Classic Mysteries

"The Case of the Constant Suicides"

Ever since my high school days (practically pre-history, I suppose), I have been an avid fan of the locked room/impossible crime mysteries of John Dickson Carr . During the past several years, I have been frustrated and unhappy over the fact that virtually all of his books have been out of print. And I am beyond delighted that some of his best books are now in print again, with more, apparently, on the way. Which brings me to today's review, on the Classic Mysteries podcast, of Carr's "The Case of the Constant Suicides," a 1941 romp which is surely one of his best, and certainly one of his funniest books. You can listen to the full podcast review here.

"The Case of the Constant Suicides" features two locked-room murders. The primary crime involves the death of a man who falls from his locked and bolted bedroom at the top of a high tower. What happened to make him fall - if he was pushed, how did the murderer get in and out of the room? The second murder - the victim is found hanged inside a locked and bolted cottage - is equally mystifying. Fortunately, Dr. Gideon Fell, who specializes in explaining the impossible, is on hand.

And so is "the Doom of the Campbells," the name given, with excellent reason, to the family whiskey. The drinking scenes in this book have been described as "heroic," which may or may not be accurate. But the scenes - and the comic mayhem which ensues as a result of those drinks - are hilariously funny and well-written. Carr was a master at creating a frightening and eerie atmosphere - but also at using wild and even slapstick humor to leaven the mystery. "The Case of the Constant Suicides" is among the best examples of this. As always, with Carr, the reader is presented with clues to the solution of the seemingly impossible mysteries - if you can spot them.

Once again, I am offering this 1941 masterpiece as an entry in the Vintage Mysteries Reading Challenge at the My Reader's Block blog. Follow the link to see what vintage books others are reading and sharing - there are some excellent lists.

"Ten Thousand Blunt Instruments"

You have to pity the police who were called upon to solve this particular murder at the New York Museum of Natural History. The victim had been murdered with a good old fashioned "blunt instrument" - in a building with ten thousand potential blunt instruments hanging on the walls or otherwise on display. And that's just one of six fascinating stories on display in "Ten Thousand Blunt Instruments and Other Tales of Mystery," by Philip Wylie, a truly fine collection. It's the subject of today's review on our podcast, and you can listen to the full review here.

I remember reading Philip Wylie when I was growing up. He wrote in all different genres - fiction and non-fiction, screenplays, even some poetry. And he also wrote some first-rate mysteries - a fact which, I admit, I didn't know until Crippen & Landru published this terrific collection. Edited by Bill Pronzini, it contains six stories - no series characters here, just some incredibly well-written, suspenseful classic mysteries.

In addition to the title story, "Ten Thousand Blunt Instruments," the others cover a wide range of crimes and settings. For example, in one, "Murder at Galleon Key," a young man finds himself being framed for a murder - and must track down the truth in the midst of a violent hurricane in the Florida Keys. Another, "Death Whispers," is about a newspaper writer, temporarily blind after surgery, who overhears what he thinks is a murder in the next apartment - and finds himself grappling with a murderer he cannot see. "It Couldn't Be Murder" has an ingenious "impossible crime" plot. What all the stories have in common is memorable characters, finely detailed settings, and plenty of clues artfully given to the reader. Bill Pronzini's introduction provides useful and interesting background on a writer who isn't all that well remembered today - and deserves better.

As these stories were written and first published between 1931 and 1944, they qualify as part of the Vintage Mysteries Reading Challenge at the My Reader's Block blog. I hope you've been looking there to see what others are reading - there are some great (and, yes, unfamiliar) choices being made!

Looking Back: "Green for Danger"

The short stories of Christianna Brand reviewed on the podcast this week are excellent. But I have to take this opportunity to recommend Brand's best-known and, quite possibly, best mystery, "Green for Danger."

When I reviewed the book a couple of years back, I said, "This is the kind of book that reminds me why I am so hooked on good, classic mysteries." I stand by that statement today. Written during World War II, it brings Inspector Cockrill to a military hospital to investigate the mysterious death of a patient, who dies during surgery. It appears impossible for it to have been a crime, and there appears to be absolutely no motive. Yet one of the nurses insists it was murder and that she can prove it - and she, in turn, is murdered.

It's a marvelous book. The reader is given plenty of clues - yet I suspect that the final twists and turns in the story will absolutely stun you. I know I was left gasping. Even Inspector Cockrill got some of the key points exactly backwards.

The blurb on my edition of "Green for Danger" quotes mystery writer and critic H. R. F. Keating as calling it "perhaps the last golden crown of the Golden Age detective story." If you've never read it - and even if you've seen the classic 1946 British mystery thriller of the same name starring Alastair Sim as Inspector Cockrill - you owe it to yourself to read "Green for Danger." It appears to be out of print again, but Amazon's booksellers appear to have a variety of inexpensive copies in various editions.

John Dickson Carr on Kindle

This is news to me - and, I suspect, good news for those of us who love traditional mysteries and own an Amazon Kindle. A number of John Dickson Carr's best books are being made available now for the Kindle. That includes two of my absolute favorites. "He Who Whispers," one of the most atmospheric and best written of Carr's  books, is a mystery in which Dr. Fell solves a seemingly impossible murder which may have been committed by a vampire. "The Plague Court Murders," the first mystery featuring Sir Henry Merrivale, is another brilliantly written book, with its eerie atmosphere and impossible locked room crime.

If you haven't read either of those books, I think they are among Carr's finest, and I urge you - if you have a Kindle - to get them and read them. I hope more classic mystery authors will be appearing on Kindle, if they cannot be brought back in regular mass market or trade paperback editions (or even if they can), so that more readers can enjoy them. Frankly, if I didn't already own a Kindle, this could push me into getting one. (Disclosure: if you decide to get a Kindle, and use my link, I get a remarkably small percentage).

Updated to add a hat tip to "Scott" on the Golden Age of Detection mail list on Yahoo, for calling this availability to my attention.

Looking Back: More Crispin

Edmund Crispin, the author of "Holy Disorders," wrote 9 novels and two collections of short stories featuring Oxford professor and eclectic detective Gervase Fen. Crispin was the pen name of Robert Bruce Montgomery, whose primary source of income was as a composer of movie music. Readers old enough to remember the old British movie comedies in the "Carry On" series will have heard Montgomery's music in those movies.

His books are witty, literate and very funny. The humor is frequently a very dark humor indeed, with laugh-out-loud scenes juxtaposed against some of the very real horrors in the books. Too many of his books remain out of print. At the moment, that includes his best-known work, "The Moving Toyshop," although I am hopeful that Felony & Mayhem Press, which has been republishing other Crispins, will get around to this one as well. For now, a number of Amazon's third-party sellers have copies, most of which are fairly expensive but there may be some decent prices at the link.

I have reviewed several Crispins on the podcast, and I will be doing more as we move forward. But if you want what I think is one of the best Crispins, let me recommend "Swan Song." It features the murder of an operatic baritone (and all-around nasty individual), and it combines a fine impossible-crime situation with some very funny backstage antics. Crispin's characters are eccentric, but also quite well drawn, with many sympathetic characters and some really unpleasant villains.

"Holy Disorders"

Today's offering on the Classic Mysteries podcast comes from another Golden Age author who is among my favorites: Edmund Crispin. "Holy Disorders" is about an impossible murder in a church - in fact, as with last week's novel, Catherine Aird's "His Burial Too," it involves a victim who is crushed by a massive piece of stone - in this case, the slab covering a tomb - inside a church, in such a way that it appears to have been impossible for anyone to commit the murder. You can listen to the full review here.

"Holy Disorders" features Crispin's Oxford University professor Gervase Fen as its detective. To call Fen "eccentric" may be a gross underestimation, but the book itself is full of both Crispin's humor - which is superb - and sudden juxtapositions with some very frightening and ugly horrors - which is effective. There is a background of evil here; the person or persons responsible for the crimes are truly chilling. But there is also a lot of very funny material here; if you like the macabre overtones of "black comedy," you'll have no trouble with the book. It's a puzzle-type mystery, and there are pretty good clues scattered throughout, although the identity of the ultimate culprit may surprise you. It was a fine entry in the Fen series, and it is very much worth your time and enjoyment.



"His Burial Too"

Inspector Sloan was not having a good day. There had been a murder - a man very definitely crushed by a huge falling statue inside a locked church tower. The statue was far too massive to have fallen by itself. There was no way it could have been an accident. But when the statue was toppled, it broke into huge chunks of marble which completely blocked the door, so that nobody could get in or out. Yet the victim was alone.

And so we find ourselves with an impossible situation in Catherine Aird's "His Burial Too." It's the subject of this week's review on our Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review here.I have always enjoyed her mysteries. Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan is an excellent investigator, despite the worst efforts of his incompetent assistant, Detective Constable Crosby (known to other members of the force as "the defective constable") and his rather off-the-wall superior, Superintendent Leeyes. This was an early entry in the series - a series which Aird has continued writing. I'm glad that Rue Morgue Press has been reissuing some of her earliest books. They are quite funny, smartly written, with ingenious puzzles and some delightful characters. I mean, impossible crime AND humor - what more could a reader want?

Where to Start with Michael Innes

As I've said in my last post, I find Michael Innes' "The Daffodil Affair" to be thoroughly enjoyable. However, if you have never read anything by Innes, I don't think it's a good place to start. The oddities and eccentricities of the plot and the characters might be a deterrent to your enjoyment, unless you're already familiar with Innes' quirky sense of humor.

As I wrote in a post several months ago, I think there are two other Innes books you should read first. One is "Lament for a Maker," which is a good introduction to his primary series detective, Inspector John Appleby. It's a riveting mystery set in the wilds of the Scottish Highlands. It is beautifully written, with an ending that is likely to leave you breathless. The second book is "The Journeying Boy," which is out-of-series. It's more of a thriller than a straight mystery, and there are some wonderfully surreal episodes in the book, but it's a funny, cleverly-written mystery and very much worth your time.

After these two books, there's a great deal more Innes to explore - including "The Daffodil Affair." It's difficult to go wrong with Innes (though I'm not thrilled by some of his later books featuring Charles Honeybath), and I'll be reviewing more of his books in the months ahead. At the moment, he seems to be in print and readily available - in fact, "Lament for a Maker" even has a Kindle version.

Mission: Impossible

The collection of "impossible crime" stories by Ed Hoch which are featured on this blog this week focus my attention once again on the locked room/impossible crime genre which - to me - are among the most interesting traditional crime stories out there.

In a way, they are all similar to the kinds of tricks used by professional magicians, and it's no surprise that some of the best writers of these stories had some background in stage magic, or at least were thorough in their research of the principles on which most magic tricks are based. The stories also suffer a bit from "is that all there is?" syndrome - when we are shown the secret of the impossible situation, we are disappointed to find that it was all a trick. It's an unfair, but entirely natural, reaction.

If you haven't done much reading of these stories, there are a few authors worth seeking out. The foremost practitioner, of course, was John Dickson Carr (who also wrote as Carter Dickson). I've written about him many times before, particularly about "The Three Coffins," published in the U. K. as "The Hollow Man," which I still think is the finest example of this genre. It's out of print at the moment, but copies are available through mystery bookstores that specialize in second-hand editions.

There are other authors. There's Joseph Commings, whose stories featuring Senator Brooks Banner are all locked-room stories. There was Clyde B. Clason, whose scholarly hero, Lucius Theocritus Westborough, was amazingly adept at solving the unlikeliest of crimes. Another Carr, Glyn Carr, wrote a series of mysteries where the murders took place on mountainsides, outdoor "locked rooms" where the crimes seemed impossible. Many of the books written by Ellery Queen, particularly the early novels, fall into this category as well - in fact, if you can find it, let me recommend "The Lamp of God," a brilliant novella in which an entire building simply disappears overnight. (It was contained in "Ellery Queen Omnibus," as well as other collections.) Happily, there are also modern authors around the world still writing such stories.

I find most of these books to be both challenging and enormously entertaining. If you haven't read many of them, but enjoy other traditional classic mysteries, I suggest you give them a try.

"Diagnosis: Impossible"

Just in time for Election Day, we have a story today about a man stabbed to death - alone inside a voting booth. And then, to add to the fun, we also get an actor apparently strangled by a haunted oak tree. Or how about the man who drives a horse and carriage onto a covered bridge in New England - and never emerges out the other side? Or the railway guard robbed and murdered inside a locked and seemingly inaccessible caboose?

All of these are stories in Edward D. Hoch's marvelous collection, "Diagnosis: Impossible--The Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne." Just as John Dickson Carr was the acknowledged master of the impossible crime/locked room novel, Hoch was certainly the master of the mystery short story, having written some 950 of them over the course of his career. "Diagnosis Impossible" is the subject of today's review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review here. 

There are a dozen stories, all of them featuring Dr. Sam Hawthorne, a small-town Connecticut doctor with a knack for solving seemingly impossible crimes. If you love mysteries that appear to be impossible (but have rational - if occasionally far-fetched - solutions), you will savor these stories by one of the 20th century's finest mystery writers.