Classic Mysteries

Landmark Achieved: Podcast #500

It is more than slightly amazing to me that I am publishing today my 500th weekly podcast on Classic Mysteries. I have been doing these reviews for some 9 1/2 years now. Over the course of those years, I've read and reread a pretty good number of outstanding mysteries. I've learned a great deal about authors I didn't know before I began doing these reviews. And I look forward eagerly to continuing to read and write about mysteries.

There are a lot of people to thank. The Golden Age (and before and after) authors who wrote the books that we enjoy together. The publishers who are bringing back the wrongly-forgotten authors whose books are ripe for republication. My wife, who puts up with me (and my mysteries and my mystery conferences and...). And you, all of you, who keep coming back for more.

Because you do keep coming back, I'm offering something special today here and on the podcast: links to a Baker's Dozen (13) of my favorite mysteries. Please note that these are in alphabetical order by author's last name - there is no "preference of order" implied here. I like and enjoy them all (and could easily have provided a list ten times as long), and my only goal here today is to call your attention to a number of great classic mysteries that I think you would enjoy.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking here to learn a bit more about many of the titles. And - although the links below are to Amazon.com - PLEASE, if you have a favorite book store, especially one dealing in mysteries, buy through them!

The books on my list:

Christiana Brand: Green for Danger

Inspector Cockrill investigates the peculiar death of a patient on the operating table, which is compounded by a separate, stabbing murder. I love it because – just when you think you have figured out what is going on – the author pulls the rug out from under you and leaves you gasping. Well, leaves ME gasping, at any rate.

John Dickson Carr: The Nine Wrong Answers

He’s among my favorite authors. This one is a stand-alone, without either of his primary detectives. It reads like a thriller (which it is), but it’s a lot more than that, and I will promise you: you will reach a point in this book where you will jump out of your chair when you realize how cleverly and smartly you have been deceived.

Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None

It is amazing how much tension Christie is able to build in this stand-alone novel about ten people trapped on a remote island while a killer picks them off one by one. Who is that killer – and will anyone survive?

Edmund Crispin: Swan Song

Personally, I prefer it to his better-known book, The Moving Toyshop. The odious baritone Edwin Shorthouse will be singing the leading role of Hans Sachs in a production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger – or at least that was the plan until someone murdered Shorthouse in his own dressing room – a murder that apparently was impossible. Oxford Professor Gervase Fen investigates in a very clever and very funny mystery 

Elizabeth Daly: The Book of the Dead

Henry Gamadge must figure out why everyone who has seen a particular battered old copy of Shakespeare’s The Tempest seems to become the target of a determined murderer. To my mind, this one rivals The Nine Wrong Answers in terms of its ability to fool the reader completely and send him or her haring off in the wrong direction. Daly is often said to have been Agatha Christie’s favorite American detective novelist. The Book of the Dead goes a long way towards explaining why.

Carter Dickson: The Judas Window

A young man is accused of murder because he and the victim were locked and bolted inside a sealed room. Only Sir Henry Merrivale, defending the accused, seems to know how that crime could have been committed - by using a Judas window. And what might that be? You'll find out...

Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles

The book which – not coincidentally! – first lured me into my life-long love of mysteries. But then, how could you not be gripped by that wonderful description: “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”

Michael Innes: Lament for a Maker

It’s a murder mystery, with an impossible crime – but it’s also a book that builds a great, brooding terror surrounding the death of a mad and miserly Scottish laird who falls to his death from the tower of his castle on a stormy winter’s night. And the surrealistic touches – well, wait until you meet the learned rats of the castle. It’s vintage Innes.

Ellery Queen: "The Lamp of God" in The New Adventures of Ellery Queen

My favorite Ellery Queen story – and it’s a story, rather than a full book, or, rather, a novella. I love impossible crime stories, and this one is truly amazing, dealing – as it does – with the disappearance of an entire house. You’ll find it in a collection called The New Adventures of Ellery Queen.

Rex Stout: The Doorbell Rang

I like all of the Wolfe books – we read them, of course, not for Wolfe’s flashes of genius, but for Archie Goodwin’s narration, his quick wit, and his amazing abilities. The Doorbell Rang is vintage Wolfe – but it’s also less of a murder mystery (though there is one) than it is an absolutely delightful Wolfe-against-the-government book, as the great detective takes on J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI in a high-stakes battle of wits.

Hake Talbot: Rim of the Pit

It’s one of the very few impossible crime books that I’d rate every bit as highly as I rate those of John Dickson Carr. A houseful of people is stranded in their lodge, surrounded by a blizzard – and with someone in their party bent on murder. It has one of the best opening lines of any book: quote “I came up here to make a dead man change his mind.” Unquote. The speaker means that literally by the way.

Arthur Upfield: Man of Two Tribes

It stars Upfield’s brilliant Australian detective, Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte. Bony is called in to find out what happened to a woman who disappeared from a train while crossing Australia’s bleak and barren Nullarbor Plain. He finds a good deal more than he expected, and it will take all his considerable knowledge of how to survive in some of the most hostile circumstances to escape and rejoin civilization.

Robert Van Gulik: Necklace and Calabash

one of the author’s brilliant historical mysteries featuring Judge Dee and set in T’ang Dynasty days nearly 1400 years ago. I think this one may be the most enjoyable and readily accessible to today’s readers, as the judge must help the emperor's favorite daughter, the Third Princess, find a valuable necklace that is the center of court intrigue, as he also solves a gruesome murder and another mysterious disappearance.

Some of these books are a little hard to find - the ones by John Dickson Carr/Carter Dickson, in particular - but the links should help, if your favorite bookdealer can't find what you need. Again, the podcast has a little more detail about most of these books, and I hope you'll listen to it! 

Comments are welcome! 

"Furious Old Women"

Mrs. Bobbin's fury might be easily explained. The 71-year-old Mrs. Bobbin had just lost her older sister, Millicent, to violence - apparently murdered in the course of a robbery. Mrs. Bobbin thought that explanation was nonsense; her sister, she believed, was murdered in the course of a vicious fight with another angry old woman, Grazia Vaillant, over the rituals that should be observed in the local Church of England. Millicent Griggs was staunchly Low Church and Miss Vaillant was just as strongly High Church, and the vicar, Mr. Waddell, did not always find it easy to keep the peace between the two. Both had well-deserved reputations for both anger and nastiness. In fact, that anger is at the heart of the mystery presented in Furious Old Women, a 1960 mystery and biting satire by Leo Bruce. It's the topic of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the entire review by clicking here.

There are, in fact, a surprising number of nasty and furious - sometimes comically so - old women living in the village of Gladhurst, along with a variety of English village "types." It is the death of Mrs. Bobbin’s older sister Millicent Griggs, that brings matters to a head. Her body is found in a new and open grave that had been dug for a Mr. Chilling, a shopkeeper in the village. She has, apparently, been hit on the head and the body appears to have been robbed of both money and jewelry. Mrs. Bobbin having little faith in the local police – a lack of faith which seems, over the course of the book, to be quite justifiable – she asks independent amateur sleuth Carolus Deene to lend a hand.

The more we see of the people in the village, the more evident it becomes that the original explanation of the death is wrong (even if the police don’t want to acknowledge the fact). The reader will follow along with Carolus Deene as he investigates the death – and the other complications which soon evolve – and will quite probably be as surprised as I was by the twists and turns along the way.

Furious Old Women, by Leo Bruce, is worth finding and reading. One warning, however: the book is available both as a paperback and as an e-book. If you have an e-reader, go for the e-book – the paperback edition is not at all well bound, and the book is likely to crack and fall apart as you try to open the pages enough to read. It’s a problem, obviously, that doesn’t extend to the e-book, so I’d recommend you read it in that format.

- 0 -

Rich Westwood, who blogs at the Past Offences blog, has been collecting reviews this month of books published in 1960. As Furious Old Women was published in that year, I'm submitting the review to Past Offences as well. You might check out the 1960 sign-up page for a lot of additional mysteries published that year!

 

- 0 -

Rich Westwood, who blogs at the Past Offences blog, has been collecting reviews this month of books published in 1960. As Furious Old Women was published in that year, I'm submitting the review to Past Offences as well. You might check out the 1960 sign-up page for a lot of additional mysteries published that year!

From the Vault: "The Moving Finger"

Our "From the Vault" feature last week was a fine Agatha Christie novel starring her Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, he of the "little grey cells." This week, let's turn to another of Christie's finest creations, Miss Jane Marple, spinster - and student of human nature. Her grasp of village psychology leads her to solve mysteries which have baffled the police. One of her best appearances, I think, is in The Moving Finger. Here, slightly edited as always, is how I reviewed that book nearly ten years ago:

- 0 -

There’s a good reason why anonymous notes are often called “poisoned-pen” letters. These messages are hateful – and sometimes the recipients can’t handle the accusations, even when untrue. That can have tragic results – and the police may ultimately need some help tracking down the letter writers. That’s where Miss Jane Marple comes in.

 Of Agatha Christie’s series detectives, I think my favorite is Miss Marple. As I’ve noted before, I find Hercule Poirot can be a bit smug, and when his annoyingly idiotic friend Hastings is around, the combination is usually insufferable. Miss Marple, however, though she has friends and admirers in the police force, usually doesn’t suffer the same intrusions from sidekicks, and she is usually quite low-key about her role in solving the most difficult mysteries.

I think The Moving Finger is among Christie’s best works, and it is interesting to note that Miss Marple, while she does solve the mystery, does so as almost a figure on the sidelines. She doesn’t even appear in the book until two-thirds of the way through the story. But – as is so often the case in these stories – her expertise at village life and her knowledge of how ordinary people are likely to behave make her the perfect detective to solve this mystery.

The Moving Finger was written in 1942, during the darkest days of World War II. It is narrated by a young man, a flyer who crashed during the war, and who is now trying to regain his health in a small and quiet English village. Small and quiet English villages, of course, are usually anything but small and quiet in such mysteries. And our narrator, Jerry Burton, and his sister, Joanna, soon find there is a great deal going on in the village of Lymstock.

There are the anonymous poison pen letters which are being sent to a lot of the villagers. They contain the usual kind of garbage found in such letters – lots of accusations of sexual misconduct and the like. While Jerry is inclined, at first, to simply ignore the letters, he soon finds that they are being received, and talked about, all over the village. While he is quick to dismiss the charges in the letters as nonsense, he discovers that a great many of the village gossips – and there are a lot of them indeed – tend to believe the old adage, “where there’s smoke there’s fire.”

Soon, the letters drive one woman to suicide. And that puts the letters in a new light – for it means that the author, when discovered, can no longer claim it was all a harmless joke. And that makes the whole affair more dangerous for everyone. Soon, there is a murder. And the police are baffled about who might be behind the letter-writing campaign.

It takes an expert to solve the case – and that expert is Miss Marple, invited to do so by the wife of the local vicar. Near the end of the book, after Miss Marple has exposed the letter-writer and killer, the vicar’s wife says of her guest:

“Look at her well. I tell you, that woman knows more about the different kinds of human wickedness than anyone I’ve ever known.”

“I don’t think you should put it quite like that, dear,” murmured Miss Marple.

“But you do.”

“One sees a good deal of human nature living in a village all the year around,” said Miss Marple placidly.

That’s what I meant when I talked about Miss Marple’s low-key approach to solving cases of this sort. She sits in the background and knits and is often ignored – but all the time, she is listening and her insights into village life and human weakness lead her to finding the right solution which has eluded other investigators.

There are also a couple of love stories woven into the mix here, as both our narrator and his sister find potential mates in the village. The characters are quite well developed here, and few fit into the all-too-frequent stereotypes of village life.

Agatha Christie is said to have considered The Moving Finger among her favorite stories. I think that’s quite justified. For once, she plays scrupulously fair with her readers. All the clues are there – in fact, the narrator frequently calls attention to points at which, he says, he should have been able to figure out what was happening and who was responsible for it. But these clues, of course, are well concealed, with a great many red herrings dragged across the trail, and the solution, when revealed, may come as a surprise.

Most of Agatha Christie’s novels happily remain in print, and The Moving Finger should be easily available through your favorite book dealer or mystery bookstore. I recommend it strongly. I think it’s one of the best Miss Marple stories, even though, as I say, she remains on the sidelines for much of the book. I think the characters are generally quite likeable and sympathetic, and the use of a single narrator throughout works quite well.

 - 0 -

If you'd like to listen to the original podcast, just click here.

Next week, one of my favorite holiday mysteries, Tied Up in Tinsel, by Ngaio Marsh.

The Nero and the BONA 2016

The Nero Wolfe Award for the best American mystery novel for 2016 goes to David C. Taylor for Night Life, the first novel in a series of historical mysteries set in New York City in 1954. You can learn more about the winner by clicking here. The Nero is presented each year by the Wolfe Pack to a novel written in the tradition of Rex Stout's stories about Nero Wolfe, and it must have been published originally in the United States during the year preceding the award - 2015, in this case.

Also announced this evening: the winner of the Black Orchid Novella Award, or BONA, which this year goes to author Steve Liskow for his novella, "Look What They've Done to My Song, Ma." He's the first author ever to win the BONA a second time; his first win came in 2009. This year's winner will be published in a forthcoming issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, which co-sponsos the award with the Wolfe Pack, the New York - based association of fans of Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe.

Both awards were presented at the Wolfe Pack's annual Black Orchid Banquet, held each year to honor the birth anniversary of Rex Stout. Congratulations to both winners!

Congratulations to Dru Ann (and Other Award Winners!)

I'm delighted and excited to announce that the Mystery Writers of America have selected my friend and fellow-blogger Dru Ann to receive the 2017 Raven Award, presented for "outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside the realm of creative writing." Dru is the proprietor, organizer and driving force behind her blog called Dru's Book Musings. Her blog goes well beyond her reviews of many mysteries in many sub-genres; her Facebook page is also a spot you might want to visit regularly. You'll find a permanent link to her blog on the Mysterious Blogroll on the lower right side of this page. She's also a regular at most of the mystery conferences I attend, and you'll never get a more cheerful greeting from anyone - or find a harder worker. Congratulations!

The MWA (which certainly tries to live up to its slogan, "Crime Does Not Pay...Enough") has also announced that two of its prestigious Grand Master Awards will be presented in 2017 to authors Max Allan Collins and Ellen Hart for their "important contributions to this genre, as well as for a body of work that is both significant and of consistent high quality." The organization will also present its Ellery Queen Award, for "outstanding writing teams and outstanding people in the mystery-publishing industry," to Neil Nyren, EVP, Associate Publisher and Editor in Chief at Putnam. The list of authors he's published over the years includes an incredible number of the stars of the mystery, thriller and related non-fiction fields, from Ace Atkins to General Tony Zinni.

The winners will be presented their awards at the MWA's annual Edgar Awards banquet in New York next Spring. Congratulations and much respect to all.

 

UPDATED to correct the award to 2017 (not 1917). Typing while tired. Thanks to Gary Curtis for the catch. Grr.

From the Vault: "Killer Dolphin"

Ngaio Marsh is regarded by many readers as being one of the Golden Age "Mystery Queens," whose books helped to popularize the genre. It's worth noting, however, that many of her books were, in fact, written and published long after the end of the Golden Age (if you accept the general guidelines saying the age roughly coincided with the years between the two world wars of the twentieth century). One of my favorites, reviewed during the first weeks of the Classic Mysteries podcast more than nine years ago, was Killer Dolphin, which was published in 1967. Here's a slightly edited version of my review:

- 0 -

A very theatrical murder – in more ways than one – and the theft of a priceless Shakespearean relic form the centerpiece of Killer Dolphin, by Ngaio Marsh.

Welcome to Classic Mysteries, a program of reviews of fine mystery novels worth reading and rereading. I’m Les Blatt.

Ngaio Marsh was a New Zealander, with a long and distinguished reputation in her home country for her work as a producer and director in the theater, particularly for her outstanding productions of Shakespearean plays. Outside New Zealand, however, she is far better known as one of the outstanding mystery authors of the 20^th century.

Between 1934 and 1982, she wrote 32 novels and a number of short stories featuring Scotland Yard detective Roderick Alleyn. Most of the novels are set in England, although in a few of them Alleyn does his detecting in New Zealand. More than a few of her novels have a theatrical background reflecting her professional and personal passion for the theater.

One of them – and a favorite of mine – is the novel Killer Dolphin. That was the American title; the British title, a bit less sensational perhaps, was Death at the Dolphin. It is a strange story. A young playwright visits the bombed-out shell of the Dolphin Theater, a casualty of the German bombing of London during World War Two. The young man accidentally falls through a hole in the stage into a pit filled with water. His life is saved by the intervention of a mysterious man, who turns out to be a fabulously rich businessman. The businessman ultimately buys the Dolphin and hires the playwright to help restore it and to write a play for its reopening. If that seems like unusual behavior, you’re quite right – but there are very good reasons for it, which will not be revealed until the very end of the novel.

There is another thread here: the businessman reveals that he is in possession of a child’s glove – one which apparently was made by Shakespeare’s father for Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, whose early death was one of the great tragedies in the playwright’s life. It is, of course, enormously valuable – not just for its monetary worth, but also as an inspiration for our young author, who decides to use the glove as the centerpiece of his play for the reopening of the Dolphin.

But there is a great deal more going on here. The theatrical company assembled to produce the play has more than its share of internal jealousies and disputes. Soon, there is a murder, another member of the cast is badly injured and the priceless glove is stolen.

Enter our detective, Roderick Alleyn, a detective whom I admire wholeheartedly. Over the years and the course of 32 novels, Alleyn ages quite gracefully and grows in rank and wisdom. He is a man with a deep appreciation of art and culture, a “gentleman,” in the British sense of that term. His wife, whom he meets, courts and marries over the course of several novels, is a noted and talented painter – for Marsh was also deeply interested in the fine arts.

Unlike many other fictional detectives of the Golden Age, Alleyn was a Scotland Yard man, with all the resources of the official police services at his disposal. Alleyn and his assistants begin to investigate the crime or crimes. Marsh generally does provide readers with the same clues seen by Alleyn – but she is less fanatical about producing a fair play puzzle for the reader than some other period authors. That’s all right. A great deal of Killer Dolphin – the actions and the motives – are rooted in her characters, who are, for the most part, rounded and believable, not just two-dimensional cutouts. Marsh puts her knowledge of theater, and theatrical tradition, to work here shaping a mystery (more than one, actually) that grows out of the very credible behavior of a troupe of actors and backstage people, not to mention the mysterious businessman who becomes so deeply involved in the story.

Her writing is delicious, and she often throws in a phrase or two that will delight and entice the reader. For example, in describing a party held in the theater for the actors and others involved with this show, she says:

“When he returned to the foyer it was to find that the party had attained its apogee. Its component bodies had almost all reached points farthest removed from their normal behaviour. Everybody was now obliged to scream if he or she wished to be heard and almost everybody would have been glad to sit down.”

That’s a fine description – I have been at an awful lot of gatherings precisely like that, and I suspect that you quite probably have as well.

Or the arrival of Alleyn at the theater after the murder and theft have been discovered. Marsh says:

“The constable had opened the pass-door in the main entrance and now admitted Superintendent Alleyn in the nearest he ever got to a filthy temper.”

Or a few pages later, Alleyn remarks that the press is “in full lurk” outside the theater – a marvelous way to describe it, some 40 years before celebrity journalism’s pursuit of Paris Hilton.

- 0 -

Killer Dolphin is a well written, carefully crafted novel that just happens to be a tightly constructed mystery as well. The theatrical background is fascinating, the murder and other unpleasantries are well conceived and the characters are memorable. The book is in print, from Felony & Mayhem Press, and ought to be readily available through your favorite mystery book dealer.

If you would like to listen to the original podcast, click here.

Next week, The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett.

From the Vault: "Lament for a Maker"

Another of my all-time favorite mysteries, beautifully written by Michael Innes, the third in his series of novels featuring Scotland Yard's John Appleby. Here's a slightly edited version of my original podcast review from 2007.

- 0 -

In a remote castle, deep in the Scottish highlands, strange things are happening. The laird of the castle, widely detested as a miser,  roams the hallways of his castle, reciting a 500-year old Scottish poem, while plotting…what? The laird will soon die – but was it suicide, or accident, or murder? There, in a nutshell, you have the central problem of the novel Lament for a Maker, by Michael Innes.

To tell the story of the strange death of the laird of Erchany castle, Ranald Guthrie, Innes uses a series of narrators, each of whom reveals a portion of the story. The result is a narrative written in a variety of styles, which peels away the mysteries of the events in the novel very much like peeling the layers of an onion. Just when you (and the characters) think you finally understand what has really happened, there will be a plot twist that will take your breath away.

The events, surely, have a Gothic flavor about them. In addition to our early glimpses of the laird, stalking through the halls of his freezing castle, reciting verses from William Dunbar’s early 16^th century poem, "Lament for the Makers,” we are shown the very odd composition of the household at the castle. In addition to the laird, we have his ward, a young woman whose presence there will only be fully explained when we reach the end of the novel. We have his two main servants, the apparently villainous butler, Hardcastle, and his wife. There is also what was called in those days a sub-normal lad who takes care of the manual chores outside the castle. And there are the rats – legions of rats, and they will play a very significant role in the story as well.

As I say, it sounds rather like the stock characters of a Gothic novel, but there is a great deal going on here that will not be fully understood until the end of the book. The various narrators will explain the action – and do so in some of the best prose you are likely to encounter in any mystery.  It is to Michael Innes’s credit that he provides each narrator with a different and appropriate voice. From the Scottish shoemaker Ewan Bell, whose narratives will open and close the book, you will get Scottish dialect – and a familiarity with some Scottish vocabulary will be helpful here; think Robert Louis Stevenson and Kidnapped. From an English traveler who happens on the scene, you get a flippant commentary on the events he observes. From the detective, John Appleby, you get a more clinical view of the investigation. And so on.

Throughout, Innes uses language (and Dunbar's powerful poem) to captivate you and draw you into his story. Near the beginning of Ewan Bell's narrative, he is describing the reaction in the village of Kinkaid when the news comes down from the remote castle that the laird has died in very strange circumstances. We have been told that Guthrie was “near” – that is, a miser, apparently pathological, a man who scoured the local scarecrows to see if anyone might have left a penny in the scarecrows’ pockets – and the laird’s servant Hardcastle is widely considered to be as bad or worse. Here is what Ewan Bell has to say:

“When the word got round Kinkeig that Guthrie had done himself a fatal mischief, there were many that were right glad and a few that were sorry. The many were glad, hoping surely for a better laird. But the few with a spark of imagination were sorry, for to them, the pity came that Guthrie had not thought to take the coarse creature Hardcastle with him, to do his pinching and screwing for him when he was set-up – as syne he’d be sure to be – among the propertied souls in hell."

You’ll find a fair amount of humor like that – sometimes a very dark humor – in the telling of the story. Each narrator approaches it a little differently, and most manage to find at least a little humor to relieve the situation. For instance, that English traveler, who is stranded near the castle when his car breaks down, describes Mrs. Hardcastle this way:

“And isn’t she a beauty? No doubt, Hardcastle, who can’t be more than fifty, took her for the sake of her old-age pension – or perhaps she made a little fortune as the Bearded Lady in a circus. If these appear brutal remarks, think of a fine gentleman-like Renaissance poet having a good go at describing a witch; that will serve for the rest.”

As you read the book, you will be rather grateful for these humorous asides, for there is little to laugh at in the central mystery itself. As with any such "impossible crime" novel, you must be willing to suspend disbelief – to avoid saying, “that couldn’t possibly have happened.” It’s fiction, after all, and we make allowances. But the action is fast and furious. The case is “solved” – in fact, it is solved several times over – but each solution in turn is destroyed by further revelations, and the ultimate unraveling of the story is deeply shocking and poignant, even as it is satisfying. 

Of all the Michael Innes novels, I have always preferred the ones featuring Appleby, although I do think that some of the later books are more than a little forced. Innes had the sense to allow Appleby to grow and mature from novel to novel; he is a young Scotland Yard detective inspector in Lament for a Maker, while, by the end of his career, he had retired from his position in charge of Scotland Yard’s criminal division.

But I don’t think Innes ever quite matched the intensity or brilliance of Lament for a Maker. The use of the different narrators, reflecting different viewpoints and interests, is extremely effective. The story moves along and carries us with it to a largely unexpected and extremely satisfying conclusion. I cannot urge you strongly enough to get and read this book.

- 0 -

If you would like to hear the original podcast review, you may listen by clicking here.

Next week: Necklace and Calabash, a Judge Dee mystery by Robert Van Gulik.

From the Vault: "The Nine Tailors"

When I am asked - as happens with some regularity - which of Dorothy L. Sayers's novels about Lord Peter Wimsey is my favorite, I never hesitate to answer: it is The Nine Tailors. First published in 1934, it features a beautifully tied-together mystery plot combining a whodunit with an even more powerful howdunit and fully-realized characters, all set against a background of bell-ringing. It was the very first book that I reviewed on the Classic Mysteries podcast. Here's a slightly edited version of what I said at the time:

- 0 -

The body of an unknown man is discovered in an English churchyard. How did he die? And who killed him? This is the central mystery in one of the finest mystery novels ever written, Dorothy Sayers’s The Nine Tailors.

The phrase, "the nine tailors,” has nothing to do with the making of clothes. The word “tailors” here is a corruption of “tellers.” It refers to the nine teller strokes sounded by a church bell to mark the death of a man.

The Nine Tailors is very much a book about bell-ringing – in particular the form of the art, so well-developed in England, known as “change ringing.” In change ringing, the object is not to play a tune on the bells, as is done with a carillon. Instead, it is to ring the “changes,” sounding the bells one after another in a constantly changing, but mathematically predictable order.

And the bells of the church in Sayers’ setting, the town of Fenchurch St. Paul, are central characters in the book, with individual personalities and their own individual names. So before I tell you more about the mystery, let’s talk about Sayers as a writer.

As with many of the English writers of the Golden Age, Sayers use of language is nothing short of breathtaking. She assumed that her readers were intelligent, educated people – which could lead to some irritating traits, such as her habit of assuming that references to Shakespearean or Jonsonian verse, for example, would be instantly recognized without having to be identified further for the reader. But in The Nine Tailors, her writing is particularly beautiful and moving.

Let me quote one of my favorite passages, from quite early in the book. The bells of the church are about to be sounded in a special "peal" on New Years Eve – it will take nine hours for the eight bell ringers to ring this peal, beginning with a midnight service in the church to mark the new year. Listen to Sayers's descriptions of the bells ringing out, listen to her name the eight bells, as the great deep voice of the tenor bell, Tailor Paul, leads the way. Here is what she wrote:

The eight men advanced to their stations, and Hezekiah consulted his watch.

Time, he said.

He spat upon his hands, grasped the sallie of Tailor Paul, and gently swung the great bell over the balance.

Toll-toll-toll; and a pause; toll-toll-toll; and a pause; toll-toll-toll; the nine tailors, or teller-strokes, that mark the passing of a man. The year is dead; toll him out with twelve strokes more, one for every passing month. Then silence. Then, from the faint, sweet tubular chimes of the clock overhead, the four quarters and the twelve strokes of midnight. The ringers grasped their ropes.

Go!

The bells gave tongue: Gaude, Sabaoth, John, Jericho, Jubilee, Dimity, Batty Thomas and Tailor Paul, rioting and exulting high up in the dark tower, wide mouths rising and falling, brazen tongues clamouring, huge wheels turning to the dance of the leaping ropes.

Every bell in her place, striking tuneably, hunting up, hunting down, dodging, snapping, laying her blows behind, making her thirds and fourths, working down to lead the dance again. Out over the flat, white wastes of fen, over the spear-straight, steel-dark dykes, and the wind-bent, groaning poplar trees, bursting from the snow-choked louvers of the belfry, whirled away southward and westward in gusty blasts of clamour to the sleeping counties went the music of the bells – little Gaude, silver Sabaoth, strong John and Jericho, glad Jubilee, sweet Dimity and old Batty Thomas, with great Tailor Paul bawling and striding like a giant in the midst of them. Up and down went the shadows of the ringers upon the walls, up and down went the scarlet sallies flickering roofwards and floorwards, and up and down, hunting in their courses, went the bells of Fenchurch St. Paul.

[That struck me, when I recorded this nearly ten years ago, as a fairly amazing and moving piece of writing. My opinion hasn't changed.] That is quite typical of the kind of writing Sayers could produce. She was one of the first women ever to earn a degree from Oxford University. Her novels, featuring her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, are mysteries, but they are most literate mysteries.

And the mystery here is a very good one. Wimsey, his car having broken down in the snow, stranding him in Fenchurch St. Paul, takes part in that great bell ringing extravaganza on New Years Eve. Some months later, he is called back to Fenchurch St. Paul: the body of an unknown man has turned up buried in someone else’s grave. The man must have been murdered, probably around the new year – but he appears to be unknown to anyone, and even an autopsy yields no indication of how he died. Wimsey sets out to discover how – and who – and why.

The story is beautifully and ingeniously developed, and the bells again play a major part in it. There is some humor – and some tragedy as well. Not for Sayers the pure puzzle mystery – there were always fully-realized, rounded characters in her novels, and while we enjoy their triumphs, we share their hurts as well.

- 0 -

From time to time, I meet other readers of mysteries who don't care for The Nine Tailors. I mention this as a matter of fairness to you; I hope you will get - and enjoy - this book, but in honesty, it may not be everyone's cup of tea. It certainly is mine. The puzzle - the murder of that unknown man, and how it was done - is brilliantly told. I can't recommend it highly enough.

 If you want to listen to the original podcast, you may do so by clicking here.

Next week: Lament for a Maker, by Michael Innes.

From the Vault: "Swan Song"

Richard Wagner's great romantic opera, Die Meistersinger, is one of the absolute gems of the opera house. As with most Wagnerian operas, it tends to be a very long performance, making tremendous demands on the singers (and on the comfort of the audience). It seems both unfortunate and inappropriate, then, to find the star of one Meistersinger production murdered - and murdered under seemingly impossible circumstances. That's what happens, however, in Swan Song, by Edmund Crispin. When I first reviewed the book nearly a decade ago, I said that it was my favorite among Crispin's mysteries. I see no reason to change my mind on that point. Here's some of what I said about the book in my original review:

- 0 -

Edmund Crispin was the pen name of Bruce Montgomery, a prolific composer of movie scores and an accomplished organist and choirmaster, according to Wikipedia. Music plays a significant role in at least a couple of Crispin’s crime novels, and it is central to the plot of “Swan Song.” A particularly nasty baritone, scheduled to sing the lead role of Hans Sachs in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger is found dead, hanging from a rope in his dressing room. Was it suicide? It certainly appears impossible for anyone to have murdered him – yet an autopsy reveals a large quantity of a sleep-inducing drug in the body, and there are signs that the singer’s hands and feet had been tied.

Nobody can be said to be grieving over the singer’s death – in fact, the singer’s brother, when notified, sends a telegram back to the authorities, reading:

“Delighted. Hoping for this for months. Suicide eh query. Don’t bother me now.”

But the police, quite obviously, cannot simply ignore what has happened.

Assisting with the investigation – at least, he would argue that he was assisting and not hindering it  – is Crispin’s detective character, Gervase Fen, a professor of English literature at Oxford University. Fen is a close friend of the chief constable, and, as such, tends to get involved in such criminal goings-on as may occur. Eventually, there will be a second murder and a reasonable amount of mayhem before the mystery is solved.

To my mind, what makes this story stand out – and, for that matter, makes Crispin’s work stand out overall – is the author’s sense of humor. He has a fine touch for the ridiculous. This is sometimes overdone, and it is often incongruous to laugh through a particularly funny passage only to have it turn into something quite unpleasant and bizarre before the end. 

But in “Swan Song,” there is a balance between the humor and the unpleasant events of the book. And Crispin’s writing style, to me, is quite winning. From time to time he steps outside the so-called “fourth wall” to speak directly to the reader – this is a book, he seems to be saying, and there’s no reason to pretend it’s not. He also has a wonderful touch for bringing out the important aspects of his characters’ personalities. At the beginning of the book, two of the major characters get married, and go on their honeymoon. Crispin ends that first chapter this way:

“They stood on their balcony gazing across the water, now amethyst-coloured in the fading light. ‘How nice,’ said Elizabeth judicially, ‘to have all the pleasures of living in sin without any of the disadvantages.”

That is more than just a very well-phrased line; it tells you something of Elizabeth’s character. And that line – together with the telegram quoted earlier – gives a fair flavor of the strain of humor that runs throughout this novel.

Swan Song is extremely fair: the reader is given all the clues – although quite often in ways designed to drag a red herring across the correct path to a solution. For example, shortly after the singer’s death is discovered, we hear the evidence of the night watchman in the theater, a man named Furbelow, whose open door allowed him to see the doorway of the singer’s dressing room, where the body was discovered. The police inspector tells Fen, speaking of Furbelow, “It’s on his evidence, so far as I can see, that the verdict for suicide must depend.” At that point, Crispin inserts a footnote, which reads, simply, “The reader may like to know, at this point, that Furbelow’s evidence was in fact correct in every particular.”

This is playing fair with the audience. This is telling the reader, pay attention to what you are being told, because it will be shown to be quite literally correct. It is the kind of challenge that no true mystery buff can resist.

What we are presented with is another example of the so-called impossible crime, with a witness situated to swear that nobody could have entered or left the singer’s dressing room between the time the singer was last seen alive and the discovery of his body. And yet we are given the clues needed to determine what really happened – if we can interpret them.

It is this sense of fair play, together with the decidedly quirky humor and the good writing, that makes Swan Song very much worth your while.

- 0 -

Swan Song is available in paper directly from the Felony & Mayhem Press; it's also available in electronic formats. There also seem to be a fair number of inexpensive used copies on the market. I think you'll enjoy it very much.

Next week: The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy L. Sayers

From the Vault: "The Doorbell Rang"

Regular visitors to this blog know that Rex Stout is one of my favorite authors. I love the books, featuring the sedentary genius, Nero Wolfe, and his right-hand assistant, Archie Goodwin; a check of the blog's backlist page will show that I've reviewed a great many of those novels and novella collections over the past decade. One of the first ones to be reviewed here was The Doorbell Rang, and it remains one of my all-time favorites. In it, Wolfe and Archie take on J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Here's what I had to say about it in my original podcast review.

- 0 -

The year was 1965. The American public, for the most part, still had a deep respect bordering on hero-worship for the FBI. While public attitudes were starting to change, it was still very much the agency of, say, “The Untouchables,” the 1959 TV series about Elliot Ness and a heroic group of agents who took on gangster Al Capone. The director of the agency was J. Edgar Hoover, and, at the time, he was still very much an untouchable, even if questions were beginning to be asked about the bureau’s methods and Hoover’s autocratic style.

But he was no untouchable to Rex Stout. And certainly not to Stout’s detective character, Nero Wolfe, who took on Hoover’s FBI in the delightful mystery, The Doorbell Rang.

Here’s the situation: a very wealthy woman comes to Wolfe’s office on West 35^th Street in New York. She has read an unflattering book about the FBI, and has bought 10 thousand copies of it and sent them to friends, government officials, and others whom she believed should read the book. As a result, she says, she has been harassed by the FBI. She believes they have tapped her telephone, spied on her movements, and generally made her life miserable. She wants to hire Wolfe to stop the FBI.

It takes some persuading. Neither Wolfe nor his assistant, Archie Goodwin, is a fool. They know that if they do get involved, the FBI will shift its harassment to them. They could wind up losing their licenses as private detectives.

But Wolfe’s ego – and Archie’s too – make them accept the case, even though Wolfe doesn’t have any immediate answer to the question: how do you persuade the entire FBI organization – not to mention its boss – to stop doing what they won’t even admit they are doing.

But Archie Goodwin can put it much better than I can. When Wolfe tells Archie that he has decided to take the case – and asks Archie for his opinion – here’s how Archie answers him:

"I would say that you should sell the house and contents and go live in a nursing home, since you’re obviously cracked. Unless you intend to gyp her, just sit on it?"

"No."

"Then you’re cracked. You’ve read that book. We couldn’t even get started. The idea would be to work it so you could say to the FBI, ‘Lay off,’ and make it stick. Nuts. Merely raising a stink wouldn’t do it. They would have to be actually cornered, the whole damn outfit. Out on a limb.”

But Wolfe decides to do it – as he says, “I will not return that check for one hundred thousand dollars because I am afraid of a bully. My self-esteem won’t let me.”

And so battle is joined. Wolfe comes up with a plan, all right, and it’s one of the most delightful, daring and ingenious charades he has ever created. Along the way to finding an answer to his problem, he solves a murder which the New York City police have, in effect, been told by the FBI not to solve. It’s not often that Wolfe finds his old nemesis, New York City homicide detective Inspector Cramer, cheering him on…but that’s one of the many odd developments in this case.

By the way, the unflattering book about the FBI which acts as the centerpiece for this novel was a very real book – The FBI Nobody Knows, by Fred J. Cook, an investigative journalist who had published a series of articles in “The Nation” unflattering to both Hoover and the FBI. Rex Stout quite clearly admired the book, and The Doorbell Rang was his reaction to it.

- 0 -

As I said, there IS a murder in the book, but - to be honest - that's treated as almost a side issue. The book is really about that clash between the FBI and Nero Wolfe - and how Wolfe goes about earning his fee. I have additional quotes and information in the original podcast, which you can listen to by clicking here.

Next week: Swan Song, by Edmund Crispin.