Classic Mysteries

Rip-Off

"Rip-off" is actually meant to be a two part headline. To begin with the second part, I am off to the Malice Domestic conference, which runs from Friday through Sunday, featuring hundreds of authors and fans, not to mention the Agatha Awards, which will be presented Saturday night.

In my absence, let me recommend the column referenced in the first half of the headline: Mike Ripley's latest monthly Getting Away with Murder column for the Shots Crime and Thriller Ezine. As always, it is filled with news and opinions about assorted crime fiction matters based mostly in Europe. Among other points, there are several that should interest readers of classic mysteries, including word of a new book from Catherine Aird and a number of republications of vintage classics.

The Ripster, as he is known, also provides the usual insights into his philosophy, including this gem: "For those of us who are infirm, crippled by taxes or subject to a variety of Passport restrictions, crime fiction is a relatively painless way of touring the world without risking (yet again) a diplomatic incident." Point well taken. In any case, enjoy the latest column.

Adding to the Blogroll

Here's another regular stop to add to your list of bloggers-who-really-need-to-be-read-regularly: blogger TracyK has just celebrated the first anniversary of her blog, Bitter Tea and Mystery. She reads - and writes about - a number of mystery genres, and she also throws in the occasional non-mystery, just to keep things interesting. Please welcome her to the Classic Mysteries blogroll - and check out her blog!

(With a hat tip to Jeff Pierce at The Rap Sheet for pointing out Tracy's anniversary!)

2012 Agatha Award Nominations

The folks who bring us the Malice Domestic conference every year have just announced the nominations for the 2012 Agatha Award. Malice, and the Agathas, celebrate the traditional mystery, as practiced by such first-rate writers as Agatha Christie. Nomination for one of the Agatha Awards is quite an honor. Here are this year's nominees:

Best Novel

• The Diva Digs Up the Dirt, by Krista Davis
• A Fatal Winter, by G. M. Malliet
• The Buzzard Table, by Margaret Maron
• The Beautiful Mystery, by Louise Penny
• The Other Woman, by Hank Phillippi Ryan

Best Historical Novel

•  The Twelve Clues of Christmas, by Rhys Bowen
• Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for Murder, by Catriona McPherson
• Murder on Fifth Avenue, by Victoria Thompson
• An Unmarked Grave, by Charles Todd
• Elegy for Eddie, by Jacqueline Winspear

Best First Novel

• Lowcountry Boil, by Susan M. Boyer
• Iced Chiffon, by Duffy Brown
• A Scrapbook of Secrets, by Mollie Cox Bryan
• A Killer Read, by Erika Chase
• Faithful Unto Death, by Stephanie Jaye Evans

Best Nonfiction

• Books to Die For: The World's Greatest Mystery Writers on the World's Greatest Mystery Novels, by John Connolly/Declan Burke
• Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen, 1947-1950, by Joseph Goodrich, Editor
• More Forensics and Fiction: Crime Writers Morbidly Curious Qudestions Expertly Answered, by D. P. Lyle
• Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, by Ben Macintyre
• The Grand Tour: Around the World with the Queen of Mystery Agatha Christie, by Mathew Prichard, Editor

Best Short Story

• "Mischief in Mesopotamia," by Dana Cameron, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
• "Kept in the Dark," by Shelia Connolly, Best New England Crime Stories 2013: Blood Moon Anthology
• "The Lord is My Shamus," by Barb Goffman, Chesapeake Crimes: This Job is Murder
• "Thea's First Husband," by B. K. Stevens, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine
• "When Duty Calls," by Art Taylor, Chesapeake Crimes: This Job is Murder

Best Children's/Young Adult Novel

• Seconds Away, by Harlen Coben
• The Edge of Nowhere, by Elizabeth George
• Liar & Spy, by Rebecca Stead
• The Code Busters Club, Case #2: The Haunted Lighthouse, by Penny Warner
• Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein

Attendees at this year's Malice Domestic Conference - the 25th annual, by the way - will vote on the final awards, which will be announced at the conference banquet over the first weekend in May. Congratulations to all the nominees!

Hail the Queen

Yesterday, we had news about a king (Richard III of England). Now, there's news about a Queen: Ellery Queen. The Mysterious Press and Open Road Media have just released a dozen Ellery Queen classics in popular e-book formats, including all of the early "puzzle"-type mysteries for which Queen was famous, with titles including a nationality (American Gun Mystery, Chinese Orange Mystery, Dutch Shoe Mystery, etc.). Also newly re-released: Cat of Many Tails, Ten Days Wonder and And on the Eighth Day, which really are among the best and most powerful of the novels.

If you're not familiar with Ellery Queen - the fictional character and the real-life novelist - "Queen" was really two cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee. As a general rule, Dannay came up with the plots in outline form, and Lee turned the outlines into polished novels. Most of the early books included a direct and literal "Challenge to the Reader," just before the final revelations at the end of the book. The reader was informed that she or he had been given all the clues needed to solve the mystery and challenged  to come up with the solution independently before reading the rest of the book. Not too many readers were up to the challenge - I certainly wasn't! And yet the clues are there - if you can find them.

As Ellery Queen, Dannay and Lee were tremendously influential on the traditional branch of the American mystery, and it is just flat-out wrong that their books have slipped into relative obscurity. To celebrate their e-book republication, Open Road Media has provided a link to this video about Ellery Queen, with brief comments from Richard Dannay and Rand Lee, the sons of the authors, and Otto Penzler of the Mysterious Press. Enjoy!

Richard and Josephine

As you may already have heard, British researchers are pretty well convinced that the human skeleton found buried in the ruins deep beneath a parking lot in the English city of Leicester last Autumn belonged to King Richard III, who died on a nearby battlefield in 1485.

No, this is no joke. You can find full details in this excellent story from the New York Times, written by John F. Burns. You may remember Richard III, vilified by Shakespeare and so many others, as the so-called "Wicked Uncle" of history, responsible for the murder of his two young nephews. As Burns points out, that assessment of Richard may now be challenged again:

"Among those who found his remains, there is a passionate belief that new attention drawn to Richard by the discovery will inspire a reappraisal that could rehabilitate the medieval king and show him to be a man with a strong sympathy for the rights of the common man, who was deeply wronged by his vengeful Tudor successors. Far from the villainous character memorialized in English histories, films and novels, far from Shakespeare’s damning representation of him as the limping, withered, haunted murderer of his two princely nephews, Richard III can become the subject of a new age of scholarship and popular reappraisal, these enthusiasts believe."

That argument was made more than sixty years ago in one of the finest historical mysteries ever written: Josephine Tey's "The Daughter of Time." Tey used her detective, Inspector Alan Grant, and the techniques of the classic detective story to examine the case of Richard III. The book's conclusion: King Richard was framed. It's a viewpoint that was not new even then, but one that has remained controversial. The new discovery of Richard's skeleton will reinvigorate the discussion. It is unlikely to settle the argument, however. As one of the characters observes, in "The Daughter of Time":

“It’s an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it. If they were merely indifferent it would be natural and understandable. But it is much stronger than that, much more positive. They are annoyed. Very odd, isn’t it?”

Indeed. If you're a lover of classic mysteries and haven't read "The Daughter of Time," please do yourself a favor and read this remarkable book. Perhaps the old proverb is right and truth really is the daughter of time...

He's Ba-a-ack!

He's not only back (or ba-a-ack) but he's early this month as well. Mike Ripley's February "Getting Away With Murder" column for the British Shots Crime and Thriller Ezine is out. His opening paragraph this time may help to explain why I look forward to his column each month:

"A number of complaints have been received at Shots concerning last month’s Getting Away With Murder column. This was universally perceived to have been far too “book heavy” and contained an inordinate amount of “factual information” about books rather than the unfounded, scurrilous gossip for which it is famous. The Editorial Collective (“a right bunch of Bolsheviks”) has therefore issued the column with its first written warning."

I'm not really sure how Ripley manages to speak with his tongue so firmly planted in his cheek; I would think he must sound a bit like Donald Duck. However, this issue is full of the usual assortment of crime fiction news and commentary, including (among many other topics) news that Catherine Aird is about to publish another book, a definition of "Nordic Noir," the continuing popularity of books featuring Leslie Charteris' great character, The Saint, a gruesome discussion of serial killers, and so forth. Oh, and more information about an award to the column. Go see for yourself.

Not So "Humdrum"

The name of J. J. Connington, whose "The Tau Cross Mystery" is the subject of this week's podcast review, was unfamiliar to me until recently - which is wrong, for so talented and prolific a writer. Born Alfred Walter Stewart, Connington is one of the writers referred to dismissively by too many "serious" scholars of crime fiction as "the humdrums," dismissed too easily as mere "plotters" who allegedly don't have the necessary serious writing skills for their books to be taken as "literature."

In addition to Connington, two other authors, in particular, are classified that way: Cecil John Charles Street, who wrote as Miles Burton, John Rhode and a couple of other names, and Freeman Wills Crofts, the master of the alibi-and-timetable mystery. All are largely forgotten today - which is a pity.

All have written books - many books - that are still great fun and very much worth reading, particularly if you enjoy traditional, puzzle-based mysteries. Many are extremely well-written, too.

One scholar who has most emphatically not been dismissive of the humdrums is Curtis Evans, whose book, Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961, looks at these masters of the classic mystery and provides good, positive analysis of their strengths, There's an affordable Kindle edition, which is good because the book itself comes from a "scholarly" press, meaning it is pretty costly in its printed form. I'd love to see it stocked in more libraries; the electronic version lives on my Kindle. It is extremely readable and quite entertaining, two adjectives which unfortunately don't always apply to good scholarly research books. If you're at all curious about these masterful authors, you might very much enjoy this book.

I have reviewed a few of the books by these authors - you can find the audio reviews listed on the Backlist page. And I should mention Curt's first-rate blog about (mostly) traditional mysteries, The Passing Tramp.

Edgar Nominees

The Mystery Writers of America has released this year's list of Edgar nominees. There are a great many nominees in a great many categories; you can find the full list here. The awards will be presented at the annual Edgar banquet in New York City on May 2, 2013. Congratulations to all the nominees!

Top Ten List - Sort Of

Traditionally, the last few days of the old year are the days when writers and other listmakers try to come up with their "top ten lists," or "best 10" or "worst 10" - certainly you've seen them.

This year, as every year for the past five or so, I've offered you a new podcast review of a classic or traditionally-oriented mystery every week, usually with a blog post about the featured book as well.

So, in that list of 52 classics read and reviewed this year, is there a "Top Ten List" waiting to be published? A list of ten books that I particularly enjoyed this year and want to call to your attention again?

Why, yes. Yes there is.

So here goes my "sort of Top Ten List of books read in 2012." The books are more or less listed in inverse order of my own enjoyment of the book. (Title links are to the book listing at Amazon.com; "full review" will play the podcast for you; "blog post" will take you to one of my posts about that book. Many are available as ebooks as well, for Kindle and in other formats.)

10. "Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries," by Melville Davisson Post. Brilliant short stories, first appearing in 1918, about Uncle Abner, a nineteenth century pioneer living in the hard mountain country of Western Virginia. Clever plots, memorable characters, beautiful settings.  Full review, blog post

9. "Murder in the Maze," by J. J. Connington. A marvelously nightmarish "English country house" story, with murder taking place inside a giant hedge maze - and the killer apparently on the loose inside the maze with you. Full review, blog post

8. "The Chinese Parrot," by Earl Derr Biggers. The second of six novels written by Biggers to feature Chinese-American detective Charlie Chan., in pursuit of thieves and murderers in the American southwest. Full review, blog post

7. "The Lacquer Screen," by Robert van Gulik.Set in seventh century China, it features Judge Dee, one of my favorite detective characters, as he solves a very tricky murder case. Full review, blog post

6. "The Fourth Door: The Houdini Murders," by Paul Halter, a contemporary French author whose work is being compared - quite justifiably - to John Dickson Carr at his best. This one is a marvelous locked room/impossible crime situation, with plenty of unexpected twists. Full review, blog post

5. "Death of a Swagman," by Arthur Upfield. This author is, I think, shamefully under-appreciated for his Australian mysteries, written during the first half of the 20th century, featuring Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, whose inherited brilliance from his Aborigine mother and his Caucasian father make him one of the ablest detectives at solving cases where other police officers have failed. Full review, blog post

4. "Any Shape or Form," by Elizabeth Daly. She was said to be Agatha Christie's favorite American author, and this book may help you understand why. Her detective, Henry Gamadge, is on hand for a murder at an American country estate, and the sudden twists and turns of the story may leave you breathless. Full review, blog post

3. "Dead Men Don't Ski," by Patricia Moyes. Inspector Tibbett is on the scene when a man who was certainly alive when he got on the ski lift at the top arrives at the bottom dead from a gunshot wound. I hope this is the first of many Moyes novels to be re-issued. Full review, blog post

2. "Murder on Wheels," by Stuart Palmer. A strong entry in the series featuring schoolteacher Hildegarde Withers. An impossible crime, great characters (including a foul-mouthed parrot), even an entire rodeo. Lots of fun. Full review, blog post

1. "Murder by the Book," by Rex Stout. One of the strongest plots of any book featuring Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, and the characters are particularly well done, especially a couple of the victims. Read about a book so dangerous that anybody who might have read it is murdered.  Full review, blog post

So there you have it. Some of the authors on that list may be new to you; I encourage you to make them all your friends in the new year.

The Nero and the BONA

Apologies for being a few days late on this...but I wasn't able to attend the Wolfe Pack's annual Black Orchid Banquet this year. One of the highlights of the banquet is the presentation of two major literary awards.

This year, the Nero Award, given for the best American mystery story written in the tradition of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe stories, went to Alaskan author Dana Stabenow for Though Not Dead, which features one of her regular series detectives, private investigator Kate Shugak. Runners-up included:

• Guilt by Association by Marcia Clark
• The Silent Girl by Tess Gerritsen
• The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz
• Spiral by Paul McEuen
• Black Orchid Blues by Persia Walker

The Black Orchid Novella Award - known as the BONA - was awarded to author Robert Lopresti, for his novella, "The Red Envelope." The award, presented jointly by the Wolfe Pack and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, honors a story written in the novella format at which Rex Stout excelled. As part of the award, "The Red Envelope" will be published in a few months by the magazine.

Congratulations to both winners and to all the nominees!