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."

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.

"The Violent End of Duncan Malveine" (2020) by nicked

And now, time for something completely different.

Outside of mystery fiction, my other big obsession is the Thief franchise. The first game, Thief: The Dark Project came out in 1998 and, along with Metal Gear Solid, played a key role in inventing the “stealth game.” (Although I know about its predecessors, such as Castle Wolfenstein.) The series revolves around Garrett, who used to be a student of a group of a secretive scholars called “the Keepers” before leaving the organization. Now he uses his training to work as a freelance thief operating in an unnamed city. Garrett would like to just steal enough loot to pay the bills and be left alone, but the Protagonist Curse means he inevitably gets sucked into saving the city, if not the world. But for all its influence, the franchise has had a very short shelf life: the original trilogy of games, a tepidly-received reboot/sequel in 2014, and now a VR game set after the 2014 game.

The franchise has retained its power thanks to a very active fan mission community. Ever since 1999’s “Gathering at the Bar,” there have been hundreds of missions placing Garrett in everything from basic Thief missions set in sparkling mansions to sprawling cities to horror to comedy. While there are less missions nowadays than there used to be, the community is still going strong. December 2023 saw the release of The Black Parade, a full campaign easily on par with, or even surpassing, the original games. With such a wide variety, it should come as no surprise that some creators have turned their hands to mystery.

One of the most prolific creators in this field is Nick “nicked” Dablin, who’s made almost two dozen fan missions since 2006. Most of nicked’s missions are high-quality missions that provide twists on the normal Thief format. “The Violent End of Duncan Malveine,” a fan mission for Thief's sequel, The Metal Age, is his most “technically ambitious.”

A journal in Garrett’s apartment sets the scene. Garrett has been eyeing Lord Malveine’s Star of Séraphine, “the world’s largest diamond,” but before he can make a move, Lord Malveine is murdered, meaning it’s likely that the diamond will pass to one of his children. Garrett is about to abandon the job when he’s introduced to an anonymous figure who asks him to track down Lord Malveine’s murderer. This person doesn’t care what Garrett steals, so long as he points to Lord Maleveine’s killer by leaving their portrait light on in the gallery. So Garrett gears up to infiltrate the manor.

Of course, not too many people are weeping over the dead man. There’s his wife, Elizabeth. Or his younger son Leon, a Pagan who resents his father’s conversion to the hyper-technological Mechanists. A conversion that’s also offended his eldest daughter and a priest staying at the estate. Or what about his older son, Raymond? He’s “a sadist with a mean streak” who’s determined to get into a vault built by Duncan’s father Gregor. Not to mention his wife, Lucy, a gambler with a temper. And that’s not counting the family doctor, lawyer, various other guests, and the servants. Which of them is the murderer?

Well, it could be any of them.

The mission’s gimmick is that it’s semi-randomized. I don’t mean in the Clue sense, where everything about the solution is random, but there are nine different choices of killer, each with their own method of committing the crime. The player will spend the mission sneaking through the manor, alternating between stealing loot and digging through the diaries and letters of the guests, figuring out who has an alibi, who has motive, who had the weapon, etc. The first time through, you’ll take extensive notes, desperately seeing who could and could not have committed the crime, you’ll angst over the autopsy report, and you’ll wonder if you have the right person right up until the ending.

Your later playthroughs will be much simpler. Part of this is just what happens when you replay something, but the fact is that the scenarios are too simple for the hardcore mystery fan. Once you know how the mission works, it becomes easy to check what you need to check and ignore everything else, even taking the randomization into account. In fact, the randomization kind of cuts against the mission. It gives the mission some replay value, but I think it would have been better off with two or three in-depth mysteries, with red herrings and double bluffs, then the current set-up with nine pretty basic scenarios. But I’m approaching this as a mystery fan, rather than as a Thief fan mission player. As a Thief fan, nicked does a great job here. Most people don’t think “Thief” and then “mystery,” so it was neat to see how nicked managed to emulate solving a mystery in a game engine not really suited for it.

And the thing is, this would be a very good mystery. You have maps, and the mansion is huge. There are plenty of suspects, with secrets ranging from the mundane to the disturbing. The gameplay mechanics—such as the security cameras you can turn off, but if you flip too many off they’ll all come back on—could be linchpins of a mystery plot. The best is the horror undertones. Nicked’s missions often feature horror, but the horror here got under my skin because you can actually completely miss it if you don’t explore thoroughly. It gives the mission an unsettling undertone if you don’t pick up on the dark thread weaving through it. There are cards and diary pages hidden throughout the manor, and every time you pick one up, there’s the sound of sliding metal from somewhere deep within the estate. “I don’t believe in curses,” Raymond brags, but the player will. It’s like if John Dickson Carr was inspired more by Lovecraft than by Poe. There are more jump scares involved than I would have liked, but most of the horror comes from the atmosphere and build-up.

So while I don’t know if this will be of any interest to this blog’s normal readers, I had a great time with this mission. It’s a solid Thief mission that any fan of the games should check out. Those who aren’t can safely pass on it, or just watch a Let’s Play. Even so, Recommended.

You can check out the mission (and nicked’s other work) here.

Towards Zero (1944) by Agatha Christie

I was inspired to read this book when I saw the commercials for the BBC adaptation. Look at when that came out. Now look at when I released this review. Clearly, a lot happened between then and now, but everything led towards this…

Towards Zero is one of Christie’s Superintendent Battle novels, and a very well-known one at that. It was interesting to compare this to my previous review of an Ellery Queen novel. The Queen novel technically has a stronger hook. Two characters enter the strange world of The Hamlet, meet the eccentric great detective, and we immediately go into an eye-catching murder. Christie’s book opens with lawyers and their hangers-on discussing a case, and yet while the Queen book is a little slow, Christie essentially rams a hook down the reader’s throat from the jump.

One of the attendees at the meeting is Richard Treves. Treves reflects that most mystery novels “begin in the wrong place. They begin with the murder. But the murder is the end. The story begins long before that—years before sometimes—with all the causes and events that bring certain people to a certain place at a certain time on a certain day…All converging towards a given spot…And then, when the time comes—over the top! Zero Hour.” A philosophy that Christie follows here, as the next portion of the book shows the reader snapshots of different events, from an attempts suicide to Superintendent Battle’s daughter being accused of theft.

But the main focus is a triangle. Nevile Strange is a professional tennis player who’s recently divorced his wife Audrey for another woman, Kay. Still, Nevile feels bad about the whole thing and his guilt has led to him hitting on a terrible great idea: He and Kay will visit his mother-in-law at her home in September while Audrey is there. He’s very insistent that this was his idea, but Kay is skeptical. Also skeptical is said very traditional mother-in-law, Lady Tressilian, who dislikes the concept of divorce and isn’t fond of Kay anyway. Also going to be there in September is Mary Aldin, Lady Tressilian’s caretaker who comes into money if the old lady dies. Also present is Thomas Royde, a distant cousin of Audrey who still carries a torch for her and Ted Latimer, a dancer who carries a torch for Kay. Not to mention Mr. Treves himself.

This is already a trainwreck in the making…but the reader knows that it’s going to get worse. For one of the snippets we get is of a person plotting, “a clear, carefully detailed project for murder.” And the date of this plan’s climax? “A date in September.”

Towards Zero is one of Christie’s best works. She throws a lot of characters at the reader, and it’s a testament to her skill that they quickly sharpen and stay in the reader’s mind. There’s ghost-like Audrey, drifting through the house, seemingly inscrutable. There’s Kay, who beneath all her garishness truly cares about Nevile and, having schemed to get him in the first place, thinks she recognizes what Audrey is doing. Nevile himself is key to the narrative. While most readers will be appalled at his decisions, they are understandable. This is a man who has never suffered a serious setback in his life, and the idea that he’s willingly built a time bomb to sit on never seems to occur to him. The other characters are well-drawn as well. Of note is Ted. Normally, Christie’s angry young men tend to get eye-rolling pity at best, but here Christie gives a sharp scene with Mary where she recognizes his frustration and anger with all the snobs he’s surrounded by and offers him genuine sympathy. It’s a good scene and speaks to the depth Christie gives her cast. The only part that rings false is a last-second romance. You can kinda justify it if you tilt your head and squint a bit, but it still comes out of nowhere. And I don't like the language used to describe marriage.

I’ve been deliberately leaving out details about the murder, because I want to leave as much as a surprise for the reader if possible. While reading this book, I thought about Peter Lovesey’s The False Inspector Dew, another book with the same formula of having the murder occur halfway through with the first half of the novel being build-up. While I thought that Lovesey’s ended up being a pretty simple mystery, Christie manages to construct a much more dense and complex mystery from her page count. The reader is struck by a series of odd details about the crime—Why did the killer drug the maid, for instance—and the plot takes a number of twists and turns, subverting the reader’s expectations and sending them off asking new questions. I think that Christie could have highlighted some bits of evidence more—and it should go without saying, but some of those opening scenes have important clues—but she gives you most of the important bits and gives you plenty of time to chew over what they mean. And to fail to understand them, of course. I had been spoiled on this book before reading it, so it amused me to see how smoothly Christie introduced a series of red herrings designed to confuse the reader who thought they were a step ahead of the Queen.

Obviously, I had a blast with this book. Excellent characters interacting in a solid mystery. Highly Recommended. 

Other Reviews: CrossExaminingCrime, Only Detect, Mysteries Ahoy!, The Grandest Game in the World, Ah, Sweet Mystery!, Countdown John's Christie Journal, Clothes in Books, A Crime is Afoot, Tangled Yarns, The Invisible Event (podcast, contains spoilers), and The Green Capsule.

The Tragedy of X (1932) by Ellery Queen

Image taken from The Invisible Event.

The year 1932 was a banner year for cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, better known for their pen name, Ellery Queen. After writing a couple of novels and short stories, the cousins made the decision to really buckle down and turn mystery writing into a career. That year saw the publication of The Greek Coffin Mystery and The Egyptian Cross Mystery under the Queen name, and the subject of today’s review, The Tragedy of X, published under the pen name of Barnaby Ross. (The sequel was published the same year.)

The Tragedy of X opens with Inspector Thumm and District Attorney Bruno making their way to a house that could serve as the setting for the next Yukito Ayatsuji: “The Hamlet,” a castle populated by old servants with Shakespearean names and the hunchback Quacey, “the world’s premier make-up man.” And the lord of the castle is Drury Lane, a renowned actor who solved “the Cramer case.” Thumm and Bruno want his help in resolving “the Longstreet Murder.”

Harley Longstreet was a Wall Street broker, a swaggering bully who thought little of others. His birthday party was less a gathering of friends and more a barrelful of targets for Longstreet to shove around. The festivities were set to continue at another location, meaning that a gaggle of people crowd onto a streetcar. But on the way, Longstreet reached into his pocket, only to jerk it out. Something had pricked him. Minutes later, he died. The weapon proved to be a ball of nicotine-coated needles. Circumstances demonstrated that the only time the ball could have been planted was after the party boarded the car, but who was it?

There’s Longstreet’s fiancée, Cherry Browne, a “musical comedy actress.” There’s Michael Collins, a government man who’s convinced that Longstreet gave him a bad tip. The police really like Longstreet’s business partner, John DeWitt, who’s the frequent target of Longstreet’s bullying and possibly blackmail. Not to mention that Longstreet likely had an affair with his second wife and made a pass at his daughter. There’s motive for both women, and for the daughter’s boyfriend, Kit Lord, who laid Longstreet out with a punch. But the best efforts of the New York police are for naught, and the case hits a dead end.

Drury Lane astonishes his visitors when he says he already has a good guess about who the killer is, but demurs to identify Mr. X on the grounds of lack of proof. Mr. X has no interest in waiting for the denouement, however, and hurls a possible witness off a New York ferry. DeWitt is inexplicably on the scene and refuses to explain why, making him suspect number one is the eyes of the police, but Drury Lane—and the reader—are certain that Mr. X still lurks in the shadows…

It was only near the end that I realized that this was my first full Ellery Queen novel. I’d read a handful of radio plays and short stories, as well as The Tragedy of Errors years ago, but that was a (meaty) outline. For an introduction, it was good. Tragedy of X is a solid novel. It is a bit slow-paced; the Queen cousins lack Agatha Christie’s smooth prose and dialogue, and we really don’t see too much of the non-DeWitt suspects after the initial murder. It feels like we lurch from one murder scene to the next without much connecting them. It didn’t bother me too much, but I was aware of how much time it was taking to finish each section. And it’s not much of a “tragedy.” I can kind of see what the Queen cousins were going for here (ROT13: gur cybg vf rffragvnyyl n Funxrfcrnerna eriratr fgbel gbyq sebz gur cbvag bs ivrj bs gur vairfgvtngbef jub gel naq snvy gb fgbc gur zrybqenzngvp naq znfgre znavchyngbe ivyynva sebz rknpgvat uvf iratrnapr), but it didn’t come off like that for me because I wasn’t really connected to the characters. (ROT13: Naq jr qba’g urne nalguvat sebz gur xvyyre nsgre uvf neerfg. Jr qba’g rira trg dhbgrf sebz uvf pbasrffvba, Guhzz naq Oehab whfg fhzznevmr vg!)

I enjoyed the mystery though. Ho-Ling is a huge Queen fan who praises the novels as the height of logical detection; you’re granted all the clues and can follow along with the detective to the truth. And here, you can. Lane is right, you can solve the crime from the initial account of the investigation. I picked up on some of the same things he did and very well could have gotten it for myself. I do think the police would have hit on the key fact eventually, but I accepted it here. While there isn’t a big epic chain of logical deduction at the end, I did enjoy Lane’s explanation, especially the reason for why the killer had to leave behind a piece of evidence that directly incriminated them. Lane methodically demolishes every other choice the killer could have made, so by the end you’re nodding your head in agreement: The killer really did have to do that.

This book also marks the first (novel) appearance of that Queen staple, the dying message. The third victim crosses his middle finger and forefinger in “the protection-sign against the evil eye.” The final explanation of what this message means is played more as a nice final line to the book, but again, you can figure out what this message means, it’s just unlikely since the key information is only briefly given. But it is there.

So overall, I liked this book. While I can’t say that, if I’d read it with no context, I’d want to rush right out and get more, when reading it knowing that this is Ellery Queen, and that there’s more and better to come…well, I’m looking forward to it. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: The Case Files of Ho-Ling, The Green Capsule, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, The Invisible Event, and Dead Yesterday.

The Spy and the Thief (1971) by Edward D. Hoch (edited by Ellery Queen)

Many years ago, I downloaded some Edward D. Hoch collections for my Kindle, determined to read more of him. One of those collections was The Spy and the Thief, “a double-barreled collection” containing seven stories of Hoch’s spy C. Jeffery Rand, and seven stories of his thief Nick Velvet. I started the collection, read most of it…and then never finished it due to having other things to read. Well, I remembered this book and set out to finally read it all the way through.

The history of The Spy and the Thief goes back to 1943, when Ellery Queen* published multiple short story collections containing stories by some of the finest writers in the genre, from Stuart Palmer to Dashiell Hammett to Roy Vickers. The goal was not only to give the public some good reading, but also to preserve magazine stories that otherwise would have fallen into the cracks of oblivion. The Spy and the Thief was part of a second round of these types of collections, which started in 1969. The collection comes with some brief dossiers on not only Hoch, but also on his two stars. On that basis, it’s worthwhile for the Hoch fanatic, but what did I think about it as a book?

I’ve already reviewed the first story in the collection, “The Spy Who Came to the Brink,” so we’ll move onto “The Spy Who Had Faith in Double-C.” Cecil Montgomery is a priest and spy at work in the island nation of Buhadi, which is currently in the midst of a power struggle between two charismatic leaders…one of whom is under the employ of the Chinese. Montgomery discovers which of the two men it is, but agents of that man kill him in a blind alley, leaving only a vague message for Rand to interpret. It’s a nice little puzzle, although one has to wonder if Rand would really be stumped by it as long as he is. Or that the killers wouldn’t have found it. I haven’t posted it since I feel that most readers, if they think about it, can crack the code.

“The Spy Who Took the Long Route” is similar to “Brink” in that there’s no doubt about the spy who’s passing information about ship placements in microdots on postcards; the question is why he’s transmitting the information the way he is. Sending the information by postcard ensures that it’ll arrive in Russian hands weeks after it’s of any use. I do like the explanation that Hoch provides. It’s bit odd, but the summation does a good job at showing why this method was used and not something else. But the main clue that tips Rand off…frankly, it makes no sense. (ROT13: Fb Enaq vf gvccrq bss orpnhfr vg’f irel hayvxryl gung gur zbyr jbhyq unir abgvprq gur zvpebqbgf ng nyy. Bxnl. Fb jul gura qbrf gur zbyr zragvba gurz, vs ab bar xabjf nobhg gurz?) It mars the story. More impactful is Hoch’s portrayal of his fictional city of Hoihong, a muggy and hazy city where the West and Russians co-mingle like the Cold War doesn’t exist. Hoch had a cynical attitude about the conflict, and I think this setting demonstrates it, as does the next story.

“The Spy Who Came to the End of the Road” opens pre-Pearl Harbor at a facility where scientists are doing work with electric eels to find a possible cure for Russian nerve gas. One man kills two workers, and then we cut to the present, where the killer might have resurfaced under another name. He claims to have worked with codebreaking, and so Rand is sent in to talk with him and test his story. This is almost a pure espionage tale with little detection until the end, with a nice little plot twist that readers might miss until the explanation. Although Hoch uses the story to talk about how much he knows about electric eels, this is pretty good.

The Lavender Machine in “The Spy Who Purchased a Lavender” is a new encryption device developed by the Americans. Old spy Peter Smith purchases one for Britain, but the odd behavior of the seller and a piece of carbon paper with a duplicate signature on it makes him suspect that the man might be trying to sell one to the Communists. I found the mystery aspect of this one pretty weak. The final explanation for the possible espionage is quite good and well thought out. But the actual crime—for of course there’s a murder committed late in the story—isn’t as well done. My issue with it, and the other Rand stories collected here, is that they almost all revolve around a dying message or code of some kind. That makes sense, seeing as Rand is a codebreaker, but it also means that alternate clues tend to be a bit thin on the ground. If the reader can break the code, they know the killer. Hoch does his best, but in order to ensure that the reader knows enough to break the code, he has to explain how it works and highlight to readers what to watch out for. Which is what happens here.

It's a shame, because I do like this story as a spy story. It’s a drag, but that’s the point, as Smith chases down thin leads that Rand is increasingly convinced are going nowhere, clumsily questioning every possible acquaintance of his suspect. Hoch does a good job of capturing Rand’s increasing frustration with what looks like a wild goose chase without making him unsympathetic.

“The Spy and the Calendar Network” is a traditional whodunit. The titular network was active after World War II, dedicated to learning all they could “about German scientists working for the Russians.” It was disbanded without accomplishing much, but now the surviving members of the group, including Rand, are gathering at Cornwall for a twenty-year reunion. But not even 24 hours in, one of the group is found stabbed to death in his room, the only evidence being a piece of paper with the word “Tarsus” scrawled on it. Once again, it probably shouldn’t take Rand as long as it does to crack this one, and again, there’s not too many clues pointing to the killer, but I liked this one. Hoch does a good job with the moody atmosphere and symbolism, and I liked the backstory behind the crimes.

We end the Rand section with “The Spy and the Bermuda Cipher.” A late-night phone call brings Scotland Yard and Rand to a Liverpool house where a Double-C agent is lying dead of a stab wound. Bizarrely, the room is filled with encyclopedias, textbooks, and clocks. 24 to be precise. Rand suspects the murder is tied to the Bermuda Cipher, a new cipher stumping the greatest minds of Double-C. The reader has no chance of figuring out how to break it, but honestly, it’s a very clever cipher that feels very practical. Unfortunately, the focus on the cipher means that the murder is a bit perfunctory, but Hoch slips in a very good plot twist that has been carefully set up. Though would a clever spy really do that? It feels like someone would notice.

I’ve become more of a Rand fan over the years, since I feel that some of Hoch’s most interesting and out-there ideas come from his espionage stories. But these aren’t Rand at his best. They’re good stories but lack the needed “oomph” to be great. And the reliance on dying messages limits them as mysteries.

We now move onto the Nick Velvet stories. Velvet is one of Hoch’s most interesting series characters, a thief who doesn’t bother with “the usual valuable things, like cash or jewels,” but “the unusual, the bizarre, the worthless.” It’s a neat hook that adds a little mystery to all of his stories, even the ones that don’t feature another crime: Why does the client want Nick to steal pool water, tickets, or a calendar? But that’s something of a soft retcon, since Hoch’s original vision for Nick placed more weight on the “unusual” rather than the “valueless.”

This is best shown by Nick’s debut, “The Theft of the Clouded Tiger.” Nick is approached by a shady trio looking for him to abduct the titular clouded tiger “a strangely mottled beast long thought to be legendary” from a public zoo for their employer, a Middle Eastern prince. The focus is on how Velvet will slip an angry tiger out of a zoo. Hoch handles this part well. Perceptive readers will figure out where the plot is going, but this was a good debut for an interesting series character…albeit one who’s quite savage here; Hoch would later tone Velvet down.

“The Theft from the Onyx Pool” sees Velvet hired by Asher Dumont, an heiress with an odd target: the water from the pool of mystery play writer Samuel Fitzpatrick. She wants it stolen not drained. And she wants it done before the Fourth. Most of the story is spent on Velvet scheming to steal the water, and his plan is honesty pretty smart. The motive for the theft is good, and I liked the reason it had to be done before the Fourth. Velvet considers a false solution which I would have also been impressed with, which is a testament to Hoch’s imagination.

I remembered liking “The Theft of the Brazen Letters” the best of my first read-through, and this reread almost held up. Velvet is hired to steal three of the letters from the sign on the Satomex Corporation building. Velvet not only has to steal the letters and figure out why his clients want them, but dodge around Charlie Weston, “a smart cop and an honest one.” I felt that most of the Velvet stories fell under “The ‘worthless’ item is secretly valuable,” but that’s not the case here at all. (Nor for the rest of the stories, honestly.) The ending is great, with Velvet explaining the risky-if-clever plan at the heart of the story and turning the tables on Weston. Some of the cluing is a little clunky, but I believe that most readers won’t think through what they mean or notice the real key evidence.

“The Theft of the Wicked Tickets” has Velvet hired to steal the tickets of the Broadway play, Wicked. The play has been closed for two months, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for Nick’s client, the father of the play’s producer. Of course, this is no simple job, as Wicked seems to still be a hot commodity in spite of it crashing and burning. Not to mention the dead man Velvet finds in the theater during his break-in. I rose an eyebrow at the reason for the theft, but I’ll trust that Hoch read about something like this.

Oh, and this story has nothing to do with the hit musical Wicked. Don’t be silly.

“The Theft of the Laughing Lions” starts with Nick’s sailboat being invaded by Ran Brewster, a “mermaid” with a job for Nick: one of the lion decorations on the tables of Phil Rumston’s “Capital Clubs.” Rumston is an odd man, an “open, friendly man” who's also "perhaps the most talkative person in the public eye." His every secret is already out in the open, so what does a young woman want with one of his lions? This is almost pure caper, as Nick’s first attempt isn’t sufficient, and his second goes wrong. Not the most amazing explanation at the end, but still a good story.

“The Theft of the Coco Loot” see Velvet hired to steal a calendar. “A calendar of this year, of the type that is given out every December. It has absolutely no value.” What makes the theft interesting is the calendar’s owner: John O’Donnell, currently in a federal penitentiary. The only thing O’Donnell seems to use the calendar for is “to cross off the days while he waits for the end of his sentence,” but when Nick and the reader learn that the crime he’s imprisoned for is piracy, it becomes obvious what makes the calendar valuable. Wisely, Hoch devotes much of the story to Velvet’s effort to steal the calendar, and I quite enjoyed the process. The main deduction hinges on trivia, but it’s trivia that Hoch seeds the story with, making it feel more fair. And a clever reader can make an educated guess if they notice those seeds. This romp ends with a gun battle and a clean win for Velvet.

Finally, Velvet is hired to steal a wooden horse from a merry-go-round in “The Theft of the Blue Horse.” The merry-go-round is part of a carnival, soon to close, near the Canadian border. But Nick’s hopes of an easy job are dashed because it seems that someone else has the same idea and has already stolen one of the horses. I thought I remembered what the reason for the theft was and was prepared to be disappointed, but it turns out I misremembered. I admit, I don’t quite follow the reason for the theft, but it’s an interesting twist that gives Velvet's actions more impact. There’s a good deduction at the end too.

Once I accepted that the Velvet stories were more likely to be caper stories than capers with full-blown mysteries, I enjoyed them more. I liked the variety of reasons for the different thefts, and the mystery elements tend to be solid, at the very least. Velvet is an appealing protagonist; it’s fun to watch a master at work—whether that be a master thief or a master author.

When I first finished this collection, I wasn’t super fond of it. The stories didn't stand out to me, and there are a bunch of typos in this edition. But on thinking about it, I can safely say I enjoyed the book. While I might put this on the lower tier of Hoch collections, I do think it’s a good book overall. I could see myself picking it up again and flipping through it, enjoying the work of an expert. But that’s because Hoch is a comfort read to me, and I don’t know if someone going into his work blind would agree, and there’s not really a story I can point to and say, “You have to read this,” (except maybe “Bronze Letters”). To be fair, I’ll label this as Not Recommended, with Caveats (I liked it, but you might not.)

*I'm assuming this refers to Frederic Dannay, but I'm labeling this as Queen to be sure.