There Goes the Neighborhood

"Ye, against whose familiar names not yet

the fatal asterisk of death is set..."

- H.W. Longfellow (Morituri Salutamus, 1875)

Christianna Brand called her "the funniest lady you ever knew," Carolyn Hart listed one of her books among her five all-time favorite mystery novels, The Times Literary Supplement juxtaposed her with satirist Evelyn Waugh and with The Asterisk Club she breathed life into one of the most absurd and amusingly unbalanced assortment of characters that ever graced the pages of a detective story. This now shamefully neglected mystery novelist was Pamela Branch. 

By all accounts, Pamela Branch must have been a delightful human being whose personal motto probably was, "if there be humor here, it's dark, and you may need a flash of light to see it," which is a sentiment that runs through out her work – especially in her firs novel, The Wooden Overcoat (1951). In it, she introduces a club more out there than the Diogenes Club and plagued by far more unpleasantries than the Bellona Club!

Founded by Clifford Flush, The Asterisk Club can boost to be one of the most exclusive fraternities in existence and you literary have to wring someone's neck to qualify as an aspirant member. Well, that is if you were able to hoodwink a jury into letting you off the noose. Yup. The ritzy, exclusive club moonlights as a refuge for wrongfully acquitted murderers and their newest associate is one Benji Cann, who bumped off his mistress and was astonished when hearing the jury proclaim him to be innocent, but they are strapped for vacant rooms at the club – so he's temporarily quartered at the rat-infested dwelling of their next door neighbors as paying guest.

Their neighbors, two artistic couples, Hugo and Bertha Berko and Fan and Peter Hilford, have, at first, no idea who they are taking into their home or with whom they made a deal, but the truth begins to settle in around the same time as the rigor mortis sets into the limbs of their lodger – and they collectively decide to dump the body. Because that's the first thing you think of when finding a stiff you are not responsible for. Hilarity ensues as Murphy's Law runs rampant during their futile attempts at dumping the bodies they rapidly accumulated over the course of the story.

A novel whose focal point are a band of murderers, who unjustly escaped the strangling clutch of the hangman's rope, with one or two corpses tossed in, who are the brunt of many of the jokes in the book, is perhaps not suppose to be this funny or endearing, but it's a physical impossibility to keep that mask of stern disapproval from slipping from your face when, for example, reading the "picnic" chapter.

Meanwhile, at the Asterisk Club, the members are aghast as they secretly observe the amateurish bungling of their next door neighbors, but then again, what can you expect from a bunch of first-time offenders – and they come to the inevitable conclusion that it's time for the professionals to show them how to dispose of those pesky human remains. More hilarity ensues!

As a detective story, it's less successful than as a ghoulish comedy of manners, but not bad on a whole – and who cares, anyway, when you're having this much fun, right? But to be honest, it's only the motive that really poses a problem here. It's impossible to anticipate. On the other hand, Branch planted a few simple, but very subtle, clues and hints that would've told me who the killer was, but they passed me by unnoticed and I appreciated the hidden symbolism that went with it – which, again, was dark and somewhat twisted.  

I think a good description of this book would be a sanguinary comedy of manners, comparable to The Addams Family on a rampage, but also manages to spin a decent plot in the background. 

It actually made me wonder why Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Josephine Tey (only know her from reputation) were elevated to Crime Queens, but Christianna Brand, Gladys Mitchell and Pamela Branch are ignored – when they were arguably better novelists than their more famous contemporaries. I find Brand and Mitchell (and now Branch) much more rewarding and their plots are a lot richer.

Shortly put, if Craig Rice was the Queen of Screwball Comedy than Pamela Branch was the Gentlewoman of Gallows Humor, both of who wrote wickedly funny murder mysteries, which, sadly, have gone out of favor with a mainstream reading audience. Thankfully, there are still publishing houses, like the invaluable Rue Morgue Press, who safe authors like these two literary jesters from being swallowed by The Nothing – or, as it is know around these parts, biblioblivion.

Note for the curious: The Wooden Overcoat was adapted in 2007 by Mark Gatiss (of Dr. Who and Sherlock fame) as Saterday Play for BBC Radio 4.

Bibliography (all of them reprinted by the Rue Morgue Press):

The Wooden Overcoat (1951)

Lion in the Cellar (1951)

Murder Every Monday (1954)

Murder's Little Sister (1958)

Raising Hell

"The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague."

- Napoleon Bonaparte

I picked up Paul Doherty's The Plague Lord (2002) on a whim at a local book fest, after a questing in vain for his stories that were confirmed to me as bona fide locked room mysteries – and as the synopsis entailed a lot of promise, I held high hopes for this book to be one of his unconfirmed impossible crime tales. Unfortunately, I'm unable to cram it in one of the familiar pigeonholes without spoiling the best thing the book has going for itself: keeping you guessing whether you're reading a mixture of a detective and thriller story with occult elements or a hybrid supernatural crime saga. I even omitted the appropriate tags lest I spoiled the gist of the story. 

The backdrop of this historical romance is Cambaluc, thirteenth century China, when the Mongol Lord, Kublai Khan, rules as the first non-Chinese emperor over the region that was part of an outstretched kingdom, but as the narrative opens dark plumes have begun clouding the extended skyline of the empire. A secret society, known as the Water Lily Sect, has resurged and their Demon Father, the sorcerer Lin-Po, is determined to assist their demonic overlord from Hell, the titular Plague Lord, in executing the ultimate crime – exterminating the human race!

Members of the Guild of Pourers, who are tasked with keeping streets clean and cities inhabitable, are the first to feel the brunt of this fiendish conspiracy – as they are almost completely wiped out during an ongoing killing spree. During the same period, a number of religious figures, from different faiths and nooks of the world, have cataclysmic visions of Hell's gates opening up and consuming the world. This apocalyptic scenario will apparently begin within the borders of Kublai Khan's realm, who receives a warning from a spiritual envoy consisting of a Franciscan friar and a Buddhist nun, and as a response to this summons one of his most trusted advisors, the Venetian Marco Polo.

It's problematical to delve deeper into the plot at this point without giving the whole game away, but also because this is a story that sort of unravels itself without the assistance of a catalyst – which in itself can be considered as a strike against the book being labeled as a detective story. 

Nevertheless, the portion of the book relating the massacre of the street sweeping guild members is a fascinating story in itself, involving demonic possession, ghostly apparitions, mind reading and a mountain of blood spattered corpses. And no, that's not an exaggeration on my part. There are close to a hundred bodies littering the three hundred and some pages of this book and one scene recounts a small-scale holocaust at a pavilion, in which an apparently demon possessed guild member treats more than twenty of his companions to another ride on the Wheel of Reincarnation. 

Marco Polo at the court of Kublai Khan

Equally fascinating is the depiction of the Mongol court, which, under the rule of Kublai Khan, showed a surprising diversity of cultures and religious tolerance. Well, more than you would expect from that period in history. Marco Polo may be a favored with a high ranking position in the government and even passes sentences in criminal cases, as is seen early on in the story, but as a foreigner he still has to watch his step when addressing the domestic ruling class – who aren't always as enlightened as their heavenly mandated emperor.

As far as the story goes, that's really all I can spill without divulging too many tell-tale details regarding the plot. But suffice to say, it wasn't what I hoped to find when opening the book. Don't get me wrong, it's a decent story for what it is, but that's really it. I think it would've been a more satisfying read if there was an unmistakable sign post at the start that identified the story, because, one way or the other, readers are bound to end up a little disappointed.

Still, if you are an ardent reader of historical fiction, you might want to check this book out at some point in your life, if only for the delineation of the ancient China under Mongol rule, but don't trip and break your neck attempting to obtain the nearest copy. There are better, more satisfying, historical mysteries than this one – especially from the hands of this particular author.

And thus ends a shoddily written review, which always is a good indicator how dissatisfied I really am with a story – in spite of its pros. Oh well, a better read next time, eh? 

All in a Days Work

"What's in a name, after all?"

- Bill Pronzini

Ever since the inception of this blog, it has chronicled a journey of discovery through the realm of the post-GAD era detective story and during these travels I grew particular fond of the private eye novels penned by Bill Pronzini. It was on this very spot that I critiqued my first, full-length Nameless novel, Hoodwink (1981), but was already formally introduced to both author and character through a number of short stories scattered over numerous anthologies. The first one I read, "The Pulp Connection," was collected in The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (2000) and whetted my appetite for more, but it wasn't until earlier this year that I began picking up his books – and the only regret I have is that I didn't do it sooner. So reading the short stories collected in Casefile (1983) felt as a return to those unenlightened years.

Chronologically, this collection opens with a smattering of archetypical, noirish private eye stories that were Pronzini's early literary endeavors into the genre, in which Nameless is confronted with the seamier side of life. But after "Private Eye Blues" the stories become gradually more complex as the unnamed gumshoe is confronted with locked rooms, semi-impossible disappearances and even a dying message.

It's a Lousy World

The bereaved widow of an ex-convict, who strayed from the crooked path to walk the straight and narrow, engages the services of Nameless to find out what really happened the night her husband was shot by two patrolling policeman – after apparently holding up a liquor store. Nameless exonerates the dead man by understanding the significance of a paper-wrapped bottle of hard liquor the ex-con was carrying when he was gunned down, and proves that this world sometimes really is just a lousy place.

Death of a Nobody

A street bum relates the story of how one of his chums witnessed a hit-and-run accident and extorted money from the driver he nicknamed Robin Hood, but this person turned Bad King John on him – and savagely beats him to death in a back alley. Nameless takes on the case pro bono. This is neither a puzzle yarn nor a hardboiled narrative, but a tale that is best described as a humanist crime story.

One of Those Cases

This is "an old story, a sordid one, a sad one," in which Nameless is engaged by a woman who suspects her husband of having a fling with another woman, but a surveillance of her husbands late night excursions into the unknown turns up evidence of a far more serious offense than not observing his wedding vowels. Essentially, this is a page from the life of a private investigator that ended on a slightly more exciting note than these types of routine checks usually do.

Sin Island

An elderly, indisposed millionaire hires Nameless to take the first plane to the sultry island of Majorca, a slice of the Spanish Mediterranean, where he's to deliver a suitcase stuffed with dough to his son – who cabled a demand for ready cash. It's a rather simplistic story, but I still quite liked the twist and it's the first entry in this collection that broke with the dark, moody atmosphere of the previous tales. 

Private Eye Blues

Here we have Bill Pronzini's "The Final Problem," in which he prematurely wrote-off his fictional brainchild to devout his career to writing big commercial novels, but came back on that premature decision in Blowback (1977) – and drastically altered the direction and tone of the series.

The Pulp Connection

Lt. Eberhardt calls his friend, Nameless, to the home of Thomas Murray, who garnered fame as the King of the Popular Culture Collectors, to assist him with deciphering a cryptic message left behind by the cultural accumulator after someone poked him with a steel spike – and left the dying man behind the locked door and fastened windows of his pulp room. The dying message is made up of three pulp magazines, Clue, Keyhole Mystery Magazine and Private Detective, but even Nameless, an enthusiastic collector himself, has a hard time making sense out of it. Unfortunately, the solution he comes up with depends too much on unsubstantiated guesswork rather than logical deductions and the locked room trick, clever though it is, is very risky and not a method I would gamble my freedom on. Nevertheless, it's still a very diverting story that shows a writer who has decided to have some fun with the conventions of the genre without apologizing for it.

Where Have You Gone, Sam Spade?

Nameless is laboring under the naïve assumption that he's earning an easy fee, when he agrees to fill-in as a temporary night watchman for an importing company. The facility he has to guard already resembles an impenetrable fortress, where he can kick back with a pulp magazine most of the time, but it takes more than locks and shuttered windows to stop the detective curse – and before long he has to find an explanation as to how a body could be introduced into a building that is the equal to a sealed box. The solution to the reversed locked room problem is as simple as it's clever as well as the identity and motive of the murderer. Great title, by the way!

Dead Man's Slough

A minor tale, in which Nameless encounters a ghostly appearance of a red headed man clutching his head on the water and disappears under semi-impossible conditions – and the appearance of the man, corresponds with that of the ghost of a murdered miner. But Nameless doesn't believe in ghosts and searches the islet for answers. It's not really a spectacular story, but it pleasantly reminded me of Scooby-Doo.

Who's Calling

The last two entries in this collection have a combined page count of one hundred and nine pages and can almost be considered novellas. In this case, an attorney wants Nameless to track down an anonymous caller who has been harassing his daughter with lewd phone calls, but soon they transition from vulgar into the threatening – and our unnamed opt stumbles over yet another body. This is fairly clued story, but the problem failed to grab my full, undivided attention and the culprit is too easily identified. Not one of my favorite Pronzini stories, I'm afraid.

Booktaker

This story, on the other hand, has been a personal favorite of mine ever since reading it in a mini-anthology, Locked Room Puzzles (1986), and it's one of the standout stories of this collection – alongside with "Where Have You Gone, Sam Spade?". Nameless takes on an undercover assignment at a bookstore where a wraithlike thief has been smuggling valuable maps past a perfect operating security system. The solution is uncomplicated, workable and absolutely brilliant.

Casefile is an excellent collection by any standards, but it will depend on where you stand in the genre on which half of the book you'll enjoy more. For me, it was the second, more puzzle-orientated part of the book, but I can understand if devotes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett find more satisfaction in the first fistful of stories. In any case, it's a perfect introduction to Pronzini's work and recommended to start of with if you aren't familiar with his work yet. 

All the books I have reviewed in this series: 

Twospot (1978)

Hoodwink (1981)

Casefile (1983)

Double (1984)

Bones (1985)

Shackles (1988)

Nightcrawlers (2005)

A Miracle by Gaslight

"Our heirs, whatever or whoever they may be, will explore space and time to degrees we cannot currently fathom. They will create new melodies in the music of time. There are infinite harmonies to be explored."

- Clifford Pickover

During a long and storied career, John Dickson Carr, arguably the greatest and certainly the most enthusiastic participant of the grandest game in the world, carved himself a legacy as the standard-bearer of the impossible crime movement. But in contrast to these accolades, achieved in the department of miracles, stands a second, equally impressive, body of work produced as a pioneering novelist of historical novels – which has seldom been the recipient of praise. There's no discernible reason why these stories are usually glossed over as they reflect a genuine love for history (c.f. The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, 1937) and the atmospheric prose resurrected the ghosts of the centuries that slipped away in the mists of time. Not to mention the fact that he probably spawned a hybrid sub-genre with the introduction of the time traveling detective. 

Fire, Burn! (1957) is a particular fine example of this plot device, in which a modern day policeman is expatriated to the primordial days of Scotland Yard. This stretch of time in the history of the British police force has always fascinated Detective-Superintendent John Cheviot, who harbored private fantasies of crossing space and time to baffle his predecessors with the wonders of modern forensic science, but when he jumps out of a cab one night he inexplicably finds himself standing in the year 1829 in a custom made body! He's all of a sudden living in a dream, but not the one he frequently had as he has to conclude that it's hard to play a demigod of futuristic police work in a time where fingerprinting, ballistics and the preservation of a crime-scene are alien concepts – and basically only has his wits to fall back upon. Oh, and it isn't helpful, either, to quote from biographies that aren't published yet.  

Wits are fine when your assignments consists of such easy tasks as baring the identity of a pilferer who has been nicking birdseed from the beak of a dowagers pet macaw, but when this trifling offense turns out to be a prelude to murder, modern sophistication becomes something to long for – especially when dealing with a murderer who struck in the presence of no less than three witnesses but remained imperceptible to the naked eye. 

The victim, one Margaret Renfrew, who lived in with the old dowager and whose conscience was burdened with guilty knowledge regarding the affair with the birdseed, was shot, at close range, in a gas lit passage in front of Cheviot and two additional witnesses, but none of them saw as much as fleeting silhouette of the phantomlike marksman. Nonetheless, I unhesitatingly tagged one of the characters as the deadeye and deduced how this person obscured him/herself from sight, but was distracted away from these ingenious deductions – which in a way exposes the Achilles heel of this story.

At the core of this story you'll find a clever enough, but rather simplistically, constructed plot, in which your attention is drawn away from the obvious solution with Cheviot romancing over an at times exasperating heroine, gambling den brawls and the preparations of a crooked duel with an army captain.

This is not the kind of misdirection you expect from a reputable Machiavellian schemer, but lets not forgot that this story was jotted down during the big drop-off period late in his career when age started to claim its toll – making this book only an average fare by his own standards. However, it must be noted that some of his faded powers seem to have rejuvenated when he was composing historical mysteries, which perhaps has something to do with his wariness of modern-day life – as he clearly enjoyed reanimating these lost passages of time. As a matter of fact, they're almost lamentable elegies describing an unforfillable longing to the times when honor among men was restored with the aid of a set of dueling pistols, a can of hot coffee and twenty paces at an abandoned churchyard at six in the morning or a concerto of dazzling sword play on the crumbling battlements of a castle under siege. Yeah, he was an incurable and unapologetic romanticist.

To summarize what I'm trying to put across here, rather poorly, is that during the waning years of his career he somewhat rebounded when dedicating himself to writing historical fiction. The plotting regained some of its former glory coupled with an evocative prose and historical detail that really brings a tale to life. And even though Fire, Burn! is a notch or two below his other historical mysteries, such as The Devil in Velvet (1951) and Captain Cut-Throat (1955), it's leaps and bounds ahead of other later period, non-historical novels like Behind the Crimson Blinds (1952) and Patrick Butler for the Defense (1956). Granted, it's not Carr at his most ingenious, but at this point in his life he still refused to yield to that one unpardonable sin, namely that of being dull, and therefore recommendable to everyone who loves a darn good yarn – especially if you're already of a devoted follower of he holds all the keys.

I have two queries, though: how did John Cheviot ended up in 1829 and were the makers of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes (the original UK series, not the atrocious US remakes) aware of this book when they created the series?

Kill Like a God

"Keep your friends close, but your enemies even closer."

- Michael Corleone (The Godfather II, 1974)

Paul Doherty is a name that has been echoing around these parts of the blogosphere, message boards and communities for weeks before it began resonating on our reading lists as more and more mystery buffs seem to be handing in book reports on their blogs and it is easy to understand why he's a writer you can easily pick up – no matter where you stand in the genre. Doherty situates his stories in fascinating sceneries, in which he allows the past to rise up to obscure the present by carefully reconstructing the mise en scène of erstwhile civilizations, fraught with danger, intrigue, mystery and oodles of crimes – some of them perpetrated in apparently impenetrable surroundings! 

The Anubis Slayings (2000) is no exception and is a continuation of the previous novel, The Horus Killings (1999), in which Hatusu, better known to historians as Hatshepsut, ascended the throne and established herself as the first women whose head was adorned with the double crown of Egypt – while her trusted subject, Chief Judge Amerotke, brought light in an ever darkening affair enshrouding the Temple of Horus.

But before I go on with this review, I must point out here that the skeleton plot of this book bears a striking resemblance to its predecessor, however, the multitude of plot strands are pulled a lot tighter together here and this benefited the overarching story notably.

In The Anubis Slayings, Hatusu and the vanquished King Tushratta of Mitanni are negotiating at the Temple of Anubis on a treaty to ensure a peaceful existence between the once warring nations, but King Tushratta is embittered at having tasted defeat at the hands of a woman he now has to bow his knees to – and in his heart he vows to avenge his wounded echo. Hatusu isn't taken in with the Mitanni monarch, either, and slowly, but surely, it becomes apparent that one of the participating parties is sabotaging the tentative truce – as the temple becomes the scene of a baffling crime that suggests the hand of a supernatural being. The patron saint of embalmers, Anubis, is even seen walking the earthly soil of the temple!

One of the temple chapels closely resembles an inviolable bastion, safeguarding a holy amethyst known as The Glory of Anubis, but someone managed to sneak pass the guards unseen, phase through a solid door, locked from the inside, without disturbing the pool dug in front of the door and plunge a dagger into the priest murmuring prayers in front of a statue of Anubis before dissolving into thin air with the amethyst – and when the door is broken down they find the only key of the door still dangling from the dead man's girdle. As with the previous book, the deception of the sealed room illusion here was also cleverly hinged on a presumption, but ultimately not a very spectacular or mind-blowing explanation. Although I definitely liked this locked chapel problem a lot more than the murder in the closed-off garden tower from the previous case.

But the theft and slaying of a priest at the temple aren't the only hurdles Judge Amoretke has to clear in order to preserve the environment needed to work out a deal with the Mitanni. In his capacity as Chief Judge he's also obliged to look into a myriad of varying problems, which range from a lost manuscript by a renowned traveler whose savaged remains were fished from the river Nile to a Mitanni warlord found with barely a mark on his body in a chamber with the door and shutters locked or latched from the inside, but in this story all the plot threads are connected to one single intricate scheme – which turned out to be a huge improvement in comparison with its forerunner.

Nonetheless, there were too many of these plot threads running through the story to utilize them all to their full potential and some of them receded into the background almost immediately after they were introduced and only brought up again towards the end as an afterthought, but that's a minor complaint, really, measured against the overall quality of the story – in which Doherty expertly reconstructed an ancient civilization and wrapped it up with enough threads from which he could've easily spun three more novels. So why do I even bring up two strands that were lost sight of when a thick blanket, embroiled with pleasing patterns, was being woven? I mean, this is the kind of plot I always hope to find in a post-GAD story.  

In summary, this is a book that is gratifying in its offering of a twisted, maze-like plot populated with interestingly drawn characters and is basically a breed of grand detective story that was thought to be extinct – and even though Doherty's sparse clueing betrays a modern heritage it takes very little, if any, away from the book.

Absolutely recommended without reservations!

The Judge Amerotke series:

The Mask of Ra (1998)

The Horus Killings (1999)

The Anubis Slayings (2000)

The Slayers of Seth (2001)

The Assassins of Isis (2004)

The Poisoner of Ptah (2007)

The Spies of Sobeck (2008)

The Spoils of Conquest

"I need more chaos to reconstruct. I read and I read, but it's never enough."

- Victorique (Gosick: The Novel, 2008)

Yesterday, I marched into a vast, open event hall that was this months stronghold for the Boekenfestijn (book fest), where mainly leftover or returned books are disposed of directly to the consumer at bargain prices, and armed with an inventory I charged the rows of tables – and was able the claim the following tomes as war booty: 

Paul Doherty's Domina (2002), The Plague Lord (2002) and The Queen of the Night (2006)

Admittedly, Paul Doherty's historical romances were the primary objective of this year's crusade to the book fest, but the result was rather disappointing – as none of the books I swooped up were listed on the scrap of paper I was carrying on me. Unsurprisingly, I was questing for his impossible crime stories, especially the ones set in ancient Egypt, but was unable to turn up even one of them. Nevertheless, the synopsis of The Plague Lord entails a lot of promise.

Jill Paton Walsh's Debts of Dishonor (2006) and The Bad Quarto (2007)

Walsh garnered fame within the GAD community when she completed Dorothy Sayers' uncompleted manuscript, Thrones, Dominations (1998), in which she perfectly captured the essence of the erudite Crime Queen – and showed that a pastiche can be good depending on who's wielding the pen. She also authored a series of her own, in which a college nurse, Imogen Quy, unravels classically conceived plots of the murkiest kinds in a scholastic setting. I picked up the last two entries in that series.

Georges Simenon's My Friend, Maigret (1949)

According to the gold standard utilized on this blog (roughly 1920-1950), this is the only novel published during that prosperous, golden era that I was able to obtain on this journey. Not that I had any hopes of excavating a copy from the catalogues of the Rue Morgue Press or Crippen & Landru, but you can't stop that flicker of hope igniting itself when you pick-up a war chariot (i.e. trolley) at the entrance and catch that glimpse of the first pile of books. In any case, the description on the book cover promises an interesting story.

The Sherlock Holmes Handbook: The Method and Mysteries of the World's Greatest Detectives (2009)

A readers companion to the investigative methodology of the world's most famous consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes. It's apparently also chock-full of Holmesian trivia and whatnot. This book could turn out to be fun as well as a disaster (or a combination of both), but at these prices it would almost be criminal not to take a gamble.

Well, there you have it, booty of war, which I will continue fondling in public as I knock them off my to-be-read list and review them for this blog in the months ahead of us. Speaking of reviews, there will be one up tomorrow.

Who Killed Geraldine Foster?

"Chemists employed by the police can do remarkable things with blood. They can weave it into a rope to hang a man."

- Margery Allingham.

When I open the yellow pages of a venerable paperback or a timeworn hardback, I always gaze briefly at the dedication in front and ponder what forgotten, often domestic, stories prompted a writer to permanently inscribe a book to a Peter or Mary. Every now and then, these inscriptions are accompanied with a cursory explanation, "in memory of a perfect holiday" or "as a token of appreciating for allowing me to draw on your expertise of the poisonous Golden Dart Frog," or the person on who this diminutive honor is bestowed was a rather well known personality himself – in which case the story pretty much tells itself. But they seldom, if ever, have any bearing on the content of a book, nevertheless, I couldn't help but think of the people to whom Anthony Abbot dedicated The Murder of Geraldine Foster (1930) as I went from chapter to chapter – and I will divulge the reason for this near the end of this post. 

The grisly murder of Geraldine Foster began as a routine missing persons case when a young woman, Betty Canfield, reports that her room-mate has gone missing and since the declarant is a niece of a friend of Thatcher Colt the case ends up on his desk. 

But before I continue, I have to make an annotation here on Thatcher Colt who's crudely drawn character in his first recorded outing. In the previous novel I read, About the Murder of a Startled Lady (1935), he was a sharply dressed, upper class commissioner of police – who relied on thorough police work and sound forensic science to bring a case to a satisfying conclusion. He's still one of the best-dressed, most sophisticated policeman on duty, but here he depends on third-degreeing information from an unwilling suspect and questionable pseudo-scientific methods.

This unfortunately ended up devaluing an otherwise class-act detective story with a dazzling plot from superb to merely excellent. It didn't help, either, that Colt was making a series of incredible, rarely substantiated, assumptions deductions like working out what brand of ink was used on a letter by merely glancing at it – turning him into a Philo Vance or Ellery Queen clone with a badge. But let us return to the story. 

With an official report to set the wheels in motions, New York's finest begin sifting through the last reported moments of the missing girls life, questioning family members, interrogating friends and putting everyone else even loosely connected with the case under the gravest of suspicion as they slowly, but surely, uncover a slew of bizarre clues – ranging from a torn-up blackmail note to the cadavers of six doves stained with human blood. These clues all point like a neon-sign post to an abandoned house, where the walls are covered blood, and a shallow grave near the site in which the murderer deposited the denuded body of Geraldine Foster – hacked to death with a double-bladed ax with a pillow-case wrapped around her head.

The elaborate plot is pleasingly entangled in its complexity and the inducement for the murderer to make a bloody mess with a clumsy ax, strip the body and dress her split face with a pillow case before dumping her in a shallow hole in the ground are logically explained – and really is what you hope to find when you begin flipping through the pages of a detective novel. What holds this book down are the aforementioned third-degreeing and exploration of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. I wouldn't have been surprised, or shocked, in the least if Colt would've whipped out a volume of Cesare Lombroso's theories and a ruler to measure facial features in search for hereditary traces of guilt.

But what really casts a dim-light on these proceedings, is the fact that the commissioner has an incredible dense district attorney looming over his shoulder, whose mind runs along a single, unbending track with as only destination strapping someone in the electric chair to further his career, making this even a bit of an uncomfortable read at times – which made me wonder throughout these portions of the story what the people on the dedication page thought of this book. 

Abbot dedicated to the book to the standing army of New York City, the police department, but what did these men think of a police commissioner pumping a suspect full of truth serum after keeping him up all night – hoping to break-down the strong minded, individualistic personality of this person? It was noted in this very book that third-degreeing and intimidating a suspect were already frowned upon as an investigative method and inadmissible in a court of law, but nonetheless incorporated them into the plot and making them run the risk of tainting a possible case against the actual murderer. Not really reflective of proper policework.  

Plot-wise, it comes dangerously close to being absolutely brilliant, but the modus operandi of Thatcher Colt is problematic to say the least. Still, if you're a fan, like me, me of those elaborately plotted mysteries from the Van Dine-Queen School of Detection than the plot of this book warrants your full attention.

Remembering Appie Baantjer II: A Spate of Crimes

"We only die if we're forgotten about. As long as someone, even one reader, remembers us... we're immortal."

- Taro Suzuki (Kamen Tantei, vol. 4.)

On August 29, 2010 Albert ("Appie") Cornelis Baantjer passed away after a brief, but exhaustive, duel with the specter of death and as a commemoration of the first anniversary of his passing, I announced the intension to post a review on that date – with an open invitation attached to it to clog the live feeds of the blogosphere that day with book critiques. Only two of my confreres officially gave the heads-up that they will be participating in this little tribute, but I hope they aren't the only ones who will be submitting book reports. Yes, I'm mindful of the fact that I posted this a day before the actual date, but there's a particle chance that I won't be able log-on to the web tomorrow and I'd rather be a few hours too soon than a day too late with this tribute – and isn't that thought more important than a number on a calendar? Oh, and before you read this review, it's advisable to take a look at the previous post first.

The Corpse Adrift

The book I plucked randomly from my overpopulated shelves for this testimonial is Het lijk op drift (The Corpse Adrift, 1998). It's a novel from the later period, in which the plots habitually kow-tow submissively to the tyrannical reign of a thriving formula, however, what was done with this particular story attests my assertion that even the formulaic books are not entirely without interest.

The opening chapter is unusually busy, in which a grumpy DeKok and Vledder wrestle themselves free from the warm embrace of their blankets and head for a malodorous alley where two policemen found the body of a man with a blood smeared shirt, but before arriving at the scene of the crime the victim rose up and walked away – leaving two rookie cops flabbergasted. Back at the precinct, the detective duo is confronted with a man, one Gerard van Nederveld, who reports his widowed mother missing and a message from the water police informing them that they've dragged up a dead woman from the murky waters of the IJ (pronounced as AY) who had a note among her possessions with DeKok's name scribbled across the surface. 

Needless to say, these spate of crimes are interlinked with eachother and the victim is swiftly identified as Alida van Nederveld-De Ruijter, the widowed mother of four grown children reported missing by her eldest son, but the family turns out to be as dysfunctional as your typical, 1920s aristocratic inbred family – rive by a mutual dislike for one another. The source of this animosity was probably the family's father, an indiscriminate collector who pumped nearly all of their money in his hobby and was not averse to employ unsavory underworld characters to acquire a particular item that caught his fancy, and was also dragged from the IJ a year previously. At first, his death was filed away as an unfortunate accident, but the autopsy on the remains of his wife turned up a couple of broken cartilage rings indicating death by strangulation – and suddenly DeKok and Vledder are burdened with what appears to be a double homicide.

Even though the plot somewhat stagnated after this opportune set-up, there's still more than enough pleasure derived from Baantjer's storytelling and the characters that inhabit this story. The fractured shards that was once the Van Nederveld family showed that he was still interested in characterization at this point and it's always fun when he brings members of the Amsterdam penose into a story. The inevitable dénouement was all right, but lacked finesse and suffered a bit from a too obvious a murderer. Nevertheless, the motivation for no less than three murders and the emotional aftermath made for a satisfying conclusion as DeKok relates the entire history behind these crimes.

While The Corpse Adrift is not Baantjer at his finest, I think it has merits and it was fun to tag-along with DeKok and Vledder again for the first time in over three years. As I said before, it was Baantjer who lit the furnace in which my undying love for the detective story has roared ever since and have always felt very much indebted to him.

And for that, I salute Appie Baantjer with a last bow: 

 

Thrones, Dominations

"There's nothing like the story of ghostly murder and brutal death, by forces unseen, to unsettle the minds and souls of our community."

- Khaliv (The Horus Killings, 1999)

Over the past few weeks, a fellow connoisseur in crime, who operates under the moniker Puzzle Doctor, launched an ongoing campaign to beat the drum for Paul Doherty – an educator and historian who draws on his professional knowledge to craft historical mysteries saturated with seemingly impossible crimes. At first, I endeavored to be strong, resolute and stalwart in the face of this temptation that was put before me, but after the first victim of the docs sales pitch dropped without a fight I knew it was time to take the road of least resistance and just give in.

However, instead of stepping back into medieval Europe, which seems to be the backdrop for a considerable chunk of Doherty's output, I took a trip to warmer climes – and settled on a story from one of his series set in ancient Egypt. The torchbearer in these books is a respected chief judge, Amerotke, who's assisted in administrating justice by several henchmen, among them a dwarf named Shufoy and the raunchy Prenhoe, who take up the legwork that is required outside of the exalted circles of society. The parallels between Robert van Gulik and Bertus Aafjes are easily drawn, but the resemblances are superficial as the character of the judge perfectly stands on his own, even though he's, at times, the only real personality in the story as the other characters are rather flat, and the setting naturally gives the story an altogether different flavor. Doherty's expertise and passion for history expresses itself in the setting and the details of every day life briefly resurrected a civilization from thousands of years ago.

The Horus Killings (1999) is the second entry in the series and takes place after Hatusu, the widow of Pharaoh Tuthmosis II, ascends as first woman the thrown after having lead a victorious army in a bloody war with the Mitanni – which is interpreted by her followers as a sign that the Gods are in her favor. But to make her divine rule undisputed, she needs the support from a circle of religious leaders, who hold an opposing view on the interpretation of definitive signs from the Gods, but an inundation of brutal killings at the Temple of Horus is endangering the first reign of a Pharaoh-Queen – as scholars are turned into human torches, flasks of poisoned wine are passed around and a Divine Father is murdered in locked room on the top floor of a garden tower!

Judge Amerotke has more than enough workload with a murderer who assiduously dispatches people towards the Far Horizon, but there are also two unconnected subplots that hover inconspicuous in the background. The first of these problems concerns the semi-impossible disappearance of two brothers from a maze, but the solution is pedestrian and a lame plot-device to resolve a touchy murder charge issued by the influential father of the boys against the son of another important person. A legal dispute that arose when a woman remarried after her abusive spouse was reported killed in battle, but turned up very much alive, spun out in something more interesting, however, hardly satisfying for someone who reads Bertus Aafjes.

That's pretty much the overall theme of the entire plot. The problems and challenges facing Judge Amerotke are cleverly devised, but the solutions failed to excite me – even if they weren't bad at all. The crux of the secret behind the murder in the locked garden tower is perhaps not a revolutionary one, but I tend to like it and the presumption everyone made on the ideal escape route from such a building was very perceptive on the authors part. I just wasn't blown away by it.

In summary, the solutions, for the most part, lacked inspiration and the clueing was too sparse to be really satisfying, but a writer who loads a detective novel with semi-impossible disappearances, a seemingly supernatural murder in a locked tower room and a baffling dying message is a man after my own heart – and someone who can probably do better than this. Now don't get me wrong, this still an extremely readable and fairly clever plotted story, and it was a delight to come across yet another contemporary mystery writer who takes joy in setting his character loose in a mazelike plot. Definitely going to read more of Paul Doherty's locked room mysteries in the very near future.

The Judge Amerotke series:

The Mask of Ra (1998)

The Horus Killings (1999)

The Anubis Slayings (2000)

The Slayers of Seth (2001)

The Assassins of Isis (2004)

The Poisoner of Ptah (2007)

The Spies of Sobeck (2008)

Clipped Wings

"The golden rule is that there are no golden rules."

-  George Bernard Shaw

Let the reader beware: extremely vague ramblings are ahead of you!  

Recently, Xavier Lechard added an addendum to a response he compiled earlier this month to the projectile vomiting an article signed by Philip Hensher, in which the savant took a fresh and much needed stance by opposing the unchallenged conventions of the rule bound mammoth that is the crime genre – and labeled its perfervid followers as the un-evolved troglodytes they really are. But as Xavier already spewed his cerebral guts all over the article, there's not much left for me to add except to seize this opportunity to make one or two general observations of my own.

In the opening of his addendum, Xavier restated one of his previous observations that the genre being "rule-bound" doesn't mean it is necessarily adverse to originality and innovation, but I think that is putting it weakly – since the genre would've never prospered as it once did had any of the practitioners in the field taken serious notice of the scribbles produced by S.S van Dine and Ronald Knox.  

Mysteries were virtually unique as a genre fiction during their golden period in the fact that they were hard to define and had a scattered fan base. For decades, a discussion raged on what constituted as a mystery as the wings of the genre seemed to encompass the entire literary globe. Within the scope of the crime-ridden genre itself there were many different denominations: the fair-play whodunit, action packed thrillers, inverted crime stories, gothic novels of suspense and maidens in distress, police procedurals, rogue adventures, spy thrillers etc.

This is not a problem found with gritty westerns, science-fiction yarns, blood curdling horror stories or sweet, diabetic inducing, romance novels. They are, for the most part, what they are and still easily identified if they crossed-over in unfamiliar territory – where as the detective story blends in almost naturally with every surrounding it is put in. The prime example of this genre bending is, of course, Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel (1954), which places a traditionally plotted mystery in a futuristic setting peppered with social commentary, but you could just as well write a legitimate detective set in Transylvania featuring a protagonist who has to exonerate Count Dracula from a murder committed in a locked and nearly impenetrable castle tower – whose only point of entrance is a tiny, top-floor window large enough for a bird or bat to pass through. A creative writer can pull it off.

As far as rules go, I have pretty much given up on them. Until recently, I clung to the necessity of a plot and strict fair play, however, that proved to be incompatible with a lot of writers and books I absolutely love and adore (e.g. Conan Doyle, Maurice Leblanc, Rex Stout and H.R.F. Keating). I still consider cleverly plotted detective stories that play fair with their readers as a personal favorite, but that's just a preference for one of the many forms the genre can be molded into by a talented pair of hands guided by an intelligent and imaginative brain. That's how I see the genre these days... as a mass that can be molded in any shape you want and should provide a gifted writer with unlimited freedom.

Lamentably, that's a potential that is rarely tapped into these days and there's not much left of that once majestic, free-roaming bird who soared over the printed pages of nearly every genre after it was captured, clipped and put in a cage too small to even stretch it wings properly.

Enter any bookstore, and it's the same old, same old. So called literary thrillers saturated with character angst and lengthy, pointless descriptions of absolute nonsense. No imagination. No experimentation. No longevity. And there's where you find the true tragedy of this problem. The people who threw themselves up as innovators with the purpose of "transcending" the genre are effectively bleeding it to death and hopefully their publishers will take notice, before it's too late, that the new generation of readers aren't all that interested in these self-proclaimed, literary masterpieces – that make pungent comments on society and whatnot. I realize that it's very vulgar of me, Ho-Ling and Patrick to admit, openly and unapologetically, that we read mysteries mainly for our enjoyment, but perhaps our generation simply isn't literate enough to appreciate lengthy descriptions of angst-ridden childhood recollections, bladder problems and CD/DVD collections.

As my fellow aficionado concluded, we should (or rather they) make the tent bigger and be more inclusive as well as stopping with that childish, unfounded phobia for the "I" word, but then again, maybe we're better off if the genre, as it stands now, withers away so we can begin anew.

And on a side note: I'm midway through another impossible crime novel (it's not an addiction, I can stop whenever I want!) and the review will be up within the next two days or so.