Classic Mysteries

Deadly Delights

Getting ready to spend the weekend in not-too-distant New Brunswick, New Jersey with more mystery readers and mystery writers. It's Deadly Ink, and while it's relatively smaller than, say, Malice Domestic, it's just as enthusiastic about the mystery genre and its various sub-genres. The guests of honor this year will be Donald Bain and his wife, Renee Paley-Bain, authors of - among other things - the continuing series of about two dozen novels (so far) based on the characters from Murder She Wrote. Jessica Fletcher may share the bylines, but the Bains have the responsibility.

Also in the spotlight will be Toastmaster Donna Andrews, another award-winning author and one of the funniest people I know. I'm very much looking forward to seeing and hearing her again this weekend.

And for full disclosure: the Deadly Ink folks have been kind enough (or misguided enough) to name me as their Fan Guest of Honor this year.

At Saturday night's banquet, the group will announce the winner of this year's David Award, for the best mystery published during 2013. The award is named for David G. Sasher, Sr., and the nominees this year are:

• Lethal Treasure, by Jane Cleland;
• There Was an Old Woman, by Hallie Ephron;
• Condemned to Repeat, by Janice MacDonald;
• The Wrong Girl, by Hank Phillippi Ryan;
• Dark Music, by E. F. Watkins.

There will, as always, be panels, book signings, and the usual continuing opportunities for schmoozing with other fans about mysteries, which is really the best part of these things. I hope I'll see some of you there!

"The Late Monsieur Gallet"

The problem was that nothing about the murder made sense to Inspector Maigret. Monsieur Gallet had been shot, the bullet clearly fired from outside his window. But he died of stab wounds. He died in Sancerre, but he had just sent a postcard to his family from Rouen, some 200 miles away. He seemed to be nearly penniless, but he had provided an insurance policy that would pay his wife 300 thousand francs.

There was quite clearly a great deal that Maigret didn't know about The Late Monsieur Gallet, which was the name of Georges Simenon's second (or perhaps third) book about Inspector Jules Maigret. Originally published in 1931, it has been reissued by Penguin, which is republishing all of Simenon's Maigret novels. The publisher provided a copy for this review. The full review can be heard on today's Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to it by clicking here.

Maigret found the case of the murder of Monsieur Gallet to be difficult. Every time he thought he was making some progress, some other odd facet of the case would turn up, and Maigret would find himself having to begin all over again. That oddity, that wrongness about the case, will eventualy prove the key to the whole mystery.

This is early Maigret, and the overall tone is quite dark. There's not much in the way of happy endings available here. The new translation by Anthea Bell sometimes seems a bit awkward to me - it sounds like a translation rather than more colloquial English, but it's quite serviceable and transmits the events and characters quite well. It's a pretty short book, and I think it's worth your reading time.

Thanks to Sally Powers and the I Love a Mystery newsletter, where a version of this review first appeared, for allowing me to use it here as well.

The Challenge

As part of my continuing commitment to the Vintage Mystery Bingo Reading Challenge under way at the My Reader's Block blog, I am submitting this to cover the Bingo square calling for one translated work. For details about the challenge, and what I'm doing for it, please click here!

Getting Serious About a Challenge

From time to time this year, I've talked about submitting appropriate reviews to the ongoing Vintage Mystery Bingo Reading Challenge under way at Bev's My Reader's Block blog. The idea is that we are filling in a "Bingo"-type scorecard in which each square requires reading a book that meets a particular criterion (see below). For the Golden scorecard, the books must all have been published prior to 1960. There are 36 squares on the scorecard.

So far this year, I have read (and submitted) reviews of 18 books. 

So it's time to get serious. Each book selected for the podcast for the next 18 weeks will fill in one of the missing squares. In other words, my goal is to fill in the entire scorecard.

here are links to all of the ones I've read and reviewed so far (with space for the squares not yet filled). I am listing them as they appear on the scorecard, by row from top to bottom, in order going across left and right.

Row 1:

• One book with a color in the title: Green Shiver, by Clyde B. Clason
• A book published under more than one title: Murder Can Be Fun, by Fredric Brown
• One book with a "spooky" title: Diabolic Candelabra, by E. R. Punshon
• A book by an author you've read before: Going, Going Gone, by Phoebe Atwood Taylor
  
• A book with a detective team: The Greek Coffin Mystery, by Ellery Queen
• One book with an animal in the title: The Puzzle of the Red Stallion, by Stuart Palmer

Row 2:

• One book set anywhere except the U.S. or England:
• One book with a number in the title:
• One book that has been made into a movie:
• One book with a lawyer, courtroom, judge, etc.:
• One book with a time, day, month, etc. in the title:
• One book with a place in the title: Murder a la Richelieu, by Anita Blackmon

Row 3:

•  One book that features a crime other than murder: Murder Must Wait, by Arthur W. Upfield
• One book that features food/cooks in some way:
• One book with an amateur detective: Whose Body?, by Dorothy L. Sayers
• One book already read by a fellow challenger: One Drop of Blood, by Anne Austin
• One translated work:
• One book with a size in the title:

Row 4:

• One locked room mystery:
• A book by an author you've never read before:
• One book with a man in the title: Pietr the Latvian, by Georges Simenon
• One book with a professional detective: They Found Him Dead, by Georgette Heyer
• One short story collection: Dorothy L. Sayers: The Complete Stories
• One medical mystery (or features Dr. or nurse):

Row 5:

• One academic mystery: Death on the Cherwell, by Mavis Doriel Hay
• One book with a method of murder in the title: Death-Watch, by John Dickson Carr
• One country house mystery: The Cornish Coast Murder, by John Bude
• One mystery that involves water:
• One book set in England: The Devil at Saxon Wall, by Gladys Mitchell
• One book written by an author with a pseudonym:

Row 6:

• One book set in the entertainment world: And So to Murder, by John Dickson Carr, writing as Carter Dickson
• One book with a woman in the title:
• One book that involves a mode of transportation:
• One book outside your comfort zone:
• One book that you have to borrow (you do not own):
• One book set in the U.S.:

So that's 18 filled so far - and you can see what lies ahead. I have books selected for all those so-far empty spaces and slots. Thanks to Bev Hankins for coming up with a really challenging challenge this year.

Time to get readin'. I hope you'll come along for the ride!

 

"A Case of Spirits"

The beliefs in Spiritualism and the occult attracted the attention of a great many people in Victorian England. For some, it was a system of religious beliefs mixed with scientific fervor, a system that might offer the possibility of finding some real basis for the manifestations of ghostly spirits allegedly taking place during seances. For others it was a convenient mask to hide all sorts of criminal activity. That is how Sergeant Cribb first became involved in A Case of Spirits: A Sergeant Cribb Investigation, which is the title of Peter Lovesey's book being reviewed today on the Classic Mysteries podcast. You can listen to the complete review by clicking here.

Peter Lovesey is a marvelous British author who continues to turn out first rate mysteries. He began his mystery-writing career with a series of books set in the Victorian England of the 1880s. They featured Sergeant Cribb, a tough but fair and intelligent detective from Scotland Yard. The books give readers a good feel for what late-nineteenth century London must have been like, the same sense of atmosphere that we can enjoy in a Sherlock Holmes story.

And then there was Spiritualism, a belief (or at least, for some, the hope) that the spirits of the dead could communicate with the living, usually through a person acting as a medium. As we see in A Case of Spirits, Sgt. Cribb had little patience for Spiritualism - like the great magician Harry Houdini, Cribb had seen far too many frauds and charlatans to believe very much of what he observed at seances. He is sent by his superiors to investigate some peculiar burglaries and thefts at the homes of some influential people involved in psychic research. The victims whose homes were robbed were all upper-middle-class people who had been dabbling in séances and Spiritualism – and, in fact, the robberies appeared to have been timed to occur when the homeowners would be safely out of the house, attending another séance. Cribb has a pretty good idea about what has been going on - but he is confronted suddenly by a seance that ends in murder. 

Lovesey writes with humor and wit, and Sergeant Cribb is a remarkably likeable investigator. The reader will also learn a good deal about some of the tricks used by less-than-scrupulous mediums to produce the effects of "spirits" at their seances. There will be some interesting and enjoyable run-ins with some of these characters before Cribb pursues his clues leading to a surprising conclusion. A Case of Spirits is available both in paper and as an e-book, and it is very much worth your time.

First published in 1975, A Case of Spirits will be my entry into the so-called "Silver" Bingo scorecard at the My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery Bingo Reading Challenge, filling the square for "One book with a professional detective." (The Silver card covers mysteries first published between 1960 and 1980.) Once again, I urge you to visit that blog to see the many different books being submitted there.

 

 

Summer Schedule Snags

We interrupt the normal flow of things to announce that it's summer (something you may already have noticed, granted). Schedules often change in the summer, so my regular-every-Monday publishing date for the podcast and new blog entry will be a bit flexible as I succumb to the lure of other events taking place away from my computer terminal.

What all that means is that next Monday's podcast will actually be posted a day early this week, on Sunday, and there will be a couple of similar shifts in August. So if you come in on a Monday and don't see anything new...well, be patient.

Thank you. Now, back to the mysteries.

"Nothing Is Impossible"

I make no secret of the fact that my favorite kind of mystery story is the locked room/impossible crime puzzle. I enjoy authors who can lay out a story so that it appears that the crime (or other event) could not possibly have happened, but did. The locked and sealed room, the murder scene surrounded by unbroken fields of snow, the mysterious disappearances, they are all part of the genre. Of course, it requires an exceptional writer to give us such a puzzle and then to explain how the trick was done - and provide the reader with well-hidden clues to the true nature of the problem and its solution.

The late Edward D. Hoch was just such an exceptional writer, a prolific author of short stories who saw one of his tales published in every monthly issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from 1973 until his death in 2008. You do the math. Hoch created many series characters. One of the most popular was country doctor Sam Hawthorne who invariably was called upon to tackle seemingly impossible crimes - and who, invariably, came up with a rational solution to the mystery.

Crippen and Landru Publishers have been republishing Hoch's Dr. Sam stories in a series of anthologies. The latest, released this Spring, is Nothing Is Impossible: Further Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, and it is the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, which you can hear by clicking here. Nothing Is Impossible contains fifteen short stories with impossibly marvelous puzzles for Dr. Sam and the reader to solve. Among the problems:

• A man's throat is cut with an apparently invisible weapon;
• A circus trapeze artist disappears from his trapeze in mid-act;
• A teenaged girl rides her bicycle around a corner - and vanishes;
• Someone is stabbed to death in a cabin surrounded by unbroken snow.

You get the idea. These are tremendously entertaining. Hoch was proud of his ability to vary these puzzles; I seem to recall reading somewhere that he never repeated the same solution. This is the third anthology of Dr. Sam Hawthorne stories reprinted by Crippen and Landru. There's still material for several more, and I hope that those stories too will be brought back for new readers to enjoy. The editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Janet Hutchings, provides an introduction to this anthology, offering more background about both the author and this marvelous series. I recommend the package very highly indeed.

"One Drop of Blood"

It is probably a very good thing for civilization in general that so many murderers make mistakes that expose their schemes. Obviously, this happens all the time in mystery fiction: the best-laid plans of a clever killer are thwarted by some critical bit of evidence. Sometimes, it is a very large and very obvious error on the killer's part. And sometimes it can be as small and as seemingly inconsequential as a single drop of blood. That is what happens in a largely-forgotten mystery from America's Golden Age of Detective Fiction called One Drop of Blood, a 1932 "lost classic" by Anne Austin, now brought back into print by the Resurrected Press. The book is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review by clicking here.

One Drop of Blood begins with the murder of Dr. Carl Koenig, the chief psychiatrist at the Mayfield Sanitarium in the midwestern U. S. city of Hamilton. The weapon used to kill Dr. Koenig is the proverbial "blunt instrument," and the psychiatrist's office has been trashed, presumably by the killer. Is the murderer one of the quite possibly insane patients? Or is it a perfectly sane, if devilish, plot created by someone else - perhaps one of the other staff members at the Sanitarium? The primary detective is James "Bonnie" Dundee, special investigator for the District Attorney's office in Hamilton. It is Dundee who points out the discrepancies in the evidence which make it pretty certain that they are dealing with a sane and cunning killer. And it is also Dundee who will discover what will eventually prove to be the critical piece of evidence: a drop of blood at the murder scene where there really shouldn't have been a drop of blood.

I do have to point out the Dundee is hindered, rather than helped, by the head of the local homicide squad, Captain Strawn, who is certainly one of the dumbest "Watsons" I've ever run across in detective fiction, far outdoing such non-geniuses as Poirot's friend, Captain Hastings. Every time a new clue is discovered, Captain Strawn spends several pages coming up with moronic theories about who the murderer must be. I found the character sufficiently irritating that he slowed down my reading of the book. Fortunately, he largely disappears for the second half, and I must say that, once he's gone and Dundee gets going on those small clues, the book becomes a real page-turner. About two-thirds of the way through the book, in the best traditions of the classic puzzle mystery, Dundee treats the reader to a list of questions to be answered that, he says, should lead to the criminal. Match wits with him, if you like.

This new edition of One Drop of Blood includes a foreword by Greg Fowlkes, the Editor-In-Chief of Resurrected Press. It contains a good deal of background about Anne Austin and some discussion of the state of psychiatric knowledge and treatment at the time the book was written. I do wish the publisher had been more careful about the typos that have crept into the digital version of the book, which are far too frequent.

I discovered One Drop of Blood after seeing a review on John Norris's fine blog at Pretty Sinister Books, and I recommend his review to you as well. I am submitting Anne Austin's One Drop of Blood to the Vintage Mystery Bingo Reading Challenge under way at the My Reader's Block blog to cover the entry calling for "one book already read by a fellow challenger," as John read this book and reviewed it back in January.

Today and Tomorrow In Wolfe's World

Two announcements in the past few days from The Wolfe Pack, that intrepid organization of fans devoted to Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, are worth repeating.

First, there are the Nero Award finalists, nominated by the group's judges as the best American mystery of 2013 written in the tradition of the Nero Wolfe books. This year's nominees are:

• Ask Not, by Max Allan Collins;
• Three Can Keep a Secret, by Archer Mayor;
• Murder as a Fine Art, by David Morrell;
• A Study in Revenge, by Kieran Sheilds;
• A Question of Honor, by Charles Todd.

The winner will be announced at the Wolfe Pack's annual Black Orchid Banquet, held in New York City on the first Saturday in December.

The Wolfe Pack has also announced that the Ninth Annual Black Orchid Novella Award competition, sponsored jointly by the Wolfe Pack and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, is now accepting submissions for next year's BONA award. Full details about length and requirements may be found here. The winner of the 2015 award will receive a $1000 prize and publication of the novella in a future issue of AHMM. 

Hat tips are due to Janet Rudolph at Mystery Fanfare and Jeff Pierce at the Rap Sheet blog, both of whom got to this before I did!

Let 'Er Rip!

Another month, another update on what's happening in and around and somewhat in the vicinity of crime fiction in the U.K. and the rest of Europe. It's another monthly report from Mike Ripley in the Shots Ezine column "Getting Away with Murder," and - as always - it's worth your reading, if only to see who has been hanging out at the parties Ripley attends. But there's so much more - reviews, comments, even photos. Go enjoy it.