Only Detect

ELSPETH HUXLEY. Murder on Safari (1938).

Mike — Thu, 31 May 2012 21:37:37 +0000

Huxley follows a model made familiar and attractive by Agatha Christie. She takes the trappings of the classic English detective story and transplants them to a locale more exotic than the steak-and-kidney-pie world where tales of that kind usually unfold. For Christie, the locale of choice was usually in the Middle East. For Huxley, an author best known today for her nonfiction writing about life in colonial Africa, it’s the Kenyan bush that provides an ideal out-of-the-way setting for murder and intrigue. During the late 1930s, she wrote a trio of mysteries that use that continent as their backdrop. Here, in the second of those books, she populates the scene with standard genre types: a self-important English lord, a fortune-bearing American wife, and an impetuous heiress, along with various hard-up adventurers—an ensemble that furnishes a perfectly suitable murder victim and a tidy crew of suspects. Other elements of her tale that echo common genre tropes include a jewel theft, an attempted elopement, and a pair of narrowly missed assaults on the life of Superintendent Vachell of the C.I.D., who represents the long (and slightly bruised) arm of British law in the Chania region of Kenya. With these and other ingredients, Huxley fashions a charming puzzler. While parts of the novel suffer from an excess of padding, overall it offers a blend of comedy, suspense, and detection that rivals the work of Christie at her best. The concluding wrap-up, complete with footnotes that cite the pages where Huxley has dropped clues for her readers to pursue, is particularly well done.

REX STOUT. The Doorbell Rang (1965).

Mike — Thu, 24 May 2012 16:22:14 +0000

Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin are timeless. Across the 41 years that span their corpus of published cases, they age not a whit. Yet their world, or at any rate the part of it that exists outside their brownstone fortress on West 35th Street in New York, does change. The great storm of 20th-century history leaves behind bits of flotsam and jetsam that occasionally drift into their lives (in this book, there’s a pair of references to Barry Goldwater, and even a stray reference to the Beatles), and it brings in business as well. In 1965, the mighty and unchecked power of the FBI wasn’t new, but it was newly salient in the minds of civil libertarians, partly because of the recent publication of an exposé titled The FBI Nobody Knows. Among those liberty-loving Americans were the real Rex Stout, the fictional Nero Wolfe, and a fictional client of Wolfe’s, Rachel Bruner, a wealthy businesswoman who hires the legendary detective to stop the Bureau from harassing her. Recently, Mrs. Bruner tells Wolfe, she bought a thousand copies of that exposé and sent them hither and yon to prominent citizens of the Republic, only to discover that the FBI doesn’t take kindly to that sort of unsolicited publicity. What can Wolfe, a mere private sleuth, do to make the Fibbies leave her alone? To find a point of leverage against the otherwise untouchable minions of J. Edgar Hoover, he directs Archie to look into some open cases on which the FBI is known to be working, and one case—the unsolved murder of a writer named Morris Althaus—catches their attention.

The murder inquiry proves to be a lean affair. Archie chats up a few friends and associates of Althaus, scouts out the victim’s Greenwich Village apartment, and puts the pieces together (what few of them there are) without requiring much help from Wolfe. More central to this adventure are the machinations that surround that investigation; the real action involves the jousting and trickery that the two detectives bring to their interaction with suspects, witnesses, police officers, and assorted G-men. Shenanigans of that type are a recurring element in the annals of Wolfe and his entourage, but the feats of subterfuge by which they foil the FBI make this entry in the saga stand apart from all others. It closes with a justly famous scene in which an illustrious (or notorious) visitor rings the doorbell on the old brownstone, and then waits. For the reader, meanwhile, it’s a little sad to be leaving this never-changing yet ever-amusing realm where the doorbell—that humble symbol of fate—looms in perpetuity, ready to be rung.

WILKIE COLLINS. The Moonstone (1868).

Mike — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:20:16 +0000

This first-ever English detective novel was born of a marriage between the English sensation novel and the English comic novel. Sensationalistic elements lie thick on the ground, certainly. There’s the midnight theft of the eponymous jewel (a lustrous diamond, stolen years earlier from a statue of Vishnu in his incarnation as the Hindu moon god). There’s the strange appearance in the Yorkshire countryside of a trio of Brahmins who have pledged to recover the Moonstone by any means necessary. There’s the use of opium for purposes that are by turns criminal, medicinal, and experimental. The spirit of comedy, enhanced by Collins’s deployment of multiple narrators, is equally prominent. It finds expression in the beneficent presence of Gabriel Betteredge, one of the great butlers in world literature; in the satirically absurd presence of Drusilla Clack, a religious fanatic whose poverty of spirit matches the poverty of her purse; and in the mutually contentious presences of Franklin Blake and Rachel Verinder, a charming young pair whose romantic ups and downs mark the rhythm of this great saga. Collins, moreover, makes room within that saga for pathos and for social criticism—witness the tale of the servant girl Roseanna Spearman, who falls tragically in love with one of her “betters,” and the story of Ezra Jennings, a mysterious half-breed whose sacrificial demise points up the cruelties of colonialism.

Yet, despite its high-Victorian scope and shape, the novel carries notable seeds of modernity. Collins writes in a style that’s ornate by the standard of today, but there’s a springy freshness to it overall. A more specifically modern feature is the presence of Sergeant Cuff of the Detective Force, Scotland Yard. Cuff appears on the scene after the Moonstone disappears from Rachel Verinder’s sitting room, and his deductions from the clue of a smear on a painted door prefigure the sleuthing feats of his more illustrious fictional descendants. Able but not infallible, Cuff goes off-track in his suspicions, and thus it devolves to Blake and Jennings and others to find out what happened to the jewel. (Although this classic work lays down numerous tropes that ultimately became central to the murder-mystery genre, it doesn’t actually fit into that category. A lone murder occurs late in the proceedings, but no mystery attaches to the killing. The plot, hinging as it does on the quest for an elusive object of desire, is an early example of a MacGuffin-driven story line.) One after another, these characters happily succumb to “detective fever,” as Cuff calls it. That quality—that need to know, that eagerness to subject the world to discovery and explanation—seems quite modern as well.

STUART PALMER. The Penguin Pool Murder (1931).

Mike — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 18:11:57 +0000

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.

PETER DICKINSON. The Sinful Stones (1970).

Mike — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 21:03:43 +0000

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).

Mike — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 16:00:31 +0000

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).

Mike — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 15:26:16 +0000

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).

Mike — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 21:10:46 +0000

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).

Mike — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 15:04:08 +0000

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).

Mike — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 15:59:41 +0000

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.]