Vintage Mystery #8

I read this book for the Vintage Mystery Bingo Reading Challenge 2015. The challenge is to read 6 or more Vintage Mysteries. All novels must have been originally written between 1960 and 1989 inclusive and be from the mystery category.

I read this for the category “L-3: With an Amateur Detective:”

Murder Against the Grain – Emma Lathen, 1967

This is the sixth of the 24 Wall Street mysteries starring amateur sleuth John Putnam Thatcher. An investment banker at the Sloan Guarantee Trust, he finds himself embroiled in shenanigans in high finance and murder.

The plot involves an early trading treaty between the US and USSR, set in 1967. On the basis of the treaty that sent surplus US grain to the inefficient USSR, an elaborate theft cheats the Sloan bank out of nearly a million dollars. Lathen takes Thatcher through a typical series of absurd situations. The Cuban Navy buzzes ships in New York harbor. Ukrainian nationalists protest. The Leningrad Symphony practices in the CCNY basketball arena. A stage-Russian impresario imports a troupe of Russian otters that eat only smelt marinated in vodka. After a Russian trade delegation tours a US potato chip factory, where they are served various dishes involving chips, one member concludes nobody could defect after having potato chip soup.

Emma Lathen was the pen-name of Mary Jane Latsis, an economist, and Martha Henissart, an economic analyst. They bring much knowledge of business transactions and office life to their novels, which give them authenticity. The theme of “Money makes the world go ‘round” is very strong. They also have a keen sense of the absurd. Thatcher is a committed capitalist although he knows that human fallibility is real enough that lying, cheating, and stealing must be constantly guarded against. Latsis and Henissart, probably both Republicans, were conservative enough not to kid themselves about the ability of Wall Street to “self-regulate.”

This novel won the Gold Dagger Award for best novel of the year from the Crime Writer's Association.

Vintage Mystery #7

I read this book for the Vintage Mystery Bingo Reading Challenge 2015. The challenge is to read 6 or more Vintage Mysteries. All novels must have been originally written between 1960 and 1989 inclusive and be from the mystery category.

I read this for the category “L-1 Set in the Entertainment World.”

Falling Star – Patricia Moyes, 1964

The death of a famous actor on the set for a movie looks like an accident. The death of the continuity girl looks like suicide. But motivated by the complaints of the cunning Mrs. Arbuthnot, the girl’s mother, the series hero, Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett, investigates and becomes convinced that these two deaths are in fact suspicious.

Patricia Moyes wrote 19 mysteries featuring Tibbett and his wife Emmy. Critics and readers often opine that this mystery is not her best. For instance, with the pool of suspects so small, it’s fairly easy to spot the perp.

I think, however, it has its strong points. Moyes had worked as a PA to actor/director Peter Ustinov, so she knows about the production and business of movie making. Her knowledge and experience strengthen the authenticity of the novel. The motive and the method of murder are pure golden age, so implausible and silly that I wonder if Moyes was parodying traditional whodunnits.

The characterization is quite witty. Usually Moyes uses third-person narration, but here she uses first-person. And what a narrator. A child of the land-owning class, he is priggish, smarmy, blustery, pompous, and thick-headed. The series hero is his likeable self, if a little boyish and bland. Also, his helpmeet wife appears only in cameo. The walk-on characters, such as Mrs. Arbuthnot, are hoots, like eccentrics in Henry Cecil’s novels.

From 1964, this was the #4 of 17 Tibbett novels. Readers who like late career Agatha Christie would enjoy this one.

Vintage Mystery #6

I read this book for the Vintage Mystery Bingo Reading Challenge 2015. The challenge is to read 6 or more Vintage Mysteries. All novels must have been originally written between 1960 and 1989 inclusive and be from the mystery category.

I read this for the category “I-3: Animal in the title”

The Steam Pig – James McClure

Set in South Africa during the apartheid era, an Afrikaner detective and his Bantu assistant investigate the murder of a music teacher who was done in with a sharpened bicycle spoke. The unexpected combination of an Afrikaner victim and a Bantu weapon proves confusing and volatile for everybody involved. Readers like me will find this novel, as the English say, strong meat – arousing dismay, anger and repulsion, but attractive because of lively style, gripping story, and plausible characters.

As to apartheid, a system of brutally enforced racial segregation, McClure’s description sounds ‘take or leave it’. He assumes that rigid laws that separate races will have negative economic, social, and moral consequences on every member of society. All the interactions among the characters proceed from their shared assumption that their racial classification is the most important factor in their lives. Kramer and Zondi, the two detective heroes, talk to everybody and each other based on their position in the hierarchy.

Nobody kids themselves about their own thoughts and feelings about themselves being more important than whether they are classified black, white, coloured, or Indian.  Anybody old enough to see red when remembering Reagan’s vetoing of Congress’ economic sanctions against South Africa generally knows how cruel that system was. But to me, the specific story of the family, for example, who are re-classified from white to colored was illuminating in terms of the systematic cruelty of segregation. Obviously such a system could only be enforced by an authoritarian and bureaucratic government. And puritanical: they banned Playboy magazine. And feeling embattled: SA had no TV until 1976 because they thought English-language programming would cause Afrikaans to die off.

McClure’s ‘take or leave it’ tone probably contributed to the success of the Kramer-Zondi series in South Africa. This first novel does have its problems. We readers long for a little backstory on Kramer and Zondi. The Kramer character is well developed, but Zondi is not. Kramer is an independent-minded realist and cynic, but has the cop mentality that the law is the law and no situation has any gray areas. Kramer has impetuous ways and overlooks key pieces of evidence. He’s a male chauvinist who condescends to women even while he uses their intelligence for his own ends. Kramer’s way of talking to Zondi, especially when other whites are around, reflects their different places in the social order. The criminal enterprise was clever, the violence horrific, and fascinating were the glimpses at Bantu gangsters, Indian shopkeepers, Muslims and colored families.

Fans who like Camilleri’s Salvo Montalbano or Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen will probably like this novel, as will people who remember Marshall’s Yellowthread Street novels. As I said above, it’s surely not for people who don’t like ugly but for readers that can tolerate sometimes repellent content with vivid, sometimes funny writing. I happened to read this one after I read a modern cozy (Old Bones byAaron Elkins). It was just the ticket to get over the blah.

Vintage Mystery #5

I read this book for the Vintage Mystery Bingo Reading Challenge 2015. The challenge is to read 6 or more Vintage Mysteries. All novels must have been originally written between 1960 and 1989 inclusive and be from the mystery category.

I read this for the category “V-1 Set in a Country House:”

Old Bones – Aaron Elkins

The fourth installment of Elkins’ Gideon Oliver series won the 1987 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Mystery of the Year. It’s easy to see why because it’s a readable blend of cozy elements.

The story takes places in France so there are numerous digressions about food and scenery. Le Mont-Saint-Michel, an island commune in Normandy, was neatly described.

The vocabulary is intelligent without being recondite a la Michael Innes or cute with big words like Rex Stout. Gideon is a physical anthropologist so readers can absorb forensic knowledge.

Gideon plays the gifted amateur who always stumbles upon cases, becoming the traditional pain in the neck of the local cops. He has a sidekick, a noble savage named John Lau, FBI agent. He has a nice wife that calls to mind the marital bliss in Patricia Moyes’ Tibbet-Emmy tales.

Romance blooms between two shy people that only needed travel to find their soul mate. The story takes routine twists and turns until the final surprise reveals how the past haunts the present.

Gideon is lecturing to the police on the latest forensic techniques, though he tries to play down his reputation as the Skeleton Detective of America. The village rich family has two big problems. An unlikeable in-law is done in with cyanide (Dame Agatha would love the inclusion of “smells of bitter almonds”). And a set of bones is found in the basement.

If I sound a little less enthusiastic than usual, like I’m ticking items off on a checklist, it’s because I found this rather by the numbers. Aside from the predictability, I found nothing wrong with it. But I doubt whether I will read another one in this series. When I want escapist fantasy, I’ll turn to Erle Stanley Gardner, whose Perry Mason in the Swinging Sixties is as incongruous and out of time as Murder in a Country Mansion in the late 1980s.