1/27/17

Tools of Death

"I am too old a crow to believe that a random deduction of mine is necessarily true... but I suggest it, my friend. I suggest it. And unless you can satisfy me that it is not the truth, I am going to make matters warm for you. Very well."
- M. Henri Bencolin (John Dickson Carr's The Four False Weapons, 1937)
Rufus King was an American mystery novelist who created a number of series-characters, such as Reginald de Puyster, Stuff Driscoll and Dr. Colin Starr, but his primary and most successful detective was a New York policeman, Lt. Valcour – who made his first appearance in the very unusual Murder by the Clock (1929). I only read one other of King's Lt. Valcour novels, The Case of the Constant God (1938), before, perhaps unfairly, shelving him away as a poor man's Ellery Queen.

Lately, I came across several reviews of King's detective novels, which tempted me in returning to his work for a second glance and there were two potential candidates on my TBR-pile: Murder by Latitude (1931) and A Variety of Weapons (1943). The former received glowing comments from both readers and critics, but settled down for the latter, because the premise and the book-title suggested the story fell into a rare, sparsely populated category of the genre – one that (so far) consists only of G.K. Chesterton's "The Three Tools of Death" (The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911), Ellery Queen's "The Hanging Acrobat" (The Adventures of Ellery Queen, 1934) and John Dickson Carr's The Four False Weapons (1937).

Well, this turned out not to be the case, however, the book was, as Anthony Boucher described it, deftly characterized with "sly shifting suspense" and "a puzzle of Kingly dexterity." It also oddly managed to be a very unconventional mystery that operated well within in the confines and conventions of the traditional detective story. If that makes any sense. Anyhow...

A Variety of Weapons is a standalone novel, originally serialized in Redbook as The Case of the Rich Recluse, which has a young woman as its main protagonist.

Ann Ledrick is slowly making a name for herself as a photographer of animals and already won an award for "a stunning shot of a Manx cat," which landed her job at the barely accessible estate of the titular recluse. Justin Marlow is fabulously wealthy and lives at a place called Black Tor, tucked away in the heart of the Adirondacks, where there are no roads, but the four thousand acres of private land has its own landing field – providing the safest way of reaching the isolated community. There are rumors, aimed at discouraging uninvited guests, that "entire safaris have perished from starvation while attempting to track to the house itself." So the place is really remote and practically inaccessible.

Marlow wants Ann to come down to Black Tor to snap a ton of pictures of the ocelots that belong to his cousin, Estelle, but it becomes apparent they've an ulterior motive for flying her down to the estate. A reason that's attached to a family tragedy and an ever increasing pile of bodies.

Twenty years ago, Marlow's only son was found standing over his pregnant and mortally wounded wife with a blood-stained knife in his hand. He was accused of having stabbed her while "she was playing Chopin on a spinet," put on trial, sentenced and executed on the electric chair, but his father never believed him to be guilty. Old Marlow "fought like a tiger to clear his son," right up to the execution, but rumors say he went cuckoo after failing to save his son. And this may have resulted in some additional deaths. Several of the men who were involved with his late daughter-in-law died before their time in hunting accidents or succumbed to food poisoning, which whispers say were murders with "a Machiavellian touch."

I do not think most readers will have too much trouble figuring out what role the twenty-something Ann played in this drama, because it's mentioned, very early on in the story, they "did a Caesarean" on the dying woman in order to save the baby. So Ann finds herself cast in the role of an unexpected and tragic heiress, but one who inherits more than just money from her newly found grandfather.

Marlow was already a dying man when Ann arrived. The victim of a slow, destructive poison and on his deathbed he handed her the torch of his private-investigation into the murders that have taken place on the estate – making it now her task to prove her father did not stab her mother. It's not a task that's entirely without danger. However, the second half of this novel is far more detection-orientated than the first one, which had a surprising amount of logical clues that instinctively make you glance in the direction of the killer. Such as the nature of the later murders of the men and "the white back" that was seen behind a rainy window of the music room on the night of the murder twenty years before. A clue that, by the end, recalled Agatha Christie's 4.50 from Paddington (1957).

There were also two interesting animal-related clues: why did the dog of Ann's mother, a Chow, not defend its master when she was being stabbed, but, instead, "trembled on her cushion" and made little noises? The second clue is the affection Sgt. Hurlstone, of the State Police, gives to a black cat, but animal-lovers will probably frown upon his reason for keeping the animal so close to him.

Of course, this positive review of a mystery novel, I genuinely enjoyed, would not be complete without me nitpicking about something small, because (minor) imperfections are there to be dragged out into the light of day. 

First of all, there's the poison that was slowly killing Marlow. It is, in fact, a slow-acting poison, but some of the details were questionable and sounded as if King got them from the pages of a lurid pulp-thriller. However, this is unquestionable one of the earliest examples of such poison being used in crime-fiction and "the grim result of the skeleton bones in silver on the films" was a nice touch. Secondly, the motive could not really be deduced based on the given evidence, but motive is of secondary importance to most readers. As long as the who (and how) can be deduced. So that won't spoil the book for most readers.

So, all in all, I found A Variety of Weapons to be a better mystery than either Murder by the Clock or The Case of the Constant God, which nicely balanced a fairly clever plot with elements of suspense – planted in a traditional, but unusual, setting with a strong cast of characters. King really redeemed himself here and Murder by Latitude has now crawled to the top of my TBR-pile.

18 comments:

  1. Thanks for your review. I just ordered my copy. King is an interesting writer. His three books of short stories about Halcyon, Florida are also good.

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    1. One of those collections is Malice in Wonderland, right? I read that one is suppose to be really good.

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  2. Malice in Wonderland is the first of them and was a Queen's Quorum pick. The other two are The Steps to Murder and The Faces of Danger. They are generally excellent. They have something of the sociological feel of Vickers's Department of Dead Ends stories.

    Speaking of Vickers, I don't see anyone blogging about him very much, which is too bad. I think the Dead Ends stories were the best inverted detective stories of the Twentieth Century (except maybe for Freeman's).

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    1. Well, you probably won't like this, but I thoroughly disliked The Department of Dead Ends when I read it years ago. A sorely disappointing collection of short stories.

      However, I've one of his novels, Murder of a Snob, on my TBR-pile, which is, reportedly, an impossible crime story. So maybe I like Vickers better as a (locked room) mystery novelist instead of a writer of short inverted detective stories.

      By the way, the best inverted mysteries of the previous century are a part of the Columbo series!

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    2. By the way, the best inverted mysteries of the previous century are a part of the Columbo series!

      I agree totally!

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  3. The Columbo stories were not bad but they were not very good either, having the usual defects of TV programs. It does not appear to me that they did anything to advance the inverted form. I always thought they relied upon class conflict for their main appeal, and I don't think that is very good, regardless of whether class snobbishness comes from either the upper class or the lower class. The Dead Ends stories, on the other hand, give an excellent picture of their times from the level of every class. It is rare for me to have to read a story twice to see just how successfully the author has fooled me, but I had to do that a lot of times with these stories. I also note that the story "The Rubber Trumpet" has been reprinted many times and is generally considered to be a classic. Even Julian Symons (for the little that is worth) thought highly of the series, of which there are a number of volumes. So we must agree to disagree.

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    1. Yeah, I think we must agree to disagree about Vickers' Dead End stories, but I'll move his locked room novel to the top of the pile and see what he can do with that. So that's one Vickers-focused blog-post you can look forward to in the near future.

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  4. Ellery Queen wrote the introduction to the 1949 edition of The Department of Dead Ends. He stated: "In the field of the contemporary detective short story the most brilliant manipulator of the "inverted" detective short story is, in my opinion, Roy Vickers. ... Indeed, since The Rubber Trumpet originally appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, I have heard nothing but extravagant praise for that first tale of the Department of Dead Ends. Such connoisseurs as Christopher Morley, Vincent Starrett, Anthony Boucher, Howard Haycraft, James Sandoe, Charles Honce, E.A. Osborne and other true aficionados, have written or spoken to me, unanimously selecting that great story for the Honour Roll Award."
    The book also got a starred award in 1001 Midnights.
    Turning to Colombo, it does not seem to me that Levinson and Link actually added anything to the formula except class prejudice. I am sure it is very flattering to hoi polloi to beat the 1 percent every week, but it annoys me when people insist on putting their politics into their stories. The characters are cardboard, there to perform their assigned rolls of wily detective and upper class villain. In Dead Ends, the stories emerge naturally from character and situation, whereas the Columbo stories are built along Agatha Christie lines where character is sacrificed to the needs of situation. I have never seen a Columbo story which dealt with the character of the murderer in any depth, nor as the years rolled by did I ever see any development in Columbo's character except for a surrender to political correctness in giving up his cigar. As mysteries they appeared to me to be rather routine.
    In short, to say the Columbo stories are the best would mean that they represented an advance over Vickers, and there are a raft of important critics who might say to the contrary.
    The novels by Vickers I have read seem to me to be good but not very important. The novels he wrote after the war seem to me to be better than those he wrote before.

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    1. Turning to Colombo, it does not seem to me that Levinson and Link actually added anything to the formula except class prejudice. I am sure it is very flattering to hoi polloi to beat the 1 percent every week, but it annoys me when people insist on putting their politics into their stories.

      I know what you mean and there are modern TV crime series with that kind of political message.

      I'm not sure that was the intention with Columbo though. My feeling is that they were trying to recapture the atmosphere of golden age detective fiction. This is an updated version of the world of S.S. Van Dine and early Ellery Queen.

      Chandler said that Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it in the alley. That's true, and it's boring. Murder in the alley is boring because it's low-lifes killing other low-lifes in predictable and unimaginative ways. The intention with Columbo was to get away from sleazy killings of petty criminals and drug dealers. Columbo, like Van Dine and early Ellery Queen, takes place in a fantasy world of clever criminals carrying out murder in imaginative and convoluted ways. It's hard to conceive of drug dealers or pimps trying to commit the perfect murder. They just knife someone and get arrested half an hour later. But a tycoon might well have the brains and the resources to commit the (almost) perfect murder.

      Columbo took murder out of the alley and dropped it back in the Venetian vase. Personally I prefer that approach but of course it's purely a matter of personal taste.

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  5. I agree with what you are saying. Columbo treats the murder mystery very much like a Golden Age game. There is certainly room for that, and even across the lapse of years I can remember a number of them. At the end of the show, the murderer never reaches for his gun or starts screaming, but rather gives Columbo a compliment on his perspicacity. The point I am making is that the Columbo stories tend to have the same two characters and follow the same formula, whereas the Dead Ends stories cover a very wide range of characters and situations. One of the points of the Dead Ends stories is that an attempt at the perfect murder can occur in any class or walk of life; it is not just an amusement for the rich. There is a great deal of space between the Venetian vase and the alley and Vickers explored much of it.

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    1. I'm afraid I don't have too much of substance to add to this discussion, because I only remember how unimpressed and disappointed I was with The Department of Dead Ends. I was well aware of the praise the stories received from such luminaries as Boucher, Haycroft and Queen, but I failed to see what they, or you, saw in them. They did nothing for me. Sorry, Anon.

      On Columbo, D pretty much summed up my opinion about the series and would like to add an additional reason as to why all of Columbo's investigations took place in a class or two above him: his character is that of the eternal underdog. Or someone who appears as an underdog. Columbo is basically a well-camouflaged predator and he would be less sympathetic if he used his tricks among a community of homeless people or stalked a victim of domestic violence who had killed her abuser.

      But the pros-and cons between both series really boils down to personal taste and what one is willing to put up with. Personally, Vickers failed to impress, or entertain, me in the same Columbo has done. So I like Columbo better than Vickers. But who knows. Maybe I should re-read the collection (or just one story) to see if the passing of the years has softened my opinion on them.

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    2. I recommend The Rubber Trumpet.

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  6. Glad to hear all this as I have yet to read King and always enjoy a good steer with a new author - thanks TC.

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    1. I'm not entirely sure, Sergio, but I think Rufus King should also be available in Italian editions. So maybe those are easier to get hold of instead of the English editions.

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  7. Rufus King's three maritime mysteries, Murder by Latitude, Murder on the Yacht and The Lesser Antilles Case, are absolutely superb. And Murder Masks Miami is enormous fun as well.

    I rate King as being among the very best of the American golden age writers. Definitely in the top five.

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    1. I'll be trying one of his maritime mysteries before long. Everyone seems to like them.

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  8. I like King a lot, though I recall being underwhelmed by Murder by the Clock as well. But I really did enjoy the maritime mysteries and a number of other titles by him. Have a new essay out on him in Murder in the Closet.

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