Classic Mysteries

New Arrival Kindles a Flame

It's here - my new Amazon Kindle e-reader has arrived. I must now download some kindling, of sorts, and begin putting it through its paces.

As a life-long reader of traditional printed books, I have mixed feelings about my new Kindle.

It is lightweight, and it will remain so even after being loaded with many books. GOOD.

E-books will take up no additional bookshelf space. GOOD.

I like the feel of a book, the looks of a book, even the smell of a book. BAD.

I will have to endure the reproachful gaze of my neighborhood bookstore owner. BAD.

The new cover for my new Kindle has a built-in reading light, useful in beds and planes and other not-well-lit places. GOOD.

My first downloaded book is L. C. Tyler's "The Herring-Seller's Apprentice." I will not be able to get him to autograph a copy for me. BAD.

So it's a toss-up, so far. I'll keep everyone posted as I learn to use it.

"Death Finds a Foothold"

Accidents do happen, and they can be as deadly on a mountainside as anywhere. But when an experienced climber falls off the side of a mountain in Wales, you can't blame police and fellow mountaineers for being suspicious. That's the mystery at the heart of Glyn Carr's "Death Finds a Foothold," one of Carr's excellent series of mysteries set among mountains and climbers. It's the subject of this week's review on our Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review here.

"Death Finds a Foothold" was originally published in 1961, and it's said to be among the best of his mysteries featuring the actor and amateur detective Abercrombie "Filthy" Lewker and his friend, Detective Inspector George Grimmett. In this one, the two men are confronted with the apparently accidental death of a very experienced (and unpleasant) climber - and discover what they believe may be a connection to another mysterious death many years before on the Swiss mountain known as the Matterhorn. Glyn Carr managed to make mountaineering sound exciting and enticing, even to a devout coward like me. His mysteries are excellent, and this one is a fine introduction to his work.

Explaining Miracles

In my opinion, John Dickson Carr was the absolute master of the locked room/impossible crime genre. With that in mind, may I make two recommendations.

The first is for what I still believe is the finest impossible crime story ever written: "The Three Coffins." As I have said before, Carr begins with a direct challenge to the reader - a challenge which says, "Watch me - I'm going to fool you," and then delivers on the challenge. It is scrupulously fair, but I suspect few readers will be up to the challenge, as the information you need to solve the murders is cleverly hidden behind some excellent atmospherics. And, as a bonus, the book contains Dr. Fell's marvelous locked room lecture, where the action is stopped while Dr. Fell lists all the ways in which impossible crimes may be carried out.

If you have read Carr before, you might also be interested in Douglas G. Greene's excellent biography, called "John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles." It's out of print, and copies seem to be pretty expensive, but it's worth checking with your local library to see if they have a copy of the book. Be forewarned that Greene's discussion of the plots of the novels will, of necessity, include some spoilers - with the reader warned ahead of time so he/she can ignore those paragraphs. But if you have read the stories, and want more insight into Carr and how he lived and worked, this is an excellent and very readable reference book.

Bureau of Missing Persons

I haven't really vanished, but I am and will be missing in action for a few days. My wife and I are taking some quiet (relatively speaking) time before she has to return to her school library next week. That means blogging will be light this week. Back with a new review on Monday! In the meantime, enjoy the late August weather.

"Locked Room Puzzles"

What could possibly be better, for an enthusiast of locked room/impossible crime mysteries, than a really ingenious, well-plotted story about something that couldn't possibly have happened - but did?

The answer: four such stories, by four masters of impossible-crime fiction, collected into a single volume called "Locked Room Puzzles," edited by Martin Greenberg and  Bill Pronzini. It's a collection of four novellas - longer than the average short story, but a lot shorter than a full-length novel. It's the subject of this week's review on our Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the entire review here.

The authors of the four novellas have earned reputations as first-rate plotters and story-tellers, and it's worth noting that they play fair. The leadoff story is from John Dickson Carr. In "The Third Bullet" he gives us the problem of a man who is shot to death inside a locked and sealed room. The only other man in the room is found by police while he is actually holding a just-fired gun. But it is not the murder weapon. And that's only the first impossibility...

Next, Bill Pronzini contributes a story about his "nameless detective" character. No murder in this one - just the problem of how somebody can be stealing books out of a locked room without setting off any alarms.

Then, there's a novella from Clayton Rawson, whose character, "The Great Merlini," is a professional magician. Here, he's confronted with a murder inside a locked room - not only locked, but sealed on the inside by strips of tape. How did the killer get in or out?

The final story comes from Edward D. Hoch, an acknowledged master of the mystery short story form. The story is complex but includes the problem of an empty room which is sealed and locked - but where, the next day, a drugged woman is found inside. She could not have been there when the room was sealed - so what happened?

Four impossibilities. Four delightful novellas. Four authors you should know. If you enjoy this kind of mystery, you'll love these stories.

Looking Back: "A Question of Proof"

"Thou Shell of Death" was the second of Nicholas Blake's excellent mysteries. The first, published in 1935, was called "A Question of Proof." It introduced Blake's detective, Nigel Strangeways, to readers in a fascinating and literate book about murder at an English school. Strangeways knows almost from the start who committed the murder, but he is reluctant to share his information with the police until he can prove it.

I reviewed "A Question of Proof" earlier in this series, and you can listen to a full podcast review here. The author wrote the book while he was a schoolmaster himself, and it's a good way to meet both the author and his stylish, literate mysteries.

"Thou Shell of Death"

Writing poetry, even for well-established poets, is not always a good way to earn a living. That appears to have been  the case with C. Day-Lewis, the late Poet Laureate of Britain, who found a very good way to supplement his family income by writing a series of absolutely top-grade mysteries, under the pen name of Nicholas Blake. Day-Lewis - the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis - wrote his mysteries beginning during the Golden Age, in 1935, and continued well into the 1960s.

One of his best books, "Thou Shell of Death," written in 1936, is reviewed on this week's Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review here. It's an extraordinary book. Blake's detective character , Nigel Strangeways, is invited to a most unusual house party by Fergus O'Brien, a flying hero of World War I. O'Brien has been receiving threatening letters warning that he will be killed on Boxing Day, December 26. He has responded by organizing this party and inviting everyone who could be suspected of having written the letters. Despite Strangeways' presence, O'Brien is indeed killed on the morning after Christmas.

And that's when the story starts to get really interesting. The more Strangeways digs into the case, the more complexities are revealed. Strangeways becomes convinced that he must look deep into O'Brien's mysterious past life, before he became a war hero, for the real motives behind the murder - and what he learns will be profoundly shocking.

This is a classic Golden Age novel. There is fair play throughout and brilliantly-placed clues, but, for most readers, it will be a challenge to unravel the complex mystery, a pleasure to meet the memorable characters - and the ending of the book is absolutely stunning. I can't praise it highly enough.

A Cozy Family Gathering

On the Classic Mysteries podcast this week, the book we review, Georgette Heyer's "Envious Casca," is one of those marvelous English country house mysteries in which a nice friendly family gathering quickly turns murderous. It's sort of a forerunner of many of today's cozies, although there's a lot of quiet humor and a willingness to play with the stereotypes of the genre that make it a great deal of fun to read. You'll find details in an earlier post.

As it happens, the next book I picked up to read this week is a much more recent cozy that is very much in the same tradition. G. M. Malliet's 2008 mystery, "Death of a Cozy Writer," was the first of three (so far) to feature Detective Chief Inspector Arthur St. Just. It will seem pretty familiar to any reader of traditional English mysteries, and I mean that in a very good sense.

It features another of those lovely dysfunctional family gatherings. The family patriarch, an incredibly unpleasant but fabulously successful author of cozy mysteries, generally plays his four largely-unattractive grown children off against each other, threating to disinherit any or all of them with astonishing regularity. This time, this dysfunctional family is invited to the writer's mansion to meet the woman he has just announced he intends to marry. Is this starting to sound familiar? Do you get the feeling that murder might be imminent? To be sure - but perhaps not quite as you might expect. Along the way, Ms. Malliet takes a number of entertaining swipes at cozy mysteries and cozy authors, not to mention the cliches of the traditional country house mystery.

It's all handled with a good deal of laugh-out-loud humor. I do note, for the benefit of those inclined to read between the lines, that this is a cozy mystery about an author of cozy mysteries who has, solely from his writings, amassed a fortune of some seventeen million British pounds. I wish Ms. Malliet well in her negotiations with her publisher, Midnight Ink, but, after all, this is a work of fiction.

Happy Belated Birthday

I missed a birthday yesterday. J. Kingston Pierce at the Rap Sheet blog points out that August 9 was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robert Van Gulik, the Netherlands-born diplomat and author responsible for the Judge Dee mysteries, set in 7th Century Imperial China.

Van Gulik began his stories of Judge Dee by translating a seventeenth-century Chinese manuscript, which was called "Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee." The translation - and the stories - followed the style and patterns set by Chinese detective stories, which differ in many ways from our Western stories. As part of his introduction to that book, Van Gulik challenged other writers to try their hand at creating new detective stories that followed those patterns. When nobody took him up on the challenge, Van Gulik wrote his own - sixteen books, all featuring fictional adventures of Judge Dee, a real Chinese magistrate who lived during the 7th Century in T'ang Dynasty China.

I've reviewed several of the Judge Dee mysteries in earlier podcasts - you'll find links to them here. I also had an earlier posting on Judge Dee and Imperial China. I do plan to review more of these wonderful books in the coming months. But if you haven't met Judge Dee, I recommend him very highly. I believe all the Judge Dee books are in print and readily available through your favorite mystery book seller or via Amazon.

"Envious Casca"

Come along for a jolly holiday at a traditional English country house. You'll love the other guests. Well - somebody should; they mostly hate each other. And when the tensions lead to murder, you'll have the interesting task of figuring out how the victim could have been stabbed to death inside a locked and watched room, when there was no trace of either a murderer or a weapon. It's all part of Georgette Heyer's 1941 mystery, "Envious Casca," which is reviewed today on our Classic Mysteries podcast. You can listen to the full review here.

Georgette Heyer is mostly remembered today for a series of Regency romance novels. But she was also the author of some excellent mysteries. There's general agreement that "Envious Casca," with its English country house setting and impossible crime, is among her best books. For those who may feel that the "traditional" English house party mystery is too prone to using stereotyped characters, I can only say that the reader will encounter quite a few rather shocking surprises along the way, some of which will turn those stereotypes on their heads. "Envious Casca" is a great deal of fun, written with very dry humor, fairly clued. with some memorable characters. Don't let your own stereotypes of "romantic novels" put you off this book - it's a first-rate mystery.