A Quiet Way to Go

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

- Kyosuke Kamizu (The Tattoo Murder Case, 1948) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maid to Kill

"This world would be in darkness without a sense of duty."
- Fuu (Samurai Champloo)

I struck up an acquaintance with Frances Crane a few months ago, when the inestimable Rue Morgue Press reissued The Pink Umbrella (1943), but I didn't exactly fell head-over-heels with the book. The detectives, Pat and Jean Abbott, the quintessential mystery solving husband-and-wife team that were all the rage back in the 1940s, were fun enough and the fluid, carelessly loose style of story telling had its attractions – but as an exercise in logical deductions and spotting fair-play clues the plot left a lot to be desired. But everyone has their off-days and I set my sights on the next title in the series, The Applegreen Cat (1943), which was slated to be release anytime soon – and received praise from Anthony Boucher!

The Pink Umbrella was the first story in which the Abbott's came onstage as a married couple, but with Pat enlisting in the marines and ready to be shipped off to war in a matter of days their separation is imminent – and the limited time they had together was interrupted by a one or two inconvenient murders. This would lead you to expect that the succeeding book entails a solo case for Jean Abbott, while her husband is overseas fighting the good cause, but they've worked out a clever scheme to be together during these trying days as they are now both stationed in wartime Brittain – Pat as a military intelligence author with the U.S. marines and Jean as a secretary with the Land-Lease Program.

Upon their arrival, Jean diligently toiled at weaving a social network around them and landed herself an invitation for two at the home of Stephen and Cynthia Heyward, fellow compatriots with their own business in London, who are throwing a weekend house party at their estate for family and friends.

Great move, Mrs. Abbott! A self-confessed murder magnate sets foot on English soil and her first course of action is obtaining an invitation to a sleep-over party at an old Tudor mansion – filled to the roof with people who harbor their fair share of secrets and hidden motives. So, of course, it's ludicrous to presume that under these circumstances a mere murder would interrupt a quiet country weekend with tea and tennis on the lawn. Not one murder, anyway. They're in England, after all, and murder in triplicate is the usual recipe over there. Ask Tom Barnaby.

The body of the first person to spoil a perfectly fine weekend is turns up when the Heyward's son, Kip, who's a R.A.F. Squadron leader home on leave, takes his punt for a midnight row on the lake when he bumps into another boat near the waterside – and its gruesome cargo comprises of the cooled-off remains of a murdered woman and a dart, jammed between her shoulder blades, that was purloined from the mansions play room, whose wooden handle is adorned with a penciled image of the titular applegreen cat. At first, it's presumed that the victim is Lorna Erickson, an alluring brunette with a tendency to capture the eyes of men and a knack for antagonizing their women, since she is the most likely candidate of the party to get her neck wrung, but the body turns out to be that the housemaid. The murderer appears to have dispatched the wrong victim to the great hereafter, however, before long the head maid takes a swig from a morphine-laced drink and succumbs to one heck of a hangover – which leaves the Heyward household in a tight spot: where do you find competent replacements with the servant problem what it is?

Yeah, this is not a detective story that takes itself too seriously, in defiance of the fact that events in this book have a dark undercurrent, leaving an entire stack of cadaver's before reaching the final page, but instead tends to be chatty with scenes that make the book somewhat of a comedy of manners. There's a clash of cultures, taking place in the background of the story, between the American inhabitants of the old mansion and the local police inspector – who's a bit nonplussed by the care-free attitude of his suspects in the face of a murder investigation (canceling their tennis matches never crossed their minds for even a single moment), while he receives disapproving frowns for his classism. 

These bits-and-pieces of satirical social commentary are clearly remnants of the ambitions she once had for her literary career, but had to settle on penning detective stories instead and I can't help but think if her style wasn't better suited for the type of novels she wanted to write. But as I pointed out in my previous review, we won from the lost suffered by mainstream literature and even though she wasn't one of the neatest plotters in the game – her books have a joyful exuberance about them that is very infectious.  

In conclusion, The Applegreen Cat is a fairly minor story, but also an out-and-out improvement on the preceding novel, The Pink Umbrella, with tighter writing, a firmer grasp on the plot and some clever touches that I felt was lacking in their previous investigation. Pat and Jean Abbott still have a long way to go before they're on equal footing with Jeff and Haila Troy or Jane and Dagobert Brown, but they're off to a good restart with this book.

Oh, and my sincere apologies for the awful punning title!

Geniuses at Work

"A picture says more than a thousand words."

While browsing through my files, I came across the following snapshot – depicting ten core members from the early days of the Mystery Writers of America who were evidently hard at work and strenuously taxing their mental dexterity. You have to love the fact that Pat McGerr, who was known for fooling around with unidentified bodies, completely immerged herself in the role of corpse in this picture. What dedication! ;-)

The Gang: Georges Simenon, Anthony Boucher, Lawrence Blochman, Harold Q. Masur, Burke Wilkenson, Dorothy Cameron Disney, Fred Dannay, Leslie Ford, Manfred Lee and Pat McGerr.  

Update: I was searching for a website to attach to Burke Wilkenson's name when I found the place I originally snatched this picture from, but I still haven't the faintest idea who he was or what he did.

Swapping Sleuths

"However, there is, as you have shown, a friendly readiness amongst the members of the Detection Club to help the weaker brethren, so I have written to one or two of our friends to ask them to tell me what, in the opinion of their sleuths, the solution is."

- Milward Kennedy.

There are moments when I wish there was a grain of truth in the popular surmise that human beings are endowed with an immortal soul. I have a practical reason for this longing: to have a bargaining chip when summoning Old Scratch to negotiate a business deal. Because getting an opportunity to travel through a tear in the time-space continuum to meet a bunch of detective writers from the previous century, while cheaply buying first editions and solicitation autographs, is totally worth the hazards of eternal damnation. But the joke would undoubtedly be on me, as I would freeze-up like a shy schoolgirl who's just been approached by her first crush.   

Me: * shoves a copy of The Hollow Man and a pen in John Dickson Carr's face *

JDC: Do you want me to sign this for you?

Me: * nods *

JDC: What's your name?

Me: J-John...

JDC: Ah, a fellow John. Nice to meet you, John! What's your surname?

Me: D-D-Dickson…

JDC: Huh?

Me: D-Dickson Carr!

JDC: Your name is also John Dickson Carr?

Me: * just points at JDC *

At this point he slowly, but surely, starts backing away from me as my under lip starts to quiver and Lucifer impatiently begins tugging my sleeve, like an eager child who just acquired a new toy and can't wait to get home to start playing with it, and that's how I would've squandered a divine wish that could've granted me world domination or the answers to the question of life, the universe and everything. Unfortunately, this scenario, which is definitely worth an eternity of third-degree sunburns, is just a pipe dream – and the only opportunity I will ever have at soaking up the atmosphere of a meeting of the original Detection Club, is reading their round-robin novels. Well, you have to be grateful for what you get and this week I immerged myself in their second joint-effort, Ask a Policeman (1933), but this time I will leave the introduction to the review to someone else: one of the original collaborators! 

Ms. Gladys Mitchell has the floor:

"I was engaged in only one of the collaborations, which were for the benefit of club funds. Anthony Berkeley and Dorothy L. Sayers exchanged detectives and, of course, Anthony's manipulation of Lord Peter Wimsey caused the massive lady anything but pleasure. Helen Simpson took over Mrs. Bradley in exchange for Sir John Saumarez. We two, I am glad to say, got along famously and it is to her that I owe, as you know, Dame Beatrice's second name, Adela."

This is an excerpt from an Question and Answer session, conducted by B.A. Pike, entitled In praise of Gladys Mitchell, and can be found in its entirely at Jason Hall's The Stone House – a website fully dedicated to the life and work of this unorthodox, alternative Queen of Crime.

The book opens with a brief exchange between the for me unfamiliar Milward Kennedy and the plotting machine known as John Rhode, in which Kennedy asks his colleague to produce a dark and murky plot for a title, Ask a Policeman, that was presented to him by his publisher – and the follow-up is a novella-length chapter recounting the shooting of Lord Comstock, an unpalatable newspaper mogul, at his country retreat. The rag king was an expert in jacking-up the circulations of his papers by viciously attacking the establishment and on the morning preceding his murder, three representatives of institutions under siege by his publications, the government, the police and the church, visited his retreat. This makes it a very sensitive and high-profile case and with the police filling in the role as one of the suspects it's decided up on, from above, to give a few notable amateurs free reign over the investigation.

This novella-length chapter demonstrates that John Rhode is undeserving of his reputation as a dullard and sleep-inducing writer. Even with such authors as Gladys Mitchell and Anthony Berkeley waiting in the wings, ready for the opportunity to seize his pen, he contributed one of the best chapters of this collaborative effort – sketching a mystifying problem with some touches of dry humor that his fellow clubmembers had a lot of fun toying around with.

Helen Simpson is the first one who gets a shot at clearing the mystifying problems that befogs the death of the hated newspaper magnate, but instead of Sir John she has Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley at her disposal – whom she promptly dispatches to the scene of the crime. I think her, and mine, solution was the most evident one as we both fingered the same person based on the significance of the police constable who was run over with a car after the killing. But the best part of this chapter is perhaps the way in which she captured the essence of the character she borrowed and how she touched upon nearly every familiar element from Mitchell's books – from the involvement of a young teenager, a niece who coincidently had a fling with the secretary of Comstock, to the diary notes at the end and a plot thread that is left dangling in the wind. Not bad if you're limited to a mere fifty pages!

Up next is Gladys Mitchell's interpretation of Helen Simpson's Sir John Saumarez, who's an acclaimed stage actor basking in the spotlights of success, however, this is my first acquaintance with the character making it impossible to judge the accuracy of Mitchell's portrayal. The solution he proposed was probably even more blindingly obvious than the previous one, but he gave away a first-rate theatrical dénouement with the best seats in the house reserved for his readers. I have to hunt down one of Simpson's detective novels featuring Sir John for an encore.

Anthony Berkeley is the only one of the quartet of crime writers who managed to upstage the instigators of this book, Milward Kennedy and John Rhode, with his marvelous and amusing rendition of Lord Peter Wimsey and his manservant Bunter. There's a delightful scene in which they discuss the appropriate attire for an appointment with an archbishop who's under suspicion of murder! And to top it all off, he comes up with a solution that points to one of the least likely suspects of the lot as the person who pulled the trigger of the gun with a deadly precision.

Dorothy Sayers' take off on Anthony Berkeley's Mr. Roger Sheringham is equally amusing, but one wishes that as much attention was bestowed on constructing a clever solution from the given clues as on exonerating the archbishop from every suspicion – who she turned into a Machiavellian schemer cleverly maneuvering the paper tycoon into one of his own traps and saving his church from further abuse. The solution is uninspired, forgettable and actually had the flip through the chapter to be reminded who the murderer was supposed to be.

The final chapter is for Milward Kennedy, who is confronted with the daunting task of explaining away the solutions presented by the sleuthing foursome and wrapping up the case – and his approach to this conundrum turns the book into a parody that's very similar to Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936) and his critical commentary on Mrs. Bradley, Sir John, Wimsey and Sheringham is hilarious! However, I still haven't decided whether I loved or hated the way in which he explained everything, but it's a perfect illustration of "the blinkin’ cussedness of things in general" at the expensive of the four brilliant amateur sleuthhounds.

In summary, Ask a Policeman is a fascinating experiment, but one that derives its interest mainly from watching a troop of famous detectives taking a stab a the same murder case and how they behave when someone else is in charge of them – while the murder at the summer retreat quickly lost its appeal by a abundance of coincidences and a lack of overall consistency. It's not the howling success that their first round-robin novel, The Floating Admiral (1931), was, but if you're a fan of any of these writers or characters the book is well worth your time – and it's one of those rare crossovers that gave me that pleasurable tingle down my spine! I love and adore crossovers and it gives me an immense pleasure knowing that Mrs. Bradley, Sheringham, Wimsey and even Sir John inhabit the same universe.  

A note of warning: avoid the recent reprint by The Resurrected Press who took gross liberties by altering the text. More details here.  

The Grim Reaper Croons a Lullaby

"All around us are people, of all classes, of all nationalities, of all ages. For three days these people, these strangers to one another, are brought together."

- Hercule Poirot (The Murder on the Orient-Express, 1934)

In a fairly recent blog post, I recounted my astonishing discovery of a caved-in well of mostly unremembered, Dutch-language detective stories and the exasperation I felt at being unable to unearth any substantive information regarding their content. There's more than enough biographical material of their authors scattered over the internet, but in most cases it's difficult to even discern whether they wrote conventional whodunits, hardboiled thrillers, tales of suspense or police procedurals. This left me with insufficient data to cherry-pick from the best titles available and made me fully dependable on my gut feeling when picking a book.  

This purely random, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, method is not the technique I prefer to decide on my next book purchase, but there's something to be said for the element of surprise that comes with it – and Ben van Eysselsteijn's Romance in F-Dur (19??), in which a world-renowned soloist comes to a sticky end at an apartment building that mainly acts as a halfway house for an international assembly of guests, was more than worth the handful of loose change that I gambled on it.

But before discussing the plot, I have to address the mystery surrounding the publication date. Every online-source I have checked states that the first edition of Romance in F-Dur started rolling from the presses in the year 1934, but events and references incontrovertibly places the story after World War II. At first, I thought the publisher of the edition I read, a reprint from the early 1960s, had "updated" the text by throwing a few allusions to the post-WWII era around – but as the story moved forward that became highly unlikely as it would've been a thorough rewrite that served absolutely no purpose. This inadequate information goes to show how apathetic people around these parts are when the focus is moved from the crime littérateur to their actual work. Yeah, I know, it's a minor quibble, but I always note the initial date of publication to show where a book fits in within the canon of the genre, and it needles that I'm unable to do that with this novel.

Now, let's take a closer look at the story! Romance in F-Dur is set, for the most part, at Zeewijck, an apartment building situated somewhere in Den Haag (a.k.a. The Hague), that provides a temporary dwelling to mainly international guests, who are averse to the impersonal drabness of a hotel room and don't want to run up an enormous bill at an expensive boarding house, and the occupants who took up their resident at the opening of the story include an Indian prince, a former general of the German army, a Dutch-Indo and a Belgium-French couple – and several other ill-assorted gargoyles who could've been plucked from Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Orient-Express (1934) or Death on the Nile (1937).

Floor plan of "Zeewijck"

We bump into the key figure in this dramatic play, the prodigal musician Eric Purcell, when he's on his way back from a concert to his rooms and he's being accompanied by Thérèse Dubois, the actress wife of one of his fellow apartment dwellers, and they leave very little to the imagination as to what they've planned for the night ahead of them. But when the impetuous violinist withdraws for a moment to shed his tuxedo for something more comfortable her husband, the cynical actor Vincent Dubois, unexpectedly turns up – subsequently ruining a perfectly thrilling and exciting evening for the two. The inevitable confrontation between husband and lover, however, doesn't happen as Eric Purcell fails to emerge from his room and when Thérèse goes to check up on him she discovers his prostrate body slumped over the bed next to his broken violin: the cloaked man with the scythe had lulled him to sleep to the tune of a whizzing bullet.

The commissioner of the local precinct puts inspector Evers, who is of British descent, in charge of this international affair and they receive unexpected assistance from one of Scotland Yard's most celebrated detectives – who was here on a special assignment to fasten the irons around the slain fiddler's wrists who are now reserved for his murderer. The ensuing investigation is an enjoyable busy one as they interrogate the odd assortment of tenants, constantly uncover new clues and rig-up strategic traps for the murderer. Van Eysselsteijn evidently had a lot of fun writing this story and he knew his classics.

I alluded earlier to the similarity between the cast of characters from this book and those from two of Agatha Christie's most celebrated whodunits, but the entire story is littered with clues and hints that Van Eysselsteijn was intimately known with her body of work and tried emulating her – only he lacked her finesse when it come to clueing and providing a rug-puller of a solution. The book reads like a masculine Agatha Christie, but the plotting technique is much more reminiscent of Rex Stout. I couldn't help but rolling my eyes at that little, but palpable, slip-up the murderer made towards the end of the book – although the reader has been set-up in advance to be on the look-out for just such a mistake. So I guess you have to give him props on that point.

However, one thing he could do as well as the Queen of Crime was planting his tongue firmly into his cheek! He forces the man from Scotland Yard to shamefully mutter mea culpa's for bringing up a hackneyed plot device such as a fabulous stolen jewel, stating that detective writers only use these sparklers to obscure the dullness of their own imagination, and he eats a bullet when he discovers, by pure happenstance, the identity of the murderer and wants to announce it to the world – leaving Evers to unmask the murderer by pure reasoning. Well, what can you say about that, except producing a hearty grin.

All in all, this book was an amusing read and a pleasant surprise that I hope to find more of as I probe deeper into this area of the mystery genre, and I will keep you posted on the developments I make.

Ben van Eysselsteijn (1898-1973)

Van Eysselsteijn was a literary jack-of-all-trades, who was a poet, novelist, reviewer and an all-around intellectual, whose oeuvre includes four detective stories:

Het raadsel van de dertienden december (The Riddle of December 13, 1926)

Het Chineesche mysterie (The Chinese Mystery, 1932; co-written with Jan Campert)

Romance in F-Dur (Romance in F-Dur, 19??)

De dubbelganger (The Double, 1944; a stage play) 

Foreign mysteries discussed on this blog spot: 

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)

The Black-Box Murder (Maarten Maartens, 1898) 

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)

Case Closed, volume 38: On the Ropes (review of Case Closed) 

The Melody of Logic Must Be Played Truthfully (discussing Spiral: The Bonds or Reasoning)

Kindaichi: The Good, The Bad and The Average (dicussing The Kindaichi Case Files)

Amnesia Labyrinth, vol 1 (review) 

The Zombie Factory

"A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others."

- Charles Darwin.

Well, it appears that the mystery community has a large-scale, Harlequin-like holocaust to deal with and we haven't even come to terms yet with the previous massacre perpetrated against innocent, harmless and defenseless books of an advanced age. The news hit us a mere few hours ago when awrobins, a long-time member over at the JDCarr.Com message board, opened a thread relating the horrific discovery he made when thumbing through his newly acquired and recently reprinted edition of Ask a Policeman (1933) – the text of the original story had been altered!

The offenders of these abominable crimes against literature operate under the aptly chosen name of The Resurrected Press, but I think The Zombie Factory would've been even more fitting – because that's what you really produce when you churn out books that have been modified without consent of the person who put them to paper (and if the author is no longer among us you simply keep your stumpy, sweaty paws of their work). The concept of a zombie is the only monstrosity that stumbles around in horror stories and movies that ever made me genuinely shiver (and that's coming from someone who nearly chocked on his own laughter when he saw The Exorcist for the first time) because their origin is truly frightening. They aren't ancient bloodsuckers who curl up during the daytime in a coffin to take a nap or cursed people who grow a tail and whiskers during a full moon, but actual people whom we might have known during their lives, loved ones even, who rise from their graves as hollow shells of their former selves and make the living miserable – and that, in a nutshell, is the catalogue of this fifth-rate publishing outlet.

They've taken stories that we've enjoyed reading or were hoping to have the pleasure of reading in the near future and stripped them of their identity. The only reason they could've had for desecrating these books is to pander to 21st century sensitivity or a misplaced sense of creative superiority – because back then they really didn't know what they were doing, but their Übermensch of an editor does as he she it goes through the story with a blue pencil to decide what's appropriate for a modern, sensitive audience and what our innocent eyes need to be shielded from. Just imagine being confronted with an unenlightened opinion or remark from the past! It can take seconds, maybe even up to a full minute, to get over it! Seriously though, haven't we learned anything from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Thankfully, a chunk of their catalogue consists of public domain work and uncensored copies can be obtained from print-on-demand publishers like The Echo Library and The Dodo Press, and especially the latter one delivers decent editions of these copyright-free books. Finally, Curt Evans was surprised that The Resurrected Press had permission to reprint The Detection Club novels, since Harper Collins has only recently reissued one of them, The Floating Admiral (1931), and this might give their "legal department" a big headache. That wasn't me chuckling, I swear!

Oh, there will be a new review up tomorrow.

Rated M for Murder: Viewer Discretion Advised

"Television has brought back murder into the home – where it belongs"

- Alfred Hitchcock.

Yesterday, I had one of those lazy days, whose hours were entirely at my disposal to be wasted as I saw fit, and without any intrusions from other carbon-based life forms or anything of actual importance to do it was inevitable that I ended up pulling William DeAndrea's Killed in the Ratings (1978) from my congested shelves – and the book neatly ties-in with the previous, sloppily scribbled, review I posted only a few days ago.

William DeAndrea's Killed in the Ratings and Herbert Resnicow's The Gold Solution (1983) were both bestowed with a nomination for a prestigious Edgar award in the category of Best First Novel, but it was DeAndrea who walked away clutching the coveted statuette to his chest – and having read these narratives back-to-back it became apparent to me why Resnicow was unable to cash in his nominee in exchange for a bust of the father of the detective story. The Gold Solution is an entertaining and diverting read, showing plenty of zest and imagination, but also displays a still inexperienced writer who was testing the waters of the mystery genre. DeAndrea, on the other hand, seemed thoroughly comfortable within the genre in his debut – even though the plot was still rough around the edges. 

Killed in the Ratings formally introduces the readers to Matt Cobb, a corporate trouble shooter in the employ of a television network and attached to Special Projects, in which he handles everything that's too ticklish for security and too nasty for public relations, but in his first outing he has not yet earned his promotion to vice-president and the full responsibility of their dirt-sheet cover-up division – and as the events unfolded in this book I became, more and more, curious how the heck he survived this case to rise through the ranks of the networks. DeAndrea threw everything at him, from a phony murder rap that looms over his head like the Sword of Damocles to a band of mobsters stalking his every move, and he handled it all!

The trouble begins when Matt Cobb receives an uptight telephone call from a man who implores to rendezvous with him at a dingy, second-rate hotel, to discuss matters that will proof to be ruinous to the network and network television in general or else he will spill his story to the FBI, but it takes the name of his ex-girlfriend to agree to the meeting – and I think even the most unseasoned reader of detective stories can guess what happens next. Upon entering the grubby hotel room, Cobb stumbles over the body of a man, with an uncomfortable looking switch-blade stuck in his back, and is clobbered from behind with an ashtray – leaving him with more than he can explain to the cops when it's their turn to come busting through the door.

Making your protagonist one of the prime-suspects has long since ceased to be a revolutionary plot device, but in the able hands of a gifted artist there still is fun to be have with that ploy and I can envisage DeAndrea smirking as he came up with another disastrous plot twist to drag Cobb even deeper into a catastrophic quagmire. The reason why he wasn't charged on the spot is that he had a reasonably acceptable story to tell them and the fact that the homicide detective in charge is a close friend to his family, but the first antagonist he faces in this story is a Second Grade Detective who sees in him an easy collar to polish up his résumé – and he feels strengthened in his precipitate conclusion after uncovering that the blood-spattered stiff on the floor is the ex-husband who whisked away his ex-girlfriend to make her his wife. Cobb didn't help his case, either, by spending an hour at her apartment after the murder. 

But wait, it gets better! In between several botched attempts on his life, he also has to shake off an unscrupulous agitator and his henchmen who shares the detective's conviction of his guilt and holds him personal responsible for missing out on a big chunk of potential revenue – giving the plot more of a hardboiled edge than the later entries in this series. The story gets really violent at one point and I wonder if DeAndrea hadn't fully made up his mind at this point whether he should lean more to the tough, hard-bitten gumshoes or embrace the orthodox, puzzle-orientated approach, but when it was time to wrap-up all the loose-ends, during a William Powell-type dénouement, he had branded, what would become, in the succeeding years, his trademark on this book – equating hardboiled story telling with a conventional, intricately constructed plot and not afraid to crack a joke at his own expense. One of my favorite scenes in the book comes when Cobb is forced to hitch a ride from two gangsters, at gunpoint, to meet their employer while they exchange cutesy insults and acting very much like stereotypical gumshoe/mobsters – at which Cobb reflects that they must have watched the same movies when growing up.

That's William DeAndrea for you! He was well aware that his types of books didn't really require him to gaze too deeply into the human psyche and find the words needed to describe its dreary scenery, but that instead he could pull his readers into a parallel world where he could thrill, baffle or merely make people laugh – and that is, for the most part, enough for me. But just to show-off that he was better than most of his contemporaries in the field he made a social comment on racism and renounced it in a few, effective sentences when it would've taken most writers a couple of hundred pages. The mob-boss in this book is a Jew with a nasty personality and this elicits a comment from the homicide cop, who's doing his best to pin a murder charge on our trouble shooter, at which Cobb muses that it takes only one bad apple to confirm the stereotype and give people the excuse needed to be racist. Great huh? Cobb repudiates both the behavior of the self-styled Godfather and the attitude of the one-track cop without delving into unresolved childhood trauma's! These books should be required reading for everyone who wants to be a published author of crime books.

There are, however, two minor blotches that mar the overall quality of the book. The first speck is that I anticipated part of the solution because it was alluded to in one of the later stories, Killed on the Rocks (1990), but that's hardly a valid complaint when judging this book. The second problem is that one of the plot threads, concerning a key player, wasn't fairly clued and most of the revelatory information, hinting at part of the motive, was withheld from the reader until the final moment, but it's such a rich and complicated plot that's easy to overlook this single oversight and I'm very lenient when it comes to first efforts at crafting a detective story – so I'm going ahead and give this one full marks!

On a final note, I want to say that the next review here will be one in the series of foreign mysteries. But I haven't decided whether to go with a modern or a classic one. One of these days, these luxury problems will drive me sane again!

The Golden Pair

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

"What the hell are you doing?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Columbo: Final Questions

"You pass yourself off as a puppy in a raincoat happily running around the yard digging holes all up in the garden, only you're laying a mine field and wagging your tail."

- How the Dial a Murder.

Peter Falk (1927 – 2011)

It has been a busy week here, with new material popping-up at the top of the page nearly every day and the plan was to trickle down the outpour of activity a little bit after uploading the review of Patrick Quentin's Puzzle for Puppets (1944). But then the news broke that Peter Falk, whose disheveled appearance, from the rumpled raincoat, stumpy cigar and a tousled head of hair, was as iconic as the deerstalker and the underslung pipe, had passed away – and I just knew I had to watch and discuss a Columbo episode in his honor. 

Columbo slipped into his wrinkled raincoat, to doggedly pursue murderers, long before I was born, but I catch-up with the decades that preceded my existence in just few short years – as I watched well-nigh every episode on DVD and enjoyed almost every minute of it. There were a few clunkers (the embarrassing episode with the robot immediately springs to mind), but even they rarely had a dull moment. But this also left me with a dilemma: should I revisit one of my favorite episodes, like Try and Catch Me and Columbo Goes to the Guillotines, or watch one I hadn't seen yet? After an internal monologue, which turned into a heated debate, I decided it would be fitting to settle on Columbo Likes the Nightlife – as it was the final episode filmed and shows this to be a series that simply will never age and that Columbo is as timeless as Sherlock Holmes.

The episode was shot in 2002 and aired in early 2003, and gives the series a fresh paint job. Remember the opening credits from the 1970/80s, in which the yellow-colored, typewritten opening credits were somewhat shakily superimposed on the screen? Here they've been substituted for flashy computer graphics and techno music, but the set-up succeeding this new opening still follows the same, unaltered classic Columbo format that we all fell in love with. 

Columbo Likes the Nightlife kicks off with the, more or less, accidental demise of Tony Galper at the hands of his ex-wife Venessa – a two-bit actress who employs her new boyfriend, rave promoter and future club owner Justin Price, to obscure the body. Their operation goes without hitch until they start receiving blackmail demands from a notorious tabloid journalist and they realize that he leaves them with only one recourse: murder!

At the scene of the crime

The murder of this two-penny mudracker is another indication that the series has moved along with the times. The on-screen killings were always very clean, usually a single gunshot aimed at the torso of the intended victim, but here we have a particular messy and graphic murder – which commences when Justin Price pretends he's dropping off the blackmail money. He slaps a cord around his neck and chokes him into semi-unconsciousness, ties the cord to a rusty old radiator and when he struggles to his feet he hurtles him out of an open window – at which the radiator is torn from the wall and plummets with its attached weight four floors to an ugly mess on the pavement. You'd almost think you're watching an episode from CSI at this point, but that delusion is quickly dispelled with Columbo's arrival on the scene – who does a top-notch job deducing, by the smell of mouthwash and toe-nail clippings, that the man was murdered and the look on the officers face as the disheveled lieutenant crawls all over the body is just funny. Note that Columbo touches everything with his bare hands and you can only imagine the apologetic shock the crew of CSI would have if they saw him "processing" this crime scene. 


From here on out, the ruffled veteran policeman does what he knows best: driving the felons with their backs up against the wall and he does it with the same playfulness as a cat before pouncing on a mouse – demonstrating that even the passing of three decades wasn't enough the blunt the edge of this old coated bobcat.

Last year, Crippen & Landru carried Columbo into the current decade with the publication of The Columbo Collection, penned by series creator William Link, and this new batch of stories impressed upon me that, even though Peter Falk is no more, the character he portrayed is still out there pursuing murderers who were laboring under the naïve assumption that they were getting away with a perfectly executed murder – and he will be on that job long after you and me have been consumed by the earth or blown to dust by the incinerator.

Oh, just one more thing... Peter Falk, thanks for more than three decades worth of quality television and may you rest in peace!

Suitable for Framing

Willie Wang: "I don't get it, Pop- was there a murder or wasn't there?"

Sydney Wang: "Yes, killed good weekend! Drive, please."

- Murder by Death (1976)

Over the past week, this blog took a cosmopolitan perspective to the detective story with an excess of alien trimmings that would've driven Inspector Cramer up the wall. But today, we're back on familiar turf with a book that has, as he would've said, a good old "American murder with an American motive and an American weapon."

Nope. Contrary to what the opening of this blog entry suggests, this is not a book review that casts a critical glance at one of Rex Stout's novels or bundle of novelettes, but another assessment of Patrick Quentin – a collaborative posse of writers who've gone up and up and up in my estimation! However, the novel that is today's subject of discussion, Puzzle for Puppets (1944), is merely an excellent attempt in lieu of the absolutely brilliant stuff I was exposed to in their last few novels – but it's one of those fun stories in which they took a sadistic pleasure in placing their protagonists in severe peril. I once read someone comparing the Peter Duluth tales to intelligently written soap operas, and I couldn't think of a more fitting label to attach to this series.

The backdrop of the story is nighttime San Francisco, during those dark days when a raging war torn the continent of Europe asunder, where Peter Duluth, now and up-and-coming naval officer, plans to spend his weekend leave with his wife, but an acute rooming shortage threatens to wreck all of their romantic plans – when a kindred spirit, named Mrs. Rose, who's on the threshold of her second marriage, comes along and promptly relinquishes her hotel room to the youthful couple. Problems solved? Nah. Their troubles have only began piling up in front of them. At first glance, Iris is commonly mistaken for her cousin, Eulalia Crawford, a renowned puppeteer, which in itself is innocently enough, but when Peter visits a sauna, to stop a developing cold dead in its tracks, his uniform is stolen – and the clues all point to a lisping man and the scent eventually leads to a drunken man with a beard who spouts riddles ("the red rose and the white rose mean blood. I warned you on page eighty-four. The elephant hasn’t forgotten. Life or death").  

This exhilarating madcappery, inconvenient though it may be, appears to be harmless on the surface, until the trail stops at the front door of the puppet-strewn apartment of Eulalia Crawford – and Peter and Iris discover her blood-spattered body, scattered with roses, slumped on the floor behind a desk with a knife handle projecting from her chest and the last person to be seen entering her abode was a uniformed naval officer. The thief from the sauna has assumed Peter Duluth's appearance in order to commit a murder!

Plans for an amorous weekend? Thoroughly wrecked! It's very hard, if not impossible, to romantically canoodle in your room when the police are in the progress of organizing a massive, state-wide manhunt and allowing a second murder to be committed, on your watch, doesn't exactly help, either. Fortuitously, for them, they have the backing of two local private detectives, who assist them in tailing suspicious persons and tucking them away from the police, which allowed them the freedom needed to backtrack the blood-dripped, rose-scattered chain of murders to a huge circus – where a frantic dénouement causes a near stampede and would've not disgraced the pages of a Sir Henry Merrivale novel. 

In spite of the admirably executed climax at the circus, it's paradoxically also the part that keeps the book from joining Death and the Maiden (1939) and Black Widow (1952) at their top-spot in the first ranks. The solution feels too slight for such a baffling problem and the grand revelation comes at 2/3 of the book, which was far too early, even if it was filled up with an interesting and extensive account of past events leading up the double murder case, but it just doesn't measure up to first part of the book – and even the final, "Ha! Gotcha!," twist didn't elevate the story to its original heights.

Still, this is a fine and solid effort from a vintage brand name in the genre and falls only just short of being a great mystery novel, but it's unfair to expect that every book that bears their nom-de-plume on the cover is a towering achievement in the field. Yes, this a book has its fair share of problems, but there's more than enough to look pass those blotches and enjoy another trying tribulation in the turbulent marriage of Peter and Iris Duluth. Their agony, is our joy!

All the books I reviewed by these writers:

Puzzle for Players (1938)

Puzzle for Puppets (1944)

Death and the Maiden (1939)

Black Widow (1952)