Obsequies at Oxford

"Murder is like any game. As in chess, you begin the game and you plan your moves. I doubt if your mind was bent on murder at first: more on catching the King's eye..."

- Hugh Corbett (The Devil's Hunt, 1996)

Paul Doherty remains one of the most reviewed authors in this niche of the blogosphere and I have done a fair share of clogging the feeds with critiques of his historical romances, brimming with high treason, royal chicanery and murder most foul, but the arrows pulled from my quiver were mainly aimed at the ones set in ancient Egypt – which diverged from the approach of fellow connoisseurs who buried themselves in medieval Britain or classical Rome. 

So, I decided that after finishing off nearly the entire series and jotting down five reviews, it was time to take a brief detour from the sweltering deserts and sultry cities, where Chief Judge Amerotke precedes over the courts, to the early 14th century – when Hugh Corbett investigates and quelled threats that imperiled the crown and reign of King Edward I. Admittedly, I embarked on this journey, over the pages The Devil's Hunt (1996), with not much that would qualify as expectations, however, when the pages began turning into chapters and the central players become more than just names, I really started to enjoy the story – and after flipping over the final page I was sold!

When the story opens, Hugh Corbett has emerged from retirement at the King's request and finds himself en route to the university town of Oxford – which in recent weeks has become a breeding ground for murder and sedition. The first predicament thrown in front of the King's loyal bloodhound is that of an amorphous entity, known as the Bellman, who covertly stalks through the sleeping streets at night to post treasonous bills and letters on doors, but these puerile attempt at in-sighting dissension among the citizenry of the town takes a complicated turn when the Bellman is linked to a series of deaths at a local college.

Whispering tongues wag with speculations on the true cause of death of John Copsale, regent of Sparrow Hall, who went to bed one night and never woke up again. It's assumed that he died of natural causes, but the wagging tongues are dripping with rumors of poison. Not long there after the remains of the college librarian, Robert Ascham, are retrieved from behind the bolted doors of the college library – with a crossbow bolt driven through his chest and a piece of parchment near his hand with a dying message on it scrawled in blood.

Oh, and if that wasn't enough to keep Corbett occupied, there's also an axe-wielding murderer on the loose, who decapitates beggars and adorns the branches of the trees in a nearby forest with their heads!

Hugh Corbett is hot on their trail and along the way he establishes himself as an engaging and likeable detective, however, Doherty appears to be using duplicate molds from which he castes his snooping protagonists and this resulted into Corbett's subsidiary, Ranulf-atta-Newgate, to seize the limelight from his master.

Ranulf is as skilled with a dagger as he's with a quill and simply the most fascinating character roving the pages of this bloody saga with a brooding personality that's in the process of evolving, which was a turn-up for the books, since I never detected any development in the nature of the regular faces from the ancient Egypt series – in which the characterization tends to be one note. The best scene with Ranulf is probably when their friend, Maltote, was mortally wounded at the hands of the Bellman and lay writhing in pain, lingering to be lulled to sleep in Death's merciful embrace, which prompts the young clerk to relieve his suffering friend by making him sip from a poisoned cup of wine – and solemnly vows to avenge his death. Great writing!

Once more, Paul Doherty proves himself to be the modern day equivalent of a medieval minstrel who effortlessly captures your undivided attention when telling a story and artfully mingles historical facts with the paper phantoms that sprang from his own imagination – and this time the story was even moderately clued! You can anticipate the solution if you were observant enough and that made up for a few weakly executed plot elements.

Part of Doherty's modus-operandi, as a mystery writer, is introducing a whole tangle of plot threads, usually enough to pad out several novels and one or two short stories, but rarely does he seem to be able to deliver on all of them with equal satisfaction. In The Devil's Hunt, I was less than impressed with the resolutions of the murder in the locked library and the case of the decapitated beggars, but the plot was rich enough to absorb these minor letdowns and dropped me off at the final page as a thoroughly satisfied reader. Heck, the unexpected cliffhanger has me on the qui vive for its sequel!

On a whole, this was an excellent introduction to a new series and I recommend taking an expedition, under the guidance of this wonderful story teller, into our past and marvel as your tour guide resurrects centuries and entire civilizations that have been enwrapped and shrouded by the mists of time – which guarantees an interesting and intriguing read even if the story fails as a fair play mystery. Recommended without reservations!

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 Student Body

I alluded in an earlier review to the intricate relationships and ever changing combinations of the participating members of a collaborative writing team, primarily known under the shared penname of Patrick Quentin, and the near impossibility to shortly summarize the inner workings of the group for a simple review as this one. Therefore, I will confine myself to the rudimentary facts, and tell you that Death and the Maiden (1939) was written by Hugh Wheeler and Richard Webb, one of the regular tandems of the group, and was signed as by Q. Patrick (as "inconspicious" as an anonym as "Carter Dickson").

Ruckus on the Campus

Death and the Maiden is easily one of the best detective stories I read this year, and has all the ear-marks of a first-rate whodunit: an elaborate, multi-layered woven plot, well-rounded, believable characters and a fairly good setting, however, the best part of the story is that the Webb and Wheeler have taken the intelligence and experience of their readers into the equation. The observant and experienced mystery reader will probably spot the murderer, either deductively or instinctively, before the final chapter, but the story is so diabolically clever and trickily plotted that you're in for a surprise no matter how solid your deductions were or how sensitive your intuition is.

Being able to gauge your readers' intelligence and knowledge of the genre, and acting on them to cleverly mislead them, is one of the greatest gifts a mystery writer can possess – and makes for a satisfying read. It's like both men crossed time and space to point and snicker at me, while saying, "Ha! You thought we came at you from this angle, but then we turned around come at you from that spot." Well played, guys. Well played.

This fiendishly cunning story revolves around Grace Hough, not one of the most popular woman on campus, who's been receiving a string of special delivery letters – which everyone presumes to be love notes from a mysterious admirer or even a secret lover. But the letters become sinister tell-tale clues, when, after a short disappearance, her body is dragged from the river of a small town – twenty miles removed from the campus grounds.

The efficient Lieutenant Trant is put on the case and skillfully unsnarls a tangled and complicated web of lies, motives and clues to discover who from the small pool of suspects, consisting of fellow students and faculty members, murdered the unpopular and dangerous Grace Hough – who's final actions resembled that of a kamikaze pilot. It's really no wonder she ended up with a dent in the back of her skull.

Lieutenant Trant is a memorable detective without being an overbearing, eccentric snob who spouts Latin phrases and quotes obscure passages from Shakespeare every five minutes. He's a shrewd, scheming homicide detective who's cut from the same mold as his colleague Lieutenant Columbo. Just like him, Lt. Trant has a knack for wreaking havoc on the nerves of suspects and knows how to give them more than enough rope to hang themselves with. In a way, his personality and police methods makes it almost disappointing that the plot wasn't constructed as an inverted detective story.

On a final note, I have to say that Patrick Quentin has impressed me as a mature equivalent of Ellery Queen. Quentin's detective stories boost the same complex, multi-layered plots and clueing as Ellery Queen, but their tone was more serious, their themes darker and they were simply better at creating characters.

Concisely, this is a five-star detective story – worthy of being labeled a classic.