"You make it sound like something out of a dime novel."- Shirley Taggert (Edward D. Hoch's "The Long Way Down," collected in Hans Stefan Stantesson's The Locked Room Reader: Stories of Impossible Crimes and Escapes, 1968)
Kel Richards is an
Australian journalist, broadcaster and author whose bibliography is stuffed
with crime-fiction, such as Sherlockian pastiches, thrillers and traditional
detective stories, but what beckoned me to his work were a number of historical
mysteries – which threw the mantle of Sherlock
Holmes over such literary figures as G.K.
Chesterton and C.S.
Lewis. Oh, there's also the fact that these novels are saturated with
impossible crime material.
So I was compelled to take a gander and
see how Richards handled everyone's favorite plot-device, because hey, any
excuse to further bloat the
locked room label. We're getting close to 250 blog-posts! But, for now,
let’s take a look at one of these locked room novels.
The Floating Body (2015), originally published in Australia as The Floating Corpse,
entered third in a series about the author of The Chronicles of Narnia
(1950-56), C.S. Lewis, who now has a penchant for getting involved in murder
cases – usually of the impossible variety. The person responsible for drawing
Lewis into these cases is one of his former pupils, Tom Morris, who seems to be
the true murder
magnet of the series.
Tom Morris is the Acting English Master
at Nesfield Cathedral School, located in the fictional town of Nesfield, which
Richards (admittedly) borrowed from Michael Innes' The
Weight of Evidence (1944). The Author's Note at the end points out that
Innes, the penname of Prof. J.I.M. Steward, was "a colleague of Lewis and
J.R.R. Tolkien in the English School at Oxford." So that's a nice touch to
the story and the narrative has several of these literary Easter Eggs. For
instance, Morris confiscated a lurid crime novel from one of the schoolboys, The
Purple Gang, which is "a non-existent mystery novel referred to a number
of times in the comic novels and short stories of P.G. Wodehouse."
I got the impression Richards tried to
emulate the kindly, lighthearted tone of the Gervase Fen mysteries by Edmund
Crispin. A tone that become particular audible in the plot-thread
concerning the shenanigans of some of the schoolboys.
The Floating Body begins with the introduction of this particular plot-thread, which
happens when Morris has to order the school bully to release his prey, "young
Stanhope of the Fourth," from his stranglehold, but the Acting Master
discovers the boy has a propensity for trouble – trying to use his father's
standing and money to get one of his fellow students to steal next week's exam
paper for him. However, not everyone appreciated how the School Toff approached
them, nose high in the air and "an ingrained look of vast superiority to the
world around him," which placed a pair of nasty bullies on his tail.
Regardless of his faults, Stanhope is
only a small boy who still has some things to learn and Morris asks a group of
friends, who refer to themselves as "The Famous Four," to play the role of
guardian angels to the young boy. This storyline runs, like a red-thread, through
the entire plot of the book and breaths some real life in the school setting.
It's also a lovely throwback and homage to the long-gone era of school-and
sporting stories from the boy's magazines of yore, which were, if I'm not
mistaken, at their zenith during the 1920-and 30s – diminishing in popularity
after the Second World War. You can also make a case that this plot-thread ties the book to juvenile crime-fiction.
However, not everything is fun and games
at the school: Morris ensnared his former university tutor, C.S. Lewis, to come
down to Nesfield and fill the spot of guest speaker, but eventually has to play
detective when he witnesses a seemingly impossible murder.
The young Mathematics Master, Dave
Fowler, is seen going to the roof of one of the school building, "well away
from all noisy schoolboys," where he plans to enjoy the summer weather and
a mystery novel – which happens to be the then recently published The
Nine Tailors (1934) by Dorothy L. Sayers. By the way, the story takes
place at the start of the summer of 1935. Anyway, Lewis and Morris witness how
Fowler is arguing with an invisible person on the roof, who stabs him in the
stomach, which is followed by the math teacher staggering unsteady across the
roof. He then "seemed to lose his balance" and "disappeared from view
as he plunged over the far side of the roof," but what they find where the
body was supposed to be was "a bare, gravel road." The body seems to
have vanished on the way down.
Fowler's corpse is eventually found where
it was supposed to be, after it was seen tumbling from the rooftop, but not for
another twenty-four hours. As if the body had been suspended in midair,
completely invisible, before falling down to the ground on the following day.
The explanation was surprisingly simple,
somewhat reminiscent of Leo Bruce's Nothing
Like Blood (1962) and the rejected solution from a fairly well-known
locked room short, but these ideas were used here to form a nice little
impossible crime. My only grip about this part of the plot is the knifing of the
victim, which unnecessarily complicated matters for the murderer. I think this
person should have used a crook-handle cane, instead of a knife, to work Fowler
over the edge of the rooftop. If you know how the murderer remained invisible
to onlookers, you know how the crook of the cane could be employed and used as
a clue that nodded in the direction of the murderer. Otherwise, I enjoyed
trying to work out possible explanations for the invisible assailant and the
midair disappearance of the body.
On the other hand, I was not as impressed
with the who, why and the fair-play of the overall plot. One of the potential
motives, linked to a hidden sub-plot and false solution, is simply thrown into
the story and the actual explanation felt uninspired, which can be explained by
all of the attention spend on the schoolboy-angle, the impossible crime and
Lewis' exhortations on Christianity – which sometimes made the book feel like a
sermon with detective interruptions.
So I feel very divided about The
Floating Body: there's some things to like about the story, but, purely as
a fair-play mystery, it has its fair share of flaws. However, I'll further
investigate his work before giving my final judgment. After all, I read some
positive responses to the second book in the series, The
Corpse in the Cellar (2013), which is also a locked room mystery. I'll
get back to him sooner rather than later.
I couldn't watch that video because the guy kept wildly (and unnecessarily) gesturing with his hands. That's something that drives me to distraction. [I know, I'm an odd bird.] I've read about these elsewhere, and they sound tempting. Very clever of them to mimic the look of the British Library Crime Classic. I thought that these were part of that imprint until I read further, then looked up the publisher.
ReplyDeleteI completely forgot to mention that in my review, but yes, this series is not being published by the Poisoned Pen Press/British Library Crime Classics. However, the covers do look nice. Even if they're just imitations.
DeleteIt's increasingly sounding like I'm going to have to check Richards' work out -- he's been floating around my radar for a year or so now (Like John, I first saw the books and thought they were part of the BL series...the cheeky beggars). Not sure how keen I am on the thinly-veiled Christian propaganda, but williing to attempt it for the purposes of an interesting impossibility...
ReplyDeleteBut, yeah, that next book does sound good!
Thinly veiled? Ha! It's very much in your face and the reason why the book often felt like a sermon with detective interruptions, which definitely came at the expensive of the overall plot. I don't know how much the real Lewis loved to proselytize, but his literary counterpart in this book was very fond of it.
DeleteNow I would be willing to put up with that, if the plots improve in other books.
I've read Richards' The Corpse in the Cellar and The Country House Murders. I enjoyed the characters, especially C S Lewis, yet for me the mysteries were not well constructed. They start off well but Richards does not capable of hiding the solutions well. Within the first two chapters of the next book I had the who and the how solved.
ReplyDeleteWell, guess I'll wait for the book with the headless corpse in the locked room, which should show some improvement as the fourth one in the series. Otherwise, I might as well drop the series. No sense in pursuing subpar plots.
Delete"The Famous Four" is probably a reference to Billy Bunter and the "Famous Five" of the Greyfriars school stories. Bunter and the Famous Five were in the "lower Fourth." The stories lasted for a long time, from 1908 through to the 1960s. I think, as you noted, that Richards was using this sort of source material. George Orwell had an interesting essay on this stuff, and there are a number of Wikipedia articles on it.
ReplyDeleteBut I would say that I find books like the Richards books to be troublesome because there is nothing new in them. Everything is recycled: C. S. Lewis, Gervase Fen, Billy Bunter and the Famous Five, Leo Bruce, etc. Even the cover is a phony. The only part of the book that seemed to be new was the impossible crime itself and you were not impressed by it. This is the sort of thing you see when a culture is in its decadence.
You're correct, anon: Greyfriars, Bunter and the Famous Five all figure in the story or are acknowledged in the Author's Note as the source of inspiration.
DeleteThere are also a several characters who carry the name of famous fictional detectives (e.g. Merrivale) or mystery writers (e.g. Crispin). So, when you put everything together, it does impress one as a book consisting almost entirely of recycled material.
However, Richards does seem to genuinely admire the sources he drew from. He simply does not seem to have had as tight a grip on the overall plot as he had on the Christian stuff or bits with the schoolboys.
The problem of the impossible crime really is the knifing: a crook-handled cane would have worked just as well and would have posed less of a danger for the murderer, which concerns something the murderer needed for the stabbing. Walking around with a cane would have been less suspicious, but would have provided the observant reader with a clue.
There's also the iffy (i.e. lack of) clueing about how the body come to vanish and reappear. It could have been a genuinely good impossible crime story that played on the cussedness of things in general.
Sounds like fun TC, thanks. Been a long time since I read a contemporary book (meaning a new mystery, even if set int he past) with such Golden Age trappings - I tend to find them synthetic or overly jokey and self-referential, but actually it sounds like this side-stepped these possible pitfalls at least!
ReplyDelete