Guest Blog: Booked for Murder

Note: this is the second installment in a semi-regular series of guest posts, which kicked-off last month with an article on the Japanese detective story, hosted on this blog spot – and this time I will temporarily hand my blog over to M.P.O. Books who transcribed one of his reviews into English. Books is a struggling author of thriller-cum-detective stories, inspired by Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Appie Baantjer, Ellis Peters and Henning Mankell, who debuted in 2004 with Bij verstek veroordeeld (Sentenced in Absentia) and deserving of a more appreciative reading audience. So, if you're an American publisher questing for a new Eurocrime writer, don't look any further than M.P.O. Books!

The Black-Box Murder by Maarten Maartens  

The Black-Box Murder is probably the first detective story for adults written by a Dutchman. The novel appeared only two years after Arthur Conan Doyle introduced the world to his sleuth Sherlock Holmes. The writer was Jozua Marius Willem van der Poorten Schwarz, better known under his pseudonym Maarten Maartens (1858-1915). Strikingly enough he wrote The Black-Box Murder in English, and as far as I know it never appeared in the Dutch language. Though his through-and-through Dutch sounding pseudonym and his real name suggest something else, this writer of literary work spent a part of his youth in England. This is evident in The Black-Box Murder. This detective story takes place partly in England, partly in France.

The Black-Box Murder was released in 1889 anonymously. This wasn't due to Maarten Maartens, as a literary writer, not wanting to be associated with a detective novel. It suited the contents of the book better. Because The Black-Box Murder is written from the perspective of Spence, the "I" person in the story, who considers his book a report of his murder investigation. By hiding his own identity, the writer suggests that we are dealing with a story that truly happened. Hence the reference on the title page, that the story was written by the man who discovered the murderer. Spence is a private detective who happens to witness the discovery of a body in a box two British ladies are travelling with. With the few clues the box is offering him, he starts his investigation, until he has unmasked the murderer.

The story is varied and contains twists which keep the reader captivated effortlessly. It reminds a bit of the atmosphere of the first novels about the master sleuth Sherlock Holmes. Spence isn't a very smart detective though. Anyone paying attention will soon suspect that the perpetrator Spence is tracing, isn't the right one. The question who did commit the murder, is relevant far beyond halfway of the story. But then there are not many suspects. A surprising twist at the end never comes up. This atmospheric detective, that also contains humour and short action scenes, shows how Spence arrives at the truth step by step. By that time the reader might have guessed it. Then the question remains how he will prove he is right.

The English of Maarten Maartens is so pure that it is evident that his British roots do not betray themselves. Most of the novels he wrote, he wrote in English, even those stories that take place in The Netherlands. The anonymous The Black-Box Murder remained quite unknown compared to the rest. Maartens was better known for The sin of Joost Avelingh and God's fool, also English titles that did get a Dutch translation. The last few years of his life he lived in the same town where I come from, Doorn, where the castle-like Maarten Maartenshuis still reminds us of his life. His books are, particularly in The Netherlands, long forgotten. The Black-Box Murder ought, however, to be rescued from oblivion.

M.P.O. Books' Bibliography:

Bij verstek veroordeeld (Sentenced in Absentia, 2004)

De bloodzuiger (The Bloodsucker, 2005)

Gedragen haat (Hatred Borne, 2006)

De blikvanger (The Eye-Catcher, 2010)

De laatste kans (The Last Chance, 2011)

Detective Stories – Both Foreign and Domestic

"I saw the world. I learnt of new cultures. I flew across an ocean..."

- Phileas Fogg (Around the World in Eighty Days)

Let the reader beware: I'm not entirely sure if this is an inspired, half-developed brilliant idea or merely one of my brain farts.

There's something I need to confess: I'm not very well read when it comes to the indigenous detective stories of my country.  

For eons, I had a pocket-size panoramic view of the Dutch crime genre, which was restricted to our historical mystery writers, Robert van Gulik and Bertus Aafjes, and a smattering of modern practitioners of romans policiers, like A.C. Baantjer, Simon de Waal and M.P.O. Books, whose books occasionally crossover into classical territory. This was the scope I had of home-grown detective stories, until I changed upon a thriller blog with a monthly feature, entitled "Plaat van de maand," focusing on mystery authors whose names were obliterated from popular view – which are both enthralling as well as frustrating!

These brief blog articles have brought numerous potentially interesting novelists to my attention, but also infuriate me because they are limited to summary biographies and barely glance at the stories themselves – and that just baffles me. Why dwell solely on the person behind the books, fascinating though they may be, if your main objective is bringing these books back under everyone's attention? I want to know where to place these tales within the ambit of the genre and determine if they're of possible interest to me. I prefer traditionally plotted, fair-play whodunits over suspenseful thrillers and hardboiled stories (although I'm not averse to a combination of both), but it's impossible to discern to which category these mysteries belong – and google isn't exactly helpful, either, as it only spits out links to secondhand book dealers or, if you're really serendipitous, a slapdash synopsis of the plot. This means I have to pick and choose these books based on their cover illustrations (oh, pretty colors!) and my gut feeling, which isn't my preferred method for selecting reading material.

Anyhow, the intention of writing this post wasn't to moan incessantly on a luxury problem, but translating a thought process by stringing a coherent bundle of sentences together and making a clear point – of which I'm already doing a pitiably job, I know. But what put my train of thought in motion was the realization that this tiny speck of a kingdom churned out an ample lump of conventional crime fiction, and you have to keep in mind that this place hasn't exactly been kind to the orthodox detective story nor has it been a safe and nurturing environment for traditionally minded artisans to practice their craft. Our first mystery writers, Maarten Maartens, was forced to publish his only mystery novel, The Black Box Murder (1889), in English because he was scorned and ridiculed here and the same kind of critics wrote contemptuously about Baantjer and Van der Wetering – until their translations started to garner favorable reviews in America and they changed their tunes. Hypocrites. Want more proof? Marco Books. Who? Exactly! Here we have have someone worthy of calling a littérateur of crime novels, skillfully finding a balance between the contemporary thriller and the time-honored whodunit novel, but he's nowhere to be found on the bestseller lists – and most bookstores don't even stock his books!

But I'm rambling again, aren't I? What I'm trying to say is that if this lap of land, in the circumstances I just described, is able to produce a pile of detective stories like that, and still fly under the radar of the likes of me, than what treasures are buried in other countries? We're all well aware by now what's to be found in France and Japan, but I'm pretty sure that until I posted my reviews of Bertus Aafjes and Tjalling Dix that very few of you had expected that there were detective stories "of more than a passing note produced by The Netherlands" – and I refuse to believe we're an exception and therefore advance the following proposition: we, the members of the international online mystery community, pool our collective knowledge and update the GADWiki with bibliographies (and, if possible, reviews) of our native GAD writers. Yeah, I know, it's not practical information for the simple reason that we're unable to read most, if not all, of the stuff that will be posted on there – but I believe that cataloging could proof to be a first step in making a portion of these stories available to a global audience.

I'm not sure how, though, but at least we have something tangible – and who knows what surprises might turn-up! Maybe we'll learn that there was an Luxembourgian counterpart of Raymond Chandler... or a man in Bulgaria who was the equal of John Dickson Carr...  or a Norwegian Conan Doyle.

Please let me know what you'll think of this plan. 

On a personal note, I'm feeling a bit indisposed and lack the concentration needed to read a book, but the moment my physical strength and mental prowess return to me, I will try to put up another Patrick Quentin review as soon as possible.

Finally, a list of the all foreign mysteries discussed on this blogspot:

The Trampled Peony (Bertus Aafjes, 1973)

Death in Dream Time (S.H. Courtier, 1959)

Murder During the Final Exams (Tjalling Dix, 1957)

Elvire Climbs the Tower (Maurice-Bernard Endrèbe, 1956)

Murder in a Darkened Room (Martin Méroy, 1965)

The Sins of Father Knox (Josef Skvorecky, 1973)

What Mysteries Lie Under the Rising Sun (guest blog by Ho-Ling on the Japanese detective story)

Exams Can Be Murder

"There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it... and expose every inch of it."

- Sherlock Holmes (A Study in Scarlet)

From what I've read, Libbe van der Wal was a well regarded and remarkable individual within the academic circles of his time, who held the position of rector at a gymnasium in Delft and was appointed a professorship at the Delft University of Technology in 1952 – which he combined with his work for the Humanist Society until he retired in 1966. Fortunately, these exalted labors still allowed him the time needed to work on his books, of which two were works of fiction, Een kogel voor Oedipus (A Bullet for Oedipus, 1954) and Moord op het eindexamen (Murder During the Final Exams, 1957), published under the byline Tjalling Dix.

Van der Wal was one of the Dutch Dons of Crime, a noted academician who wasn't too stuffy to be distracted from his noble pursuit of enlightenment to dabble around with red herrings and alibis, and you'll understand why when you read an anecdote from one of his former students. He seems to have been a man who escaped from the pages of a Michael Innes novel! The story comes from a pupil of his school who one day slipped from his class, to take bathroom break, when, on his way back, he heard how another, disobedient class was on the receiving end of a verbal tirade from Van der Wal – who angrily stormed out of the room to decide their faiths. But to his very great surprise, he saw, when peeking around a corner, that the rector had burst into a violent fit of laughter. He wasn't angry at all, must have even thought they were amusing, but it was his task to discipline them – and after molding his face back into a mask of stern disapproval, failing several times, he marched back into the classroom to dish out their just desserts. What a fun docent he must have been!

Moord op het eindexamen (Murder During the Final Exams), his second and final detective story, is set at a small-town gymnasium during exam period – and the author draws from his own experience as rector of such a school to bring the book alive. The high strung-nerves of the graduating students, the hustle-and-bustle in the staff room and the visiting delegates make this a wonderful period piece depicting the educational system of the 1950s – and the vendetta between Termols, a math teachers who's at odds with everyone and everything in possession of a heartbeat, and the beloved and popular rector of the institute furnishes the plot with a classic set-up for a good, old-fashioned murder case.  

Termols is a particular nasty piece of work, unscrupulous and scorned by virtually everyone in the environs of the school, who jeopardizes students educational careers, and thus their future, if he can score a grubby point with it in his feud with the rector and one has to wonder why nobody cut his lifeline short before – but the inevitable eventually happens when his body is discovered, locked-up in his own classroom, after falling to be present at an important staff meeting. Nope. Unfortunately, this is not a locked room mystery, even though it was teased as such for a brief moment, as the murderer could've snatched either the spare key of the room or made an exit through the open fire escape.

Enter Joris de Corthe: a police inspector who appears to be a literary relative of John Appleby and Roderick Alleyn and he does a competent enough job at figuring out who bludgeoned the unpopular math teacher to death, but the solution he comes up with is workmanlike rather than artistically inspired – hinging on faked blood spatters, a missing piece of paper, a hidden alibi and a trivial piece of information the murderer couldn't possibly possess if this persons hands weren't stained with blood. However, there are touches of ingenuity in the opening chapter, which contains a clever bit of misdirection, and I have to give props for skillfully handling the weakness surrounding the motive. We're not provided with any hints that point to a motive, making it very hard to confirm your deductions or suspicions, but De Corthe is faced with the same problem as the reader – since he grabs as much in the dark were motivition is concerned until after the final confrontation with the murderer, and that's, IMHO, entirely fair.

Overall, this book is neither a tour-de-force nor a disaster, but a proficient stab at having a little bit of fun from an otherwise occupied scholar – and that attitude definitely rubbed off on me. It should also be noted that he seems to have something in common with Hake Talbot and John Sladek: both men published two detective novels during their lifetime with one of them standing out as a enduring masterpiece, while the second one is considered to be an afterthought. Well, from what I understand, Moord op het eindexamen fulfills the position of the latter, while Een kogel voor Oedipus apparently was his magnum opus – one critic even proclaims it as one of the best Dutch detective stories ever written and an exempli gratia of fair play. Looks like I have to go hunting again!

Prof. L. van der Wal

a.k.a. 

"Tjalling Dix"

1901-1973

My 150 Favorite Mysteries (Updated: July 1, 2012)

"There are those among us who claim that the detective story is a form of escapist literature. Lovers of the genre will deny this, and they are right to do so, for the detective story addict is not content to sit back and enjoy what is called "a cosy read." For full enjoyment of the story, the reader needs to use his brains. A problem has been set before him, and the true addict obtains pleasure from doing his best to solve it."
- Gladys Mitchell.

Last month, fellow blogger and mystery enthusiast Sergio, who's better known under his shadowy aliases of Cavershamragu and Bloodymurder, posted an assemblage of his favorite mystery and crime novels – which is an idea I have been chewing on ever since opening up this blog for business. His post prompted me to start laboring on a list of all-time favorite mysteries of my own and today I was finally in the right mood to put the finishing touches to that compilation, however, this list will look completely different a year or so from now – and I will probably have to extent it to 150 200 favorite mysteries. There are already a few glaring omissions in this one, but at least I tried to make it as varied as possible. My picks range from classic, puzzle-orientated stories to modern hardboiled private eye novels.

A regular review will be up within the next two or three days, but in the mean time you could hop over and take a look at Ho-Ling's blog – who has been on a posting binge the past few days and just uploaded a critique of Bertus Aafjes' Een ladder tegen een wolk (A Ladder Against the Clouds, 1969).

My 150 favorite mystery novels and short story collections:

Lampion voor een blinde (Bertus Aafjes, 1973)

Murder Points a Finger (David Alexander, 1953)

Mystery and More Mystery (Robert Arthur, 1966)

Caves of Steel (Isaac Asimov, 1954)

The Naked Sun (Isaac Asimov, 1957)

The Return of the Black Widowers (Isaac Asimov, 2003)

De dertien katten (A.C. Baantjer, 1963)

Een dodelijke dreiging (A.C. Baantjer, 1988)

The Sullen Sky Mystery (H.C. Bailey, 1935)

Black Land, White Land (H.C. Bailey, 1937)

Jumping Jenny (Anthony Berkeley, 1933)

Trial and Error (Anthony Berkeley, 1937)

A Question of Proof (Nicholas Blake, 1935)

Head of a Traveller (Nicholas Blake, 1949)

The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (Lawrence Block, 1994)

De laatste kans (M.P.O. Books, 2011)

The Case of the Solid Key (Anthony Boucher, 1941)
The Case of the Seven Sneezes (Anthony Boucher, 1942)

Exeunt Murders (Anthony Boucher, 1983)

Green for Danger (Christianna Brand, 1944)

Death of Jezebel (Christianna Brand, 1948)

London Particular (Christianna Brand, 1952)

Hardly a Man is Now Alive (Herbert Brean, 1952)

The Traces of Brillhart (Herbert Brean, 1961)

Holiday Express (J. Jefferson Farjeon, 1935)

Night of the Jabberwock (Fredric Brown, 1950)

Case for Three Detectives (Leo Bruce, 1936)

Chinese Red (Richard Burke, 1942)

The Youth Hostel Murders (Glyn Carr, 1952)

Poison in Jest (John Dickson Carr, 1932)

The Three Coffins (John Dickson Carr, 1935)

The Four False Weapons (John Dickson Carr, 1937)

The Crooked Hinge (John Dickson Carr, 1938)

The Problem of the Green Capsule (John Dickson Carr, 1939)

Till Death Do Us Part (John Dickson Carr, 1944)

He Who Whispers (John Dickson Carr, 1946)

Captain Cut-Throat (John Dickson Carr, 1955)

The Lady in the Lake (Raymond Chandler, 1943)

The Complete Father Brown (G.K. Chesterton, 1911-35)

Partners in Crime (Agatha Christie, 1929)

The Mysterious Mr. Quin (Agatha Christie, 1930)

Peril at End House (Agatha Christie, 1932)

Murder on the Orient Express (Agatha Christie, 1934)

The A.B.C. Murders (Agatha Christie, 1936)

Death on the Nile (Agatha Christie, 1937)

After the Funeral (Agatha Christie, 1953)

The Man from Tibet (Clyde B. Clason, 1938)

Poison Jasmine (Clyde B. Clason, 1940)

Half-Moon Investigations (Eoin Colfer, 2006)

Banner Deadlines (Joseph Commings, 2004)

The Case of the Gilded Fly (Edmund Crispin, 1944)

The Long Divorce (Edmund Crispin, 1951)

The HOG Murders (William L. DeAndrea, 1979)

Killed on the Rocks (William L. DeAndrea, 1990)

The Werewolf Murders (William L. DeAndrea, 1992)

Murder – All Kinds (William L. DeAndrea, 2003)

The Plague Court Murders (Carter Dickson, 1934)

The Unicorn Murders (Carter Dickson, 1935)

The Punch and Judy Murders (Carter Dickson, 1937)

The Judas Window (Carter Dickson, 1938)

Nine-and Death Makes Ten (Carter Dickson, 1940)

She Died a Lady (Carter Dickson, 1943)

The Department of Queer Complaints (Carter Dickson, 1944)

Death in the Back Seat (Dorothy Cameron Disney, 1936)

The Strawstack Murders (Dorothy Cameron Disney, 1939)

The Anubis Slayings (Paul Doherty, 2000)

The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887-1921)

Full Dark House (Christopher Fowler, 2004)

Ten Second Staircase (Christopher Fowler, 2006)

The Eye of Osiris (R. Austin Freeman, 1912)

The Stoneware Monkey (R. Austin Freeman, 1939)

Something Nasty in the Woodshed (Anthony Gilbert, 1942)

Smallbone Deceased (Michael Gilbert, 1950)

The Danger Within (Michael Gilbert, 1952)

Dead Skip (Joe Gores, 1972)

What a Body! (Alan Green, 1949)

The Chinese Gold Murders (Robert van Gulik, 1959)

The Red Pavilion (Robert van Gulik, 1961)
Necklace and Calabash (Robert van Gulik, 1967)

The Fourth Door (Paul Halter, 1987)

Night of the Wolf (Paul Halter, 2007)

The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett, 1930)

An English Murder (Cyril Hare, 1951)

Spelen met vuur (Heuvel and De Waal, 2004)

The Devotion of Suspect X (Keigo Higashino, 2005)

On Beulah Heights (Reginald Hill, 1998)

Murder on Safari (Elspeth Huxley, 1938)

Inspector Ghote Goes by Train (H.R.F. Keating, 1971)

Inspector Ghote Draws a Line (H.R.F. Keating, 1978)

Under a Monsoon Cloud (H.R.F. Keating, 1986)

The Body in the Billiard Room (H.R.F. Keating, 1987)

The Whistling Hangman (Baynard Kendrick, 1937)

The Curious Casebook of Inspector Hanshichi (Okamoto Kido, 2007)

Obelists Fly High (C. Daly King, 1935)

The Exploits of Arsène Lupin (Maurice Leblanc, 1907)

813 (Maurice Leblanc, 1910)

The Mystery of the Yellow Room (Gaston Leroux, 1907)

The Columbo Collection (William Link, 2010)

Bloodhounds (Peter Lovesey, 1996)

The Far Side of the Dollar (Ross MacDonald, 1965)

Surfeit of Lampreys (Ngaio Marsh, 1941)

Points and Lines (Seicho Matsumoto, 1957)

Mr. Splitfoot (Helen McCloy, 1968)

The Blushing Monkey (Roman McDougald, 1953)

Pick Your Victim (Pat McGerr, 1946)

The Seven Deadly Sisters (Pat McGerr, 1948)

The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop (Gladys Mitchell, 1929)

Come Away, Death (Gladys Mitchell, 1937)

St. Peter’s Finger (Gladys Mitchell, 1938)

Merlin’s Furlong (Gladys Mitchell, 1953)

The Glass Mask (Lenore Glen Offord, 1944)

The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (Stuart Palmer, 1933)

Nipped in the Bud (Stuart Palmer, 1951)

The People vs. Withers and Malone (Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice, 1963)

Death and the Maiden (Q. Patrick, 1939)

Verdict of Twelve (Raymond Postgate, 1940)

Hoodwink (Bill Pronzini, 1982)

Bones (Bill Pronzini, 1985)

Shackles (Bill Pronzini, 1988)

Carpenter and Quincannon (Bill Pronzini, 1998)

The Greek Coffin Mystery (Ellery Queen, 1932)

The Adventures of Ellery Queen (Ellery Queen, 1935)

Cat of Many Tails (Ellery Queen, 1949)

The Tragedy of Errors (Ellery Queen, 1999)

The Adventure of the Murdered Moth and Other Radio Plays (Ellery Queen, 2005)

Black Widow (Patrick Quentin, 1952)

Death from a Top Hat (Clayton Rawson, 1938)

The Gold Deadline (Herbert Resnicow, 1984)

The Gold Frame (Herbert Resnicow, 1986)

The Dead Room (Herbert Resnicow, 1987)

The Case of the Little Green Men (Mack Reynolds, 1951)

Death on the Board (John Rhode, 1937)

Home Sweet Homicide (Craig Rice, 1944)

The Frightened Stiff (Kelley Roos, 1942)

Sailor, Take Warning! (Kelley Roos, 1944)

Murder on the Way! (Theodore Roscoe, 1935)

The Sleeping Bacchus (Hilary St. George Saunders, 1951)

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (Dorothy L. Sayers, 1928)

Murder Must Advertise (Dorothy L. Sayers, 1933)

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (Soji Shimada, 1981)

Black Aura (John Sladek, 1974)

Too Many Cooks (Rex Stout, 1938)

Some Buried Caesar (Rex Stout, 1939)

The Tattoo Murder Case (Akimitsu Takagi, 1948)

The Hangman’s Handyman (Hake Talbot, 1942)

Rim of the Pit (Hake Talbot, 1944)

The Riddle of Monte Verita (Jean-Paul Török, 2007)

The Maine Massacre (Janwillem van de Wetering, 1979)

The Silver Scale Mystery (Anthony Wynne, 1931)

The Inugami Clan (Seichi Yokomizo, 1951)

 

Cue "how could you forgot" or "why didn't you include" comments in 3... 2... 1...

"The burning ghost without a name"

"Watching tomorrow with one eye, while keeping the other on yesterday."

- The Real Folk Blues.

When I first started reading detective fiction, I was fascinated with stories of unremembered crimes and their effect on the living when their faded memory is exhumed from oblivion – where they've lain dormant for decades. I mean, just imagine that someone goes missing and two decennia's later a pile of earth-caked bones are discovered by construction workers, confronting family and friends, whom all lived a full life in those twenty years, with the incarnate past – and even though they've become different people in the intermediating years, what matters is what happened twenty years ago. A skeleton has crept into the clock and turned back time.

I guess the concept of the past rising up to obscure the present captivates me, because I suffer from a relatively mild form of chronophobia and although time cultivated my taste and preferences, I still perk up when a detective story focuses on a crime buried deep in the past or uncovers a bundle of dusty bones and a grinning skull. So you can imagine my joy when I discovered that Bill Pronzini's Bones (1985) has his then unnamed detective not only investigating a 35-year-old suicide of a famous pulp writer, but also made him discover a stack of old bones and busting open the door behind a cleverly executed locked room trick. Hey, is it my birthday already!? 

As most of you've noticed by now, I've been zigzagging through this series and it's interesting to observe that none of the books I have picked up are really alike – not only in style but also the constant evolvement of the characters. In this book, nameless already shed his lone wolf persona and has gone into a partnership with Eberhardt, who retired from the force after a fifteen year run as a homicide detective, while the story itself is a Carrian mixture of a dark, but understated, atmosphere and sometimes complete farce. There's a painfully funny sequence, in which nameless and his fiancée are, more or less, forced to spend an evening with Eberhardt and his voluptuous breasted wife-to-be, who, by the way, is also an annoying blabbermouth, at a shabby, second-rate Italian restaurant – and the ensuing diner "conversation" just wants to make you slump to the floor, crawl under the table and die as fast as possible. What else can you do when you're caught in the cross fire of a fatal four-way of that magnitude?

I also enjoyed the parts in which he compared an aggressive guard dog, belonging to one of the suspects, to the burbeling Jabberwock, or when he decided to play Sherlock Holmes and deduced by the state of Eberhardt's clothes that he got laid mere hours ago. Oh, and we should try our hands at that stupid game Russell Dancer and Harmon Crane use to play and come up with the worst possible book titles using the word death. Here's my first shot: Death's Inexhaustible Customer Base. Cringe, my friends! Cringe!

But it's not a story that's entirely compounded of laughs and giggles. It's an exceedingly dark, brooding and sinuous problem that nameless is facing, which begins when he's summoned to the home of a very ill man, who wants him to look into the death of his father, Harmon Crane – a once famous pulp writer who shot himself in his locked study more than three decades ago. His son wants a motive pinned to the deed. The prospective of satisfyingly concluding an assignment like that is nearly non-existent, but nameless, the always enthusiastic pulp fanboy, takes on the case and gives it his best shot – and he acts more as a detective cut from the classic mold here than in any of the other novels I read. He diligently pursues suspects, hears witnesses, follows up on leads and sniffs around for clues while stumbling over no less than three bodies in the process! Jessica Fletcher is a rank amateur compared to this guy.

One of these macabre routine discoveries is made when he's prowling the grounds around the remains of an old cabin, used by Harmon Crane during his lifetime, when the titular pile of bones are brought to light by a recent earthquake, which conveniently reopened an old fissure that was used as a makeshift grave many decades ago, warming up a dead cold trail that eventually leads our gumshoe to the guilty party. I have to say, though, without giving too much away, that the solution is a bit too busy and I wish more attention was bestowed upon the problem of the locked room – but those are minor quibbles, really. I have only one real complaint about this book. Nameless alluded to Sherlock Holmes, but made a small, but not entirely unimportant, mistake: the Victorian maverick detective didn't snort cocaine; he shot-up heroine. Not that that is any better, but hey, with detective stories the importance is in the details. 

I normally have some insightful observations to make on how Bill Pronzini effectively made a statement regarding the genre or how perfectly he dropped off the classic detective story in the real world, like he did in the previous two books I read, but this is not that type of book. Bones is a return to Hoodwink (1982), in which he refuses to make any excuses to have some old-fashioned fun. This is a just a detective story, plain and simple, and you can take it or leave it – and it's your lost if you pick the latter.

On a final note, I want to thank our nameless gumshoe for helping me find the words needed to express my appreciation and gratitude to the author who gave us these little hybrid gems: Mr. Pronzini, "I think you're the cats nuts!" ;)

All the books I have reviewed in this series:

Hoodwink (1981)

Bones (1985)

Shackles (1988)

Nightcrawlers (2005) 

EDIT: the title of this blog entry is a line from the song Gotta Knock a Little Harder. 

Too Many Skeletons, Not Enough Closets

Sgt. Scott: "Is the body count always this high around here?" 

DCI Barnaby: "It's been remarked upon."

- Midsomer Murders.

Well, how do you open a review when you have literarily nothing to set it up with? The book under review today, Peter Hunt's Murders at Scandal House (1933), was randomly selected from my mountainous pile of unread detective stories by slingshotting rocks at its top, and whatever toppled down from its lofty heights would be my next read. What? It's an absolutely flawless method, but, admittedly, left me this time with a tiny problem: Peter Hunt is so obscure that he doesn't even have a page on the GADwiki – which is a who's who of who the hell are these guys? So I have decided not to bother with a cutesy introduction and dig right in.

Murders at Scandal House starts off with Alan Miller, Chief of Police of Totten Ferry, who's on holiday in Adirondacks, when a local game warden drags him along to a swamp island – above which buzzards soar suspiciously. They expect to stumble upon animal carcasses, left behind by poachers, but are instead confronted with the body of a naked man, tied to a tree, who's been eaten alive by a swarm of mosquitoes – and a track of mysterious, elephantine paw prints are leading away from the body into the drassy swamp. Here's where the problems with the story begin to manifest themselves. The author evidently understood that a detective story needs good, intriguing and puzzling plot threads, but seems to have been clueless as to how to follow up on them. He actually explains the otherworldly paw prints a few pages later by ascribing them to the murderer walking on swamp shoes, and gives a similar, premature and mundane explanation to the origin of a ghostly prowler!

 

In fact, it's almost as if this book was written by someone who suffered from dual personality: with one individual being a reasonable gifted writer, equipped with enough imagination to churn out a half decent mystery, and the other a second-rate hack who couldn't plot his way through a lunch appointment. This dualistic personality also strongly reflects in the fluctuating quality of the chapters. Some of them were very readable, interesting even, while others were dull at best – and tempted me to skim through them to the next one.

But let us return to the story, and the victim who has now been identified as the private chauffeur of the Burrell clan, who are local royalty around those parts, with the elderly and opinionated Lydia Whyte-Burrell as their matriarch – reigning over her relatives with a firm, but generous, hand. And like nearly all families, particular ones with a long pedigree like theirs, they have embarrassing secrets that are best forgotten or ignored – but the murder coincides with the bursting of their overstuffed closets and all of the family skeletons come pouring out to parade their past sins in front of them. From illegitimate children to an unresolved death, which, in turn, leads to the creation of new skeletons and will leave a trail of half a dozen or so fresh bodies.

In general, I'm afraid that this is not a very good detective story at all. There are some good and even absorbing excepts to be found between the covers of this book, but they're hardly enough to elevate the story even slightly below an average attempt – which is also partly due to the fact that Hunt neglected to emulate his murderer who spend a lot of time and effort in putting out a trail of red herrings. If only Hunt had been as liberal with sowing actual clues this could've been a passable endeavor by a second-stringer. The motive, however, has one interesting feature, but, again, nothing to make up for the annoying fluctuation in quality of the chapters and the lack of actual clues or a stunning conclusion. This one is for collectors of Dell Mapback editions only!

This has been a rather depressing review, but the next detective story on my list promises to be gem and coincidently seems to continue the theme of this book: skeletons in the closets. Oh, and it has a locked room mystery!

Killed in All Kinds of Ways

"Maybe the truth is that Bill was a man who believed that fairy tales came true, and that we can live happily ever after – but his fairy tales were more like fractured ones from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle Show than anything that might have been written by brothers named Grimm. These stories are fairy tales in their way, and at the same time homage to the genre he spent his life immersed in."

- Jane Haddam

Yes, another review of a book that has William DeAndrea's name plastered across the front cover, but this one is special – a posthumous compendium that's an exhibit in miniature scale of his considerable talents as a storyteller and plotter. The first fistful of stories feature Matt Cobb, a specialized trouble shooter for a television network, handling everything that's too ticklish for security and too nasty for public relations, who's job often drags him into high-profile and baffling murder cases connected to the world behind the small screen. The book also includes two Holmesian pastiches, one of them narrated with the voice of the hardboiled detective, and the remaining tales are standalones – one of them the standout story of this collection. Lamentably, he never wrote any short stories that chronicled one of the many cases that were handled by Niccolo Benedetti and Ronald Gentry, and which were alluded to in The Werewolf Murders (1992). 

Murder – All Kinds (2003) opens with a short introduction from his wife, Jane Haddam, who's an accomplished mystery author herself, telling briefly of one of those domestic tragedies that most of us, unfortunately, are all too familiar with from personal experience. But optimistically noted that he produced a lot of work in the final year of his life, and that "it's impossible to tell which were written when he was sick and which when he was well." I found myself agreeing with her, more and more, with each passing story!

Matt Cobb, Special Projects:

Snowy Reception

In this opening story, Matt Cobb is escorted to an airport by two federal government agents to identify a notorious terrorist – who procured a spot on the most wanted list by taking the anchorman of the Evening News hostage and murdering several security guards. The consequences of this on-air killing spree made the fame-seeking terrorist a bit camera shy and upon his escape abroad, he drastically altered his appearance. Cobb identifies him by pointing out the one thing even the best plastic surgeons in the world couldn't alter. This is a fun, but slight, story that reminded me of some of the tales from Detective Conan, in which a single suspect has to be deduced from a suspicious lot of characters.

Killed Top to Bottom

With the sole exception of a sobbing clown, everyone started hugging the concrete floor when an unobserved assailant took aim at the host of a local cable show – a noted professor of linguistics. The smoking gun proves to be as elusive as the shooter and the solution as to how it was obscured is exemplar of DeAndrea's creativity. There's also a hilarious scene, in which Matt Cobb wrestles the half hysterical clown to the ground and is stunned by a security guard, who was under the impression that he had stopped an attempted rape, and this skirmish turns out to contain an important clue!

Killed in Midstream

Justice Quest is a true-crime show that asks its viewers to help them shed some light on unsolved mysteries, but the ratings have been lagging behind that of its competitors and it's given one more shot at reeling in viewers with a high-profile, mind blowing case – and dispatches Matt Cobb and one of the shows executives to the island of an ex-diamond merchant. The merchant and his cat were the only ones who survived a massacre at his store, in which the lives of twenty-seven people were extinguished to safely obtain a pile of precious stones, and whomever was responsible got away with it. But when Matt Cobb and his TV station starts probing the case again, it becomes evident that the police were looking for the mass murderer too far away from home. And the method for hiding diamonds is one of the cleverest I have ever come across in a detective story!

Killed in Good Company

Matt Cobb receives an invitation to partake in a round-table discussion with other famous investigators for a documentary, but the discussions are interrupted by the noisy rattling emanating from the cupboards of skeletons demanding to be let out – with deadly results. Cobb nearly lost his life when he attempted to save a retired private eye from the poisonous fumes that filled his room and the method employed here is both brilliant and original. The story also very much reminded me of Rex Stout's novella "Too Many Detective" (collected in Three for the Chair, 1957) and the gathering of detectives in volume 30 of Detective Conan/Case Closed.

Other Stories:

Hero's Welcome

A short-short Cold War spy story, in which a Soviet agent returns home and there's an expected twist ending. Not a very interesting story, I'm afraid.

Sabotage

This is the standout story I referred to earlier, and I can't tell too much about it without divulging any of its surprises. But it's a story that keeps you guessing until the end which direction the plot is going to take and involves a dedicated psychiatrist, questing for the reason behind the suicide of one of his patients, a promising teenage genius, and its connection with a radical figurehead of the pro-environmental movement – and ties it neatly together with one of the most dreadful tragedies of the modern era. Why can't more modern crime stories be like this?

Friend of Mine

Even in the broadest interpretation used these days, it's impossible to pigeonhole this story as one of crime or detection, however, there is a sense of genuine mystery – but one that's more at home between the crumbling pages of classic tales of horror and adventure. In this modern fable, a soldier, stationed in the artic region, has a brush with Victor Frankenstein's monstrous creation – who has been elevated to Godhood by the locals. It's completely out-of-place in this collection, but nonetheless a very engaging read and a first-rate pastiche of Mary Shelley's immortal horror yarn.

The Adventure of the Cripple Parade (ascribed to Mickey Spillane)

Depending on where you stand, this is either one of the most successful or one of the most disastrous attempts at bonding the European and the American detective story. Here we have the personification of the conventional detective story, who's voice suddenly vibrates with the violent poetry of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane – and vows revenge to whoever beat Watson to a bloody pulp. I guess this is a nod to The Maltese Falcon (1930). Although Sam Spade's motive for finding his partner's assailant wasn't driven by the kind of friendship that Holmes feels for Watson. Anyway, it's a surprisingly amusing story, but not that everyone is going to like.

The Adventure of the Christmas Tree

This is a bona fide attempt at recreating Conan Doyle's magic, in which the forester of a Scottish lord brings Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson a most singular problem: the Christmas tree he hand picked and marked for his master was spirited away from his private woods, but nevertheless turned up in the ancestral home of his employer! Coincidently, the Lord is entertaining an important German diplomat, while they negotiate the terms of important business deals between their nations, and the tree has an important bearing on these talks. In the end, Holmes and Watson foil a devious conspiracy that might have kicked started WWI prematurely. However, it's not one of the most ingenious Sherlock Holmes stories I have ever read, original or replica, but it's amusing enough and would've made a fun episode with Jeremy Brett.

Prince Charming

A cutesy retelling of the titular fairly tale trope in a contemporary setting with a kidnapping plot woven into the story telling. The story actually managed to utterly fool me, because I was convinced that Prince Charming staged the kidnapping of a young heiress in order to cast himself in the role of her savior and get his hands on all of her fathers money by marrying her – completely forgetting that in fairly tales lovers are supposed to live happily ever after. Oh well...

Murder at the End of the World

This previously unpublished story, set in the 1970s, is basically Orson Welles The War of the Worlds Hoax as perceived by a scribbler of detective stories, in which the military accidentally sends out an erroneous emergency notification to all radio and television stations – entailing that a nuclear strike against the country is imminent. This causes a panic at a small student radio station that leads to a vicious assault on one of them, but what possible motive still stands in the face of a nuclear fall-out? The solution, unfortunately, is uninspired, but that's more than made up by the premise of the story and the surprise of the hidden and understated identity of the detective!  

Altogether, this is a solid collection, comprising of all the short stories William DeAndrea produced during his life time, which is certainly worth acquiring if you're already a fan of his work – or just enjoy kicking back with a bunch of well written stories.