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When I began this blog and podcast nearly five years ago, I was determined to keep my book discussions, for the most part, limited to classics that were still in print (or at least readily available). This has been frustrating on a number of occasions - there are authors I'd love to discuss at greater length here but can't because their books are out of print, and even second-hand copies are relatively pricey and/or rare.
So it is with considerable pleasure that I find that the Rue Morgue Press has republished the first novel by a long-time favorite of mine, Patricia Moyes. "Dead Men Don't Ski
"Dead Men Don't Ski" is set at a remote ski lodge in the Italian alps - a lodge so remote that there are no roads leading to it. One arrives at the lodge only by riding the longest chair-lift in Europe. Tibbett is on hand (vacationing) when a murder takes place - a man named Hauser gets on the chair lift at the top, but is found shot to death when his chair arrives at the bottom. Hauser, as Emmy observes, appears to be "the most hated man in Europe," a man involved in drug trafficking as well as blackmail and other delightful crimes. Naturally, there are a lot of potential suspects at the lodge, all of whom would have had excellent motives for murdering Hauser. But it is Tibbett, through a combination of routine police work, his "nose," and a bit of keen observation from Emmy, who ultimately solves the mystery.
Along the way, we will be introduced to a broad array of fascinating characters. One of the reasons why I so enjoy Moyes' books is her excellent characterizations. The reader often gets the impression that the characters are only stereotypes - but in just about every case, those impressions will be proven wrong.
I have chosen this 1959 novel as my entry for the decade of the 1950s in the My Reader's Block blog Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge. This new edition from the Rue Morgue Press includes an introduction to Moyes written by another mystery writer, Katherine Hall Page. She quotes a reviewer who called Moyes "the writer who put the 'who' back in the whodunit." I think that sums it up quite nicely.
For a longer review of this book, please check out my review at the new edition of the "I Love a Mystery" newsletter - thanks to Sally Powers for sharing!
An elderly woman is shot to death at Johnny Redfield's country estate. The victim is his elderly aunt, a woman who claimed to belong to an obscure "sun cult" and insisted on being called by her astral name of "Vega." What possible motive could there be for the murder? And what significance attaches to a particularly grotesque statue in the garden of the estate?
It's a classic country-home murder, but the setting isn't rural England and the author isn't Agatha Christie. The book is "Any Shape or Form
Christie's admiration for Daly is quite understandable, because Daly was one of the finest American practitioners of the classic puzzle-plot mystery. Her detective, an expert on rare books and manuscripts named Henry Gamadge, is within a few feet of "Vega" when she is shot to death. There is a house full of potential suspects, although both motive and opportunity seem difficult to establish. Daly keeps things moving along, with clues carefully palnted amidst some expert misdirection, not to mention another murder, and I suspect that most readers will find the final twists to the plot both unexpected and breathtaking in their audacity. I would advise you to pay particular attention to that statue in the garden.
Between 1940 and 1951, Daly wrote 16 mysteries featuring Henry Gamadge, who is one of my favorite American detectives. The Felony & Mayhem Press has been republishing Daly's books, with seven of them in print at the moment, and I can recommend all of them quite heartily. I am delighted to be able to offer Elizabeth Daly's "Any Shape or Form" as my entry for the 1940s in the My Reader's Block book blog Vintage Mysteries Reading Challenge.
Here's an early Nero Wolfe book with some very unusual features from Wolfe's perennial battle with police:
It's all incidental, of course, to murder - and, in this case, to a story that has roots in a lawless Nevada mining town in 1895, a near-lynching, a promise unkept, and a disreputable character called "Rubber" Coleman. It's the story of "The Rubber Band
"The Rubber Band" was only Stout's third novel about Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin, and the rest of the 35th Street crowd. It's still a bit rough around the edges - Archie, in particular, has some maturing to do - but I think it's one of the better plots, overall.
The story begins with a businessman trying to hire Wolfe to investigate an apparent theft from his office. Before he can do so, however, the woman who is suspected in that theft, Clara Fox, shows up, trying to hire Wolfe to investigate (and collect) an old and potentially very valuable debt. More than 40 years earlier, her father was involved in an escapade in a Nevada mining town, where he and his friends - members of the "Rubber band," led by Rubber Coleman - freed a man about to be lynched by a mob. In return, the man - an Englishman - had promised them a share of his fortune. Now, 40 years later, that man has finally been traced. He's a wealthy English diplomat, and Clara Fox and others want their share of his wealth.
But there's much more - and, obviously, there is a murder. And, with the police now very interested in Clara Fox, Wolfe is forced to hide her in the brownstone. The scene where the police - in the form of Lieutenant Rowcliff, Archie Goodwin's nemesis - search the brownstone for Clara Fox is, by itself, worth the price of admission. The book, of course, ends with one of Nero Wolfe's distinctive office confrontations.
"The Rubber Band" is, I think, excellent in many ways. It is my entry for the 1930s in the "Deadly Decades" division of Bev Hankins' Vintage Mysteries Reading Challenge at the My Reader's Block blog. The book is available in print and also as an eBook; for Nero Wolfe fans, it is a must-read.
Wow.
OK, this is WAY off topic, folks. No mystery here; if you object, then proceed to the next post. Nothing to see here. Move along.
It's just that one of my favorite comic strips from what we'll politely call my formative years has suddenly reappeared - and what a reappearance.
The strip is "Pogo," by Walt Kelly. Pogo is perhaps best known for saying, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Pogo, as you should know (if you're old enough to remember) is a possum, living in the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia, with a whole lot of friends, like Albert Alligator, Mam'selle Hepzibah (a skunk), Churchy LaFemme (a turtle), Porkypine, Howland Owl, Deacon Mushrat (who "speaks" in Old English gothic type) and a whole lot more. It was a comic strip with attitude; Walt Kelly did political satire long before Doonesbury. His comics were pointed and yet they were also, usually, very very funny.
According to the editors' note in the recently published Pogo: The Complete Daily & Sunday Comic Strips, Vol. 1: Through the Wild Blue Wonder
The strip ended in 1975 (nearly two years after Kelly's death), so I suspect a lot of my readers simply are too young to remember Pogo. That's a pity. But you'll never see a more beautifully put-together collection of comic strips, complete with the full-color Sunday strips, than this one. I hope a new generation of Pogo readers can be created. I'm thumbing through the book and here's Pogo, having just won or maybe lost a rigged election, saying "I protests, contests and deetests every ol' thing 'bout this ee-lection." We haven't come very far, have we?
Ah well. As Porkypine says, "Don't take life so serious, son...it ain't nohow permanent."
Welcome back, everyone.
Thank you. We now return you to your regularly scheduled mysteries...
It was a meeting (a reunion, actually) that rivals, in the history of crime fiction, the first meeting between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson:
As I came out again, I cannoned into a little man who was just entering. I drew aside and apologized, when suddenly, with a loud exclamation, he clasped me in his arms and kissed me warmly.
"Mon ami Hastings" he cried. "It is indeed mon ami Hastings!"
"Poirot" I exclaimed.
And so, for the first time, Captain Arthur Hastings introduces the reader to his "old friend," Monsieur Hercule Poirot, war refugee and retired Belgian police detective. And it proves to be a good thing that he did, for without M. Poirot's intervention (and without Captain Hastings to record the results!), the poisoning of a disagreeable old woman at the country manor known as Styles might well have gone unsolved - or pinned on the wrong person. It all happens in Agatha Christie's very first mystery novel, published in 1920, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles
"The Mysterious Affair at Styles" contains a great many of what would become Christie's trademarks: it is set in a country house; the victim is a particularly unpleasant family tyrant; there are a lot of people around who might well have had sufficient motive for murder; the police are headed in the wrong direction and need help from Poirot; and the mystery is solved and explained at a confrontation in a drawing room where Poirot has gathered all the suspects.
The story of the creation of Hercule Poirot is fairly well known. He sprang, more-or-less fully formed, into Agatha Christie's head, an already-elderly retired foreign police detective who came to England as a war refugee from his native Belgium. That "already-elderly" designation would come to haunt Christie, who acknowledged in her autobiography that Poirot must have been well over a hundred years old before his career finally ended.
All the same, Poirot's first case, in "The Mysterious Affair at Styles," is a delight, made all the more astonishing by the fact that the story was written by a young woman with next to no real writing experience, dared by her sister to try her hand at writing a detective story. The book is full of Christie's marvelous tricks, as she uses misdirection artfully to throw readers off the right track. The poisoning is quite brilliantly handled; Christie used her extensive knowledge of poisons (acquired as a hospital dispenser during the Great War) to provide a novel and ingenious solution to the problem of "howdunit." If the characters are less than perfectly drawn, the plot is more than sufficient to carry the book along.
After "The Mysterious Affair at Styles," Christie went on to write novels, short stories and plays, eighty books in all; I think that no other author quite embodies the heart of the Golden Age of Detection as Agatha Christie does. If you've never read the book that started it all, what are you waiting for? There are inexpensive paperbacks available (see the link above); for that matter there are inexpensive Amazon Kindle versions including one for 99 cents
"The Mysterious Affair at Styles" is my entry for the 1920s in the "Deadly Decades" division of the Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge under way at Bev's My Reader's Block blog. Check there for some of the other wonderful classic mysteries being read by other bloggers - books which you might enjoy reading.