Bertie and the Seven Bodies (1990) by Peter Lovesey

In between the end of his historical Sgt. Cribb series and the beginning of his contemporary Peter Diamond series, Peter Lovesey experimented with a variety of non-series novels, a couple of which I’ve looked at. One of those books was Bertie and the Tin Man, a book starring Bertie, Prince of Wales and the future King Edward VII. I was interested, but the reviews I read indicated that this was more of a thriller than a straight mystery. But Lovesey’s second Bertie book, Bertie and the Seven Bodies, looked more promising. I read the Soho Press omnibus edition containing all three of the Bertie books with an introduction from Lovesey. In it, he says that the book was meant for the centenary of Christie’s birth, further whetting my appetite. Lovesey might not be a patch on the Queen of Crime, but perhaps this tribute would be worthwhile.

The book opens with Bertie getting an invitation to a shooting party at Desborough, the estate of one Ameila Drummond. Bertie wants to go for the shooting and for the widow, though his wife Alexandra (“Alix”) intends to accompany him to prevent any funny business. Also at the party are the hostess’s brother, Marcus Pelham, the charitable and giving Sir George Holdfast and his wife, Moria, a shy and stuttering poet (but an excellent shot) Wilfred Osgot-Edge, Jerry Gribble, His Grace the Duke of Bournemouth, commoner Claude Bullivant, and Jerry’s latest fling, actress Queenie Chimes. There are also other assorted guests, such as the famed explorer Isabella Dundas and other members of the household. All in all, it promises to be an exciting party, with shootings and parlor games and even a ghost story.

And then Miss Chimes faceplants into her dessert. She is dead by morning. A natural, if shocking death. Bertie isn’t concerned. Then during Tuesday’s hunt, Jerry is found dead of a gunshot to the head. Clearly, Bertie thinks, a grief-stricken suicide. He and the other discoverers endeavor to cover the whole thing up. Then on Wednesday, during a game of Sardines, another guest is found stabbed and shoved into the dumbwaiter.

At this point, Bertie starts to suspect that there’s a murderer afoot.

Guiding his conclusions are the pieces of paper left by the bodies, each labeled with the day of the week. It seems inexplicable until Alix notes that the days are a reference to the poem, “Monday’s Child”:

“Monday’s child is fair of face,

“Tuesday’s child is full of grace,

“Wednesday’s child is full of woe…” And so on and so forth, only the killer is replacing “child” with “corpse.”

To grant Bertie his due credit, once the magnitude of what’s going on sinks in, he takes, if not competent, certainly decisive action, taking control of the investigation with the help of Inspector Sweeney (who’s really his bodyguard). Lovesey strikes a good balance between Bertie’s inflated ego and incompetence versus his role as a detective. His dumb decisions are usually justified in the moment, and his more boneheaded or amorous actions are quickly called out by either his own narration or other characters. But as the Crown Prince, he has the ability to throw his weight around and gain information from the other suspects, no matter how much they dislike him personally. Lovesey keeps the story moving at a good pace, and there’s plenty of wit and amusement to be found.

The mystery is pretty solid too. While there aren’t much in the way of clues per se—and the key clue is an offhanded comment that I’m sure most readers will miss—you can make a genuine guess at who the killer is if you really think about what’s going on. Lovesey provides some nice false solutions along the way, one of which I dare say will be most readers’ first guess at what’s going on. I do wish the rhyme had been better implemented. Early on, Lovesey does a good job at playing with the ambiguity with some of the lines to misdirect the reader about who will be next, but in the end some of the connections are very tenuous, and the killer’s motive for working the rhyme in gets handwaved. But I liked the motive for the murders, which casts a more somber light on some of the preceding events and gives the ending a darker hue when you realize what Bertie has done.

But I can honestly say that I liked this book. I was getting skeptical of Lovesey as a mystery writer (he’s a very good writer in general), but this revived my faith some. Not a stone-cold classic of the genre, but a fun read that tries to give the reader a legitimate mystery. I’m tempted to give Bertie and the Crime of Passion a shot based on the strength of this, but we will see. Recommended

Other Reviews: Mystery*File, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Mysteries Ahoy!

Cards on the Table (1936) by Agatha Christie

“Supposing that four people sit down to play bridge and one, the odd man out, sits in a chair by the fire. At the end of the evening, the man by the fire is found dead. One of the four, while he is dummy, has gone over and killed him, and intent on the play of the hand, the other three have not noticed. Ah, there would be a crime for you! Which of the four was it?”--Poirot, The ABC Murders

Agatha Christie is known for many things. One is her ability to surprise and astonish the reader with someone they never suspected. You name a least-likely killer, they probably star in at least one of her books. What makes Cards on the Table so interesting is how Christie doesn’t do that. There are four, and only four, suspects. They all have equal motive. They all have equal opportunity. Any one of them might have done it. But which one?*

The book begins at a party attended by shady Mr. Shaitana, a collector. He sets his sights on Poirot and provokes and banters with him. Then he gets an idea: he’ll show Poirot his most prized collection…of murderers. Not just any two-bit murderers, but murderers who have gotten away with it. He invites Poirot to a dinner with these esteemed criminals. Poirot is too much of a gentleman to say that this is the stupidest idea he’s ever heard, but he implies it.

Poirot isn’t the only detective in attendance. He’s joined by Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard, by Colonel Race of the Service, and by Ariadne Oliver, a famous mystery writer, making her first appearance in one of Christie’s novels. Matching them are the murderers: hearty Dr. Roberts, laconic Major Despard, classy Mrs. Lorrimer, and shy Anne Meredith. Shaitana relishes the conversation, dropping smug hints about his guests’ secret pasts, before proposing a game of bridge. Detectives at one table, murderers at another, while he sits and watches his collection of killers. All goes well until the detectives take their leave for the night. They go to tell Shaitana…and find that he’s been stabbed in the chest.

Initial interrogations don’t help much. All four suspects say that they barely know Shaitana. All of them had at least one moment when they got up from the table, and that’s just what was noticed. There are almost no clues. Christie says in her foreword that “The deduction must, therefore, be entirely psychological,” and she’s not kidding. Sure, there’s no hard evidence, but Poirot and Battle know that a killer tends to repeat themselves. Not in that they’ll use the same methods, but that they’ll commit the same type of murder. The four detectives each dig into the suspects’ past, trying to determine what murders they’ve committed to match them with Shaitana’s death. This is very promising, but in practice it’s mostly just Poirot and Battle. Race does all his work off-screen, says some racist stuff about how a white man won’t commit a murder, then skips out of the narrative to do hush-hush work. Mrs. Oliver is more successful, both practically—she manages to get one over Battle by getting information on one of the past murders—and in the meta sense. Christie is clearly having a blast whenever Mrs. Oliver speaks. Her normal laconic, to-the-point dialogue is replaced with paragraphs of her poking fun at the business of mystery writing. Sadly, she too fades out of the narrative about halfway through.

The suspects are also vivid characters. All of them seem like very nice, respectable people, but those are the people you need to watch out for in Christie. It seems impossible that any of them would have committed a crime, but Christie gives them all plausible murders, each distinct to the suspect. One character in particular is chilling in their lack of any hesitation when it comes to murder, and they’ll stick with me for a while. Again, you need to pay attention to the past murders to be able to solve the present one. This mostly works out. On the one hand, the psychological similarity between the deaths is clever. It’s not obvious, but when Poirot spelled it out, I realized that yeah, it makes sense. But I can see a more skeptical reader picking at it or being annoyed at how Christie somewhat backs off on her promise that all four suspects are equally guilty near the end of the book. I will say you do not need to know bridge to solve this; a couple of five-minute tutorials on YouTube are all you need, and I think the main point is made clear enough through context.

Christie expertly paces the book. While reading I thought to myself, “I should really be bored with this,” because Christie is all dialogue, and like I said, it’s often very to-the-point. But man could she control a narrative, expertly dolling out information at just the right pace to keep you hooked. It would have been very easy to let this spiral out of control with four detectives and four suspects, and it’s a testament to Christie’s skill that it doesn’t. But I'm not happy with how Poirot catches the killer. I didn't mind it in the moment, and I feel that you can argue it's thematically fitting, but it is a weakness in the book.

All in all, I liked this one. I’ve been looking forward to it, and there's a degree where I know I'm responding to the book that I imagined it would be and not the book it is. But I still enjoyed it. I want to read it again to see how I react to it, which I wouldn't want to do if the book was truly bad. I wouldn’t recommend it to Christie neophytes, but for someone who has a few Christie's under their belt and wants to see her try something a little different, this is Recommended. 

Other Reviews: Ah, Sweet Mystery (contains spoilers for the TV version at the end), In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, (review one and review two), The Green Capsule, Mysteries Ahoy, Countdown John's Christie Journal, Crossexaminingcrime (spoiler analysis), FictionFan's Book Reviews.

*Also, this was her third Poirot book that year!

Blood From a Stone (2013) by Dolores Gordon-Smith

Blood from a Stone is the seventh in Dolores Gordon-Smith’s Jack Haldean series. So far, I’ve been really enjoying these books. This is one of her more complex mysteries. We start in the small village of Topfordham, where local lady Mrs. Paxton has received an unexpected guest: her nephew, Terence Napier. Napier’s superior attitude has rubbed the village the wrong way, but Mrs. Paxton is very accepting, since he claims to be able to lead her to her long-lost son, Sandy. Sandy went missing on the battlefield, but there are rumors that he deserted and is lying low in Paris. But Mrs. Paxton and Napier return from there empty-handed. Then, shortly after, Mrs. Paxton is found dead in her bedroom from an overdose of sleeping draught. It looks like a clear suicide, but the local doctor believes it’s murder, and finds proof, including a forged will that leaves her money to Napier. Needless to say, he makes himself scarce.

Two months later, Isabelle Stanton, cousin to Jack Haldean, is traveling by train when she has an encounter with an unpleasant man in a blue bowler hat. She finds the experience unsettling but doesn’t think more of it, until she finds a would-be reporter looking nauseous outside one of the compartments, telling her not to go in and rambling about jewels. The man is inside. Someone stabbed him before shoving his head out the window as the train was passing a bridge, making him almost impossible to identify. And there’s a beautiful sapphire necklace under the seat, one that was just reported stolen. Evidence on the man indicates that he might have been the Vicar, a notorious criminal thought dead, but there’s more to come. Someone tries to kill both Isabelle and the reporter. The various characters gather at Breagan Grange, an estate built next to an anxiety temple with disturbing imagery and a history of human sacrifice. There’s a shady private eye, séances, near-death experiences, and yes, it’s all connected to the murder of Mrs. Paxton.

Blood is another one of Gordon-Smith’s dense and complex mysteries. I admit, she partly lost me this time. This might have been due to my mood while I was reading, but I had a hard time following some of the character relations. I think this could be because Gordon-Smith doesn’t really give the reader much to latch onto. Like in her previous book, the mystery hinges on the dead man’s identity. But we get a lot of discussion about it and not much progress. Is he Sandy Paxton? Some of the items on him could have belonged to Sandy, and they weren’t forged. But were they planted? Is he the still-missing Terence Napier? Is he the Vicar? An accomplice? Gordon-Smith’s other novels feature dense plots with lots of possible avenues, but here it feels like we spend a lot of time talking about the theoretical identities of people we haven’t met. It’s not concrete. Even when we get a quite brutal attempted murder later in the book, we never really sit down and think about who could have done this, why would they do it, etc. The only investigation is based an overheard statement that, while the character would plausibly come to a certain conclusion, the reader is likely to see other explanations.

This is frustrating, because the book is really good otherwise. It’s a book in motion, things are happening and, in spite of my griping, they don’t feel thrown in for the sake of exciting the reader with fluff. Haldean does some good detective work here, digging deeper into the crimes. For example, after Mrs. Paxton was killed, all three of her servants skipped town. Haldean can believe that one, maybe two, would, but why would all three skip town without leaving any information? I like these sorts of mini-mysteries that give the reader something to think about.

Gordon-Smith also toys with the impossible crime here, albeit without committing to it. Mrs. Paxton dies behind the locked door of her bedroom, but her poisoning isn’t treated as a locked room. Later, at Breagan Grange, during a séance, one character has blood suddenly appear on their hands, and they’re later attacked in a cave with a locked door. But again, they aren’t treated as impossible crimes (although the blood trick is pretty neat).

For all my gripes, once everything is wrapped up and Haldean explains everything, this is probably the best-constructed mystery I’ve read from Gordon-Smith. There are more clues, the clues that are there are more plentiful, there’s foreshadowing and set-up for the twists, etc. Some of the clues are only clues because this is a mystery novel and so you know that X is going to be a clue, but this is a minor problem. Once I got over my initial annoyance at the identity games and thought about the solution, I saw that it was pretty solid. I’m noticing certain motifs that the author returns to, so a savvier reader might see the solution coming, but I was fooled and happy to be so.

So, in the end, this is another solid work from one of my favorite modern authors. Again, this is the best mystery I’ve read by her, even if the construction could have been improved. Recommended; this is well worth your time if you like classically-styled mysteries.