also sub-par. I've seen Pronzini do better than this, even in an out-and-out thriller like Shackles! Still, it's an interesting experiment that has its moments and perhaps I should've read a Lt. Frank Hastings novel before tackling this book (to get the overall and complete experience), which is a lesson I will take to heart before I start chippen away at the crossover novel, Double (1984) – co-written with his mystery writing wife, Marcia Muller. I'm sure there are one or two of her books I can easily obtain, even in these parts. To be continued.

By the way, why does even a somewhat disappointing book usually translate itself into a shoddily written review – even after a number of revisions this is the best I have to offer. I really do suck! Oh well, the next blog post will hopefully be a bit better as I run through the plot of a locked room mystery by an obscure, nearly forgotten mystery writer. 

Update: I received additional information on this book from Bill Pronzini:

"It's a fair review. Twospot was written a long, long ago and I've never much liked it myself. It was supposed to be Threespot -- a three-way collaboration with the third writer being Joe Gores. Gores backed out just as we were about ready to start plotting and writing the book, so Collin Wilcox and I had to rethink and rework it. Neither of us was satisfied with the finished book. The original Threespot story would have made for a much more effective novel."

It's a pity that the triple crossover never came to fruition and killed what could've been an excellent, and unique, crime book within the genre.

All the books I have reviewed in this series:

Twospot (1978)

Hoodwink (1981)

Bones (1985)

Shackles (1988)

Nightcrawlers (2005)

Death Can't Be Locked Out

"Death doesn't always leave his signature behind to be read infallible like your people profess to be able to read finger marks."

- Dr. Prescott (Death Leaves No Card, 1944)

One of the most prolific mystery writers, from those prosperous early decennia's of the previous century, was without a shadow of a doubt John Street – who primarily enjoyed a reputation as one of the champions of the so-called humdrum detective story under his pennames John Rhode and Miles Burton. He has a reputation for being a tediously dull writer whose books are the miracle cure for long-suffering insomniacs, but the few books I read under the John Rhode byline were anything but unimaginative, sleep inducing run-of-the-mill detective stories. The House on Tollard Ridge (1929) and Men Die at Cyprus Lodge (1943) were perhaps a bit dry in parts, but not tedious or dull – and it was actually interesting to see someone handle the haunted house setting in a sober and rational manner.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said about Death Leaves No Card (1944), published under the Miles Burton name, which has a solid enough plot and the locked room angle has its points of interests, but the uninspired story telling made this a real chore to plough through.

The story opens at the residence of Geoffrey Maplewood where one of his servants, Reuben Dukes, makes an attempt at breaking down a solid wooden bathroom door that separates them from Basil Maplewood – Geoffrey's entitled nephew who failed to resurface from his morning bath and has been unresponsive ever since. After the door finally yields, they extricated his stark naked body from the room, however, the only marks on his body coincide with the way he fell – and the cause of death is a complete mystery. A shock seems the most likely answer, but there were no electric appliances in the locked bathroom and it's one of the last households in neighborhood that isn't connected to the grid.

John Street was the mechanical engineer of the detective story, who was particular inventive when it came to constructing deadly contraptions, and the solution to the locked room is a fine example of that talent, but not one that will give the reader much trouble in figuring out how it was done. The question of the murderers identity and motivation suffer from the same transparency. However, it's not that the construction of the plot has any serious faults, but that it resembles the skeleton frame of a building before construction is completed. It's interesting from a technical point of view, but not very habitable and that pretty much sums up this book for me.

This impression of incompleteness was further strengthened by the nonappearance of Desmond Merrion, created for the Miles Burton penname, who simply dispatched a telegram informing Inspector Arnold that he is indisposed by the flu and that he won't be joining the investigation – which is the equivalent of Inspector Cramer tackling a murder case all by himself because Wolfe and Archie aren't around Inspector Japp tracking down the ABC murderer on his own because Hercule Poirot has indigestion. 

Plot wise, this book is still a fairly competent entry into the locked room sub-genre, but the ho-hum storytelling also makes it a decidedly unexciting one – and not a book that you'll likely finish in one sitting. I guess I should've gone with one of the John Rhode titles instead, which has been a source of considerable embarrassment to me for the better part of a year. A while ago, I accumulated several, hard-to-get, titles from the Dr. Priestley series whose pleas to be read have been falling on deaf ears ever since acquiring them. But rest assured, shame hangs like a noose on my conscience.

Well, this was a rather short and negative review, especially after such a long and exuberant book critique posted earlier today, but I finally wrapped up this story and had to put this out while I was still semi-conscience of the solution – because this, for me, is a very forgettable story. So check out the review of The Last Chance, if you haven't done so already! 


Update: Patrick's review of Death on Sunday (1939) pointed out that John Street hated the name Cecil. Sorry, John! It won't happen again.

The House in the Woods

"The people who live in places like this think that the rules don't apply to them."

- Inspector Morse

If you've been a regular visitant of this blog, you probably already bumped into Dutch crime-writer M.P.O. Books, who was kind enough to reiterate one of his reviews in English for this blogspot – and I prefaced it with a short, but to the point, introduction. But to safe you the inconvenience of clicking to another page, I will reproduce my prelude here and beef it up with some additional information. Hey, nothing but a five-star service for the customers of this dodgy supplier of red herrings!

Sentenced in Absentia

Marco Books is a struggling author of thriller-cum-detective stories, cut from the same mold as most of the other Euro-style police procedurals, who debuted in 2004 with the novel Bij verstek veroordeeld (Sentenced in Absentia), in which a murderous conspiracy goes awry and the co-conspirators have to dodge not only an unknown murderer, who wants to spear them on the receiving end of a pitchfork, but also have to deal with Books' series detective, Inspector Bram Petersen. The furrowed-faced Petersen is a veteran detectives on the force, approaching his retirement age at a steady pace, usually backed-up by his able, and younger, colleague, Ronald Bloem, both of whom are stationed at the police precinct that resides over the idyllic Utrechtse Heuvelrug – a setting that immediately conjures up images of Midsomer County and not entirely without reason.

Bij verstek veroordeeld was an auspicious first appearance by an enthusiastic and promising writer, but unfortunately the book didn't make much of an impact on the national scene and was unfairly labeled as a regional roman policier. Nevertheless, he labored on two more books, De bloedzuiger (The Bloodsucker, 2005) and Gedragen haat (Hatred Borne, 2006), which maintained a consistent quality of story telling, plotting and characterization – and the latter has a superb scene involving a rehearsal of a funeral, a busted-open casket and a severed head. The theatrical execution of that particular scene would've received the nodding approval of Ngaio Marsh!

The Eye-Catcher

But he really hit his stride last year, when he published his fourth novel, De blikvanger (The Eye-Catcher, 2010). It's a beautiful paradigm of plot complexity, in which Books hit upon a grand opening gambit that guaranteed both readers of modern crime novels, who make up a considerable portion of his readership, and incorrigible classicists, like yours truly, had an equally enjoyable reading experience. This opening move basically consists of loading the first few chapters with mystifying, foreshadowing and seemingly unconnected episodes, like an out-of-focus kaleidoscopic photograph, and he spends the rest of the story turning the lens back into focus to create a complete, coherent picture of the incidents as they went down – which allows him to create elaborate, multi-layered plots in the classic tradition and still be a writer that is marketable to a contemporary reading audience.

This, however, also makes it difficult to describe De laatste kans (The Last Chance, 2011), because where does one begin summarizing such a fractured, variegated plot without giving anything away? The first twenty pages alone contain enough material to pad out a number of books, from the unearthing of a skull, in a place miles away from where the actual story takes place, to a married couple finding a crib with an abandoned child in their drive way, and they all, somehow, tie in with the main problem of the story – a grotesque murder committed in a secluded house in Leersum.

The Last Chance

Jacques Vermin was somewhat of a miser, living mostly by his own and recently separated from his wife, who had few friends and accumulated a pile of money from a very nefarious avocation, for which he eventually has to pay with his life when someone sneaks into his abode and beats him over the head with a stoneware urn, encapsulating the ashes of his departed father, smashing to smithereens on impact – and blackening his body with parental residue.

This by-effect of the murder will turn out to be very symbolic and is merely one of the many fascinating patterns that emerge as the story progresses to the inevitable solution. It's not entirely unlike watching someone emanating perfect circles of smoke that seem to playfully interact with one another, but more importantly, he got the concept of fair play down to a T – which tightened the knottiness of the plot even more. The first couple of books had the tendency to withhold crucial information from the reader, but lately he's been making one of his literary heroes, Agatha Christie, very proud and it's a shame that the ethics of reviewing detective stories forbids me to point out a gem of a clue. The unabashed homage to Conan Doyle, concerning a collection of motley colored busts of Napoleon in the study of the victim, should also be mentioned in passing.

I know I have been summary in my description of the book, but its difficult, if not impossible, to discuss the plot without spoiling anything that was set-up in the opening chapters. But suffice to say that this is a lavishly plotted detective story, which looks respectfully over its shoulder to what came before it while marching proudly alongside its peers. Because Petersen and his colleagues become more than just instruments of justice as we learn to know them through a series short intermezzos that barely intrude on the actual story. In short, De laatste kans is a book that nips at heels of such modern grandmasters as William DeAndrea and Bill Pronzini and I, for one, can't wait for the next installment.

"Beware the Jabberwock Books, my son!"

If this was a perfect world, Books would've been recognized as the logical successor to the immense popular Appie Baantjer and this book would've adorned the top-spot of today's bestseller lists. But, alas, that's not the case and I hope that an American or British publisher, questing for a new Eurocrime writer, read this rambling review and decide to give him a shot. De blikvanger and De laatste kans have been the model for the marriage between the modern police procedure and the neo-classic detective novel, and just for that he deserves a broader, more appreciative, audience. 

Yes, Simon, I know... you're generally considered as Baantjer's literary heir, but really, what have you produced over the past few years that comes even close to competing with these staggering pieces of contemporary crime fiction? I haven't been impressed with the Bureau Raampoort series at all, and if you want to reclaim your spot I suggest you start penning another historical mystery with C.J. van Ledden-Hulsebosch at the helm... who solves an impossible crime. Hey, don't blame me for trying! ;-)

A Quiet Way to Go

"Even after the actual locked room ceases to be a mystery, the locked room of the mind remains an enigma." 

- Kyosuke Kamizu (The Tattoo Murder Case, 1948) 

Herbert Resnicow is one of the neo-orthodox GAD writers who captured my full attention with his ebullient debut novel, The Gold Solution (1983), in which the colossal union of Alexander and Norma Gold have a go at busting open the sealed door of a locked room mystery – and they did it with the same élan as the wisecracking, mystery solving couples who came before them. The plot wasn't exactly a pièce de résistance and the mechanics explaining the illusion of the locked room were workmanlike rather than inspired, but it entailed more than enough promise to pick up another one of his books.

The Dead Room (1987) was published only a few years after his first venture in the genre, but evinces that had grown and matured, as a mystery writers, in the intermediating years. The story telling is more to the point and the plotting a lot tighter. And I can't help but wonder if the introduction of a new set of series detectives, the entrepreneur Ed Baer and his philosopher son, Warren, donning a pair of deerstalkers after an seemingly impossible murder threatens one of Baer's investments, had anything to do with that. The comparison between Ed and Warren Baer and Ellery and Richard Queen is easily made, however, it's only a superficial resemblance as both duo's are father and son, but they're altogether different characters and their relationship goes a lot deeper in this one book than we've seen from the other father-and-son team in an entire series – not to mention that both Ed and Warren are equals as they both solve one half of the puzzle. Ed Baer tries to find a way to enter and leave a room unseen, while his son philosophizes about the whom and why.

The problems begin when Walter Kassel, a seventy-year-old inventor of an innovative new sound speaker, is knifed in a darkened, anechoic chamber – an echoless room for testing and acoustic experimentation known as the dead room and it's impossible for anyone else to have entered the room undetected. The spot where the body was found, on a soft roped netted floor, suspended halfway up the room, near a concrete rig to mount a test-speaker on, makes the murder appear even more impossible than it already was.

Faced with an apparent unsolvable murder, a baffled homicide squad seals-off the crime-scene indefinitely with the profitable speaker still hanging from its rig and the only way for the company and investors to retrieve it, before they start losing money quick, is if the murderer starts producing sound that amounts to a confession – and Ed and Warren Baer are more than willing to help pry loose an audible admission of guilt. They do an admirable job, for two rank amateurs, at sifting through the evidence, interrogating witnesses and pinpointing whom of the six executives of Hamilcar HI-FI, with enough motives between them to have wiped him out a dozen times over, silenced the hated inventor – whose obsessive suspiciousness, secrecy and stalling had become more than just a nuisance to them.

But the story also takes a look at the relationship between father and son, which needed a bit of maintenance and has a few touching moments, without intruding on the plot, and that's when I realized I had found a companion for William DeAndrea and Bill Pronzini in Herbert Resnicow. Just like them, he exhibited an explicit understanding that he was writing detective stories and not potential Pulitzer prize winning novels that explore the ruins of Ed Baer's love life, after the passing of his wife, or which substances Warren used to dull the pain. They aren't two-dimensional, cardboard cutouts, but they aren't overbearing caricatures, resembling a psychiatrists file cabinet with legs, arms and a head, either.

The praise plastered across the front cover of the book boosts that the story is an original wrinkle in the impossible crime genre and I have to agree. Not only is the enclosed situation of the murder innovative, but the solution is custom-made to the circumstances and environment in which the murder was committed – comparable to Alan Green's What a Body! (1949), which also sports an impossible murder with a tailor-made solution that's unique to the events in the book. It's no mean feat to conceive a one-of-a-kind locked room mystery! But the entire book is a pleasure to read and has a very rich plot hinging on an ingenious rigmarole involving a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo.

In summary, this book has a near perfect balance between plot and characterization, and the look behind the scene of an institution, in this case a technology company, is one of those extras I extremely enjoy in these American detective stories from The Van Dine-Queen School of Detection. Recommended without reservation!

There will almost certainly be more reviews of Herbert Resnicow's books popping up here in the comings months. The proprietor of Pretty Sinister Books directed my attention to several of his locked room stories and I will definitely pick-up a few of them when I order my next batch of mystery novels. And then the agonizing waiting begins before they're delivered to my doorstep.

The life of a mystery addict is filled with tribulations and pain.

Maid to Kill

"This world would be in darkness without a sense of duty."
- Fuu (Samurai Champloo)

I struck up an acquaintance with Frances Crane a few months ago, when the inestimable Rue Morgue Press reissued The Pink Umbrella (1943), but I didn't exactly fell head-over-heels with the book. The detectives, Pat and Jean Abbott, the quintessential mystery solving husband-and-wife team that were all the rage back in the 1940s, were fun enough and the fluid, carelessly loose style of story telling had its attractions – but as an exercise in logical deductions and spotting fair-play clues the plot left a lot to be desired. But everyone has their off-days and I set my sights on the next title in the series, The Applegreen Cat (1943), which was slated to be release anytime soon – and received praise from Anthony Boucher!

The Pink Umbrella was the first story in which the Abbott's came onstage as a married couple, but with Pat enlisting in the marines and ready to be shipped off to war in a matter of days their separation is imminent – and the limited time they had together was interrupted by a one or two inconvenient murders. This would lead you to expect that the succeeding book entails a solo case for Jean Abbott, while her husband is overseas fighting the good cause, but they've worked out a clever scheme to be together during these trying days as they are now both stationed in wartime Brittain – Pat as a military intelligence author with the U.S. marines and Jean as a secretary with the Land-Lease Program.

Upon their arrival, Jean diligently toiled at weaving a social network around them and landed herself an invitation for two at the home of Stephen and Cynthia Heyward, fellow compatriots with their own business in London, who are throwing a weekend house party at their estate for family and friends.

Great move, Mrs. Abbott! A self-confessed murder magnate sets foot on English soil and her first course of action is obtaining an invitation to a sleep-over party at an old Tudor mansion – filled to the roof with people who harbor their fair share of secrets and hidden motives. So, of course, it's ludicrous to presume that under these circumstances a mere murder would interrupt a quiet country weekend with tea and tennis on the lawn. Not one murder, anyway. They're in England, after all, and murder in triplicate is the usual recipe over there. Ask Tom Barnaby.

The body of the first person to spoil a perfectly fine weekend is turns up when the Heyward's son, Kip, who's a R.A.F. Squadron leader home on leave, takes his punt for a midnight row on the lake when he bumps into another boat near the waterside – and its gruesome cargo comprises of the cooled-off remains of a murdered woman and a dart, jammed between her shoulder blades, that was purloined from the mansions play room, whose wooden handle is adorned with a penciled image of the titular applegreen cat. At first, it's presumed that the victim is Lorna Erickson, an alluring brunette with a tendency to capture the eyes of men and a knack for antagonizing their women, since she is the most likely candidate of the party to get her neck wrung, but the body turns out to be that the housemaid. The murderer appears to have dispatched the wrong victim to the great hereafter, however, before long the head maid takes a swig from a morphine-laced drink and succumbs to one heck of a hangover – which leaves the Heyward household in a tight spot: where do you find competent replacements with the servant problem what it is?

Yeah, this is not a detective story that takes itself too seriously, in defiance of the fact that events in this book have a dark undercurrent, leaving an entire stack of cadaver's before reaching the final page, but instead tends to be chatty with scenes that make the book somewhat of a comedy of manners. There's a clash of cultures, taking place in the background of the story, between the American inhabitants of the old mansion and the local police inspector – who's a bit nonplussed by the care-free attitude of his suspects in the face of a murder investigation (canceling their tennis matches never crossed their minds for even a single moment), while he receives disapproving frowns for his classism. 

These bits-and-pieces of satirical social commentary are clearly remnants of the ambitions she once had for her literary career, but had to settle on penning detective stories instead and I can't help but think if her style wasn't better suited for the type of novels she wanted to write. But as I pointed out in my previous review, we won from the lost suffered by mainstream literature and even though she wasn't one of the neatest plotters in the game – her books have a joyful exuberance about them that is very infectious.  

In conclusion, The Applegreen Cat is a fairly minor story, but also an out-and-out improvement on the preceding novel, The Pink Umbrella, with tighter writing, a firmer grasp on the plot and some clever touches that I felt was lacking in their previous investigation. Pat and Jean Abbott still have a long way to go before they're on equal footing with Jeff and Haila Troy or Jane and Dagobert Brown, but they're off to a good restart with this book.

Oh, and my sincere apologies for the awful punning title!

Geniuses at Work

"A picture says more than a thousand words."

While browsing through my files, I came across the following snapshot – depicting ten core members from the early days of the Mystery Writers of America who were evidently hard at work and strenuously taxing their mental dexterity. You have to love the fact that Pat McGerr, who was known for fooling around with unidentified bodies, completely immerged herself in the role of corpse in this picture. What dedication! ;-)

The Gang: Georges Simenon, Anthony Boucher, Lawrence Blochman, Harold Q. Masur, Burke Wilkenson, Dorothy Cameron Disney, Fred Dannay, Leslie Ford, Manfred Lee and Pat McGerr.  

Update: I was searching for a website to attach to Burke Wilkenson's name when I found the place I originally snatched this picture from, but I still haven't the faintest idea who he was or what he did.

Swapping Sleuths

"However, there is, as you have shown, a friendly readiness amongst the members of the Detection Club to help the weaker brethren, so I have written to one or two of our friends to ask them to tell me what, in the opinion of their sleuths, the solution is."

- Milward Kennedy.

There are moments when I wish there was a grain of truth in the popular surmise that human beings are endowed with an immortal soul. I have a practical reason for this longing: to have a bargaining chip when summoning Old Scratch to negotiate a business deal. Because getting an opportunity to travel through a tear in the time-space continuum to meet a bunch of detective writers from the previous century, while cheaply buying first editions and solicitation autographs, is totally worth the hazards of eternal damnation. But the joke would undoubtedly be on me, as I would freeze-up like a shy schoolgirl who's just been approached by her first crush.   

Me: * shoves a copy of The Hollow Man and a pen in John Dickson Carr's face *

JDC: Do you want me to sign this for you?

Me: * nods *

JDC: What's your name?

Me: J-John...

JDC: Ah, a fellow John. Nice to meet you, John! What's your surname?

Me: D-D-Dickson…

JDC: Huh?

Me: D-Dickson Carr!

JDC: Your name is also John Dickson Carr?

Me: * just points at JDC *

At this point he slowly, but surely, starts backing away from me as my under lip starts to quiver and Lucifer impatiently begins tugging my sleeve, like an eager child who just acquired a new toy and can't wait to get home to start playing with it, and that's how I would've squandered a divine wish that could've granted me world domination or the answers to the question of life, the universe and everything. Unfortunately, this scenario, which is definitely worth an eternity of third-degree sunburns, is just a pipe dream – and the only opportunity I will ever have at soaking up the atmosphere of a meeting of the original Detection Club, is reading their round-robin novels. Well, you have to be grateful for what you get and this week I immerged myself in their second joint-effort, Ask a Policeman (1933), but this time I will leave the introduction to the review to someone else: one of the original collaborators! 

Ms. Gladys Mitchell has the floor:

"I was engaged in only one of the collaborations, which were for the benefit of club funds. Anthony Berkeley and Dorothy L. Sayers exchanged detectives and, of course, Anthony's manipulation of Lord Peter Wimsey caused the massive lady anything but pleasure. Helen Simpson took over Mrs. Bradley in exchange for Sir John Saumarez. We two, I am glad to say, got along famously and it is to her that I owe, as you know, Dame Beatrice's second name, Adela."

This is an excerpt from an Question and Answer session, conducted by B.A. Pike, entitled In praise of Gladys Mitchell, and can be found in its entirely at Jason Hall's The Stone House – a website fully dedicated to the life and work of this unorthodox, alternative Queen of Crime.

The book opens with a brief exchange between the for me unfamiliar Milward Kennedy and the plotting machine known as John Rhode, in which Kennedy asks his colleague to produce a dark and murky plot for a title, Ask a Policeman, that was presented to him by his publisher – and the follow-up is a novella-length chapter recounting the shooting of Lord Comstock, an unpalatable newspaper mogul, at his country retreat. The rag king was an expert in jacking-up the circulations of his papers by viciously attacking the establishment and on the morning preceding his murder, three representatives of institutions under siege by his publications, the government, the police and the church, visited his retreat. This makes it a very sensitive and high-profile case and with the police filling in the role as one of the suspects it's decided up on, from above, to give a few notable amateurs free reign over the investigation.

This novella-length chapter demonstrates that John Rhode is undeserving of his reputation as a dullard and sleep-inducing writer. Even with such authors as Gladys Mitchell and Anthony Berkeley waiting in the wings, ready for the opportunity to seize his pen, he contributed one of the best chapters of this collaborative effort – sketching a mystifying problem with some touches of dry humor that his fellow clubmembers had a lot of fun toying around with.

Helen Simpson is the first one who gets a shot at clearing the mystifying problems that befogs the death of the hated newspaper magnate, but instead of Sir John she has Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley at her disposal – whom she promptly dispatches to the scene of the crime. I think her, and mine, solution was the most evident one as we both fingered the same person based on the significance of the police constable who was run over with a car after the killing. But the best part of this chapter is perhaps the way in which she captured the essence of the character she borrowed and how she touched upon nearly every familiar element from Mitchell's books – from the involvement of a young teenager, a niece who coincidently had a fling with the secretary of Comstock, to the diary notes at the end and a plot thread that is left dangling in the wind. Not bad if you're limited to a mere fifty pages!

Up next is Gladys Mitchell's interpretation of Helen Simpson's Sir John Saumarez, who's an acclaimed stage actor basking in the spotlights of success, however, this is my first acquaintance with the character making it impossible to judge the accuracy of Mitchell's portrayal. The solution he proposed was probably even more blindingly obvious than the previous one, but he gave away a first-rate theatrical dénouement with the best seats in the house reserved for his readers. I have to hunt down one of Simpson's detective novels featuring Sir John for an encore.

Anthony Berkeley is the only one of the quartet of crime writers who managed to upstage the instigators of this book, Milward Kennedy and John Rhode, with his marvelous and amusing rendition of Lord Peter Wimsey and his manservant Bunter. There's a delightful scene in which they discuss the appropriate attire for an appointment with an archbishop who's under suspicion of murder! And to top it all off, he comes up with a solution that points to one of the least likely suspects of the lot as the person who pulled the trigger of the gun with a deadly precision.

Dorothy Sayers' take off on Anthony Berkeley's Mr. Roger Sheringham is equally amusing, but one wishes that as much attention was bestowed on constructing a clever solution from the given clues as on exonerating the archbishop from every suspicion – who she turned into a Machiavellian schemer cleverly maneuvering the paper tycoon into one of his own traps and saving his church from further abuse. The solution is uninspired, forgettable and actually had the flip through the chapter to be reminded who the murderer was supposed to be.

The final chapter is for Milward Kennedy, who is confronted with the daunting task of explaining away the solutions presented by the sleuthing foursome and wrapping up the case – and his approach to this conundrum turns the book into a parody that's very similar to Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936) and his critical commentary on Mrs. Bradley, Sir John, Wimsey and Sheringham is hilarious! However, I still haven't decided whether I loved or hated the way in which he explained everything, but it's a perfect illustration of "the blinkin’ cussedness of things in general" at the expensive of the four brilliant amateur sleuthhounds.

In summary, Ask a Policeman is a fascinating experiment, but one that derives its interest mainly from watching a troop of famous detectives taking a stab a the same murder case and how they behave when someone else is in charge of them – while the murder at the summer retreat quickly lost its appeal by a abundance of coincidences and a lack of overall consistency. It's not the howling success that their first round-robin novel, The Floating Admiral (1931), was, but if you're a fan of any of these writers or characters the book is well worth your time – and it's one of those rare crossovers that gave me that pleasurable tingle down my spine! I love and adore crossovers and it gives me an immense pleasure knowing that Mrs. Bradley, Sheringham, Wimsey and even Sir John inhabit the same universe.  

A note of warning: avoid the recent reprint by The Resurrected Press who took gross liberties by altering the text. More details here.  

The Grim Reaper Croons a Lullaby

"All around us are people, of all classes, of all nationalities, of all ages. For three days these people, these strangers to one another, are brought together."

- Hercule Poirot (The Murder on the Orient-Express, 1934)

In a fairly recent blog post, I recounted my astonishing discovery of a caved-in well of mostly unremembered, Dutch-language detective stories and the exasperation I felt at being unable to unearth any substantive information regarding their content. There's more than enough biographical material of their authors scattered over the internet, but in most cases it's difficult to even discern whether they wrote conventional whodunits, hardboiled thrillers, tales of suspense or police procedurals. This left me with insufficient data to cherry-pick from the best titles available and made me fully dependable on my gut feeling when picking a book.  

This purely random, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, method is not the technique I prefer to decide on my next book purchase, but there's something to be said for the element of surprise that comes with it – and Ben van Eysselsteijn's Romance in F-Dur (19??), in which a world-renowned soloist comes to a sticky end at an apartment building that mainly acts as a halfway house for an international assembly of guests, was more than worth the handful of loose change that I gambled on it.

But before discussing the plot, I have to address the mystery surrounding the publication date. Every online-source I have checked states that the first edition of Romance in F-Dur started rolling from the presses in the year 1934, but events and references incontrovertibly places the story after World War II. At first, I thought the publisher of the edition I read, a reprint from the early 1960s, had "updated" the text by throwing a few allusions to the post-WWII era around – but as the story moved forward that became highly unlikely as it would've been a thorough rewrite that served absolutely no purpose. This inadequate information goes to show how apathetic people around these parts are when the focus is moved from the crime littérateur to their actual work. Yeah, I know, it's a minor quibble, but I always note the initial date of publication to show where a book fits in within the canon of the genre, and it needles that I'm unable to do that with this novel.

Now, let's take a closer look at the story! Romance in F-Dur is set, for the most part, at Zeewijck, an apartment building situated somewhere in Den Haag (a.k.a. The Hague), that provides a temporary dwelling to mainly international guests, who are averse to the impersonal drabness of a hotel room and don't want to run up an enormous bill at an expensive boarding house, and the occupants who took up their resident at the opening of the story include an Indian prince, a former general of the German army, a Dutch-Indo and a Belgium-French couple – and several other ill-assorted gargoyles who could've been plucked from Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Orient-Express (1934) or Death on the Nile (1937).

Floor plan of "Zeewijck"

We bump into the key figure in this dramatic play, the prodigal musician Eric Purcell, when he's on his way back from a concert to his rooms and he's being accompanied by Thérèse Dubois, the actress wife of one of his fellow apartment dwellers, and they leave very little to the imagination as to what they've planned for the night ahead of them. But when the impetuous violinist withdraws for a moment to shed his tuxedo for something more comfortable her husband, the cynical actor Vincent Dubois, unexpectedly turns up – subsequently ruining a perfectly thrilling and exciting evening for the two. The inevitable confrontation between husband and lover, however, doesn't happen as Eric Purcell fails to emerge from his room and when Thérèse goes to check up on him she discovers his prostrate body slumped over the bed next to his broken violin: the cloaked man with the scythe had lulled him to sleep to the tune of a whizzing bullet.

The commissioner of the local precinct puts inspector Evers, who is of British descent, in charge of this international affair and they receive unexpected assistance from one of Scotland Yard's most celebrated detectives – who was here on a special assignment to fasten the irons around the slain fiddler's wrists who are now reserved for his murderer. The ensuing investigation is an enjoyable busy one as they interrogate the odd assortment of tenants, constantly uncover new clues and rig-up strategic traps for the murderer. Van Eysselsteijn evidently had a lot of fun writing this story and he knew his classics.

I alluded earlier to the similarity between the cast of characters from this book and those from two of Agatha Christie's most celebrated whodunits, but the entire story is littered with clues and hints that Van Eysselsteijn was intimately known with her body of work and tried emulating her – only he lacked her finesse when it come to clueing and providing a rug-puller of a solution. The book reads like a masculine Agatha Christie, but the plotting technique is much more reminiscent of Rex Stout. I couldn't help but rolling my eyes at that little, but palpable, slip-up the murderer made towards the end of the book – although the reader has been set-up in advance to be on the look-out for just such a mistake. So I guess you have to give him props on that point.

However, one thing he could do as well as the Queen of Crime was planting his tongue firmly into his cheek! He forces the man from Scotland Yard to shamefully mutter mea culpa's for bringing up a hackneyed plot device such as a fabulous stolen jewel, stating that detective writers only use these sparklers to obscure the dullness of their own imagination, and he eats a bullet when he discovers, by pure happenstance, the identity of the murderer and wants to announce it to the world – leaving Evers to unmask the murderer by pure reasoning. Well, what can you say about that, except producing a hearty grin.

All in all, this book was an amusing read and a pleasant surprise that I hope to find more of as I probe deeper into this area of the mystery genre, and I will keep you posted on the developments I make.

Ben van Eysselsteijn (1898-1973)

Van Eysselsteijn was a literary jack-of-all-trades, who was a poet, novelist, reviewer and an all-around intellectual, whose oeuvre includes four detective stories:

Het raadsel van de dertienden december (The Riddle of December 13, 1926)

Het Chineesche mysterie (The Chinese Mystery, 1932; co-written with Jan Campert)

Romance in F-Dur (Romance in F-Dur, 19??)

De dubbelganger (The Double, 1944; a stage play) 

Foreign mysteries discussed on this blog spot: 

The Trampled Peony (Bertus Aafjes, 1973)

Death in Dream Time (S.H. Courtier, 1959)

Murder During the Final Exams (Tjalling Dix, 1957)

Elvire Climbs the Tower (Maurice-Bernard Endrèbe, 1956)

The Black-Box Murder (Maarten Maartens, 1898) 

Murder in a Darkened Room (Martin Méroy, 1965)

The Sins of Father Knox (Josef Skvorecky, 1973)

What Mysteries Lie Under the Rising Sun (guest blog by Ho-Ling on the Japanese detective story)

Case Closed, volume 38: On the Ropes (review of Case Closed) 

The Melody of Logic Must Be Played Truthfully (discussing Spiral: The Bonds or Reasoning)

Kindaichi: The Good, The Bad and The Average (dicussing The Kindaichi Case Files)

Amnesia Labyrinth, vol 1 (review) 

The Zombie Factory

"A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others."

- Charles Darwin.

Well, it appears that the mystery community has a large-scale, Harlequin-like holocaust to deal with and we haven't even come to terms yet with the previous massacre perpetrated against innocent, harmless and defenseless books of an advanced age. The news hit us a mere few hours ago when awrobins, a long-time member over at the JDCarr.Com message board, opened a thread relating the horrific discovery he made when thumbing through his newly acquired and recently reprinted edition of Ask a Policeman (1933) – the text of the original story had been altered!

The offenders of these abominable crimes against literature operate under the aptly chosen name of The Resurrected Press, but I think The Zombie Factory would've been even more fitting – because that's what you really produce when you churn out books that have been modified without consent of the person who put them to paper (and if the author is no longer among us you simply keep your stumpy, sweaty paws of their work). The concept of a zombie is the only monstrosity that stumbles around in horror stories and movies that ever made me genuinely shiver (and that's coming from someone who nearly chocked on his own laughter when he saw The Exorcist for the first time) because their origin is truly frightening. They aren't ancient bloodsuckers who curl up during the daytime in a coffin to take a nap or cursed people who grow a tail and whiskers during a full moon, but actual people whom we might have known during their lives, loved ones even, who rise from their graves as hollow shells of their former selves and make the living miserable – and that, in a nutshell, is the catalogue of this fifth-rate publishing outlet.

They've taken stories that we've enjoyed reading or were hoping to have the pleasure of reading in the near future and stripped them of their identity. The only reason they could've had for desecrating these books is to pander to 21st century sensitivity or a misplaced sense of creative superiority – because back then they really didn't know what they were doing, but their Übermensch of an editor does as he she it goes through the story with a blue pencil to decide what's appropriate for a modern, sensitive audience and what our innocent eyes need to be shielded from. Just imagine being confronted with an unenlightened opinion or remark from the past! It can take seconds, maybe even up to a full minute, to get over it! Seriously though, haven't we learned anything from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Thankfully, a chunk of their catalogue consists of public domain work and uncensored copies can be obtained from print-on-demand publishers like The Echo Library and The Dodo Press, and especially the latter one delivers decent editions of these copyright-free books. Finally, Curt Evans was surprised that The Resurrected Press had permission to reprint The Detection Club novels, since Harper Collins has only recently reissued one of them, The Floating Admiral (1931), and this might give their "legal department" a big headache. That wasn't me chuckling, I swear!

Oh, there will be a new review up tomorrow.