Partners in Stitches

"I am an old-fashioned villain."

"Old-fashioned villains are always killed in the end."
- Casino for Sale (1938)

Death is no laughing matter, especially when it manifests itself in the guise of a callous murderer, but the mystery genre has a long and storied history of making a laughing stock out of the homicidal tendencies of the scythe wielding death-dealer – goaded by the ghouls who relish these abdominal stories. And yes, we're all guilty of this one. After all, who can honestly say they read Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936) with a straight face or were not reduced to soft chuckles after strangling a laugh while flipping through the pages of Kelley Roos' The Frightened Stiff (1942)?  

Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon, co-conspirators in a series of comical mysteries and historical farces, were two of the malefactors responsible for turning the cloaked embodiment of death into a figure of fun. These literary equivalents of Bonnie and Clyde openly confessed that they intended to keep Londoners laughing during the Blitz and schemed their risible narratives while cremating cigarettes, draining cups of tea and emitting frequent shrieks of laughter – which is why I always refer to them as partners in stitches. Well, if Bill Pronzini is ever going to compile a Gun-in-Cheek sequel, dedicated to awful puns and cringing witticism from hack reviewers like myself, I have secured a spot in it with that one!

Their first collaborative achievement as a criminal enterprise came with the publication of A Bullet in the Ballet (1937), in which Inspector Adam Quill and the members of Vladimir Stroganoff's absurd and uproarious ballet company made their first on-stage appearance – as they tangoed with an assassin who insists on killing performers dancing the role of Petrouchka during shows with hundreds in attendance as potential eye-witnesses. The jocular story telling gelled perfectly with a well-constructed plot, but it was the impresario Stroganoff who usurped the spotlights. A genuinely droll character who gave actes de présence in numerous of their satirical mysteries as well as non-criminal comedies.

Casino for Sale (1938) opens with the beleaguered Stroganoff being bamboozled into purchasing a small, dilapidated casino within the vicinity of a recently erected, modish casino and on top of that his newly acquired gambling den turns out to be cesspool of crime. Blackmailers and confidence tricksters have a run of the place, but the indefatigably impresario takes on the competition by inveigling the discerning public into the run-down gaming house with his world famous and celebrated ballet company. But nothing runs smoothly and when Pavlo Citrolo, an eminent ballet critic who moonlights as a blackmailer, refused to give a good notice the promoter recognizes that the situation calls for swift and immediate action by doing what everyone in his position would've done – spiking the critics drink with a sleeping draught and rushing-off to write a laudatory review in his name after safely locking the snoring blackguard up in his own office.

So problem solved? Casino Stroganoff receives a commendatory notice from a highly regarded patron of the stage and the decrepit casino becomes a success after all. Well, not quite.

When he returned to unlock his office, a speech prepared to logically account for his groggy state and the locked environment, in which Pavlo Citrolo found himself when he woke up from the drug-induced stupor, he finds the strangled remains of the man in what can only be described as a sleuth's nightmare. There was a noose dangling from the ceiling and a gun near the body; there was a bullet hole in the wall and an untouched glass of milk next to a bottle labeled poison; a half-smoked cigar on the mantel piece and the safe door was swung wide open – and guess who the local Inspector Clouseau incarcerated for the murder after his first inspection of the crime-scene? Exactly! Luckily, for Stroganoff, he had the blind foresight to dispatch an invitation to Adam Quill, now retired from the force and making a living as a private enquiry agent, to waste his vacation at the casino – which now has turned into a busman's holiday.

Casino for Sale is a rollicking cavalcade of crime, in which the bantering characters and effervescent dialogue decide on who has the brightest sparkle by holding a repartee duel – making this is a fast-paced and breezy story. Unfortunately, as a detective story, the plot missed a beat or two by trivializing the circumstances in which the murder was discovered. The clue filled murder room was fairly quickly accounted for as one of Stroganoff's artistic fits (hoping to obscure the murder as a suicide and abscond any personal responsibility for drugging him) and the banality of the locked room trick was unsatisfactory to say the least. Admittedly, the latter advanced the plot and provided a few chuckles, but I think littering the place with a dozen spare keys would've worked just as well and been less of a disappointment.  

Nevertheless, these cosmetic anomalies take very little away from the overall quality of the book as it remains a very amusing romp and Adam Quill is a pleasantly assiduous detective – diligently picking up clues, interrogating witnesses and pursuing suspects. It's just that I feel that this could've been a minor classic if Quill also had to explain away the murderous instruments and intriguing clues, one after another, before uncovering the culprit's identity – akin to Carter Dickson's Death in Five Boxes (1938).

If you'd compare this book to a casino slot machine, it only missed one of the symbols needed to complete the winning combination that would've hit the jackpot. Oh well, at least playing the game was plenty of fun.

Bibliography of the Adam Quill and Vladimir Stroganoff series: 

A Bullet in the Ballet (1937)

Casino for Sale a.k.a. Murder a la Stroganoff (1938)

Envoy on Excursion (1940)

Six Curtains for Stroganova a.k.a. Six Curtains for Natasha (1945; non-mystery)

Stroganov and Company (1980; a short story collection)

Leverage: First Impressions

"Sometimes bad guys make the best good guys."

Last week, I posted a brief synopsis of the BBC series Hustle, in which a team of conmen take on the undesirable elements of society who abuse their wealth and power – and separate these unquenchable Scrooges from a considerable amount of dough. Overall, it's a superb series with fun characters, cleverly constructed, multi-layered plots and a brisk tong-in-cheek style. So when I read there was an American counterpart to this series, entitled Leverage, I perked up and immediately placed an order for the first season box-set. The first disc just stopped spinning and it left me with mixed feelings. 

We provide... leverage

First of all, the series has the same unpretentious, facetious tone (even when there's a darker, more serious edge to a story) and the characters are every bit as much fun as their European brethrens. The main objective of this series evidently lies in filling up nearly an hour with unadulterated amusement, however, it misses the cleverness and labrythine plotting of Hustle.  

But let us begin with lining up the suspects and identifying them: Timothy Hutton assumes the role of the crew's mastermind, Nathan "Nate" Ford, who was an insurance fraud investigator until his employer refused to cough up the cash needed to provide his son with life saving medical treatment – resulting in the kids untimely passing. The aftermath of this domestic tragedy is that Nate not only lost his son, but also his wife and career until a man hires him to lead a crack-team of criminals to do a job that would cost the insurance company who allowed his son to die a lot of money. But when they're double-crossed they band together instead of dissolving and take down their first mark as a team.

The other members of this band of criminals include the reputable grifster, who occasionally nicks valuable paintings and artifacts, Sophie Devereaux; the martial arts, fire-arms and retrieval expert Eliot Spencer; the cat burglar Parker and last, but not least, computer expert and master hacker Alec Hardison. They pool their unique talents and knowledge to provide leverage to those who've been wronged, harassed and bullied by influential individuals and domineering corporations by leveling the playing field for them – and this often includes retrieving what was taken from them or get what their targets morally owe their clients.

This is where the fact that you're watching an American series smacks you in the face. The marks are bigger, richer and wield more power and therefore the stakes and risks are a lot higher – resulting in more action based story lines and less of the Machiavellian scheming I was expecting to find in the only peer Hustle has. The plotting can be downright lazy at time! When they're faced with a hurdle, Alec simply strokes his keyboard and it's solved (because everything is online); where as the other crew work their fingers to the bone when on a long-con and their fixer never solved the really difficult tasks with such ease. Heck, in one of the episodes he was unable to bypass a seemingly perfect security system and they had to cook-up a clever plan to work around it – creating an impossible theft in the process. 

Admittedly, the last two episodes I watched, The Miracle Job and The Bank Shot Job, showed definite improvement over the first three episodes. The first one has them fabricating two miracles, making a statue of St. Nicholas cry and disappear before a full congregation, in order to save a church and the second came closest to matching their overseas counterparts – when Nate and Sophie land smack in the middle of a hostage situation during one of their cons at a small-town bank. Yeah, putting your main characters in a hostage situation is not a very innovative plot idea, but you can churn out something decent if you know how to spin it and that was definitely the case here. And the fact that this is as much a crime fantasy, which refuses to take itself too seriously, as the other series also helped making this plot work and everyone can cheer when the villain-of-the-week received his comeuppance.

Plot-wise, Leverage is just a cut below Hustle, but not any less enjoyable and I'm already foolishly keeping my fingers crossed for a continental crossover project, in which the crews of Nate Ford and Michael Stone chase the same mark. But not something as a trivial as looting a casino or bank. No, no, no! This has to be something on the same scale as Maurice Leblanc's epic 813 (1910).

Oh, one can but dream...

The Misadventures of the Ironmongers

"You're very difficult to convince, Professor."

"I’m only difficult to convince when the facts appear to me inadequate for positive proof."

- Death on the Board (1937)

Before we examine today's yarn of calculated murder, unmarked sins and cherished revenge, I have to begin with a shout-out towards William I. Lengeman III – who blogs over at Traditional Mysteries. When he opened up for business, the focus began to shift after a few weeks from book critiques to supporting fellow bloggers and now that he's back on track with the former I want to return the favor. So check out his reviews and drop him a line. Now that's out of the way, it's time to assume an air of feigned intelligence and began reviewing this book.

Your honor, ladies and gentleman of the jury, my client, John Street, has been accused of a most heinous crime. A monstrous atrocity in the literary world that's worst than mass murder or grand larceny. Yes, this man has been wrongfully, slanderously and maliciously accused of what John Dickson Carr described as the one unforgivable sin: namely, that of being dull. Well, my dear fatheads, I would like to enter Death on the Board (1937), published under the penname of John Rhode, as counter-evidence against these trumped-up charges. 

The Corporate Body

The focal point of Death on the Board are the members of the board of directors of Porslin Ltd., a corporate imperium dominating and monopolizing the iron mongering business, which began as a small hardware store expending rapidly after the Wiggenhall brother took over the helm from their deceased father – and adopted an aggressive, cut-throat business model to drive local shop keepers into the ground. As a result of this take-no-prisoners stance, the map of the country is dotted with red specks indicating the locations of their branch stores. Unfortunately, for them, opulence comes at a price when it's obtained by drawing guiltless blood and one day the board members begin to drop one after another, stretched over a one year period, but until the fourth corporate body confirms an undeniable pattern they were filed away as deaths by misadventures.

John Street establishes here why he's the mechanical engineer of crime. These shrewdly plotted murders aren't subtle deaths that quietly suggest an accident, like a dive down a flight of stairs or a deadly hunting accident, but a grand scale booby traps like an exploding country estate and a burning bed that barely leave a thread of evidence in their wake – and he effortlessly shakes five of such tricks from his sleeve. This is the equivalent of a Dr. Gideon Fell novel featuring five seemingly impossible situations or Ellery Queen trying to decipher half a dozen dying messages within the ambit of one story!

The official police, represented here by Hanslet and Waghorn, are completely out of there debt with these lethal booby traps, but the cerebral Dr. Priestley reconstructs them without getting up from his armchair – aside from a trip to his upstairs, private laboratory for a scientific demonstration. Here's where the main interest in Street's works lies: crime isn't treated as a fine art, but as an applied science and that's in all probability how he acquired the label of being humdrum.

However, let me assure you that this is not a story that trots along by employing a smattering of gimmicks as a crutches, even though the diabolical murder traps do usurp the spotlights, but its also a well-written story with some fine touches of characterization. I was especially intrigued by the chapter in which Turnstead began to reminiscence on his early days with the company, when he was appointed as a manager of a newly established branch in charge of destroying a local merchant, while the vexatious Grimshaw was launching an embarrassing eulogy for their late founder. Say about his prose what you want, but that excerp was a fine example of good writing and aptly foreshadows the inevitable culmination of this murky plot. And no, that's not a spoiler. It's evident from early on that we're dealing with an avenger from the past, but the question is as who this person is masquerading and how the traps were set-up.

There's only one minor quibble I have to throw out here regarding the final fifty pages, which was basically a repetition of the previous two-hundred pages and began to drag you down a bit when the only thing you want to do is confirm your deductions, which, even without paying too much attention to the clues, should be entirely correct at this point in the story. If they 'd trimmed thirty or forty pages from this story it would've tightened the plot and made this book even better than it already was.

So, my esteemed and highly regarded collection of dunces and numskulls of the jury, I will not stand before you and claim with a straight face that the accuse was without his fair share of faults, but then again, who within the confines of the genre was? John Dickson Carr, who I affectionately refer to as the maestro, produced Patrick Butler for the Defense (1956) – a serious contender for the worst mystery novel ever written.

I therefore have the effrontery not to beg, but to tell you, to carve this into your minds when you're in that jury room deliberating: whether this man was a gifted novelist or a boring hack is completely subjective, but there's no denying that he was a mystery writer who had some interesting ideas to offer and therefore deserving of this retrial that should, if there's any justice in this world, lead to be finally released from biblioblivion. The decision is yours.


EDIT: don't be offended, the jury members I adressed in this post exist only in my beautiful mind! ;-) 

Bloody Murder

"Revenge should have no bounds."

- Hamlet: act iv, scene vii

During the waning years of the late 1920s, S.S. van Dine unveiled with the publication of The Bishop Murder Case (1928) the only perspicacious stratagem from his entire oeuvre, in which an imperceptible entity knocks-off members of New York City's intelligentsia with varying methods modeled on nursery rhymes – but it was Agatha Christie who popularized this plot device a decade later in one of her most popular novels, And Then There Were None (1939). Killers who patterned their crimes after nursery rhymes became a trademark of her work and some of her notable contemporaries followed suit, e.g. Jonathan Stagge's Death's Old Sweet Song (1946) and Ellery Queen's Double, Double (1950).

"Alas, poor Yorick!"

It's one of those simple, but clever, ploys that stuck around when the light from the golden epoch of the detective story began to diminish and modern interpretations can be found in a movie like Se7en (1995) or in the mini-series Messiah: The Horrowing (2005) – tho' none of these newfangled representations can hold a candle to the alternative, campy masterpiece that is Theatre of Blood (1973).

In this early slasher, Vincent Price, inimitable and sublime as always, drapes himself in the theatrical costumes of Edward Lionheart, one of the staunchest Shakespearean actors to ever come onstage, who threw himself into a river after suffering a public humiliating at the hands of a group of critics at an award ceremony. The body was never recovered and the devoted actor was presumed dead, but as Price remarked on an episode of The Simpsons, "You should know that the grave could never tame me!"

Unbeknownst to the world at large, a group of filthy, hard-drinking and drugged-up vagrants hauled Lionheart from a watery grave and adopted the thespian as one of their own – even going as far assisting him in extracting revenge on the circle of critics who unjustly maligned him for years with their poisonous pens. The gruesome murder of each critic is modeled on a death scene from one of Shakespeare's many plays with one or two rather horrific, but clever, variations.

This bare plot outline hints at a rather standard fare as far as serial killer flicks are concerned, but what makes this movie work is the fact that the actors were friends or at least well acquainted with one another – and Vincent Price evidently had the time of his life bumping-off one after another of his real-life friends and the feeling was apparently mutual. You've never seen a more eager group of potential victims enthusiastically tugging at the Sword of Damocles that is suspended above their heads, as if they're idolatrous followers of a charismatic cult of personality who's handing out bottles of cyanide laced lemonade, which rubbed off on me fairly early on the movie. I don't have much resistance when it comes to enthusiasm and I am easily contaminated with the darn stuff. And then again, it's Vincent Price who's doing the killing. Getting yourself murdered at the hands of punitive basket case will definitely put a damper on your day, but when that loony, knife-wielding madman turns out to be Vincent Price you can at least put your mind at rest that you're going out in style.  

But the coup de grâce is the campy, but exhilarating, manner in which the gruesome murders are set-up and portrayed on screen. I don't think words will do these scenes justice, but one of them involves a meticulous decapitation of a man while a romantic tune plays in the background and the demented character actor ensnarls another victim by disguising himself as a gay hairdresser with a huge afro – even flirting with the uncomfortable cop whose job it was to the protect the prospected victim! But the cartoony fencing scene that involved trampolines and summersaults easily overshadows every other scene.

With a less talented cast, this fabulous, blood drenched picture could've easily deteriorated into a horribly cheesy and silly precursor of the slasher movies from the 1980/90s, but the chummy players elevated this movie from a campy blood fest into an extremely watchable slaughter party. Shortly put, murder was never supposed to be this fun, but it was, and thankfully nobody was considering for even a single second to apologize for his or her behavior.

By the way, from what I understood, not every critic was charmed by the premise of this movie. The critics targeted and dispatched to an early grave were thoroughly unlikable and they made it impossible not to align yourself with the homicidal Lionheart, which was kinda the whole point of the movie. It's not entirely unlike a macabre comedy of manners which pokes (with a sharp blade) fun at stuffy critics with illusions of grandeur, but I guess self-deprecating humor is an acquired taste. 

An "F" for Felony

"It was as fantastic as Alice's sojourn in Wonderland – as improbable as her tea party with the Mad Hatter!"

- Hilary Fenton (Murder at Cambridge, 1933)

The collaborative, literary venture, operating during one of the most prosperous eras of the detective story under a number of different pennames, such as Patrick Quentin and Jonathan Stagge, accumulated a considerable hoard of praise on here – and each and every laudatory syllable was well deserved. Unfortunately, they didn't permit me to compose another meritorious song of praise, in which I would've lyrically waxed about their skillful handiwork at knitting an intricately patterned wire mesh from a ball of plot threads and their knack for gauging the intelligence of their readers and act on it to cleverly lead them up the garden path. But none of these talents were on display in Murder at Cambridge (1933).

When I invaded the opening chapters of Murder at Cambridge, published under the Q. Patrick byline, I was astonished to find myself at the heart of what appeared to be John Dickson Carr territory. Naturally, the style of story telling diverged from that of the maestro himself, but the characters and events suggested a conscience pastiche – which I would've assumed to be the case were it not for the fact that John Dickson Carr was still an up-and-coming writer himself at the time of publication.

This felonious yarn of double murder, sudden romance and buried family skeletons, clawing away a ton of dirt to their freedom, set at a quiet, British college is narrated by Hilary Fenton, son of a well-to-do, notable jurist from the States, who studies abroad and leads the habitué lifestyle of an undergraduate – which is turned on its head when he catches a glimpse of a woman in the lecture hall and promptly falls in love. The name of the woman, referred to by the love struck chronicler as The Profile, turns out to be Camilla Lathrop, a daughter from a wealthy family, who trots the campus grounds with her fair share of secrets – one of them being the true nature of her relationship with Julius Baumann, a South African of Dutch extraction, who coincidently turns up at Fenton's doorstep with a rummy request.

Baumann wants Fenton to countersign a document as a validation of his signature and entrusts him with an envelope, which he has to drop off in a mailbox, in case anything happens to him – dire words pregnant with prophesizing qualities. Because one night, during a roaring thunderstorm, doubling as an atmospheric backdrop for a group of students telling horror stories and as a cover to drown out the noise of a gunshot, someone surreptitiously slipped into Baumann's room and shot him in the face.

Well, there you have it: nearly all the ingredients required to formulate a John Dickson Carr novel. The male lead of the story is a youthful, American hero who is swooned off his feet by an attractive, British girl and they're subsequently plunged heads first in a shady, dangerous affair – cumulating in a murder committed while everyone was breathlessly listening to ghost stories with occasional interuptions by the crackling thunder. The only components needed to have completed this concoction was a killer striking in a hermitically sealed environment and the hidden presence of ingenious, double-edged clues.

The lack of a proper, meticulously conceived locked room trick is a grave offence, but one that would've received some leniency if there had been even a single, semi-clever clue to look at – instead of randomly selecting a culprit who snugly fitted the role of least likely suspect and even that bolt from the blue was deflected by the front cover of my edition! Yes, the second-rate, poor excuse for a hack illustrated the front cover of the Popular Library edition with a depiction of the murderer in the act of poisoning the cup of the third, intended victim – hence the reason for picking a different cover to embellish this post with. 

Thankfully, this artistic debauchery didn't spoil a better detective story, but I'd still like to show this paint-waster, and others of his kind, the error of his ways in an interactive college course I entitled, The Experiments of Dr. Mengele: An Reenactment. Guess who will be wielding a set of syringes filled with a brightly, multi-colored liquids? Oh, c'mon, don't pretend you failed to notice the tell-tale signs of my crumbling sanity and ever weakening grip on every-day reality.  

Anyway, the only redeeming qualities this book possesses is the Carrian flavor that lingers through-out the book, the protagonist who tells an excellent story and the delineation of college life in the early 1930s – but as a clever, fair-play detective story this one just might constitute as the biggest misfire of the year.

This is not at all what I expected from the same, straight "A"-minds who crafted the deviously, twisted and multi-layered plots that adorn the pages of Death and the Maiden (1939) and Black Widow (1952) – and I have no other choice than to mark this one down with a big red "F". I hope you do better next time, guys!

On a final note, I once again have to apologize for the fact that a bad read translated itself into another shoddily written review. When a book turns out to be as disappointing as this one, it's an exhausting wrestling match to gather the right words, string them together to form coherent sentences and hoping that it miraculously resembles a half decent review. Hopefully, I will do better in my next blog entry, which, by the way, will focus on one of John Rhode's most praised books. Stay tuned! 

All the books I reviewed by these writers:

Murder at Cambridge (1933)

Puzzle for Players (1938)

Puzzle for Puppets (1944)

Death and the Maiden (1939)

Black Widow (1952)

The Con is On

"The con: an invisible crime build on the premise of finding someone who wants something for nothing, and then giving them nothing for something."

Recently, I've been re-watching a bunch of episodes from the first three seasons of Hustle, in which a troupe of professional confidence tricksters play the long con on credulous and avaricious marks – who expect to get something for nothing, but end up getting nothing for something.

Would these faces lie to you?

After a so-so season earlier this year, these episodes helped jog my memory as to how the stories roped me into watching this show in the first place. The convoluted plotting, facetious characters and tongue-in-cheek approach was the antidote needed after trudging through a batch, of then, recent Poirot and Miss Marple adaptations – which were very bleak, tone-wise, and suggested P.D. James rather than Agatha Christie. Needless to say, the ambitious plotting and light-hearted nature of these deft capers invigorated my downtrodden spirit.

The contemporary Robin Hood, who leads this modern-day band of merry men, is the infamous, all-round confidence trickster Michael "Mickey Bricks" Stone, who is best described as a cross-breed between the charming gentleman rogue and the brilliant amateur detective. He has a labyrinthine mind that is capable of devising the most intricate schemes with the outward appearance of seemingly random, unrelated events and very few are able to outthink or even second-guess him. This talent is not only employed to separate a mark from his money, but also to help them escape from tight situations.

This craft for deceiving was discovered and cultivated by his mentor, Albert Stroller, a semi-retired, legendary conmen from the US (played brilliantly by Robert Vaughn) who acts as the crew's roper by enmeshing potential marks in one of their traps – and my favorite character in the series. A cunning old fox if there ever was one! Ash "Three Socks" Morgan's main job is that of the teams fixer by turning Mickey's elaborate schemes into workable plans, but he's also a talented grifter in his own right and I love the episodes in which he impersonates a Dutchman. It's so bad it's good!

Mickey, Albert and Ash are the core members of this criminal enterprise, but in the first four seasons their business partners were Danny Blue and Stacie Monroe. The former is an ex-short con artist turned long con rookie and apprentice of Mickey, in spite of regularly challenging his leadership, while the latter is a beautiful, all-round-grifster and potential love interest to both Mickey and Danny. They were replaced in the fifth season by the brother-and-sister team of Sean and Emma Kennedy.

Regardless of their status as professional criminals, this gang isn't made up of hardened thugs who support their millionaire lifestyle with narcotics or running a protection racket, but by skinning fat cats who are a public nuisance or a holy terror to their immediate surroundings. In the episode The Hustler's News of Today, they take down a tabloid paper after one of their targets, a friend of Stacie's, attempted suicide due to false accusations of embezzling funds, while in Missions they face-off with a bend copper who wants to cut-in on their profits.

However, not every episode is modeled on this pattern and the crew often has to deal with authority figures, who want to use their unlawful expertise to further their own cause, and the best example can be found in Law and Corruption – in which an over ambitious cop plants a suitcase full of cocaine on Mickey and blackmails him into capturing a famous gentleman thief for him. A similar situation arises in Cops and Robbers when a head of security, an ex-cop who once beat Albert Stroller at his own game, strong-arms them into entrapping a bank-burglar who has been targeting branch offices and his employers are not amused. 

And then there are the Ocean's Eleven knock-offs, in which they meticulous plan daring heists and impossible escapes. Big Daddy Calling has them visiting grifters heaven, Las Vegas, where they plan to loot the publicly displayed, $5 million jackpot of the Big Daddy Fruit Machine. There's just one tiny problem: it's situated in a tightly secured casino run by a ruthless mob boss, but then again, this is the same team who successfully burgled The Tower of London in Eye of the Beholder! 

In New Recruits and Tiger Troubles, they try their hands at the locked room illusion as they made a painting disappear from a gallery protected with a perfect security system and spirited a diamond encrusted statue from a sealed bank vault – but I've seen these tricks before, although, they were cleverly executed here.

If you haven't got the idea already, these stories are a delicious, crafty criminal fantasies that purposely stretch probability, occasionally knocking down the fourth wall and refuses to apologize for giving viewers like me 60-minutes of unadulterated entertainment – and I highly recommend this comical capers to everyone bored with the current crop of crime shows. Just bear through the introductory pilot episode. It's necessary to establish the characters.

Finally, checkout my review of Freeman's The Stoneware Monkey (1939), which, for some reason, failed to pop-up on numerous blog feeds.

All That Remains

"Art is in the eye of the beholder."

It's remarkable the extent to which enthusiasm is contagious, especially within a closely-knit network of blogs, message boards and mailing lists – populated with adherents of the grandest game in the world. As I scribble this, Curt Evans is putting the final touches to his manuscript with which the erudite gladiator will enter the intellectual arena to defend the often, and unjustly, undervalued humdrum writers. This rallying cry for an upcoming battle impelled Patrick to unsheathe his sword in defense of John Rhode, Freeman Wills Crofts, Henry Wade and R. Austin Freeman, which, in turn, provoked me into action and pulled a copy of Freeman's The Stoneware Monkey (1939) from my cluttered bookshelves. 

One of the genre's most well-known pricks, Julian "Bloody" Symons, condemned Freeman as a penman of negligible talents, whose stories are the figurative equivalent of chewing on dry straw, but after finishing The Stoneware Monkey I have to ask if he actually bothered to read his work in-depth before passing judgment – since this book contained both wittily written sections as well as a fairly realistic approach to the detective story. But, of course, realism in Symons'

book has nothing at all to do with scientific accuracy, or any such nonsense, but with whether or not a detective has a sex life. I had written here an example of how Freeman could've earned the demagogue's nodding approval, but deleted it since nobody wants to be stuck with a mental image of an amorously Dr. Thorndyke sneaking into the city morgue and smothering the cadavers with kisses. Oh, wait...

The first portion of the book is narrated by Dr. James Oldfield, one of Dr. John Thorndyke's former pupils, who relates the story of his involvement in two, seemingly, unconnected crimes – which cumulated in a third. The ruinous seedlings of the case were planted in a countryside village, where Oldfield was looking after a small practice of a vacationing medico, when, after returning from a late house call, he hears the alarm of a police whistle – and promptly spots a mortally injured police constable who was slugged with his own truncheon. There's no question that the perpetrator was the same person who, mere minutes before, swiped a parcel of diamonds from the home of a local merchant and the constable was in pursuit of the pilferer. But despite an incriminating thumbprint, left on the murder weapon, no viable suspects turned up to secure a match – and the case went unsolved.

Dr. John Thorndyke

The purloining of the diamonds and subsequent murder of the police constable only take up the first thirty pages of the book, before receding into the background, after which the story picks up again in the city where Dr. Oldfield has set-up a new medical practice. One of his first patients is Peter Gannet, a pottery maker who suffers from incurable abdominal pains, but a consult with his ex-mentor, the famous medico-legal forensic investigator, results in diagnosis of arsenic poisoning – and together they foil the plans of a scheming poisoner. However, the potter refuses to bring in the police, because the would-be-murderer can only be one of two persons: his devoted wife or a live-in friend – who shares Gannet's studio to make hideous, artsy jewelry.

Here's where my favorite part of the story begins. Dr. Oldfield becomes a regular visitant to the Gannet home and strikes up sort of a friendship with the artist, but quivers at the primitive monstrosities the potter molds from hunks of clay and the crude, barbaric jewel-studded ornaments, crafted by the annoying Frederic Bowles, aren't up to the conventional tastes of the medico, either – resulting in one or two delightfully, witty observations and potshots at the expense of the modern art movement at the time.

In one particular chapter, Dr. Oldfield kills off some time by visiting an exhibition of Gannet's work and a pompous art critic is erratically rattling on about how art is not meant to be understood and how verbal language is inefficient in conveying the abstract qualities that are to be felt rather than described. This amusing parody turns into a merciless mockery when the arbiter begins describing the qualities of a decorated jar as the masterpiece of the collection, possessive of the artistic personality of the potter, but it was Oldfield who made the jar during one of his visits to the studio – and Gannet fraudulently passed the object off as part of his own work. Hey, you can't blame a Classicist/Romanticist for snickering at that... or at any of the other jokes!

But there's also a simplistic, but effective, detective plot, which centers around the two modernist artisans – who live as two warring countries under a temporarily suspension of arms and the doctor prevented one of their fights from escalating into a declaration of war with one of them as the first casualty of the ensuing onslaught. It's therefore no surprise when the two men disappear simultaneously and evidence is uncovered that a body was cremated in the pottery kiln, but who of them assumed the role of murderer and who was the victim?

The final quarter of the book, narrated by Jervis, provides the answer as he relates how his associate, Dr. Thorndyke, reconstructs the crime and links it with the pernicious diamond heist a few months earlier and expounds on the importance of the titular stoneware monkey. However, the observant reader won't find a bombshell revelation in this part of the book, but then again, it was evident from the outset that the interest of the plot lay in reconstructing the events rather than identifying the perpetrator – and very few played that game better than Austin Freeman.

In short, if Julian Symons' description is accurate than the taste of dry straw has been grossly underrated.

Touring Baker Street with Vincent Price

"Well, tonight it's back to Baker Street. Back to that unlikely London of the nineteenth century where high adventure awaits all who would seek it, in a hansom cab or under a gas lamp in an Inverness cape."

- Orson Welles, The Mercury Theatre on the Air.

Normally, I blaze across the pages of any detective novel that stands in my way, and even a brush with a 400-page behemoth, whose sheets are covered with turgid prose, hardly effect my pace, but somehow I was thrown off my game this week – and have been trotting through Freeman's The Stoneware Monkey (1939), without reaching the final chapter, for over three days now! Social obligations also make it unlikely that I will arrive there before Thursday; however, this provides me with an opportunity to post this filler recent discovery.

Back in the 1980s, the incomparable Vincent Price guest hosted a television show, in which he introduced the viewers at home to a new Sherlock Holmes episode, starring Jeremy Brett as the maverick detective from Baker Street, and closed the hour with a final thought – which are minor gems and usually very insightful. It's also a delight to hear him cite Ellery Queen as a source when introducing Silver Blaze as one of the finest sports detective yarn ever written. They can be found scattered all over YouTube, but here you can have a peek at his opening and closing statements regarding a personal favorite of mine, The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual. Take note of the brilliant, second part of the video! 

An Amsterdam Policeman: Remembering Appie Baantjer

"You're are a warm person with a cold job in a chilly country."

- An old Surinamese man to DeKok (DeKok and the Dead Pall-Bearer, episode 9.5).

A.C. Baantjer (1923-2010)

Despite the fact that foreign critics draped the mantle of Georges Simenon and Conan Doyle over Appie Baantjer's shoulders, in recognition of his talent as a storyteller whose words gave life to a detective as human as Jules Maigret and possessive of amaranthine qualities comparable to those of Sherlock Holmes, he continues to be tagged as a second-rate hack – and admitting that you derive any sort of pleasure from his writing is not entirely like openly fessing up your dirty bedroom secrets. But as someone who tirelessly champions the legacy of archaic, unremembered mystery writers, I defy this snobbish notion and proudly proclaim that it was Appie Baantjer who lit the furnace in which my undying love for the detective story has burned ever since.

The Thirteen Cats, 1963

Albert ("Appie") Cornelis Baantjer came into this world on September 16, 1923 in the small seafaring village of Urk, but escaped from a predestinated life as a fisherman when the family moved to Amsterdam – where they lived as a regular, working class family until the war. During the German occupation, Baantjer voluntarily took the place of a colleague, a father of two children, who was designated for labor in Germany, but ended up in prison after forging leave notes for fellow laborers. After the war, he wanted to go to Dutch-Indonesia but his father prevented that from happening by scrawling his sons name on a job application form – which landed him a forty-year career on the Amsterdam police force where he ended up finding a second vocation as the nations best-selling crime novelist.

The literary talents of this rookie cop were gradually discovered through the obligatory paperwork that came with the job. Police reports rolled effortlessly from his typewriter, while colleagues were struggling to find the correct words or right turn of phrase. This inevitable resulted in a book, 5x8 grijpt in!: politie-ervaringen uit de grote stad (5x8 Intervenes: Police-experiences From the Big City, 1959), which he co-authored with a fellow policeman, Maurice van Dijk, under the penname, A.C.M. Baandijk. Unfortunately, it was not a premonition of things to come and it did so poorly that the book was never reissued after its initial publication, making this, in combination with a limited print run, a rarity on the collectors market.

Murder by Moonlight, 1996

Baantjer persevered in writing stories, mostly semi-fictionalized anecdotes, which were collected under his own name in a volume entitled Het mysterie van de doodshoofden (The Mystery of the Dead Heads, 1963), all the while slowly, but surely, making a name for himself as an up-and-coming crime novelist. He achieved minor successes with Een strop voor Bobby (A Noose for Bobby, 1963) and De dertien katten (The Thirteen Cats, 1963), but they were atypical of the stories he would come to write in the years ahead. The former begins as a noirish study of characters but turns into a full-fledged locked room mystery in the final quarter of the story, while the latter has an unusual plot in which everyday crime seemingly goes hand in hand with the supernatural – tantamount to John Dickson Carr's The Burning Court (1937) and Robert van Gulik's The Chinese Gold Murders (1959).

Early 1965, marked the first appearance of Inspector DeKok, whose worn hat and rumpled raincoat became as iconic as Columbo's tousled head of hair and stumpy cigar, and his trusty sidekick Vledder – solving their first case in De wurger op zondag (The Sunday Strangler). DeKok and Vledder are crude and undefined characters in these primordial tales and the plots unimpressive and often cheated by withholding crucial information from the reader. For example, in Het lijk in de kerstnacht (The Corpse on Christmas Eve, 1965) and De dode harlekijn (The Dead Harlequin, 1968) the characters assuming the role of the murderer aren't introduced to the reader until the final chapter.

The Merry Bacchus, 2001

The publication of De treurende kater (The Sorrowing Tomcat, 1969) ushered in a sort of neo-classicist period, in which the plotting tightened, the characterization sharpened and conventional tropes from a previous era began popping-up. De stervende wandelaar (The Dying Stroller, 1972) has a solution that hinges on a dying message; Moord in séance (Murder in Séance, 1981) has a classic closed-circle of suspects situation reminiscent of Agatha Christie and De ganzen van de dood (The Geese of Death, 1983) is a take-off on the British country house mystery – stocked with members of an aristocratic, inbred family. These books, jotted down between 1969 and 1989, were not yet bound by a rigid formula and evinces a lot of imagination and willingness to experiment – which naturally make these best and most rewarding reads in the series.    

Admittedly, the fully developed formula validates part of criticism launched against Appie Baantjer as a writer and can't be written off as invidious accusations over his record breaking book sales, which left literary thrillers in a cloud of dust kicked up as each novel made a dash to the top echelons of the bestseller lists, since it's undeniable that it stifled the tentative plotting and experimental creativity. But this later, formulaic period is often put forward as an argument in dismissing his entire body of work as hack writing, which is not only unjust but also petty and childish. The early and mid-period books deserve to be recognized for what they are, and even the formulaic ones aren't entirely without interest.

The Frisky Widow, 2006

The sheer readability of his prose easily distracts your attention away from a routine plot and some of them hark back to the days that lay behind them: Tranen aan de Leie (Tears at the Leie, 1997) centers on a series of bizarre poisonings and has Baantjer sniping at the leniency of criminal prosecutors and judges; De onsterfelijke dood (The Immortal Death, 1998) is a throwback to the supernatural tinged stories; De blijde Bacchus (The Merry Bacchus, 2001) has a very original motive and De dartele weduwe (The Frisky Widow, 2006) was his last performance that was above average before the great drop off, but that's to be expected from a writer in his eighties who turned out books on a yearly basis for over fifty years!

After his wife passed away in 2007, he decided to put an end to the long running DeKok series with Dood in gebed (Death in Prayer, 2008) and quit writing altogether, but after a while he started to get the itch again started a new series with a co-author, Simon de Waal, who also happened to be an ex-colleague of Baantjer. The main characters are thinly disguised versions of themselves and Baantjer's character is an elderly detective who recently lost his wife, but continues to have long conversations with her. Awwww!

Unfortunately, he only contributed to the first three titles in the series before losing a short, but intensive, bout with cancer, which was, at the end of this month, exactly one year ago. My motivation for hastily scribbling this summary overview of his life and career is the hope that my fellow bloggers will join me in a little tribute on August 29, 2011 – in commemoration of the one-year anniversary of his passing.

Don't worry, Baantjer's novels are readily available, including a batch of brand new translations from Speck Press, and I hope we can clutter the blogosphere on that day with reviews of his books. Let me know if you want to join the party.

(yes, I know, this isn't exactly a scholarly piece of writing, but I did it in a hurry because I want to give everyone enough time to obtain a book to read at their leisure. And yes, I used the English spelling of DeKok's name, because the Dutch spelling makes the filters of search engines a bit nervy).

The Adventure of the Scarlet Blaze

"The one who gets the last laugh isn't the criminal, but the little guy with the big brain."

- Hattori Heiji (a.k.a. Harley Hartwell)

Ever since I began participating in the online mystery community, I triumphantly lured over a dozen fellow enthusiasts into reading Kelley Roos' The Frightened Stiff (1942) and John Sladek's Black Aura (1974) and unintentionally resurged an interest in the obscure, hard-to-get books by Anthony Wynne – who stands as one of the most fertile writers of impossible crime stories. But try as I might, I just can't seem to generate even half as much attention or buzz for Case Closed / Detective Conan as I did for an unremembered writer whose books have been out-of-print for nearly seven decades – even with the backing from Ho-Ling and Patrick. This makes me wonder if the lack of overlap, between readers of Conan and Golden Age Detectives, isn't due to mis-advertisement but simply an unbridgeable age and cultural gap. I mean, here we have a detective series that literarily has everything one hopes to finds in well-written, tightly plotted and fairly clued mysteries, ranging from classic locked room mysteries to character-driven suspense stories, but, for some reason or other, older readers seem to be unable to warm up to it.

I hope this is an misunderstanding on my part, but whatever the answer may be, we will continue to proselytize, indoctrinate and incorporate new members into the Cult of Conania, and here's my latest contribution:   

Blazing Horses and a Glowing Firebug

The first murder case of this volume covers just about half of the book, and has Conan and Harley hot on the trail of a serial arsonist – whose modus operandi varies case by case but are signed with the incendiaries unmistakable trademark signature: leaving a small statuette of a red blazing horse at the scene of each inferno. At heart, this is a blazing eulogy to the memory of Agatha Christie, which adeptly avoid the familiar pitfall filled with tired old clichés and misconceptions, but it's also a solid detective story in its own right. And it's always a pleasure to watch Conan and Harley team-up.  

Murder Among Friends

Professor Agasa chaperons another outdoors excursion for Conan and his buddies from The Detective Boys, when they bump into a group of friends from a college club touring around in a campervan and not unexpectedly one of them turns up dead after briefly disappearing from the party. On the surface, it has all the earmarks of an unfortunate accident, but a bike in perfect working order, tire tracks and a bloody picnic blanket are the silent witnesses that scream out foul play. The gist of the trick is easily deduced, but the clueing and use of the outside environment makes this a satisfying detective story.

The Mother Hunt

In the final story of this collection, Richard Moore is employed by a well-known child actor who was abandoned by his mother when he was only a baby, however, recently he has been receiving a slew of postcards which were evidently send by his mother – and he wants the famous Sleeping Moore to locate her. However, it's Conan who does a top-notch job at deducing her whereabouts from the tell-tale clues on the postcards. As a matter of course, their mother hunt turns into a murder investigation and they have to deduce who of three women strangled a freelance, hack mudracker – and who of them is the boys mother. Not one of the best stories in the series, but it has nifty visual clue that I really liked. The deadliness of the murder weapon is questionably, though.