Classic Mysteries

"Seven Dead"

You have to feel at least a little sorry for Ted Lyte. Ted was a petty criminal, the kind who tries to avoid violence, preferring to break into an empty house to see if there's any silverware to be stolen and fenced. Ted was pretty happy about finding a remote house called Haven House where nobody appeared to be at home - and there was a rear window conveniently left open. So Ted slipped inside and wandered around the house, looking for anything small and portable. And, as he searched the house, he finally came to a room next to the front door,  a room shuttered on the outside with the door locked, with a key still in the lock. And so Ted Lyte opened the door...

And he ran screaming from the house. For inside that room there were seven dead bodies, six men and a woman. That's what you'll find in Seven Dead, a melodramatic mystery and thriller from 1939 by J. Jefferson Farjeon. It's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.

J. Jefferson Farjeon’s Seven Dead is the newest addition to the British Library Crime Classics series; it’s due to be published in the United States next week by Poisoned Pen Press, which provided me with an advance copy for this review. 

When Ted Lyte ran from that house of death as if the devil pursued him - he ran smack into a police constable. Ted really doesn't concern us any more, for the case quickly fell into the hands of Inspector Kendall. Working with a young free-lance journalist named Thomas Hazeldean, Inspector Kendall allows the young man to accompany him back to Haven House,  where they do indeed find that terrible room, packed with the bodies of seven murder victims. A search of the house also turns up the painting of a young woman – but the painting appears to have been shot through the heart. There is no sign of the owner of the house, John Fenner, or his niece, Dora.

Hazeldean finds himself fascinated by that woman’s portrait – he (and Inspector Kendall) believe it must be a picture of Dora Fenner. But where is she? Where is her father? Who are these seven people and what caused their deaths? Inspector Kendall continues pursuing the clues to be found in the house while Hazeldean travels to France in an effort to find the mysterious Dora Fenner. What he finds is, indeed, at the heart of the mystery in Seven Dead, and he and Inspector Kendall will travel halfway around the world before the solution to the puzzle is revealed and the true criminal unmasked.

I must add that – if you’re looking for plot realism or fair cluing – you probably won’t find them here. It’s a thriller, and a good one; few authors and few books could come up with a more gripping opening that sets up the scene inside that deadly room. But the ending and the solution seem rather hard to swallow, relying on some pretty improbable circumstances. On the other hand, that’s hardly unique among thrillers, and there are plenty of twists and turns to keep the plot going. And for a mystery with such a grim premise, Farjeon’s writing is pleasantly witty. This new edition also features an introduction by mystery historian Martin Edwards. It’s certainly worth your consideration.

 

From the Vault: "The Secret Adversary"

You know that old TV advertisement for a particular brand of potato chips that says, "Bet you can't eat just one"? That's sort of the way I feel about reading Agatha Christie mysteries: I'd bet you can't read just one. Not when Christie wrote so many - and so many different kinds. For example, Christie wrote so many fine series mysteries, with so many different detectives, that it's difficult to decide to follow just one. Hercule Poirot! Parker Pyne! Mr. Satterthwaite and Harley Quin! Miss Marple! You get the idea.

And then there were Tommy and Tuppence. The Beresfords. The young (at the outset) couple whom Christie would put into some appallingly dangerous situations in stories which were far more thrillers than detective stories. The first of those was a delightful little book called The Secret Adversary. Here's what I had to say about it when I reviewed it nearly a decade ago - again, with some minor editing done to update references and so forth.

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When we talk about an Agatha Christie book, we are usually talking about a really clever mystery, with a complicated and twisting plot, some brilliant detective work, and a villain whose identity usually surprises us. We don’t think that often of a straightforward thriller-type book. But Agatha Christie did write thrillers as well as more cerebral mysteries. Consider the case of her second published book, The Secret Adversary.

Agatha Christie’s first novel was The Mysterious Affair at Styles, starring Hercule Poirot, and it dates back to 1920. It was what we would consider a typical Christie mystery. But her second book, published in 1922, was quite different – much more a thriller, in the style of, say, Edgar Wallace or Sax Rohmer. The Secret Adversary introduces us to a young man named Thomas Beresford and a young woman named Prudence Cowley – whose friends call her Tuppence. Over the course of her career, Christie would write a total of four novels and more than a dozen short stories featuring Tommy and Tuppence, most featuring a fair amount of action, with some espionage and, to be sure, a super-villain thrown in.

Certainly, that’s the pattern we find in The Secret Adversary. It begins on board the Lusitania, the liner torpedoed by the Germans in 1916 during what we now call the First World War. Most of the action, however, takes place a few years later, in England. Tommy, who had been a lieutenant during World War I (then called only “The Great War”), and Tuppence, who had worked in an army hospital during the war, meet at a time when neither can find a job. They decide to form a new company, which they will call “The Young Adventurers, Limited” offering themselves up to anyone willing to pay them for some kind of adventure. Or, as their proposed newspaper ad will read, “Willing to do anything, go anywhere. Pay must be good. No unreasonable offer refused.”

They very quickly find their adventure. Tuppence is hired by someone who wants her to go off to France to impersonate a missing American girl. But it quickly becomes clear that there is a great deal more at stake here than a mere impersonation. Tuppence and Tommy become involved as unofficial investigators for England’s secret service, trying to locate that missing American girl, and to find a document believed to be in her possession which apparently could be catastrophic if it ever became public.

In addition, the young adventurers are told, they must be particularly careful about their chief opponent – a man known only as “Mr. Brown.” Nobody seems to know what this super-criminal looks like, including the people who do his bidding. We encounter Mr. Brown in a series of guises, usually appearing as an apparently minor character in some nefarious plot. It is only when the events of the novel reach their climax that we will discover – in the course of some very Christie-like plot twists – the true nature of the plot and the true identity of Mr. Brown.

I’m probably not doing justice to the plot of this novel, or to Agatha Christie, for that matter. As was usually the case, there are elements of the detective story woven through the thriller material, and a number of remarkable red herrings are used to send the reader – and Tommy and Tuppence, for that matter – off in the wrong direction. As for the master villain, he is truly a fine character, particularly in his various offstage appearances. I’m always a little amazed at these characters who manage to create complex plots to take over the world, and build huge criminal organizations, while leading double lives that one would think would not allow enough time for such complexity.

But “The Secret Adversary” was written in an age when such stories – and such characters – were legion, and it’s worth noting that Christie managed to create a truly excellent cast of characters and enliven the book with enough action, kidnappings, escapes and near-misses to make it very much worth reading. I think it’s also worth quoting the dedication of this book, as Christie wrote it. She says –

To all those who lead monotonous lives, in the hope that they may experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure.

I think that really does sum up The Secret Adversary quite well. As with many other Agatha Christie novels, there are several different editions of the book, all of them in print; there are even some Kindle editions. For a book that was first published more than 95 years ago, it holds up remarkably well.

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To listen to the original podcast review, please click here.

Next week, a different Christie and completely different kind of book: The Labors of Hercules.

"Have His Carcase"

Harriet Vane's holiday plans most certainly hadn't turned out precisely as she had hoped. She had wanted a quiet holiday hiking along the southwestern coast of England. She had wanted some respite from Lord Peter Wimsey's all-too-regular offers of marriage, a union for which she was most certainly not eager, thank you. She wanted, in short, solitude, relaxation and exercise. She had not bargained for her discovery of the body of a man on an isolated stretch of beach. He was lying on the shore, about to be washed away by the incoming tide, with his throat cut, and a single line of footprints - his own - crossing the otherwise pristine sand. Murder? Suicide? (Certainly, it couldn't have been an accident!) But - as she scrambled to take photographs of the body (which was about to wash away with the tide, there being nobody to help bring the body safely back to shore) she wondered what the police would make of the whole thing, once they had been alerted to the problem. As for Lord Peter, he soon turned up and began investigating a most peculiar death with both Harriet and the police. It happens in Have His Carcase, by Dorothy L. Sayers, originally published in 1932. It was the seventh of eleven novels to feature Lord Peter Wimsey and the second to co-star Harriet Vane. This Golden Age mystery is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.

In Have His Carcase, Lord Peter hurries to the town of Wilvercombe when he hears about Harriet’s discovery of the body. The victim turns out to be a gigolo who worked at one of the local hotels as a paid dancing companion. The police are grateful for Harriet’s quick thinking and photographic work, as the body has indeed been washed away by the tides, and it is likely to take at least several days before it can be recovered. It seems to the police to be quite clearly a case of suicide – after all, the evidence shows that the victim was quite alone on the beach, with only that single set of his own footprints. Lord Peter is unsatisfied – there are too many unexplained quirks. Intrigued, he and Harriet begin investigating what turns out to be an enormously complicated case. Along the way, Lord Peter will repeatedly ask Harriet Vane again to marry him. And she will continue to refuse him – at least in this book. Sayers provides an interesting cast of characters and a rather staggering set of complications that must be resolved before a very clever murder plot can be unraveled. And the interplay between Lord Peter and Harriet, a running theme throughout the book, is a wonderful sparring match.

Waiting for Lefties

We're now just a little more than a month away from the start of this year's Left Coast Crime conference, this year entitled "Crime on the Comstock,"  being held this year from March 22 to March 25 in Reno, Nevada. One of the highlights of this conference is the presentation of the Lefty Awards. Conference organizers have just announced the nominees short-listed for these awards; you can find the nominees and other pertinent information at Janet Rudolph's Mystery Fanfare blog.

"The Sunken Sailor"

There really wasn't any reason why Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett and his wife, Emmy, shouldn't go off with friends for a vacation that would be spent learning how to sail. The harbor at Berrybridge Haven was admirably suited for such an expedition. And the holiday certainly started off well. It wasn't until Henry began hearing stories about a most unfortunate accident that resulted in the drowning death of an old sailor named Pete Rawnsley that Henry's professional instincts kicked in. His "nose," as he called his intuition, found too many odd things in the story of Rawnsley's death that pointed to murder. And he'd very soon be proved right. It happens in a book called The Sunken Sailor in the U. K. (and Down Among the Dead Men in the U.S.), a most excellent mystery written in 1961 by Patricia Moyes. It's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you are welcome to listen to the complete review by clicking here.

 I have been hoping for some time that some publisher would bring back the wonderful Henry and Emmy Tibbett mysteries by Patricia Moyes. She wrote 19 of them, all fine mysteries in the best traditions of both classic, plot-oriented mysteries in general, and the Golden Age in particular. Now, Felony & Mayhem Press has begun offering these books in a new edition, making the Tibbett books available to a new generation of readers. The Sunken Sailor was the second book in the series, and it's much about the sport of sailing as it is about murder.

The Tibbetts are invited by friends to join them for two weeks of sailing in the waters off Britain’s east coast. Their headquarters for this vacation is the town of Berrybridge Haven, a picturesque, if tiny, port. Henry only wants to relax and enjoy this rare opportunity to spend time away from the job, and – at first – it certainly seems as if that’s what’s going to happen. But along the way, Henry begins to hear about a still-fairly-recent tragedy – the death of a rather crusty sailor named Pete Rawnsley. Pete died in a kind of freak accident, drowning in just a few inches of water. At least, the coroner, the police, and many of the other sailors who kept their boat at the port agreed that it had been an accident. A few of the locals, though, swapping stories in the local pub which served as a kind of headquarters for the visiting sailor men and women, weren’t convinced that it had been an accident at all.

As Henry Tibbett listened to their stories about Rawnsley’s death, he found himself more and more troubled by the inconsistencies he found in those stories – things which just didn’t add up properly. He didn’t want to investigate – he only wanted to enjoy his vacation. But what Henry called his “nose” told him that there were too many loose ends in that story for it to be true. It certainly seemed that he was hearing a lot of lies from a surprising number of people. And it wasn’t very long before there was another, very similar, death to prove that Henry’s nose was quite right. All of this is woven into a story about the pleasures (and occasional risks) of sailing, as seen through the eyes of Henry and Emmy, a couple of warm and wonderful characters. I am delighted that these books are coming back into print, and I urge you to meet the Tibbetts. They're delightful people, and Henry is a first-rate police detective.

From the Vault: "The Bar on the Seine"

As I look back at more than a decade of these weekly podcast reviews, I find myself surprised sometimes at some of my own choices - the books and authors I choose to feature here or on the Classic Mysteries podcast. One author to whom I feel I should really pay more attention is the Belgian author Georges Simenon, an astoundingly prolific writer. His detective, Inspector Jules Maigret of the Parisian Sûreté, appears in more than six dozen mysteries written between 1931 and 1972. The first Maigret book which I reviewed on the podcast nearly a decade ago was The Bar on the Seine, also known as The Tavern by the Seine or The Two-Penny Bar. According to the Golden Age of Detection Wiki, this book was one of an astonishing eleven Simenon novels published in that same year. At the time when I wrote this review, most of Simenon's novels were out of print in the United States. That's no longer the case - Penguin has been re-publishing the Maigret novels in new (and, from what I've seen, very good) translations, and they are now using The Two-Penny Bar as the title for this one. Here's what I had to say in my original podcast review of The Bar on the Seine, edited to remove my comments about the book's unavailability at the time:

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The year is 1931. It is summertime in Paris, hot enough to melt the asphalt pavement. A determined police inspector must track down the details and the perpetrator of a murder that may have taken place six years earlier – a murder that never came to the attention of the police. How he does this – and what he learns – is told in The Bar on the Seine, by Georges Simenon.

Over the course of a long and prolific career, Georges Simenon wrote 75 novels and 28 short stories about Police Inspector Jules Maigret. He remains enormously popular in France.

The Maigret stories are police procedurals – not the enormously complex, DNA-evidence-laden novels of today. Rather they are stories of Maigret’s thorough investigations, backed by the force and science that a then-still-primitive big-city police department could provide. And, above all else, they are psychological dramas, for Maigret studies his criminal opponents and, very frequently, that study of their psychological makeup will lead him to the perpetrator.

The Bar on the Seine, dating from 1931, is one of the earliest Maigret novels, but it has many of the ingredients that became so familiar over the years. It begins with a touch of that psychology: Maigret is talking to a condemned criminal, who is to be beheaded the next morning for murder. That criminal remarks that he knows of another man whose head should be on the block – a man who got away with murder six years earlier. He will not reveal the man’s name to Maigret, telling him only that he will find the murderer at a bar on the Seine, named La Guinguette à deux sous.

Maigret has never heard of the place. Nor, it quickly develops, has anyone else on the police force. By coincidence, however, Maigret happens to be in a shop and overhears someone talking about La Guinguette à deux sous. He follows the man, a middle-class factory owner, who goes first to an assignation with a mistress, and then on to the bar. It turns out to be in a Parisian suburb, a place used as a weekend escape by a group of middle-class Parisians, all of whom know each other, and all of whom have been going to this bar on weekends and on vacations, for more than six years.

Maigret himself is supposed to be going on vacation, as all of Paris empties out in the heat of summer. Instead, he begins visiting the bar and learning about the customers – and trying, all the while, to figure out if, as he was told, one of these customers was responsible for an as-yet unidentified murder.

There will soon be a death. Curiously enough, though, that is of less interest to Maigret than the mystery about what might have happened six years earlier. It is a riddle that he will put together, painstakingly, piece by piece, until the true story is eventually revealed. Some of the answers will come to Maigret by coincidence and by luck. More will be uncovered by routine detective work – and by his own skillful analysis of the psychology of the people who surround him.

These psychological games are at the heart of many Maigret novels. It has been observed, correctly, I think, that many of Simenon’s books could have been written by Raymond Chandler – although remember, please, that Simenon was writing before Chandler began, and The Bar on the Seine predates any published Chandler by at least a couple of years. But the two shared a love for moral ambiguity and a focus on the psychology of the characters involved. And both, certainly, wrote of the mean streets, often with a compassion that could surprise and move the reader. In Simenon’s novels, Maigret often has enormous sympathy for the criminal – even as he moves to uncover and arrest him. You may want to keep that in mind as you read The Bar on the Seine. It is a short book, one that can easily be read in a couple of hours.

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[POST EDITED to correct Simenon's nationality from French to Belgian. Mes excuses!]

You can listen to the original audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast by clicking here.

Next week: The Secret Adversary, by Agatha Christie.

"Death of Anton"

If you were looking for culprits to blame for the violent death of Anton, the tiger tamer in Joseph Carey's World Famous Circus and Menagerie, there were seven easy and obvious ones: the seven ferocious tigers who shared the spotlight with Anton in their star circus act. Had the tigers finally lost control of their tempers (or, perhaps, had Anton simply lost control of the tigers)? Most of the circus performers and staff, along with most of the public, quite clearly believed in that scenario. Detective-Inspector Minto wasn't so sure; there were too many factors that simply wouldn't fit into such a neat, pat solution. To Minto, it seemed to add up to murder. And there were certainly enough human suspects with potential motives such as blackmail, money and jealousy. You'll find details in Alan Melville's 1936 Golden Age mystery, Death of Anton. It's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.

The British Library continues to discover and bring back before the public's eye any number of fine mysteries from Britain's Golden Age of Detection between the two world wars of the 20th century  as part of its British Library Crime Classics Series. In the U.S., that series is being published by Poisoned Pen Press, who provided me with a copy of Death of Anton for this review.

“There’s more crime going on in Carey’s Circus than in the whole underworld of London, and I happen to know the underworld of London pretty well. I lived in it for three years, and a tamer and more respectable lot of people you couldn’t find.” 

That assessment comes from Dodo the Clown, another of the star acts in Carey's Circus whom we will meet in Death of Anton. Certainly, a great many peculiar things do seem to be going on - there's that affair that one of the trapeze artists is said to be having with Anton, for example, and some intimations of blackmail, not to mention some rather odd things that seem to be happening under cover of darkness at Joseph Carey's motor home late at night, after the shows are over. There is certainly a great deal of tension among these circus stars, and it all culminates in the discovery of Anton lying dead in the cage, amid his ferocious and roaring cats. Those tigers are blamed by most people – including virtually everyone in the circus – for killing Anton. Detective Inspector Minto says no – and soon finds evidence of murder.

That murder is at the center of Death of Anton, but it’s by no means the only crime. Nor is it the only feature that makes the book worthwhile. Author Alan Melville’s real strength is in taking what is a pretty grim story line and lightening it with enough wit and humor to make parts of the book laugh-out-loud funny. It’s not an easy trick to balance laughter with horror, but I think Melville achieved his goal. It’s also worth saying that there are a couple of sudden twists in the story that I, for one, never saw coming – and I like that sort of thing very much. I think you will too. This new British Library edition comes with a fresh new introduction by mystery historian Martin Edwards.

From the Vault: "The Case of the Late Pig"

Margery Allingham, generally considered to be one of the Golden Age's "mystery queens," had the agility to write many different kinds of crime stories, almost all of them featuring her amateur detective character, Albert Campion. Some of her books are out-and-out thrillers, while others are carefully plotted puzzle mysteries. And then there is The Case of the Late Pig which is rather hard to classify, as Mr. Campion investigates the death of a singularly unattractive bully named Pig Peters, whose funeral Campion apparently had attended several months before Peters's death. It's a very short book and it has the distinction of being the only one of the Campion adventures to be narrated by Campion himself. Here's what I had to say about it on the Classic Mysteries podcast nearly a decade ago:

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Very few people seemed to mourn the death of Pig Peters. Perhaps that’s not too surprising, as he was a school bully grown up. Still, the funeral was duly held, Pig was buried, and everyone went home. The situation became a bit more complicated, however, several months later, when someone was murdered in the village of Kepesake. You see, the victim, apparently, was Pig Peters. As very few people really can be said to have died twice, it was something of a problem for Albert Campion, in Margery Allingham’s 1937 novel, The Case of the Late Pig.

We’ve discussed some of Margery Allingham’s golden age detective stories before, but The Case of the Late Pig is different for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is quite short; even though it has been published as a separate book, it is really only a little over novella length – 138 pages in the copy I have been reading. For another point, the story is narrated by Albert Campion himself – and I believe it’s the only one of Allingham’s books or short stories where that happens.

The Case of the Late Pig is an excellent story. While some of the books featuring Campion tend to be more thriller than mystery, this book is very much in the classic puzzle mode. Let’s take a closer look at the plot:

The book begins with Campion reading a newspaper announcement of the funeral of Pig Peters. Campion had been at school with Peters – who was very much a bully in those days. He was sufficiently unpleasant, in fact, for Campion to see no reason to attend the funeral – until he gets a peculiar anonymous letter, which rouses his interest. He goes to the funeral, where he observes a number of people attending, most of whom will play significant roles in the story as it unfolds, and then he returns home.

Nothing else happens – to Campion’s knowledge, at any rate – for the next five months. Then, he receives a phone call from a friend who happens to be the Chief Constable for the area around the town of Kepesake: there has been a fairly nasty murder and Campion’s help is needed. When Campion answers the call, he is taken to view the body and discovers that it appears to be Pig Peters – the man whose funeral he had attended five months earlier.

Campion struggles to figure out what might be happening, and how it could be that the one-time bully (who had been up to some very nasty bullying indeed in Kepesake) should turn up dead twice. He receives more hints in additional anonymous letters. But he realizes that there seems to be no way the murder could have happened – yes, it is an impossible crime story – and that that problem dwarfs the several other difficulties Campion and the police are having as they attempt to unravel the story of the murder – and whatever other crimes may have been going on.

There’s a good deal more, but let it suffice to say that Pig Peters turns out to be a thoroughly despicable character – and yet one whose murder must be solved and his double death explained. And Campion finds that his own life will be very much in jeopardy before he is able to solve the mystery.

As I indicated earlier, Allingham plays quite fairly with the reader, providing clues and even allowing Campion to call attention to some key points, although – as with any good classic mystery – it is up to the reader to interpret the clues correctly. It is also true that, because we are dealing with such a short book, there aren’t all that many possible culprits, and the astute reader may be able to guess the criminal’s identity simply by elimination. But that’s probably an unfair criticism, and it shouldn’t take away from your enjoyment of a fine mystery. That’s especially true as Allingham writes, from Campion’s perspective, with enough light humor to make some really nasty events palatable. For example, here’s Campion’s reaction when he hears of Pig Peters’ death the first time. Campion remembers Peters as the school bully –

Pig Peters was a major evil in our lives at that time. He ranked with injustice, the devil and Latin Prose. When Pig Peters fed the junior study fire with my collection of skeleton leaves I earnestly wished him dead, and, remembering the incident that morning at breakfast, I was mildly surprised to find that I still did.

I enjoy that – it is right in keeping with Campion’s character, and, unfortunately, very much in keeping with that of Pig Peters, too.

The Case of the Late Pig, by Margery Allingham, remains in print, and your favorite book dealer should have no difficulties finding a copy for you.

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You can listen to the original podcast by clicking here.

Next week: The Bar on the Seine (also published as The Two-Penny Bar), by Georges Simenon.

"The Long Arm of the Law"

As we begin a new year of (we hope) fictional murder and mayhem, perhaps a good way to begin would be by saluting the common and uncommon police detective. A lot of policemen get something of a raw deal from mystery authors; many early fictional police detectives were inserted into the plot by their authors merely for the Brilliant Amateur Detective to dismiss as clearly incompetent. Think of Sherlock Holmes's foils such as Lestrade or Gregson, for example, or some of the not-too-bright policemen who express contempt for Hercule Poirot. No, it's high time to recognize another group of fictional police detectives, the ones whose detection skills and observation techniques are more than a match for the hapless criminals they encounter. You'll find several of them in a brand new anthology called The Long Arm of the Law, edited by mystery historian and author, Martin Edwards. 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 Long Arm of the Law comes to us from Poisoned Pen Press, the U.S. publisher of the British Library Crime Classics series, who provided me with an advance copy of the book for this review; it is scheduled to be published in the U.S. this week. Martin Edwards has selected fifteen short stories, originally published between 1908 and 1966, each of which highlights some very smart detective work by the police. Most, though not all, involve murder. There are well-known authors, such as Edgar Wallace, Christianna Brand, Nicholas Blake and Freeman Wills Crofts. There are also authors whose names are new to me, such as Laurence W. Meynell, Gerald Verner and Leonard R. Gribble. As usual with these British Library editions, Martin Edwards has provided an introduction which examines this sub-genre; he also introduces each of the stories, offering some insights into the authors and their work. If you'd like more details about each of the fifteen stories in this collection, please click on the link to the podcast to listen to my summary. The Long Arm of the Law is a first-rate anthology.