The murder cited in the title occurs next to a huge display tank, quite a distance from the pool where penguins waddle forth at the New York Aquarium. But no matter. “Penguin Pool” has a jaunty sound to it, and panache counts for more than precision in this late Jazz Age tale. With the blunt, staccato clatter of an old newsreel, Palmer’s début mystery conjures up a very specific place at a very specific time: We’re in Manhattan, an island of the mind that extends from a posh suite on Central Park West to the dank downtown holding pen known as the Tombs, and it’s November of 1929, one month after the Great Crash on Wall Street. The crash looms as a vivid backdrop to the events that unfold here, and also as a possible source of homicidal motive; the primary victim, stockbroker Gerald Lester, had played several of his clients for suckers at margin-call time. Around those circumstances, and around a hat and a hat-pin and a hatful of other clues, Palmer fashions a plot that’s old-fashioned in its complexity and yet fresh in its pure ingenuity. He fumbles the exposition of his finale, thereby depriving his best tricks of the dramatic impact that they deserve. But a nice moment comes when amateur sleuth Hildegarde Withers—a spinster schoolteacher, tart of tongue and sharp of eye—has an epiphany while testifying in court and announces the culprit’s name from the witness stand.
STUART PALMER. The Penguin Pool Murder (1931).
PETER DICKINSON. The Sinful Stones (1970).
A 92-year-old Nobel Prize winner who once cracked the secrets of the atom, and who might have other secrets to reveal. A crude sect of pseudo-Christian anchorites, which the venerable man of science has joined for who knows what reason. A forbiddingly remote isle in the Hebrides, where followers of the sect—including the scientist, Sir Francis Francis—are building a world apart from the “Babylon” that is modern Great Britain. 
This quirky thriller rises upon the foundation of those elements, and at first it holds a lot of promise. Superintendent James Pibble of Scotland Yard, traveling to that island on what turns out to be a busman’s holiday, aims to add a few missing pieces to the tragic story of his long-dead father, who had served as an assistant to Sir Francis a half-century earlier. Instead of finding ready answers to his filial inquiry, however, Pibble encounters a difficult old man who insists on taunting him and on maligning the memory of his father. Pibble also discovers a nest of intrigue among the crew of mad monks who surround Sir Francis, and before long he spots an apparent murder in progress. There’s no real mystery as to the culprit. (The monks all bear names such as Hope and Tolerance, so distinguishing between would-be suspects would be a hopeless task in any event.) What Dickinson offers, in place of mystery, is a harrowing, half-comic tale of rescue and escape
The promise of the book proves to be hollow, unfortunately. And that’s because the book itself is all too full: too full of material imported from several different genres (there’s adventure of the Boy’s Own sort, and horror in the Island of Dr. Moreau tradition, and working-class social realism of the “kitchen sink” variety, and a dollop of detection as well), and too full of dense, thorny prose. Dickinson tends to write in an arty and elliptical style, and while that style definitely has its charms—he tosses off arresting, poetic phrases left and right—it doesn’t suit the thriller form. The language gets in the way of the action; in some passages, it’s hard to discern what’s actually happening amid the baroque manner of its telling. A good novel yearns to break free of this literary jumble, but it never gets off the island where Dickinson has marooned it.
TIMOTHY FULLER. Keep Cool, Mr. Jones (1950).
The people of Saxon, a newly suburbanized village outside of Boston, can’t decide whether they want to retreat from the modern world or to embrace its many amenities. Just now, an old-timey square dance is under way in Jack Maney’s converted barn. In the barn’s basement, meanwhile, Maney has installed a state-of-the-art deep freeze, as big as a living room. 
In Fuller’s adroit hands, the freezer becomes a casual metaphor of America in the Age of Anxiety (to borrow W.H. Auden’s phrasing). It also becomes a scene of attempted murder. Jupiter Jones, taking a break from the rigors of homespun recreation, mosies down to the deep freeze and discovers four eminent Saxonites padlocked inside. Immediately, he suspects homicidal intent. Who, he wonders, was the targeted victim? And who would be so cold-blooded as to add three extra victims to his or her kill? Later that night, the town police chief meets with a fatal shotgun blast while investigating the incident. Jones, a gentleman scholar and sometime amateur detective, devotes the next day—the “kind of day one hopes to avoid by moving to the country”—to sorting through the stories and secrets of various town characters. Punctuating his labors are reports of that afternoon’s Red Sox game, and news of Ted Williams’s every at-bat. The resulting tale is a wonderful period piece and a fine novel in its own right, complete with dialogue that proceeds through unforced wit, social insight that combines satire with sympathy, a heavy helping of romance (along with a light salting of sex), a hunt for buried treasure, and a dash of philosophizing on Jones’s part. His comments on the spiritual plight of mid-century Americans are off-the-cuff yet trenchant, and the book’s final word is hard to argue with: “There would always be baseball.”
[ADDENDUM: This novel, unlike some that I've reviewed in this space, well and truly deserves to be called a "forgotten book." Harper Perennial did reissue it back in the 1980s, as part of an excellent line of classic mystery reprints, but that was more than a quarter-century ago. Meanwhile, on the Internet (that magical place that now constitutes our collective memory) the book appears to have left very few traces. The same goes for Fuller and his sleuth, Jupiter Jones. Not even Fuller's first detective novel, Harvard Has a Homicide (1936), which achieved a fair bit of renown in its own time, seems to have garnered much attention from online commentators. And a search for "Jupiter Jones" mostly turns up references to another fictional detective—one of the teenagers who star in the Three Investigators series, which I recall fondly as my literary way station between Encyclopedia Brown and Agatha Christie.]
JOHN DICKSON CARR. The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941).
A scene of comedy, set on a sleeper coach as it heads from London to Glasgow, marks a frothy start to this twin-locked-room adventure, featuring Dr. Gideon Fell. Although Carr’s humor often has the effect of pushing his work off the rails, the interplay here between two Scots scholars of Restoration history, one stubbornly male and one winningly female, recalls a well-oiled screwball romance from Hollywood’s golden age. 
Awaiting Alan Campbell and Kathryn Campbell in Scotland (they are cousins, but genetically at a decent remove from each other) is the puzzle of how a relative of theirs, Angus Campbell, tumbled to his death from a 60-foot-high tower window at the Castle of Shira, the family’s ancestral home. A massive bolt had sealed shut the chamber from which he plunged, so murder would appear to be out of the question. But Dr. Fell, within his gargantuan frame, harbors a doubt or two about the case. What about the animal carrier found under Angus’s bed, for example? Might a killer have smuggled in a creature fierce enough to make the old guy leap from the window in fright? Then Alec Forbes, a known enemy of Angus and an ideal murder suspect, dies in his securely locked cottage; ostensibly, he took his own life by hanging. Meanwhile, there’s a war on, even out on the highland moors, and curious circumstances involving blackout window screens and the watchful eyes of the Home Guard give Fell further reason to harbor doubt.
As is usual for Carr, variations on “what might have happened” outnumber candidates for “who might have done it,” and the identity of the guilty party comes into view less through artful detection than by process of elimination. Add in just enough comedy and just enough romance and just enough Scottish atmosphere, though—along with two clever impossible-crime solutions—and the upshot is one of the author’s most agreeable tales.
DONALD WESTLAKE. The Hot Rock (1970).
The stone of the title is the Balabomo Emerald, and the joke that drives this first chronicle of the perennially hapless crook Dortmunder is that the rock, though certainly “hot,” simply refuses to remain stolen. Or, to be precise, it insists on being stolen again and again, thereby setting in motion not a single humorous heist but five zany capers in all. 
Dortmunder and his crack team of cracksmen—each with his own personal foible (a mania for model trains, say, or an obsession with interborough traffic patterns)—first wrest the jewel from under armed guard at the New York Coliseum. Then they break into a Long Island jail. Then they invade an Upper West Side precinct house via helicopter. Then they use a locomotive to assault the ramparts of an upstate loony bin. Then, finally, they employ hypnosis to connive their way into the safety-deposit vault of a Midtown bank, where they gain custody of the emerald. “Custody” is a relative term, though: Even after that series of larcenies comes to an apparent stop, this gem of a novel shows that it has a few more facets to reveal. But it also reveals, along the way, some inherent limitations to the comic-crime genre. The early byplay that sets up the tale, be it subtle or slapstick or surreal, has a delightful kick to it. Then it subsides; in a caper story, after all, the plot must come first. And when Westlake later tries to restore a spirit of levity, it comes off as pat and contrived. High jinks that might carry a short story or a movie script don’t really work in a full-length novel about men who risk life and liberty to make a big score. Ultimately, crime does not play.
AGATHA CHRISTIE. Murder in Mesopotamia (1936).
As he did so often during the long “lost weekend” of British Imperial life between the world wars, Hercule Poirot finds himself just down the road from a murder. This time, the road is an ancient one, leading from Baghdad to a site on the banks of the Tigris, where the American archeologist Dr. Eric Leidner is conducting an excavation of a lost Assyrian city. 
The murder claims the life of Leidner’s wife, the “Lovely Louisa,” who addles men and women alike with her ethereal beauty. Suspects are plentiful, and all of Western origin; they include Brits, Yanks, and a lone, very peculiar Frenchmen, but no natives of Iraq (as the lands of Mesopotamia were known even then). Aside from a few dabs of local color—an evocation of a desert sunset, a stray reference to the disorientations of the Orient—Christie gives short shrift to her Near Eastern setting. (Which is too bad, since she has a knack for such atmospherics that critics have never given her enough credit for.) Within the mud-brick walls of the Leidner dig compound, there flourishes a tight little society that might as well be in Sussex, complete with the local equivalent of a lord and lady of the manor who incite secret desires and resentments in all who surround them. Poirot capably picks through all of that emotional debris, brushes away the dust that clings to it, and espies a hitherto-buried pattern that explains the who, the how, the when, and the why of Louisa’s violent death. Yet again, Christie manipulates locations, time frames, and alibis in a way that renders plausible, or indeed inevitable, a solution that had earlier seemed impossible. To tell the tale, she employs the voice of a nurse named Amy Leatheran, an all-too-reliable narrator who can be relied on to treat both the fact of murder and the “mysterious East” in a comically stolid manner.
HAROLD Q. MASUR. Bury Me Deep (1947).
Masur lacks a keen talent for plotting, but he does plenty of it. From a classic opening scene, in which a luscious and meagerly clad blonde surprises lawyer Scott Jordan in his New York apartment, to a final showdown between Jordan and a similarly provocative culprit, the author tosses his hero into a bewildering series of terse, tense encounters. 
The blonde turns up dead after Jordan sends her away in a taxi, whereupon he starts to tangle with various parties implicated in her death: smarmy fellow attorneys, suspicious cops, a jealous would-be lover of the blonde, a stage-struck rich dame and her gigolo vocal coach, a dipsomaniacal client, and a dope fiend with a gun (and with a vendatta against Jordan), among others. Tying these characters to the murder are a divorce case, a car crash, a poisoned bottle of brandy, a lilac-colored glove, and much, much else.
The private-eye tale, at its best, hovers artfully between gritty realism in a “Naked City” vein and improbable fantasy in a “Baghdad on the Subway” vein. It sketches a familiar-looking urban jungle populated by guys wearing cheap suits and gals wearing cheap perfume, and it sends those people on a merry, madcap chase. Masur tries hard to achieve that potent combination but falters on both sides of the equation. His hardboiled details have a glossy, put-on look to them, and his overly dense yarn unwinds in ways that appear random rather than magical. In Jordan, Masur has created a likable sleuth, and his prose sparkles throughout. His story, however, merely glitters.
[ADDENDUM: Maybe I was too tough on this book. Several years have gone by since I read it (and since I originally wrote this review), and today I might take a kinder view of it. Many other folks, to judge from mentions of the book in the detective-fiction blogosphere, seem to like it well enough. The novel is indeed fairly derivative, and its plotting is too helter-skelter for my taste, but I've developed a growing fondness for the mid-century hardboiled genre from which it derives, and I've learned to accept that a revved-up plot counts as a feature—rather than a bug—in that tradition.]
PHILIP KERR. March Violets (1989).
And Philip Marlowe thought that he lived in a corrupt civilization! He should have traveled to the Berlin of 1936. There, his fellow private eye Bernhard Gunther could have shown him what it’s like to go down streets that are really mean. 
In capital of Hitler’s Reich, the would-be knight-errant faces challenges that make Marlowe’s tribulations in greater Los Angeles seem about as vexing as a day at Santa Monica Beach. Up to a point, the imaginary realms in which these two imaginary sleuths ply their trade do have much in common. Each world is morally septic at its core. In Gunther’s Germany as in Marlowe’s Southern California, a cadre of image makers beguile the masses by offering visions of personal power and physical perfection—visions that, effect, provide cover for a class of goons who run the place down at the mean-street level. In both settings, the goons find cohorts and victims among ethically rudderless rich folk, and among a surprisingly large population of women who are emotionally lost, dangerously beautiful, and usually blonde. The goons in Nazi Germany, though, are more Teutonically efficient than their L.A. counterparts, and their brutal sway over the land gives the Bernie Gunthers in their midst very little room to operate. Gunther, the grizzled antihero of this first tale in a trilogy by Kerr (which has since grown to encompass seven volumes, and counting), fits the classic mold of a fictional private eye. He’s an ex-cop whose reasons for going it alone lie in a gray zone between ignominy and integrity. Sure, he hates the Nazis, but he’s no saint-in-a-trenchcoat; when he takes a case, his goal is not to save a soul but to earn a fair Pfennig.
In its beginnings, at least, the case here is one that Marlowe would recognize. Hired by a steel magnate to investigate the murder of his daughter and son-in-law, and also to recover a stolen necklace,Gunther starts out by rattling the cages of the criminal underclass, seeking clues from those who traffick in stolen goods, discounted lives, or both. In short order, though, his efforts rile the criminal overclass that runs the country. 
Members of the SS, the SA, and the Gestapo, and even Prime Minister Hermann Goering, take an unsettling interest in his work. Finally, after undergoing a host of beatings, a pair of seductions (one manipulative, one not), and a painful and painstakingly described stay at the Dachau concentration camp, Gunther succeeds about as well as an honest shamus in the Third Reich could ever hope to do. He finds the necklace, identifies a perpetrator for each of the many homicides that clutter his trail, and uncovers more information than he wants to have about the inner workings of the Nazi system. Still, one mystery of great personal importance to him remains open. What begins and mostly unfolds as an artful pastiche of the American detective story ends on a dark note that has a distinctly European ring to it: An echo from the world as envisioned by Kafka resounds in the distance. The detective has mastered one series of crimes, but he and the reader both sense that something unfathomably worse lies in the offing.
REX STOUT. The League of Frightened Men (1935).
The eponymous “league” consists of about two dozen Harvard men who, back in 1909, engaged in a hazing episode that left one of their classmates crippled not only in body, but also (it now appears) in spirit. A quarter-century later, two men from the group die in possibly homicidal circumstances, a third member goes missing—and the surviving members begin to suspect that the victim of their long-ago high-jinks, a novelist named Paul Chapin, has targeted them all for vengeance. Letters to some of them, written in verse and in what appears to be Chapin’s style, turn their guilt-edged suspicion into cold-blooded fright. That’s the situation when the gargantuan man of pure thought Nero Wolfe and the nimble man of action Archie Goodwin take up the case, with Goodwin also taking up the duty of narrating the affair (it’s the second of their published adventures) in his usual wised-up way. Their investigation twists this way and then that way, but never strays far from a focus on the haunted and haunting personality of Chapin. After the murder of another old classmates of Chapin’s, Wolfe gleans the last bit of information that he needs to pinpoint a killer. Thus, by banishing the fear that had brought his clients to him, Wolfe effectively dissolves their league, and for his trouble he collects a huge fee that suits both his outsized needs and his outsized talents.
Some critics rate this densely layered tale as the best entry in the entire Wolfe corpus, and perhaps rightly so. The puzzle that Wolfe picks apart is one of the most adroitly constructed problems that Stout ever set for him. Behind it, moreover, is a tragic back story whose human dimensions—including the existential mystery that is Paul Chapin—span a wider range than Stout typically tried to cover. Still, the latter element fits awkwardly within the essentially comic world that Wolfe and Goodwin inhabit. In their later outings, not surprisingly, Stout rarely allows any other character to share the narrative spotlight that he shines warmly and narrowly upon them.
ARTHUR W. UPFIELD. The New Shoe (1951).
Toward the end of this spare, somber tale, one of the hardy folk who populate the Australian coastal village of Split Point says to Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, “You are the agent of Nemesis.” Indeed he is. 
A half-caste, with the brown skin of his aborigine mother and the blue eyes of his white father, Bonaparte has the raw cunning and the bottomless persistence of a born tracker, and he always gets his man. This case requires Bony (as both his creator and his police comrades call him) to undertake a twofold tracking job. First, he must trace the identity of a naked corpse found in the Split Point Lighthouse. Second, he must hunt down the party or parties who put a bullet through the man whom that corpse had once been. Clues are scarce, consisting mainly of a pile of the victim’s clothing that—along with the eponymous new shoe—turns up in a nearby cave.
Bony, pretending to be a sheep rancher on holiday, gets to know the locals, as well as the ocean-etched landscape from which they sprang. They are the sea-salt of the earth, as it were, and Bony likes them all: the happy-go-lucky day laborers who drive a truck full of lumber across a perilous mountain route; the sad, half-sane Mary Wessex, who dreams of childhood pirate games and of men who went to war and never came back; the old craftsman Mr. Penwarden, who sculpts custom-made coffins that will last for ages in the unforgiving country ground. But, like the lighthouse, the people who live in its shadow send a mixed signal; they bid a visitor welcome, yet also warn him away. No one of their kind, they insist, could have anything to do with the dead man or his killing. While Bony locates spoors of the crime in Melbourne and in other dens of urban vice, his pursuit leads back to Split Point, where he must deal out truth and justice in his own semi-legal fashion. Relentless but not ruthless, Bony comes across as a Maigret of the bush—as a man, writes Upfield, “whose infinite patience was equalled by limitless sympathy.”
