Corpse de Ballet

"We watched the ghostly dancers spin

To sound of horn and violin,

Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.

Like wire-pulled automatons,

Slim silhouetted skeletons

Went sidling through the slow quadrille."

- Oscar Wilde (The Harlot's House, 1885)

The sometimes absently-minded proprietor of Pretty Sinister Books, John Norris, dropped a comment on another blog, in which he was clearly amused at how hopelessly stuck me and Patrick are in the post-GAD era – and how we'll probably never find the yellow brick road back to the past if we continue to look the other way when Paul Doherty, Bill Pronzini and Paul Halter mischievously lock up the ghosts of John Dickson Carr, Kelley Roos and Ellery Queen in the cupboard. But in our defense, we infelicitously picked the phrase post-GAD to label the books we discuss on here that were published after the 1940s, when Neo-GAD would've been a far more accurate description.

And none of these contemporary writers, emerging during the last four decades, radiated with a brighter afterglow than the late Herbert Resnicow – who was a living and breathing fossil in his day. Not only did he keep the form alive with elaborate plotting and fair-play clueing, but his stories read and feel like genuine GAD mysteries resettled in the 1980s. The fact that every single one of them copes with a murder committed under apparently impossible circumstances is the coup de grâce!

The Gold Deadline (1984) opens with Alexander and Norma Gold receiving an invitation from billionaire Max Baron to attend a performance of the Boguslav Ballet, which has to serve as a cover that dresses up business talk as a social engagement – since he doesn't want the world to know that he's consulting a private detective. But halfway through the performance, the curtain separating them from the adjoining box-seat parted, and like an apparition at the bedside of Ebenezer Scrooge, the paling countenance of Max's son, Jeffrey, appears to inform them that his employer has been stabbed while he was alone with him in the box – and guess who cops want to tag for that murder?

Max Baron takes on Alexander and Norma Gold to exonerate Jeffrey from the murder charge that is suspended over his head like the Sword of Damocles, but they have a deadline of less than three days to do so and collect the biggest paycheck in their lives.

If you never had an opportunity to meet and watch the bantering behemoths at work, than you've been missing out on a few good chuckles. Alexander and Norma could've been the result of splicing and stitching together the genetic materials of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin with those of Jeff and Haila Troy, but don't presume that they are merely theatrical puppets with clowns make-up on who solve a murder in-between bouncing risible comments off each other. They are well-characterized personages, however, their literary father wasn't laboring under the misapprehension that he was writing fiction that addressed the disintegration of society but simply 200-pages of intelligent escapism – and therefore allowed his characters to have a bit fun besides dealing with lives problems. As a result (and I have to warn the literary thriller fans here), Alexander and Norma are allowed to play detectives to their hearts content and spend a considerable amount of time on working out how the murder was executed and who was responsible.

The murder of the detestable impresario, Viktor Boguslav, is a doozy. Not only do the wedded gumshoes have to figure out a way to enter a theatre box, when the only door is latched from the inside, stab Boguslav without disturbing a snoozing Jeffrew or being witnessed by anyone of the hundreds of spectators and sneak out again undetected – not to mention the baffling fact that the impresario didn't struggle with his assailant or called out for help.

In a previous review, I pointed out that Resnicow's closed environment diverged from the traditional sealed rooms and guarded spaces. The locked rooms in his novels are wide-open spaces, from an entire top-floor apartment to a multi-level archaic chamber, but still manage to lock them as tightly shut as the typical locked study or bedroom. A theatre box seems therefore a little bit claustrophobic in comparison with previous stories, but the way in which practically employs the entire building through out the story not only reflects the experience of civil engineer with a lifelong working experience in construction work, but also that of a bona fide talent in constructing complex plots.

The solution, perhaps, stretches credulity, but you have to give Resnicow props here for coming up with yet another original take on the locked room and adroitly avoiding one of the most dangerous pitfalls of all by logically explaining why anyone would go to such insane and risky lengths to create the illusion of an impossible murder.

All in all, this is an immensely amusing and interesting detective novel, which does not only spin an enigmatic problem for the reader, but also allows you to catch a glimpse of what goes on behind the curtains of a ballet company and the characters that prance around there. Resnicow openly confessed his love and respect for ballet at the opening of the book and this is reflected in the story, especially when Norma lovely describes her favorite piece, Petrouchka, in which a rag-doll comes to life, falls in love and is killed for his humanity.

Resnicow shows here that entertainment can be both lighthearted as well as intellectually satisfying. Why he's all but forgotten today is beyond me.

The Alexander and Norma Gold series:

The Gold Solution (1983)

The Gold Deadline (1984)

The Gold Frame (1986)

The Gold Curse (1986)

The Gold Gamble (1989)

The Ed and Warren Bear series:

The Dead Room (1987)

The Hot Place (1990)

A Night at the Opera

"There will be blood on that stage... unless..."

- The Gold Curse (1986)

I alluded in a previous blog post to the possibility that I had come up with a contemporary compeer in Herbert Resnicow to William DeAndrea and Bill Pronzini, and having just finished reading a third classically styled, exquisitely plotted detective novel with his name plastered across the dust jacket I feel vindicated in my premature assertion of the man. He was perhaps one of the last true GAD writers the Western mystery genre has seen.

The Gold Curse (1986) has the colossal union of the behemoths Alexander and Norma Gold attending a charity performance of the opera Rigoletto, at a thousand bucks a seat, featuring an all-start cast and crew, but the backstage atmosphere is tainted with strife, rivalry and bloodlust – and the final aggregate of this disastrous, star-lit assemblage is an impossible stabbing during the final act of the play! 

But I passed over the rapid succession of brief, but evocatively, written chapters preceding the murder here, in which the tension is gradually mounting during the first two acts and you can feel the looming presence of the Grim Reaper waiting in the wings for his cue. Beautifully done! Resnicow also draws parallels between the performers and characters they're portraying by noting that, when the characters are cursing one another, they're speaking with the vitriolic tongues of the opera singers themselves – which was enough by itself to want an encore before the curtains had even closed on the first act.

Well, there you have it! An audacious murder committed under seemingly impossible circumstances, during a rendition of a famous opera, with thousands of eyewitnesses in attendance and four running television cameras, but none of them spotted the knife wielding fiend when the victim received the fatal knife thrust – including Alexander Magnus Gold. Needless to say, this does not sit well with a man whose physic is dwarfed only by the size of his stellar ego, but now that he's a licensed private investigator he sort of needs a client. Not that the unsavory Cretan billionaire, Minos Zacharias, who has his dark motives for retaining Alex and Norma, is the perfect client, but he has to do – although the golden pair are playing hard-to-get as they gamble with a $1.000.000 fee!

The ensuing battle-of-wits between the Amazonian Norma and her hardheaded husband against the Cretan billionaire is probably my favorite part of the book. You could argue that it takes up too many pages, but it sets-up a part of the solution and it's just fun watching Norma, "fastest lip on the West Side," bounce snarky comments off on someone not named Alexander – and seizes control of their prospective client. Of course, her partner has to upstage her by showing off his massive intellect and prolonging this clever and witty sequence.

During the second portion of the book, the investigative husband-and-wife team begin to audition suspects for the role of murderer and attempt to reconstruct the events in order to find out the true nature of culprit's invisibility trick – which is both delightfully simple and workable. This gives the plot an edge over other locked room stories with similar on-stage murders, like Christianna Brand's Death of Jezebel (1948) and Ngaio Marsh's Off with His Head (1957), boosting clever, but complicated, solutions.

It's interesting to note that Resnicow's locked rooms are set in large open spaces. In The Gold Solution (1983), the sealed crime-scene is an entire top-floor apartment and The Dead Room (1987) has a stabbing in a large anechoic chamber, but he locked them as tight as a drum and the same goes for the stage in this story. It's an open space, in which people are constantly moving around, however, everything plays out in such a way that nobody was near the victim when she was stabbed. Locking up a body in a locked and bolted study or bedroom is one thing, but it takes a considerable amount of skill to set an impossible crime in these spacious environments and he should be commended for pulling it off a second time (his first effort was only so-so).

Simply put, The Gold Curse is an astute and amusing romp, populated with both likeable and detestable characters, whom all dance around a scorned opera singer, while one of them plunged a knife in her neck in full view of a sold-out theatre and four running television cameras without being seen – and provides a satisfying and believable solution. The only blotch is that the killer's motive was insufficiently clued, but that's a minor quibble in light of the overall plot. I loved this book, plain and simple.

It's mind-boggling that a prolific mystery writer, whose oeuvre consists mainly of impossible crime stories and was even nominated for a coveted Edgar statuette, has been all but forgotten today as he's rarely, if ever, mentioned or revered to – at least not in the digital realm. I'm probably the first reviewer in many years to post more than just a few passing lines on the web regarding his work and that's just a depressing thought. I guess Herbert Resnicow found a new champion and I'll be place a few more orders for his books in the months to come. Stay tuned! 

The Alexander and Norma Gold series:

The Gold Solution (1983)

The Gold Deadline (1984)

The Gold Frame (1986)

The Gold Curse (1986)

The Gold Gamble (1989)

A Quiet Way to Go

"Even after the actual locked room ceases to be a mystery, the locked room of the mind remains an enigma." 

- Kyosuke Kamizu (The Tattoo Murder Case, 1948) 

Herbert Resnicow is one of the neo-orthodox GAD writers who captured my full attention with his ebullient debut novel, The Gold Solution (1983), in which the colossal union of Alexander and Norma Gold have a go at busting open the sealed door of a locked room mystery – and they did it with the same élan as the wisecracking, mystery solving couples who came before them. The plot wasn't exactly a pièce de résistance and the mechanics explaining the illusion of the locked room were workmanlike rather than inspired, but it entailed more than enough promise to pick up another one of his books.

The Dead Room (1987) was published only a few years after his first venture in the genre, but evinces that had grown and matured, as a mystery writers, in the intermediating years. The story telling is more to the point and the plotting a lot tighter. And I can't help but wonder if the introduction of a new set of series detectives, the entrepreneur Ed Baer and his philosopher son, Warren, donning a pair of deerstalkers after an seemingly impossible murder threatens one of Baer's investments, had anything to do with that. The comparison between Ed and Warren Baer and Ellery and Richard Queen is easily made, however, it's only a superficial resemblance as both duo's are father and son, but they're altogether different characters and their relationship goes a lot deeper in this one book than we've seen from the other father-and-son team in an entire series – not to mention that both Ed and Warren are equals as they both solve one half of the puzzle. Ed Baer tries to find a way to enter and leave a room unseen, while his son philosophizes about the whom and why.

The problems begin when Walter Kassel, a seventy-year-old inventor of an innovative new sound speaker, is knifed in a darkened, anechoic chamber – an echoless room for testing and acoustic experimentation known as the dead room and it's impossible for anyone else to have entered the room undetected. The spot where the body was found, on a soft roped netted floor, suspended halfway up the room, near a concrete rig to mount a test-speaker on, makes the murder appear even more impossible than it already was.

Faced with an apparent unsolvable murder, a baffled homicide squad seals-off the crime-scene indefinitely with the profitable speaker still hanging from its rig and the only way for the company and investors to retrieve it, before they start losing money quick, is if the murderer starts producing sound that amounts to a confession – and Ed and Warren Baer are more than willing to help pry loose an audible admission of guilt. They do an admirable job, for two rank amateurs, at sifting through the evidence, interrogating witnesses and pinpointing whom of the six executives of Hamilcar HI-FI, with enough motives between them to have wiped him out a dozen times over, silenced the hated inventor – whose obsessive suspiciousness, secrecy and stalling had become more than just a nuisance to them.

But the story also takes a look at the relationship between father and son, which needed a bit of maintenance and has a few touching moments, without intruding on the plot, and that's when I realized I had found a companion for William DeAndrea and Bill Pronzini in Herbert Resnicow. Just like them, he exhibited an explicit understanding that he was writing detective stories and not potential Pulitzer prize winning novels that explore the ruins of Ed Baer's love life, after the passing of his wife, or which substances Warren used to dull the pain. They aren't two-dimensional, cardboard cutouts, but they aren't overbearing caricatures, resembling a psychiatrists file cabinet with legs, arms and a head, either.

The praise plastered across the front cover of the book boosts that the story is an original wrinkle in the impossible crime genre and I have to agree. Not only is the enclosed situation of the murder innovative, but the solution is custom-made to the circumstances and environment in which the murder was committed – comparable to Alan Green's What a Body! (1949), which also sports an impossible murder with a tailor-made solution that's unique to the events in the book. It's no mean feat to conceive a one-of-a-kind locked room mystery! But the entire book is a pleasure to read and has a very rich plot hinging on an ingenious rigmarole involving a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo.

In summary, this book has a near perfect balance between plot and characterization, and the look behind the scene of an institution, in this case a technology company, is one of those extras I extremely enjoy in these American detective stories from The Van Dine-Queen School of Detection. Recommended without reservation!

There will almost certainly be more reviews of Herbert Resnicow's books popping up here in the comings months. The proprietor of Pretty Sinister Books directed my attention to several of his locked room stories and I will definitely pick-up a few of them when I order my next batch of mystery novels. And then the agonizing waiting begins before they're delivered to my doorstep.

The life of a mystery addict is filled with tribulations and pain.

The Golden Pair

"Have no fear, Sire, I will remedy the oversight at once. The name of the murderer is—" I paused dramatically and looked stealthily over my shoulder.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"Isn't this the point in the movie when a shot rings out from the surrounding darkness and I slump over dead before I can reveal the name of the evil killer?"

- Norma & Alexander Gold (The Gold Solution, 1983)

I have with a certain degree of regularity mourned the demise of the vision I had for this place, when I embarked upon this journey in the blogosphere, which was that of a digital mausoleum erected in the memory of the grandmasters and disregarded works of criminal fiction from a bygone era, but that went out of the window as a different pattern started to emerge in my reading habits and completely encompassed me – as the presence of contemporary practitioners, such as William DeAndrea and Bill Pronzini, shooed away the ghosts of John Dickson Carr and Kelley Roos. Today, I realized that my fellow Connoisseurs in Crime have been all but supportive in helping me breaking that habit and instead have been dangling novelists like Louise Penny and L.C. Tyler in front of me – which is the disastrous equivalent of pouring alcoholic beverages at an AA meeting.

But I can't blame them entirely for my precarious situation, in which I unmercifully have to pick and choose between detective stories from two different epoch's, since I picked up Herbert Resnicow without being probed by my habitual tormenters – and it's been a delight to discover another GAD throwback on my own accord.

The Gold Solution (1983) was Herbert Resnicow's first detective novel, in which he introduced the world to Alexander and Norma Gold, two behemoths of physical specimens endowed with an above average level of intelligence, and a penchant for the same kind of affectionate banter that makes the Jeff and Haila Troy mysteries such a joy to read. As a matter of fact, this book is not entirely dissimilar to a Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin story as perceived by Kelley Roos with a locked room problem thrown into the mix. The relationship between the genius Alexander and the snarky Norma here is especially akin to Wolfe and Goodwin. Alexander survived a brush with the specter of death and recovery binds him to an armchair, which leaves Norma with all the legwork and towing suspects to her husbands study – all the while keeping his ego in a manageable size with a few cutting remarks.

Alexander Gold is on the rebound from a nearly fatal stroke, but the road of recovery is a long and tedious one – and his considerable intellect is withering away with inactivity until one of his friends, a high profile criminal lawyers, offers him an enigmatic puzzle to solve. One of his clients, a young man named Jonathan Candell, is accused of killing his employer, Roger Talbott, one of America's foremost architects – and his fiancée and friends are convinced of his innocence. The problem is that he was found hunched over the body, with a bloodstained knife in his hand, inside a locked studio atop a brownstone that resembles a heavily guarded fortress – making it impossible for a second person to have slipped in and out of the room unnoticed to plunge a knife in Talbott's back. The hefty couple sets to work to examine the sealed environment of the studio for cracks and find out who of the partners in the firm squeezed through it to deliver the fatal knife thrust.

The impossible situation is not entirely unlike the one in Carter Dickson's The Judas Window (1938), but the solution here misses the spark of ingenuity of the titular window in Carr's novel and failed to excite me once the mechanics were explained. It's a workable solution, certainly, but it's also workmanlike rather than inspired – and basically an elaborate reworking of a time-honored trick. But I think the merits of this locked room illusion will be different for each individual reader and I don't want to take anything away from this highly diverting read, which was also his first foray in the genre and I make it a policy not to be too critical of first attempts at crafting a detective story. Imperfections are bound to show up. 

But Herbert Resnicow should be commended for retaining a light-hearted and spirited tone of story telling throughout the entire book, even when it becomes known that the victim had a taste for teenage girls, who bore a superficial resemblance to his dead mother, which would've been a turn for the worse in most of the crime novels of today, but here the focus remains on the intellectual problem – which is also something that was noted in his obituary (yes, he's gone, too!). He preferred to treat his readers on brainteasers, intellectual puzzles and just having some fun all-around.

Is this a perfectly constructed and executed detective story? I'm afraid not, but it's good and fun enough to keep the pages turning – and it's not a book that should be missing from your shelves if you're a fan of mystery solving husband-and-wife teams. Alexander and Norma Gold continued where Jeff and Haila Troy, Jane and Dagobert Brown and Pam and Jerry North left off and literarily demonstrated that there's always a place on the printed page for larger-than-life detectives – even in this day and age.