Classic Mysteries

Children's Mystery Challenge: "The Westing Game"

On the second Tuesday of each month, now through June, we are joining with other blogs to write about great mystery books aimed at kids. The challenge is to get them interested in reading the kind of mysteries we enjoy.

My choice this month is "The Westing Game," by Ellen Raskin, which is an absolutely first-rate puzzle-style mystery, very much in the classic tradition. It's a book written for kids, to be sure - in fact, it won the 1979 Newbery Medal for children's lit, the top honor in the field. But I can assure any adult reading this: "The Westing Game" is every bit as enjoyable and challenging to adults as it is to younger readers.

Sixteen people (including four children) are invited to an old mansion to hear a lawyer read the last will and testament of Samuel Westing, who has been found dead in that house. What they hear is a very strange offer: if they will agree to follow the instructions in the will, they will be divided into two-person teams to play a sort of game. Each twosome will be given $10,000 to start and a few written clues. Clues? Yes - but to what? An open question - but, according to Westing's will, he says that he did not die a natural death - and he wants the sixteen heirs to solve the puzzle and find the person - one of the sixteen - responsible for his death. The person who solves the problem will receive the bulk of his $200 million fortune.

Will they play along? What is the meaning of the peculiar clues - most of them only a single word? Before it is over, the sixteen heirs are going to have their whole lives changed, some quite radically, because of this unusual "game." There will be danger and adventure - and new relationships will be formed, too.

What makes the book work so well for me (I couldn't put it down for the last 80 pages or so) is the fact that it really is a classic puzzle mystery. There are a great many plot twists and turns, layer built on layer, but the reader is given every clue - yet, I suspect, will be unable to see where the book is heading until the final twists.It very much resembles the work of such great classic mystery writers as Ellery Queen, in that there are several "solutions" in succession, each new one supplanting what had seemed to be the correct solution. The use of a dying victim's message and the planting of open but cryptic clues were also favorites of Queen.

In other words, it plays the game so dear to those of us who love these puzzle mysteries, and plays it fairly and well. And if it brings that game to younger readers, letting them see the joys of these mysteries where the reader is given a fair chance to work out the solution, that's a wonderful thing. If I had children who had just read "The Westing Game," I'd challenge them - at the end of the book - to look back and see where they were given each piece of information which, correctly interpreted, would have led them to the right conclusion (just as it leads one - and only one - character in the book to the correct answer).

"The Westing Game" appears to be out of print at the moment, but there are a fair number of used book dealers who can get it quite easily, including several at the Amazon.com link above. My school librarian wife tells me it's recommended for age 9 and older - fine, as long as we clearly understand that "and older" means "right through adult." I can't recommend it highly enough, not only for children, but for any lover of this kind of mystery.

"The Iron Clew"

All right, class, come to order. Today's topic of discussion will be, "The Murder Mystery Considered as Slapstick Farce." What's that? Sounds unlikely? Then you're probably not familiar with the mysteries featuring Leonidas Witherall, a schoolmaster whose head bears an uncanny likeness to the classic busts and portraits of William Shakespeare. Witherall is the star of a series of novels written during the 1930s and 1940s by Phoebe Atwood Taylor, the creator of Asey Mayo. She wrote the Witherall novels as "Alice Tilton." And while there is a fair amount of slapstick humor in some of the Asey Mayo books, particularly the later ones in the series, they are pale indeed compared to the antics in a Leonidas Witherall mystery.

Take the goings-on in "The Iron Clew," which is the subject of our podcast review this week - you can listen to the entire review here. The plot is fairly typical: Witherall, the headmaster of a distinguished boys' school, is also the author of a string of popular adventure thrillers featuring one Lieutenant Haseltine. Witherall is usually engaged in writing another of these potboilers when his own life suddenly comes to resemble one of the Lieutenant's wilder plots.

This time, Witherall, writing at home, goes upstairs to change before going out to a formal dinner meeting. When he comes back downstairs, he finds that his house has been burgled, and a package stolen - a package which, as far as he knows, contains a valueless bank report. After some preliminary chases and shenanigans, Witherall goes off to that formal dinner only to find that his host has been murdered by someone who unkindly used a bust of Shakespeare as the traditional blunt instrument. And Witherall finds that he is the primary suspect.

And off we go for a night of lurching from narrow escape to narrow escape and cliffhanger to cliffhanger before Witherall is able to wrap things up, point out the real murderer - and emerge with a new plot for his next Haseltine novel.

Unrealistic? You bet. Funny? Hilarious. Would the Three Stooges have groaned at some of the artificial plot twists? Absolutely. But who cares? "The Iron Clew" is a great deal of fun, once you resolve to simply accept the plot as it comes and laugh your way to a solution. If enjoy the Asey Mayo stories, you may also like these much wilder adventures of this Shakespearean headmaster. Just please don't tug his beard.

A Christie Challenge

I see where Mysteries in Paradise blogger Kerrie  is taken on quite a challenge: she has challenged herself and anyone who cares to join her to read all of Agatha Christie, more-or-less in the order of writing. She's going slowly (which is wise). You can find details here, as well as an invitation to join the challenge yourself.

As I posted over there, anyone interested in doing this might also want to take a look at Mark Campbell's little book, "Agatha Christie." It contains what seems to be a complete list of EVERYTHING Christie wrote - books, stories, plays, etc. - with very brief, one-or-two line reviews of each item. It makes a great checklist.

Christie in Small Doses

As I mentioned in the previous post, I think Agatha Christie did some of her best work in her short stories. Maybe because it required her to keep everything very tight, or maybe it just gave her the opportunity to use some really ingenious tricks to fool the reader, the short stories really distill most of her best qualities into some very small packages.

While "The Tuesday Club Murders" is probably the best of her Miss Marple stories, I think "The Labors of Hercules" probably shows off Hercule Poirot at his finest. These stories, all patterned after the original twelve labors of the Graeco-Roman hero Hercules, are beautifully put together. I have more extensive notes here. They may start from a premise as trivial as the kidnapping of a woman's dog, or as serious as a murder. But they are all carefully designed to lead the reader astray, so that he/she will not see the clues as they are fairly presented - until it is too late.

I am also very fond of another of her detectives, who only appeared in a dozen short stories, all but one of them collected into a volume called "The Mysterious Mr. Quin." It's Christie bordering on the supernatural. The solutions to the mysteries are all straightforward, solved, mostly, by one of her most endearing characters, little Mr. Satterthwaite, but he solves them with guidance provided by the engimatic and mhysterious Harley Quin. I enjoy all of Christie's detectives, and the short stories are a good way to meet them - and really to appreciate the amazing skill with which she plotted and wrote these fine mysteries.

"The Tuesday Club Murders"

There's a good reason why virtually all of Agatha Christie's mysteries are still in print: she was, above all else, a wonderful story-teller. That's evident in her novels, to be sure, but perhaps even more so in many of her short stories, where the limited length also limited the scope of the story and allowed Christie's genius to shine more brightly.

Take the case of Miss Marple, that quintessential "little old lady" who proves to be more than a match for any number of criminals and evildoers over the course of her fictional career. The earliest Miss Marple stories come from "The Tuesday Club Murders," and they're the subject of our review today on the Classic Mysteries podcast. You can listen to the whole review here.

"The Tuesday Club Murders" is based on a simple premise: there is a small group of people in the tiny English town of St. Mary Mead who gather every Tuesday to discuss some mystery and attempt to solve it. The participants include an ex-commissioner of police, a lawyer, a clergyman, a writer and his fiancee - and Miss Jane Marple. Guess which one of them is able to see through the deceptions and irrelevancies to unmask the true solutions of these fascinating problems.

Christie began writing these stories in 1927, and this collection was first published in 1932 (as "The Thirteen Problems"). The stories feature Christie - and Miss Marple - at their best. The reader may be mystefied, but Miss Marple uses common sense and her own everyday experiences of village life to cut through to the solution every time. One of these stories at bedtime beats the chocolate on the pillow as a good-night treat.

P. D. James Talks Mysteries

Mystery author P. D. James has attracted a large following over the years for her mysteries. While some of them (particularly the earlier ones) are traditional mysteries, her later books have tended towards the psychological-profile type of story. I'll admit I'm not a huge fan of the style, but it is certainly a major genre of modern mystery stories, and there are a great many people who do like the style.

So it is of considerable interest when an author such as James writes a non-fiction book of literary criticism about mysteries, to put forward some of her own views about where the mystery story has come from and where it may be headed. With that in mind, James's "Talking About Detective Fiction" is, I think, a very worthwhile read. She offers some definitions of the genre, looks back at both the Golden Age and classical tradition on the one hand and the hard-boiled school on the other, and gives an overview of what she sees to be the present state of the mystery story and where it is headed. Having just turned 90, with such a long and prolific career, her viewpoints are worth your consideration.

I have mixed feelings about the book - I think some of the choices she makes of authors to be discussed are a little odd, for example - but I do have to recommend it. It's a fairly quick read, well-written and quite lively. If you're serious about your mysteries and want to expand your horizons a bit, "Talking About Detective Fiction" can be a good starting point.

Looking Back: "Trent's Last Case"

In "Case for Three Detectives," the book reviewed on our podcast this week, a lot of the fun is generated by the fact that three great amateur detectives - we are assured they are amateurs and much smarter than the police! - come up with brilliant - but wrong - solutions to the mystery.

In doing so, those detectives really are offering a homage to E. C. Bentley's wonderful "Trent's Last Case." Published in 1913, this book features a brilliant amateur detective who, in the course of a complex and highly enjoyable mystery, manages to come up with a dazzling and ingenious solution to the crime, marred only by the fact that he is totally wrong. I reviewed it on the podcast more than two years ago, but you can still listen to the review here.

According to the blurb for the Dover edition of this book (see the link above), Agatha Christie called "Trent's Last Case" "one of the best detective stories ever written." Dorothy L. Sayers was another fan. The Dover edition also features an excellent and informative introduction by Douglas G. Greene, who is widely recognized as an authority on classic mysteries and the author of the definitive biography of John Dickson Carr. The story itself is clever, occasionally funny, and a fair puzzle mystery. The Dover edition is very inexpensive, but there's also an electronic edition, for those of you with Amazon Kindles; it's accessible through the linked page where you can read about the Dover edition.

"Case for Three Detectives"

Take three famous detectives from Britain's Golden Age of the detective story: Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey, Agatha Christie's M. Hercule Poirot and G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown. What would have happened if all three had been turned loose on the same case?

Well, we may never know the exact answer - they were the creations of three very different authors, after all. But we can come very close, as "Lord Simon Plimsoll," "M. Amer Picon" and "Monsignor Smith" discovered when all three of those Great Detectives converged on one locked room mystery in Leo Bruce's marvelous mystery-parody, "Case for Three Detectives." It's the subject of this week's review on our Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review here.

What happens is a delight: each of the three Great Detectives investigates independently and comes up with an absolutely brilliant solution, solidly reasoned, brilliant in its logic. Wrong, but brilliant. Meanwhile, the plodding, local police sergeant, Bruce's own Sgt. Beef waits for the Great Detectives to finish up - so that he can go ahead and arrest the real criminal. But then, as Sgt. Beef has been telling the Great Detectives throughout, "I know who done it!"

Bruce is marvelously funny as he skewers the Great Detectives - and their styles of speaking and detecting - while at the same time presenting a genuine locked room puzzle to the reader. This 1936 book deserves a much wider reading audience; if you enjoy any of the original detectives, you'll find this a laugh-out-loud parody combined with a satisfying mystery.

R. I. P. Robert B. Parker

Sorry to hear about the passing of author Robert B. Parker, who died yesterday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 77. He's probably best known for his novels about his one-named detective, Spenser, but he wrote a great many other mysteries as well.

Sarah Weinman has a nice appreciation of Parker in the Los Angeles Times.

"Shadow on the Wall"

Reginald Fortune, a medical doctor and special advisor to Scotland Yard, does not like to be manipulated. So when he feels that someone is trying to manipulate his interpretation of some sinister events, he is extremely unhappy. And when Reggie Fortune is unhappy, he can make things very unpleasant indeed for the criminal minds trying to mislead him.

In a nutshell that's what happens in H. C. Bailey's "Shadow on the Wall," his first novel about Reggie Fortune, one of the outstanding and most popular detectives of Britain's Golden Age of Detection. It's the book reviewed this week on our Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review here.

Fortune had already appeared in several collections of short stories prior to this novel. This book is a classic, fair-play mystery puzzle, offering the reader the chance to work out, along with Fortune, the reasons why, as he complains, "we're only seeing what's arranged for us and the shadows of the people behind." There are murders, to be sure, and a number of other crimes, all arranged in a fairly-presented and clued plot. It's back in print, thanks to the Rue Morgue Press, and it's a fine way to spend a winter's evening.