Find a Victim (1954) by Ross Macdonald

One of the most famous authors in American mystery fiction is Kenneth Millar. Under his pen name of Ross Macdonald, Millar wrote a series of hardboiled novels starring private eye Lew Archer. While his early work was following in the footsteps of Raymond Chandler, Macdonald would carve out his own path around the publication of The Galton Case in 1959, transforming Archer from your stereotypical private eye into a more emotionally involved character, trying to save the souls of the diseased and rotten families he encountered in addition to bringing justice to the culprit. It’s fair to say that while many of us see Ellery Queen as the American detective story, for many of the literati, that crown goes to Ross Macdonald.

I’d first heard of MacDonald in Robert Barnard’s study of Agatha Christie, A Talent to Deceive. Barnard praised his “magnificently conceived, satisfyingly shaped, and wonderfully entertaining” plots, and other reviews I’d read over the years backed that up. Macdonald also became focused in his later works on mysterious crimes in the past affecting the present, and as you all know, I’m a real sucker for that sort of thing. So when I saw his Find a Victim in a bookstore, I decided to take a chance on it, even though I’d never seen the title before now.

The book opens with Archer meeting,“the ghastliest hitchhiker who ever thumbed me,” crawling out of a ditch. The young man has a bullet in his chest. Archer gets help at a nearby hotel, but not without drawing the ire of the owner, Kerrigan. The victim is Tony Aquista, a truck driver for “the Meyer line.” His truck, now missing, was carrying “bounded bourbon.” Kerrigan’s bourbon to be precise. And Kerrigan’s clerk, Anne Meyer, is missing. Tony Aquista had a thing for her and was stalking her. Archer gets involved partly to find Aquista’s killer and partly to get one over the brutish Kerrigan, who he suspects is up to his neck in the whole affair.

I’ve never read a private-eye novel before, but this plays out about how I expected. Archer digs around, interrogates suspects, does some breaking and entering and so on. He clashes with the local sheriff, Church, as well. Church humors Archer at first but quickly turns against him when Archer notes how lax he’s being about investigating the hijacking, climaxing in a brutal parking lot brawl. The whole book takes place over two or three days, tops, and Archer spends most of the first half running around Las Cruces on a warm summer night. I was genuinely engaged at this very lonely man poking around the lives of very lonely people. Macdonald is a vivid prose writer, and his characters are distinctive, if prone to dropping their life story on Archer. For all the sordidness there’s a fair bit of sympathy. Kerrigan and old man Meyer are the only two who really fall under Archer’s scorn by the end of the book. Archer is even willing to stand up for a young thug who beat him with iron knuckles when the DA tries to pin the murders on him. And yes, more than one character bites the dust by the end.

But all that aside, how’s the mystery? Well, it wasn’t the complex and well-clued mystery I was expecting. That’s not to say that it’s bad, just that this is a private-eye novel in the end, albeit a complex one. The culprit and their motive is a genuine surprise, but I suspect that keen readers will turn their eye in this character’s direction before the end, even if the full story eludes them. Like the other books I’ve been reviewing recently, it’s more about the process of elimination once Archer gets the full story than it is about interpreting seemingly meaningless clues.

I still enjoyed this book. Macdonald is sharp but sympathetic, and I enjoyed the solitary investigation that Archer embarks on here. I admit that if I’d read this book blind with no knowledge of the author, I might not have been inclined to seek out more based on this book alone. But knowing who Macdonald is and knowing that he’s going to write even better books in the future, I’m looking forward to trying out more. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: Only Detect, Jason Half (this one gives some good behind-the-scenes detail on the book's construction, namely that Macdonald had to rewrite it to add some Mickey Spillane-style gunplay)

Wobble to Death (1970) by Peter Lovesey

Over the past year, I’ve been checking out the works of Peter Lovesey. I’ve looked at his non-series works and I’ve looked at the first of the modern-day police procedurals he wrote for most of his career, but I haven’t yet looked his debut series set in the Victorian era, which, I’m given to understand, sparked a trend for historical mysteries, especially those set in that time period. That changes today.

The titular Wobble of Wobble to Death is a “Go As You Please Contest,” a sort of indoor walking/endurance challenge. They were “instituted by Sir John Ashtley in 1878, and became very popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the eighties.” It will come as no surprise to the curious reader that Lovesey had written before this book a profile of five long-distance runners, The Kings of Distance and "contributed to many sporting journals."

The Wobble in question takes place on a cold November week in 1879 at the Agricultural Hall in Islington, which has been turned into an indoor racetrack. The main draw is the competition between the arrogant Captain Erskine Chadwick and Charles Darrell, both champion runners. There are other present as well, from the ambitious first-timers and wannabe champions to the just plain weird, such as F. H. Mostyn-Smith, whose eccentric method of running conceals one of the more amusing motives I’ve seen in a mystery novel. Similarly to Keystone, Lovesey makes the race genuinely engaging and interesting. He’s a sharp writer, and while some of the runners blend together (three of them serve as a Greek chorus to the events), Lovesey makes his key characters distinct. I was honestly invested in the race, even though it’s about fifty pages before a body hits the floor.

The body in question is Darrell’s. During the second day of the race, Darrell is felled by what he thinks are bad cramps, but within the hour, he’s dead. At first, death is put down to tetanus—the Hall is normally used to store animals and Darrell walked barefoot with open blisters the day before—but by the end of the second day Sergent Cribb and Constable Thackery are on the scene. Darrell’s body was pumped full of strychnine. His trainer, Sam Monk, is the prime suspect, a suspicion that seems to be confirmed when he’s found gassed in one the makeshift huts for the runners and their trainers. But Cribb isn’t convinced.

Cribb and Thackary are a great detective duo. Cribb is amazingly lazy—he does two interviews before laying down for a nap in the dead man’s bed—but he has the quick wit and sharp eye we want from our great detectives, and a silver tongue to boot. Thackary is good too, plodding but not stupid, never keeping pace with Cribb but no more than a step behind. I see how these two became so popular. Lovesey gets some humor about how the race goes on even with two dead men in the background. Class is also a major factor in the race; Chadwick is only taking part in something so lowly because of the promise of a competition with Darrell. With him dead, the manager is forced to resort to bribery to get Chadwick to run with his lessers. Thackery is forced to take to the track himself to interrogate some of the suspects. Lovesey captures Victorian England perfectly, casually taking parts of this world that doubtless seemed alien then and mindboggling now—strychnine as a stimulant!—and introduces them with great ease, never bogging the reader down in his research. It’s a charming and fun book all the way through.

But most readers want to know how good the mystery is. I was satisfied with it. Lovesey pulls off a clever deception on the reader, but I can see some being slightly disappointed with the resolution. At the end of the day, this is a police procedural set in Victorian England, not an Agatha Christie pastiche, and the mystery reflects that. It’s well-clued and there are some nice bits of mystery—such as Monk’s “suicide note,” which he definitely wrote, much to Cribb’s mystification—as well as some good detection, but it’s not trying to be Ellery Queen.

But overall, I really liked this book. It’s a short but solid piece of historical fiction, worth reading for fans of this type of mystery. Recommended.

Other Reviews: Mysteries Ahoy!, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Past Offenses, Tipping My Fedora, Beneath the Stains of Time.

Strange Pictures (2022/2025) by Uketsu (translated by Jim Rion)

Like many of this blog’s readers, I’d never heard of the masked Japanese horror YouTuber Uketsu until Ho-Ling posted a review of his debut book, Strange Houses. Uketsu turned out to be a popular guy, with multiple videos ranging from horror stories to humor. One would think that such a figure would never make it to the US except through dedicated fans subtitling his videos, but translator Jim Rion and the good people at Puskin Vertigo proved that cynicism wrong with a translation of Uketsu’s second book, Strange Pictures.

There’s a lot of crossover between the horror and mystery genres. Both involve digging into a shadowy past in order to uncover some sort of tragedy or event that continues to impact the present day. This element was at its strongest during the Victorian era, which often starred paranormal detectives like Carnacki the Ghost Finder or John Silence who used logic to deduce the truth behind explicitly supernatural events. And there are plenty of mystery authors, like John Dickson Carr, who mix horror elements into mystery fiction, either through seemingly supernatural events or through dark truths or disturbing solutions that reveal human cruelty. I’ve been interested in these types of mystery/horror stories, so I was looking forward to reading this one.

After a brief intro, Strange Pictures is divided into four stories, each revolving around hand-drawn pictures. The first, “The Old Woman’s Prayer,” looks at a couple of college students and their investigation into a seemingly innocuous blog, “Oh No, Not Raku!” The blog appears to be nothing more than an artifact of an earlier period of the Internet, where personal blogs where people posted their daily routines were more common. But there’s years’ worth of deleted posts and a chilling final message:

“I am going to stop updating this blog today.

I’ve finally figured out the secret of those three drawings.

I can’t imagine the pain you must have been suffering.

Nor can I understand the depths of whatever sin you’ve committed.

I cannot forgive you. But even so, I will always love you.”

The three drawings in question were done by the blogger’s wife, Yuki, showing a baby, a woman looking at the viewer, and an old woman at prayer. The two students puzzle over the meaning before arriving at the truth. This was a solid little horror story, the exact kind of online horror that I enjoy. While the final truth isn’t something that any reader can figure out (unless they’re willing cut up the book), it’s very unsettling when the full message is revealed. We also see some of that smart mix of horror and deduction during the first conversation between our detectives, where one of them shows how some off-hand blog posts point to something concealed and retroactively horrifying. This is a very effective story.

The next, “The Smudge Room,” is my favorite story of the book. The narratives shifts to Naomi, a single mother running the rat race to try and provide for her son, Yuta. One day, she goes to pick him up at daycare when she’s shown a drawing he made for a Mother’s Day project: a picture of him and his mother outside of their apartment building…with a gray smudge over his and his mother’s apartment. This is unsettling enough, but after a close encounter with a stalker and Yuta’s disappearance from the apartment, the picture takes on a whole new meaning.

This one was very good. Uketsu weaves an unsettling mystery while dropping interesting tidbits to hook the reader. (Why does Naomi not want to contact the police?) Once again, the deductions made from the picture are really good, and a reader who’s willing to pay close attention, and to think like a child, has a chance at at least guessing the truth. To be honest, I’d say that this story isn’t fairly clued, but it is fairly foreshadowed, as all parts of the solution—both the real and the fake—are present in the narrative before the reveal. The result is an oddly heartwarming story…before a sudden act of violence reminds us that there’s more going on here.

“The Art Teacher’s Final Drawing” is the most mystery-focused—with alibis, timelines and everything—and yet my least favorite of the narratives here. The story revolves around art teacher Yoshiharu Mirua, who’s found brutally beaten to death at the final rest station on a mountain. Not only did the killer savage him with a viciousness that could only come from pure hatred, but they also stole some of his camping equipment. The final bizarre aspect of the case is a crude drawing of the mountain view, unbefitting a skilled artist. The police fail to solve the crime, so a young man who Miura helped sets out to solve the crime himself.

As I said, this is the most mystery-focused of the stories, and Uketsu does his part to make this as painless as possible for the reader, with multiple illustrations of key points and timelines of the crime. They crowd out the text, but they do their job of making the crime easy to follow. The main trick the killer uses is brilliant and really fits the horror tone of the rest of the work. The final sequence is genuinely chilling as we see how deep a mess our protagonist has found himself in. But the main draw of the story, the picture, doesn’t work for me. The initial deductions the protagonist makes about the picture are smart and well-observed. But the final reveal…look, at the end of this story, we have two dying messages, and both hinge on the police making very specific leaps of logic, both are created by people who are suffering from a brutal and violent attack. I didn’t buy them at all.

The final story wraps up the narrative, filling in missing details and revealing the doomed and corrosive love at the heart of this book. Some of the reveals are quite good, some feel like one twist too many. And yet, I liked this book. I picked it up wanting a horror/mystery mix and got exactly what I asked for. Uketsu expertly blends the disturbing subject matter with the mystery content, using the investigation to lead us, hand-in-hand, to the truth…letting go when the reality of what’s happened hits us.

I can think of no better complement to pay to author and translator alike than to say I intend to check out Strange Houses in the future. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: The Library at Borley Rectory, Beneath the Stains of Time, Puzzles, Riddles, and Murders, Stephen M. Pierce, Pretty Sinister Books, The Invisible Event (contains minor spoilers).

Trouble Brewing (2012) by Dolores Gordon-Smith

A few months ago, I checked out Off the Record, one of Dolores Gordon-Smith’s mysteries, starring Jack Haldean, an Army major turned mystery writer. While it could have used some more cluing, I was on the whole very impressed with the book. It was a genuine effort at emulating the best of the Golden Age of Detection, with a clever and twisty plot. I was looking forward to checking out the next book in the series.

Trouble Brewing opens with Haldean summoned to the home of Harold Rushton Hunt, the owner of Hunt Coffee. Hunt wants Haldean to track down his great-nephew, Mark Helston, who vanished months ago before a meeting. The police foolishly, in Mr. Hunt’s view, think that his great-nephew was involved in something shady, and he wants Haldean to track him down or, if he’s met with foul play, clear his name. Haldean takes the case and quickly learns that Mark has a lot of money circling around him. Helston’s grandmother was a rich woman who left him quite a lot in her will. After his disappearance, she changed it to create a trust for when he returned. There’s more than enough money to justify murder, but no one knew she had that much to give in the first place, and if he was killed over the money, where’s his body?

It's not long before Haldean finds a body: a rotting corpse in an abandoned house with a knife stuck in it. But it’s not Mark Haldean’s…

This book is hard to summarize. Gordon-Smith throws the reader into the deep end from page one and never lets up. There’s a constant circle of ideas and theories as none of the theories seem to make any sense, and there are baffling questions no matter where you look. Beyond the fact that no one benefits from Mark’s disappearance, as opposed to his death, there are other odd bits. Did the killer intend for the body in the house to not be identified? If so, why did they make no effort to disfigure the corpse? They had no way of knowing that it would go undiscovered for months. Why does Hunt’s son, Fredrick, insist that Mark was racist against a Brazilian plantation manager for the company when everyone else says that he wasn’t? As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more attracted to mysteries where these seemingly simple questions drive the plot.

Sadly, not all of these questions get interesting answers. Some of them get good answers, but I felt that more could have been done with them. To its credit, the book stays in motion. I felt that it would have been easy to get bogged down in characters talking about the crime and not much else happening, but Gordon-Smith keeps things moving at a nice pace. Like in Record, she has a good feel for when readers will start to turn a critical eye towards other characters and is ready to address those theories when they come up. There’s always something happening, some new breakthrough, some new line of inquiry, including another genuinely shocking murder.

In the end, however, there are no clues at all.* Haldean’s summary at the end is more “this is the only explanation that makes sense of this,” which, true, but I would have liked a little more pointing to it. It’s frustrating, because overall I liked the solution. The final summing up is clever and involved, but there’s not much evidence for any of it. The main example of this is Mark’s fate. I thought it was decently clever, but there’s nothing pointing to it until Haldean has his revelation. It stands out because I think Gordon-Smith could have seeded hints to it throughout the book without drawing attention to it. I also felt that the author exonerated a few too many suspects over the course of the book. In fairness, this is intentional; she makes the culprit clear before the final summation, but the killer feels obvious before they’re meant to be exposed.

And yet, in spite of all of that, I enjoyed this book. I think the trick is that the mystery is genuinely meaty. There’s plenty of interesting directions and theories, and some honest detective work done. The explanation is genuinely very involved. This may not be a Christie or a Carr, but it’s also not a disposable piece of fluff you can just skim over. Which I think sets this apart from lesser mystery novels.

So Gordon-Smith is now put together with Lee Goldberg and his Monk spin-off novels: Genuinely well-written and solid mysteries that don’t match up the Golden Age, but are still written for serious mystery fans who want something substantial from their reading. In spite of my issues, this is Recommended. But be aware that I think some of you won’t get on with it like I did. 

*EDIT: Okay, I double-checked the solution after posting this and there are a few clues, so mea culpa on that one. The clues are more about "what did the killer did" and not "who the killer is."

Full Dark House (2003) by Christopher Fowler

In the early 2010s, some of the mystery blogs I followed started rumbling about an author named Christopher Fowler. Here, they promised, was a modern-day author whose work featured great detectives, clever, twisted plotting, and impossible crimes. I was intrigued, but it took me many years to finally try the first book of his Peculiar Crimes Unit series, Full Dark House. I read it, and…didn’t really care for it. I saw some of what others loved, but the book was disappointing to me as a mystery. Fast-forward some more years, and I decided to take the book with me on a trip, just to flip through again. Now I found myself drawn in by Fowler’s writing, and I decided that I’d been a bit too harsh on the mystery, now that I had a better understanding of what Fowler was doing. Fast-forward to today, and I’ve decided that it’s time to really commit to reading the adventures of John May and Arthur Bryant, those noble octogenarians of the Peculiar Crimes Unit.

Christopher Fowler was primarily a movie marketing guy and horror author. (His website claims that he came up with the famous Alien tagline: “In space, no one can hear you scream.”) I don’t quite know when he started to turn towards mystery fiction, but some of his early works do feature elements of the police procedural. But Fowler didn’t make the jump to writing full-blown mystery fiction himself until this book. Even though this was, for many readers, the first appearance of Bryant and May, the two had featured in other books before this point, such as the occult thriller Rune and the pseudo-zombie novel Soho Black. They were never leads and their characterization would shift for the PCU series, but Fowler clearly saw potential in them. Full Dark House then, can be read a soft reboot for the characters.*

But “soft” in Fowler’s world doesn’t mean what you think it does, as the book opens with an explosion at PCU headquarters, destroying the building and killing Arthur Bryant off before he and the readers have a chance to meet. Fowler does a good job of making his presence felt even so, with multiple characters reflecting on his eccentricities, his ability to destroy any technology he encountered, his willingness to think very outside the box (witches and spiritualists on speed dial), and his genius. John May sets out to investigate which of the many culprits the duo put away blew up the building and quickly realizes that the crime has its roots in the first case the duo investigated together: a series of murders at the Palace Theatre during the Blitz.

You see, the word “peculiar” in the name of the Peculiar Crimes Unit refers to “particular,” and the unit is supposed to investigate crimes that are too sensitive to be discussed publicly, or that involve government officials. Instead, "the name is attracting some very odd cases," such as a vampire running around. Luckily, the Palace Theatre has both controversy and sheer oddness in spades. The theatre is hosting a performance of Jacques Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers, Orpheus in the Underworld. The play promises to be controversial but is also turning into a propaganda statement of British resilience during the Blitz. So it can’t afford to have someone picking off the performers.

A dancer has her feet torn off by an elevator, and then they’re thrown into a chestnut stand. Then one of the stars is impaled by a prop globe. The son of another performer is hacked up during a rehearsal. All of this mayhem seems to be the work of a phantom who can go where he pleases in the theater at will. Not that it’s hard for anyone to lurk among the dim, poorly understood, and prop and passage-filled corridors of the theater. Our heroes have a hard time making progress and it does hurt the book’s pacing. There’s a lot of treading water with no real theories until about two-thirds through. And while Fowler has some sharp and witty character observations, the suspects don’t stand out very much, tending to drift out of focus after their introduction with only a few exceptions.

But the book is uplifted by Fowler’s writing, which does an amazing job at capturing the madness of the Blitz, the devastation wrought by the bombs combined with resignation at their monotony. Fowler’s London is a mad place, and Bryant and May are almost willing to write the whole thing off as just another symptom of the war. The present-day parts aren’t as strong, but like I said, Fowler does a good job capturing the characters and their reactions to Bryant’s death, especially May’s. You do get a good sense of the long and bloody history these two men have shared and May’s grief at that being cut short.

After reading this book, I do stand by my first impression that the false solution is a little more interesting than the true. Not better, just more interesting. It fits the heightened tone a little better. But I do think the true solution has its strengths. The cluing, in fairness, is a little thin on the ground. I think that Fowler does something interesting in that he meta-clues the solution. What I mean by this is that he doesn’t really directly hint at X, but seeds X into the narrative enough so that it’s close to the forefront of the reader’s mind, giving them a fair shot at seeing what he’s getting at or at least not being totally blindsided at the end. The explanation for the present-day bombing isn’t as strong, but I still enjoyed the resolution and thought Fowler set it up well.

It's worth noting that there are a few locked room mysteries in this book, although none of them are really the main focus. The second death occurs when no one was in a position to sabotage the prop, the phantom appears in a locked bathroom before vanishing from the roof, and one of the dancers vanishes from her locked apartment. None of these have really amazing solutions (in fact I don’t think Fowler ever explains the bathroom trick, though you can make inferences), and you shouldn’t read the book for them.

No, you should read this book because it’s an interesting and quirky little book. Fowler eagerly buried the reader in historical detail, gives a vivid picture of a London at war, and presents a good if flawed mystery to chew over. Perhaps I’m being a little over-generous, but I do think this is a firm Recommended, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the later books improve.

*Although, according to Fowler, this was unintentional, as the book was meant as a standalone. 

Other Reviews: Abstracts and Chronicles.

Trent's Last Case (1913) by E. C. Bentley

Before we start, I have an announcement: I have completed a blog archive under “The Library” tab above, so it’ll be easier for you to find specific posts. I’ve also added tabs and fixed images on old posts.

All quotes not from the book are taken from Bentley's Those Days. Image is taken from the Mystery Writers of America-New York Chapter.

Even though I love mystery fiction, there are a lot of famous authors I haven’t read much, if any of, and a bunch of famous works that I haven’t touched. One of those was Trent’s Last Case. Oh, I knew about it. I knew that it was written by novelist Edmund Clerihew Bentley--inventor of the comic verse form the clerihew--as a lighthearted jab at the then burgeoning genre of mystery fiction. I knew that it codified the faliable detective and the idea of “the false solution, then the true” that later authors like Ellery Queen would make much of. But I’d never actually read the book. Now, if you look at the title of this post, you can tell that I have, at long last, read it.

Trent’s Last Case (aka, The Woman in Black) opens with the death of Sigsbee Manderson, the great Wall Street financier, who could make the business world quake in terror. He is found outside his home, a bullet in his eye, unusual scratches and bruising on his wrists. The death sends shockwaves through the business world but barely impacts the average man: “the world lost nothing worth a single tear.” Manderson was a man of great brilliance but little human feeling, but he didn’t inspire obvious resentment among his wife, secretary, and servants. Who might have hated him enough to ambush him in the middle of night?

The case is brought to Philip Trent, an artist and the special correspondent for the Record. He has already distinguished himself in the "Illkley mystery." Now, the reader might be confused at how we ended up at his last case already, but the Manderson death will challenge the great man. Who was Manderson meeting at midnight? Who drank extra from the decanter? Why did no one in the house, including the restless butler, hear the shot that killed him? Why was Manderson almost fully dressed, but missing his dental plate?

Trent must also deal with his attraction to Manderson’s wife, "the woman in black" and the niece of a friend. This romance is about what you would expect from the time period; very melodramatic and over-the-top. But there's a point to it. Bentley is presenting a more realistic detective, "recognisable as a human being, and...not quite so much the 'heavy' sleuth." One can't imagine Sherlock or Dr. Thornedyke being distracted by a woman's beauty. That's not to say Trent just spends his investigation waxing lyrical. He crawls all over the estate, measuring shoes, finding guns, and even indulging in some primitive fingerprinting. All of which leads him directly to the culprit…or does it?

Trent’s Last Case is "not so much a detective story so much as an exposure of detective stories." To Trent's credit, his explanation is sound and logical and answers some of the major questions of the affair. But in the end, he misses the key points and ultimately points the finger at the wrong person. "Why not show up the Holmesian method?" Bentley asked. But that doesn't meant that he skipped out on writing a solid mystery. The major parts are clued or at least can be reasonably guessed at, especially for modern readers who are more familiar with the tricks of the trade.* The final explanation isn’t, but that’s the point. Bentley jabs the ribs of the great detective by noting that not everything can be deduced with pure logic, and that random chance and “the blasted cussedness of things in general” (thank you John Dickson Carr) can derail any carefully laid plan…and any efforts to work it out. Just as Upton Sinclair aimed at the public’s heart and hit them in the stomach, Bentley aimed at the reader’s funny bone to point out how silly this all was ("Detective-story fans...do not want to be told that the detective hero has made an ass of himself.") and smacked them in the brain. Many future authors would read this and take what was meant as a decisive jab at the genre and focus on the fallible detective, the multiple solutions…and mix in some clever cluing to spice it up.

I enjoyed this book overall. Reading the rather flowery and dramatic narration makes one have more respect for the Christies of the world for taking the old melodrama and forcing it into a more grounded mold. But this is still a short and worthy read. And besides, it’s public domain, so it’s free to boot! Casual mystery fans might not need to rush out and read it, but anyone interested in the history of the genre should check it out. I'm glad I read it. Recommended.

*I did not figure it out. 

Other Reviews: Playing Detective, crossexaminingcrime, Mrs. K. Investigates, The Grandest Game in the World (and another review/analysis of the book and its impact from the same blogger.)

Murder on the Blackboard (1932) by Stuart Palmer

A couple of months ago, I read Stuart Palmer’s debut novel, The Penguin Pool Murder, which introduced the world to Miss Hildegard Withers, teacher at Jefferson School and a battle-ax who stubbornly forces herself into murder investigations. While I had my issues with the book, I enjoyed it enough to set out to read the rest of the series. I intended to read it in order, and so downloaded Murder on the Blackboard…only to find that it was the third book in the series. More fool me. That aside, I sat down to enjoy a book that, as the title implies, brings murder very close to home for Miss Withers.

The book opens with Miss Withers sitting in on detention for one of her students, who made tactless comments about Anise Halloran, the sweet young music teacher, and her relationship with the school principal. Miss Withers hears the teacher’s heels clacking into the cloakroom before unsteadily heading out. When she goes to the cloakroom to see if Miss Halloran is alright, she finds the woman lying dead on the couch, her head caved in.

This is only the beginning of one of the worst days of Miss Withers’s life. When she returns to the school with NYPD Inspector Oscar Piper in tow, the body has vanished. Piper knows better than to doubt Miss Withers, but his search is cut short when the murderer bashes him over the head, leaving the investigation in the hands of Inspector Taylor. "She had little respect for the intelligence of the police when Oscar Piper was in charge of a case, and none at all now that he lay on the operating table in the emergency ward at Bellevue.” A feeling vindicated when Taylor latches onto the school’s drunken fool of a janitor, Mr. Anderson, as his prime suspect.

This is a surprisingly gritty book! We have critical comments on the use of the third-degree by the police, and the discovery of the victim’s body, while not dwelled on, is disturbing and treated as such by the characters. Miss Withers is on the defensive for much of the early chapters and it’s not until later that she’s able to really get a grasp on the case. The set-up is good. The idea of setting a murder at a school is an interesting one, and Palmer gives us a nice, multi-chapter section where Withers explores the school, looking for clues and a murderer. Palmer also throws multiple interesting questions at the reader. Why does the secretary have a gun loaded with two blanks? Why has Miss Halloran been acting sickly over the past few weeks? What is the meaning of the sequence of musical notes she scrawled on the blackboard? There’s even a minor locked room mystery thrown into the mix, as the janitor makes a surprise appearance in the school basement even after it’s been gone over with “a fine-toothed comb.” Twice! It’s a neat little problem. I enjoy these little locked rooms Palmer’s given the reader in the two books I’ve read.

Like Penguin Pool, even if you hit on the killer early, it’s still satisfying to see Withers piece everything together. There are some good clues throughout the book, and it’s always fun to see an author lay the groundwork for what the killer did without the reader noticing. And Palmer gets credit for subverting a common mystery plot point. But I don’t think Palmer quite sticks the landing here. Part of the problem is the characters. Palmer implies a lot of suspects—the various teachers at the school—but in practice we only focus on a handful of them, meaning the reader can probably hit on the killer through pure chance. There are also a couple of minor dangling loose ends, and the whole sequence with Professor Pfaffle, a criminologist, goes nowhere beyond letting Palmer take shots at psychology. And some of those questions I wrote earlier don’t get satisfying answers. The biggest example is the motive. “Why would someone kill the harmless music teacher?” is a question underlying the investigation, and when we get to the explanation, Miss Withers implies it’s important…and then just glosses over it. It makes for a slightly dull ending to an otherwise hard-hitting novel.

But you know what? I enjoyed this book anyway. I think it shows a more confident Palmer, with a more complex mystery for the reader to unravel. Miss Withers is on fine form too, high-handedly bulldozing her way through the investigation. All in all, I’d put this book about on the same level as Penguin Pool. I’m looking forward to seeing Palmer improve himself more. Recommended. (Although right on the borderline here.) 

Other Reviews: Ah Sweet Mystery! (contains other Miss Withers reviews), The Book Decoder, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, CrossExaminingCrime, Bitter Tea and Mystery, Tipping My Fedora.