Classic Mysteries

"Murder Fantastical"

The Manciple family, gathered at their family home, Cregwell Grange in the English village of Cregwell, is one of those delightful (if rather surreal) collections of colorful eccentrics who may be found in some traditional, plot-and-puzzle driven English mysteries. There is Major George Manciple, the titular head of the family. There is his brother Edwin, the retired Anglican bishop from the African nation of Bugolaland who loves English-style cryptic crosswords, full of puns and odd wordplay clues. There is another brother, Sir Claude, director of the nearby atomic research station. There is Aunt Dora Manciple, 93 years young and not slowing down at all, thank you, even if her hearing aid only whistles. And several more relatives, each with their own oddities and weaknesses. They are a charming family, even if they have next to no money and the house, Cregwell Grange, appears to be on the verge of collapsing around their ears. But could one of them possibly be guilty of murder? That's what Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett of Scotland Yard must determine in Murder Fantastical, a 1967 mystery by Patricia Moyes, featuring Inspector Tibbett, along with one of the finest supporting casts of eccentric characters any reader could wish. 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 problem certainly began when Raymond Mason bought - and moved into - the lodge, on the Manciples' home property of Cregwell Grange. Mason was a bookmaker - that's a bookie, to you American visitors - and he was, not to mince words, a snob, interested in muscling his way into the upper layers of Cregwell society. He wanted to buy Cregwell Grange; the Manciples refused his offers, both reasonable and unreasonable, and Mason was setting up some truly nasty entanglements to force the issue. And then Mason was shot in the back - in the driveway of the Grange. The Chief Constable - another good friend of the Manciples - called in Scotland Yard to avoid the awkwardness of having to investigate close friends for murder. And so Henry Tibbett and his wife, Emmy, arrived in Cregwell. That's when Henry first encounters Major George Manciple sitting in a tree, waving a revolver, saying "bang bang" and trying to recreate the murder scene. As another character, the Chief Constable, observes, "conversation with George Manciple had this distressing effect of dispersing logic, as sunshine disperses fog." It leads to a memorable moment:

As Henry climbed into his car again he was aware of the carefully aimed pistol and the faint cry of ‘Bang, bang!’ from among the branches. He drove the few yards up to the front door in a state of pleasant anticipation. He felt reasonably certain that he was going to enjoy himself.

I’ve been trying – without much success – to figure out how to tell you more about the plot, more about the shooting, more about the Manciples, more about the surprising twists and the witty writing, all without spoilers. I have finally given up. Look, my friends, here’s the situation: you have a shooting. You have a likable and intelligent detective. You have a wildly eccentric family for whom misunderstanding the world around them seems to be a part of everyday life. You have some developments that are so funny that you will find yourself laughing very loudly indeed – and some other elements that will chill you.  Saying much beyond that, I’m afraid, would spoil your reading pleasure. Trust me on this one. Murder Fantastical is well plotted and both very funny and touching. Just read it. Thank you.

 

From the Vault: "The Case of the Constant Suicides"

You would think, with all the attention now being paid to classic-but-forgotten mystery writers from the Golden Age in both the U.K. and U.S., that some enterprising publisher would by now have acquired the rights to re-publish all or at least most of the works of John Dickson Carr (who also wrote as "Carter Dickson"). Unfortunately, it hasn't happened yet, at least not that I can tell. If Carr's name is new to you, he was - and remains, I think - the ultimate master of the locked room/"impossible" crime mystery. For that reason, I thought it might be a good time to raid the vault for the text of my audio review of Carr's brilliant The Case of the Constant Suicides, which ran on the Classic Mysteries podcast about eight years ago. The book is out of print (again), but there do seem to be a few dozen copies out there in the wild, in case you'd like to see why I make such a fuss over Carr's books. As always, there has been some editing, mostly to update information about the book's availability:

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When Angus Campbell fell to his death from his room at the top of a high tower, he left several unanswered questions behind. First among them, certainly, was the question of whether Angus had committed suicide – or had been murdered. If suicide, why would he kill himself and so invalidate his fairly new life insurance policies, thus leaving his family as paupers? But if it was murder, how could it have been committed inside a locked and bolted room? Fortunately for the Campbells, Dr. Gideon Fell, that master at solving impossible crimes, was on hand – and he found himself confronted with more than one impossibility in The Case of the Constant Suicides.

John Dickson Carr was the acknowledged master of the locked room or impossible crime story. Almost all of his books feature crimes – usually murder – that apparently never could have happened – but somehow did. And Carr was scrupulously fair with his readers, giving them every clue they needed to solve his impossible crimes before his detective – if the readers were clever enough to pick up those clues and follow them. It was a game to both Carr and to his readers – the grandest game, he often called it, and it is one of the reasons why he remains one of my favorite authors.

Carr has been out of print for far too long, and I am delighted that the Rue Morgue Press has been reissuing some of his best books. [Note that the RMP is no longer in business, so the books are, once again, out of print. -Ed.] The newest addition to their list is The Case of the Constant Suicides, which has to be one of Carr’s finest books. It was first published in 1941, and it is set in a Britain which has begun blacking its lights out at night, in preparation for what would become the devastating Nazi blitz.

The Case of the Constant Suicides revolves around two young people – rival history professors, in fact – somewhat distant relatives and members of the Campbell family, who are summoned to the family’s castle in the Scottish highlands. The family’s patriarch, old Angus Campbell, has died in a fall from his locked bedroom, located in a virtually inaccessible high tower attached to the castle. If he was murdered, or if it was an accident (which seems highly unlikely), then his heirs will receive the payouts on some insurance policies which he took out shortly before his death.

But if it was murder – as the family believes, for suicide would be most unlike Angus, particularly as he would have known that suicide would mean no money for his heirs – if it was murder, how was it done? Angus was sleeping in his bedroom, which was locked and bolted, at the top of the tower, accessible only by an inner stairway – there was no other way to reach the room. But what happened to Angus’s diary, which disappeared from the bedroom after his death? And what of the empty animal carrier, found latched under his bed, empty? Did it contain some nightmarish creature that killed him by forcing him to leap out of that tower window? What of the later appearance of an apparent ghost in the tower – or another person’s fall from the tower room, under the same circumstances?

And just when we think we may know the answer to that question, there is another death – another man, found hanging inside a locked and bolted cottage.

The man who makes sense out of all these peculiar happenings is Carr’s wonderful character, Dr. Gideon Fell. Physically and mentally, Fell is based on the author G. K. Chesterton, the creator of Father Brown. Dr. Fell is an expert at solving impossible crimes, and he finds himself challenged by the events in this book – although he will eventually reach a solution and even bring about what he will consider a fair and just end to a difficult case.

What all this fails to tell you is that The Case of the Constant Suicides is also a wonderfully, laugh-out-loud funny book. Set in Scotland, the characters find themselves drinking a family whiskey known as the Doom of the Campbells – called that for excellent reason. There are drinking scenes perhaps best described as heroic. Here’s young Alan Campbell – one of our history professors – taking his first taste of the whiskey:

He lifted the glass, drained it, and almost literally reeled.

It did not take the top of his head off, but for a second he thought it was going to. The stuff was strong enough to make a battleship alter its course. The veins of his temples felt bursting; his eyesight dimmed; and he decided that he must be strangling to death.

The description goes on at some length. Be forewarned that, just as the drink itself was amazingly powerful, so too will be the hangover when Alan wakes up the next morning.

There are other brilliantly funny passages – particularly the rivalry and eventual romance between Alan and his second cousin twice removed, the other history professor, Kathryn Campbell. But there is also a marvelously frightening atmospheric quality to the nightmarish events in the book. Carr was always masterful at suggesting unseen and supernatural terrors – that would all, of course, be quite rationally explained at the end of the book.

Enough. It is funny. It is mysterious. It is fair to the reader. It is a delight. The Case of the Constant Suicides is one of John Dickson Carr’s best. It should not be missed.

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To hear the complete recording of the original review, click here.

Next: Death in the Stocks, by Georgette Heyer.

The Twelve Reading Days of Christmas

For the Classic Mysteries blog and podcast this week, may I present all my readers here with a gift: a list of twelve mysteries that may help instill a bit of the Christmas spirit into the stoutest Grinch. I would hope that you'd take your list down to your favorite mystery bookstore, whose staff, I'm sure, would be happy to help you fill your shopping basket with these books. Believe me, those bookstores really can use your support. Another reason for me to celebrate: this is podcast # 600 - give or take a couple of the early ones. We're at about 11 1/2 years of doing the podcast; the blog came a year or so later.

That said, and in an effort to keep the size of this post to a level where it really is readable, let me urge you to listen to today's podcast (#600!!), which contains brief descriptions of each of the twelve books, along with other useful information about the Twelve Reading Days of Christmas. Then, as you wish, please look at the links below. For each book, I have provided a link to my original podcast review. For all but one of them, I have also provided a link to each book's original post on this blog. The exception is Ngaio Marsh's Tied Up in Tinsel, which was reviewed on the podcast before the blog began, meaning I have nowhere to link.

This is being posted about two weeks ahead of the holiday, so I'm hoping many of you will take advantage of the opportunities to add to your collections and to enjoy what I suppose is a more murderous way to greet the season. May we all have something to celebrate during this season.

The twelve books:

1. Agatha Christie, Murder for Christmas   click for podcast     click for blog post

 

2. Rex Stout, "Christmas Party." In And Four to Go.     click for podcast     click for blog post

 

3. Georgette Heyer, Envious Casca     click for podcast     click for blog post

 

4. Nicholas Blake, Thou Shell of Death     click for podcast     click for blog post

 

5. T. Jefferson Farjeon, Mystery in White     click for podcast     click for blog post

 

6. Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet     click for podcast     click for blog post

 

7. Ngaio Marsh, Tied Up in Tinsel     click for podcast     Blog post unavailable. Sorry!

 

8. Charlotte Macleod, Rest You Merry     click for podcast     click for blog post

 

9. Mavis Doriel Hay, The Santa Klaus Murder     click for podcast     click for blog post

 

10. Francis Duncan, Murder for Christmas     click for podcast     click for blog post

 

11. Martin Edwards (ed.), Crimson Snow     click for podcast     click for blog post

 

12. John Mortimer, A Rumpole Christmas     click for podcast     click for blog post

I do hope you'll get the chance to read and enjoy at least a few of these. I'm off to celebrate with the world's friendliest mouse at Disney World. See you next week!

"The Division Bell Mystery"

A murder in Britain's House of Commons! Well, a fictional one anyway, and the parliament, politics and characters involved are all from the first third of the twentieth century. But given the intense battles over politics in the United States this year - some of which, clearly, continue to be fought - it seems very appropriate, at the end of that American political year, to relax a bit with a classic Golden Age mystery about an English murder that seemed to have the potential to bring down the English government. The story may be found in The Division Bell Mystery, a 1932 mystery by Ellen Wilkinson, one of the first women ever to be elected to Parliament. It is the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you are invited to listen to the complete review by clicking here.

The Division Bell Mystery is a political mystery from the Golden Age, being re-published as one of the British Library Crime Classics series. Poisoned Pen Press is publishing the book this week in the United States, and the publisher provided me with a copy for review.

The central character of the book, a young member of parliament named Robert West, serves as what is called the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Home Affairs. It is in that capacity that he is present in the House of Commons one evening, when the members await the sounding of the division bell calling them to scheduled parliamentary votes. But as the bell rings, it is almost drowned out by the sound of a shot. Robert is closest to the door of the small private Parliamentary dining room, Room J, where that shot was fired. When he rushes to the locked door, he finds the body of a very rich – and very important - American financier, a dinner guest of the Home Secretary, shot to death. The victim was alone in the locked room. Was it a suicide? The Scotland Yard police officer in charge is not convinced. And so Robert West, the humble P-P-S, as those low-level and overworked functionaries are called, will find himself – with police blessing – acting as an amateur detective, dealing with a politically charged murder that could cause a financial crisis in London and even bring down the government. Robert was quite used to the arcane practices of the House of Commons – and he would soon find himself dealing – very diplomatically, to be sure! – with some extremely important people, all of whom had secrets to hide.

All of this, of course, makes for a good, lively mystery. To me, the book is also made vastly more interesting because its author, Ellen Wilkinson, drew on her experience as an elected member of parliament and put a great deal of insider knowledge into the book both about the scenes inside Parliament and about some of the politics involved. As usual, mystery historian Martin Edwards provides an introduction, focusing his attention this time on politics in Golden Age detective fiction. There is also a preface, written for this new edition by Rachel Reeves, another elected Member of Parliament. I recommend the book to you very highly indeed.

From the Vault: "His Burial Too"

Let's take a look back today at a really clever "impossible crime" story: someone is killed in a church tower when a giant statue is tipped over and smashed into small pieces. Unfortunately, rubble from the smashup blocks all the entrances and exits - yet, while the victim most definitely could NOT have committed suicide by toppling the statue on himself single-handedly, there is no sign of anyone else in that tower. What caused that enormous statue to fall on its victim? The answer may be found in His Burial Too, written in 1973 by Catherine Aird, one of her "Calleshire Chronicles" featuring Inspector C. D. Sloan of the Calleshire police. Here's my original review from the Classic Mysteries podcast, updated somewhat with availability information:

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One thing was very clear to Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan: the man found dead in the church tower could not have committed suicide. He had been killed when a giant memorial statue was toppled over onto him. The statue was smashed into a lot of smaller pieces, most of which quite effectively blocked the doors and made it impossible for anyone to get in or out of the room. Yet the victim was there, under the statue – and there was nobody else in the tower, nor was there any other way in or out. Inspector Sloan was not happy. Neither was his boss, Superintendent Leeyes, who groaned irritably and said, “Not another of those locked room mysteries, Sloan, I hope.” Unfortunately, that’s exactly what he gets in His Burial Too by Catherine Aird.

The impossible crime at the heart of Catherine Aird’s His Burial Too is really one of the more ingenious plots I’ve read. Consider the problem: a man is found, quite clearly murdered, crushed by a gigantic statue that has been toppled over on him. The statue is massive; there is no way that anyone could have pushed it over single-handedly. Even more conclusively, though, the destruction of the statue has resulted in huge chunks of marble blocking all the doors so that it is impossible to open them – in fact, when the police need to get into the sealed room, a crew of workers must use welding equipment to remove the door from its hinges. So how did the statue get pushed over onto the victim – and how did the killer escape from the room?

The job of answering those questions falls to Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan. He is assisted – although that may be the wrong word – by Detective Constable Crosby, a young man so dense that he is referred to by other officers as “the defective constable.” In all of Catherine Aird’s books about Sloan, the inspector is invariably weighted down with the dubious assistance of Crosby because there simply is nobody else in the small local police department available to work on the case.

Sloan’s problems also extend to the higher-ups in the local constabulary, for his superior, Superintendent Leeyes, is extremely irascible and not particularly helpful, cherishing his own feuds with other police departments and always taking self-improvement classes, which he does not always understand. Aird describes it this way:

The various instruction courses attended by Police Superintendent Leeyes left their scars in a way which would have astonished the highly skilled instructors who lectured at them had they known. Like a sticky snail the Superintendent strewed a trail of imperfectly assimilated concepts behind him: not only did they show where he had been but they were a nuisance to the unwary.

All the same, Inspector Sloan manages to negotiate his way through something of a minefield when dealing with the superintendent – sometimes by reflecting on his own need to preserve his future police pension!

Catherine Aird juggles these elements quite nicely, with a great deal of quiet humor and writing which brings out the conflicts among the characters. As with most of her stories, there are some elements of a police procedural here: Sloan and the other police do their questioning and collect their evidence, discarding false trails as they are discovered. But this is still primarily a puzzle mystery, with that most peculiar locked room problem at its heart. As Sloan realizes, the problem is not only how the murder was accomplished, the question is why it was necessary to go to such elaborate lengths. As with any good mystery, the reader is presented with clues, although I suspect most may be led astray by the assorted false leads. If you enjoy witty mysteries, with intelligent protagonists and believable characters, you are quite likely to savor this book, His Burial Too, by Catherine Aird.

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Since this review was written several years ago, Open Road Media has brought many of Catherine Aird's titles back in e-book formats. There are also print copies, mostly used, I believe, available through your local mystery bookstore or through Amazon's network of second-hand booksellers. I do recommend the book quite highly, particularly if you haven't yet met Sloan and company.

 You can listen to the complete audio review by clicking here.

Next: Holy Disorders, by Edmund Crispin.

 

From the Vault: "Diagnosis: Impossible"

Back we go into the vault again and come out bearing...impossibilities. My favorite kind of traditional mysteries: crimes which simply couldn't have happened - but did happen. Locked rooms, victims surrounded by unbroken fields of snow - I'm sure my visitors here know many examples of these wonderful mysteries. So today, let's look at some stories by a master of the genre, Edward D. Hoch, and his long string of stories starring Dr. Sam Hawthorne, a New England doctor with a real knack for untangling the secrets of impossible-crime stories and revealing those secrets for the illusory magician's tricks that they are. The Dr. Sam stories are gathered now in four good-sized trade paperbacks from Crippen & Landru. The first collection was called Diagnosis: Impossible, the Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, and it was the subject of my audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast all the way back in 2010. Here's what I had to say about it:

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Hi there. Come on in and chat for a while. I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. Dr. Sam has been practicing medicine in a small town in Connecticut for quite a while now. But – much more than that – he’s also helped solve some pretty amazing mysteries while he was going about his business. Amazing – because the crimes all appeared on the surface to be impossible. So sit down, pour yourself a small libation, as Dr. Sam might say, and get ready for Diagnosis Impossible: The Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, by Edward D. Hoch.

Talk about amazing: Edward D. Hoch was a pretty amazing author. Hoch, who passed away in 2008, only wrote a handful of novels in his career. But I think he was unequalled in short stories, turning out some 950 of them in the course of his writing career. He had a number of different series detectives. But our focus today is on one character, Dr. Sam Hawthorne. Hoch wrote dozens of stories about Dr. Sam, all published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine from 1974 until his death in 2008. Every one of them is about an impossible crime – usually murder. In many ways, Hoch was the successor to the 20^th century master of locked room mysteries, John Dickson Carr – in fact, Carr once said of Hoch, "Satan himself would be proud of his ingenuity."

The publishing house of Crippen and Landru has issued a number of anthologies of stories by Hoch. In Diagnosis: Impossible, we are given the first dozen of his stories about Dr. Sam Hawthorne. The stories are all fascinating: in each case, we see a seemingly impossible crime committed. Police are baffled. But Dr. Sam, who is observant and intelligent, is able to figure out what really happened and solve the crime – although he doesn’t always turn the criminal over to the authorities.

What kind of situations are we talking about?

• How about the case of a man driving a horse and carriage into a covered bridge – and never coming out the other side? The driver, horse and carriage all simply disappear.
• How about a politician murdered in full view of witnesses by what appears to be a homicidal ghost who appears, stabs his victim – and vanishes in a puff of smoke.
• Or the kidnapping of a schoolboy who simply disappears from a schoolyard swing.
• Or the captured escape artist who manages to get out of a locked jail cell and out through a locked stairway door without anybody seeing him.
• Or the stunt actor who parachutes into a supposedly haunted oak tree…but is found to have been strangled AFTER he jumped and BEFORE he could get down from the tree.
• Or another politician who is stabbed to death in front of witnesses as he leaves a voting booth – yet there’s no sign of a killer or knife.

Are we having fun yet? I certainly hope so. There are a dozen of these stories, and they all feature some apparently impossible situation. And, yes, there are natural and honest (if sometimes improbable) solutions to all of these problems. As always with such stories, it can be a lot like learning how a magic trick was really done – there’s a tendency on the reader’s part to say, “Is that all there was to it?” That’s an unfair, if quite understandable, reaction, and it should never be strong enough to keep a reader from savoring these remarkable stories.

They’re all set in the Connecticut town of Northmont, where Dr. Sam Hawthorne lives and works. And they are historical mysteries as well as impossible crimes – they’re all set in the 1920s, a time when America was struggling with prohibition, a situation which plays a significant role in several of the stories. Hoch wrote them for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and intended them to be a regular series, as they were. Each story begins with Dr. Sam welcoming his anonymous listener – that would be you – and offering what he calls, in those days of prohibition, "a small libation" of brandy. And each story in this collection ends with a one or two line preview of the next one. It was a good gimmick, which was continued long after the first dozen stories had appeared.

Are the stories fair to the reader? Yes…although we are not always given some of the key clues early enough to draw our own logical conclusions. But we ARE told the facts we need to know. And, frankly, much of the fun in these stories comes from realizing that we are watching a fine magician at work, producing these impossible illusions before our eyes. Diagnosis Impossible is a wonderful introduction to Ed Hoch’s stories about Dr. Sam. I’m looking forward to reading more of them.

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Over the past several years, Crippen & Landru have published three more volumes of Ed Hoch's Dr. Sam stories. You can find links on the Classic Mysteries backlist page (just scroll down to "Hoch" on the list). 

Next: Lady in the Lake, by Raymond Chandler.

"The Case of the Murdered Major"

With the outbreak of World War II, Britain found itself in need of such things as Prisoner of War camps, to house captured enemy fighters, some refugees and interned civilians. So it was that Ludovic Travers, that very successful amateur investigator of major crimes, became Captain Ludovic Travers, the Adjutant Quartermaster (and second in command) of Prisoner of War Camp #54, in the city of Shoreleigh. It wasn't going to be an easy job, and the camp's commandant, Major Percival Stirrop, described as "a bantam of a man, full of quick and self-important nervousness," most certainly wasn't going to make it any easier. A nasty, incompetent officer, a monkey wrench in the efficient mechanism of the camp's operation, the major was a source of immense frustration to Travers and the other officers and men charged with the camp's operation. So perhaps it won't come as much of a surprise to find Major Stirrop dead - murdered, lying in a field of snow unbroken by any other footprints. Fortunately, Scotland Yard sent in a senior officer to help the military with their investigation: Ludovic Travers's old friend, Superintendent George Wharton. He and Captain Travers will have to solve The Case of the Murdered Major, which is the title of the 1941 mystery by Christopher Bush which is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast. You can listen to the complete review by clicking here.

 The Case of the Murdered Major provides the reader with a powerful and exciting view of an England on the verge of war (for it is set just before the war actually begins). Against that backdrop, an impossible murder and the search for a murderer – and quite possibly for senior enemy agents and high-ranking Nazi officials trying to get into England to be ready for the war – makes a fascinating detective story. I must admit I couldn’t put it down – and I was caught off-guard by several of the story’s twists.

Dean Street Press is continuing its project of re-issuing all of Christopher Bush's 63 mysteries that featured Ludovic Travers, and the publisher sent me an e-book version of The Case of the Murdered Major for this review. According to mystery historian Curtis Evans, who provides a very helpful introduction to this book and to the rest of Bush's work as well, this was the first of a trilogy of wartime books which was based on Bush’s own experiences as an administrator of a real prisoner of war camp in England early in the war. It's quite good, and I recommend it to you.

From the Vault: "Envious Casca"

One of the Golden Age (and slightly later) authors whom I feel has been quite unjustly neglected lately is Georgette Heyer. She's still known primarily as a writer of period romances, but she also wrote a dozen classic mysteries, and she wrote them with style and grace. I've reviewed a number of her books on the Classic Mysteries podcast. Here's a review of one of my favorites among her works: Envious Casca. Here's what I had to say about the book, several years back. As always, I've edited a few things, including revising the information about the book's availability nowadays:

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Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing to hold a family reunion over the Christmas holidays? A time when family members and friends get together for a little old-fashioned celebration. Of course, the head of the family is a tyrannical and bad-tempered old man. His brother is a wooly-headed optimist. His nephew matches the old man in personality and temper AND is engaged to a pure gold-digger. His niece is an actress who wants him to pour money into an awful new play by an unknown author. His business partner is engaged in some shady deals. What could possibly go wrong? That’s the situation we find in Envious Casca, by Georgette Heyer.

When we remember Georgette Heyer as an author today, it is primarily for her historical novels and her regency romances, books that are quite charming in their way but hardly mysteries. But Georgette Heyer also wrote a dozen thrillers. Critics and students of Golden Age mysteries differ on the overall quality of the thrillers – but there’s general agreement that one of the best of them is the book Envious Casca, originally published in 1941. It combines some interesting characters with a great deal of humor – and it throws in an excellent locked-room murder as well.

As Envious Casca opens, we meet Joseph Herriard. He’s a former actor, now retired, who has brought his wife to live at Lexham Manor, the country house owned by his older – and much wealthier – brother, Nathaniel. Joseph is an incurable optimist, always eager to see the best in anyone. He has been plotting to bring together a normally hostile collection of relatives and friends for what he is sure will be an old-fashioned family Christmas. Somehow, he succeeds in bringing everyone together and gathering them at the family estate. His hopes for family togetherness, however, are not going to succeed.

Old Nathaniel Herriard, Joseph’s older brother, is a bad-tempered and tyrannical person who probably should never have let his younger brother talk him into inviting everyone to Lexham. His nephew, Stephen, arrives with his young, not very smart gold-digger fiancée. Stephen’s sister, Paula, who is an actress, comes to the party with a young man who has written a new (and pretty awful) play; Paula wants her rich uncle to finance the play. Not likely. Paula and Stephen inherit their uncle’s bad temper, which doesn’t help the overall atmosphere a bit. There is another, more distant, cousin on hand, named Maud Clare. There is old Nathaniel’s business partner, who also seems to quarrel with the old man. And there are a variety of other characters, all of whom appear to be very much at odds with each other. The bottom line, of course, is that virtually everyone present probably could have had a good reason for murder – and, when that murder happens, there are plenty of suspects.

Unfortunately for the police, the murder is one of those impossible crimes – the victim is found stabbed to death inside a locked room, with no weapon in sight. So the police, represented eventually by Scotland Yard detective inspector Hemingway, must not only figure out who killed the victim – but how the crime could have been committed at all.

Now if what I’ve been describing to you sounds like a collection of clichés and stereotypes, you might have a point. But beware. Georgette Heyer may present what seem to be stereotypical characters – but she will then surprise you and present different evidence that can radically change your opinion of those characters and their behavior. The locked room murder is quite ingenious – yet quite fairly solved, and the reader is given a series of hints, many of which are very cleverly hidden in the story.

Heyer is also genuinely funny in a lot of her descriptions, and I found myself laughing out loud at some of it. At one point after the murder, for example, the mother of Stephen’s gold-digging fiancée arrives on the scene to comfort her daughter:

“My little girl mustn’t let her nerves run away with her,” said Mrs. Dean bracingly. “Who could possibly want to murder you, my pet?” A glance at Stephen’s face might have provided her with a possible answer, but happily she did not look in his direction.

I enjoyed Envious Casca. I liked the way the characters developed from the stereotypical country-house-mystery types into very different individuals. I enjoyed the locked room murder, which, as I say, was well- and fairly-clued. And I very much liked the humor. Envious Casca remains available in both print and electronic editions.

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You can listen to the complete audio review by clicking here.

Next: Double for Death, by Rex Stout - NOT a Nero Wolfe story!

"The Hangman's Handyman"

Can you kill someone simply by cursing them?

On this blog, I have written a number of posts in the past about an impossible-crime locked-room mystery called Rim of the Pit, by Hake Talbot. Among mystery readers and critics who enjoy such mysteries, it is considered to be among the best of the best. Its author, Hake Talbot, wrote only two mystery novels, of which Rim of the Pit was the second. I have finally read Talbot's first novel, The Hangman's Handyman, written two years before Rim of the Pit, in 1942, and it is now available from Ramble House publishers and other sources. 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 Hangman's Handyman begins with gambler Rogan Kincaid arriving at a lonely house on a remote island off the Carolina coast known as the Kraken. He is one of the guests at what is supposed to be a dinner party at the home of a casual acquaintance, Jack Frant, who owns the island. Kincaid finds a young woman wandering in the front hall who apparently fainted during dinner and woke up to find herself alone in her room – with no idea what caused her to faint or the whereabouts of the other guests. Bit by bit, she recovers, as those guests begin to reappear, and she soon learns that she fainted out of sheer terror: their host, she says, is dead – killed quite literally by a curse, words spoken by the victim’s half-brother, an English lord in fact named Evan Tethryn. So Rogan hears the story of a family curse, and of how Jack Frant tormented his half-brother Evan, who believed that he, Evan, had the power to cast that curse. Then…well, here’s how another guest at this very peculiar party, Sue Makepeace, describes what happened, as Frant continued to torment his brother about the curse:

“He said…” Sue gulped. “’By God, you’ve asked for it and here it is. Od rot you, Jack! Od rot you!’”

The girl took a deep breath and shuddered. She was silent for so long that Rogan asked, “What happened then?”

“Mr. Frant died.”

Kincaid stared at her. “But surely there must have been something else?”

Evan laughed harshly. “There wasn’t anything else. My brother…'did thereupon fall down and was found to be dead.’”

Rogan had no answer for that. There was none.

 

And the victim's body - in the few hours since all this took place - apparently has almost completely decomposed. Od rot you indeed...

It's quite a story - not as sharp, perhaps, as Rim of the Pit, some loose ends and coincidences and such - but still very much worth reading, packed with atmosphere, with touches of genuine horror and some grim humor. Recommended for lovers of "impossible" crime, nightmarish scenarios, and some very powerful writing.

 

From the Vault: "Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee"

For many years, I have been a fan of Robert Van Gulik's marvelous mysteries featuring Judge Dee, of T'ang Dynasty China. Dee Jen-djieh was, in fact, a real, historic figure who served in the Imperial Court and elsewhere around the latter part of the seventh century. While Van Gulik, a Dutch diplomat and scholar who served in China and elsewhere, wrote all of the later Judge Dee mysteries by himself, he began by translating an existing Chinese manuscript, Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee. I reviewed it on the podcast several years ago. It remains a favorite book. Here's the text of my original review, slightly edited (mostly for time references).

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Those of us who relish good, classic mysteries – and enjoy the occasional foray into exotic settings and historical mysteries – are fortunate to have more than a dozen books by Robert Van Gulik about the exploits of Judge Dee. Judge Dee was a real person who lived in seventh century China. For much of his early career, he was a district magistrate, the most powerful local official in early Chinese society, before moving on later in life to become a leading official at the imperial court. Van Gulik – an orientalist and Dutch diplomat – introduced many western readers to imperial China, with his original novels and short stories about Judge Dee. But he began in 1949 with a truly classic mystery – a Chinese detective story, written in the 18^th century, featuring Judge Dee, which Van Gulik translated for western readers. The book was called Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee.

The traditional Chinese detective story was different in many ways from the kind of mystery that those of us in the west enjoy. In his introduction to Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, Robert Van Gulik notes five primary characteristics that might surprise many readers. First, the criminal is generally revealed at the outset of the book, so that the reader is less concerned with the question of whodunit than how and why the detective catches the culprit. Second, there is often a supernatural element, with the detective aided by ghosts or dreams. Third, there is an excess of details and digressions. Fourth, there is an enormous population of characters. And fifth, there are incredibly detailed and gruesome descriptions of the criminal’s ultimate execution.

Van Gulik picked Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, written by an anonymous Chinese author in the 18^th century, to translate because most of these factors were far less prominent than they were in many other traditional novels. He did take some liberties in his translation, trying to make the book more palatable to western readers – and I think he succeeded admirably.

Judge Dee, as noted earlier, was a historical figure. In this book, he is the magistrate of the district of Chang-ping. The magistrate was the central local authority and civil official in any district, called “the father-and-mother figure” by the people, responsible for everything from maintaining land records to solving crimes. In Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, he is presented with three difficult crimes which must be solved, sometimes at considerable risk to himself. There is the murder of a silk trader, whose body is found lying by the side of a road. There is another murder in a nearby village, which proves both difficult and dangerous to solve. And there is the poisoning of a bride on her wedding night. While the cases are not related to each other, the judge must solve them all nearly simultaneously.

Van Gulik’s introduction provides a great deal of information about the Chinese justice system and how it worked, and the background information is invaluable in making the book readable and enjoyable. While there is a supernatural element involved in the plot, it is far less important in this novel (at least according to Van Gulik) than in many others, as the supernatural guidance tends merely to reinforce the judge’s own observations and deductions. Overall, the book provides a fascinating look inside another culture that few of us can really claim to know well. More to the point, it is an enjoyable mystery. It is fascinating to see how the judge reaches his conclusions and how he manages to solve the crimes and bring them home to the guilty. Van Gulik’s introduction and notes add considerable value to his translation. In those notes after the book, by the way, he observes:

I think that it might be an interesting experiment if one of our modern writers of detective stories would try his hand at composing an ancient Chinese detective story himself.

Apparently nobody took him up on his challenge – so Van Gulik himself went on to write 15 novels and a volume of short stories, all about Judge Dee, all put together along the lines of the Classic Chinese detective story. I find them thoroughly enjoyable, in no small measure for what they reveal about what was, to me, a little known or understood way of life. If you want to see how it all started, try Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, by Robert Van Gulik.

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You can listen to the original podcast review by clicking here.

Next: The Case of the One-Eyed Witness, by Erle Stanley Gardner.