Classic Mysteries

Looking for Something New?

The latest issue of Sally Powers' bimonthly I Love a Mystery Newsletter for mystery readers has just been posted. It carries, by my count, reviews of 98 new mysteries from just about every sub-genre of crime fiction. That includes my review of Sarah Weinman's new anthology, Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives. No matter what kind of mystery you like - hard-boiled, soft-boiled, noir, cozy, traditional, thriller, espionage, paranormal, whatever - you're sure to find some new reading suggestions here. Give it a try!

Extra: "The Shape of Water"

From time to time, I like to throw in an "extra" review or two here on the blog, often of a book that - for whatever reason - doesn't fit neatly into the pattern of a classic or traditional mystery.

I think that applies to The Shape of Water, by Andrea Camilleri, the first in his very successful series of books about Sicilian Inspector Salvo Montalbano. It is more police procedural (and a very good one) than puzzle, but its primary appeal to me is in its characters, especially that of Inspector Montalbano, a smart, shrewd investigator with a taste for fine food. The book was first published in Italy in 1994, and the translation, by Stephen Sartarelli, first appeared in the U.S. in 2002.

In The Shape of Water, Montalbano must investigate the death of a local celebrity in the town of Vigata. The victim is found dead, with his pants around his knees, in an area commonly used by local prostitutes (and quite well-known to the police, who appear to make a tidy sum by looking the other way). The man's death appears to be from natural causes, but there is something about it that leads Inspector Montalbano to believe that it's not as simple as it appears. In fact, much of the crime scene, and the "facts" surrounding it, appear to have been staged in order to provide a convenient - and false - explanation for the victim's death.

There is a fair amount of action here, and some interesting police procedure. There's also a well-crafted view of some of the corruption and graft that seems to make up a surprisingly large part of the local culture in Vigata. As a procedural, we really don't learn much of the truth until Montalbano and his investigators have uncovered surprise witnesses and the like - in other words, it isn't really in the "fair play" or puzzle tradition. But it is, I think, a wonderful mystery, with a memorable protagonist in Inspector Montalbano, and I can see why the series is very popular today.

A word of warning: there's quite a bit of explicit sexual description here because it makes up a key element of the plot. If you don't enjoy that kind of description, you may be a bit uncomfortable at places. But it is a powerful and necessary part of the book.

And without saying more, let me commend to you the title of the book, for the mystery here does, in large part, depend on it.

"The Maltese Goddess"

For a dealer in antiques, the job offered by the wealthy client certainly seemed ideal. Having spent thousands of dollars on remarkably valuable antiques and art objects, he wanted Canadian antiquarian Lara McClintoch to fly to the Mediterranean island of Malta, to oversee the placement of those new purchases in his newly-renovated apartment there. What could go wrong?

Well, a great deal, in fact, could - and did - go wrong. The apartment wasn't finished. Weather and strikes delayed the shipment of those antiques. And when the shipment from Toronto did arrive, so did the body of the client - in one of the packing crates.

Welcome to The Maltese Goddess, by Lyn Hamilton, the second in her series of mysteries featuring archeologist and antiques dealer Lara McClintoch. First published in 1998, The Maltese Goddess is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.

The Maltese Goddess combines a traditional mystery with a plot that also contains elements of a political thriller.  It becomes clear pretty quickly that somebody is not at all happy that Lara is in Malta. There's a mysterious nighttime prowler hanging around near her door. Somebody appears to have tampered with her car's brakes. And then her client's body turns up in that shipment from Canada. There will be more murders committed and attempted before the mysteries are sorted out.

Lyn Hamilton's archeological mysteries are quite enjoyable, and Lara McClintoch is an engaging protagonist. The Maltese setting is fascinating - Hamilton gives us a good deal of the island's history and culture as well. The Maltese Goddess is entertaining, and I'm looking forward to reading more of Hamilton's books. It has been reissued as an e-book from Bev Editions, which made a copy available to me for this review.

"Death of Jezebel"

There were more than a thousand witnesses to the murder. The victim was on stage, at a big English industrial show. She was in a room in a high tower on the stage, where she was supposed to come out on a balcony and make a speech. Instead, when the lights came up for her speech, what the enormous audience saw was the victim's body, apparently pushed over the side of the balcony, falling to the stage - and she had been strangled within moments of her fall. Yet it was impossible that anyone could have gotten to her in that room - or gotten away afterwards.

Like it so far? That's the central problem in Death of Jezebel, a 1948 mystery by Christianna Brand. It's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the entire review by clicking here.

The victim is a woman named Isabel Drew, who has managed to make herself actively disliked and loathed by most of her acquaintances. Many of them refer to her as "Jezebel," a Biblical princess of ill repute. Just as the Biblical Jezebel met her death by being thrown from a high tower, so does this modern day Jezebel.

Christianna Brand puts not one but two sleuths to work on the case. Her primary series detective, Inspector Cockrill, finds himself here working with Inspector Charlesworth, a London detective who appears on his own in two other novels by Brand. It is inspector Cockrill - Cockie - who will ultimately provide the solution to the case, but only after more murder and attempted murder.

The whole story is told with Brand's usual wit. And as for the impossible murder, you'll be relieved to know that Cockie and Charlesworth manage to come up with not one but several ways in which it could have been carried out. And it's worth noting that Cockie is a very human detective - one who makes his share of serious mistakes...

"Death of Jezebel" is an excellent mystery, a sometimes bloody tale about believable characters, characters for whom you will find yourself caring. And, yes, that includes the murderer. It is not currently in print in hardcover or paper, but it is available in electronic editions. I do recommend it highly.

Michael Crichton Revisited

I received an interesting email this week from Charles Ardai at Hard Case Crime about a new project for that ambitious small house. It seems that Michael Crichton (author of such thrillers as Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain), back in the days when he was still a medical student, wrote (and had published) eight thrillers, under the pen name of "John Lange." The public never knew about those early Crichton works - he jealously guarded the secret of John Lange's identity - and the books eventually went out of print and disappeared from the market.

Until now.

Before Crichton passed away recently, Charles Ardai and Hard Case were in touch with him about reissuing those eight John Lange books. Crichton's family has continued working on the project - and has given permission for the new editions to reveal Crichton as the author. They'll be published this fall. You can read more about the series at Hard Case Crime's web page. Here's how Ardai describes it in his email:

The books are terrific reads, really delicious examples of Michael experimenting
with the genres he would become famous for in later life – you’ll find sinister
consequences of bioengineering (on a secret island vacation resort, no less!),
you’ll find a race-against-the-clock political thriller penned long before the
TV series “24,” you’ll find an archaeology professor hunting for a lost tomb in
the Egyptian desert decades before Harrison Ford ever donned a fedora…plus a
heist of a luxury hotel planned with the aid of a computer, a case of mistaken
identity that pits an innocent man against a league of assassins, and more, all
presented behind the gorgeous painted cover art of Greg Manchess and Glen Orbik.

If you're a Crichton fan, you may want to take a closer look at the information at Hard Case Crime's site.

Rinehart and Black Mask: Open Road Opens Doors

A couple of emails from the good folks at mysteriouspress.com/Open Road Media that I want to pass along to my readers.

First, Open Road has released as e-books thirteen books written by Mary Roberts Rinehart. She's mostly remembered (rather unfairly, I think) as the queen of "Had I But Known," whose stories often featured brave heroines (and some uncautious men as well) who insisted on venturing into dark cellars and the like with little regard for, or knowledge of, the dangers they faced. The books appear to be mostly from later in Rinehart's career, and they include a couple of gems I have never read, such as The Swimming Pool and The Yellow Room. They don't include her first two books, The Circular Staircase and The Man in Lower 10, but those two classics are out of copyright and available elsewhere. If you've never read Rinehart, whose books were tremendously popular during the first half of the 20th century, you have a treat in store.

Balancing "Had I But Known" with "Hard-Boiled," mysteriouspress.com/Open Road Media has also announced plans to release stories from the original Black Mask magazine, now in digital formats. They'll be publishing monthly, beginning on August 27th. If you don't know Black Mask, it was one of the most influential pulp publishers in the first half of the 20th century, introducing and publishing Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Norbert Davis, and many other early hard-boiled writers. If you're a fan of hard-boiled stories, this is major news. Here's a link to a description of one of the reissued stories on the Open Road site.

As I've said before, I'm delighted to see mysteriouspress.com and Open Road Media releasing e-book versions of so many classic authors in many different genres. Most have long been out of print. I hope a new generation of readers will discover these wonderful books and stories.

"The Great Merlini"

The sign on the wall of Merlini's magic shop was very emphatic: it read, simply: "Nothing is Impossible." It's a good thing somebody felt that way, given the large number of seemingly impossible crimes that take place in The Great Merlini: The Complete Stories of the Magician Detective, a collection of the first-rate Merlini short stories by Clayton Rawson. The book is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.

Clayton Rawson only wrote a handful of novels and a dozen short stories, but he was tremendously influential on a lot of writers, and his short stories, focusing as they do on so-called "impossible" crimes, are really first rate.

What kind of stories? Well, consider "Off the Face of the Earth," in which a man being watched very closely by police steps into a phone booth in the middle of Grand Central Station...and disappears. Yet when police enter that phone booth, they find a telephone receiver off the hook...and when they pick it up, they hear the missing man taunting them.

Or consider "The Clue of the Missing Motive," in which a man is shot and killed in the park, in front of scores of people, and yet nobody saw the killer or heard the shot.

There are a dozen stories (including the delightfully-named "The World's Smallest Locked Room." Some are very short; others approach novella length. All are remarkably ingenious. I’m glad to see these stories by Clayton Rawson re-emerging from the obscurity into which they had fallen over the years. Unfortunately, they have all but disappeared from print (unless you'd like to spend a few hundred dollars for a copy). Happily, The Great Merlini is available as an inexpensive e-book from The Mysterious Press and OpenRoad Media. It includes an introduction, written for the earlier printed version of the book in 1979, by the managing editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine at the time, Eleanor Sullivan. The stories will delight any fan of the impossible crime genre. 

Sad News

I have returned from vacation to learn the sad news (via a Facebook post from Douglas Greene) that Barbara Mertz, who wrote a number of fine mystery series under the names "Elizabeth Peters" and "Barbara Michaels," has died after a long illness. It's a serious loss for the mystery-loving community; her best-known series featuring archeologist Amelia Peabody and set in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, remains very popular. Under her real name, she also wrote two excellent non-fiction books about Egyptology and archeology. She was a mainstay of Malice Domestic, with a wonderfully sharp wit and sense of humor.You will find her website here and a complete list of her books here. She will be missed.

Schedule Reminder

My review of "Hamlet, Revenge!" (next post) is the review and podcast for the week of August 5. Next one will be posted on August 12, if all goes according to plan. I'm pretty much off the grid for a few days.

"Hamlet, Revenge!"

There were a number of possible reasons why the Lord Chancellor of Great Britain should have been murdered. After all, there were messages - several messages, in fact - which seemed to indicate that someone with a powerful desire for revenge was lurking in the background. On the other hand, the victim might have been killed because he appeared to have been carrying with him a top secret document which has now disappeared, a document which, if made public, might even have led to war. And, on top of all that, the murder took place during a private performance of an amateur production of Shakespeare's great tragedy, Hamlet - which, not coincidentally, is also about murder and international intrigue. It was quite a case for Inspector John Appleby. You can read about it in Hamlet, Revenge!, by Michael Innes, the book featured in today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the whole review by clicking here.

Hamlet, Revenge!, first published in 1937, was only the second novel written by Michael Innes and it is one of his best mysteries - which, I would argue, also makes it one of the finest mysteries of the late "Golden Age" period between World Wars I and II. The action of the book takes place in and around Scamnum Court, the stately home of the Duke and Duchess of Horton. The Duke and Duchess are staging an amateur production of Hamlet, featuring a number of family members, senior government officials, and a leading Shakespearean actor in the role of Hamlet. There are ominous warnings, in the form of sinister messages which turn up in and around Scamnum. And, on the night of the production, when the actor playing Polonius should be stabbed to death behind a curtain onstage as part of the play, a shot is heard...

And so, Inspector Appleby is sent off to Scamnum Court by no less a personage than the Prime Minister. Because, you see, that actor - the Lord Chancellor - had taken with him a top secret document in order to study it. And if spies were to get hold of that document, and it fell into the wrong hands...well the consequences (this was 1937, remember, with Europe about to slip into a world war) would be hideous.

But where is that document? What is the significance of those sinister messages? And who was driven to murder - and why? It seems appropriate to quote Polonius: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.”

All this is woven into and through Hamlet itself. Michael Innes, true to his background as a literary scholar, does a first-rate job presenting Shakespeare's masterpiece to the reader and in using the intrigue found in that play as a background for the modern mystery taking place at Scamnum.

If you have never read Michael Innes, Hamlet, Revenge! could be the book that convinces you to become more familiar with one of the wittiest and cleverest writers of the period. It's in print and also available in a Kindle edition.

I am entering Hamlet, Revenge! in the Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge at the My Reader's Block blog, under the category "Repeat Offenders," which is for mysteries featuring a favorite series detective. That certainly applies to Appleby and to his creator, Michael Innes - I recommend both very highly indeed.