Points and Lines

"To see what isn't true is easy. But to see what is true will take some doing."

- J.W. van de Wetering (A Glimpse of Nothingness, 1975)

The now-late H.R.F. Keating emerged as a mystery writer at the tail end of the Golden era, publishing his first novel in 1959, but didn't made his name until five years later with the creation of a downtrodden, Bombay policeman, Ganesh Ghote, whose trials as an underdog made him a fan favorite.

In those intervening years, Keating accumulated experience as a novelist by cutting his teeth on a handful of standalone detective/thrillers and his second foray, Zen There Was Murder (1960), impressed me as a farewell to a previous, by-gone era. The setting is an old-fashioned, English country mansion converted into a school for adult educational courses (e.g. philosophy) conveniently occupied with a closed circle of suspects and a Japanese artifact that ends up being swiped from the premise – presented to the reader in the guise of a locked room mystery. However, don't expect too much from its explanation, because that's the only part of the solution in which contemporary attitudes rears it ugly head.

Mr. Utamaro has the task of lecturing a small, but argumental, assembly on Zen Buddhism. There's a visiting schoolmaster, Alasdair Stuart, and a clergyman in limbo, Rev. Cyprian Applecheek, alongside the misses Flaveen Mills and Olive Rohan, but Honor Brentt is there hunting material for her weekly column in The World with her husband, Gerry, in tow – in order to help him abstain from women. Zen is discussed for the first couple of chapters, when the first disturbance happens: a Japanese small-sword, wakizashi, vanishes from underneath its glass showcasing that was hotwired to a burglar-alarm.

They had to install an alarm system after the media picked up on a story attached to its bigger brother, the katana, now residing in an American police museum and confused the swords. However, the age of the small-sword gives it a bloody history of its own, because it was the blade used for hara-kiri. As I said above, you shouldn’t expect too much from the theft of the sword and stands out in the story as a small piece of anti-detective material in what’s otherwise a respectful send-up of the genre. The group decides to keep the police out of the affair and conduct their own sanzen interviews, in which Mr. Utamaro materializes as the Asian compeer of the Hungarian historian, Dr. Bottwink, from Cyril Hare's stand-alone mystery An English Murder (1951).

Mr. Utamaro is unable to prevent the small-sword from turning up protruding, predictably, from the body of one of his students, but he's able to solve the case and Keating gave his readers a surprisingly fair opportunity to do the same. Granted, it's not all that difficult to solve and I was put on the right track, early on, by what might have been unacknowledged joke in the story. There were also ideas planted here that took shape in succeeding novels. Here two German maids regularly interrupt the story to comment on the characters and events taking place in that sprawling mansion and they may have paved the way for Mrs. Cragg, a charwoman and occasional sleuth, from Death of a Fat God (1963) and a number of short stories. The seemingly impossible disappearance of the Japanese short-sword and how it came to disappear was revisited and improved upon with a vanishing one-rupee note in The Perfect Murder (1964).

Zen There Was Murder stands as a fair-play detective story as well as allowing the readers of today to examine the ideas a young writer was working with and a writer who, evidently, never seems to have lost that youthful spark of enthusiasm for writing and mysteries. I have said in the past that Keating was as a mystery writer at his best when he wasn't trying to write mysteries. Keating was at his best when he hurled Ghote into a David vs. Goliath-style battle-of-wits, but he wasn't completely inept with the form and I'm glad to discover that The Body in the Billiard Room (1987) wasn't a one-off as a good example of classic, English drawing room mystery. 

By the way, I really love the title of this book. 

Other H.R.F. Keating reviews: 

Inspector Ghote Plays a Joker (1969)

Filmi, Filmi Inspector Ghote (1976)

Inspector Ghote Draws a Line (1979)

Under a Monsoon Cloud (1986)

Secrets of the Heart

"Oh, my son! You don't know my history. I've seen a feller who was dead, and yet who wasn't dead. I've seen a man make two different sets of finger-prints with the same hands. I've seen a poisoner get atropine into a clean glass that nobody touched... as for a murderer floating in the air, I'm expectin' to meet one any day. It would just round out my cycle before the old man goes into the dustbin."

- Sir Henry Merrivale (She Died a Lady, 1943)

There are only about half a dozen reviews posted on this blog concerning my all-time favorite mystery writer, John Dickson Carr a.k.a. "Carter Dickson," whose name, however, I drop whenever as much as a particle of an opportunity presents itself. You only have to look at the number of posts labeled "Locked Room Mysteries" or "Impossible Crimes" to know I had no shortage of opportunities.

I felt that a return to the maestro himself was in order, and Sir Henry Merrivale in particular, but had only And So to Murder (1940) left to explore and I was in the mood for something grander – ending up re-reading one of the best titles in the H.M. series.

She Died a Lady (1943) is set during the most defining period of the previous century, when Adolf Hitler had set out to conquer Europe and England was one of the last strongholds of the continent where his troops hadn't put boots on the ground... yet. The isolated, seaside town of Lyncombe with its sheer cliffs overlooking the sea, is almost a stand-in for the rest of the country. On top of that stone protrusion a small group of people begin to feel the effects of the war when it begins to intermingle with their normal, everyday problems.

Dr. Luke Croxley's narration of the events begin with a visit from Rita Wainwright, a patient of his son, Tom, who caught herself up in an affair with an American actor named Barry Sullivan, while still being legally tied to her husband Alec – of whom she’s fond and wants to spare his feeling. But her desire to be with Barry grows with the day and Alec's only occupied nowadays with listening to gloomy news broadcasts on the wireless on the war. There, amidst the blackouts and rationing, someone cuts the phone lines and drains the petrol from the cars. Rita and Barry vanish. They only leave a trail of footprints behind on sandy ground of a cliff, "a romantic promontory called Lovers' Leap," which looks out over a seventy-foot drop into the unforgiving tides and rocks below. Everything points to a suicide pact, until they wash ashore and bullets peeled out of the body indicate that they were shot at close range before falling from the cliff. This does not preclude suicide, if the gun had been found at the top of the cliff or somewhere below, but it was discovered somewhere discarded on a road!

This means, according to the evidence, that Rita and Barry were facing their murderer while standing on the edge of a cliff, which entails that the shooter was lighter than air, but still capable of lifting a gun, before apparently ceasing to exist. Or hovered back over the foot prints on to solid ground. 

Luckily, H.M. happens to be in the neighborhood to have his portrait done as a Roman senator and being bound to a (motorized!) wheelchair, on account of a broken toe, does not prevent him from leaving an ever-lasting impression on the village – frightening a few of its inhabitants by racing through the town as a cross between Winston Churchill and emperor Nero. However, the comedy does not intrude on the serious and somber tone of the story. It's Merrivale's way of coping with life and he becomes, IMO, more human as the story progresses. H.M. knows how to deal with supposedly cursed rooms that kill, dagger-waving poltergeists and the pseudo-science of telepathy, but a worldwide conflict the size of WWII reduces him to a rather helpless figure vowing "to be some use to this ruddy country yet... just you wait and see!" Before H.M. helped the allied forces plotting Hitler's downfall (you know he did), he did what he does best, find a natural explanation for everything.  

The impossibilities about footprints, whether it’s a single set of footprints where there were supposed to be two or the complete lack of them altogether, always struck me as one of the more difficult tricks to pull-off successfully – even more so if you try to be original. They always have me struggling for possible explanations and She Died a Lady is arguably Carr's most successful treatment of this type of impossible crime, because it's not a stock-in-trade situation the footprints emerge in and thus the solution is original. It's one of those tailor-made for the plot and setting types of solutions that Herbert Resnicow loved to play with during the 1980s (c.f. The Gold Deadline (1984) and The Dead Room, 1987), but the impossible elements do not dominate the story. They're a part of the larger picture that's not only one of Carr's most accomplished mystery novels, but also one of his most mature and character-driven stories, which deserves the reputation of The Judas Window (1938) – as good as that book is in it's own right, it lacks the depth of She Died a Lady.

She Died a Lady is in my eyes Carr's Death on the Nile (1937), one of his favorite mystery novels, and if you look closely at the plot, you may agree with me that Lady might be a very cleverly disguised homage to Nile. If you can't see it, think of a water mirror effect with ripples in it, caused by Carr to give it his own touch. And that's not a spoiler, because (SPOILER, select of CTRL+A to read): it's not giving anything away when Carr’s Eternal Triangle has a fourth side. Vintage JDC!

Finally, I found two more clock-quotes! I know, I know, but I'm still fascinated how the passing of time and the faces of clocks are associated in Carr's stories with impending doom, sickness or herald the death of a character. Sometimes, they even have the face of death, e.g. Death Watch (1935) and The Skeleton in the Clock (1948).

From chapter 13, page 126 (penguin edition):

"It inspired in me, I must confess, much the same sense of impending disaster as was inspired in Captain Hook by the approach of the crocodile with the clock inside."

From chapter 18, page 180:

"A clock ticked asthmatically in the dark hall."

I remain convinced that clocks are the source of all-evil in Carr's universe.

A Fish Out of Water

"Things were certainly bad when a respectable communications officer began playing gumshoe."

- Lt. Chuck Masters (Murder in the Navy, 1955) 

A year before the late Evan Hunter adopted the Ed McBain moniker for the 87th Precinct series, which ran for fifty years, there was a crime novel with the stylistic trappings of a traditional whodunit, Murder in the Navy, published under the Richard Marsten byline – later reissued as Death of a Nurse (1955) as by Ed McBain.

U.S.S. Sykes is a U.S. Navy destroyer and the backdrop for Death of a Nurse, on which the well-oiled, but routine, existence of the sailors is disrupted by Navy Day sight-seers and the discovery of the body of a Navy nurse in the radar shack. The reader witnesses how her boyfriend throttles Claire Cole to death without learning his identity and the case becomes a brass concern.

An investigative board of naval officers is formed, one of them being Lt. Chuck Masters, the story's protagonist, and a pair of FBI agents are send down to look into the case – which promised a nice contrasting of amateur and professional detective work. Frederick Norton and Matthew Dickason are G-Men, however, they look and act more like a snotty amateur reasoner of some celebrity of a bygone age and his Dr. Watson, but they let the captain know who's in charge of the inquiry – restricting the investigative board to gathering facts for the ship log. Nonetheless, they scooped up a handful of names from the sea of suspects by employing the same method: who were in possession of the keys to the radar shack and were, at one time or another, committed to the hospital ward and on leave during a specific period.

They had four names to pick from and that makes for a joyful game of whodunit, but, unfortunately, a second murder is written off as the suicide of Claire Cole's murderer. Consumed by remorse or feeling the hangman's noose tighten and preferred to chuck himself overboard, but the reader witnessed the unknown, shadowy assailant attacking and rolling him into the water beneath them. Here the official and investigative board, under pressure and after roughly sixty pages, closes the case and that takes the urgency out of the story – which rapidly deteriorates into a run-of-the-mill crime novel.

Lt. Masters is convinced that the murderer is still at large, but is forced to stop snooping around and ordered to accept the official explanation. Meanwhile, Masters and the unknown murderer are developing an interest in nurse Jean Dvorak, but at this point in the story, I was only able to marvel at the breathtaking stupidity at how some of the characters were poking and agitating the murderer – especially the last one to fall. He was one step away from dropping on his knees and popping out a small, velvet lined box containing a shiny cyanide capsule and asking, "will you murder me?"

McBain probably realized this and tried to excuse the victim by letting Jean confess that he was a good boy inside, who loved to violate classic compositions on his violin. The defense should probably take note of that. Hey, I try to keep this review up beat and you should sing my praise for not going with "Through a Keel-Haul" as a post-title for this shoddily written review.

Anyway, to whom did Jean make this confession, alongside a truckload of pesky questions about Cole Claire, while pretending to fall for this persons advances? The man who she happens to gravely suspect of having killed three people and successfully eluded investigators from different bureaus and organizations... while alone and slowly being undressed. Three of the four (would-be) victims could've easily aired their suspicions in saver environment to officials, but they practically went in front of him (the second one on an abandoned part of the ship in the dark) while saying, "I know what you did and it's going to ruin your life." I accept one dummy like that, but there were all together three of them (minus Claire Cole, who was the true victim of this book) and only one of them survived.

Death of a Nurse is well written as a story of crime, but lousy as a detective novel and that was what it posed like for the first quarter of the book. I expected more from the author of Killer's Wedge (1957) and Tricks (1987).

Finally, I wanted to come back on my previous review and I wanted to make a separate post for it, but it would've been a very short one. Anyhow, Marco Books pointed out one of the "Easter Eggs" that he had hidden in Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013), which I had shamefully missed. I mentioned in my review that the video security of the house showed a lot of animals passing by and the first to "discover" the murder was an inquisitive tomcat, who tried to further investigate the trail of blood, but, ironically, couldn't get in on account of a locked front door and plaintively meows like the cat from A.C. Baantjer's DeKok and the Sorrowing Tomcat (1969). Again, thank you for that wonderful cameo(w)! 

And will I be stopped before spinning the purr-fect pun? Find out in the next blog post.

The Auspicating Bone Counter Murders

"Calm down, doctor! Now's not the time for fear. That comes later."

- Bane (The Dark Knight Rises, 2012)

First of all, an explanation is needed for the unusual and archaic-sounding post-title I slapped on this review, which is nothing more than a contorted attempt at linking Agatha Christie's The A.B.C. Murders (1936) with John Rhode's The Murders in Praed Street (1928) – one of the first detective novels to examine the handy work of a serial killer.

John Rhode has a reputation for being a dry and dull writer, whose books herded flocks of insomniacs to dreamier pastures, but I think that reputation is undeserved. Back in 2011, I wrote jubilating review of Death on the Board (1937), in which I "defended" Rhode against the charge of being dull and have often praised The House on Tollard Ridge (1929) and Men Die at Cyprus Lodge (1943) – both handling the haunted house setting in a sober and rational manner. The Murders in Praed Street is basically an overdose of imagination peppered with out-right acts of super villainy!

The opening of the story depicts the shop strewn Praed Street, which has turned in recent years in a dreary traffic artery of London, and the people who toil there. There's the simple-minded, but hardworking, green grocer, Mr. James Tovey. The chatty tobacconist, Sam Copperdock, whose son, Ted, is friendly with Tovey's daughter, Ivy. And the herbalist, Ludgrove, is the confident of many of the secrets of the inhabitants of Praed Street.

After being lured from his home with a telephone call, Mr. Tovey collapses in the street with an unusual blade buried in his back. The old baker, Ben Colburn, buys a brand new pipe in Copperdock's shop and cuts his tongue on a poisoned crumb of glass lodged in the stem and dies a few hours later. A middle-aged poet, Mr. Pargent, died under similar circumstances as the green grocer. The only thing Inspector Whyland has to connect these deaths is that each victim received a white bone counter, about the size of a half penny, with red roman numerals etched on them in sequential numbering. But it gets better!

A former resident of Praed Street, Mr. Martin, who resided there as a receiver of stolen goods from only "the aristocracy of thieves," is lured back with a blackmail note and is poisoned in the small cellar of No. 407, Praed Street. The house was locked and bolted from within, windows securely fastened and the body blocked the door of the cellar – and all of the keys were accounted for. And even if we learned of the solution in the next chapter, it's still a bone-fide locked room mystery and there was even more impossible material. Another bone counter was found in someone's bedroom when the house was locked up and the key in possession of the owner. Not very difficult to solve, but I appreciated its inclusion nonetheless.

This is the point where Dr. Priestley enters the picture, but the analytical and cerebral is incredible dense here and that may be due to his personal involvement in the case. The murderer is easily spotted as was the then original, well hidden-and clued motive that will be viewed today as hackneyed, but you can't slam Rhode for coming up with it first. However, the background of the motive reads like an origin story of a hero (Priestley) creating a super villain (the murderer) and involves something that is still considered controversial today. I couldn't help but feel somewhat sorry for the murderer and Priestley came-off as a dick in that part.

Under its pulp-like exterior, The Murders in Praed Street has a lot of modern-day grim and grit. It's the Golden Age of Detectives' answer to The Dark Knight Rises and I just love how apt the opening quote of this post is for this book. Even the endings share some similarities. But for the villainy, Rhode seems to have tapped from the Sherlock Holmes canon. The image of The Black Sailor and the numeral warnings recalled the vengeful Jonathan Small from The Sign of Four (1890) and Rhode's love for deadly gadgets got echoed another one of Holmes' iconic adversaries.

My only quibble is that none of the victims made the connection themselves. It seems such an obvious thing to remember, especially in the face of a rising body count. Anyway, I was glad to discover that I had not become too jaded and was still able to enjoy the ride, even if it's one of the oldest, timeworn rides in the park.

Oh, and shame on you, Mr. Rhode. Writing about working class people and criminal folks, and addressing controversial topics while you're at it, when you're suppose to be writing posh thrillers with smart aleck dialogue or the gentry's plight. You were a man and published this book in 1928. What are scholars supposed to do with you? Do you think Curt Evans' book, Masters of the Humdrum Mystery: CecilJohn Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961 (2012), hawks itself? 

Rest in Pieces?

"I've never been a cop nor hope to be a cop, thanks."

- Evan Hunter. 

Ed McBain was perhaps the best known penname of the late Evan Hunter, a prolific author of crime and mystery novels, whose 87th Precinct stories are still being praised for its portrayal of a policemen and their daily struggle against crime, but I have seen McBain's work only in diluted form – like his completion of the unfinished manuscript, The April Robin Murders (1958), that Craig Rice left behind upon her death.

I have wanted to sample one of the 87th Precinct novels ever since my radical attitude towards post-WWII mystery writers began to taw, but before that fairly benevolent proprietor of Pretty Sinister Books posted a review of Killer's Wedge (1959), describing a hostile cat-and-mouse game with a locked room puzzle looming in the background, I had nothing to aim for. Well, it still took a year and a few months for it to reach the top of the pile, but it got there and sometimes it's worth to be picky when tackling a new writer.

A large slice of the story told in Killer's Wegde takes place in the squad room of the precinct, where a group of detectives are being held hostage, which began when Virginia Dodge sailed into the room brandishing a gun and a bag containing a jar of nitroglycerine!

Dodge is described as Death personified, "she had deep black hair pulled into a bun at the back of her head... brown eyes set in a face without make-up, without lipstick, a face so chalky white that it seemed she had just come from a sickbed somewhere," who's more than willing to complete the illusion by announcing that she has come to kill Detective Steve Carella. Dodge holds their colleague responsible for the death of her husband, who died in prison, and I wonder if the writer of Columbo had this book in mind when they wrote Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo (1990), which is not out of the question, since a few episodes were based on stories by McBain. Anyway, the wedge in her plan is that Carella is out on a case and so they have to wait until he returns.

The case that requires Carella attention stands in stark contrast to the premise set fort in the first chapters and throws the reader back to the days of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, who's referenced when Carella muses over the case. It appears as if the patriarch of the wealthy Scott family, and business tycoon, took his own life at his mansion by throwing a rope over a beam and tying the other end to the doorknob in a windowless room – bolting the door from the inside before hanging himself. The door had to be practically destroyed at the seams with a crowbar to gain access, and not before cutting the rope, which makes suicide a very tenable theory. Interestingly, the reader becomes privy of information that never reaches Carella, who has to reach the solution by pure reasoning – giving the reader an extra edge over the detective.

I suspected the correct solution even before forensics confirmed that it was murder, but I still enjoyed it because I have been on the look-out for a locked room mystery that would use it. The crux to the create the locked room is so simple and obvious that I have always been convinced that it had to been use, and it was proposed as a false solution in a novel from the 1930s, but never as the actual explanation and I have to give it to McBain for how he handled it.

Meanwhile, back at the squad room, the tension is slowly becoming unbearable as the detectives and Dodge engage in a dangerous battle of wits, a swelling pool of hostages (consisting of a wounded cop and a prisoner), several attempts to communicate with their (dense?) colleagues, but the shrew has firm grip on the gun – and all the while she keeps everyone guessing whether there's actual nitroglycerine in the jar. McBain weaved two separate stories, a character-and a plot driven one, together into a great, snappy page turner that was, for me, an excellent introduction to his 87th Precinct series. It's obvious that the author of Killer's Wedge embraced the new direction that crime fiction was taking at the time, but it's gratifying to see McBain was also one of those writers who occasionally glanced in the rearview mirror to determine how well he was going down that new route. As a result, Killer's Wedge is a book that can be appreciated by detective and thriller/crime fans alike.

Sergio from Tipping My Fedora also reviewed this book a while ago and delved deeper into the characters populating the plot. I'm just here to give the plot my stamp of approval.

Why So Serious, Inspector Ghote?

"Clean up your act, Joker."

- Batman: The Animated Series (The Last Laugh)

I'm familiar with the term "hobby deformation" and the symptoms that escort this twist of the mind that makes us, devoted mystery enthusiasts, associate Gaston Leroux and A.A. Milne with Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1907) and The Red House Mystery (1922) instead of La Fantôme de l'opéra (The Phantom of the Opera, 1910) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), but never expected that a simple news item about a zoo, who're expecting their first baby flamingos in over a decade, would direct me to my shelves to pull out my unread copy of H.R.F. Keating's Inspector Ghote Plays a Joker (1969).

Not at all how I imagine Ghote!

The much-plagued inspector of the Bombay police, Ganesh Ghote, is summoned to his superiors and asked to play the fool in an almost impossible task: protect the last remaining flamingo left in the Bombay Zoological Gardens. The birds were a gift from the American Consulate and a sniper has been picking them off, one by one, and, sure enough, Ghote arrives just in time for his assignments swan song. But worst of all, the epitome of incompetence, Sergeant Desai, will lend him an "assisting" hand in his inquiries, however, it's this same incompetent fool who puts Ghote on the trail of the joker. Desai knows that three months previously a popular racing horse was substituted for a donkey and uncover that a malicious prankster is picking on the proud and prominent members of society.

Among the victims who involuntarily played the fool are a scientist and the owner of the racehorse, Anil Bedekar, all of whom prefer to forget their embarrassments, but with his superiors breathing down his neck for results, Ghote pushes through and finds an unexpected ally in the Rajah of Bhedwar, known to his friends as "Bunny" Baindur, who fancies himself an amateur detective. He drags Ghote along to watch the yogi Lal Dass perform a miracle in public, walking across the surface of a brimful water reservoir, exactly the kind of place where the joker would strike, which he does, and Dass is saved thanks to the rapid intervention from Ghote. I have to point out that, before this happened, Dass walked on water and Keating provides the most simple and logical explanation for this miracle and thus qualifies as an impossible crime novel – even if it’s only a tiny fraction of the plot and immediately supplies a solution.

The joker is pulled from the pack halfway through the game, but most of the readers will have picked up on that punch-line before its delivered, because this person is exactly the kind of opponent Keating likes to pit against Ghote: affluent, influential, powerful, smart and charismatic. Pretty much the exact opposite of the timid detective and this series is at its best when Ghote is barking like an underdog at a towering tidal wave. It seems futile, but, somehow, he manages to come out on top and prefer the cat-and-mouse games of Inspector Ghote Goes by Train (1971) and Inspector Ghote Draws a Line (1979) to the "solved-by-inspection" novels like Inspector Ghote’s Good Crusade (1966) and Filmi, Filmi, Inspector Ghote (1976). I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Keating was at his best, as a mystery writer, when he wasn't writing mysteries. As Wakko Warner once famously observed, "the mind boggles."

Anyway, back to the review, where the book, incomprehensibly, contorts itself into a regular police procedural when Ghote's opponent is murdered just when an interesting development had presented itself: how can he stop the prankster now that he knows this persons identity? They even had a confrontation, in which the joker wondered out loud how Ghote was planning to put a stop to all the tom foolery. It would've made for a classic Keating novel! This book is a good demonstration of Keating's strength and weaknesses (a wonderful and promising first half vs. duller second half), but I prefer to watch Ghote overcome seemingly insurmountable odds when he takes on influential town bosses, stubborn ex-judges and cunning master criminals. They tend to be more fun, but walking the beat of Bombay alongside Ghote never feels like a chore.   

One more thing that should be mentioned, is that I suspect Inspector Ghote Plays a Joker of being secretively being an homage to Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes is referenced and the business of the stolen racehorse calls to mind the affair of "Silver Blaze" and the dead flamingos of the work of Moriarty's henchman in "The Empty House."

Still Life

"When the scheming, indomitable brain of Sigsbee Manderson was scattered by a shot from an unknown hand, that world lost nothing worth a single tear; it gained something memorable in a harsh reminder of the vanity of such wealth as this dead man had piled up—without making one loyal friend to mourn him, without doing an act that could help his memory to the least honor."

- E.C. Bentley (Trent's Last Case, 1913).

Max Murray (1901-1956) was an Australian mystery novelist, who began as a bush boy

and did odd jobs in American lumber camps and on freight yards, before he began to work his way up in the world of journalism – holding positions as a foreign correspondent for News Chronicle and during WWII he was the writer/editor of Radio Newsreel for the BBC. When the war ended, Marruy devoted most of his time to writing fiction and cranked out a dozen detective novels, all but one of them hoisted in a uniform title, but they have individual personalities as they lacked a series detective. As Xavier Lechard remarked on the GADgroup last week in reference to Pat McGerr, "not having a series character may often be a good thing artistically but it never does wonders in terms of sales and recognition," which is why Murray is referred to nowadays as Max Who.

The Sunshine Corpse (1954) is Murray's eight stand-alone mystery and opens with Arnold Emeny, a traveling marine biologist, wandering into a fruit stall in Florida, the Sunshine State, to buy a oranges – only to find a corpse sprawled in a chair, amidst souvenirs and fruit, and a man, the artist Bignal Hycer, busy sketching the body. This is probably the best part of the book, soaked in juicy, imaginary scenes and touches of humor (e.g. Arnold's staring match with the corpse, which he lost). 

Lattimer Kell was the name that went with the body and was regarded as an outsider, who did very little to make himself agreeable or blend in with the community. On the contrary, as even his son, Bill, and the woman he wishes to marry, Lili, turn out to be in possession of some very good motives, but then again, everyone seems to have wanted him dead. Like Sarah Jo Chansey and her brother, John, two members of one of the regions oldest family and the preacher Sherman Jones, whose rifle was used to shoot Kell, and his two charges: two young boys named Palmer and Willie.

Normally, I wince when children are introduced into a mystery, because, most of the time, they are portrayed as either miniature adults or as a character from Children of the Corn (i.e. unhinged), which, luckily, was not the case here and Murray appears to have had the same knack as Gladys Mitchell when it came to characterizing children – making it less of trial when they regularly appeared after the sheriff began printing wanted bills with Sherman's face on it. The direct result of a second murder of one of the locals, who was found floating face-up and staring at the sun.

Sherman's escape from town shows that Murray could plot, but this never carried over into the solution, which was a bit muddled and a lot of things were withhold from the reader (and the clues were already thin on the ground to begin with). Signs that a new era was dawning and characterization was beginning to take president over plotting. So I can't really recommend The Sunshine Corpse to Golden Age aficionados, unless they want something different for a change. But don't expect too much from it as a proper detective story.

A year or two ago, I read The Neat Little Corpse (1951) and that one I can recommend, even if it's not exactly a paradigm of Golden Age plotting either, however, it's a cracking good yarn involving a sunken pirate ship, off the coast of Jamaica, stuffed with treasure, local superstition and dark secrets as unfathomable as the depths of the sea itself. I really enjoyed it and was tempted to put it in my list of favorite mysteries, but it just wasn't good enough no matter how enjoyable the story itself actually was. But decide for yourself if you ever happen to stumble across a copy. 

Well, I hope this one was obscure enough.

Max Murray bibliography:

The Voice of the Corpse (1948)

The King and the Corpse (1949)

No Duty on a Corpse (1950; a.k.a. The Queen and the Corpse)

The Neat Little Corpse (1951)

The Right Honourable Corpse (1952)

Good Luck to the Corpse (1953)

The Doctor and the Corpse (1953)

The Sunshine Corpse (1954)

Royal Bed for a Corpse (1955)

Breakfast with a Corpse (1956; A Corpse for Breakfast)

Twilight at Dawn (1957)

Wait for a Corpse (1957)

A Sniff of Crime

"(...) When we parted she was a free woman, but I could never again be a free man."

- Captain Crocker ("The Adventure of the Abbey Grange").

Back in March of 2010, "Mousoukyoku" began to record his explorations of the traditional detective story and his reports still appear at semi-regular intervals On the Threshold of Chaos. He has been focusing his attention mainly on Japanese detective fiction, but, as of late, began drifting towards the works of Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr – which this JDC fanboy encouraged from the comment section.

Interestingly, my fellow John Dickson Carr fan-to-be prefers the more mature novels from the post-1930s period to the earlier ones, in which a Skull-shaped castle, situated on the Rhine, provides an atmospheric backdrop for a Gothic tale of revenge or a spate of hat thefts that turn out to be a prelude to a peculiar murder at the Tower of London (and involves a lost manuscript by Edgar Allan Poe). Instead, the preference is for the more sober and serious novels from the post-WWII era, in which there's more emphasis on characterization and the impossible situations tend to be a result from the actions of the characters rather then creating the illusion that it was the fulfillment of a curse or a temper tantrum of a malevolent spirit. You will therefore find more praise on his blog for She Died a Lady (1943) and Till Death Do Us Part (1944) than for the more popular novels such as The Plague Court Murders (1934) and The Hollow Man (1935).

Having just thumbed my way through The Emperor's Snuff-Box (1942), often praised as John Dickson Carr’s most mature and character-driven novels, I can honestly state that I lack such a preference. I simply derive pleasure from his writing and can enjoy an atmospheric, borderline ghost story, in which an army of rats have taken custody of a disused and haunted prison, as much as a "cozy, comfortable, hearth-rug murder of the sort which almost always originates at home," however, I do think that "Mousoukyoku" underrates Carr as a writer of the macabre. Some of his books may impress readers as a tad-bit artificial, but, as Dorothy L. Sayers noted, "he can create atmosphere with an adjective, alarm with an allusion or delight with a rollicking absurdity," which is not a stock-in-trade talent among mystery writers – not even during that golden period. Like it or hate it, but only a few could compete with him when it came to conjuring up demon-haunted worlds with a few simple lines. 

Anyway, I have babbled on long enough and barely mentioned the book under review today, The Emperor's Snuff-Box, which opens with the attractive Eve Neill severing her marriage ties with her charming, but lousy, husband Ned Atwood and settled down at La Bandelette – a French seaside resort where her life took an unexpected turn when she bumped into Toby Lawes.

At first, Eve and Toby have a relationship based on friendship, but before long, they hear the promise of wedding bells and their pealing sent Ned Atwood in a "flying rage" back to France – vowing in his heart to take Eve back from Toby. Eve and Ned have a tense reunion in her bedroom and from her window, overlooking the Lawes' residence, they witness how a brown-gloved hand closes a door on the battered body of Sir Maurice Lawes!

Sir Maurice Lawes was a collector and before death crossed the threshold of his study, he was immersed in his examination of a valuable snuff-box, curiously shaped like a pocket watch, which was also smashed to pieces by the murderer (note how, once again, the imagery of a clock is closely associated with death). But the shock at having been a witness to the brutal murder of her prospective father-in-law soon spirals into an out-and-out nightmare as condemning testimonies mark her as a murderess in the notebooks of the local police and the only person who can establish her innocence ended up in a deep coma.

This makes for an engrossing psychological suspense story that neatly plays a tune on one of Agatha Christie's most well-used themes, the eternal triangle, which also boasts a clever, but ultimately simple, plot – whose crafty misdirection lead me away from the murderer. I think every well-read and clued-up mystery fan will guess the murderer instinctively, but a talented mystery writer can fling the solution in your face and laugh at you as you reject it and settle on a different suspect. That's exactly what Carr did here. I also loved how Murphy's Law ran amok on the perfectly thought-out plans of the murderer, which, I think, always helps in giving a detective story a suggestion of realism. I'm not a fan of murderers who possess an almost supernatural streak of luck in timing their schemes to the second.

However, there's one thing that bothered me about the solution and this may be the books sole flaw: the murderer should've been drenched in blood after having delivered eight or nine blows to the head of Sir Maurice. You can't strike in a frenzy at someone's head and not land one or two blows in an open wound inflicted after a previous blow, which causes the splattering of blood. You have to be very calm and have a very, very willing victim to have a spatter-less battering. I would've bought it with one or two blows but not with eight or nine.

I also think Carr made a mistake when he assigned the job of detective to Dr. Dermot Kinross, a rather bland and uninteresting character, if you ask me, since this book would've been, IMHO, a perfect vehicle to reintroduce his reading audience to either M. Henri Bencolin (as he appeared in The Four False Weapons, 1937) or the alcoholic John Gaunt – whose only recorded case was in The Bowstring Murders (1933).

But those are minor imperfections in an otherwise well-written, sharply characterized and cleverly plotted detective story showing that its author was not depended on hermitically sealed environments or un-trodden fields of snow to baffle his readers.

There's Evil Under the Sun

 "Look! That's France you can see over there, twenty minutes away by boat, an I'm as lost as if I were in the heart of Africa or South America."

- Inspector Maigret (My Friend Maigret, 1949).

Last Tuesday, fellow mystery enthusiast and scholar Curt Evans, who's still tramping past the musty covers and brittle pages of detective stories that were abandoned a long time ago to accumulate dust particles, pulled out a novel that not only looked pretty good for its age but also had managed to clung to the public's collective memory. "The Passing Tramp" had hitched a ride with Georges Simenon to review Un Crime en Holland (Maigret in Holland, 1931), which infused me with pure, undiluted nostalgia as I always associate Georges Simenon with the late Appie Baantjer – whose politieromans ignited my love for the detective story.

As might be expected, from a chronophobiac on a nostalgia rush, I wanted to read one of their novels next, but picking between both men and deciding on a specific title proved to be more difficult than it should've been. I was initially inclined to go with Appie Baantjer's De broeders van de zachte dood (The Brothers of a Merciful Death, 1979), but decided to make an offensive gesture at that mocking demon in the clock and went with Georges Simenon's Mon ami Maigret (My Friend Maigret, 1949).

The scenery of Mon ami Maigret moves from the rain swept streets of Paris to the perfidious tranquility of a Mediterranean island, Porquerolles, where a two-bit criminal was brutally murdered after he boasted in a crowded bar about his friendship with a policeman named Maigret. He can even show a signed letter as proof. Maigret is dispatched by train and ferry to delve into the matter, but even though the island is as rich in suspicious character as in sunshine, from a wealthy old English lady with her much younger French secretary to a Painter from Holland with anarchistic tendencies and his Belgium mistress, nobody of them seems to be equipped with a motive good enough to empty a gun on a bragging crook.

But Maigret also has another matter that plagues him like a Big Brother: The presence of Mr. Pyke who follows him around like a discreet shadow. Mr. Pyke is an inspector from Scotland Yard and was invited to study Maigret while he's working on a case – and this worries the inspector to no end. Maigret is very pre-occupied what a colleague from such a prestige's institute might think of their simple methods, like roughing up a suspect to loosen up their tongues, difference in cuisine, clothes (etc.) and the inevitable discovery that there's no order or method to how handles a murder case.

At one point in the story, the reader becomes privy of Maigret's thoughts and how he would've preferred to roam the island and soak up the atmosphere as oppose to interviewing people in order to keep up an appearance of professionalism to Mr. Pyke. Unfortunately, the opportunity to pit Maigret's intuitive method against the sound police work of a Scotland Yard tech was left unexploited.

Statue of Maigret in Delfzijl (Holland)

All in all, Mon ami Maigret was a nice, quiet read for the most part, but the pace became so slow that I began to loose interest and the only encouragement for going on was that I was only two chapters removed from the back cover. Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad story but very little happens and that goes on for far too long. And unlike the book Curt Evans reviewed, this was not a pure detective story. The case got solved by a few very late discoveries, but then again, I knew beforehand that Simenons was, for the most part anyway, not that kind of writer, however, the solution and motive were interesting – especially the motive, which was later reused and improved upon in one of Baantjer's best efforts at penning a genuine whodunit. 

So even though this was not a thoroughly bad book, au contraire, I do think I prefer Appie Baantjer over Georges Simenon any day.  

After thought: the French cover gives off the impression that the book takes place on the dirty backstreets instead of a sun soaked island.

A Can Full of Criminal Intent

"If there were no bad people there would be no good lawyers."

- Charles Dickens. 

Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Empty Tin (1941) opens with a peek behind the curtains of Mrs. Gentrie's home life. The household is homey, domestic and cozy. A tea-kettle whistles a familiar tune on the stove, mending work is loitering in a basket and her family gives the place the buzz of life. A charming and tranquil domestic scene, which takes a turn for the worst when Mrs. Gentrie finds an empty, unlabeled preserve tin in the cellar with a coded message scratched on the inside and this opens the proverbial can of worms: disturbances in the night-time and shots fired next door – and that's just for starters.

Their next door neighbor and ex-gunrunner, the wheelchair bound Elston A. Karr, enlists Perry Mason to keep him out of this mess and clean up the shooting incident in the apartment, one floor, beneath him before it becomes a nuisance that interferes with his business – willing to sign his name on the dotted line of a fat, but reasonable, paycheck if he succeeds. But there's one snag: no body! The tenant who lived on the first floor, one Red Hocksley, went missing and only left a few puddle of dried-up blood behind as silent witnesses, but their testimony becomes muddled when the name of his housekeeper, Mrs. Perlin, also finds its way onto the list of missing persons.

It's been so long since I read a Perry Mason novel, that I had completely forgot how fun and sharp they could be.

Mason acts here more as a detective-cum-lawbreaker than as an attorney, which was of assistance in piling up the fun as he diligently exposed hidden relationships, concealed clues and compounds one felony after another as he, for example, neglects to call the police to inform them that he has just stumbled over a body – an unwanted chore he leaves for his private-eye buddy, Paul Drake. There's also a good and amusing scene, in which Mason and his secretary, Della Street, are caught during a not so very legal sneak-and-peek operation (read: housebreaking) and brush the cop off after winning a one-sided game of bluff. However, this has one downside: the case never enters a courtroom and deprives Mason of an opportunity to showcase his legal sleight-of-hand, but hey, you can't have it all.

You could make an argument that its actual weakness is a somewhat contrived plot, but with the recent memories of more than just one dud, ricocheting around in my head, I found myself able to appreciate its intricacies. As convoluted as the plot may be, the clues were all on display and should enable you to catch on to the truth before turning over the final page.

I know this post has more of a resemblance to a brief synopsis than to one of my usual rambles, presented as an in-depth review, but I did not want to ruin any of the plot twists you would encounter for yourself if you ever decide to pick this one up – and I think this demonstrates how variegated the plot really is and how much fun I had reading this story. On the other hand, it  made writing this review somewhat of trial. I really had to drag out the right words for this short piece.  

The Case of the Empty Tin is an engaging mystery with a busy plot that plays absolutely fair with everyone willing to take a shot at whodunit. Because of that, a pretty solid effort from one of the most prolific mystery writers from the previous century.

On a final and not entirely unrelated note: Jeffrey Marks has set-up yet another mystery blog entitled The Corpse Steps Out. Marks wrote several autobiographies of some well-known mystery writer from the Golden Era and at the moment he’s working on a book that tells the story of Erle Stanley Gardner. 

You can also watch and hear Gardner in this black-and-white video clip of the game show What's My Line?