Classic Mysteries

"Foreign Bodies"

Not all classic crime stories come to us from the English-speaking world. Here's an unusual collection of short stories, all of which would probably qualify as "classics" in their original language, from the British Library, a publisher who has been a leading enthusiast for the revival of Golden Age crime fiction from the 20th century. The new anthology is called Foreign Bodies, edited by Martin Edwards, and it's the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast. Poisoned Pen Press, which publishes the British Library Crime Classics series in the United States, provided me with a copy for this review. You can listen to the complete review by clicking here.

These days, a fair number of authors who write crime fiction in other languages have become very popular with readers who meet them in books translated from their original languages. We have enjoyed, and become accustomed to,  Scandinavian noir, Italian police procedurals, French and Japanese impossible crime stories, and so much more. Now, the British Library, in its Crime Classics series, has given us a collection of short stories to serve as a sampler to give modern readers a taste of mostly twentieth century authors, many of whom may be new to them, at least as mystery writers. Editor Martin Edwards has chosen fifteen short stories arranged more-or-less in chronological order, from the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov's story, "The Swedish Match," written near the end of the 19th century, to "The Puzzle of the Broken Watch," a 1960 story by the Mexican author, Maria Elvira Bermúdez. The reader will find an enjoyable and tantalizing display of some fine crime fiction that, for the most part, echoes many of the traditions of the English-language Golden Age stories we all enjoy. 

Among the ones I enjoyed most:

Maurice Leblanc, the French author who created gentleman thief and rogue Arsène Lupin presents one of his stories, “Footprints in the Snow,” an impossible crime story that demonstrates that a situation that seems impossible on its surface may appear quite different when it is approached in another way.

A Dutch author using the pen name of “Ivans” gives us “The Return of Lord Kingwood,” and the story of an art theft that grew quickly into a murder – and its surprising solution.

A Belgian author who wrote as John Flanders, gives us a horrifying little story called, simply, “Kippers.” A warning: if you enjoy those tasty little herrings, you may want to pass on this one.

Another rather horrifying, but quite ingenious, story comes from the Japanese author, Koga Saburo. It is called “The Spider,” and I would have to say it contains what I’m sure is – quite fortunately – a very unusual method of murder.

There are nearly a dozen more, by authors from France, Bengal, the Netherlands, Hungary, Germany, Japan and more. A lot of different sub-genres are represented, including both horror and noir. Foreign Bodies provides an entertaining and enticing invitation to explore crime fiction more widely - and serves as a reminder of its enduring popularity around the world, whatever the original language may be.

"Somebody at the Door"

Councillor Henry Grayling was not a particularly nice or pleasant person. He was building his own little empire of sorts from his home in the London suburb of Croxburn. He was also something of a prig when it came to other people's morality. He was quick to see malice or illegality or both among the people around him and just as quick to take offense at anything and everything. He was heartily disliked by almost everyone who knew him. The question facing Inspector Holly of the local police, however, would be: did any of those people dislike him enough for that dislike to become a motive for murder? It's the central issue in another Golden Age mystery by Raymond Postgate, originally published in 1943, called Somebody at the Door. 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. It's another of the British Library Crime Classics series of classic Golden Age mysteries written by authors who have pretty well been forgotten in the half century or more since their work was popular and published. This new edition of Somebody at the Door is being published in the U.S. this week. by Poisoned Pen Press, which made an advance copy available for this review. 

Councillor Grayling had taken his usual train home to Croxburn that Friday evening. He was carrying a fair quantity of cash in an attaché case, planning to use the cash to pay salaries to the staffs of the offices where he worked. It was wartime. The trains were crowded - jam-packed, actually - and with the wartime blackout under way, there was virtually no light anywhere once he got off the train. He vanished in the night. And that is all we know of Councillor Grayling until his wife called the doctor: could he please come over at once? The councilor had arrived home quite late and in very bad shape – in fact, when she had opened the door, her husband had fallen inside, unable to stand, covered in blood, obviously sick, and without that attaché case or its contents. He appeared, in fact, as she told the doctor, to be dying. And that is exactly what happened very shortly afterwards.  

Inspector Holly quickly determines that not only did Grayling have a real knack for making enemies - he also had had the ill-fortune of riding home in that overcrowded train car with many of those enemies. Inspector Holly soon finds himself focusing on those fellow-passengers. The author uses an interesting technique in dealing with that investigation: the focus is primarily on flashbacks from many of these characters (and others), looking into the backgrounds of each suspect in turn. Some of the stories are quite grim as we examine each one's relations with Grayling, the sources of their grievances against him and the often devastating consequences for all involved. It's an effective technique, helping the reader find a way to a logical, if painful, solution to the mystery. Along the way, we get a picture of the tribulations of English life during the bombing raids of the Second World War.

The British Library Crime Classics edition features an introduction by mystery writer and historian, Martin Edwards. Somebody at the Door is worthy of a place on your To Be Read list.

From the Vault: "Cat of Many Tails"

Regular visitors to this blog and listeners to the podcast will know that - as a general rule - I am not a fan of books about serial killers. I don't care for books that delve into the personalities and psychoses of such killers. There are exceptions to this rule (as there are to all such rules): there are a few, a very few, books that I like about multiple murders committed by a single person, whether for an obsession or for some other reason. Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders fits into that category. So does Ellery Queen's marvelous and very definitely "noir" Cat of Many Tails, from 1949, with its searing picture of New York City at its worst, with apparently random murders taking place in the midst of one of those dreadful New York heat waves (no insult meant, Phoenix readers - it's really more the humidity). Here's what I had to say a decade ago, when I reviewed Cat of Many Tails on the Classic Mysteries podcast, somewhat edited - mostly to update and correct information about the book's availability. If you haven't already done so, this is a book you really should read.

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On a hot evening in New York City, back in the late 1940s, a man was murdered in his apartment – strangled with a silk cord. Police said there were no clues. A few weeks later, there was another murder…and another. The city began to move towards panic, as it realized a serial killer, who left no clues, appeared to be on the loose. They called the killer “The cat.” The story of how the cat was finally exposed is told in Ellery Queen’s Cat of Many Tails.

There are multiple Ellery Queens. There’s the author – actually two cousins, Frederick Dannay and Manfred Lee. And there is Ellery Queen the detective character featured in the Queen novels. (I’ll try to make it clear as I go along which one I’m referring to at any given time.)

Earlier in this series, I reviewed the very first Ellery Queen novel, The Roman Hat Mystery. The early Ellery Queen books were fine examples of the “play-fair” school of mystery writing – the reader was given every clue when the detective got it; there was even a “challenge to the reader” late in the book, where the reader was given the chance to beat the detective to the correct solution.

Later Queen novels, though, are better developed in terms of plot and character, and I think Cat of Many Tails is one of his best. We are shown the city of New York in a panic over the series of murders – every week or two, another person, apparently chosen at random, is found strangled, with a silk cord around his or her neck.

Ellery Queen – the detective – becomes involved in the case after the fifth killing, at the direct and urgent request not only of his father, Police Inspector Richard Queen, but the police commissioner and the mayor. Ellery believes that there MUST be some connection among the different victims – and that if he can figure out what the connection is, he will be able to solve the murders and put the cat out of business.

In this, of course, he is correct. But for those who like puzzles, be aware that it is only by chance that Ellery stumbles across the connection, which points him to the killer.

Or does it? Like many other Queen novels of the period, Ellery’s role is fairly ambiguous – and he makes a huge mistake in his reasoning, a mistake which – he argues – led to the deaths of two more people.

The book is fascinating. Serial killers were pretty rare in those days – in fact, the term itself wasn’t coined until much later; Ellery refers to a “multiple murderer” instead. And it is one of the few instances from that period where a major author tried to come up with a plot involving such a killer. In Cat of Many Tails, the murderer really is suffering from a psychosis, and the final exposition of what really happened takes place in a conversation between Ellery Queen and a psychiatrist in Switzerland. Earlier – after a couple of additional murders – another psychiatrist tells him:

"[we] have...seven persons dying by the same hand who have no inter-identity or contiguity. What does this mean in practical terms? A series of apparently indiscriminate acts of violence. To the trained mind, this spells psychosis. I say ‘apparently’ indiscriminate, by the way, because the conduct of the psychotic appears unmotivated only when judged in the perspective of reality – that is, by more or less healthy minds viewing the world as it is. The psychotic has his motivations, but they proceed from distorted views of reality and falsification of facts."

It is a grim book, but – I think – it is quite a satisfying one.

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Cat of Many Tails is out of print, but it is available as an e-book from MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Media, and there are a fair number of second-hand copies around. Your favorite mystery bookseller should be able to find a reasonably-priced copy for you.

You can listen to the original podcast by clicking here.

Next week: The Body in the Library, by Agatha Christie.

"Verdict of Twelve"

A woman is on trial for her life, charged with the murder of her young nephew. The ultimate decision about her fate will rest in the hands of ten men and two women, the members of the British jury who will try her. But will they base their decision solely on the facts presented in evidence? Or will each of the jurors bring his or her own prejudices and life experiences to the jury deliberations - and what will be the effect on their verdict? That's the question posed in a powerful mystery novel by Raymond Postgate called Verdict of Twelve. Originally published in 1940, Verdict of Twelve is being re-published as part of the British Library Crime Classics series. Poisoned Pen Press will be releasing the book early in October, and the publisher has made an advanced reading copy available to me for this review. The book is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.

Verdict of Twelve will focus our attention on the individual members of the jury. Postgate spends more than a third of the book with the stories of each juror's life experiences - and you should be forewarned that some of the stories are quite harrowing. But all of those experiences, from the trivial to the life-changing, have a significant impact on the viewpoints that each of the jurors brings to the trial and to their deliberations. Many of these jurors come from the lower classes within English society (circa 1940), and the stories of their lives may shock you. If you have heard the expression, “the banality of evil,” you are likely to find disturbing examples in some of the histories of the assembled jurors.

After meeting the jurors, we are told the story of the crime itself – the deteriorating relationship between a young boy (who has a violent temper and perhaps a touch of madness) and his aunt, the woman accused of murder. Again, the focus here is on the characters – not only those of the woman and the boy, but also of the two servants in their house, the over-the-hill doctor who so clearly should no longer be practicing medicine, and other witnesses to what certainly appears to have been the murder of a child.

And then, after the witnesses are heard in court and the jurors retire to the jury room to consider their verdict, we are shown how they do so – and we learn their decision and the reasons why they decide the case as they do. Will they convict the accused? Will justice be done? Read Verdict of Twelve by Raymond Postgate to find out. It is a powerful book, very highly regarded by many critics - with considerable justification. Once again, mystery historian Martin Edwards provides a thoughtful introduction. The U. S. publication date is October 3, but it is available now for pre-order and also available now in the U.K. I recommend it highly indeed.

 

From the Vault: "Nothing Can Rescue Me"

In 1940, when the literate and literary detective Henry Gamadge first appeared in print, his author, Elizabeth Daly, was more than 60 years old. Over the course of the next decade, she wrote 16 novels featuring Gamadge, and the books she wrote are highly literate (there's that word again!), intelligent, well-plotted and filled with twists and surprises. With her novels back in print, she will (I hope) be pcked up and read by a new generation of mystery lovers. This week's return from the vault is Daly's Nothing Can Rescue Me, presented here in a slightly cleaned-up-and-edited version of my original audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast:

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It began with what seemed at the time to be nothing more than a series of vicious practical jokes, in the form of phrases added to a typewritten manuscript. It ended in murder and madness. And it took the insight of rare book consultant Henry Gamadge to uncover the passions that led to so much trouble, in Elizabeth Daly’s Nothing Can Rescue Me.

 I admit to having a weakness for this too-often-neglected author, and I’m delighted to see that some of her books are being republished. According to mystery historian Dilys Wynn, Daly was Agatha Christie’s favorite writer. I have seen that challenged, but, as I say, I have a weakness for these books. Henry Gamadge, the expert on rare books and autographs who is at the center of these mysteries, is a literate and intelligent detective.

On the other hand, as Gamadge would undoubtedly admit, his actions in Nothing Can Rescue Me are insufficient to prevent a couple of murders. Gamadge is approached by an old school friend, Sylvanus Hutter, who is worried about some strange events taking place at the friend’s family home in upstate New York. The home, where Hutter and his sister Florence live, is also the residence of a number of friends, more distant family members, and general hangers-on. Florence Hutter has been writing a novel – but somebody has been frightening her by typing some additional lines into her manuscript – lines which can easily be interpreted as threats.

Gamadge recognizes the additional lines as being literary quotations – and he is surprised that nobody in the Hutter household seems to have noticed. Before his investigation can go very far, however, there is a murder – and there will be at least one more killing before the mystery is solved.

A great deal of the problem lies in determining a motive for the killings and for the other peculiar events. There are tie-ins, as well, to the kind of spiritualism that was quite popular in some American and English circles during the first half of the 20^th century. At least one of the residents insists that evil spirits are behind the events that have shaken the Hutter family. Gamadge is no believer, however, in malevolent spirits – he sees a human hand at work.

As with most of Daly’s books, Nothing Can Rescue Me is what is generally called a bibliomystery – that is, a mystery based on literary or bookish allusions. Gamadge is passionate about his books, and quite well versed in them, and that is one of the reasons he can be quite sure that the goings-on are of human, not spirit, origin.

Unfortunately, the audience isn’t always given the same clues that the detective receives. We are shown most of the relevant clues – enough to enable us to deduce some of the solution. But the one final clue, the one that will point to the killer most conclusively, is withheld from the reader until Gamadge makes his final deduction and public accusation – and I think that’s a flaw in an otherwise well-constructed mystery.

I might add that Gamadge also finds himself unable to save the lives of the murder victims – the people he tried to protect by becoming involved in the case. That does seem to be the case in a number of Daly’s other mysteries as well.

But on the whole I think that “Nothing Can Rescue Me” is very much worth your investigation. It is fairly benign – that is, there is very limited violence (beyond the obvious violence of the murders), and the book presents a fine portrait of an old-fashioned and upper-income family during the early years of World War Two. Gamadge is a charming and literate detective, and I find it most entertaining to watch him at work. Thanks to the Felony & Mayhem Press, Nothing Can Rescue Me is back in print – as are a number of Daly’s other books – and your mystery bookseller should be able to find it for you quite easily.

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To listen to the original podcast, please click here.

Next week: Cat of Many Tails, by Ellery Queen.

From the Vault: "The Big Sleep"

Last week, we shared one of my early podcast audio reviews, focusing on Dashiell Hammett's book The Thin Man. Hammett is generally regarded as one of the leading proponents of the "hard-boiled" school of American mystery fiction. This week, I want to share another of my early reviews dealing with another of the leaders of that school - Raymond Chandler, whose books about private eye Philip Marlowe helped to promote the hard-boiled mystery into its prominent position in crime fiction. Here, again somewhat edited, is what I had to say about Chandler's first book, The Big Sleep, originally published in 1939:

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Start with murder. Mix in some pornography and a double helping of blackmail. Add a mysterious disappearance. Season with an elderly millionaire and his psychotic daughters. Now stir in some gangsters and some illegal gambling. Carefully add several additional murders. Finally, mix in one hard-boiled, but sensitive, American private eye. You have the recipe for The Big Sleep, the first Philip Marlowe novel written by Raymond Chandler.

You can’t really have a conversation about the American mystery novel without talking about Raymond Chandler. Just like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, Chandler’s creation of Philip Marlowe really defined the American, hard-boiled school of mystery writing. Unlike many of the great puzzle mysteries we associate with the Golden Age, the hard-boiled novels were filled with action – the reader, like the detective, barely having time to catch a breath before another murder or some other event propelled the plot still further along.

Chandler’s first novel was The Big Sleep. The plot is enormously convoluted. I’ve lost count of the total number of murders, but I’m not alone – even Chandler himself, famously, observed once that he didn’t have any idea who really killed one of the victims or if it might have been suicide. It’s that kind of plot.

Basically, private eye Philip Marlowe is hired by an elderly and very rich man, a retired general, to try to deal with an extortionist, who apparently has some IOU’s signed by the general’s younger daughter. We quickly discover that the daughter is also a nymphomaniac and a drug addict, and a blackmailer manages to take a nude photo of her. The blackmailer is murdered, and we’re off and running. Characters come and go with dizzying speed. We meet the general’s other daughter, whose husband apparently ran off with another man’s wife about a month earlier. She’s also a gambler, deeply involved with a gangster and a number of other unsavory types.

I’m not going to try to lay out much more of the plot, because, as I say, it is remarkably complicated – and, to be honest, it’s only part of what makes The Big Sleep a classic. Chandler was a fine writer, and both his descriptions and his dialogue are snappy and memorable.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

Early on, for instance, when Marlowe meets the general’s older daughter, her maid walks into the room. Here’s how she is described:

A maid came into the room by a side door. She was a middle-aged woman with a long yellow gentle face, a long nose, no chin, large wet eyes. She looked like a nice old horse that had been turned out to pasture after long service.

That’s a remarkably economical way to introduce us to a minor character.

Or listen to this description of a woman clerk in a bookstore, where Marlowe has discovered something strange is going on and confronts the clerk:

I thought she was going to fall on her nose. Her whole body shivered and her face fell apart like a bride’s pie crust. She put it together again slowly, as if lifting a great weight, by sheer will power. The smile came back, with a couple of corners badly bent.

And the dialogue is memorable. One of my favorite lines comes when Marlowe is in trouble – tied up in a remote house, guarded by a woman he’s been searching for, waiting for a hit man named Canino to come back…he tells her:

"You know what Canino will do – beat my teeth out and then kick me in the stomach for mumbling."

Or, on another occasion, having just kissed the general’s older daughter, he tells her,

“Kissing is nice, but your father didn’t hire me to sleep with you.”

It all adds up to the quintessential American hard-boiled detective story. Chandler wrote a number of other books about Philip Marlowe, but The Big Sleep remains my favorite.

Fans of old movies may remember the movie version of The Big Sleep, made by the American director Howard Hawks and released in 1946. It starred Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as the general’s older daughter. The screenplay authors included William Faulkner, but a great deal of the dialogue comes straight from the book. The plot had some changes – we’re talking about 1946, and the movie censors would never have approved of some of the nudity, the discussion of pornography and the rough language which are essential to the book. In fact, the ending of the movie was changed, wrapping things up far more neatly than the book does – although that one murder I mentioned earlier is as unsolved in the movie as it was in the book.

I have said before that I’m not a great fan of hard-boiled detective stories, but Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett are the exceptions to that rule – maybe because, in a lot of ways, they were the originators of the form. If you haven’t read The Big Sleep, I recommend it to you.

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

Next week, Busman's Honeymoon, by Dorothy L. Sayers

From the Vault: "The Thin Man"

For a man who wrote fewer than a half-dozen novels (and a lot more short stories) in his career, Dashiell Hammett has had an oversized influence on the development of the American detective story - by which I mean the hard-boiled, private investigator or - in this case - amateur detective story. Hammett's creation of Nick Charles - and, perhaps even more so, his addition of Nora Charles (not to mention the couple's dog, Asta," remain very firmly fixed in the mystery-reading public's eye, despite having appeared in just a single novel. I suppose that goes to show the power of the movies in popularizing a character. In any case, here's what I had to say about The Thin Man some nine years ago - as usual, edited slightly.

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A chance encounter in a New York City prohibition launches Nick and Nora Charles into the middle of a murder case involving a disappearing scientist, his strange family and acquaintances, and his mistress. That’s the basic plot of Dashiell Hammett’s novel, The Thin Man.

I don’t know if you have to be of a certain age to really enjoy The Thin Man. I suspect not – I’m certainly not old enough to remember Prohibition, and the speakeasies which flourished in New York City, particularly along 52^nd Street. Many of them later became flourishing legitimate night clubs. But Prohibition – and the easygoing, two-fisted speakeasy culture – are at the heart of The Thin Man.

Right from the beginning of the book – when Nick Charles, who is both the central character and narrator, tells us, “I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over to me. She was small and blonde, and whether you looked at her face or at her body in powder-blue sports clothes, the result was satisfactory.”

And off we go. The girl turns out to be the daughter of a man whom Nick Charles knew. Nick used to be a private detective, but he married Nora – a very wealthy woman – and now, er, manages her business interests. As we will see, he also drinks a great deal. Alcohol pretty well floods this novel – just about everybody drinks, here in the middle of Prohibition, with the only regrets likely to come on the morning after.

At any rate, the girl whom we have just met tells Nick that she’s looking for her father, who seems to have vanished. Nick – soon joined by both Nora and their dog, Asta – is sympathetic, but tries not to get involved.

No such luck. Very soon, we learn that the missing man’s mistress has been murdered. Everybody – including the police – seems to believe that Nick knows a great deal more about both the disappearance and the murder than he is telling. And – with Nora’s encouragement - he soon finds himself forced into the center of the case. There are more murders and a fair amount of double-dealing, not to mention some excellent plot twists, before the full story is revealed and Nick is able to turn over the true culprit to the police.

The Thin Man is vintage Hammett, a good, hard-boiled detective story, with a fair amount of humor. The book became the basis, first for a movie based on the novel itself, and then a series of movies using the Nick and Nora Charles characters in new plots. Curiously, The Thin Man, which was Hammett’s last novel, never really spawned any sequels in print, at least during Hammett's lifetime, although he did some work on the movies as well.

If you’re familiar with the characters from any of the old “Thin Man” movies, or from the TV series which aired for a couple of seasons back in the 1950s, there are a couple of points to keep in mind. First, the movies, with their light, witty and sophisticated dialog, are a lot lighter than the book itself, which has the usual very dark undertones and events that we would expect in a Hammett novel. For example, near the end of the book, when Nick is explaining what happened, Nora gets impatient with his explanation of what had happened, and reminds him that it’s all just a theory – that the criminal was supposed to be considered innocent until proven guilty. Nick responds this way:

"That’s for juries, not detectives. You find the guy you think did the murder and you slam him in the can and let everybody know you think he’s guilty and put his picture all over newspapers, and the District Attorney builds up the best theory he can on what information you’ve got and meanwhile you pick up additional details here and there, and people who recognize his picture in the paper – as well as people who’d think he was innocent if you hadn’t arrested him – come in and tell you things about him and presently you’ve got him sitting on the electric chair."

Now that’s not exactly light dialog, and it’s fairly typical of the thought processes that we see and hear from Nick during the course of the book. There’s also a fair amount of physical violence – the police in this novel seem predisposed to slap suspects around first and ask questions later, and I suspect strongly that today’s police would find the portrayal pretty objectionable. But this is a hard-boiled novel, not nearly as much the suave, sophisticated comedy-mystery that we know from the Thin Man movies.

One final point: although the movies kept reusing the words “Thin Man” in the title – After the Thin Man, Shadow of the Thin Man, and so forth – and make it clear that they are referring to Nick Charles – Nick wasn’t the thin man. The thin man was the disappearing scientist who is the elusive subject of Nick’s search in the novel.

But The Thin Man is very much worth reading. Nick and Nora Charles are rich, sophisticated, and glamorous – and they solve murders. What more could you ask? And, as Dashiell Hammett’s last novel, The Thin Man deserves a place on your reading list.

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

Next week: The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler.

 

"Secrets Can't Be Kept"

Quite frankly, the police were at a loss: a young man had disappeared and nobody seemed able to trace him. Even those whom you might have thought would be concerned, such as the young man's mother, didn't seem particularly eager to investigate what might have happened to him. And every lead that Inspector Bobby Owen, head of the tiny Wych County CID, tried to check wound up leading nowhere. "What it all comes to," said Bobby gloomily, "is a classic example of the blind man looking at midnight in a dark cellar for something that isn't there." It seemed as though everybody connected with the case had a secret to hide. But, as Bobby Owen points out on a number of occasions, "Secrets Can't be Kept." That's the title of E.R. Punshon's 1944 mystery featuring Bobby Owen which is the subject of today's review on the Classic Mysteries podcast. You can listen to the complete review by clicking here.

The more I read of E. R. Punshon’s mysteries, the more I find myself respecting him as a plotter, as a mood-setter, as a creator of interesting characters, and, overall, as a writer. His detective character, Bobby Owen, is quite endearing, with a charming wife, Olive, who often finds herself participating in her husband’s investigations. And while these mysteries are written in classic Golden Age style, with some nice satirical and humorous touches, there is often a definite darkness about the plots and about those characters which wouldn’t be at all out of place in some of today’s darker mysteries.

There’s a good deal of that on display in Secrets Can’t Be Kept. England is at war, a war that has produced significant hardships for the whole population of the country – and which has made even routine police investigations more difficult. A young man named Ned Bloom visits Inspector Bobby Owen in his office, seeking a job as a policeman…and claiming to have some important information to share with the authorities. But Ned Bloom was – in the language of those days – a cripple, a man with a deformed club foot. Bobby Owen can’t see any point in hiring someone who, physically, can’t do the job that police officers may be called upon to do. Ned Bloom storms out of the office, leaving Bobby Owen shaking his head.

But that same afternoon, the police receive three separate telephone calls at the police station – from three different women – each claiming to be Ned Bloom’s mother and asking if the young man has been to see the police. As for Ned himself – he has disappeared. And that’s a quandary for Bobby Owen, who feels that – whatever may have happened to Ned Bloom – he, Bobby, shares the responsibility by having dismissed him so quickly.

There’s plenty of evidence, too, that Ned Bloom had a real talent for learning other people’s secrets. And that can be a very dangerous pastime.

Secrets Can’t Be Kept, by E. R. Punshon, is an excellent page-turner of a book, with much darkness both in incident and in the telling, though nicely leavened with flashes of humor. Dean Street Press has published it in a new edition with both print and e-book versions, featuring an introduction by mystery scholar Curtis Evans. It's definitely worth your reading time.

 

"The Dain Curse"

"You're her daughter," she cried; "and you're cursed with the same black soul and rotten blood that she and I and all the Dains have had..."

A young woman, for whom drug addiction may be the least of her problems, believes she is cursed by bad family blood. Those close to her have a way of finding themselves badly hurt - or dead - in ways for which she may or may not be responsible. And it's up to a detective whose name we never learn to find out the truth behind The Dain Curse. That's the title of Dashiell Hammett's second novel, originally published in 1929, featuring his anonymous detective, a man who worked as an investigator for the Continental Insurance Company, who is known to us simply as "The Continental Op." The Dain Curse is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the entire review by clicking here.

Dashiell Hammett was one of the strongest influences on the hard-boiled Private Investigator mysteries which became the dominant style used by most American authors looking for ways to challenge the puzzle-oriented tradition of the Golden Age detective story. Before Nick and Nora Charles, before Sam Spade, Hammett created the Continental Op. He's not smooth, not suave, not sophisticated; he's short and fat and kind of dumpy. But though he doesn't seek out violence, he'll respond to it if he has to - and, in The Dain Curse, that happens with some frequency.

In the first section, of the book, the Op is assigned by his insurance company to investigate the theft of some valuable jewelry from a scientist named Edgar Leggett. Leggett’s wife, Alice, and the mother of his daughter Gabrielle, named Lily, were both members of the Dain family – and they, and those around them, seem plagued by often-fatal bad luck. Gabrielle believes that she is cursed by the family’s bad blood. Soon enough, there will be murder, and signs that Gabrielle may have been directly – or indirectly – responsible, which she attributes to the Dain curse.

In the second part of the book, the Op finds himself hunting down Gabrielle at the headquarters of a very weird religious cult – and, once again, in true hardboiled style, there is murder and, again, possible evidence that some family curse is involved.

In the final section, we have really two more stories, again with the Op and Gabrielle at the center – and some really interesting twists that may surprise readers.

I’m deliberately being vague because the stories are so full of action, so full of character, and, very often, so surprising that it wouldn’t be fair to spoil any of it for you. Hammett’s plots here are vintage hardboiled private-eye stuff, and they move along at a breakneck pace. Regular visitors to this site know that I'm not much of a fan of so-called "noir" mysteries or of hard-boiled private eyes - but Dashiell Hammett's writing is breathtakingly good, and I can recommend The Dain Curse without any hesitation.

From the Vault: "Hallowe'en Party"

From time to time, in discussing my preference for classic mysteries from authors such as Agatha Christie, I run into people who shrug and say, "Well, I've never really liked Agatha Christie - she's far too cozy for me." Leaving aside, for the moment, the notion that "cozy" is a pejorative when used against an author, I find it particularly galling when it is applied to Agatha Christie. I think that people who consider Christie "cozy" have never really read that much of what she has written - including what I still think is her masterpiece, And Then There Were None. But it also applies to the genuinely disturbing - and remarkable - Poirot mystery called Hallowe'en Party. Here's what I had to say a decade ago on the Classic Mysteries podcast about that book - as usual, I've edited it slightly.

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"I saw a murder once."

Chilling words from a thirteen-year-old girl, made to a group of friends and adults preparing for a Halloween party. Before the party is over, the girl is dead – drowned while bobbing for apples. A horrifying story – but what would you expect from Halloween Party, by Agatha Christie?

To me, Halloween Party is one of Agatha Christie’s more harrowing mysteries. She rarely dealt with crimes as emotional as the murder of a child – which, of course, is what we have in this story.

Halloween Party begins as preparations are being made for just such a party in a suburban home. There is the usual chaos – children and adults working together, trying to get everything set up in time for the party. One of the adults, a guest in the house, is a woman named Ariadne Oliver, who writes mystery stories. One of the children, a not particularly attractive thirteen-year-old girl, talking to the group in general, claims that she once saw a murder. The others laugh – why didn’t you go to the police, they ask. Because, she says, “I didn’t know it was a murder when I saw it. It wasn’t really till a long time afterwards, I mean, that I began to know that it was a murder. Something that somebody said only about a month or two ago suddenly made me think, ‘Of course, that was a murder I saw.”

It appears that nobody believes her. She’s making it up, they say. But during the party, she is murdered. Could she have been telling the truth? Was she murdered because of what she said? Did an already-successful murderer decide to eliminate her?

Fortunately, Ariadne Oliver is a friend of Hercule Poirot. And she soon brings Poirot down to the village to help the police investigate. And Poirot realizes that in order to solve this murder, he must first determine whether what the child had claimed about having witnessed a murder could be true.

This is fairly late Christie – it was published in 1969. But she is still at the top of her form. Poirot is ageless, of course; by rights, he must be well over 100 years old when he becomes involved. But that’s one of the beauties of detective fiction – your audience is likely to let you get away with fudging how rapidly your character ages.

Poirot solves the case, as usual, by talking to people – to witnesses, to other guests at the party, to a nearby landscape artist and designer, to some schoolteachers, and to his good friend, Inspector Spence, who has retired from the police force but is still quite active in helping his former colleagues. Gradually, Poirot pieces together the solution to the murder – and discovers the events that led up to it. For, as you might anticipate, this murder did indeed have its roots in past events – although the nature of those events might not be exactly as advertised.

As I’ve said before, I’m quite fond of Agatha Christie’s mysteries in general. She normally does play fair with her readers, providing the same clues that Poirot is given. If you interpret the clues correctly, you may be able to foresee the ending. But be warned. Christie was quite brilliant at devising enormous red herrings to drag across your path. She does so quite effectively in Halloween Party.

Poirot’s friend Ariadne Oliver is an interesting character who appears in several of Christie's novels. There are a number of critics who see in the character Agatha Christie herself – after all, we’re talking about a successful female mystery novelist. You can keep that in mind as you read Halloween Party for any insights it might offer into the real author’s craft.

There’s also a wonderful observation that I wanted to share with you. Remember, this book appeared in 1969, well before the computer had become a part of daily life. Only serious engineers and technicians really understood computers, which were mostly giant mainframe machines. So it’s worth taking note of this dialogue fairly early in the book, when Mrs. Oliver is talking to Poirot:

Do you know what you sound like? said Mrs. Oliver. “A computer. You know. You’re programming yourself. That’s what they call it, isn’t it? I mean, you’re feeding all these things into yourself all day and then you’re going to see what comes out.”

“It is certainly an idea you have there,” said Poirot, with some interest. “Yes, yes, I play the part of the computer. One feeds in the information –“

“And supposing you come up with all the wrong answers?” said Mrs. Oliver.

“That would be impossible,” said Hercule Poirot. “Computers do not do that sort of thing.”

Points to Agatha Christie for that exchange – although Mrs. Oliver does say, “a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries.”

Here we are nearly fifty years later…and she’s right, isn’t she?

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

Next week: The Chinese Lake Murders, by Robert Van Gulik