Moonflower Murders (2020) by Anthony Horowitz

It's been a while since I’ve read one of Anthony Horowitz’s works.

Magpie Murders is one of my favorite mystery novels, expertly combining a classic, Golden Age style mystery with a modern, more serious one, with some excellent meta storytelling. I was surprised when I heard that Horowitz was doing a sequel, since the book didn’t really lend itself to one. But now that I’ve read Moonflower Murders, I can safely say that Horowitz succeeded.

After the events of Magpie, Susan Ryeland has moved to Crete with her partner, where they run a hotel. One day, Susan is approached by Lawrence and Maureen Treherne, a couple who own a hotel of their own back in England called Branlow Hall. They need her help. Their daughter, Cecily MacNeil, has suddenly disappeared, and they believe it’s connected to an old murder at their hotel. Eight years ago, on Cecily’s wedding day, the body of a guest, Frank Parris, was discovered in his room, savagely beaten with a hammer. Suspicion quickly fell on one of the hotel’s workers, Stefan Codrescu—there was blood on his clothes and bloody money was found under his mattress—and he was duly arrested. But Cecily became convinced that he was wrongly convicted. It’s because of a book she read. Atticus Pünd Takes the Case, by Alan Conway.

So Susan troops off back to England to look into the past murder and figure out what Cecily saw in the book. Conway took a perverse joy in inserting real people into his books, often in very unflattering ways, but Susan can’t see the relationship between the book and real life:“There was no advertising executive, no wedding, no hammer.” Horowitz takes some joy in teasing the reader with the future contents of the book. He’s not so crass as to spoil the killer, but does drop a few tidbits, building anticipation for when Susan finally bites the bullet and returns to Conway.

In the meantime, Susan digs up what she can on Parris’s murder. While the crime seems straightforward, there are questions that need to be answered. Why did the dog cry out on the night of the murder? How was the killer able to enter Stefan’s room to plant evidence? Who moved the Do Not Disturb sign on Parris’s door, leading to his body being discovered? Horowitz is good about crime scenes with weird details. And then there are the suspects…sort of. Because as Susan quickly realizes, almost none of the suspects have any obvious motive for killing Parris. The only exceptions are the shady Williams’ next door. They clearly know something about the murder, but the husband likes to play games, and his wife is deeply hostile to Susan. Cecily’s unmarried sister Lisa hates her, but did she kill Parris? Cecily’s husband, Aiden, is the perfect picture of a grieving partner, but he’s quick to shut down any serious questioning. Even Alan’s ex-wife Melissa turns out to be hanging around the night of the murder. It’s a baffling and challenging mystery.

But the clues are there. I really think that Horowitz got better and better at writing mysteries. Both Moonflower and Takes the Case are loaded with clues and hints. There are multiple plausible false solutions and red herrings for readers to chase after. And the explanations are satisfying. There’s even foreshadowing for some of the twists that aren’t necessary meant to be mysteries. It’s all very well-constructed. Like in Magpie, Horowitz contrasts the complex, deliberately implausible solution from Takes the Case with the “actual” solution. I do think that it’s a little more involved than *Magpie, but that’s because Horowitz gives a lot more clues and Susan’s chain of logic leading to the killer is more involved. Some of the clues for the outer narrative are a bit slight, but during the summation I kept nodding along whenever Susan mentioned something and going. “Yes I remember that…and that…and that…” The book also contains one of the funniest clues I’ve ever seen in a mystery novel. One clue hinges on knowledge of Italian opera, but other than that I have no complaints about the cluing.

My main issue is with the pacing. Don’t get me wrong, Horowitz uses his page count wisely, and he has Christie’s knack for good conversation and description that keeps the plot moving. But some of his characters don’t really get enough screentime. I think here of Cecily’s sister, who gets one chapter very early on and then barely appears for another 300 pages. This all reflects the looser nature of Susan’s investigation, but it is a disappointing part of the narrative. There are also a couple of plot threads, like the one with Susan’s own sister, that don’t get much attention or are quietly dropped (but those are very minor ones).

But overall, I really enjoyed this book. I doubted him, but Horowitz pulled through with an excellent two-in-one mystery novel. It’s a touch below Magpie in quality, but just a touch. Recommended.

Other Reviews: CrossExaminingCrime, Ah, Sweet Mystery, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Stephen M. Pierce.

Atticus Pünd Takes the Case (2009) by Alan Conway

Image pulled from Britbox Australia's Instagram account. For some reason it's really hard to find pictures of the book cover.

It’s been a while since I’ve read one of Alan Conway’s works.

Atticus Pünd Takes the Case is the third entry in Conway’s beloved series of classic mysteries starring Holocaust survivor and great detective Atticus Pünd . I admit it’s a bit weird to be reading someone’s books so soon after their death, but I figure that Conway would rather be remembered for his detective fiction than anything else.

The book is set in the small village of Tawleigh-on-the-Water, a gentler, long-forgotten England. The intro to the book is a little slow, as we get a bird’s eye look into the villager’s lives. The central figure is Melissa James, an actress creeping close to being past her glory days. She’s the owner of the local inn, the Moonflower, but suspects that she’s being ripped off by the managers, Lance and Maureen Gardner. Not to mention there’s domestic trouble at home: She’s growing distant from her husband and her butler, Eric Chandler, has a secret of his own. Finally, she has an unpleasant run-in with Simon Cox, a producer who’s based his upcoming script around James…and she’s not interested. There are also some other hangers-on who will play a role in the plot. Such as Algernon Marsh, who’s introduced thinking about how he’s scamming Melissa and other investors before hitting a man while driving drunk. Then there’s his sister, Samantha Collins, who might be able to come into a large inheritance, and her husband, the village doctor. Conway does a good job at setting up his cast and laying the groundwork for the murder, which comes at the end of chapter 4, when Melissa is found strangled to death in her bedroom.

At this point, we introduce Atticus Pünd, fresh off solving the Ludendorff Diamond case. Which is actually a locked room mystery where jewelry vanishes from a safe to which only three people know the combination and with only one key, in possession of the owner. I liked this, it’s a good little mystery, but it does slow the plot down right when it should be ramping up. I wonder what his editor was thinking. Anyway, Pünd is contacted by Melissa’s agents to investigate the crime, and he agrees. He’s assisted in his investigation by his assistant, Madeline, and the local police officer. This guy is a great side character. He’s worked in this sleepy little town all his life and is getting close to retirement and is frustrated that his last case is a publicized murder that’s he making little progress on. I really liked his interactions with Pünd; he’s not the typical “stupid cop” of fiction.

The mystery is pretty good on the whole. Pünd quickly picks up on some odd facts about the crime. Such as the tissues in Melissa’s house, two in the bedroom, one in the living room, and a ten-minute gap in her schedule that the murder must have been committed in. Pünd is on good form, and I really liked his explanations. Conway is good about crime scenes with weird details.

The characters are good, if a bit shallow. Like I said, we get a good bird-eye view of them early on, but some get more attention than others. But they are well observed; almost as if they were pulled from life. Some of them come off quite badly—Eric in particular —but they are at least memorable.

This is a well-clued mystery. As usual for Conway, in spite of all the chaff thrown around the central crime is quite simple. While there is one implausible bit about the murder—I suspect most of you will know what I’m talking about—this is easily overlooked. We get some solid cluing and even multiple false solutions, with proper evidence for each. Even some of the smaller plot twists get cluing! It’s all very well done. And the final twist is excellent. One clue hinges on differences between English and American culture, but other than that I have no issues.

All in all, this is another excellent mystery from a writer taken from us too soon. This tale of murder and skullduggery beside the English sea is another worthy mystery. Recommended.

The Tragedy of Y (1932) by Ellery Queen

A few months ago, I reviewed The Tragedy of X, the first novel written by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee under the Barnaby Ross pen name. I admired the book more than I really liked it. I wanted to read an Ellery Queen and I was in the mood for something dense, but I acknowledge that it has problems. But the Queen cousins were busy beavers during 1932, publishing four books, including X, and they followed up the book with a sequel, The Tragedy of Y.

The book begins with the discovery of York Hatter’s body floating in the Hudson. A suicide note found on the body makes it clear that his death was self-inflicted. And no wonder, so tuts New York high society, when you consider that he was the second husband of the tyrannical Emily Hatter. Emily rules her family with an iron fist, and her husband was verbally beaten down over the years. And then there are their children. Barbara Hatter is“the most nearly human of Emily’s leaping blood,” a brilliant poetess. Conrad Hatter is much worse, a drunken playboy with a series of controversies dogging him, including one death. His long-suffering wife Martha is mother to Jackie and Billy, a pair of screeching demons who torment every adult in range. Youngest daughter Jill sleeps around, a sure sign of madness and insanity. And there’s Emily’s daughter from her first marriage, Louisa. Born blind and mute and having long grown deaf, Louisa is dependent on her mother and personal doctors for help and a board of Braille letters for communication. And yet, she has great strength and gentleness. What she does not have is the love of her siblings, who see her as an object of pity at best and a pest to be squashed at worst. Not helping the tension is that she is the apple of her mother’s eye and Emily will do anything for her daughter. But it seems that that tension is finally boiling over.

More than two months after the discovery of York’s body, someone poisons Louisa’s daily glass of eggnog. She is only spared because Jackie swipes it and gulps it down himself, barely surviving. Emily is outraged, and while she abhors the publicity, the might of the NYPD descend on the Hatter household. However, Inspector Thumm and District Attorney Bruno make no progress, even when they call about the great actor Drury Lane for his insights. Then,“a little less than two months later,” disaster. Emily Hatter is found dead in her bed. It seems that she interrupted another effort to poison Louisa and took a blow to the head from, of all things, a mandolin.

The pacing in this book is much better than in X. In retrospect, it was a mistake to have Drury bragging in that book about how he solved the case by page 100. It made him look smart but also meant all of the key information was frontloaded and made the rest of the book a drag. Here the cousins do a better job at disguising the downtime between incidents. There’s more going on as well as a more active investigation by the police and Lane. He’s still pretty sure of the solution early on, but he doesn’t brag about it and still focuses on gaining proof of the killer’s identity and making sense of the weird clues. These come from Louisa; she interacted with the killer on the night of the murder and reports that they had a smooth face and smelled of vanilla. The hooks are much stronger that its predecessor.

That being said, it does share an issue with X. The characters are memorably grotesque but are pretty shallow otherwise. We spend most of our time with Louisa and her caretakers, and while the character is memorable and the Queen cousins treat her with some respect, there’s also not much depth there. Her siblings aren’t much better. We get about one interview each and then they all but drop out of the book. And that’s not counting the family’s various hangers-on who also don’t do much after their introduction (though in fairness, most aren’t mentioned in the main cast of characters, so the cousins didn’t plan on us spending much time with them). We get more depth on Jackie and Billy’s tutor than we do some of the family members! And even then, it’s solely based around any motive he has for the crimes. The characters do what they need to do and leave. It’s efficient, if not impactful.

The mystery is very good, however. Lane’s final explanation of the killer and their actions is ruthlessly logical, debunking some casual assumptions from much earlier in the book and showing why the killer did what they did. Again, while the last book frontloaded the mystery, here the Queen cousins do a better job at sprinkling clues throughout the book. There’s even a point where I’d argue that any reader can sit down and solve the mystery, but the Queen cousins are rightfully confident that most readers won’t seriously consider the solution. Said solution is one of the best shock moments I’ve seen in a mystery novel, but the build-up to it is, again, very logical. Only the motive is a little obscure, but again, the cousins give you what you need. The reason why the killer used a mandolin? Brilliant, excellent, a real forehead-slapper that makes you go, “Why didn’t I see that!?” I did have some issues, but the overall idea is too solid to dismiss. To be as vague as possible, the solution depends on the killer making some very specific misunderstandings.*

The tone of the book is very good. Instead of the dry investigation of the previous book, we have a book that wallows in the Gothic. The doomed and grotesque family and parts of the solution pull from Gothic novels. However, some of this is not handled well. The “explanation” for the family’s madness isn’t actually stated flat-out due to the mores of the time, so if you’re not familiar with the few hints they do give, you’re going to be lost a key moment. Also, I can’t say that I’m fond of how much the cousins pound in how the state of the Hatter family is 100% on Emily and her diseased blood. And that’s not a metaphor! The misogyny is impossible to ignore.

The end of the book centers Drury Lane. He gets up to some high-handed acts that normally I’d roll my eyes at, but the cousins did a good job of building up to his decision. He doesn’t take it lightly and his summation is as much him wrestling with the magnitude of what he did as it is an explanation of the crime. It’s an interesting take on the “failable detective” idea that the Queen cousins would explore more later in their career. The “tragedy” consumes him as well. He’s still a shallow character overall, but he has some depth here.

Yes, I quite enjoyed The Tragedy of Y. There are some issues, and I don’t know if it would turn a Queen hater into a fan, but it has a better chance of that than most. This is a fascinating Gothic mystery novel that will linger in the memory. For Queen fans this is required reading, for everyone else, it’s Highly Recommended. 

Other Reviews: The Case Files of Ho-Ling, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Noah's Archives, The Green Capsule, Reading Ellery Queen (contains spoilers), Dead Yesterday, At the Scene of the Crime.

*To elaborate, (these are huge spoilers!), V qvqa’g ohl n guvegrra-lrne byq znxvat gur zvfgnxrf gung Wnpxvr qvq. Fher, n grrantre zvtug abg tenfc gur ahnapr bs gur bhgyvar naq jbhyq sbyybj vg zber yvgrenyyl guna na nqhyg, ohg V pbhyqa’g oryvrir gung ur jbhyq qb gung jvgu rirelguvat. V’q fhfcrpg gung gur Dhrra pbhfvaf jrera’g snzvyvne jvgu puvyqera. Vs ur’q orra n yvggyr lbhatre V’q unir orra zber pbaivaprq.

Bodies from the Library (2018) edited by Tony Medawar

The Bodies in the Library conference is a well-known (among mystery bloggers) conference held in London at the British Library. The conference is a gathering place for all fans of detective fiction, and some of the biggest and brightest names in both mystery writing and mystery fandom have gathered there to socialize and share their knowledge of the genre. One thing that becomes apparent to any visitor is just how much there is in the Golden Age of Detection. Even some of the best-known writers in the genre have had some of their works slip through the cracks. That’s what Bodies from the Library intends to rectify.

Edited by genre historian Tony Medawar, Bodies from the Library is a collection of “lost” material from some of the most well-known writers in mystery fiction. Sometimes they’re stage or radio plays whose scripts were never published, sometimes they’re obscure pieces of work, sometimes they’re stories which were never published at all. While these lost works on their own aren’t enough to fill a single-author collection “there is ample material for volumes such as this, bringing together ‘lost’ works by different writers.” So just what are these stories?

“Before Insulin” is my first encounter with the work of J. J. Connington, as well as the only short story featuring his series detective Sir Clinton Driffield and his Watson, Squire Wendover. Here Sir Clinton is faced with a case of fraud. A young man suffering from diabetes and due to inherit a fortune died the day he came of age…but not before leaving that fortune to a nurse he’d fallen for. Sir Clinton is asked to sit in on the meeting to determine the will’s validity and quickly sees it as a fraud. A neat work of scientific detection, and the reader has a chance to see the issues when Sir Clinton explains his findings.

Leo Bruce follows up with “The Inverness Cape,” the clothing of choice by a shady nephew and what he was allegedly seen wearing while beating his aunt to death. “Allegedly,” because his coat turns out to have been getting repaired at the time of the murder. So who wore a duplicate to frame him? Sergeant Beef makes quick work of the plot in this short-short.

“Dark Waters” is another short-short, this time by Freeman Wills Crofts. An embezzling solicitor schemes to kill his client before he can discover the theft. He drugs the man then stages his drowning in a boat accident. Sadly, there’s no real brilliance in how Inspector French brings him in, instead finding a piece of evidence that points right to him.

“Linckles’ Great Case” is the only uncollected short story by Georgette Heyer. The titular Linckes is a rising inspector who’s put on the case of a series of leaks connected to the highest levels of British government. Sadly, the title is a misnomer, as the solution is not only a cliché, but also doesn’t really seem to explain very much.

Next is a radio play by Nicholas Blake,“part of a series of two-part plays by members of the Detection Club produced by John Cheatle.” “Calling James Braithwaite” is set onboard the title ship. The owner of the ship, James Braithwaite, has Nigel Strangeways go undercover as his secretary to keep an eye on his junior partner and wife, who he suspects are having an affair. He’s completely correct, since he’s a snarling, criminal bully. So it’s no surprise that he’s thrown overboard in the middle of the night, but is the killer an escaped maniac from Newcastle with a grudge against Braithwaite, or (let’s be honest here) someone using him as a cover for a more personal motive? Strangeways does good work here, and while this isn’t the best I’ve read by Blake, it’s still a solid mystery.

Next is one of John Rhode’s few short stories, “The Elusive Bullet,” originally published in the collection Detection Cavalcade. A man is found shot to death on a train, and Inspector Hanslet narrows in on his shady nephew. Dr. Priestly doubts this easy conclusion and justifies himself. There’s really no chance for the reader to guess this; the idea is interesting, but I see why Rhode didn’t expand it into a novel. That being said, Rhode is a solid writer and I enjoyed the story.

Cyril Hare is up next with “’The Euthanasia of Hilary’s Aunt,” in which the titular Hilary, who quite likes his aunt but thinks that she’d be better off deceased, plots to kill her, only to be foiled, in a sense. Good, but I’ve seen enough of these kinds of stories in the collection.

“The Girdle of Dreams” is an almost-lost story by Vincent Cornier. A jeweler meets with a strange client, an ancient woman who wants to sell her bridal girdle, a beautiful object designed by Benvenuto Cellini himself. The jeweler is unable to shake the feeling that something odd is going on, and indeed, the meeting ends with him helping the woman to rob his business while in a state of drug-induced bliss…but the police find no drugs in his system. The case is brought to Professor Gregory Wanless of the Intelligence Service, where he unravels the whole plot from his office. The story is a pulp one, so don’t expect anything grand from the solution, although a careful reader can tell when the hapless jeweler is drugged.

“The Fool and the Perfect Murder” is the only short story to feature Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, the series detective of Arthur W. Upfield. Here he has his work cut out for him as he tries to track the body of a missing rancher. But we the reader already know how his killer was inspired by the titular fool with a plan for a perfect murder…Upfield used this idea in a novel too, but it was interesting seeing it in the short story format.

A.A. Milne is up next with another short-short, “Bread Upon the Waters.” Another disreputable nephew plots to murder his rich uncle with a plot straight out of one of his uncle’s detective stories, only to be foiled.“Very unfair” the narrator intones at the end, and the reader might indeed feel that this young man was very cruelly outplayed by Fate.

And then, just as I was getting tired of inverted mysteries and greedy nephews, in comes Anthony Berkeley with his serialized story, “The Man with the Twisted Thumb.” A former governess decides to take a vacation to Monte Carlo after being unjustly fired and quickly strikes up an acquaintance with a young man in the same boat as her. Said young man is a bit dishonest, however, and plans to win her over by “finding” her lost bag…but he gets a hold of the wrong one. This bag is being hunted for by various shady figures, including the titular man. While there’s very little detection, I really enjoyed this one! It’s very funny. While some of our hero’s antics made me roll my eyes, Berkeley really nails the banter between him and his best friend, and I found the romance engaging. The ending is a bit of an anticlimax, but the ride there is worth it.

Next is what most will probably consider to be the crown jewel of the collection: a lost story by Christianna Brand! “The Rum Punch” focuses on Sergent Troot, whose dreams of a seaside holiday with his wife and kids in his newly painted yellow roadster are put on hold when he’s on duty at the party of some family friends, and the patriarch is murdered by poison in the punch. Or was it in the cigarette? These kinds of questions keep the good Sergeant involved in a dragged-out investigation. But he pulls through, exposing both a surprise culprit and a clever method of poisoning.

Next is the first publication of a play by Ernest Bramah starring his blind detective Max Carrados: “Blind Man’s Bluff.” But the content is a bit light. A small group of conspirators plan to steal some valuable plans by an American attaché by swapping his coat, in which he always carries them, with a fake. Needless to say, they are foiled by Carrados. Good, certainly, and worth it for fans of the author and character, it just didn’t do much for me.

“Victoria Pumphrey” is H. C. Bailey’s contribution. The titular Victoria is a secretary at a law firm from a now-fallen noble family. That makes her a perfect candidate to possibly save a young man’s inheritance, or so a family friend of the young man believes. The young man is set to inherit when his uncle dies, but a new candidate from Australia has just surfaced, and Victoria is sent in to see if his claims are legitimate. Another good story with minimal detection, but with a good twist.

“The Starting-Handle Murder” is one of the few uncollected stories from Roy Vickers’ The Department of Dead Ends series. The Department solves unsolved crimes, but more through luck and random connections than through detection on the philosophy that “a law-breaker will walk into prison if you open enough doors for him.” That’s on full display here. The criminal this time is “a gentleman in the formidable Edwardian sense of the word.” He was on the losing side of a love triangle, his love taken by a schoolfriend who fell into disrepute, but he could tolerate that. But when he gets a first-hand look at how this old friend’s eccentric and destructive behavior affects his wife and learns that it’s the result of a worsening insanity, he takes action. A starting-handle, a handle that was used to start older cars, helps him commit a crime that goes unsolved for five years, until one of the other suspects gets involved in a crime of his own. I liked this story, but I feel that it would have worked better if I could have compared other stories from the same series together, since the culprit is unusually honorable and isn’t caught through some brilliant subterfuge, but“because he was a gentleman.”

Finally, Dame Agatha herself presents “The Wife of the Kenite.” Herr Schager is a German agitator, albeit one working for the Communists. When the group he was helping is exposed, he makes his escape through farmland, where he meets a woman, one of a good, solid stock. He takes an instant liking to her, but well…those of you who know your Judges can see how it will go.

I went into this collection with wrong expectations. I expected some little-known tales of deduction and mystery. And while there are some examples of that, most were inverted mysteries or minor tales that I admired but didn’t much care for. But that’s on me. Really, writing my review has helped me appreciate these tales all the more. For those mystery fans or historians who are looking for something new, this collection is right up your alley. Taking my own skewed expectations into account, I can say that this is Recommended. 

Other Reviews: CrossExaminingCrime, A Crime is Afoot, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Mysteries, Short and Sweet.

Thus Was Adonis Murdered (1981) by Sarah Caudwell

Non-book quotes are taken from the blurb.

I’d first heard of Sarah Caudwell in the late, lamented Noah Stewart’s “200 Authors I Would Recommend” series.* I took note of his praise, thought that Caudwell would be nice to read sometime, but never got around to it. Still, I consistently heard praise for Caudwell’s writing from various mystery fans (including the host of this blog) and decided to finally give her a shot. Caudwell “studied law at Oxford, was called to the Chancery Bar, and practiced law for several years at London’s Lincoln Inn,” which is the setting for much of her debut. Sadly she only managed three novels, one contribution to the round-robin The Perfect Murder, a play, The Madman’s Advocate, and a handful of short stories before her death at 60, with one more published posthumously. Thus Was Adonis Murdered was her debut.

Adonis, like the rest of her books, is mostly an epistolary novel. The letters come from Julia Larwood, a barrister who is, regarding tax law, a sensible and level-headed young woman and a brain-damaged magpie in every other aspect of her life: “looking—as, indeed, she does at the best of times—like one of the more disheveled heroines of Greek tragedy.” She writes a series of letters detail her vacation to Venice on an“Art Lover’s Holiday,” for the edification and amusement of her law partners. Julia is getting a first-hand look at the city’s historical buildings. But she’s really looking forward to laying eyes on attractive men. Sadly, they are in short supply. One is married to a quiet, pale lady, and another is an obnoxious ex-colonel who takes her as his confidant, much to her horror. One other member of her group, Ned, gets her attention immediately, but he has a major personality flaw, a characteristic that almost destroys her attraction as soon as she learns of it: He is an employee of the Department of Inland Revenue,“a vast conspiracy having as its sole objective her physical, mental, and financial ruin.” (Julia didn’t pay taxes for four years.)

While doubtless this blog’s readers are recoiling in horror as such a revelation, it gets worse. Julia’s coworkers learn of an incoming news report. It seems that an employee of the Department of Inland Revenue was stabbed to death in Venice, and a British tourist is being held for questioning.

Caudwell uses the epistolary format very creatively here. Our heroes are getting Julia’s letters after the murder, meaning that they (and the reader) have to dig through otherwise innocuous letters to find foreshadowing—unintentional on Julia’s part—of the murder to come. Caudwell creates an interesting effect as the cast do what little investigation they can while slowly getting a more complete picture of the other members of the tour group and their dynamics. There’s marital problems, possible gay lovers, a thief lurking about, and more. But what provoked Ned’s murder? He was found stabbed in his bed after having sex with Julia, and the circumstances are a borderline impossible crime. A group of chambermaids were watching the entrance to the annex where Ned’s room was, and they reported seeing no one but him and Julia enter or leave. Though it’s worth noting that Caudwell doesn’t make a huge production about it. It’s just part of the noose around Julia’s neck.

Caudwell’s style is very old-fashioned, arch and witty. I feared that it would make the book insufferable, but once you get into the flow it’s quite an easy read. There are some good turns of phrase, (“The effect was as of attempting to camouflage an armored tank by icing it with pink sugar,”) and a couple of laugh-out-loud moments (“Barristers Shot in Fulham Fracas”).

I admit I was worried that the writing style would make it hard for me to remember the characters, but that wasn’t a huge problem. The suspects are well-differentiated for how little "on-screen" page time they get. The same cannot be said for the investigators. The main detective is Professor of History Hilary Tamar, but the good professor is almost a background character for the first half of the book until the other suspects return to England. After that, Professor Tamar takes a more direct hand in the investigation but still remains a bit of a cypher (which, in fairness, is intentional on Caudwell’s part). Julia’s fellow barristers are great fun to watch in action, but I could not for the life of me tell them apart, barring Selena, because she’s a woman, and Timothy, because he’s more directly related to the plot and ends up in Venice to take up Julia’s defense. But I did enjoy their antics.

Caudwell plays the mystery game with tongue-in-cheek. There’s an amusing moment where Caudwell-through-Tamar explicitly says that one part of the mystery is a red herring with nothing to do with the murder (not that it stops the professor from lying to one of the investigators about it). The characters regularly discuss the crime and propose plausible theories for their own personal culprits. Tamar even assures the reader about halfway through that the crime is perfectly solvable at that point. Is it? Sort of. Caudwell does something odd here. There’s a subplot that she clues very well indeed; while I didn’t pick up on the clues, I did notice an odd sequence that Caudwell draws attention to and that is important for the subplot. When I looked back, I quickly saw how it all worked out. But the main mystery doesn’t feel as well clued, hinging on the reader picking up on very small details. Even Professor Tamar admits that the solution depends on a lucky-but-educated guess. It’s a good solution to the mystery, but I’d be surprised if most readers truly solve it, as opposed to making a good guess based on their experience with mystery fiction. That being said, Caudwell does work the epistolary format into the solution in a clever way but dare say no more.

In the end, I enjoyed this book. It’s a clever and literate mystery that has something for both casual and hardcore mystery fans. It was a very pleasant read, and I quite liked it. Recommended.

Other Reviews: Mysteries Ahoy, Playing Detective, Mystery*File, FictionFan's Book Reviews, Clothes in Books.

*Thanks to Life of To Solve a Mystery for finding this link for me.

The Case of the Lonely Heiress (1948) by Erle Stanley Gardner

A couple of years ago, I read my first Perry Mason novel and really enjoyed it. Not so much for the mystery, but for Perry Mason flying as close to the legal sun as possible. So when I saw this in a bookstore, I decided to give it a shot. But is The Case of the Lonely Heiress one of Gardner’s hidden gems, or one of his flops?

The book opens with a minor legal problem for Mason. Roger Caddo is the slimy owner of Lonely Hearts are Calling, a mail-order catalog with personalized ads. Recently he’s been getting great business from a particular ad he’s been running. The writer claims to be a heiress on the hunt for a “personable young man.” Needless to say she’s been getting mail by the boxful, but Caddo’s competitors have accused him of writing the ad himself. And the woman in question is hard to get a hold of, going to great lengths to keep Caddo from finding out who she is, even as she rejects multiple letters from eligible bachelors.

Mason goes to work and is able to track the woman down. She’s Marilyn Marlow, and she is indeed a heiress. Caddo is satisfied but Mason’s good work doesn’t stop him from ratting Mason’s man out to Marlow so he can get at that money. Mason is inclined to write the whole thing off as a bust when Marlow tracks him down herself. She also wants legal help.

You see, Marlow inherited her money from her recently-deceased mother, a hospital nurse who took care of George P. Endicott in his final days. Endicott was a rich man and left her a fair bit of his estate in his will. Needless to say, his siblings don’t like this and are challenging the will in court. They claim that Marlow’s mother pressured or tricked their brother into signing the will. There were two witnesses to the will, but one of them, Rose Keeling, has been showing signs of swaying in her testimony. Here we learn what Marlow wanted those men for, which I will leave to the interested reader to find out.

Mason is again interested, but the situation escalates. First is that Caddo’s angry wife finds out what her husband is up to and goes on the warpath. Mason is recovering from that when Marlow rings him from Rose’s apartment. The other woman has been stabbed with a knife, shortly after Marilyn received a letter where Rose said she was going to testify that her original story about the will was a lie…

*Lonely Heiress is an entertaining yarn. It takes a while for the body to hit the floor, but Gardner keeps the reader hooked with Caddo’s initial problem, which is honestly very interesting, and gets a few jabs off at romantic writing in the process (albeit with tongue in cheek, as Mason himself plays Cupid at the end). There is a dull period early on, where Mason spends a bit too much time insisting that what Marlow and Caddo are planning isn’t his problem, but once Marlow contacts him the pace picks up again. Unlike Counterfeit Eye, where Mason was in full control, here he’s struggling to keep up, even getting outplayed by the police and suspects a couple of times. Being Mason however, he just grins and dives back in harder. Based on other reviews I’ve read, that’s the main appeal of this series. Gardner pulls no punches demonstrating just how stacked the deck is against defendants, with Marilyn put through a psychologically brutal third-degree that Mason barely manages gets her out of. We’re rooting for Mason to thumb his nose at the machine that’s trying to grind Marlow down, so we overlook some of the shadier things he does in pursuit of his client’s best interest. There’s less of Mason’s game-playing than in Counterfeit Eye, but what’s there is more impactful as we see how far Mason will stretch legal ethics.

But what about the book as a mystery, I hear you ask. Well, there we’re on shakier ground. There are a couple of good moments. There’s a neat reversal of a seemingly trivial point that everyone has taken for granted that could have been pulled right out of Ace Attorney, giving Mason and Della real hope for their client. There’s also a very clever ploy from the culprit that stuck in my mind after the book was finished. But the mystery is overall nothing special. Well-worked out and with substance, but also not the reason I’d recommend the book. Some of the evidence is based on things that either the average person nowadays wouldn’t be familiar with (the stuff about the pens) or on evidence that we don’t get to see as the characters do; instead, it’s merely described for us.

But make no mistake, this was a good read overall. Mason is an appealing protagonist, and while he doesn’t pull off the same pyrotechnic display of legal fireworks I saw in Counterfeit Eye, he’s still firing on all cylinders fighting a seemingly hopeless battle for the sake of his client. And that’s what most people read this series for. I know I’ll be coming back. I’d appreciate hearing about any of your favorites. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: James Reasoner. 

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)