Classic Mysteries

Oh, Just One More Thing...

...as Lt. Columbo was known to say. If you were a fan of the television series, or if you are new to Columbo and are enjoying the short stories in "The Columbo Collection," you might enjoy watching Peter Falk and the rest of the talented cast who brought the Columbo stories to life on television.   Amazon has several collection of Columbo DVDs available for you to buy and watch. They're good fun, well written and well acted.

"The Columbo Collection"

If you enjoy watching classic mysteries on television, you're probably familiar with Lieutenant Columbo. He's a fairly quiet, self-effacing kind of police detective; his opponents tend to underestimate his abilities. That is generally a mistake. As played by Peter Falk, Columbo, the creation of William Link and the late Richard Levinson, may look fairly shabby, but he is both smart and patient.

Well, if you enjoy Columbo on the small screen, his co-creator, William Link, has written "The Columbo Collection," a fine collection of short stories about the intrepid Lieutenant. The collection, from publisher Crippen & Landru, is reviewed this week on our Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review here.

These stories are good, fair-to-the-reader mysteries written as "inverted mysteries," a style invented nearly 100 years ago by the late R. Austin Freeman, the creator of Dr. Thorndyke. In an inverted mystery, you generally start with the crime and the criminal fully exposed to the reader; the story then goes on to follow the investigator as he or she tries to identify and catch the criminal. As Link says, the stories are not "whodunits," they're more "howcatchems."

That may be, but they are certainly very firmly in the classic mystery tradition; for that matter, the Columbo character has been around for half a century. And while many of the books written around characters who began their fictional existence on TV are not very good, that's not true of the short stories in "The Columbo Collection." It may be the hand of Bill Link - after all, who could know better how to write Columbo stories than the man who created the character? If you enjoy the character on television - or even if you've never seen him - you'll enjoy these stories.

The Case of the Curious M. E.

The Deadly Ink conference is well under way in Parsippany, New Jersey, and - as promised - there has been a murder. That is only to be expected at a convention of mystery writers and readers. But there has been a complication: I am deeply involved in the case as the M. E. - the medical examiner.

Now I am sure that my family will collapse into uncontrollable laughter at that curious assignment, knowing my own inability even to apply a band-aid properly without passing out. But I have been assigned the role of Medical Examiner Ducky Kuryakin. It is my duty to advise people (when asked) that the victim, an author named Stephanie King, was stabbed to death around midnight with a wound that punctured the aorta. We have determined the killer is left-handed. Beyond that, I know nothing. Believe me when I say, I know nothing.

The crime is to be solved tomorrow.

In addition to the murder, there are all kinds of panels and presentations. One panel, featuring six authors (pictured above), was a lively discussion of favorite detective characters - why they are favorites, what these authors have learned from them, etc. Others were designed to give writers some tips on making their detection methods more realistic.

An awards banquet tonight and more panels tomorrow...and then the solution to the mystery.

Deadly Weekend

I'm headed for the not-so-wild wilds of Parsippany, New Jersey, and a mystery-soaked weekend with the authors and readers attending the Deadly Ink conference. It should be a great deal of fun. In addition to the usual bookish pleasures, we are promised a mystery to be solved by the guests over the course of the weekend. Standby for plot thickening!

Summer Reading: Asey Mayo Mysteries

Summertime and the reading is easy, or at least it should be. If you're looking for summer reading, something ideal for that vacation at the beach or poolside or even your own back yard, you might want to get acquainted (or re-acquainted) with Asey Mayo, the hero of two dozen books written by Phoebe Atwood Taylor between 1931 and 1951.

Asey Mayo is known as the "codfish Sherlock." He's a resident of Cape Cod, on Massachusetts, and all the mysteries are set on the Cape, which may have been a little less crowded and more rural in the 1930s and 1940s but was still an extremely popular vacation spot. Taylor's books are always fun. She had a well-developed sense of humor which is very much in evidence. The early books could be a little grim, but most of the series was pretty light-hearted. Asey combines a good deal of Yankee ingenuity and shrewdness with a fair amount of take-charge leadership. His cousin Jenny and her husband and a small group of other regular characters make very good company.

In the past couple of years, I have reviewed three of the Taylor books on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you're welcome to listen to my take on "The Asey Mayo Trio," "The Criminal C.O.D." and "Death Lights a Candle." If you want to try Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Amazon.com has most of her books available, You might also enjoy her mysteries featuring Leonidas Witherall, written as Alice Tilton, which could best be described as the Marx Brothers and the Keystone Kops meet Sherlock Holmes and Bulldog Drummond - they're slapstick thriller-mysteries and great fun to read.

Almost all of these are in print, and your favorite mystery bookstore would be delighted to get them for you! Or, that Amazon link above will do the trick (and toss a few pennies my way...)

Feeling Appreciated

I've been invited to participate in Book Blogger Appreciation Week, which is coming up from September 13 to 17. I am registering this blog in the niche category for Thriller/Mystery/Suspense/Crime Book blogs. As part of that registration process, the organizers have asked me to post this entry directing them to a series of posts on this blog for their review.

They have asked for three posts reviewing appropriate books. My choices:

"The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder," by Edgar Wallace;

"The Westing Game," by Ellen Raskin;

"Swan Song," by Edmund Crispin.

In addition, they need two additional entries. I have chosen:

A review of "Evidence of Things Seen," by Elizabeth Daly, posted for the Classics Circuit blog tour of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction;

A review of "Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee," translated by Robert Van Gulik, posted as part of a special "Detectives Around the World" blog tour.

If any of my visitors are book bloggers themselves, why don't you register your own blog? After all, you too can and should feel appreciated. You can get the details here. Good luck - and happy reading!

"The Turquoise Shop"

The southwestern corner of the United States is an area with many stunning natural beauties. Many artists have been attracted to the area to live and work. A mysterious disappearance - perhaps - and a murder - probably - prove to be a dangerous challenge for the people  In the fictional artists' colony of Santa Maria, New Mexico, in Frances Crane's 1941 mystery, "The Turquoise Shop." It's the subject of this week's Classic Mysteries podcast review, and you can listen to the whole thing here.

"The Turquoise Shop" is noteworthy for introducing readers to the soon-to-be husband-and-wife team of Pat and Jean Abbott. In this one, Jean is still Jean Holly, the proprietor of The Turquoise Shop, a small gift shop on Santa Maria's main street. When a dead, unidentifiable body is discovered in the desert outside of town, Jean becomes involved in the investigation - even more so when private detective Pat Abbott comes into town. He says he wants to learn to be an artist. Jean's not convinced.

There will be another murder, and a pretty interesting assortment of characters and clever plot twists. The looming threat of World War II adds some additional complications to the plot. It's an enjoyable mystery, from an interesting time period and set in a fascinating community. It makes for a good summertime read.

Bad Dad

With Father's Day coming up this Sunday, I thought it might be a good time to point out a classic mystery about a father - though this dad is a bad role model, to put it mildly. Rex Stout's 1968 Nero Wolfe novel, "The Father Hunt," is about a young woman's search for her father. The young woman, Amy DeNovo, never knew him, and her mother never spoke about him - but, after her death, Amy discovered that her unknown father had been sending her mother one thousand dollars a month in cash.

It turns out to be a bit more complicated than Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin might have hoped. You see, it appears that the unknown father may have murdered Amy's mother.

There's a full audio review on this Classic Mysteries podcast. Wolfe and Goodwin are always a delight - and there's a first-rate confrontation in Wolfe's house with Inspector Cramer and Sgt. Purley Stebbins that is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Birthday for a "Psycho"

Happy 50th Birthday tomorrow to one of the best, and most frightening, classic mystery movies ever made. On June 16, 1960, Alfred Hitchcock's brilliant thriller "Psycho" was released to the public.

"Psycho" broke all kinds of rules. One of the most noteworthy: a key star was murdered - very much onscreen - early in the movie. "Psycho" turned the act of taking a shower into a nightmare for millions of us. And the shocking ending of the movie still ranks as one of the most horrifying scenes ever.

Those were the days, of course, when directors knew how to make effective horror films without needing buckets of blood and guts. "Psycho" was made in black and white. No 3D effects. Very little real on-screen violence. Just good acting and, of course, Hitchcock's incredible direction. Even in the classic horror scenes, you never saw what you might have thought you had seen. It was the direction, the editing, the acting (not to mention Bernard Herrmann's music) that made the movie work and scared the stuffing out of you.

ABCNEWS.com has a fine article about the movie and its birthday. It reminds us that the audience HAD to be seated in the theater by the beginning of the movie - latecomers would not be allowed in. Those of us who had seen it knew there was a good reason for that. If you have never seen it - go ahead. Scare yourself. But take your shower before you watch it.

Hat tip: Buck Wolf and AOL Weird News

"The Book of the Dead"

A sick man, suffering from leukemia, enters the hospital and - to nobody's surprise - dies of his disease. But before he died, this man had made a few marginal notes in an old and not particularly valuable copy of Shakespeare's play, "The Tempest." And suddenly anyone who might have seen those notes is very much at risk of being murdered.

That's the central situation in Elizabeth Daly's 1944 mystery, The Book of the Dead, our featured review today on the Classic Mysteries podcast. You can listen to the entire review here. 

Daly, who is said to have been among Agatha Christie's favorite authors, is an ingenious plotter. But her strength also lies in her characters and her settings. Her detective, biblio expert Henry Gamadge, is a complex and engaging character. The other people we meet in the book are fully drawn. The victims in Daly's books are rarely cardboard cutouts - nor are the villains. And the ending, with its sudden twists and turns, will surprise most readers. The Felony & Mayhem Press has been republishing Daly; "The Book of the Dead" is the eighth of her books to be back in print, and it's an excellent entry in the series.