RUTH RENDELL. A Guilty Thing Surprised (1970).

In the early going, at least, this novel of murder among the gentry in a Sussex village has a lot to recommend it. The outlines of the story are almost stereotypically classic: There is a great and ancient house, and a clutch of servants, and a tangle of familial tensions that suggest a range of possible motives to kill, and a hitherto-secret will that casts some of those motives in a provocative light. At the same time, this fifth work in the Inspector Wexford saga has a decidedly modern flair; it wholly lacks the cozy, complacent mood that hangs over many country-house mysteries of the prewar era. Rendell’s telling of this tale, moreover, is as brisk as the tale itself is admirably brief. The author gazes on her subjects with a cold, satiric eye, but she also conveys a compassionate view of the drives that make each character no better (but also no worse) than he or she should be.

The most important character, although she is onstage for only a short time, is the victim, Elizabeth Nightingale. Elizabeth, the lady of Myfleet Manor, was a beautiful albeit slightly vain woman who devoted her days to charity and leisure. Why would anyone wish to find or join her in Cheriton Forest and there, under a midnight moon, smash her head with a blunt object? The puzzle of who Elizabeth was, and of the true nature of her relationships with other characters—including her distinguished husband, Quentin; her brother, a prickly writer named Denys Villiers; and a young gardener on her staff, Sean Lovell, whose aspirations to become a pop star she encouraged—give Wexford and his young colleague, Mike Burden, plenty of leads to investigate.

The tale comes with a mighty twist, yet that twist throws the foregoing tale perversely out of whack. The final revelation—told in the form of an extended confession—not only bears a tenuous (and minimally clued) connection to what precedes it but also banishes Wexford and Burden to the margins of their own case. Rendell thus achieves an effect that is both unsettling and unsatisfying.

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CARTER DICKSON. He Wouldn’t Kill Patience (1944).

The Royal Albert Zoo, an enclave located fictitiously in Kensington Gardens, provides the backdrop for most of the action in this dazzling tale from the prime of John Dickson Carr’s tale-spinning life. (The Carter Dickson pseudonym, of course, in no way obscures the unmistakable stamp of Carr’s authorship.) But in a broader sense, the backdrop is the wild kingdom that extends across the war-wracked skies over London. Set during a three-day period in early September 1940, the events in this novel of domestic murder unfold as German bombers begin their decidedly international assault on Britain’s capital. In several scenes, the haunting drone of aircraft sounds overhead. In one scene, smoke from fires in the East End wafts over the West End, offering a preview of the horrors that will come as the blitz advances over the whole city. And in a pivotal early scene, an air-raid warden on his rounds peeks through a window that should be blacked out, but isn’t, and spots a prone body on the floor.

The body belongs to Edward Benton, director of the zoo. By all accounts, he was a harmless-enough fellow, driven primarily by an obsession with maintaining his large and exotic menagerie amid the challenges and privations of wartime. He was also a man of independent wealth, and a brother of his who might inherit that fortune hovers about the Royal Albert grounds. Otherwise, it’s hard to discern who had a motive to extinguish the zookeeper’s life. But attention here focuses less on motive than on means. Somehow, and for some obscure reason, the killer lined the edges of every point of egress in the murder chamber—from the sills of windows to the bottom of the room’s only door—with adhesive-backed paper. Benton, in other words, drew his last breath in a thoroughly (and not just metaphorically) sealed room. It’s a perfect case for Sir Henry Merrivale, who, by the serendipitous logic of Carr’s world, happens to be at the Benton residence on the evening of the crime.

As noted, the circle of suspects is almost alarmingly small: The reader must ask not just “Who committed the murder?” but “Who even might have committed it?” Despite that handicap, Carr manages to work a kind of surprise in the whodunit department. For Sir Henry, though, pinpointing a killer and proving the killer’s guilt are discrete endeavors, and in this instance court-worthy proof eludes him. So Old H.M.—a man who is largely innocent of patience—confronts the killer in the zoo’s Reptile House and forces the issue in a starkly cold-blooded way.

 

GEORGETTE HEYER. Why Shoot a Butler? (1933).

More than once, the amateur sleuth Frank Amberley asserts that the murder of Dawson, the butler who had served long and honorably at Norton Manor, is the least intriguing aspect of the case at hand. He means to say that he discerns an underlying pattern of crime and connivance that poses a more scintillating problem—to his kind mind, anyway—than the shooting of Dawson per se. But Amberley also speaks for his creator: Heyer clearly views other elements of her tale as worthier of her energy and ingenuity than the humdrum business of solving a murder puzzle. What’s most compelling to her mind, it would seem, is the timeless problem of how an eligible bachelor and a nubile maiden who don’t appear to like each other will find a way to love each other. (Heyer, who produced about a dozen novels in the detective genre between 1932 and 1953, later became best known for her work as a writer of Regency romances.) The bachelor is Amberley, a rising barrister whose cleverness is almost equal to his arrogance. The maiden is Shirley Brown, a prideful woman in her own right who struggles to make a life as an assistant to a lady novelist. For mysterious reasons, she has leased a cottage along with her brother in a patch of country near the village of Upper Nettlefold, which in turn is near both Norton Manor and the Greythorne estate, where Amberley’s uncle and aunt reside.

The couple’s meet-cute moment occurs over the corpse of the eponymous servant. Amberley, gliding along in his Bentley toward Greythorne, happens upon a roadside tableau that features Miss Brown, a gun that she has in her possession, and Dawson, sporting a fresh bullet wound in his chest. The suspicious young man and the suspicion-arousing young woman bicker in the time-honored style, but he decides not to divulge her presence at the crime scene to the police. Amberley isn’t inclined to entrust information to them, in any event. Even after the local authorities invite him to take part in their investigation, he treats them with genial contempt. He doesn’t trust Miss Brown very much, either. Yet he does respect her, and over the course of several tension-filled encounters, that feeling melts into something softer than respect.

There are follow-up murders that add to the body count while trimming an already short list of suspects. To specify who’s on that list as the book enters its final sequence would give the game away: At that point, it’s not a puzzle, it’s a coin flip. Establishing who shot the butler and why, moreover, isn’t an entirely fair-play proposition. Amberley, we discover during the wrap-up phase of this affair, has withheld vital facts not just from police officials but from readers as well. Which isn’t to say that Heyer neglects the puzzle element completely. Her plotting is crisp and intelligent, if not intricate. She includes just enough detection to keep the love story honest, as it were, and the wit that she brings to telling that story partly redeems any weakness in the novel’s detective component. She also writes perfectly modulated prose that throws off sparks of tart humor in almost every scene.

 

COLIN DEXTER. Last Bus to Woodstock (1975).

For this first Inspector Morse tale, Dexter uses a scenario that was highly popular among British crime writers during the final decades of the 20th century: A women in the full, dangerous bloom of her youth is found dead, the victim presumably of a man with sex on his mind and a sick way of showing it. Other notable works that tell a similar tale include Cover Her Face (1962), by P.D. James; Death in the Morning (1978), by Sheila Radley; The Killing of Katie Steelstock (1980), by Michael Gilbert; and Close Her Eyes (1984), by Dorothy Simpson. On the one hand, that scenario seems compellingly modern, tapping as it does into anxieties about what can happen to a young woman now that the restrictions and protections of Victorian patriarchy have fallen away. On the other hand, it draws on the age-old trope of an innocent maiden who falls prey (or so we presume) to a wolf in disguise.

Characterization partly compensates for this lack of narrative innovation. The personality of Morse, a prickly eccentric on the model of Sherlock Holmes, and the relationship between him and his assistant, Sergeant Lewis—which are frosty but show signs of thawing—provide much of the appeal in this procedural. The plot might have held some appeal as well, but there are major flaws that undermine it. Suspects in the case are few in number, a couple of them are plainly red herrings, and the guilt of the “least likely” among them becomes clear well before the denouement. Most important, Morse’s detection hinges too much on his own leaps of intuition and not enough on clues available to the reader.

[ADDENDUM: For a couple of years, and until a few weeks ago, I had let this site go dark. Now, as I rev it up again with the aim of posting something every week or so, I am trawling through old material that i can adapt for use here. This brief review is very old—and, indeed, very brief. In any event, I note that my cursory judgment of this book aligns with the considered view of other readers.]

 

NGAIO MARSH. A Wreath for Rivera (1949).

This mid-career opus has a pleasantly nostalgic feel. Marsh, in what reads almost like a self-pastiche, reworks some of the standard plot turns and favored tropes of her early work from the 1930s. There is a dotty peer who presides over an aristocratic household in which Edwardian-era norms still hold sway: People “dress” for dinner, for example, and afterward the menfolk and the womenfolk retire to separate rooms. There is a pair of young women who chatter, like characters out of an Evelyn Waugh novel, in the register of carefree cynicism. There is a pair of young men, one posh and one working-class, who each in his own pompous way expresses a vaguely leftist contempt for the Establishment. There is a “hot” jazz band that plies its trade at a Soho joint called the Metronome. And so on. Toward the end of the book, Marsh offhandedly describes a blitz-ravaged block of the City, and that reference comes as an abrupt reminder that a war had recently taken place that altered British society from top to bottom. On the whole, though, she has fashioned a milieu that seems decidedly prewar.

The most quintessentially retro figure of all is the eponymous victim. Carlos Rivera, an oily Latin type, plays the piano-accordion in high style and also fancies himself a great ladies’ man. In describing the contents of his flat, Marsh lays it on thick: She puts erotic prints on the walls, and black sheets on the bed. Back in the twenties and thirties, actors like Roman Novarro and Cesar Romero played variations of this fellow in one B-movie after another. Much of the intrigue that Marsh uses to drive the action, meanwhile, pivots around two staples of the interwar crime story—blackmail and small-scale dope dealing. Rivera, as it turns out, supplemented his pay as a musician by practicing both of those illicit avocations, and as a result he made plenty of enemies. The circumstances of his murder have a theatrical flair that also calls to mind an earlier era. One night at the Metronome, as the Breezy Bellairs band winds down its set, there is a planned bit of business that swerves in an unplanned direction. A gun supposedly filled with blank cartridges goes off, Rivera drops his instrument and falls to the stage, and a funeral wreath is brought out to cover his “corpse.” In the ensuing chaos, it becomes evident that he’s actually dead. At the same time, someone had taken an umbrella used in the floorshow and jury-rigged it to accommodate a stiletto knife. Which of these two peculiar weapons killed Rivera? Either way, the murder technique is a straight throwback to the fantastical methods that Golden Age writers routinely used to dispatch their victims. A Wreath for Rivera isn’t a locked-room caper, but it unfolds in the same otherworldly spirit that one finds in the madcap tales that John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen (and indeed Marsh herself) penned during their antebellum heyday.

On hand at the Metronome to witness the death of Rivera is Inspector Roderick Alleyn, and although he would continue to star in Marsh’s work up through the 1970s, he too comes across as a refugee from an earlier time—a period when, at least in fiction, a genteel master sleuth always seemed to be nearby whenever an unknown villain decided to commit a puzzling homicide. Marsh, for her part, effectively refutes the notion that she’s just retelling an old tale. She writes sparkling prose, she brings real verve to the scene-by-scene construction of her plot, and she manages the narrative with noble efficiency and with little of the plodding recitation of interviews that characterizes even her best early work. (Her talent had evolved, even if her social attitudes and her storytelling habits had not.) Finally, with a practiced hand, she guides this amusing romp to an elegant conclusion.

 

CHRISTIANNA BRAND. Death in High Heels (1941).

Inspector Charlesworth, an up-and-comer on the Scotland Yard force, is known for having not just a keen eye for clues, but also a bright eye for the charms of women. With his latest case, though, he encounters a more concentrated dose of feminine pulchritude than he might ever have wished for. A murder has occurred at Christophe et Cie, an exclusive Regent Street dress shop, and when Charlesworth arrives there and starts looking for suspects, what awaits him is a bewitching retinue of British lovelies. The victim, a shop manager named Miss Doon, had certainly been a head-turner—that is, before a few crystals of oxalic acid sprinkled on a serving of luncheon curry sent her in fatal agony to the hospital. Among the surviving employees who might have done the sprinkling are Miss Gregory, another manager of the shop and a rival of Doon’s for the affections of Frank Bevan, owner of the establishment (Bevan is also a suspect, of course); a trio of saleswomen; and a pair of “mannequins,” otherwise known as dress models. The women of Christophe et Cie are a fetching lot, and each of them comes across as fetching in her own way. The shop also employs a dress designer, Mr. Cecil, and each of the saleswomen has a husband who figures in the plot to a greater or lesser degree. That’s a lot of people to follow, and Charlesworth falters in that area now and again. Who can blame him, distracted as he is by the winsome qualities of the women in the case?

Death in High Heals joins the noble tradition of English detective novels that exploits the array of customs, personalities, and relationships that converge inside a certain kind of workplace. These tales, which include such classics as Murder Must Advertise (by Dorothy Sayers) and Smallbone Deceased (by Michael Gilbert), are typically set in small firms within the big city that is London. Whether the scene of the crime is an advertising agency, a law office, or a vendor of women’s apparel, it will have attributes that well serve a writer who doesn’t mind working in miniature: an array of passions, both overt and covert, that might inspire a zeal to kill; a tightly circumscribed physical space in which comings and goings are easy to track; a set of work routines that provide a sleuth with plenty of investigative fodder. In this instance, the commercial setting gives Brand a nice, compact bottle in which to construct her intricate little ship of a novel.

In its early and middle sections, the novel labors under the burden of featuring too many characters. But the resulting assortment of permutations provides Brand with the material that she needs to generate a satisfying denouement that involves multiple solutions. This work, the author’s début, marks an apt launch for a career that would reach the apex of what detective fiction can offer. Despite a few rough spots at the level of execution, Brand here shows her knack for blending a formal crime puzzle with a fine-tuned exploration of social mores and individuals manners.

[ADDENDUM: Curt Evans has written a sharp, informative review of this book. He notes, for example, the spirit of unembarrassed candor—somewhat unusual for prewar popular fiction of this kind—that Brand brings to her treatment of both female sexuality and male homosexuality. Her depiction of an obviously gay character has a sniggering, mildly homophobic tone, but that flaw seems less notable than the matter-of-fact way that she recounts the details of his romantic life. All in all, High Heels has a modern feel to it that trumps the dated quality of certain plot details.]

 

AGATHA CHRISTIE. Black Coffee (1930).

The thirst among publishers for titles to which they can attach the “Agatha Christie” brand remains as unquenchable as ever. To serve that thirst, a writer named Charles Osbourne took the raw material of a play that Christie wrote during her heyday and subjected it to a bit of benign violence; in other words, he novelized it. The result, published in 1998, has a few charms and curiosities, but ultimately it’s devoid of the rich, world-building magic that Christie brought to her prose fiction. Try as Osbourne might to invest this treatment with light ironic touches and other writerly grace notes, he succeeds mainly in revealing the creaky, old-fashioned stagecraft that undergirds the original work. In a bid to “open up” the play, he launches his novel with a scene that features sleuth-hero Hercule Poirot in his Mayfair flat. Even so, most of the action here takes place in a single setting—the library of Sir Claud Amory, the victim of the piece. Stock characters, such as Sir Claud’s debt-ridden son and the son’s mysterious foreign-born wife, flit in and out of the room, uttering cliché-laced speeches that move the plot forward across an all-too-visible three-act structure. The murder puzzle hinges on several well-deployed clues (one of which, unfortunately, involves a bit of outdated household terminology), and Osbourne does capture some of the antic flair that marked Christie’s writing at its best. All the same, he fails to close the gap that yawns wide between a well-made play and a well-turned novel.