In the Grip of the Lobster (1965) by B.J. Kleymens

I closed my relatively recent review of Ton Vervoort's Moord onder toneelspelers (Murder Among Actors, 1963) with a promise to smear out my future explorations of those obscure, untranslated and long out-of-print Dutch detective novels, but curiosity got the better of me – happily tumbling down another rabbit hole. So here we are again. You can blame it wholly on the ghosts of Vervoort and the Frederic Dannay of the Low Countries, Ab Visser. 

Back in March, I reviewed Vervoort's Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologists, 1963), subtitled "het dood spoor van de tweeling" ("the twins' dead end"), which is the second title in the so-called "Zodiac Mysteries." An ambitious collaborative effort, under the editorship of Visser, who gathered a dozen writers each tasked with writing a detective or crime novel in which one of the twelve signs of the zodiac plays a central and perhaps even a decisive role. This idea had a ton of potential and could have been a notable contribution to the genre, but the project was abandoned after two years and eight novels. You can find a list of the eight published zodiac-themed mysteries in the review of Murder Among Astrologists.

I don't know why the series was abandoned, but it could not have been due to a lack of writers to pen the remaining four novels. While playing internet detective, I came across an archived article from 1964 mentioning the four unpublished contributors. So this opened the door to the elusive Phantom Library with potentially more items of "Lost Media" to add to its shelves.

I already knew Robert van Gulik was one of the four writers and that he "had already finished his story for the series," which was likely published in The Monkey and the Tiger (1965) as the Judge Dee novella "De nacht van de tijger" ("The Night of the Tiger," 1963) and can be read as a backdoor entry in the series – as Judge Dee was born in the year of the tiger in the Chinese zodiac. But what about the other three writers? Leo Derksen was a journalist and writer, but, to my knowledge, not with roots in the detective story. Dick A. van Ruler was the art editor of Utrechts Nieuwsblad and one-time TV presenter who has one detective novel to his credit, Moord op een negatief (Murder of a Negative, 1963), which is currently on the big pile. Jacques Presser was a historian and part-time mystery writer who penned four madcap detective novels between 1953 and 1965. Nothing else to link those three names or their work to that abandoned series beside that one article.

So this begs the question whether the series was, on paper, completed with article mentioned that all twelve writers wrote a novel around one of the astrological signs. What happened?

I suppose the publisher pulled the plug (disappointing sales figures?), but what happened to the unpublished manuscripts Derksen, Presser and Van Ruler contributed to the project? Are the manuscripts slowly crumbling to dust somewhere in a drawer or were they thrown away decades ago? Or did one or two follow the Van Gulik route? Derksen appears to have not written anything in our genre and Van Ruler's only novel was published around the time the series began, which probably got him the gig, but Presser's Moord in de Poort (Murder in the Poort, 1965) possibly could be a lost Zodiac mystery. The window of the time is very narrow, as 1965 was the year the series was canceled, but Murder in the Poort was Presser's last detective novel and the only one to be published by N.V. W. van Hoeve – which also published the Zodiac series. So tracking down a copy has been added to my priority wishlist and finding any trace of an astrological plot-thread should settle the matter.

But what has all of this to do with today's review? While exploring the rabbit warren of the Dutch detective story of the 1950s and '60s, I also stumbled across several contemporary reviews of the Zodiac series. One title, in particular, caught my attention.

B.J. Kleymens' In de greep van de Kreeft (In the Grip of the Lobster, 1965) was the seventh or eighth novel to appear in the Zodiac series, which received some surprising and suspicious praise from the normally hostile critics. Carl J. Bicker evoked the name of Raymond Chandler and pointed out that the detective-characters introduced in the story were unlikely to carry a whole series, but also noted it was a well put together deduction story. I knew the name of the reviewer sounded familiar and a quick search revealed Bicker was a pseudonym of the editor of the Zodiac series, Ab Visser! A second review was published under his own name. There were a few warning bells, but the premise sounded like something straight out of a Christopher Bush or Brian Flynn mystery. So I took a small gamble and tracked down a copy. But this presented me with another puzzle.

Who was J.B. Kleymens? This is a question with an easy and difficult answer. The easy answer is that it was the shared penname of J. Kleijn and B. Mensen, but the difficult part is answering who they were. A little detective work allowed me to identify the former as the journalist and writer, Jek Kleijn. Jek is an unusual name and his surname means small or short in Dutch, which makes his involvement evident as one of the two journalistic detective-characters is named Jek Groot – whose surname translates as big, tall or long. You can Anglicize those names as Jack Short and Jack Long. Unfortunately, I've been unable to pin down the identity of his co-author, because, without a first name, Mensen returns too many unrelated results. Not a bad piece of genre archaeology, if I say so myself.

Just one more thing before finally getting around to the review. In the Grip of the Lobster is listed in the review of Murder Among Astrologists as In the Grip of Cancer, which is a technically correct translation. But in Dutch, the name of the zodiac Cancer is Kreeft (Lobster) and thought In the Grip of Cancer sounded a little brutal for a well intended, but completely amateurish, detective story. Yeah... I'm afraid the review is going to be significantly shorter than the long, roundabout introduction. 

In the Grip of the Lobster takes place in the small, sleepy and entirely fictitious provincial town of Rooldrecht where normally very little or exciting happens. Least of all during the tri-weekly council meeting at town hall. Jan Frens and Jek Groot in the press box were secretly looking forward to a cold glass of beer in the favorite pub of the local journalists, which is when it happened. An elderly, venerable councilor, P.C. Hooftman, apparently decided to take a nap during the meeting. Very much to the annoyance of the mayor, but Hooftman is not sleeping. He's as dead as a door nail. The doctor determines he had a stroke, but then lightening strikes twice when, an hour later, the town hall messenger dies under similar circumstances and that same evening Frens witnesses a shady individual, face hidden under a big black umbrella, breaking into town hall – rifling through the documents of that day's meeting. So he follows the mysterious man with the black umbrella, but it's Frens who's caught red handed and eventually imprisoned, which places the two local journalists in direct opposition to the police. Frens and Groot are determined to get to the bottom of the business before the police.

What ensues is clumsy, amateurish dance around shady, small town politics with a development project, a dry-as-dust document that everyone wants to get their hands on and a black umbrella with an astrological sign stamped the handle. But nothing particular clever or good is done with any of the plot pieces.

There were one, or two, good ideas with a glimmer of potential. Such as the risky poisoning-trick, which is already unconvincing, but the way in which the poison was delivered could still have made for a good howdunit. But what did they do? They simply tell the reader how it was done without any real detective work. I also expected something clever from the journeying umbrella that was lost, found and lost again. The last time it got lost something suggested it could have been "Chesterton's umbrella," but that possibility would have only fitted an even more unimpressive solution. 

In Grip of the Lobster is written well enough, especially its opening and closing chapters, but, purely as a detective story, it's nothing more than a well intended, clumsily plotted and sparsely clued piece of amateur detective fiction. There were many tells in the story betraying its authors were either the most casual of mystery readers or complete outsiders, but appreciated the attempt to craft a genuine whodunit. So a textbook example of the chase being more fun than the capture.