Classic Mysteries

And on the Other Hand...

While we're talking reading challenges here, let me accept another one to be completed this year - this time from Jen Forbus, the blogger responsible for the indispensable Jen's Book Thoughts blog. She calls it "Criminal Plots II."

It works a little differently from other challenges. Jen has come up with six categories - things like "Novel with a weapon in the title" and "Crime novel whose protagonist is the opposite gender of the author," for example. The idea is to read one book in each category, write a review, then publish the review. If you have a blog, do it on your blog and link to it; if not, just post it as a comment on Jen's blog.

Sounds like fun. You can find the complete rules, explanations and descriptions here. I plan to keep my entries to the same kinds of mysteries I write about here - traditional, classical mysteries. There are plenty of them and, yes, they fit into Jen's categories.

Why don't you take part, too? Again, you don't need to have a blog of your own - just read the books and post your reviews as comments on Jen's blog. No, they don't have to be lengthy, formal reviews - just write down your reactions to the books and post them. Again, you'll find full details at the links.

Accepting the Challenge

As I noted here a couple of months back, I have accepted this year's Vintage Mystery Challenge sponsored at the ever-admirable My Reader's Block blog. This is the second year that blog hostess Bev Hankins has challenged lovers of vintage and traditional mysteries to read - and write about - classic mysteries. This year, she has provided readers with what she calls "vintage themes": a wide range of topical choices, including the ability to create flexible lists. The only requirement is that the books must have been published before 1960.

Fair enough. Beginning next Monday, for the next eight weeks, this blog and podcast will focus on the theme called "Deadly Decades." We begin with a novel written before 1900, followed by a book from each decade through the fifties - plus a "bonus" title, for a total of eight mysteries in eight weeks.

Here's what you can expect to see (and hear) reviewed here:

• January 16: "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1887);
• January 23: "The Man in Lower Ten," by Mary Roberts Rinehart (1909);
• January 30: "The Secret House," by Edgar Wallace (1917);
• February 6: "The Mysterious Affair at Styles," by Agatha Christie (1920);
• February 13: "The Rubber Band," by Rex Stout (1936);
• February 20: "Any Shape or Form," by Elizabeth Daly (1945);
• February 27: "Dead Men Don't Ski," by Patricia Moyes (1959);
• March 5: "The Left Leg," by Phoebe Atwood Taylor (writing as Alice Tilton) (1940).

That last one is still tentative, but I think a good farce about murder - which nicely describes "The Left Leg" - will round things out quite well.

I intend to have a lot of fun with this - and I'd like to remind my readers that they too can be a part of this challenge. You can find details about how to enter the challenge here, and Bev is also modifying the terms to allow people to complete a kind of "mini-challenge," by reading only four books - details here. If you'd like to see what others are reading and track everyone's progress in the challenge, you can do so here.

If you've never been part of a reading challenge, this might be a fun way to start. The goal is to get more people to read more vintage mysteries. And I can't think of anything wrong with that goal at all.

More Gaslight Favorites

If you enjoy the kind of marvelous crime-by-gaslight stories you'll find in "The Dead Witness," you may want to read some more of them. Lucky you: Michael Sims has edited a couple of other first-rate anthologies featuring Victorian/Edwardian-era detectives and criminals. Both of them are available from Penguin Classics, whose taste in crime fiction is to be commended.

On the side of law and order, you'll find The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime: Forgotten Cops and Private Eyes from the Time of Sherlock Holmes. It's a very readable anthology of favorites featuring female detectives, bringing a whiff of fog and the flicker of gaslight to your comfortable armchair (or wherever you do your reading). And, on the other side, you may enjoy The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime: Con Artists, Burglars, Rogues, and Scoundrels from the Time of Sherlock Holmes, with its fine collection of rogues, thieves and borderline villains.

You'll find podcast reviews here of both these books on the Backlist page (see the link in the right-hand column of this page; the books are alphabetical by author/editor). It's amazing how well most of these stories have remained enjoyable over the years.

"The Dead Witness"

The kinds of detective stories that we consider to be classic, traditional mysteries are perhaps surprisingly young, with the oldest of them dating back less than two centuries. While literary tastes obviously have evolved a great deal over that time, some of the original stories that helped to define the genre remain thoroughly entertaining to read.

That may explain why I have so enjoyed a new anthology of early detective stories called "The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories," edited by Michael Sims. It's a big collection - nearly six hundred pages and twenty-two stories. The first one, "The Secret Cell," by William E. Burton, dates back to 1837, four years before Edgar Allan Poe published "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," which is generally regarded as the first modern detective story. Michael Sims, who has written an informative and entertaining introduction to the collection along with individual introductions to each story, points out that, while "The Secret Cell" really contains very little detection, it does have a detective character who follows clues and even dons a disguise in order to pursue a suspect. Sims believes that Poe would certainly have been aware of "The Secret Cell" before writing his own stories.

The collected stories were mostly written and published both in the United States and in England between 1837 and about 1915 - a period of time which covered the Victorian and Edwardian eras (and slightly beyond) in the U. K. There are some landmarks - "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," to be sure, but also the title story of the collection, "The Dead Witness," written in 1866 by an Australian, Mary Fortune. It is said to be the first known detective story written by a woman.

There are stories as well by classic authors such as Mark Twain and Bret Harte. You'll also find the opening chapters of "A Study in Scarlet," in which Dr. John Watson, M. D., meets his future roommate, one Sherlock Holmes. There are detectives whose names you will recognize - Holmes, for example, and Father Brown. There are others whose names may be new to you - Loveday Brooke, Uncle Abner, Violet Strange and Max Carrados. It's a delightful collection of stories - truly, as the subtitle of the book has it, "A Connoisseur's Collection."

Michael Sims is the editor of a number of other anthologies of early detective stories. This one is published by Walker & Company, who provided an advanced reading copy for this review. I recommend it very highly.

Clothe Your Kindle?

I know that some of my visitors here received Amazon Kindle e-readers for the holidays (or gave themselves a Kindle as a gift).

So...now that you have your Kindle...how about a little TLC for it? Amazon has all kinds of Kindle accessories for your new reader - covers, sleeves, reading lights and lots more (not to mention a wide range of great books for you to read). If you use my link, I get a remarkably small commission, and you get...clothes for your newest family member? Sort of, anyway.

More Reading, More Opinions

While I am gratified by the loyalty of my readers to this blog - and to the traditional mystery as well - I realize there are plenty of readers who like other mystery genres.

Fair enough. So let me suggest two places you should be looking to keep up with the rest of the mystery world.

First, there's Mike Ripley's monthly "Getting Away With Murder" column, which will tell you a great deal about who's reading what in the British mystery world (and beyond). If you want to broaden your horizons even further, you should be reading SHOTS Crime & Thriller E-zine, which is where Ripley's column appears.

And the latest issue of Sally Powers' "I Love a Mystery" newsletter has been posted as well. Disclosure: I have a couple of reviews there (including a longer review of "The Duel of Shadows." But you'll find dozens of reviews of newly published or newly re-released mysteries of every genre.

Both newsletters are extremely readable, and both are good guides for your own future reading. Check them out!

"The Duel of Shadows"

Here's a collection of "impossible crime" stories with a fascinating twist: most of the "impossibilies" in the stories are resolved by science - obscure science on occasion, to be sure, but science none the less. The stories may be found in "The Duel of Shadows: The Extraordinary Cases of Barnabas Hildreth," by Vincent Cornier, and the collection is the subject of this week's review on the Classic Mysteries podcast. You can hear the full review by clicking here.

What kind of "impossibilities" are we talking about? Well, in the title story of the collection, "The Duel of Shadows," a man is shot and wounded by a bullet which had been fired only once - in a duel, more than two hundred years earlier. In "The Mantle that Laughed," not only does an ancient cloak give off an eerie laugh, it also masks a most bizarre method of murder. In "The Stone Ear," a murder apparently is committed through the poisoning of a glass held by the victim - a glass which inexplicably turns to powder.

The mysteries are solved by Barnabas Hildreth, a British Secret Service agent known as "The Black Monk." Hildreth appears to be well versed in some of the more obscure branches of science - for he is the one who finds the scientific answer to all these puzzles and more. There is one story in the collection which crosses the line into the supernatural, but most of them are grounded in science. I will admit to having found myself rereading some of the solutions to try to understand the explanations. Most of the stories were written in the 1930s, with a couple of exceptions.

I recommend highly one of the later Hildreth stories, called "The Monster." It deals with an apparently inexplicable situation: everyone knows the identity of a multiple murderer - yet they are powerless to stop him from killing or punish him or even arrest him. Why? Read the terrifying story to find out.

The collection, a volume in Crippen & Landru's marvelous "Lost Classics Series," is edited by Mike Ashley, who provides an excellent introduction that puts the Hildreth stories into the context of their author's work, for Cornier was a prolific storyteller. But the Hildreth stories are truly fascinating; Ellery Queen (who published many of the stories in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine," called them "One of the great series of mdern detective stories." It's hard to argue with him.

I have written more about "The Duel of Shadows" in the newest edition of the "I Love a Mystery Newsletter," edited by the redoubtable Sally Powers.

Losses

As we set out on another new year's journey, let's pause for a moment to look back at some of the mystery world's losses during the past year. Authors, critics, actors, musicians, producers - the people we've lost in 2011. J. Kingston Pierce sounds the tocsin at The Rap Sheet blog.