I've said it before: I love authors who can make a fool out of me. Authors who can skillfully mislead me into missing the real clues among the shoals of red herrings. Authors who make me go back through their books after I finish them, in order to find out where those critical clues were hidden. It's all part of what John Dickson Carr used to call "the grandest game," the game between the author and the reader. When played skillfully, there's nothing I prefer to find in a good mystery.
Which brings me to this week's archived "From the Vault" review. Elizabeth Daly's brilliant book, The Book of the Dead, is, in my opinion, a clear victory for the author. Side retired. If you read it - and I do hope that should have been when you read it - you will come to a point where you will find that someone has thoughtfully pulled the rug out from under you and any theories you might have formed about how the story would be resolved. I think it's one of the best examples by ANY author of how to play that game. It was the eighth of Daly's sixteen books, and I think she was absolutely at the top of her form. I explain myself in my original audio review (with minor edits)that appeared several years ago on the Classic Mysteries podcast:
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It is July of 1943. New York City is gripped by a major heat wave. In a large, not-too-uncomfortable room, a middle-aged man looks quite realistically at his fate: he is dying of a swift and incurable disease – leukemia, which was pretty much untreatable in those days. The dying man is attended by another man who appears to be part caretaker and part nurse – and, perhaps, part keeper. He is also attended by a doctor, who knows there is little he can do to keep his patient alive. Soon, the man is transferred to a nearby hospital – and, sure enough, he dies. A sad story, to be sure. But it’s not the end of the story. Not even close. For – within hours of his death – there is the murder of someone who had only casual contact with the dying man. And there is the attempted murder of book expert Henry Gamadge. And therein lies a fairly complex and quite satisfying mystery, in Elizabeth Daly’s The Book of the Dead.
Author Elizabeth Daly has been largely forgotten by mystery readers today – and I think that’s a pity. Her stories, featuring documents expert Henry Gamadge, are marvelous mysteries, among the finest produced during America’s Golden Age of Detection. Daly wrote sixteen books between 1940 and 1951, all featuring Gamadge. He is an expert on books and manuscripts; he is frequently consulted by people who want or need to know if a given document is authentic or a forgery.
In The Book of the Dead, Gamadge is brought into a most peculiar case by a young woman who had befriended that dying man before he moved to New York City. The man had loaned her an old copy of a volume of Shakespeare which included the play, The Tempest. And, scribbled in the book, were some cryptic underlinings and notes in The Tempest. The young woman wants to return the book to the man, and she travels to New York City to do so – but she also visits Gamadge to see if he can figure out the meaning of those mysterious notes in the script for The Tempest.
That is the starting point for what quickly becomes a pretty amazing mystery, with that copy of The Tempest playing a most significant role. I don’t want to tell you very much about the plot because most of the fun comes from the really surprising twists in Daly’s excellent story. Like her contemporaries, the so-called “crime queens” of England’s Golden Age, Daly provided ingenious plots. She also created marvelous characters, and you will come to know the different characters in “The Book of the Dead” quite well – and may be stunned by some of what you learn about them.
It is worth noting that Daly was said to be one of Agatha Christie’s favorite American authors, and I suspect that was because of Daly’s care in setting up her plots. While the reader is not always given all the clues when Gamadge discovers them, Daly is scrupulously fair; the things that are hidden are generally the result either of some expert misdirection or some specific action on Gamadge’s part. In this book, for example, we may be told at one point that Gamadge has written a letter – but we are not told to whom or about what. At another point, we are told, Gamadge goes off to make a series of telephone calls – but, again, we will not be told to whom, or what he learned. On the other hand, in those instances, we might have been able to infer or guess what track Gamadge was following – and what he learns is simply confirmation of theories that he already held. Meanwhile, the reader may be expertly misguided by some excellent red herrings – and there are a number of fine surprises revealed in the ultimate solution to the mystery. The misdirection, I think, is quite fair, and if we are surprised by the revelations (as I think most readers will be), we will have to admit that we were quite legitimately fooled.
I have always enjoyed the Gamadge mysteries. I had never read The Book of the Dead before – I had never been able to find even a used copy – and I am delighted to find it back in print. [Ed.note: also now available in e-book versions.] If you haven’t met Henry Gamadge, by all means please ask your favorite mystery bookseller to introduce you.
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You can listen to the complete audio review by clicking here.
Next: The Columbo Connection, by William Link.
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