Classic Mysteries

Looking Back: My Favorite Judge Dee Novel

Looking back over the past three years, I see that I have posted several reviews of Robert Van Gulik's Judge Dee novels set in seventh century Imperial China. I plan to review more in the months and (I hope) years ahead. They are all good. But if you ask me to name a favorite Judge Dee novel, I have no hesitation about doing so: "Necklace and Calabash." It was one of Van Gulik's last books, and, I think, his best.

I did a review of "Necklace and Calabash"  on the podcast about three years ago, and you can listen to the full review here, but let me summarize for you: the story takes place fairly early in Judge Dee's career, when he was magistrate of the fictional district of Poo-Yang. Judge Dee, hoping for some fishing and relaxation, stops to rest for a couple of days in a town along the riverbank, not far from the Water Palace, the home of the Emperor's favorite daughter.

Judge Dee is quickly involved in a variety of intrigues, as a mutilated body is fished out of the river, some strange guests are hanging around the local inn and the local authorities seem to be behaving rather oddly. Soon, the judge is summoned to the Water Palace - and that's when the story really takes off. It becomes a combination of traditional mystery and thriller, with some truly memorable characters. "Necklace and Calabash" is the most "westernized" of the Judge Dee mysteries, and, as I say, I think it is one of the best. I can't recommend it highly enough.

"The Chinese Gold Murders"

Love, lust, greed, intrigue, murder - all the elements of a good mystery story - are fairly timeless characteristics. So it shouldn't be daunting to find that we are going back nearly 1400 years this week to seventh-century China, to follow Judge Dee and his assistants as they unravel the complexities of "The Chinese Gold Murders," by Robert Van Gulik. It's the subject of this week's review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review here.

Van Gulik wrote 16 books about Judge Dee, not counting his first, "Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee," which was really a translation from an 18th century Chinese manuscript. "The Chinese Gold Murders" follows Judge Dee as he travels to his first official post as a magistrate, the central official in the life of a Chinese village of that period. On his way, he is attacked by a couple of highwaymen who are so impressed by the judge that they instantly give up crime and become his assistants. He finds that his first task will be solving the murder of his predecessor, and he will find that several other crimes must be solved as well along the way because they are all related.

I love the Judge Dee stories, and "The Chinese Gold Murders" is one of the best. If you haven't met Judge Dee - or if the idea of learning something about everyday life in seventh century China fascinates you - by all means, try this one.

Dining in Wolfean Style

It wasn't an official part of last weekend's Bouchercon in San Francisco, but the Rex Stout banquet held in conjunction with the conference was unquestionably one of the high points of a great weekend.

The Wolfe Pack's banquet was held at the Payne Mansion, a charming old Victorian townhouse in the heart of the city. Under the guidance of Executive Chef Michael Goldstein, about 70 of us were treated to a recreation of the French Dinner featured in Stout's 1938 book, "Too Many Cooks." We worked our way through a six course banquet:

• Consomme
• Quenelles Bonne Femme
• Sauteed Brook Trout with a brown butter caper sauce
• Confit of Leg and Thigh of Liberty Duck on a bed of braised apples, onions and cabbage, and herb roasted fingerling potatoes with a fresh cherry sauce
• Rossi Salad (named for the chef who created the salad in "Too Many Cooks")
• Chocolate Tartuffe with fresh raspberry sauce

Each of those courses (except the salad) was paired with an appropriate wine.

Oh my. But I strongly suspect that Nero Wolfe would have pronounced it "satisfactory," his highest compliment.

The Wolfe Pack added to the general hilarity of the occasion by assigning each table to write a parody song which would put some appropriately Wolfean words to a familiar tune. The example which was used as an inspiration or a warning went this way:

Archie had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb,

Archie had a little lamb 'cause Nero ate the rest.

Maybe you had to be there. We were also entertained and enlightened by a keynote speech from spy novelist Gayle Lynds on "Nero Wolfe, the Spy."  With all that wine, there were a lot of toasts - and we were honored by the presence of members of the Stout family.

It was a dinner to remember.

Looking Back: Miss Withers and the Penguin Pool Murder

Hildegarde Withers, the heroine of Stuart Palmer's novels, including the one reviewed this week, first appeared in the 1931 novel, "The Penguin Pool Murder." She and Inspector Oscar Piper proved to be welcome additions to the public's store of interesting and often amusing detectives.

The book was quickly turned into a movie the next year. "The Penguin Pool Murder" starred Edna May Oliver as Hildegarde Withers and James Gleason as Inspector Piper. It's worth noting, as mystery publishers Tom and Enid Schantz point out, that Palmer said he was inspired to create Miss Withers after seeing Edna May Oliver's performance in the original 1929 version of Jerome Kern's "Show Boat."

The movie doesn't seem to have survived - it certainly doesn't seem to be readily available, although I do see one copy currently on eBay. I have to wonder whether the original film has simply deteriorated, as has happened to so many other early movie classics. Fortunately, the book has been republished by the Schantzes at the Rue Morgue Press. It's a light, funny puzzle mystery, almost too well and fairly clued. I did a full audio review on the podcast a couple of years ago; you can listen to what I had to say by clicking here.

"The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla"

Let's face it: there are times (at least in mystery fiction) where it can be enormously helpful to have a persistent and meddlesome old battleaxe on hand to help an errant police inspector. Certainly that's true in Stuart Palmer's Golden Age classic, "The Puzzle Of The Blue Banderilla," which is the subject of this week's review on the Classic Mysteries podcast. As always, you can listen to the full review here.

The battleaxe in question is Hildegarde Withers, the intrepid and acerbic schoolteacher who has an irritating habit of helping her good friend, New York City homicide inspector Oscar Piper, when he gets caught up in a murder case that threatens to find him out of his normal depths. In "The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla," Inspector Piper is traveling through Mexico when a young customs inspector is murdered by sniffing some cheap perfume - found in the luggage of one of Inspector Piper's traveling party. It gets worse when another person dies, stabbed to death with a blue banderilla, a crude tool used by bullfighters. Fortunately, Miss Withers is on hand to help sort everything out. All of this is wrapped into a fairly lighthearted and quite enjoyable mystery, very much in the Golden Age tradition.

And the Winner Is...

On the final morning of this year's Bouchercon world mystery conference in San Francisco, the winners of the 2010 Anthony awards have been announced.

• Best Critical Nonfiction Work: TALKING ABOUT DETECTIVE FICTION, by P. D. James.
• Best Short Story: "On the House," by Hank Phillippi Ryan, from QUARRY: CRIME STORIES BY NEW ENGLAND WRITERS.
• Best Paperback Original: STARVATION LAKE, by Bryan Gruley.
• Best First Novel: A BAD DAY FOR SORRY, by Sophie Littlefield.
• Best Novel: THE BRUTAL TELLING, by Louise Penny.

For a full list of the other nominees, click here. It was quite a competitive field this year. Congratulations to all the nominees and the winners.

10 Crime Novels You Must Read Before You Die

A very lively panel today at Bouchercon featured Declan Hughes and John Connolly with their own list of 10 crime novels which should be on everyone's list to read before dying. There are some interesting choices here (and a few that merit my digging out and re-reading in order to comment on them on this blog and/or the podcast).

• Dashiell Hammett, "The Glass Key."
• Raymond Chandler: "The Long Goodbye" and/or "The Big Sleep."
• Ross MacDonald, "The Chill."
• Patricia Highsmith, "Deep Water."
• Ed McBain, "Cop Hater."
• George V. Higgins, "The Friends of Eddie Coyle."
• James Lee Burke, "Dixie City Jam."
• Margaret Millar, "A Stranger in My Grave."
• Thomas Harris, "Red Dragon."
• Agatha Christie, "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd."
• Alternatives for Christie: Dorothy L. Sayers "The Nine Tailors" or Margery Allingham, "The Tiger in the Smoke."

Hughes and Connolly added two more suggestions:

• Charles Willeford, "Miami Blues"
• James Crumley, "The Last Good Kiss."

An interesting collection. They also suggested Thomas Pyncheon's "The Crying of Lot 49," which I had never thought about as a mystery - yet it is one, in its own paranoid, ambiguous way. This was a great session - a good example of the kind of thing which makes these conferences so worthwhile.

And the Winners Are...

Several awards were presented this evening at Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco, the world's largest conference of mystery fans and readers. The Mystery Readers Journal presented its Macavity awards, while Deadly Pleasures Magazine handed out the fourteenth annual Barry awards. The winners this year:

For the Macavities:

Sue Feder Historical Mystery: A TRACE OF SMOKE, by Rebecca Cantrell;

Best Mystery Short Story: "On the House," by Hank Phillippi Ryan;

Best Mystery Nonfiction: TALKING ABOUT DETECTIVE FICTION, by P.D. James;

Best First Mystery Novel: THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE, by Alan Bradley;

Best Mystery Novel: TOWER, by Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel.

The winners of the Barry Awards:

Best short story: "The High House Rider," by Brendan DuBois;

Best British Novel: IF THE DEAD RISE NOT, by Philip Kerr;

Best Paperback Original: STARVATION LAKE, by Bryan Gruley;

Best Thriller: RUNNING FROM THE DEVIL, by Jamie Freveletti;

Best First Novel: THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE, by Alan Bradley;

Best Novel: THE LAST CHILD, by John Hart;

Mystery/Crime Novel of the Decade: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, by Stieg Larsson.

Quite a collection. Many of the authors are here at Bouchercon - there are nearly 1400 attendees listed in the program. The conference's own Anthony awards will be presented on Sunday. The nominees are listed here.

Bouchercon, Here I Come

I am headed back to San Francisco this week for Bouchercon, which really gets rolling on Thursday and concludes with the Anthony awards on Sunday. It's my first time at this event, the largest gathering of mystery fans and authors anywhere, and I am looking forward to it.

There will be panel discussions, authors to meet, books to be signed, online friends to greet, book dealers aplenty. If you'll be there, please let me know, and we'll try to meet. There's a Wolfe Pack banquet on Saturday night, when a guest chef will be preparing the French banquet discussed in Rex Stout's "Too Many Cooks." Local Sherlockians are doing their thing. There are all kinds of tours of parts of San Francisco, including a newly-announced Dashiell Hammett walking tour. It should be a fabulous experience; I'll try to post at least a couple of times.

By the way, next year's Bouchercon will be in St. Louis, from September 15-18, 2011. You can sign up for it now (sign up before the end of 2010 to get a price break).

And away we go.

"The Moonstone"

There are books which may rightly be said to have defined an entire genre of literature. Surely one of those is "The Moonstone," by Wilkie Collins, the 1868 novel which is generally regarded as the first real detective novel (as opposed to detective story). The elements which defined the mystery novel were present in, and often introduced by, this book:

• The presence of a real detective, who gathers clues, interrogates witnesses, and ultimately solves the crime;
• The inclusion of a group of suspects, with the guilty party being one of the least likely choices (and the requirement that the guilty party be a significant, if not major, character);
• the English country-house setting;
• The fabulous jewel stolen from an idol and pursued by relentless foes determined to reclaim their treasure;
• the inclusion of false leads and red herrings to throw the reader off the trail.

These and so much more are all part of "The Moonstone." Most interesting, to me, is that after nearly a century and a half, it is still an excellent read, with plenty of unexpected twists. It's the subject of this week's podcast on our "Classic Mysteries" podcast, and you can listen to the full review here. It's available in a variety of editions and as an ebook as well for Kindle and other readers.