Classic Mysteries

"The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime"

Long before police departments in Britain were ready to hire female officers, the British reading public had discovered female detectives in the pages of popular fiction. While the first London policewomen were not  hired as officers until 1918 - 1918! - fictional female detectives, often working for or consulted by the police, began appearing in mysteries half a century earlier.

These pioneering female detectives aren't very well known to today's readers - names like Loveday Brooke or Dorcas Dene or Lois Cayley. So it is a delight to meet some of them in "The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime," edited by Michael Sims and recently published by Penguin Classics. The book's subtitle also sums it up quite well: "Forgotten Cops and Private Eyes from the Time of Sherlock Holmes." It's the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to that review by clicking here.

Sims has gathered eleven stories about Victorian women who were every bit as talented as their fictional male counterparts. They solve seemingly impossible murders, figure out how ingenious robberies were committed (or block them altogether). There are fiendish murder plots, secret underground passages - all the trappings of Victorian mystery stories, with the sleuthing done by some remarkable and talented women.

For readers of vintage mysteries, these stories are excellent companions, having been written between 1864 and 1915. Penguin Classics has been reissuing a lot of excellent early mysteries and thrillers, and Michael Sims's commentaries on the individual stories along with his first-rate introduction make this lively and informative collection well worth a place in any mystery lover's library.

 

(Disclosure: this post is based on a complimentary copy sent to me for review.)

Looking Back: A Dip in the Pool

Hildegarde Withers was featured in a large number of Stuart Palmer's books. But, for my money, one of her best outings remains her first one: "The Penguin Pool Murder." Published in 1931, it's the story of a murder in the New York City Aquarium - and Hildy, having brought her class to the aquarium to see the penguins, finds a body floating in the penguin pool - and finds that she needs to help Inspector Piper solve the case.

It's funny and refreshing. It was turned into a movie starring Edna May Oliver as Hildy, with James Gleason as Inspector Piper. According to publishers Tom and Enid Schantz of the Rue Morgue press, Palmer was inspired to create Hildegarde Withers after seeing Edna May Oliver on stage in the first run of "Showboat." The movie version of "The Penguin Pool Murder" was a hit for RKO - but it seems to no longer be available for home viewing, which is a pity.

"The Penguin Pool Murder" was reviewed on the Classic Mysteries podcast a couple of years back. You can listen to the review here.



R. I. P. Peter Falk

Sad news today of the death of actor Peter Falk, the actor who played Lieutenant Columbo on TV between 1971 and 1993. Falk's quiet, low-key delivery style, his rumpled trenchcoat, his signature line of "Just one more thing," as he prepared to trip up the villain - all combined beautifully to create a likeable, familiar police detective. He won five Emmy awards in his career - four of them for his role as Columbo.

Falk was 83 when he died at home in Beverly Hills. He had been suffering from Alzheimer's. You can learn more from a good obituary from USA Today.

"Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles"

Riddles can be funny. Riddles can be provocative or profound. And - when those riddles involve murder and mayhem - they can be a real treat for mystery readers. That's certainly the case with "Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles," which features Stuart Palmer's "meddlesome old battleaxe" of a schoolteacher, Hildegarde Withers, in eleven hitherto uncollected short stories, most dating from the 1930s. The collection is the subject of this week's review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to it by clicking here.

There are some intriguing stories here, including a number of seemingly impossible crimes, the sort which usually do stump Hildy's foil and sparring partner, Homicide Inspector Oscar Piper. And, as usualy, Hildy is more than up to the challenge of solving the mysteries - and doing so in such a way that Piper can claim the credit.

There's a lot of humor in some of the stories, although there are nightmarish overtones to some of them - not surprising, perhaps, in a collection of murder mysteries. And Hildy seems to be unflappable, whether it's finding the holes in a supposedly perfect alibi or figuring out where a thief hid a priceless cup stolen from a museum. They're all tied together in an entertaining package, courtesy of publisher Crippen & Landru's "Lost Classics" series. If you're looking for some light beach reading, these stories will do very nicely indeed.

Guess Who I Saw at Costco

When I go shopping at one of the big "box" stores, such as Costco, I always try to swing by their best-seller tables, just to see whose books are available there this week. It's a good way to keep up with the people at the top of today's best-seller lists. People like...Agatha Christie?

WHAT?

Yup. There they were among the best-sellers - new paperback editions of "Murder on the Orient Express" and "The Clocks," from HarperCollins in what look like shiny new trade paperback editions.

Now, it's certainly true that Agatha Christie has always been a top seller - she is said to have sold more than two billion books so far, and that is a conservative estimate. But I have to admit that I never expected to see her books at Costco, along with the latest thrillers and other best-sellers. It's enough to renew my faith in my fellow readers. As my daughters undoubtedly would say, "You go, girl!"

How Christie Did It

For devoted Agatha Christie fans - and we are surely legion - there is always a desire to dig a little deeper into her work, to find out how she wrote her stories and novels, and how she managed consistently to pull the wool over the readers' eyes.

If that describes you, you might very well enjoy browsing through John Curran's excellent non-fiction book, published last year, "Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making." Curran was given exclusive access to Christie's 73 private notebooks, where she jotted down her ideas, her random thoughts, her detailed plans for many of her works. It's fascinating stuff, if you're a Christie fan.

For me, it's not really a book to simply read cover-to-cover, though you can certainly do so. I found it much more enjoyable to look through the index to see if one of my favorites appeared and then browse through Christie's notes and Curran's comments. For that reason, this is really a book for the Christie devotee. If you haven't read a story, there will be spoilers here, and the whole exercise may strike you as pointless. But for those of us who read and reread her books, there is a real treasure trove here of fascinating detail.

It's worth noting that this book won this year's Agatha Award from Malice Domestic for the best non-fiction book.

This is only the first volume - I believe a second volume about the notebooks will be coming out in November, and I see that Amazon is accepting pre-orders for it. It should be just as fascinating as the original.

"The Man in the Brown Suit"

Agatha Christie created several outstanding series detectives - Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Tommy & Tuppence, to name the most widely read ones. But she also wrote a great many "stand-alone" mysteries and thrillers, and some of her best books are among them.

I'd have to put "The Man in the Brown Suit" in that category. It's the subject of today's review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review here. One of Christie's earliest books, originally published in 1924, it's a delightful, often funny Golden Age thriller, which centers on a young woman named Anne Beddingfield. Anne's father having recently died, and having left her nearly penniless, Anne is certain she is facing life in some low-paying hard-working position. She wishes for a little excitement in her life.

I don't think I'm providing any spoilers when I assure you that she gets excitement, all right. And then some. First, she witnesses the death of a man who falls onto the tracks of the London underground. She also sees a mysterious man in a brown suit who shows up right after the apparent accident, claiming to be a doctor, and examines the victim's body before disappearing into the street. Police aren't interested. But before you know it, poor Anne finds herself mixed up in a murder case in a London house - a case marked again by the appearance of that mysterious man in the brown suit. And Anne winds up as a passenger on a ship bound for South Africa. Attempts are made on her life. Another mysterious man bursts into her cabin in the middle of the night, nearly dead of a stab wound. What's going on? A great deal, as it turns out, involving murder, robbery, smuggling, even a mysterious super-criminal. Anne will need a little help from a lot of her friends before the mystery is solved.

Agatha Christie was in fine form with this one, and it's great, light reading. As usual, Christie manages to pull a few rabbits out of hats along the way, and there are plenty of surprises and twists in store. Unfortunately, except for a rather pricey hardback, "The Man in the Brown Suit" appears to be out of print at the moment (Christie titles bounce in and out of print with some frequency), but the link above will take you to Amazon's collection of third party booksellers who do seem to have inexpensive copies available.

Once again, I'm offering this vintage Christie to the Vintage Mysteries Reading Challenge at the My Reader's Block blog - and I suggest you check out their site for a lot of excellent reading suggestions.

Nero Award Nominees

The Wolfe Pack, the association of Nero Wolfe fans (I am tempted to say "fanatics," including myself), has announced the nominees for this year's Nero Award.  presented to an author for literary excellence in the mystery genre. This year's nominees are:

• Ice Cold by Tess Gerritsen
• The Book of Spies by Gayle Lynds
• Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny
• The Midnight Show Murders by Al Roker
• Think of a Number by John Verdon

The winner will be announced at the annual Black Orchid Banquet held during the first weekend of December. For more details about the award, check out the news release from The Wolfe Pack.

Congratulations to all!

The Cat Who...Lost An Author

We have lost an extremely popular mystery author - Lilian Jackson Braun, the author of the best-selling "The Cat Who..." series has died. She was 97 years old.

Lilian Jackson Braun began writing her "The Cat Who..." mysteries back in the mid-1960s, but the series stopped after three novels, because, she said, the publisher wanted her to put more sex and violence into the books, something she was unwilling to do. She didn't return to mystery writing until persuaded to do so by her second husband, Earl Bettinger, in the late 1980s, and all of her later books include a dedication to him as "The husband who..."

Her books featured a newspaperman named Jim Qwilleran, but they were really about his Siamese cats, Koko and Yum Yum, who played major roles in the novels, often by cryptically calling Qwilleran's attention to some object or book that might be construed as a clue. Most of the later books are set in the fictional town of Pickax, which was said to be modeled on the real town of Bad Axe, Michigan, where the Bettingers lived until the mid-1980s.

In all, Lilian Jackson Braun wrote 29 novels in the series. If you enjoy "cozies," you probably already have read some of her books - if not, you should do so. Personally, I can't recommend the last couple - I felt that - to me - they abandoned mystery and simply became loosely connected anecdotes. But most of her earlier books were quite good, surprisingly ingenious, entertaining and she certainly earned her place on the best-seller lists. The Washington Post had a pretty good obituary, and you might also enjoy this profile originally published by the Detroit Free Press in 1987, which the newspaper reprinted this week as a tribute to The Author Who...

Persistence Pays

As most writers will tell you, breaking into the writing market isn't easy - not even in the modern marketplace where electronic publishing might be advantageous. Persistence pays, however. J. Kingston Pierce of The Rap Sheet blog has a really great story about how Perry Mason's creator, Erle Stanley Gardner, learned the value of persistence - and why getting rejection notices may be helpful.