Classic Mysteries

"The Bar on the Seine"

The steaminess of August in Paris provides the background for melodrama and murder in "The Bar on the Seine," by Georges Simenon, the book reviewed this week on the Classic Mysteries podcast. It's another story about Police Commissaire Jules Maigret, a fine cross between a police procedural and a psychological drama, with plenty of puzzle elements thrown in. You can listen to the full review here.

This time, Maigret is told about someone who apparently got away with murder some years earlier - a murder the police didn't even know about. All that Maigret knows is that the person supposedly responsible for this killing can be found at a small bar on the Seine - but it is a place that nobody seems to know. How Maigret finds the bar, the crime and the killer - and the other events that develop during the course of the action - make this a riveting book.

Looking Back: "The Body in the Library"

As I mentioned, Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver is quite similar in some ways to Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. It's worth noting that the two ladies (Miss Silver and Miss Marple) made their first appearances in the same year 1928.

One of my favorite Miss Marple mysteries has always been "The Body in the Library," in which Christie manages to neatly skewer some of the cliches of mystery writing even as she herself writes an excellent and enjoyable mystery. If you're reading "The Key" or another Patricia Wentworth book, you might enjoy looking up "The Body in the Library" for comparison. You can listen to the podcast review here. On the whole, I'd have to admit that Christie was the better writer - but Wentworth's Miss Silver also has flashes of brilliance, and she's well worth knowing.

"The Key"

As mystery readers, you are probably familiar with the names of many of the women who wrote so many fine books and stories during the Golden Age of English detective fiction - writers such as Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and Dorothy L. Sayers. But the author whose book is featured on this week's Classic Mysteries podcast may be less familiar to modern American audiences. Patricia Wentworth created a sort of professional version of Miss Marple. Her name was Miss Maud Silver, and she is the detective featured in "The Key," which is reviewed in full on the podcast - you can listen to it here.

Miss Silver is a retired governess and teacher who has become a private investigator. She draws on many of the same strengths you'll find in Miss Marple, including a remarkably sharp mind, the ability to appear like a harmless little old lady, and an intimate knowledge of village - and city - life.

Because Patricia Wentworth is not as well known in the United States as many other mystery writers, her books are out of print in this country. Amazon's booksellers have many used copies available, or, if you prefer, the book remains in print and available from Amazon's British affiliate. If you enjoy Miss Marple, I suggest you give Miss Silver a try.

Riding the Subway with Moebius

Having spent part of my weekend riding the subway system in Boston - the T, as it is known (if not exactly loved) by locals - I couldn't help thinking of a favorite short story called "A Subway Named Moebius," by A. J. Deutsch, in which a Boston subway train disappears, along with its passengers.

It's not a mystery, really - it's more science fiction, or, to be precise, mathematical fiction: the subway disappears because the enormous complexity of the Boston subway system of interlinking tunnels essentially allows one of the trains to suddenly enter a different dimension. It's one story in a brilliant collection called "Fantasia Mathematica," edited by Clifton Fadiman, which includes a lot of stories and some poems all based on mathematics.

In the case of "A Subway Named Moebius," it's based on the peculiarities of that branch of math called topology, and is most commonly explained to people by demonstrating a Moebius strip - a continuous loop which has been twisted and fastened to itself; while at any point, it has two sides and two edges, in fact the loop has only a single edge and a single side. If that confuses you, here's what Wikipedia has to say about it, complete with an illustration showing a Moebius strip, and good luck: you're in much the same position as those fictional Boston subway officials in the story who are trying to figure out what happened to their missing train and some 350 passengers.

At any rate, riding on the Red Line from Cambridge into Boston, I remembered the story. But the train arrived at South Station on schedule and, so far as I could tell, without passing into the fourth dimension. So I'll have to rely on the story's solution to the mystery.

"The Secret Adversary"

They were young, newly emerged from World War I (or, as it was known then, "the Great War"), unemployed, and looking for some kind of work - romantic, mildly dangerous work perhaps; adventurous, to be sure. In fact, Tommy Beresford and Prudence "Tuppence" Crowley decided to name their new company, "The Young Adventurers, Ltd." What they got, however, was something decidedly more dangerous, in "The Secret Adversary," by Agatha Christie, the first of her novels to feature Tommy and Tuppence. It's the subject of this week's review on our Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to it here.

"The Secret Adversary" is Christie in thriller mode. It was one of her first books, published in 1922, at a time when many popular mysteries fell into the thriller category. But, like almost all Christies, there's a large element of traditional puzzle mystery involved, as Tommy and Tuppence are drawn into an international intrigue, complete with an arch-villain, which proves dangerous, challenging and exciting. Both the thriller and the puzzle aspects of the book are quite well-done, with the kind of exuberance Christie could bring to her best books. Tommy and Tuppence may not be as widely read or popular as the books featuring Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, but they are no less enjoyable and tremendous fun to read. It's a great book to take to the beach for that last summer fling.

Art Forgery, Fraud, and "The Raphael Affair"

Iain Pears is a writer who manages to take the arcane and difficult and often confusing world of art forgery and art fraud and turn it into a fascinating subject - not to mention a fine mystery story. "The Raphael Affair" is the first in a series of mysteries by Pears to feature General Bottando, the head of the Italian National Art Theft Squad, his assistant, Flavia di Stefano, and a British art historian (student in this novel) named Jonathan Argyll.

In "The Raphael Affair," first published in 1992, the three become involved in trying to unravel a complicated and thoroughly enjoyable plot involving smuggling, fraudulent paintings, vandalism, arson - oh, yes, and murder. While there are classic puzzle elements, this really isn't a straightforward mystery; too many of the clues are withheld until General Bottando sums up the solution for us. But there are a great many twists and turns and surprises to the plot - enough, certainly, to keep readers off-balance, even as we enjoy ourselves. Pears is an art historian, and he manages to make the convoluted mechanics of art fraud understandable to the lay reader. I hadn't read anything by Pears until my wife and a friend both suggested I try him. I'm glad I did.

Looking Back: Brother Cadfael and "An Excellent Mystery"

As I mentioned in my last post, Ellis Peters is best known for her mysteries featuring the 12th century Benedictine monk, Brother Cadfael. If you haven't read her books, and you are fond of historical mysteries and/or classic puzzle mysteries, let me suggest that you make Cadfael's acquaintance.

One of the best ways to do that is by reading my favorite Cadfael mystery, "An Excellent Mystery." Set in the midst of an English civil war, in 1141, it is a beautifully written story. There are a couple of mysterious monks, a disappearing maiden, a young would-be suitor, and Cadfael and his fellow monks. Things are seldom what they seem, and Cadfael finds himself involved, not only in the investigation of a disappearance and possible murder, but in a deeper mystery that could bring down his order around his ears. While it's currently out of print in the U.S., there are many dealers with inexpensive copies available - check out the Amazon link above. And for a fuller review of "An Excellent Mystery," here's the podcast I did about a year ago.

"Black Is the Color of my True Love's Heart"

Mystery readers may be familiar with the work of Ellis Peters, who wrote the marvelous books, set in 12th-century England and Wales, featuring the detective work of Brother Cadfael, a Welsh Benedictine monk. Many of the Cadfael stories were made into TV movies, starring Sir Derek Jacobi as Cadfael.

But before writing the Cadfael mysteries, which began to appear in the late 1970s, Ellis Peters had written another series of excellent classic mysteries set in contemporary England, and featuring Detective Inspector George Felse. They are written with the same passion as the Cadfael novels, for Peters was quite good at creating powerful, believable three-dimensional characters and forcing the reader to care very deeply about them.

One of these was "Black is the Colour of My True Love's Heart," which first appeared in 1967. It is a beautifully-told tale of love and hate, set at an English folk music seminar. It is also a classic puzzle mystery, with clues generously provided and well-camouflaged. You can hear a complete review on this week's Classic Mysteries podcast. Suffice to say that, if you have enjoyed any of the Brother Cadfael mysteries, you will almost certainly enjoy this book and the other mysteries starring Inspector Felse.

Challenging the Reader

One of my favorite anthologies of early (Golden Age and earlier) mystery stories has been out of print for a long time. In 1938, Ellery Queen - certainly one of the most influential editors involved in 20th century mystery publishing - edited a marvelous collection called "Challenge to the Reader." It contains 25 mystery stories, featuring popular authors, such as Conan Doyle, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie, and their detective characters - some largely forgotten today, others still quite famous. But that's not what made this collection unique.

What Ellery Queen did was to present the stories without identifying either the author or the detective until the reader had reached the end of the story. Instead, the stories were presented with the name of the detective and other recurring characters changed. The reader was challenged to recognize and identify the detective while reading the story.

How? To some degree, by externals: where is the story set? What is the time period? But even more so by identifying the detective's manner of detection, as well as by verbal phrases which a given detective might have used as a regular "tag line" in many stories. In addition, Ellery Queen picked stories were were generally not the most famous or most often republished stories featuring these characters, just to make it a bit more challenging.

It's great fun and adds to my enjoyment of the fine stories in this book. As I said, it's out of print, but there are plenty of used copies floating around. The link in the first paragraph above goes to a page in Amazon.com which links to a great many second-hand book resellers who may have copies of "Challenge to the Reader" available - some at quite reasonable prices. If you enjoy the kind of classic mystery stories we discuss here, I think you'd really like these stories, enjoying the challenge of recognizing the detective by his/her behavior, mannerisms and attitude.

Looking Back: Arsene Lupin

In my last post, I mentioned that the "Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime" didn't include any of Laurice Leblanc's "Arsene Lupin" stories, about the granddaddy of all gentleman-thieves. If you haven't met that interesting character yet, let me refer you back to "Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Thief ," with an excellent introduction and notes by Michael Sims, the same critic responsible for the "Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime." I reviewed it last year on the "Classic Mysteries" podcast, and you can still listen to the review here. Sims calls Lupin "the most entertaining felon in literature," and I would have to agree with him. This collection contains a dozen stories showing Leblanc and Lupin at their best.

If you prefer your hijinks at novel length, you might want to try "813," which I reviewed earlier this year - again, you can listen to my review here. It's more than just a collection of episodes - it deals with a vast and complicated plot, several murders, and a scheme hatched by Lupin to shift the balance of power in Europe. It's another delightful read, and it is generally considered one of the best of the novels featuring Lupin.