Murder in Retrospect: The Worst Mysteries Read in 2013

"You know, I'm glad this is over, but I feel like everyone is gonna wish they knew who was really last on the list."

- Kyle (South Park, The List) 

"I cannot live without brain-work"

There are up-and down sides to wading through piles of obscure, all-but-forgotten mystery novels, more often than not from writers whose headstone epitaphs are probably read by more people than their literary legacy, but, if you're interested in the history of the genre, it's stimulating to map the emergence of ideas and trends within the detective story. This is why I avoid non-fiction writing on the genre, because they tend to openly discuss solutions and I prefer to discover them on my own.

Anyhow, there are also the disadvantages, such as availability and the price tags, but the greatest one is finding out there was a pretty good reason why a particular book or author slipped from our collective consciousness. I do encounter them from time to time, but this is the first year I suffered through enough of them to compile a modest worst-of list to precede my annual best-of list.

Interestingly, five of the seven titles listed here were published during the twilight years/transitional period of the Golden Age and only two from the 1920-and 30s, but hey, I have always been up front about my predilection for the classics. So lets cast the first stone in alphabetical order of surnames!

The Cursing Stones Murder (1954) by George Bellairs

Arguably, one of the worst mysteries I have ever read and its only, vague claim to be called a detective is the subtitle the cover should have carried, The Cursing Stones Murder, Or, The Case for Book Burning, because everything of remote interest becomes a part of the passing and dreary scenery – as Inspector Littlejohn tramps up and down the Isle of Man. To rehash one of my remarks from the original review, it's like a Gladys Mitchell tale that got its soul ripped out of it.

The Purple Parrot (1937) by Clyde B. Clason

The best of the worst on this list and had to be put on here due to the plots resolution, which turned an intelligently written detective story into an ineffective parody of a shilling shocker. Clason is still one of my favorite mystery writers and he usually delivers, only to fall short in sight of the finish in this instance. Oh, well, you can't win them all.

Death Draws the Line (1949) by Jack Iams

A waste of a detective story with a nifty, unique gimmick surrounding a batch of missing comic strips and they're included in the book, but by the time you got to them, they tell the story you probably already deduced or guessed. The book is further marred by fuzzy, unclear plotting and incompetent police work.

Murder One (1948) by Eleazar Lipsky

The author of this piece was a lawyer and prosecutor himself, which gave the book its only redeeming quality: a keyhole in time for the reader to peek through and observe the machination behind the closed doors of a District Attorney's office in the late 1940s. However, the story's more-than-usual realism is hampered by the lack of even a ghost of a plot, psychological torture (a.k.a. "The Fourth Degree") and an under whelming conclusion after a pair of surprise witnesses were pulled from thin air.

The Red Cavalier (1922) by G.E. Locke

A gaudy collection of shopworn, but propitious, tropes such as a haunted castle and a mysterious murder in the past, however, Locke failed to apply as much as a lick of originality on even a single one of them – prettied up instead with colonial attitudes and casual racism. Even if you think your suffering is over, there's still a fifty-page counting explanation and surprise twist to look forward to. Yay...

Death of a Nurse (1955) by Ed McBain

Granted, not the worst book on the list, but I had to include it to be fair and I was severely disappointed after reading two excellent 87th Precinct novels previously – which Death of a Nurse was not a part of. It's a standalone set on a U.S. Navy destroyer as Lt. Chuck Masters becomes entangled with the death of the titular woman in the radar shack and poses as a traditional whodunit before disintegrating in the second half. Reading back my review, I see I was surprised at the breathtaking stupidity in how some of the characters approached and agitated the murderer, almost begging to be killed next, which makes me now suspect McBain writing it as a lark. Well, not every punch line hits home.

The Benevent Treasure (1954) by Patricia Wentworth

A tiresome story in the "Had-I-But-Known" tradition and in spite of a promising opening, evocative setting and more than enough plot threads to weave a carpet, they only bogged down the story as it processed – if you can speak of progression with a pace like that. It's books like these that give genuine talented HIBK writers like Dorothy Cameron Disney a bad name. I just want to blot the book from my mind. 

Note that the reviews of these books are poorly written, because a bad read usually translates itself in a shoddily written review. The reader has been warned. 

Fallen Idols

"Scene of the crime—well, what's wrong with the good old library? Nothing like it for atmosphere. As for the weapon—well, it might be a curiously twisted dagger—or some blunt instrument—a carved stone idol..."

- Captain Arthur Hastings (Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders, 1936)

Last month, I reviewed The Scarlet Macaw (1923) by Gladys E. Locke and the absence of as much as a profile page from the hive mind of the modern mystery reader, Golden Age of Detection Wiki, attests that your name on a book cover isn't always an inked guarantee of its immortality.

Locke's second, exasperatingly titled mystery, The Red Cavalier, Or, the Twin Turrets Mystery (1922), was reported as one of the better mysteries of the year, but, what struck the critics' fancy at the time, it sure as hell wasn't innovation. If you could spread out the plot material, of The Red Cavalier, like the content you'd likely find in a suitcase from the era, it would be as plain and familiar as a straight razor, a bank book and black-and-white photographs.

The backdrop is a castle in the country side of Yorkshire, dating back to the Wars of the Roses, which comes with a ghost garbed in the costume of the days of the Merry Monarch and the unresolved death of the previous owner, Sir Roger Grainer – stabbed in the library with a poison smeared, Hindu dagger. Sir Roger had stocks in the ruby mines in Burma and applied this wealth to fill Twin Turrets with a collection of Hindu curios and idols. Statues of foreign deities line the hallways and the neighborhood has recently been plagued with burglaries reputedly done by the spectral cavalier of the castle, wrestled free from the gibbet cage to plunder once again.

Twin Turrets can be regarded as a problem on the market and not a property that can be easily foisted on a proper, English lady. However, it's Miss Egerton who snatches the lease from under the noose of Prince Kassim Bardai and even matched the outrageous sum he was willing to pay for it. Miss Egerton wants the place for the summer to couple her nephew, Maxwell "Max" Egerton, but he has plans of his own and they involve another woman. And, somehow, Max is acquainted with Bardai, who never stopped pressuring his aunt to hand over the lease, but manages to secure an invitation for the prince.

Meanwhile, at Twin Turrets, statues of Eastern idols are toppled from their base in the dark of the night and a friend of the Egertons, Lord Reginald Borrowdean, watches how the events and cross-relationships culminates in another murder committed in the library – while a fancy dress party was in progress. On the surface, the motive of the murder appears to have been the possession of the Azra-El-Kab ruby, a ball of fiery red fire, which was stolen from the body and the red cavalier had been seen at the scene of the crime, but they also discovered a piece of spangled dress clasped in the hand of the victim. There's much to do about who locked and unlocked the library door, and when, and who was possession of a spare key, but there's hardly any ingenuity about it and painfully lays bare how overwritten the story and outdrawn the plot are. The chapters covering the inquest and the explanation seemed to never come to an end. I still feel like I haven't quite got there yet.

The Red Cavalier didn't profit elsewhere, either, because the setting with its homegrown legend furbishes the story with the same amount of ghostly, suspenseful atmosphere as a science lecture hall and Locke also failed to capitalize in the characters department. There was an interesting contrast between the English and East Indian characters, and their views on their inter/national "ties," but it never went beyond mere racism. Locke might as well have gone all the way and called the book Dark Are the Moors. It fits the setting, color-theme titles and, you know, the racism. 

By the time (well into the story) Borrowdean calls in a private detective from London, a "young woman professionally known as Mercedes Quero" who build herself a "reputation as a solver of unsolvable mysteries," it's too late to safe the book. Quero showing-off her cleverness and dexterity with a tiny pocket revolver falls horribly flat and the overdrawn explanation, euphemistically entitled "Gathering Up the Thread," didn't do much help either. Nor did surprise twist. Long story short, the premise was better than the end product. 

Well, that could've been a great post, if you could measure greatness in a hack review by hack reviewing an extremely hacky mystery novel. Anyhow, I hope to be back after Christmas with a more jolly review and I'll probably be returning to more regularly to some modern mystery writers. Any locked room mysteries? Well, that's a possibility. Sure, sure. Let's wait and see. And in meantime, I hope you have a merry what-ever-it's you happen to be celebrating around this time of the year. 

True Crime: A Journey Back in Time

"Men are foolish, are they not, Mademoiselle? To eat, to drink, to breathe the good air, it is a very pleasant thing, Mademoiselle. One is foolish to leave all that simply because one has no money — or because the heart aches. L’amour, it causes many fatalities, does it not?"

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's The Mystery of the Blue Train, 1928)

On New Year's Eve, 1921, a steam locomotive pulling an express train makes a stopover at Amsterdam Central Station and Mr. Jacques Wijsman, a promising young lawyer celebrating his thirty-second birthday and on his way to mark the turn of the year with his parents, boards the train – occupying a warm, first-class compartment. An hour later, they arrive at station Hollands Spoor, Den Haag (The Hague), where a female passenger makes a gruesome discovery. Mr. Wijsman lies on the floor of the compartment, partially covered with his overcoat, shot three times in the elbow, shoulder and chest.
 

J. Wijsman

This is not a sketchy premise of yet another obscure, untranslated detective story set aboard a train, but the curtain-raiser in an illustrious murder case I first read about in A.C.Baantjer's true-crime book Doden spreken niet: veertig onopgeloste moorden (The Dead Don't Speak: Forty Unsolved Murders, 1966). There are aspects to Mr. Wijsman's murder, professional and personal, which I can only describe as food for mystery writers and even gave raise to a bone-fide conspiracy theory. Yes, I have a possible solution tucked away at the ending. It's classic.

Let's take the known facts from the beginning: detectives found three, copper shell casings on the floor of the compartment and discovered the murderer had taken Wijsman's jacket (holding his personal documents and other papers). Curiously, a wallet containing 10 guilders was left on the body. 

Another, online source I consulted, described the police-investigation as hilarious fumbling and this evident when only a subsequent look at the moordcoupé reveals a crumpled up, paper bag from a sandwich store in Amsterdam – which still had one shrimp left in it. Granted, the station master had removed the body and sealed the compartment, which had badly affected the evidence, but it's still sloppy police work the bag didn't turn up during the first sweep of the crime scene. The police departments of Amsterdam and Den Haag were (from the given reports) everything but cooperative in their search for the unknown man who shared the compartment with Wijsman and nurse Greetje de Boer. Interestingly, De Boer was shown photographs and she made a positive identification, but the man was able to produce a satisfying alibi. Days after the murder, the police were inundated with tips from physic mediums, crackpots and people who may've thought they witnessed something of importance. But the point is that they had to be checked and basically amounted to chasing phantasms or passengers who were seen running to catch their last train home on the evening of the murder.

The Dead Don't Speak (1966)

What caused the turmoil surrounding the murder (all the way up to the 1930s), and led to questions being asked in parliament, wasn’t all on the bungling of the police, but the rampant rumors surrounding Wijsman’s private life – who was gay in a time when being gay condemned you to a double-life. Wijsman was linked with actor Gerard Vrolijk, who was known for keeping a house filled with unwed men and the papers buzzed with rumors of directions from above to sweep this embarrassing case under the carpet. 

However, as interesting an angle as Wijsman's private-life may've been to the press and their readers at the time, I would've personally followed a different trail from his professional life and it's according to one of the elementary rules of police work – follow the money. There were unconfirmed rumors of Wijsman possessing documents about the Renate Leonhardt, a German ship torpedoed in 1917 by the British after sailing from Rotterdam to Hamburg and became a lore of the sea as a goudwrak (gold wreck) on account of its cargo, 55 million guilders in gold, but there were questions asked how the British knew how and when to strike (they barely left the harbor). Was there even gold aboard the ship? And were the British in on the scheme and tied up the loose ends by sinking the evidence to the bottom of the sea? It's basically on conspiracy on top of another conspiracy. 

Well, I'm not going to drag an international conspiracy from The Great War into my version of the crime, but the fact remains that personal documents were taken from the body. A theft of papers doesn't fit the modus operandi of an enraged lover following Wijsman around on New Year's Eve, undoubtedly fingering the loaded firearm in the pocket of his winter coat, waiting for the moment to strike. Even if you assume the documents were love-letters and dangerous to the murderer's social status (and assume Wijsman carried them on his person), you also have to ask yourself why he took the risk of shooting Wijsman when they were both stuck on a moving train. It would've been safer and easier to get away, if he had struck when Wijsman got off the train and was on his way to his parent's home.

I think there was a work-related affair at the back of the shooting and someone hired an amateur to the job of a professional, which I base on two (admittedly meager) clues, but the circumstances of the crime weren't given in details. For example, I have no idea what the distance was between the murderer and Wijsman when the shots were fired, but I know Wijsman was sitting in a corner seat by the window in the first carriage of the train – practically with his back against the proverbial wall. I don't presume they were at opposite sites of the carriage when the shots were fired, and yet, the bullet wounds weren't grouped closely together. Two of the three bullets struck the shoulder and elbow, and only the third found the heart. I assume that someone who’s used to handling firearms would shoot with more precision, even inside a hunk of metal in motion, which is my other point and the most baffling aspect of the case...

The fatal shooting occurred in the first-class compartment of a moving train and the wounds of the body could suggest a murderer not entirely comfortable with handling pistols, but still did the job akin to Michael Corleone strolling into a restaurant and shooting Captain McCluskey in the throat. Murder under any circumstances would make a man nervous, let alone on an express train without an escape, but that's the cold and deliberate part of the killing. The murderer must have felt comfortable to premeditatedly fire three shots in a train carriage that's still on the run.

I know this sounds trite and hacky, but I would've closely investigated the complaisant witkiel (railway porter), who gallantly held open the door to the lady discovering the body (at least as a witness if he didn't hop the ride) and the conductor of the train as the main suspect. Wijsman had apparently a good relationship with his parents, who didn't hear about the death of their son until the following morning, after asking at the station if any accidents had happened, and it's safe to assume he made the journey before. You can safely assume people knew he was going to spend the last hours of his birthday and the old year with his parents (or guessed it), which gives our secret adversary an opportunity to snatch the documents from Wijsman at a vulnerable moment of presumed safety... this/these person(s) only have to grease a poor conductor's palm with some silver, supply him with a gun and instructions. 

A conductor can pass through a train unnoticed and talk with passengers without raising suspicions. The train is not moving prison to a conductor, but a familiar surrounding in which he naturally belongs. People hardly even notice them.

Oh, the sandwiches bag with the shrimp. It's probably nothing and left there by the mysterious, but innocent, traveler, however, if you insist on a clever explanation. Do you really think the police found shell casings and missed a wad of paper? The compartment was stored at the railways and it's not unthinkable the murderer, who probably read detective stories at moments of leisurely at a station house, planted it afterwards as an act of bravado to baffle the police (he could have had access). After all, the police would be asking the sandwich shop to describe the people who bought their shrimps before the murder and not after.

Now if I can be so rude to ask one of you to play the Dr. Watson to my Sherlock Holmes and marvel at my stellar deductions.

The Wastelands of Heaven

"Flying may not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price."

- Emelia Earhart 

After my previous post embroiled deliberately on the recurrent image of railway mysteries, I intended to follow the theme. A plan as simple as it's perfect, if it were not for the fact that you can't always shape an accidental pattern further and that are perhaps too many words to say I forgot to check if there were any unread, train-bound detective stories on the big pile – which was not the case and didn't feel like re-reading any of the classic examples. The substitute book I picked was meant as a compromise, but the story turned out the be a pleasant surprise!

The "Moth" Murder (1931) is the first of two mystery novels by Lynton Blow, one more name for the list of writers who are conspicuous by their absence on the GADWiki, and the sole case for Inspector Hunt, from Criminal Investigation Department of New Scotland Yard, burdened with finding Sir Charles Stafford's killer – an aviation hero of the modern era.

One year before, Stafford had made a daring double crossing of the Atlantic in a light aero-plane, which raised Britain's prestige in a time when air supremacy was seen as the key to victory in future conflicts, but a coastguard in Bournemouth Bay is the lonely witness of Stafford's burning machine crashing down from the sky. Immediately, Hunt is confronted with the first of many problems: there's only one body retrieved from the burned out wreckage of the plane. Stafford's body is badly burned, but there weren't any remains found of his female passenger, Mrs. Evans. Even more puzzling is that Mrs. Evans husband, Dennis, who was flying solo, also appears to have dropped off the map – alongside with his airplane. However, the proverbial bombshell goes off during the inquest when the police surgeon reveals Stafford was shot in the back of the head before he crashed!

Meanwhile, down on the ground, Hunt is summoned to a ditch in Redstock Lane where a local cowman found the body of Constable James, also shot through the head, which is one of many complications resulting in some genuine (and fun) detective-and think work. The bits of theorizing, especially the part on what must've happened in the air, were engrossing on account of the multitude of methods you could use a two-seater, light airplane in a murder or body dump and I know of one mystery writer who reworked one of these rejected premises in a full-length detective novel – of course, I'm not going to spoil anything. Blow jam-packed the plot with twists and turns, seemingly complicating the case with every step Hunt takes forward, with Stafford's heir disappearing from the scene almost as fast as he appeared, a suitcase full of money, a dead tramp (Curt is OK) and a gang of dope peddlers hanging around in the background. Not to mention unsnarling a knot of footprints and tire tracks. There are even allusions to the problem of a single set of footprints and the disappearance of a car from a locked garage, but they didn't materialize into actual impossible crimes of the Carrian kind (ah boo!).

The "Moth" Murder weaves a fine, complex mesh from multiple plot threads and Blow understands these kind of plots work best when they play out according to Murphy's Law, instead of allowing the murderer smooth sailing on the winds of good luck like a demigod, but what holds the book back is that there's a very dated trick at the heart of the plot. This makes the solution as plain as day to any seasoned mystery reader. And that's somewhat funny, because it's a trick I used to fall for all the time. Once, I fell for it twice, back-to-back, while reading the same author! That's how easily fooled I was and every time I was just as surprised as the time before that I had fallen for it. Who knew mystery writers could lie through the teeth by stating factual truths. 

Finally, there's a shimmer of continuation on the railway theme as one of the characters crashes with a car into a London-bound express train, but hardly enough to tag it as such. Still nice to see it popping-up though!

Steve from the MysteryFile website/blog has more on Lynton Blow's second novel, The Bournewick Murders (1935), and link to read The "Moth" Murder yourselves, if this review has piqued your interest. 

A Strain on Reality: More Examples of Everyday Impossible Problems

"Heck, my grandma used to spin yarns about a spectral locomotive that would rocket past the farm where she grew up!"

- Roy Brady, Reporter (Ghostbusters, 1984)

In late March of this year, I cobbled together the first of three (filler) posts on those so-called unrealistic, impractical and pesky "Locked Room Mysteries" and "Impossible Crimes" popping-up outside of the boundaries of the printed pages. Here are the links to parts I, II and III.

I reported on actor Wilfred Lawson, renowned for being one of the few from his trait "who could function quite well with a skinful" and "has a stockpile of thespian anecdotes second to none," counting an hilariously failed attempt at getting him sober in front of a live radio-mike. Lawson was put under supervision of a minder, who searched the actor and the dressing room before locking him in, but these trifles did not prevent Lawson from getting properly drunk inside a locked room bare of any traces of alcohol. As surprising as any plot-twist you can foresee from the get-go, I had to include my own solution to this unsolved mystery. However, there were also instances where there were answers to the impossible premises: a magician who plugs a leak of information in a tightly secured betting facility known as the "Horse Room" and the homely anecdote of a mystery writer's cat accidentally (or instinctively?) creating what could've been an entire locked house mystery – if only she hadn't been witnessed in the act.

I had run through the best stories after merely three posts and the left over material simply wasn't as tantalizing, but there's one that now gave me an excuse to add a fourth part to the series (hence the padded introduction retracing my previous posts).

Departing for the departed

The St. Louis Ghost Light (or Ghost Train) is a light phenomenon from a supposed supernatural origin seen near St. Louis, Saskatchewan, Canada and was a subject on the TV-series Unsolved Mysteries. The phenomenon involves unaccountable, varied-colored lights moving up and down along an old, abandoned railway lines and even breaking up the tracks failed to put a stop to the ghosts lights. Locals report the apparitions can still be seen almost every night. And where there are locals, you can bet there's a good campfire story to be told. There's one about a brakeman checking the tracks who was struck down and decapitated by a passing train, which he now wanders in search for his head with his lantern – causing the smaller, red lights. The bright, yellowish lights are ascribed to a spectral steam locomotive pulling its carriages. If there's something beyond this world we should do business with them, because ectoplasm-driven ghost cars and phantom planes will break our carbon footprint in several crucial places.

Unfortunately, a pair of bright Grade 12 students, Alysha and Shannon, from Northern Saskatchewan wrecked the whole epic thing with their science fair project based on proper research and field work – yielding a surprisingly natural and demonstrable explanation called diffraction. It's basically an optical illusion making light apparent from far away when it passes through a small opening and this won them a gold medal at the fair. You can read a more detailed account of the explanation here, but, interestingly, one of these self-styled miracle detectives is a believer and the other a skeptic. If you add up the story of the ghost lights/train and the nature of its solution, you're left with the perfect plot-outline for a crossover story between Thomas Carnacki and John Bell. All in all, a job well done and a deserved medal. 

By the way, the wikipedia page of the St. Louis Ghost Light (linked above) mentions the lights have been seen before cars were invented (a citation is still needed!), which should leave open the door for ghosts... if you ignore that back then there were still trains running over those lines... or assume that before cars people travelled without lanterns after dark... I'm just saying.

To pad out this filler post even further, I might as well throw in another one that didn't make the cut because it was too sketchy on the details. In a post from 2005 on a magician's forum, DrNorth tries to recalls a conversation from 20 years ago in which he was told about a fellow performer assisting the police by showing the Scooby Doo-like trickery in what appears to have been a brutal murder case. More than one person were apparently found slaughtered inside a locked warehouse with evidence abound of an occult ritual, including a burned hoof print in a cinder block, which he was able to reproduce to show how they used fear to manipulate the public and their followers. The demonstration was so convincing the officers at the scene drew their weapons when smoke began to appear from the hoof print, but I have to add that this is the only source I was able to find of the story. I want it to be true though. Or at least be given some clues to piece together a workable solution. 

Discussing locked room mysteries over a game of cards with Luci

Well, I guess my mind belongs to a period when it was possible to chase Sir Basil Zaharoff, the Mystery Man of Europe, across the continent or have been attached to some secret, Allied department of dirty tricks during the Second World War. I would've found Hitler's sense of security in his sealed, underground bunker adorable and unexpectedly polite to pose such a challenge to me. How did he know I loved locked room mysteries so much? That silly goose really was a tough nut to crack.

Enough mindless filler for one sitting and you can hopefully expect a fresh review this weekend. I feel strangely compelled to dig up some mystery novel set aboard a train or around train tracks. No idea if I have such a book on my TBR-pile.  

Off the Rails

"The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances." 

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, 1934)

The seemingly impossibility of making something of an enormous size, such as an elephant, vanish from the face of the Earth is one of the time-worn tricks of the stage magician, but not an act often attempted by the members of the impossible crime movement from any era.

Of course, the magician has a marked advantage in that he isn't obliged to point out the sliding-mirrors secreted in the bars of the animal cage, concealing the elephant from the audience without being moved an inch, but the mystery writer has to explain the trick at the end of the ride – which makes it harder to find new ways to make a train disappear between stations. The well appeared to have dried out with the publication of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost Special," a short story from 1898, and Ellery Queen's “Snowball in July,” collected in Q.B.I: Queen's Bureau of Investigation (1955). However, I had been aware of a mystery novel from the 1980s with a different take on the problem and this particular item finally fell into my hands.

Kyotao Nishimura's Misuteri ressha ga kieta (The Mystery Train Disappears, 1982) is a Grand Caper masquerading as a police procedural and the mark is the Japanese National Railways, who run the one-time Mystery Train. Its destination is unknown, but the J.F.N. promises an entertaining ride. There were only 400 tickets to allot among 8000 applicants and thus The Golden Ticket for railroad aficionados. A day after The Mystery Train departed from Tokyo Station, the director receives a phone-call demanding one billion yen ransom in exchange for their train and passengers. The twelve-sleeper coach from J.F.N. vanished between Kyoto and Tottori, as if it sprouted wings and took off, and they turn to the discreet Inspector Totsugawa from the Metropolitan Police Department – a bland policeman attracted to railway crimes.

What ensues is a chapter-by-chapter struggle with shadows as Totsugawa and the J.F.N. attempt to find the hostages and criminals, which makes for exciting (and fun) reading because every new discovery and development brings a new set of problems for the police. The shadows are due the vastness of the crime, the professional character of the people who executed it and the uncertainty of the amount of people it took to pull off. Totsugawa hopes to capture the criminals and retrieve the ransom money before they can split with it, but they manage to unload the bulk of money from a moving train, in which all the windows were locked and luggage of disembarking passengers searched by the police. This impossibility was better done and more convincingly explained than the disappearance of the titular Mystery Train, however, I tended to still like it because I didn't expect a polished diamond. I was also warned it had its flaws. The bit with the vanishing train is basically text-book stuff, as Jonathan Creek would’ve remarked, but I probably absorbed so many locked room mysteries that I can appreciate new ideas, even if flawed, more than I used to.

If The Mystery Train Disappears faults, it's lacking either a clear, definable opponent (caper-wise) or a pay-off at the ending (mystery-wise), but the Nishimura gave the reader neither and the book ended with a sudden whimper instead of a bang. Its weaknesses stands out especially among the small crop of (better) Japanese detective-and mystery stories translated in English. However, The Mystery Train Disappears is not a completely unrewarding read and there is some genuine detective/impossible material between its covers, but lower your expectations or you'll probably end up feeling disappointed. It's somewhat of a cross between Hilary St. George Saunders' The Sleeping Bacchus (1951) and Seicho Matsumoto's Ten to Sen (Points and Lines, 1958) without reaching the heights of either, but an interesting curio nonetheless.

Finally, I was surprised at the cooperative portrayal of the train-passengers and media towards the police, because I imagine nothing but sneers for the Nederlandse Spoorwegen (Dutch Railways) for outdoing themselves by losing an entire train alongside a few hundred people. And it would be a case of life imitating art, if they ever attempted their own version of a Mystery Train. The US media would probably go in a full, 24/7 meltdown and finally lose themselves in a courtroom, collectively frothing from the mouth, demanding a photo-opt with the bloated corpse the police dragged from the river.  

Spirits in Clay

"You're not supposed to root for the criminals." 

- Nathan Ford (Leverage, The Frame-Up Job)

The Pot Thief Who Studied D.H. Lawrence (2012) is prefaced with an acknowledgement by the author, J. Michael Orenduff, whose series featuring a shopkeeper and part-time treasure hunter, Hubert Schuze, began in 2009, stating that the book presents a twist on the age-old question on whether a series should be read in order. The Pot Thief Who Studied D.H. Lawrence was written as the third installment, but was shelved during a holiday, rewritten and eventually published two books later.

I think whether a series should be read in order is more pertinent today than it was during the heydays of the genre, when a series of detective stories were usually written as stand-alone cases, but the private affairs of the detective have become a popular plot-thread in this era – which can make you feel like dropping in the middle of a story at the beginning of a contemporary crime novel. Bill Pronzini's on-going biography of his Nameless Detective is a notably exception.

Hubert Schuze is a character best described as a literary descendant of Bernie Rhodenbarr, an owner of a second-hand bookshop supplementing his income from the store with nighttime burglaries from Lawrence Block's The Burglar Who-series, but Schuze is more consciences about his activities. The pottery Schuze digs up from the earth were deprived of their owners thousands of years ago, opposed by a law not even nearly that old, and therefore he does not see himself as a thief. Schuze argues that he gives an artifact, buried from human eyes for centuries, back to someone who appreciates it, usually a collector willing to pay big bucks for it, which is not exactly giving it back to the world. If it's in the public domain (so to say), the pottery should be on display in a museum, but Schuze's motives personal and entirely selfless – it must be added. Schuze is supporting his college-going nephew, paying the medical bills for his former nanny and donates to a scholarship fund for kids from the local area.

The failing kidney and looming transplant operation for Schuze's former nanny is actually a pretty good motivation for him to cross the line between excavating a site without a permit and outright thievery, and while it was a deciding factor here, the focus tended to be on Schuze's personal life. That means for the reader stepping in the middle of those embarrassing moments that a relationship completely disintegrates on a personal level.

Anyhow, the task for Schuze here is delivered by an Indian, Cyril Duran, who wants him to retrieve a pot his great-great grandfather, Fidelio Duran, presented to D.H. Lawrence (of Lady Chatterley infamy) as a welcome gift and trade it for three Taos pot from the same era – adding up to a neat, tidy sum in fresh merchandise. The problem is that Schuze doesn't even know if the pot is still at the Lawrence Ranch, high in the mountains, but he happens to have received an invitation to go up there before the request came in, which is too much coincidence according to his mystery novel savvy friend, Susannah Inchaustigui. Unfortunately, it takes them a while to get at the conference and the intervening chapters were a mixes bunch of bits that were either interesting, like Schuze brushing up on his Lawrence, or the exact opposite (e.g. a disintegrating relationship).

The first in the series

I prefer these personal tidbits and ongoing characterization to be briefly interspersed in the main plot of a novel as is done in the stories by Bill Pronzini, William DeAndrea and Herbert Resnicow. The problem I have with the lump of characterization in the middle-section is that it made the second half felt rushed when, upon their arrival at the ranch in a snowstorm, they are introduced to a large cast of characters. Schuze does a memory exercise to remember them all, but, in my opinion, it would've been better if the characterization had been devoted to the people at the ranch – most of whom don’t make it out alive. But then again, I'm not the best person to judge characterization in any contemporary crime novel. Cloaks and daggers is my department.  

The first death offers the titular pot-thief an opportunity to play detective and deduces the accidental death/suicide in a bathtub by electrocution is, indeed, murder, and not long thereafter, another guest turns up in the walk-in freezer. Snowbound and beginning to suspect one another, they lock themselves in for the night and have sentry shifts of two to guard the hallways. What else but the lure of an impossible crime can draw me in unfamiliar pastures and while the two-part solution to the locked bedroom are old hats, Orenduff found another way to use them and I appreciate the fact that the locked room trick could've only been pulled off with an open window.

Naturally, these were my favorite bits from The Pot Thief Who Studied D.H. Lawrence (alongside Susannah chattering about locked rooms and detective stories) and wished there was more of it, but there was another thing I found to be an endearing quality that makes up for its short-comings: the whole book impressed me as a very long fan-letter to Lawrence Block and Bernie Rhodenbarr is even mentioned towards the end.

The structure of the plot shares similarities with The Burglar in the Library (1997), in which Rhodenbarr attempts to steal a first-edition copy of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939), inscribed to Dashiell Hammett, from the library of a snowbound mansion. Here Schuze wants to lift forgotten piece of work from an important potter, gifted to a famous author, at a ranch cut-off from the outside world by a blizzard. Schuze’s shares a similar friendship with Susannah as Rhodenbarr has with Carolyn Kaiser and Detective Whit Fletcher is like Ray Kirschmann "the best cop money can buy." I rather like the idea that traditions like these still continue within the genre and Poe only knows that if I ever write a detective story, it will be mockingly referred to as "a love-letter to John Dickson Carr." 

The post-title is the name of Schuze's pottery store. 

The Train-Ride from Hell

"Accursed be he who plays with the devil!"

 - Friedrich Schiller 

After posting my review of Donald McGibney's 32 Caliber (1920), I glanced at the hillocks of Mount To-be-Read and indecision made its move to the forefront as primary advisor, but I was able to counter the initiative after Ho-Ling posted a review of Jan Apon's Een tip van Brissac (A Tip from Brissac, 1940) – an obscure, Dutch-language mystery novel.

I happened to have one or two little known, home-grown detective stories laying around and picked Herman Heijermans' Moord in de trein (Murder on the Train, 1925), which has the dark clouds of literature and history hanging over its authors. Yes. Plural. Heijermans passed away in 1924 and left behind an unfinished manuscript, but an eminent writer, A.M. de Jong, was able to complete the final chapter based on the directions and notes from its original author. A.M. de Jong was a prolific writer and contributed to a socialist comic strip (apparently) known for handling sensitive and controversial topics, but his socialist sympathies were not appreciated during the German occupation of '40-45. On October 18, 1943, assassins of the Dutch-SS rang De Jong's doorbell and stepped back into the darkness in order to have a clear shot at the silhouetted outline in the hall-lighted doorway – signature method of the Silbertanne (Silver Fir) murders. I'm glad to report a few of them got an appointment with a firing squad after the war ended, which, I'm sure, was an experience far more threatening to the personal security than the ideas of an ailing, middle-aged writer... even if De Jong had resorted to puns.  

The dark touch comes in the opening and closing chapters of Murder on the Train, written respectively by Heijermans and De Jong, in which Satan himself visits the key players of the story and one them is a self-absorbed writer, Hans Thyssen, but there's also a rich-banker, Arthur Rondeel and the hotel rat Karel Johan Tulp (a.k.a. Charles Jean Tullipe). The only thing they seem to have in common is a ticket for the D-train to Paris, however, it's going to be an extraordinary journey filled with shenanigans. A German widow, Mrs. Menzel Polack, is drugged and robbed of her jewelry in the ladies room, while another passenger, Nathan Marius Duporc, Inspecteur of the Amsterdamse Centrale Recherche, witnesses how a body is being pushed from the train crossing the Maasbrug and disappear into the waters below – making him grab for the emergency brakes.

There's one passenger presumed dead on account of a blood-soaked compartment bunk and the red smeared brake-handle tells the story of what must have been a battle for life and death, in which the victim was forcefully pushed through the window. A triangle is drawn in blood at the foot end of the bed. Another person is unaccounted for and Duporc has to map out the complex movement through the compartments and stations stops to get a reasonable picture of what happened, but the rough, short-spoken Duporc has to spar with nearly every suspect he encounters. And he does so as he hops from city to city, hotel to hotel, and through the various layers of society – from the daughter of the banker to checkmating the small-time criminal and crony of the hotel rat, Jaap Eekhoorn.

Ho-Ling mentioned in his post on the Jan Apon novel his strange habit of reading Dutch mysteries that aren't set in the Netherlands, such as Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee (ancient China) and Bertus Aafjes' Judge Ooka (18th century Japan), which he puts on his eclectic reading rather than a trope of the genre. But that's not true. Up to the mid-1920s (with the arrival of Willy Corsari's Inspector Lund), Dutch mystery writers imported their detectives: Ivans had the British Geoffrey Gills and Havank the French Charles C.M. Carlier (a.k.a. De Schaduw). I think there are perhaps two explainenations for this: a) detective stories have never stood in very high standing over here and this might have been an excuse for those early writers to get away with it b) mysteries with a foreign flavor simply sold more, because people didn't had the wealth back then to go mass-holidaying. The exploits of a detective attached to the Sûreté may've been more appealing to the reading audience than an intrigue in their own backyard, but the intercontinental flavor has always been very strong in these early Dutch mysteries – including Murder on the Train. There are characters from Australia and Germany and the text is littered with phrases and snippets of conversations in French, German and English. It was definitely a trope of the time. If anything, Van Gulik, Aafjes and Van de Wetering's Inspector Saito are continuation of this international tradition.

Anyway, I read Murder on the Train under the assumption it was an amusing, busily plotted and intelligently written detective story with a strong opening that the ending simply couldn't live up to, but the middle part served its purpose for the solution. And it was very Carrian! I could draw some comparisons here with some of his and another famous detective story, and if this book had been translated in English at the time, it would've probably been tagged as the ancestor of those stories. But I won't be messing around here with spoiler-tags, because the posts on foreign, untranslated stories are mostly ignored (see Ho-Ling's post) and that means it will be read by a very small number who have read this book and happened to stumble across my blog. I'm also sleepy.

However, the motivation and resolution was not something John Dickson Carr would've stuck with, more reminiscent of Anthony Berkeley, but it does defy the common notion that Golden Age mysteries snug up to the upper-classes, ignored the lower-classes and were all about restoring order. You could argue order was restored, but every way you turn it, this is more a cruel than a cozy mystery novel, but a good one at that. Just take the last sentence for example, "it was simply the tip of Satan's vanishing tail..."

The trail of obscurity has really brightened up lately.