Opening Night

"I've never before seen anything on the stage that impressed me so deeply."

- Chief-Inspector Roderick Alleyn (Ngaio Marsh's Enter a Murderer, 1935)

Alan Melville was a consummate entertainer with a varied and wide-ranging résumé: playwright, lyricist, actor, producer and raconteur, but gained name recognition as one of Britain's first television personalities, which he did as host of A to Z and as a panelist on a host of popular programs – such as The Brains Trust and What's My Line? Sadly, these accomplishments overshadowed his short-lived career as a mystery novelist.

During "a short burst of energy when he was in his twenties," Melville produced a number of light-hearted and humorous detective novels, but they were soon forgotten about and passed into literary oblivion. Fortunately, the British Library noticed them and reprinted two of them: Quick Curtain (1934) and Death of Anton (1936). I reviewed the latter several months ago and the very amusing, circus-set detective story recalled the works of Leo Bruce and Edmund Crispin. I was also reminded of Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon's satirical A Bullet in the Ballet (1937) and the equally fun Casino for Sale (1938). 

So I ushered the other reprint on to the short-list of detective novels to be relieved from the Mount-to-be-Read and my previous read, Come to Paddington Fair (1997) by Derek Smith, provided me with an excuse to pick up Quick Curtain – as both are theatrical mysteries about the on-stage shooting of a thespian. But they both take a vastly different approach in storytelling and resolving what is, essentially, the same problem.

Quick Curtain opens, fittingly, with a playbill of Blue Music, a musical comedy operetta, which is billed as a Douglas B. Douglas production. Douglas is "a master of publicity," of the subtle variety, who had London rumoring about the show before it had even been written. There were even a number of women, members of the Brandon Baker Gallery Club, who had parked themselves, two days before the opening, outside the entrance of the Grosvenor Theatre. What they got as a reward for their dedication, besides stiff necks and sore backs, was being present for the unexpected swan song of their idol.

Brandon Baker's character, "Jack," is shot in Act Two by "Phillipo," played by Hilary Foster, but when the trigger is squeezed the lead actress, Miss Eve Turner ("Coletta"), responds in a way that reminds one of the attending critics of "the famous tragediennes" of the stage – not without reason. The weapon seems to have been loaded with a live round and the man who discharged the fatal shot immediately disappears from the stage, but is soon found in his dressing-room "hanging by the neck." It looks like an open-and-shut case.

There is, however, one person in attendance who sees the hand of an unknown murderer at work: Inspector Wilson of Scotland Yard. He was in the audience with his son, Derek, who is a reporter on the Gazette and they immediately take charge of the case, which is done without much regard for proper police procedure, but they are a fun and memorable pair of characters – with a large depository of banter between them. I also have to add them to the short list of father-and-son detective teams mentioned in blog-post about Clifford Orr's The Dartmouth Murders (1929).

Inspector Wilson and Derek make an actual attempt at reconstructing and explaining the crime, but the comedic tone and some sparks of insanity prevail. However, these make for some fun scenes and sequences. I particularly loved the funeral scene! Several members of the Gallery Club obtained admission to the church and they "stormed the pews like a mass attack going over the top in the trenches," which had its objective the securing of a number of mementos and resulted in them ripping "the church bare of its lilies, carnations and lilac inside a couple of minutes." They even removed chunks from the prayer-books and hymnals strewn on the pews. I think the Brandon Baker Gallery Club is one of the earliest depictions in pop-culture of the creature known as the rabid fangirl.

Derek also contributes some fun to the case by following a potential lead to Crailes, a village in Buckinghamshire, which he does under an alias, "J. Hopkinson," but this will land him a spot of trouble after dispatching a chain of cryptically worded telegrams to his father – eventually arousing suspicion in the local postmistress, Miss Ethel Prune. After the body of a woman is found in Craile Woods, Derek is taken into custody when the local constable learns of the odd telegrams and alias.

So, as a comedic spoof of the detective story, the book is a roaring success, but, purely as a mystery, the plot got the short end of the stick.

Sure, the false solution by Inspector Wilson was not exactly a jaw-dropper, but perfectly acceptable, which even had a fairly clever, if simple, use for the stage in relation to the supposed direction of the shot. But then the letters were delivered. Letters that poked the detective story in the eye, punched it in the nose and buried a knee in its groin. Dorothy L. Sayers was correct when she said Melville blasted "the solemn structure of the detective novel sky-high" and this approach did not exactly do any miracles for the concept of fair-play either.

Quick Curtain is really a light-comedy that uses the detective story as a vehicle, but the book is still a very fun and amusing read. So, if you don't mind the author poking a finger between your ribs, the book comes very much recommended to even the staunchest purist. However, if you want to read something amusing with a more traditional plot-structure by Melville, I recommend you pick up Death of Anton.

Come Into My Parlor

"Well, one of us must have killed him!"

- Mrs. White (Clue, 1985)

Last year, the first officially sanctioned Agatha Christie pastiche, The Monogram Murders (2014) by Sophie Hannah, was released and garnered criticism for its implausible, convoluted plotting and inaccurate portrayal of Hercule Poirot.

The estate has always been protective of Agatha Christie's intellectual property and never allowed an author to pen a continuation or a previously unrecorded case in one of her series before, which is probably why this one fell short of the mark.

For over ninety years, the only standard for an Agatha Christie novel was set by the Queen of (Golden Age) Mysteries herself, which is a tough bill to fill for any contemporary crime novelist. It would be like asking Napoleon III to equal Napoleon I on the battlefield. Sure, you could expect the same results, but disappointment probably won't be trotting far behind those expectations.

How different was the situation at the beginning of this millennium: there was still entire stack of Hercule Poirot mysteries to be filmed, Miss Marple eagerly awaited a return to the small screen and a handful of stage plays were being novelized by Charles Osborne – a journalist and author of The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie (1982).  

During the late 1990s, early 2000s, HarperCollins were reissuing all of Christie's book in hardback in the order they were originally published, which included new material such as Black Coffee (1998), The Unexpected Guest (1999) and Spider's Web (2000) – novelisations of stage plays that didn't endure the same, long-running success of The Mousetrap (1952-present). Well, in my time away from this blog, I serendipitously came across a beautiful, hardcover edition of Spider's Web and finally got around to reading it. You know you're reading a previously unexplored minefield by Christie, when you find out you have been eyeing the wrong suspect the entire time.

Christie wrote Spider's Web in 1954 for "the British film star, Margeret Lockwood, who wanted a role that would exploit her talent for comedy" and "stayed for 774 performances" at the Savoy Theatre in London.  

The story opens at Copplestone Court, eighteenth-century country home of Henry Hailsham-Brown, Foreign Office diplomat, and his wife, Clarissa, who's entertaining friends and waiting for her husband to return home from work. It's a warm, homely picture that's disturbed when a man named Oliver Costello is announced by the butler. Costello was the man who probably introduced Henry's first wife, Miranda, to the drugs that destroyed their marriage, but Costello has married Miranda and now she wants their daughter, "Pippa," back from Henry – who's scared to death of her mother and Costello.

Agatha Christie: The Last True Queen of Great Britain

There's one particular aspect of that plot strand that's rather dark and atypical for Christie (Costello sexually abused Pippa), which could be something Osborne added to make the story more appealing to readers of modern, psychological-and character driven novels of crime. After all, the dark cover of Spider's Web is stamped with "A Novel" instead of such vulgar terms as "A Mystery" or "A Thriller," but at least it's less pretentious than "A Literary Thriller." Anyway, moving on.

Clarissa doesn't breath a word of the visit to her husband, because he has returned with the rather important tasking of hosting a (secret) meeting at their home between the premier of the Soviet Union and the British Prime-Minister. The only thing Clarissa has to do is leave ham sandwiches and hot coffee in the library, while he's going to fetch the "guests," but in that very same library she stumbles over the lifeless body of Costello – clobbered over the head with something sharp. Luckily, Clarissa has the clarity of mind to do what everyone would do in such a situation: call a couple of friends to hide the body.

The three friends are her godfather, Sir Rowland Delaheye, Hugo Birch and a young man, named Jeremy Warrander, who's in love with Clarissa and after some convincing (including setting up a bridge-alibi), they decide to help. To quote Warrander, "what's a dead body or two among friends?" Unfortunately, an anonymous phone call was made to the police telling them there has been a murder at Copplestone Court and they send Constable Jones and Inspector Lord, who doesn't believe there hasn't been a murder and makes things very difficult for them – especially after he's been proven to be correct.

Clarissa has to draw from her rich well of imagination, which often wondered what she would do if she ever found a dead body in the library, to find explanations for the ever-expanding web of lies she's weaving to keep everyone out of trouble. Even going as far as drawing up a dummy case against herself, claiming self-defense, to protect Pippa. The living quarters setting and group of friends, having each others back, recalled London Particular (1952) by Christianna Brand, but done in the light-hearted, good natured humor reminiscent of Kelley Roos and the Tommy and Tuppence stories in Partners in Crime (1929).

Throw-in a dead antique dealer, a hidden drawer containing an envelope and autograph of Queen Victoria and a good use for that hoary, 19th century plot-device known as the secret passage and you have a fun, fast-paced comedy thriller in which the reader is in the pleasant position of knowing more than Inspector Lord, but not enough to know who's hand is actually behind it all. Not in my case, anyway.

I'll return presently with a new review/blog-post.

Fishing for Answers

"A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime."

- Mark Twain

The 51st volume of Case Closed, known to most as Detective Conan, starts off with the concluding chapter of a story that began in the previous volume, in which Conan and Harley were reminiscing over the telephone about one of their first murder cases.

Over a period of several years, two men apparently took their own lives while riding alone on a ski lift. They were shot through the head and a bag filled with snow was found next to them, which could be interpreted as a calling card of the malevolent snow spirit – whom reputedly haunts the white-topped mountain peaks of the region. I mentioned in my review of the previous volume I had a rough idea how the murderer pulled off this trick. Well, I was partially right, but nice to see how Aoyama took a different approach to create this illusion, because I was expecting something along the lines of the no-footprints trick from volume 20.

However, the amount of familiar (side) characters and detectives crawling the slopes of that resort made Aoyama's bustling, ever-expending universe look like a small world after all.

The second story can be filed away under filler material and consists of two chapters. Conan, Rachel and Richard Moore are enjoying some refreshments at Café Poirot when they are launched into a search operation for a missing child. The only clues they have to go one are a some cryptic text messages of which this was the last one, "I'm scared of dying like a fish in a net." It's short. It's simple. It's filler. But passable filler.

In the third story, Doc Agasa takes Conan and the Junior Detective League along to the beach to dig around for clams. At the beach, they meet a group of college students and lovers of delicious shellfish, but they become very gloomy when a recent hit-and-run accident is mentioned. The one who appeared to have been constantly depressed is found not long after in what looks like a suicide, but Conan figures there's more to it than that and figures out how someone managed to poison a bottle of green tea without being observed – which makes this an impossible crime story and a pretty clever one at that.

However, the best poisoning story (IMHO) from this series still comes from the 15th volume, in which a moneylender is administrated cyanide in his locked office building. The explanation is given in a chapter aptly titled, "The Devil's Summons." 

The next story is another short one, spanning only two chapters, which spoofs "Tortoiseshell Holmes," a cat-detective created by Jiro Akagawa, but being aware of the cozy cat detectives would be enough for us (Western readers) to appreciate this story. Moore has to baby-sit his wife's new kitten, Ricky, who's giving subtle hints that are helping him deciphering a coded text message for a client. These code-cracking stories are next to impossible to solve, but I managed to solve this one instinctively. Or, as I like to call it, "educated guesswork."

Finally, the last three chapters form the last story of this volume and returns to one of the locations from volume 5, but the story turned out to be a bit of a disappointment – in spite of two different locked room mysteries. The first one concerns a window that was nailed shut from the inside, but can still be opened by a demon to peek out and this has been witnessed. This is followed by a hanging in a room of which the doors and windows were locked from the inside, but the tricks were as old as the house they were staged and there was a simple, elegant explanation for the second impossible situation.

The hanging victim had a special key chain on her belt that attached the keys to a tape measure that stretches for three feet and springs back when you let go of it. It was suggested that the murderer pulled the key under the crack of the door, locked it, and let go of it – so it would spring back to her waist. However, the key wasn't found on the chain, but inside the room on top of a keyboard. It couldn't have been tossed under the crack of the door into the room. So how should it have been done? The key should've been replaced with a duplicate on the chain that looked different from the original key of the door. Maybe with a plastic cover over its head. Or a label reading, "office," or something. The original key was right there in the room, which would make it unnecessary to try if any of the other keys fitted the lock in the door. Especially if they appear to be for locks outside of the house. I know it sounds disappointingly simple, but not as disappointingly simple as the actual solution.

Anyhow, this was a decent collection of stories with a dud at the end, but these collections are always fun to read and good stories to pick up your reading pace again after a short break. Yes, I'm still steady on schedule with being behind on all my reading.

The Bludgeoning Method

"One dumb-bell, Watson! Consider an athlete with one dumb-bell. Picture to yourself the unilateral development—the imminent danger of a spinal curvature. Shocking, Watson; shocking!"

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear, 1915)

From the very first paragraph, Case with Ropes and Rings (1940) plunges diligently in what readers have come to expect from Leo Bruce and Sgt. Beef: a high spirited, but intelligent, tongue-in-cheek treatment of the detective story, while obliterating the fourth wall.

"This isn't a love story... it's a detective novel," is one of the clues that Beef is more than aware of his status as a fictional character, but his long-suffering and under appreciated chronicler, Lionel Townsend, has become anxious about his job – as three months has passed since they had a case and Beef is starting to enquire about the book rights.

A headline in the Daily Dose finally spurs Beef into action. Lord Alan Foulkes, second son of the Marquess of Edenbridge, who was being educated at the prestigious Penhurst School, was found hanging from a beam in the gymnasium on the morning after having won the School Heavyweight Boxing Championship. Coincidently, Townsend has a brother, Vincent, who teaches at Penhurst, but they've never been particular close and Lionel has to absorb some backhanded abuse over the course of the investigation. Like when his brother suggested that Beef should've approached someone with a genuine gift for writing prose, such as Aldous Huxley, which gave Beef a swelled ego.

The first part of Case with Ropes and Rings follows Beef and Townsend around Penhurst, as the former (poorly) pretends to be the temporary School Porter, but the "bludgeoning method" of Beef doesn't make it easy on the formal-minded Townsend – and neither do the students give him a break. I particularly liked the scene with the boy asking "Ticks," which is his nickname for Townsend, if they are still on the old game and follows it up with:

"The detective racket... you're both nosing round after someone to pin a crime on, aren't you? God, how that sort of thing bores me! All these fearful women writers and people like you, working out dreary crimes for half-wits to read about. Doesn't it strike you as degrading?"

Well, I never! And as Townsend said, "one can scarcely expect schoolboys to appreciate the subtlety and depth of modern detective fiction" and one has "only to quite the name of Miss Sayers to remind you of what this genre has already produced." This all sounds perhaps more fun than it is, but there's a well thought out, expertly knotted plot at the heart of the story and an abundance of suspects that are being questioned – which gives room to the reader for a spot of theory building.

The second portion of the plot deals with an identical death in Camden Town gymnasium and the background stands in stark contrast with the supposed suicide of Alan in a prestigious bastion of knowledge and education. A young and professional boxer, Stanley Beecher, was found swinging from the rafters, but it has handled as a homicide as the case is surrounded with all the "paraphernalia of low life" – from criminal associates to ties to Spanish Nationalists and the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War.

It's an unlikely combination of characters, events and background to produce two identical deaths, but Bruce, evidently, knew his way around a plot and brings everything together coherently. I'd place Case with Ropes and Rings alongside the best in this series, which includes Case for Three Detectives (1936) and Case for Sergeant Beef (1947). Needless to say, I quite enjoyed this one.

Bruce was a mystery reader's mystery writer and you'll probably enjoy the Sgt. Beef novels the most, if you have more than a passing acquaintance with the Golden Age detective story. Bruce is the kind of mystery writer you grab when you've come to the starling realization that you've gone through every Agatha Christie novel, while burning through the remaining Crime Queens like an inquisitor in a medieval witch hunt, and your supply of yet to be read mysteries by John Dickson Carr and Nicholas Blake are dwindling. That's the excuse moment, you can start adding Leo Bruce to your wish lists and TBR piles.

Finally, the opening was quote was the only sports-related mystery quote I could think of/find.

Not a Case for the Police

 "The past is the father of the present."

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party, 1969)

There is something familiar about the story of a body in the proverbial library of a dreary, Victorian-era mansion and an ornamental, bloodstained dagger covered with incriminating fingerprints. It's a premise so familiar it borders on cliché, but Rupert Croft-Cooke wouldn't have been "Leo Bruce," if he hadn't found a way to sidestep the trite and tropes of the Roaring Twenties – while spoofing them at the same time, of course!

Leo Bruce's penchant for tongue-in-cheek mysteries was cemented in his debut novel, Case for Three Detectives (1936), in which caricatures of Hercule Poirot, Father Brown and Lord Peter Wimsey try to unravel a locked room murder mirroring the plotting techniques of their creators. It was, however, a village policeman, by the name of Sgt. Beef, who solved the case with dull, routine police work as opposed to the intricate, fanciful theories erupting from the amateur reasoners.

Case with No Conclusion (1939) opens with a note from the former police sergeant to his longsuffering chronicler, Mr. Lionel Townsend, announcing he's now a private investigator with quarters near Baker Street – the "Harley Street of Detection." Townsend struggles with the concept of Beef as a discreet, private-investigator, but Beef suspects Townsend's portrayal of him as a blundering, speech impaired buffoon in uniform is to blame for the lack of clients. They've zero respect for the fourth wall as commentary from Milward Kennedy and Raymond Postgate are cited, while throwing about allusions to other detectives and their famous biographers. I especially liked the part when Beef began to complain about the stiff competition: "There was that nice little case the other day, for instance, that would just have suited me. Body found in a brewer's vat. And who got the job? Nigel Strangeways, of course, Nicholas Blake's detective." Bruce will let you know you're reading a detective story!

However, there are still more than enough cases and one of them soon finds its way to Beef and Townsend: Mr. Peter Ferrers is the co-editor of a small, leftist newspaper and his brother is to stand trial for the murder of an old family friend, Dr. Benson. The doctor was found on the morning after a small party in the library, stabbed in the throat, when it was presumed he had left the previous evening. A blood smeared, ornamental dagger lays in its usual spot on the desk and the handle has Stewart's fingerprints on it like a signed confession. There was, as to be expected, a violent quarrel between both men, before the party broke up, and Stewart may've been fooling around with Benson's wife – giving the police a nice, clean-cut case to hand over to the prosecution.

Beef and Townsend come in a fortnight after the facts, and the later is immediately annoyed at the unusual methods of the former, because being forced to steal liquor from your client to test it for poison is far off the beaten track in a stabbing case. Evidently, Bruce had a lot of fun writing about Beef and his Boswellian narrator, while poking fun at the genre, but Bruce was besides a good humorist also a very decent plotter. There are clues and hints placed, here and there, while Beef seemingly blunders to a premature end of his career, but I can't delve much deeper in that – because ethics of the mystery reviewer.

I'll say this, though, the story takes dark turn when Peter Ferrers has to stand trial for the murder of Dr. Benson, but the way Bruce handled the newspaper angle and public reactions is what made Case with No Conclusion one to remember. Even the parodies from Case for Three Detectives responded to the outcome of the trial. Of course, there's final revelation, but, again, ethics. Detective stories. Reviewer. You know the story. And that is just my luck. Finally dug up a detective story that I fully enjoyed and I can't tell too much about the plot, which, of course, translates in a badly written and shaky review.  

Oh, well, I'll dig up another unapologetic, traditionally plotted mystery for the next review.

Out of Time

"The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story—that is, a person with whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest."

- S.S. van Dine (Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories, 1928) 

I came across an entry for An Old-Fashioned Mystery (1983) by Runa Fairleigh while thumbing through Robert Adey's Locked Room Mysteries (1991), a regular feeder line these days, and the publishing date in combination with the detectives being listed put the book (possibly) in the same category as Herbert Resnicow's excellent Alexander and Norma Gold series from the 1980s. 

However, Sebastian and Violet Cornichon weren't the wisecracking, mystery solving husband-and-wife team I expected to find, but a brother and sister who exchange snappy remarks. Oh, and they're twins. Sebastian was born four minutes before Violet and therefore inherited everything, which now finances his lavish and loose lifestyle, and cultivated a penchant for making remarks/jokes that could be argued suffer from bad timing. In defense of my favorite character from the book, and to quote comedian Doug Stanhope, "they just died, it's perfectly timed." On the other hand, Violet had to work hard on her cosmetic line and earned the moniker of Society-Girl Detective by helping the police close one or two open cases – which proved to be the best kind of advertisement for her business money can't buy.

But first things first, because if I have to start anywhere, it's with the introduction, entitled "The Mystery Runa Fairleigh," written by crime novelist L.A. Morse, on the manuscript of An Old-Fashioned Mystery and the questions left behind by its author. Thee decades before, Fairleigh purchased one of the smaller of the Thousand Islands, somewhere near the border between the United States and Canada, where she lived the solitary existence of a hermit before disappearing from the face of the Earth – leaving only 288 pages of a type written manuscript behind. Morse ends the introduction with the following observation: "However, it might equally well have been titled The Last Mystery, since it is most definitely the mystery to end all mysteries. Indeed, it may be the eschatology of the mystery." Well, that's a case to be decided by the individual reader, but it's without a doubt one of the most flattering homage’s to Agatha Christie I have read to date. 

The first and obvious inspiration for An Old-Fashioned Mystery was And Then There Were None (1939) and the backdrop is an old, gothic-style manor house, complete with battlements, on the isolated Komondor Island. It's a place with a chequered history: a cursed place where rumors of buried treasure from the Revolutionary War linger on and people continue to die under mysterious or absurd circumstances. A previous owner and notorious prankster was shot in the face when he sneaked up on someone who was fooling around with a shotgun. Komondor Island is the place Rosa "Mousey" Sill has picked to celebrate her 25th birthday and gaining full control of her trust fund, but the party that has been put together couldn't have ended any other way than in bloodshed.

First of the unlikely table companions is Mrs. Cassandra Argus, Mousey's deranged godmother and involved in the boating accident that killed her mother, which took a toll on her mental conditions and now shrieks eerie sounding prophecies. Beatrice "Budgie" Dijon is Mousey's aunt and the wife of the insufferable Colonel Nigel Dijon, who seems obsessed with smacking people and actually shocked to find out the cook, Mr. Ching, is an "Oriental." You have to be pretty racist, if that is your first complaint considering the quality of Mr. Ching's cooking. Derrick Costain is Mousey's well-dressed fiancé and rumored gold digger. Mr. Eustace Drupe is the dome-headed lawyer and trustee of Mousey's funds, but, since this is a detective story, Drupe is one of those "Wicked Uncle Andre" types. Cerise Redford and the housekeeper, Mrs. Hook, round out the party and they mix, socially, as well as soccer fans of opposing teams and beer.

Fortunately, they soon stumble over the first body in the coal pile and it's been neatly chopped up, and from here on out the plot is compartmentalized in murder blocks: a murder is committed and Viola thinks she has pieced together the solution only to be upset by another murder. The (false) solution that tied together the first three murders can easily stand on its own (great clueing) and the case Violet made against her own brother was simply amusing – an (unconscious) spoof of the case against Roger Sheringham from Anthony Berkeley's Jumping Jenny (1933)? I surely got the impression Morse Fairleigh knew her classics. By the way, Drupe was killed in a locked room, but Violet completely forgot about the impossible angle until the story was nearing its end and the explanation was perhaps the only part of the story that should've stayed in the past (somewhere around the mid-to late 1800s). 

This compartmentalized story telling helped in keeping the insanity in proper bounds, until the end, because the mounting terror of being picked off one-by-one wasn't enough. There had to be a radio broadcast on the only station they could receive, Big Band Era station, announcing a mass murderer had escaped from a high security prison – and he's familiar with the island. On a side note: I suspect Kanari Yozaburo from lifting bits and pieces of the plot for The Legend of Lake Hiren (1994) and given his own interpretation to other aspects of the plot, which wouldn't be the first time. The Mummy's Curse (1993) is basically an abridged version of Soji Shimada’s The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981). I know the line between emulation and copyright infringement can be sketchy at times, but Yozaburo walked that line as if it was the Silk Road during its heyday. Picking up ingredients here and there when it was time to hand in a new manuscript. But I'm getting off-topic here and long-winded. 

I'm not sure what I liked more about An Old-Fashioned Mystery: the story or the solution. The former has a lot of interesting detective work and a galore of red herrings for genre savvy readers to slip on. I had solutions based on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Death on the Nile (1937) and After the Funeral (1953), but the actual explanation is something else. Originality is a bit of an overused cliché when reviewing books, but here you might actually have something that's original and you could even argue "transcends" the genre. Some will love it (I think I do), while others will probably hate it and call shenanigans, but it was fairly clued – though I can definitely see why some would label it a rule breaker. But if it's a rule breaker, it's a classic of its kind. A great play on playing with the readers' expectations. And appreciated the cameo of a famous mystery writer in the final chapter. 

I would recommend An Old-Fashioned Mystery the strongest to devotees of Agatha Christie and people who have read altogether too many mysteries. They'll probably appreciate the book the most!

Let the reader be warned: the book contains a few puns and word jokes. No idea why everyone hates them. And to readers new to Golden Age detectives and neo-classical mysteries: never, ever take Van Dine's rules too seriously.

Down the Rabbit Hole

"I just want to say that in the Other Reality things happen to you that you will never experience in your reality."

- Eddy C. (De Griezelbus 3, 1996)

Back in October, I reviewed Mike Resnick's Stalking the Dragon: A Fable of Tonight (2009), in which John Justin Mallory, a licensed Private Eye from our reality, wanders an otherworldly Manhattan in hot pursuit of a stolen dragon on Valentine's Day – accompanied by an entourage as bizarre as the collection of characters that plodded down that yellow brick road. It's not entirely unlike Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) set in the maddeningly bizarre world of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and the result is an eclectic, but surprisingly pleasant, mishmash of genres and tropes.

I ended up liking it so much that I chucked Stalking the Unicorn: A Fable of Tonight (1987) in a digital shopping cart not long after putting up the review.  

Stalking the Unicorn is where it all began for John J. Mallory. Or where it ended, depending from whose point of view you look at it. It's New Year’s Eve and Mallory's personal life and career has hit rock bottom. A prophetic image for anything within reach that contains alcohol. So when a green elf named Mürgenstürm turns up in his office with a job proposal, he isn't too surprise, but than again, with a gang of thugs banging on your door you can't be too picky about clients – especially ones who can pluck thousands of dollars from thin air (all scientific, of course).

In the alternate Manhattan, Mallory has to track down Larkspur, a rare unicorn that was put in Mürgenstürm's charge, and he has to find the animal before sunrise or the elves' guild will kill him for losing it! It's from here on out that story sets up a pattern that was picked up in Stalking the Dragon. Mallory wanders around the city, bumping into peculiar characters and unusual situations, but everything was just so much better done here. In retrospect, Dragon read more like a well-oiled machine while Unicorn had rougher edges that suited the story. It's a hardboiled fantasy, after all! I also enjoyed the bizarre characters a lot more and thought the book as a whole was better written. How can you not love a famous detective and a master criminal locked in a never-ending power struggle over a chessboard? Or how both worlds connect and explain such things as subway tokens and the rate of unsolved crimes.

Unicorn is more a joyride through fantasyland as oppose to a proper mystery, but who cares, we have the quintessential image of the tough gumshoe battling a demonic power known as The Grundy in a race for a mythical horse and a last chance at obtaining a one-way ticket home. It's a well-written, fun trip outside the ordinary like this that makes it worth taking a break from those old-time detective stories.

By the way, I wonder if Resnick (unknowingly?) gave an explanation for this line from J.M.Barrie's Peter Pan (1911):  

"After a time he fell asleep, and some unsteady fairies had to climb over him on their way home from an orgy."

If we take Grundy's explanation on influences and apply it to a certain event towards the end of the story, than it becomes very likely that Resnick is somehow responsible for the drunken, fornicating fairies and whatnot stumbling around in a classic children's story. It was probably done with time travel. I'm sure Resnick could enlighten us, if he's not having dinner at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe or taking a stroll around Ancient Rome. ;)

Fables of Tonight series:

Stalking the Unicorn (1987)

Stalking the Vampire (2008; review At the Scene of the Crime)

Stalking the Dragon (2009)

Stalking the Zombie (2012)

On the Dragon's Tail

"The way all the creatures argue. It's enough to drive one crazy!"

- Alice (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865)

A perusal glance at the ever expanding quantity of impossible crime fiction, discussed on here with accelerating regularity, persuaded me to go easy on the old hobby horse and mix things up a bit. But the book I fixed upon, for a much-needed change of pace, almost feels out of place on this blog and it still concerns an impossibility depending on your criteria. After all, it's a wild goose chase for a missing dragon on Valentine's Day!

Mike Resnick was an unfamiliar name to me when I chanced upon Stalking the Dragon: A Fable of Tonight (2009) at the Boekenfestijn (Book Fest), where excess stock is disposed of at bargain prices, and I have to admit, I was drawn to this book by its fantastic cover illustration – evoking an image of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) set in the Land of Oz. I simply had to own a copy! By the way, I checked up on Resnick and he's a huge name in the SF/Fantasy genre, sweeping up five Hugo Awards during his career, and producing a steady stream of fiction since the late 1960s. All in all, an image of a modern-day fictioneer.

John Justin Mallory is an old-fashioned gumshoe with an ample supply of snappy comebacks, who made his first appearance in Stalking the Unicorn (1987), in which an elf named Mürgenstürm transports Mallory to an alternative Earth in order to find a stolen unicorn. I want to read that book just to watch a less jaded Mallory interact with the fairytale world he suddenly finds himself in. It oddly reminds me of the premise of the BBC series Life on Mars (2006/07), in which a modern day policeman awakes in the early 1970s of his childhood and has to adjust himself while figuring out what's happened to him. One of the few modern, character-driven crime series I enjoyed watching and first season was solid gold.

In Stalking the Dragon, Mallory has already adapted himself to his new surroundings and it hardly surprises him when a distraught client, Buffalo Bill Brody, engages him to find his tiny dragon, Fluffy, who's the heavy favorite for the Eastminster pet show to be held the following day. Mallory suspects Brody's competitor Grundy, a powerful demon, and plans to make quick work of the case, but Evil Incarnate fancies himself a sportsman and doubles Mallory's fee if he can bring back Fluffy in time – and it's during this nocturnal quest that mystery and fantasy tropes really begin to intermingle. It should also be noted that Grundy knows what really happened, due to his demonic powers, but refuses to help Mallory in order to keep things fair. Well, that's one way of dealing with supernatural beings in a mystery.

Anyway, when the case began, Mallory was accompanied by just Felina, resident office cat-person, a walking appetite with a penchant for mischief and one of my favorite characters in this book, but along the way they begin to pick up an assortment of characters that any other sane person would've left at the side of the road.

Would you have picked up Dead End Dugan, professional zombie and slowest thinker on the otherworldly side of Manhattan, a cell-phone named Belle, who constantly tries to seduce Mallory, or a samurai sword-wielding goblin? But together they tramp those mean streets like Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion strolled down the yellow brick road and just as in the journeys of Atreyu (The Never-Ending Story,1979) and Stach (Koning van Katoren, 1971; translated as How to Become King), they visit many memorable sites. My personal favorite was the neglected wax museum where the figures of Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Humphrey Bogart are perpetual hunched over a statue of a bird – occasionally coming to life to threaten and scare any lost soul who wandered in by mistake.

On a whole, Stalking the Dragon was an enjoyable read and can be classified as a proper detective story, adhering to the basic structure and keeping the fabulous abilities of imaginary creatures out of the explanation also helped a lot, but the overall plot hardly poses a challenge to a seasoned reader of whodunits. It's something to bear in mind, but not something that should deter you from reading the book. Resnick obviously wrote it to amuse his readers and not to baffle them. I think he succeeded in doing so.

What the Hex is Going On?

"This is too strange for school, Hadji."

- Jonny Quest (East of Zanzibar)

One of the umpteen entries in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991) that caught my interest was R.H.W. Dillard's The Book of Changes (1974), which has a problem of the impossible variety that is described as follow: "death of a man inside a locked room that could only be locked from the outside, yet the sole key was in the victims stomach."

A brief search on the web revealed that the book is still available in paperback, a 2001 reprint from the Louisiana State University Press, but this good news was accompanied with a sobering and off-putting review – calling the book "pointless experimentation" and "potsmoke prose, accompanied with babygoo beatifics." I was still intrigued though and bumped the book up my list of priorities, but now I have to review a story as disjointed as a recently unearthed skeleton.

To understand this, I can easily place this book in the canon of the genre alongside Virgil Markham's Death in the Dusk (1928), Joel Townsley Rogers' The Red Right Hand (1945) and Fredric Brown's Night of the Jabberwock (1950), stories with either a nightmarish or dreamlike quality that ditch realism at the side of the road and string together a series of often episodic events that defy common sense, and Dillard goes all out in The Book of Changes! The stories switches from scene to scene, era to era and from characters to characters and none of them seem to make much sense. One of the persons we follow around, throughout many decades, is the consulting detective Sir Hugh Fitz-Hyffen, a distorted, funhouse mirror reflection of Sherlock Holmes, whose cases lead him from the home of an English matriarch, after a number of the local women turned up dead and a wolf is seen dancing on its hind legs, to Chicago where a Zodiac killer stalks its citizens and a man turns up dead in a locked room.

Regrettably, Fitz-Hyffen's cases are more anti-detective stories than proper mysteries and readers like yours truly should expect not much from them. The explanation for the problem of the locked door was even more disappointing than venomous animals, secret passageways or another Isreal Zangwill rip-off – while another, simple but elegant, solution presented itself based on the evidence given in the story. According to the pathologist, who dug the key from the victims innards, it was acid bitten and might not have properly worked if they tried the lock. Dillard could have easily made that key a false one, while the murderer used the actual key to lock the door.

The episodes set on a street named Life, where the moral fabric is slowly disintegrating, were, perhaps, my favorite segments in this book and showed that Dillard had more than just a nodding acquaintance with the genre. Inhabitants of Life includes, alongside Oscar Wilde, a pair of twin brothers, separated at birth, named Leslie Ford and David Frome, and a couple who listen to the names of Michael Venning and Daphne Sanders. Everyone can come across as genresavy by referencing Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle and Sgt. Cuff, but I bet those four names would go over a lot of readers heads nowadays. Oh, and did I mention this weird plot also involves The Moonstone and the Mask of Fu-Manchu? Both of them nicked.

I think this makes the "potsmoke prose" and "babygoo beatifics" the least of the books problems, if they are problems, because the style seems to fit what Dillard set out to do and you can’t fault an author for doing that. It would be akin to lambasting Dashiell Hammett for not writing village cozies featuring Nanny Spade. The real problem is that The Book of Changes is a story without a payoff and Adey mentioned that liking this book depends on your allegiance to the genre. I guess I'm not that enlightened yet to embrace a book like this, but what amplified this weakness, for me anyway, is that I know of three, much earlier, books (mentioned above) that did this long before Dillard and they all did it better than him. Heck, even Rogers' The Red Right Hand was better and I belong to the group who think it's overrated. 

So I can only recommend this if you’re in the mood for something goofy.