The Murder of My Aunt

The Murder of My Aunt  – Richard Hull

Set in Wales, this 1934 mystery takes place in the country town of Llwll. Our comically obnoxious and self-absorbed narrator Edward Powell cluelessly lets his anti-Welsh stereotypes show. He takes pains to point out how unspeakable Llwll seems, in terms of both its pronunciation and its dullness. The maritime weather is cloudy, windy, and as wet as the bottom of the ocean. The men are all built like rugby-players and their speech has an “ugly Welsh lilt.” Worse, they are browbeaten by Welsh women who tend to be small but make up for it by always taking charge. Edward’s Aunt Mildred recruits the local farmers and merchants in efforts to man Edward up into a real Welshman.

Indeed, Edward has serious need of manning up. Like many narrow-minded idlers, he is a selfish narcissist. As lazy as a toad, he only grudgingly helps in the garden. He’s happily jobless, content to live on an allowance doled out from his dead parents’ fortune. He nags his aunt to improve the stodgy interior decoration of the house. He keeps a Peke named So-So, spoils it rotten, and lets it kill his aunt’s pigeons. With no girlfriend in sight, he reads French smut. Even more alarming than his admiration for British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley is his penchant for wearing sweaters the color of crushed strawberries.

Aunt Mildred continually harangues him for his weight, acne, foppishness and incompetence at bridge. With so much bad blood, their sick sad relationship, we feel, can only get worse. Edward is caught out by his aunt in a series of pointless lies, vandalism, and farm animal endangerment. Aunt makes him pay, literally, and so he decides to murder her and inherit his parents’ fortune. His attempt to kill her fails. And fails. And fails again. The plot twists are funny in a mordant, ironic way. Edward's sulky egotistical explanations for his repeated failures are a hoot.

Judging by the fact that Hull’s first novel has been released in more editions than his fourteen other novels, The Murder of My Aunt remains his best-known and best-regarded work. Hull worked as a full-time accountant. Writing was in his moonlighting job, so his hyper-articulate prose is a wee bit stiff and feels labored by the end. This is balanced by his ingenious plotting and black sense of humor. The first-person narrative is amusingly unreliable, calling to mind the clueless narrator in The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford.

Knowledgeable fans and critics regard The Murder of My Aunt as a classic of the inverted mystery. It appears on “The Reader’s List of Detective Story Cornerstones.” Critic-historian Howard Haycraft called this mystery "a classic of its kind; an intellectual shocker par excellence."

The Continental Op

The Continental OP: More Stories from The Big Knockover - Dashiell Hammett

Published by Dell in 1967, this pocket paperback bundled about half the pulp magazine long stories that appeared in a collection called The Big Knockover. I re-read these stories in my little free time since I didn’t feel up to reading anything else. The year-end festivities and the end of a semester are exhausting.

Hammett’s hero works in the San Francisco branch of the Continental Detective Agency. To make up for not having a name, he has developed an astute sense of how bad guys think. His core competence is using devious, often violent, methods to get the job done.

This King Business (1928). The Op finds himself in a Balkan country where the idealistic son of a rich guy is bankrolling a revolution for a band of crafty Slavs. Seems that the insurrectionists have promised to make the son a king if the revolution is successful. The rousing climax comes out of an action packed series of events which support the notion that the calculations of criminous types and political types aren’t all that different, a fairly common belief in the 1920s.

The Gatewood Caper (1923). A daughter is kidnapped and the desperate father wants her back mainly because it is a blow to his sell-made man ego that somebody has the audacity to extort money out of him. “I’ve never been clubbed into doing anything in my life. And I’m too old to start now.” When the daughter doesn’t return even after the ransom is paid, the cunning Op smells something fishy. The story seethes with vindictive feeling and the setting of the Pacific Northwest – lumbering land – is persuasive.

Dead Yellow Women (1925). Très awkward title in our more enlightened era so we make allowances for the era’s prejudices if that is our inclination.  Set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the Op and a Chinese Tong Boss match wits. In places it feels like a parody of a Yellow Peril story, especially the elaborate polite language of the Tong Boss. The description of the maze-like interior of the criminal mastermind’s mansion is a tour de force. Also, a theme pops up: political idealism is exploited by venal crooks as in The Gatewood Caper.

Corkscrew (1925). In this bizarre mixture of western and noir, the Op is a fish out of water when he assigned to clean up remote dusty Corkscrew, Arizona. This ought to remind the astute reader of the masterwork Red Harvest, an exercise in violence and horror that rivals Tarantino.  A gunslinger remarks, “A hombre might guess that you was playing the Circle H. A. R. against Bardell’s crew, encouraging each side to eat up the other, and save you the trouble.” The Op replies, “You could be either right or wrong. Do you think that’d be a dumb play?”

$106,000 Blood Money (1927). This presents the sequelae to the story The Big Knockover. Like many aftermath stories, it is overall less satisfying than the original. The best part of the story is how the Op neatly solves a complicated problem. Again like Red Harvest, the plot is complicated with many characters and motivations. The Op slyly manipulates events to tidy conclusion.

The 1967 Dell paperback has an introduction by Lillian Hellman. It’s interesting but it tells more about her and Dash’s rocky relationship more than the stories. She makes a provocative point about the difficulty of living with somebody who is too stoically proud to complain when they are hurting.

A Dram of Poison

A Dram of Poison – Charlotte Armstrong

In this 1956 suspense mystery, a crime may occur. The protagonist and his merry band must prevent the crime. Otherwise, the protagonist may lose his wife and his freedom. The ending delivers the satisfying emotional release that we look for in a suspense novel. But on the way to the climax this story also provides the intellectual pleasure that we want from a novel.

Like Shirley Jackson, Armstrong was a close and cool observer. Of a wedding procedure between a middle-aged poetry prof and a girl young enough to be his student: “It was an ugly, dreary wedding. It made Mr. Gibson wince in his soul, but it was quick, soon over. He was able to take it as just necessary, like a disagreeable pill.”

Armstrong had a dab hand at constructing a plot that dragged her characters through the mill until the very last moment. In this novel, she examines the physical and psychological effects of a bad car accident. Now lame and feeling old and unsure, the protagonist goes into a depression that his unhelpful sister worsens with her cheap cynicism and amateur Freudian psychoanalytical mumbo-jumbo.

When the post-World War II anxiety is reaching a pitch, however, Armstrong twists the plot and changes the tone from somber to comical and philosophical. With lesser writers we would wonder about the wisdom of sudden changes in plot and tone and the introduction of a five new characters half-way through.  But Armstrong pulls off these audacious moves. She was truly a surprising, enchanting writer.

Christopher Pym in the Spectator wrote: "Nobody gets hurt in this pleasantly sentimental, good-natured version of the `psychological study' sort of crime story, but there is plenty of suspense, and a good chase after the poison bottle. Full marks for the fresh approach.” This novel won the 1957 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. I read another of her suspense novels, a howdunnit called The Unsuspected, which I also highly recommend though it is as unclassifiable as this one.

Back to the Classics: Mystery

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

This novel stars the detective duo of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson. The story uses country superstitions, a fiendish hound, and an old family curse. Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead with a rictus of terror on his face. And near the corpse, in one of the most famous lines in detective fiction, “… the footprints of a gigantic hound!”

Conan Doyle skillfully piles up weird little incidents that unnerve the heir to the vast estate, Henry Baskerville. Even the unflappable Holmes is concerned for the safety of Sir Henry. He sends Watson with the heir to his remote Dartmoor mansion. Watson therefore is particularly active in this story and tells his story in letters, diary extracts, and straight exposition.

On the up side, Conan Doyle skillfully describes dreary landscape in order to capture an overall grim tone. Turning a conventional Victorian creepy novel into a Sherlock Holmes tale contributes to the originality of the plot. What Conan Doyle called “female interest” is fostered in the story, mainly due to indirectly describing the hard lot of women, married and not, at the hands of men. There are melodramatic passages but they are a lot of fun. On the down side, there are is a plot hole so large that even Holmes himself acknowledges it in the reveal when, provoked by questions, he says, “It is a formidable difficulty, and I fear that you ask too much when you expect me to solve it.”

The Second Man

The Second Man – Edward Grierson

This excellent courtroom mystery begins with our narrator Michael Irvine in a dour mood. In the north of England in a crowded set of chambers, he is forced to double up in a broom-closet of an office with The New Guy. The New Guy turns out to be woman barrister Marion Kerrison, who, on the bright side, is about the same age and has the same depth of legal experience as Michael. Over time he recognizes that while she may be young, green, and reckless in court, she’s brilliant, insightful, and possesses amazing gifts for speaking and cross-examining.

Marion gets her once-in-a-lifetime chance in a high-profile murder case. She must defend a shady Australian named John Maudsley, charged with the murder of his aunt. The two witnesses for the prosecution give unassailable testimony. Maudsley doesn’t help himself by looking deceitful and acting over-confidently. Nor does Marion when she flies off the handle in court and rankles the judge. She intuits that it was a second man, not her client, that did the deed.

Edward Grierson (1914 - 1975) was a lawyer himself so the settings of chambers and courts strike the reader as authentic. Set in the middle 1950s, this vintage mystery weaves together the murder case itself with a woman barrister’s struggle to be accepted as a professional and a damn good one. Vintage too are the various male attitudes ranging from outright hostile to condescendingly sympathetic. Also old-fashioned is Grierson’s assumption that we have read the same books that he has:

I was always moved too easily: by the death of Steerforth, and the perplexities of John Forsyte, by Soames walking in his picture gallery in Mapledurham, Uncle Pio, Natasha at the window in the summer night, and the dying fall of the words that record the passing of Socrates.

David Copperfield, The Forsyte Saga, The Bridge at San Luis Rey, and The Apology, but who’s Natasha? Where was her window?

In the spirit of “two great peoples separated by a common language,” American readers will have to brush up on Rumpolian terms such as “take silk,” “leader,” and “queen’s counsel” and picture barristers in gowns and little wigs. I daresay that Americans will be flummoxed by the idioms too: “[Women] want to make an Aunt Sally of you; so will you please to perch yourself up there to be shot at!” They will turn to the Web to figure out puzzlers from European history: “Cross-purpose crimes of the Reichstag variety have a respectable ancestry: do not some historians believe that there were two independent plots afoot on the night when Darnley died in Kirk o’Field?”

Still, these are mere quibbles, questions easy to answer in our wired world. I agree with James Sandoe, a critic for New York Herald Tribune, who ranked this mystery "among the very best of that long, diverse series of detective stories set within the formalities of a trial." In 1956, it won the Crime Writer’s Association Golden Dagger Award, when it was called (say it three times fast) the Crossed Red Herring Award.

Back to the Classics #4

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Rear Window and Other Stories – Cornell Woolrich

Among fanatics of noir, Woolrich is up there with Hammett, Chandler, and Cain, though most admit, I gather, that his prose is the most purple and pulpy of the founding bunch. Among non-fans of noir, Woolrich is probably best-known through the movie adaptations: The Bride Wore Black is a 1968 French film directed by François Truffaut and Rear Window is a 1956 corker by Alfred Hitchcock.

It Had to Be Murder was the original title of Rear Window, which he published in 1942 in the late lamented pulp Dime Detective. Left obscure in the story is why the narrator is trapped in his Big Apple apartment and so idle that he takes to secretly observing the lonely city lives of his neighbors through their windows. He realizes that the man across the way has very likely done away with his invalid wife. And he enlists the help of his “houseman,” an African-American, to break into the possible killer’s apartment. It’s a solid story that’s fun, though allowances are asked to be made by the casual racism and all of us readers know the reveal, more or less.

Though the fanatics seem to regard Post-Mortem (1940) as a mediocre story, I think the over-the-top premise redeems it. A widow wants to have her recently deceased husband disinterred so that a pocket of the last suit he’ll ever wear can be checked for a missing but winning sweepstakes ticket. Hey, $150K back then had the purchasing power of $2.5 million today, so I don’t think many people would think twice on this unique problem. The oddity is that her current husband puts his foot down and refuses to go along with the disinterment. Why?

The story Three O’Clock made its first appearance in a 1938 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly. A concussion turns a mild-mannered watch repairman into a deviser of infernal engines of death. He rigs up a homemade bomb to blow up his house with his wife in it. Oh, what these nimble-fingered handy guys will get up to when they go off the rails. But circumstances prove that Creation is not above having its little joke on the unwary makers of infernal engines. The suspense in this story is so killing that the smart reader slows down to get the maximum effect.

Change of Murder (Detective Fiction Weekly, 1936) is the shortest story of this collection. It is a noir story with gangster characters, one named Brains and the other Fade (as in the craps term). What makes it worth reading in our jaded day is Woolrich’s surprise ending, which will call to mind the tradition of H.H. Munro (Saki) but a lot grimmer.

Momentum was originally published as Murder Always Gathers Momentum in 1940. In a story with a persuasive Depression-era bleakness, an ordinary guy, half of a young married couple, has the wolf baying at the door. He runs into a peck of trouble when he accidentally yet fatally shoots a conscience-free rich guy who owes him money. This fast-moving, ironic story will persuade even the most skeptical reader that doing a bad thing once makes it more likely to do so again. And again. And again.

In Woolrich’s view, the universe has endless space, time, and flux. In other words: so many people are bouncing off so many other people – especially in cities, the usual setting of his stories – that mischief and turmoil and irony are inevitable. The characters in Woolrich stories think to get across muddy roads they are walking safely on planks but really they are walking on tightropes over abysses. With no pole.

The Case of the Bigamous Spouse

The Case of the Bigamous Spouse - Erle Stanley Gardner

Pretty Gwynn Elston tells Perry Mason an odd story. Selling kid’s books, she visited the Frankline Gillett residence. Seeing the customer’s son, she was struck by the boy’s resemblance to Felting Grimes, husband of her best friend, Nell.  A snapshot of Gillett, Senior also looked like Grimes.  This concerned Gwynn since she lives with Felting and Nell Grimes. 

Her concern turned to suspicion when, once home, Felting started probing her with questions about her rounds and later Gwynn detected a bitter taste in the drink Felting gave her. Perry tells Gwynn what she should do to protect herself.

But stuff happens. 

Felting Grimes ends up with a bullet in his chest. Lt. Tragg and DA Burger line up Gwynn in their sights as the obvious perp. Perry gives his usual warning to his client to say nothing to the cops because talking never helps a suspect. But she caves when, using a trick they still use today, the cops lie to her, telling she can go home after she talks and they confirm the truth of her story.

In his tradition of creating sturdy female characters, Gardner has Nell Grimes attack Perry in a car by turning in her seat and letting him have it with high heels. Crikey, a guy could lose an eye, fer the luvva Pete. Gardner also paints Gwynn as savvy city woman, and able to take care of herself as both a no-nonsense working woman and fender off of wolves and mashers. 

During the investigation Perry and Della Street visit a mountain village. Gardner stretches out a bit and builds two interesting characters, the town undertaker and the local poacher, who as a confirmed bachelor, is shy with “right pert” Della. In a couple of lines, Gardner creates a nice moment when Della feels her devotion to Perry. 

This was the 65th of 86 Perry Mason novels and was released in 1961. Although Gardner handles time in his usual skillful way, one begins to feel qualms. After all these cases since the late Thirties, shouldn’t Lt. Tragg and DA Hamilton Burger trust Perry a little more when it comes his clients’ innocence? After so many well-publicized losses and humiliations, how is it Burger keeps his job? 

Still and all, I’m not sorry I read this mystery – I’m proud to be in the dwindling number of Gardner fans among the quick – but non-fans might spend a better three or four hours with a better Perry Mason novel such as The Case of the Counterfeit Eye or The Case of the Shoplifter’s Shoe or The Case of the Fiery Fingers.

The Red Box

The Red Box -  Rex Stout

In the fourth novel (1937) starring rotund PI Nero Wolfe, three poisoning deaths bestir the immovable orchid fancier and gourmet to solve the case with the assistance of his PA Archie Goodwin and operatives Saul, Frank, and Orrie. The pace moves much faster in this one compared to the longer Fer-de-Lance and the decidedly sluggish The League of Frightened Men (which I feared was never going to end).

Stout has little interest in describing so readers have to be patient with the vague depiction of the fashion house at the beginning. But this lack is balanced by many quips and quotable asides. Archie’s down to earth pragmatism comes out often. “…I’m a great one for the obvious, because it saves a lot of fiddling around….” And “…As I understand it, a born executive is a guy who, when anything unexpected happens, yells for somebody else to come and help him.”

Plus, a reader wishes our leaders read Stout when they teenagers so they could have thought about Archie’s realistic and logical view of torture:

They [the cops] had Gebert down there, slapping him around and squealing and yelling at him. If you're so sure violence is inferior technique, you should have seen that exhibition; it was wonderful. They say it works sometimes, but even if it does, how could you depend on anything you got that way? Not to mention that after you had done it a few times any decent garbage can would be ashamed to have you found in it.

Who says mysteries are just escapist genre fiction? The roots of the murder in The Red Box are as ghastly but plausible as in a Maigret novel by Simenon with the theme How Families Get Balled Up.

Wolfe, however, gets the best of the best lines. He loftily scolds a mouthy client, “…I know you are young, and your training has left vacant lots in your brain.” Touching on a theme dear to his fans, he chides Archie, “Someday, Archie, I shall be constrained … but no. I cannot remake the universe, and must therefore put up with this one. What is, is, including you.” He says with tongue firmly in cheek, “Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.” But he gets right to the pith of human relations with “The central fact about any man, in respect to his activities as a social animal, is his attitude toward women.”

I don’t read Nero novels in any kind of order so I don’t think other readers have to either. One critic said, “Stout's material succeeds on general mood alone.” I’d agree -  it’s the characters, humor, and the fantasy nostalgia of old time Manhattan  that make this one a classic Nero novel.

Reviews of other Stout Novels
The Golden Spiders
Hand in Glove
Not Quite Dead Enough
The Rubber Band
The Second Confession
The Silent Speaker
Where There's a Will
The Case of the Black Orchids
Too Many Cooks
Trouble in Triplicate
Over My Dead Body
And be a Villian
In the Best Families
Some Buried Ceasar

The Devil Loves Me

The Devil Loves Me – Margaret Millar. 1942

Dr. Prye, I have arranged a little surprise for you. Knowing how interested you are in murders, I have decided to give you one on your own doorstep, as it were. I am leaving this note in a friend's pocket. (Unsigned).

What best wishes to receive on one’s wedding day. Worse when psychiatrist-detective Dr. Prye’s wedding is stopped and postponed by a queasy, fainting bridesmaid, who turns out to have been poisoned. She pulls through but two ax murders and a fatal shooting ensue.

In this early Forties mystery, Dr. Paul Prye, Millar’s series hero, should not to be confused with Erle Stanley’s Gardner’s Paul Pry, a short-lived PI in the pulps, or the proverbial Paul Pry, any inquisitive meddlesome guy. Dr. Prye does not ask many questions. His manner seems rather above it all. Luckily he teams up with Millar’s other series hero, Detective-Inspector Sands. The Toronto sleuth is more used to upper class crimes such as scions forging checks or wealthy manufacturers suffering convenient lucrative fires in their factories. The opposite of the quietly charming Pry, Sands is "an odd little man ... the type who encourages you to talk by his very quietness, until you talk too much."

On the positive side, Millar is a graceful and vivid writer. For instance, of a character descending into a basement: “The cold air swept past her like ghosts clammy and chill from their graves, laying damp fingers on her cheeks. The steps sighed under her weight.” The dialogue is funny in a waspish way. Since the tragic destiny of the characters inexorably comes out of their flawed personalities, one can tell Millar studied the classics while she lived in Toronto.

However, despite the vivid but not showy writing and amusing talk, the characters are not differentiated clearly. Prye’s fiancée and her mother don’t have much to do. The mystery side of things is slighted. Even I, always dense about clues, was able to guess the culprit. I could see many readers becoming bored with the urbane barbs traded by what sour old Kirkus Reviews called “morally questionable characters.”

This was Millar’s third novel. She had been working in the Craig Rice tradition of the comic mystery. But with this 1942 book, probably because of her education in those darn classics and the utter seriousness of WWII, she took up heavier themes than we’d expect in a lightweight genre. Millar went on to have a successful career as a writer of suspense stories and novels. She was granted the well-deserved Grand Master award for lifetime achievement by the Mystery Writers of America in 1983. Her obit is here.

As time goes by, she is becoming a neglected writer.

Too Much of Water

Too Much of Water – Bruce Hamilton

This 1958 mystery is set on a small steamer going from Liverpool to Barbados, carrying cargo and passengers. The unusual setting would be easy to visualize for readers who’ve been on a cruise. Ditto for people who have travelled on smaller ships for overnight runs like Helsinki to St. Petersburg or back in the day four-day hops like Naha to Kaohsiung.

The main character is orchestra conductor, Edgar Carrington. In his mid-fifties, he is intelligent and avuncular, but not sickeningly so. The characters – that is, suspects -- vary from a classics master, a Barbados planter, a chemist, an architect, a drunken major, a counter-tenor, a YMCA organizer and a socialite. Hamilton effortlessly helps the reader visualize the characters in terms of appearance and personality. For instance, to introduce a character at table: “He dived instantly into the menu, rather in the manner of a hen investigating her feathers, so that almost all immediately visible of him was a satisfying bald head.”

The mystery plot, clues and solutions all play fair. Aside from the clear and pleasant prose, Hamilton appeals to thinking readers with asides about serious music, bridge, and the culture of Barbados such as the hospitality of the planters and the mania for cricket. The writing and the story never bog down and the reveal is satisfying. All in all, a good read.

Bruce Hamilton (1900 - 1974) was the brother of the better-known novelist, Patrick Hamilton, who wrote a play called Rope that Alfred Hitchcock made into an interesting if flawed movie. Martin Edward, British crime writer said, “Hamilton’s policy of avoiding formula in his writing meant that his career as a crime novelist never had the success that I, at least, think he deserved.” It’s true – I think a mystery writer with a formulaic series character is more likely to be remembered.

Like many writers of his generation, Hamilton’s writing career was interrupted by WWII. I could not find any details about his professional life apart from the bare fact that he wrote well-regarded detective thrillers. Too Much of Water was his last mystery and is listed on Roger Sobin’s “The Essential Mystery Lists.”

Untimely Death

He Should Have Died Hereafter (UK) aka Untimely Death (US) – Cyril Hare

Hare’s series amateur, Francis Pettigrew, appears solo in some stories but acts in concert with Inspector Mallett in others. A Thurberesque male at odds with inanimate objects, bolting ponies, and incalculable females of all ages, Pettigrew works as a barrister and finds himself dragged into murder cases against his will and inclination. Inspector Mallet is a “beefy man with a nimble brain.”

Untimely Death was the last book featuring the detecting team Pettigrew and Mallett. Pettigrew, retired and vacationing with his wife, stays at a bread and breakfast in Exmoor, the same neighborhood in which as a boy he was frightened by finding a corpse. Unluckily enough history repeats itself as Pettigrew finds another corpse. When he returns to the scene of the crime with members of the local hunt club, however, the body has vanished. His new-age wife convinces him that it was pre-coginiton – a vision of future events – so he doesn’t inform the cops.

This sin of omission and the deaths that occur in the village during their vacation come back to haunt him after he returns home. Mallett, also retired, is called in to act as a PI for people involved in a lawsuit concerning a death. Due to his efforts, Pettigrew is subpoenaed as a witness in a Chancery case about an unusual legal point arising out of the death. In other books, too, such as the stand-alone mystery An English Murder, the case hinges on legal point. Hare in real life worked as Judge Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark.

One hesitates to criticize “last books” since authors facing The Big Sleep falter (See Chandler’s Playback or Gardner’s All Grass Isn’t Green). But the story and characterization seem thin in this one. Easy to read, with a tight plot, enjoying this would be readers who like amateur and professional duos and the familiar elements of cozy mysteries such as descriptions of the Somerset and Devon countryside, stag hunts on the moors, crazy wills, and eccentric judges wearing little wigs. Hare also presents provocative asides about memory and middle-age.

See also
Tenant for Death

Tour de Force

Tour de Force – Christianna Brand

Like Cyril Hare, who wrote 10 mysteries before he died young, Christianna Brand wrote only eight whodunnits in the 1940s and early 1950s before raising a family became a bigger priority. Prior to this one, I’d read only Green for Danger regarded as a classic novel and movie.

As in Green for Danger, Tour De Force (1955) features a small group, any member of which had more or less the same motive and opportunity to do in the vic. Brand’s cat and mouse game involves giving the reader fair clues all the way down the line, so it’s excellent for readers who enjoy puzzlers.

Her series character is Detective Inspector Cockrill, nicknamed Cockie, which is as well since we never find out his first name. Bird-like but tough, ironic, mercifully quirk-free but middle-aged enough to be tender-hearted, his base is Kent, but in Tour De Force, he is  vacationing solo to San Juan el Pirata (John the Pirate). He is tired of his fellow tourists on the package tour even before he disembarks, and about a third into the novel is he tired of abroad as well.

Indeed, the tourists run the gamut. Cecil Prout is a fashion designer who doesn’t seem to mind who knows he’s gay. Miss Trapp is a lonely woman who is getting the glad eye from Fernando, a Spanish-British tour guide from Gibraltar. Leo Rodd used to be a concert pianist before he lost an arm and his wife Helen helps him so much that she gets on his nerves. A young woman with red hair and lots of flash, Louvaine Barker is in fact a noted novelist. Vanda Lane is a reclusive young woman who is man-hunting. All the characters are well-developed and convincing.

A member of the group turns out to be a blackmailer and ends up with a knife in the chest. Strangely, the suspects were on the beach in plain view of Inspector Cockrill. The local police, smugglers one and all, need a patsy to appease touristic opinion so anybody will do, evidence be damned. Cockie, then, must act fact to protect his fellow nationals from the horror of injustice at the hands of feudal  and sinister foreigners. Underling the farcical aspects of the incidents in the story, Cockie must don the “hapless overseas” mask in a funny scene hinging on the language barrier.

I must confess that at more than 250 pages any mystery starts to weary me and this was no exception. But that’s just me. The reveal is truly a rocker. Justifying the gutsy choice of a title for this novel. I’m sure that readers who like puzzlers a la Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr would get a kick out of this story.

Three Sisters Flew Home

Three Sisters Flew Home - Mary Fitt, 1936

I’ve read only two mysteries by Mary Fitt, the other being Death andPleasant Voices. Even with little evidence, I have to conclude that though she was writing at the same time as Christie and Sayers, her stories don’t have the familiar elements of the Golden Age mystery. It takes a long time to get a corpse. No clues. No red herrings. No detective so no detecting. Nothing cozy that I can see, except that the action occurs in country houses filled with the rich, good-looking, and glamorous.

In fact, this story ends with the death of the character that we readers knew all along would be the vic. A cruel female artist invites her admirers, hangers-on, and enemies to a New Year’s Eve party. The guests include the enigmatic three sisters of the title. Each of the guests has a motive to knock her off. They play The Murder Game in the dark. In short, it is inevitable that the cruel artist will get her fatal come-uppance.

Inevitability is what Mary Fitt explores, as well as the psychology of women and the interplay of characters who are educated beyond their intelligence.  Kathleen Freeman (1879-1959) was educated at the University College of South Wales (Cardiff). She lectured there in the Greek classics from 1919 to 1946. English crime fiction writer H.R.F. Keating said, “As might be expected from a lecturer in Classical Greek, the novels of Mary Fitt are patently the product of a cultivated mind. A character in them is likely to comment on a situation with the words ‘as in Turgeniev’, and the reader is expected to pick up the allusion.”

Clearly, the novels of Mary Fitt are not for every reader. She’d be appreciated by readers who like academic mysteries by writers such as Michael Innes, Nicholas Blake, or Josephine Tey.

The Big Clock

The Big Clock – Kenneth Fearing

This inverted mystery was made into two movies, The Big Clock in 1946 and No Way Out in 1987. It was a best-seller when it was released in 1946 and has morphed into a cult classic since the late Forties, so the New York Review of Books published it in 2006 as one of its well-regarded re-issues.

I don’t want to risk spoiling this unique noir mystery with a plot description. Suffice to say, this “whodunit in reverse” provides plenty of surprising plot twists. What really sets this novel apart is the intelligent satire of corporate conformity. In the late Forties and early Fifties many social critics, malcontents, and beatniks were expressing their distaste for the Organization Man. Fearing gets in his whacks, as a characters describes the ideal writer for Futureways, a take-off on a Time-Life type of weekly magazine:

First place, you’ve got to believe you’re shaping something. Destiny, for example. And then you’d better not do anything to attract attention to yourself. It’s fatal to come up with a new idea, for instance, and it’s fatal not to have any at all, see what I mean? And above all, it’s dangerous to turn in a piece of finished copy. Everything has to be serious, and pending. Understand?

Another interesting theme is existentialism, another intellectual fad after WWII. The narrator of most of the chapters is George Stroud. Like a character in a Simenon novel set in New England in the Fifties (see here), he leads a routine tepid existence, not stunted but not contented either. Rejecting the illusion that life gives a “big prize,” he thinks, “The big clock ran everywhere, overlooked no one, omitted no one, forgot nothing, remembered nothing, knew nothing. Was nothing. “ Wanting to beat the big clock, he takes the usual Simenon way out by having an affair. When his adventuress-mistress is murdered, George finds himself facing that darn old hostile universe.

This is an excellent novel that I’d recommend to any reader into vintage mysteries.

The Case of the One-Eyed Witness

The Case of the One-Eyed Witness – Erle Stanley Gardner

What distinguishes The Case of the One-Eyed Witness from the other 81 Perry Mason novels churned out by, in the author's own words, the Gardner Fiction Factory? This question must be answered, not for us Perry fans who will read any of them -- or heaven help us re-read them -- but for novices careful with their time and attention.

The Millennial generation, social observers assert, feels nostalgic for the Nineties. This is consistent with the tendency for us post-moderns to be nostalgic about the era just before and just after we were born. So for me, born in the Fifties, that would be what Gore Vidal called America’s Golden Age, 1939 to 1954, from WWII to the Cold War.

The Case of the One-Eyed Witness opens with so much antique Americana that we readers wonder if this is some post-modern author overdoing the period detail: movie theaters full on week-nights, drugstore soda fountains, nickels for a pay-phone, and an LA night club with a live orchestra, a floor show, a hat-check girl, a photograph girl, and a cigarette girl. People sport retro names like Medford, Myrtle, Clark, Arthman, and Carlton. They use vintage Americanisms “in a blue funk,” “thimblerig,” “look all over hell’s half acre,” and “You’ve got a lot of crust to….” As in Mad Men everybody smokes; in fact, Mason smokes Raleighs.

It’s not all cheesy nostalgia. In The Case of the One-Eyed Witness Perry and Paul’s investigation uncovers a racket engaged in human trafficking, a problem that has hardly gone away. They also expose a con that depends on the mark’s racism and fear of discrimination, two sides of prejudice still among us. The criminal justice issues Gardner raises plague us yet, particularly over-reaching on the part of the cops and prosecutors. Other issues that still burn include improper police procedures, mis-identifications by witnesses and incorrect understanding of circumstantial evidence. Recall, it is a system that is staffed by human beings, entities that have not reached perfection since I last checked.

Gardner was more interested in the puzzle than characterization and atmosphere. But in this one, he takes a stab at describing weather and a dispiriting room. Better – thank heaven – is that he tells a joke or two.  In Chapter 6 Perry and his PI Paul Drake are in a Turkish bath steam room, hiding from their nemesis Lt. Tragg, when the fully clothed policeman joins them. Tragg, sweaty and surly, insists that they come out to be questioned but they complain that they’ll catch their death if they go out into the cold.

Just as an aside, during her confirmation hearing to become a Supreme Court justice, Sonia Sotomayor said that the TV series starring Raymond Burr as Perry Mason awakened her to the vital role of the law in our society. Many lawyers of a certain age will cite Perry Mason and Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird) as their inspirations to become attorneys.

Widow’s Web

Widow’s Web – Ursula Curtsis

Ursula Curtiss, like her sister Mary McMullen, wrote stand-alone mysteries and suspense stories. They often featured a dash of romance and the setting of a New England town. In Widow’s Web, the main character is a male reporter who suspects that his partner in journalistic exploits was done in by a wicked woman.

Curtiss grabs us in the first 30 pages, with a gothic atmosphere of suspicion, disbelief, and tension. She’s especially good with the noisy crashes and bangs of everyday life that scare the ever-lovin’ bejesus out of the reader. Like Victor Canning in The Rainbird Pattern, Curtiss contrasts decent people who want to earn what they get with psychopathic predators that unobtrusively exploit, steal, and kill.

She won the Red Badge Mystery Award in 1948 for Voice Out of Darkness. The Forbidden Garden was filmed as What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? by Palomar Pictures in 1969. Other books by Curtiss are creepily titled The Stairway, Out of the Dark, The Deadly Climate and The Noonday Devil.

The Master of the Day of Judgment

The Master of the Day of Judgment – Leo Perutz

This 1930 classic fantastic mystery by Leo Perutz is set in Vienna in the early 20^th century. The themes and devices will be familiar to us post-modern readers.

A romantic triangle in the era of the late Hapsburgs as in Sándor Márai’s Embers. Guilt over sexual transgressions as in Arthur Schnitzler’s stories from decadent Vienna.  The secret revealed in a manuscript as in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. The phantasmagoric atmosphere as in William Kotzwinkle’s Fata Morgana. The unreliability of an unsympathetic narrator – well, name your favorite modernist writer from the early 20th century.

Our narrator, the often ruthless and brutal Baron Yosch, narrates the events surrounding the suicide of actor Eugene Bischoff, the latest in a mysterious series of suicides. His chronicle is plagued by semi-confessed guilt over adultery. We readers receive tantalizing hints as to who is behind the eponymous "The Master of the Day of Judgment." As the amateur detectives Solgrub and Gorsky reconstruct the dead man's final hours, we realize we have to read this slowly so as not to be more confused than the author intends us to be.

Creepy, with a surprise ending. Readers looking for Kafka-lite won’t go wrong.

The Bride Wore Black

The Bride Wore Black – Cornell Woolrich

Innocently, I had picked up The Red House Mystery, a 1922 mystery by A. A. Milne. Yes, Winnie the Pooh, that A. A. Milne - Eyore should have tipped me off. After about four pages, the coziness started to smother me. To get my wind back, I did fifteen pushups, three chin-ups, ran in place five minutes and then chucked The Red House Mystery as far as I could.

Like a shot put.

And then – panting – I turned to the 1940 classic of the suspense mystery genre The Bride Wore Black. Yee-haw! A raving beauty shoves a guy off a high-rise ledge, blasts another guy to death, and suffocates yet another guy inside a closet. Coolest of all, dressed as Diana the Hunting Goddess, she zings an arrow into a guy’s chest.  To summarize the plot would do a disservice to both Woolrich the writer and prospective readers. Suffice to say, Woolrich weaves noir magic in unemotional prose as he builds suspense to heart-stopping points, while still developing character and plot. The ending is a rocker.

Just read this exciting and well-crafted story! Don’t mind that the grotesque coincidences  because it’s not like real life is free of them. Ditto for the relentless prose. After all, it comes out of the venerable pulp tradition. And Woolrich is considered a founder of noir, up there with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

Bury Me Deep

Bury Me Deep – Harold Q. Masur

Woo-hoo, this 1947 mystery has a humdinger of an opening scene. Returning from a business trip in Florida, lawyer Scott Jordan enters his New York City apartment. On his couch he finds a bodacious and scantily-clad blonde, listening to his radio and sipping his brandy from his snifter. But Scott smells a rat and bundles the boozy beauty into a taxi. The honey turns up dead, embroiling Scott with iffy lawyers, snarky cops, dense bully boys, a rich girl that wants to be a Broadway star and her sleazy singing coach, a drunken bon vivant and his angry wife, a smooth villain, and a snow bunny. Scott also finds the love of his life. As if the cast of scores was not enough to grab and hold our interest, the episodic action includes poisoning, a fatal car accident, shootings, and assorted fisticuffs.

A contemporary critic summed up this novel with this telegram of a review, “Fast and tough by rote but played so effectively that it slips past the eyes.” This is true. Like a noir movie from the same period, this mystery is simultaneously realistic and implausible. The hard-boiled characters strike the same old poses and their capers are pretty zany. The reader gets the feeling that in this first novel, the writer is jamming in every character and plot twist he can think of, in the most shiny prose possible. It’s appealing as a glittering, fast-moving story. I won’t remember it after a month.

I felt Raymond Chandler’s influence on Masur. For example, Masur describes in dazzling expressions  - “Broadway had pulsed into neon-glaring night life. Swollen throngs milled restlessly with a rapacious appetite for pleasure. Box-office windows spawned long queues, and the traffic din was a steady roar in your ears.”

Released in the same year as the notorious I, The Jury, this best-selling novel is regarded as “a cut above many of the American detective novels churned out at the end of the Second World War.”  Masur later wrote nine mysteries starring lawyer Scott Jordan. Masur once described Jordan: “The series character, Scott Jordan, a New York attorney, was first conceived to fall somewhere between Perry Mason and Archie Goodwin . . . with the dash and insouciance of Rex Stout’s Archie.” Therefore, readers that like the novels of Rex Stout and Erle Stanley Gardner would like Masur’s work.

Plunder of the Sun

Plunder of the Sun – David Dodge

In this 1949 crime adventure novel, PI Al Colby accepts a job from a mysterious, wheelchair-bound Chiliean. Colby has to smuggle a small package from Chile to Peru. As an American tourist with coveted Yankee dollars, his luggage won’t be tossed by customs officials like his employer’s would. But often assignments that easy are on the face are not easy in the execution. A dead body. Two beautiful women lead him down the garden path. Colby is lambasted and sees stars. Greedy gunmen menace him. A crafty villain steals the small package. The rousing climax has Colby and greedy guys on the hunt for a treasure of Incan gold in Peru.

Cripes, with the South American locale, noir atmosphere and non-stop action, it would be crass to ask for more. Dodge’s other job was travel writer so his descriptions feel accurate. Like this: “There was a tremendous snow-capped volcanic cone rearing up behind the town but looking so close in the thin mountain air that it practically kept me company while I ate.”

At times the travel writer and the noir writer get along real well: “The [train] car stank with the smell that exists only on the desert side of Peru, where the population is heavy and water is too valuable to waste on washing. It was a dead, rancid smell that even the breeze from the open windows wouldn’t blow away.”

At other times it’s pure noir: “She was done up like a Christmas tree – over-ripe mouth, beads of mascara thick on her eyelashes, green eye-shadow, a hat with a trailing drape that wound twice around her throat and hung down her back. The only thing missing was a man on a leash.”

David Dodge’s most famous book is To Catch a Thief because it was made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock. Plunder of the Sun was also made into a movie with Glenn Ford, but apparently Hollywood, in its typical ham-handed way, screwed it up so badly that nobody remembers it.

The novel, though, is terrific reading courtesy of its crisp and vivid writing, wild pace, and unpredictable plot twists. The series character Al Colby is tough-minded but good-hearted in that he doesn’t exploit the vulnerable and takes the side of the underdog. Besides, my inner 12-year-old is partial to buried treasure stories.