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)

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."