Classic Mysteries

"Close Quarters"

Not too many mystery authors could claim the honors accorded to the late Michael Gilbert. He was named a Grandmaster by the Mystery Writers of America. The Crime Writers Association of his native Great Britain awarded him a Diamond Dagger. He won accolades in other countries and was honored for lifetime achievements at a session of Bouchercon, the annual world mystery conference. He wrote in a wide variety of styles - thrillers, police procedurals, spy thrillers, courtroom dramas - and, yes, classic mystery stories, including his first novel, "Close Quarters," which is the subject of our review this week on the Classic Mysteries podcast. You can listen to it here.

Set in 1937, and published a decade later, "Close Quarters" is set on the grounds of a cathedral - or, as it is known, the cathedral close. It includes an apparently impossible crime in a community of religious leaders and a thoroughly entertaining investigation by very competent police. In their introduction to the Rue Morgue Press edition, Tom and Enid Schantz note that other prominent mystery writers criticized Gilbert for being too entertaining - prompting Gilbert to write, "I find the whole thing puzzling. What is a writer to do if he is not allowed to entertain?" I suspect today's readers will find "Close Quarters" to be very entertaining indeed.

"The Bloody Wood"

At the center of our "Classic Mysteries" podcast review this week is a strange and strained house party gathered at an English manor, Charne House. The hostess is terminally ill, and the guests realize she is unlikely to survive much past the weekend. Her behavior is strange, to say the least, for she wants to persuade her husband to remarry after her death - and to marry another member of the family. It is a gloomy atmosphere, and it affects the mood and behavior of senior police official Sir John Appleby, who is among the guests. The story is "The Bloody Wood," by Michael Innes, and while the somber mood predominates, the book contains the kind of wit and dry humor we expect to find in his Appleby novels.

You can listen to the full review on our podcast here. Suffice to say that there will be several deaths in the course of a most ingenious plot that twists its way to a surprising conclusion. Pay attention to the nightingales - they matter.

More About Nero Wolfe

As I think I have made clear before, I am very much a fan of Rex Stout's marvelous Nero Wolfe novels and novellas. I don't think any other author has ever been so successful in combing the "man-of-action" genre with the cerebral armchair detective as Stout was with Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe.

I've reviewed a number of Stout books on this site and on the podcast, including "The Final Deduction," "The Doorbell Rang," and "The Father Hunt." But for those of you who have really developed a taste for Nero Wolfe, and the regular characters who surround him, may I recommend another book, now sadly out-of-print, though still available through a variety of second-hand mystery dealers. "Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street: The Life and Times of America's Largest Private Detective," by William S. Baring-Gould is a delightful book, providing a full "biography" of Wolfe and his cases through the late 1960s - it is missing the last few Wolfe books/cases because it was published in 1969. It also contains some informed speculation on Wolfe's parentage (not to mention his relationship to his daughter), full details, including a floor plan, of Wolfe's house on West 35th Street in New York City, and a wealth of information about Fritz Brenner, Theodore Horstmann, Inspector Cramer, Saul Panzer, and the rest of the regular and irregular characters in Wolfe's household. Yes, Arnold Zeck is also there. Baring-Gould manages to do all this without using a single spoiler - the purpose is to intrigue you, not to give away plots and solutions.

Baring-Gould himself was a fascinating person. He was also the author of "The Annotated Sherlock Holmes," which looks in exhaustive, two-volume depth at the world's first consulting detective. And, for those who would go beyond mystery, there is also "The Annotated Mother Goose," an expanded and expansive treatise on nursery rhymes - and their sometimes bawdy cousins. All are out of print, alas, but there seem to be a fair number of good copies on the marketplace (including via these links to Amazon and its second-hand booksellers). If you're a fan of Wolfe - or Holmes, or Mother Goose - you might well enjoy these.

Transparency Begins at Home

The Federal Trade Commission appears to be afraid that you might not realize that those links in many of these posts, which take you to various pages on Amazon.com, are ways to try to earn small amounts of money for this blog. How small? Small enough so that Amazon has yet to pay me anything - I'm supposed to get a few cents (literally!) from anything you may purchase through the link, but there's a minimum threshhold that I have yet to achieve. But as I don't want the government riding in here to shut me down, and as I do believe in transparency, I thought I'd make it clear. Consider yourself duly advised.

I still only recommend books on this site that I think you'll enjoy. It might be nice to make enough commission to worry about a conflict of interest, but - at the moment - my income from Amazon remains at zero. Sigh.

"The House Without A Key"

For many of us, the name "Charlie Chan" brings back memories of a series of black-and-white movies from the 1930s and 1940s, as seen while watching late-night TV while growing up. To us, Charlie Chan was an American detective, quite obviously oriental, who mouthed sometimes offensive platitudes, the kind that were all too prevalent in those early days. It may come as something of a shock, then, to meet the original Charlie Chan, whose first appearance was in "The House Without a Key," by Earl Derr Biggers, published in 1925.

As created by Biggers, Charlie Chan was a fascinating character, a brilliant detective of Chinese-Hawaiian origin, working on the Honolulu police force. He often faced the kind of racial prejudice that was very common in those days, but he overcame it, earning the respect of virtually everyone.

"The House Without a Key" tells the story of a murder in Honolulu, its impact on a family of New England aristocrats, and how a family member and Chan worked their way through to a solution. You can hear a full audio review on this week's podcast. If you remember Charlie Chan from those heavily-stereotyped movies, you may want to see how his appearance in this book shattered those stereotypes.

Incidentally, for those of you with compatible readers, there is an Amazon Kindle edition available.

"Author's Page" for Ellery Queen

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Amazon.com now has an author's page for Ellery Queen. It's not complete, by any means - among other omissions, for some reason it doesn't list "The Tragedy of Errors," which, I believe, is the only Ellery Queen book still in print. But it does list more than 30 other books by one of the most influential American mystery authors and, arguably, perhaps THE most important American mystery editor -  Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine is still publishing and is one of the few reliable sources for new mystery stories of all varieties. Anyway, if you're looking for Queen books, this Amazon page might be a good place to start.

Looking Back: "Swan Song"

If you enjoy this week's mystery, "Buried for Pleasure," you are quite likely to enjoy another Edmund Crispin book, "Swan Song," which I reviewed last year. You can hear the full review here. As with many of the stories about Oxford English Professor Gervase Fen, it combines a terrific mystery - a locked-room murder, for that matter - with some marvelous comedy.

It's about the murder of an opera star, a truly malicious individual even if he is a great Wagnerian baritone, and the book takes full advantage of its setting to satirize the world of opera and classical music in general. The victim is so generally despised that even his own brother, when notified of the death, sends back a telegram reading “Delighted. Hoping for this for months. Suicide eh query. Don’t bother me now.”

The mystery is quite fairly clued for the puzzle-solving reader. I think the humor and mystery are well-balanced here, perhaps more so than in other Crispin efforts. I recommend it highly.

"Buried for Pleasure"

This week's review on the Classic Mysteries podcast is of a book which is a combination of a well-plotted, fairly-clued mystery - and a raucous political satire. It's "Buried for Pleasure," by Edmund Crispin, featuring the exploits of Crispin's detective, Gervase Fen, a Professor of English at Oxford and - for the moment, at least - an independent candidate for a seat in the British Parliament.

The mystery stems from the death of a woman, who has been sent a box of poisoned chocolates. She is the first - but will not be the only - victim, but the investigation of the murder will provide a useful distracton for Fen, whose political campaign really stems more from boredom than from any deeply-held political convictions. While the satire obviously is aimed at British political styles and institutions, I suspect many modern readers, 60 years after this book's first publication, will find there are wonderful echoes of today's politics. Don't miss Fen's final political speech, the night before the election, when he has decided he really does not want to win. It's brilliant.

You can listen to my full audio review here. And, if you enjoy the book, or if you don't, why not come back here and tell me about it in the comments?

Looking Back: Ellery Queen

If you enjoyed the Philo Vance novel, "The Canary Murder Case," discussed on the Classic Mysteries podcast this week, you might also enjoy Ellery Queen's "The Tragedy of Errors," a collection of outlines, stories and articles about Ellery Queen. You can listen to a full audio review here.

The Philo Vance novels of S. S. Van Dine are generally seen as precursors of the early Ellery Queen novels, and certainly Queen - the detective character - is clearly modeled after Vance. Personally, I prefer Queen, although both authors specialized in fair play puzzles, providing readers with the clues which should - if properly interpreted - lead them to the criminal.

"The Tragedy of Errors" is an interesting example of how the "Ellery Queen" collaboration really worked: of the two cousins who made up "Ellery Queen," Frederick Dannay generally came up with the plot outline, complete with the various clues, twists and turns. His cousin, Manfred Lee, then "fleshed out" the bare bones of the outline, writing the actual novel itself.

In "The Tragedy of Errors," we see how that worked, because we are given the full Dannay-written outline of a never-completed novel. Dannay had completed the synopsis, but Lee died before he could turn it into a novel. The book also contains a half-dozen short stories, not collected into books before, and a number of essays about Ellery Queen. These articles, by family members, other mystery authors and scholars, provide a great deal of insight into Ellery Queen and the art of mystery writing in general.

It is a pity that this appears to be the only book by Ellery Queen currently in print in the United States. I'm grateful to the Crippen & Landru Press for publishing it, and I do heartily recommend it.

"The Canary Murder Case"

Our book this week on the Classic Mysteries podcast is quite a case: a young woman is murdered - inside a locked room. Which, in turn, is in a locked building. Where there is a switchboard operator on duty who can swear than nobody could possibly have entered. In fact, when you get right down to it, the murder couldn't have happened. Only it did - and Philo Vance is challenged to solve "The Canary Murder Case," by S. S. Van Dine. You can listen to the full review here.

When it comes to detective characters, Philo Vance could be among the most irritating - definitely a know-it-all, fond of obscure references and quotations, supercilious in his treatment of an obviously inferior police department. But he could also shine at detection, had his own freely-admitted flaws and deficiencies. And his author, S. S. Van Dine, the pen name of Willard Huntington Wright, was scrupulously fair about planting his clues for the reader. I've written before about his 20 rules for writing detective stories. If you haven't read Van Dine, you probably should, if only because he has been such an enormous influence on the writers who followed.

By the way, the in-print version of this book, linked above, is a trifle expensive for a book whose author died 70 years ago, to my mind. So I would point out that Project Gutenberg Australia has this and other Van Dine books available for free download, if you have an ebook reader (or don't mind reading it online).