A Fête Worse Than Death (2007) by Dolores Gordon-Smith

As has become clear by now, I really enjoy the works of Dolores Gordon-Smith. Her books make a genuine effort to emulate the Golden Age novels of yore, and even when she falls short, she still gives a charmingly written and dense mystery to chew on. I decided to go back to the beginning of her Jack Haldean series to enjoy it in full.

A Fête Worse Than Death opens at the village fête, run by Jack’s aunt, Alice. He’s enjoying the festivities, aside from the heat, but runs into a fly in the ointment: Jeremy Boscome, a former fellow officer. Boscome was only in the Royal Air Force to escape the front lines of World War I and was a notorious nuisance. A reputation he lives up to here, getting drunk, making insinuations, and being a pest, before crashing in the fortune teller’s tent to sleep it off. He’s seemingly left alone in there, but when someone peeks in, they find that he’s been shot in the head.

This murder is soon followed up by one of Boscome’s compatriots catching a bullet to the head in his hotel room. Luckly for Jack, the investigator in charge, Superintendent Edward Ashley, has heard about his previous work in crime solving and is willing to let him assist. Boscome was a vulture who had a nasty habit of prodding people’s emotional weaknesses, and Jack suspects he was making money off of blackmail. But against who? The truth lies in Boscome’s memoirs, where he recounts how a traitorous officer led good men into a German ambush in the tunnels under the battlefield…

Gordon-Smith does a good job here. There’s plenty of mystery and intrigue. There’s a love triangle of sorts. Marguerite Vayle has fallen for a war hero with movie star looks, Colonel Whitfield, but one of her trustees, Hugh Larwrence, opposes the marriage on the grounds that the colonel comes off as a gold-digger. There’s also shady parentage, more murders, the works. She evens hints at an impossible crime with Boscome’s death. It seems, if not impossible, certainly very unlikely that anyone could have slipped into the tent and shot him without being seen or heard. She doesn’t make much of this (although the clue that explains it is what breaks the case for Haldean), but I wanted to make a note of it. I predicted some of the plot twists in advance, but I can see someone less familiar with her work not reaching the same conclusions I did. The mystery isn’t as complex as her later ones, but there’s still plenty of theorizing for characters and reader alike to chew on.

If I have any complaints, it’s that the cluing is, again, a little weak. Haldean points out multiple little indications during his explanation at the end, and fair enough. While reading the explanation, I was impressed at how easily Gordon-Smith slotted the killer’s actions into earlier parts of the book. But those elements really only point to the killer after you know who they are. You can’t look at them and deduce who the killer is from them. I also think that there needed to be one or two more suspects for the reader to, er, suspect. Now, part of this is just the fact that I’ve read enough of Gordon-Smith to get a feel for how she constructs her stories, but the killer stood out to me here. She does a good job of spreading suspicion around, but I think another potential killer would have served her well.

All in all, while this isn’t my favorite of Gordon-Smith’s novels, it is still a good read. Remember that this was her first book and that she would get much better. You could certainly do worse than starting here if you’re prowling around looking for a new author. Recommended for anyone looking for good historical mysteries. 

Other Reviews: In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, The Invisible Event, My Reader's Block.

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.

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."

Off the Record (2011) by Dolores Gordon-Smith

Image taken from the Puzzle Doctor's review, linked below.

For some years now, the Puzzle Doctor has been a passionate advocate for Dolores Gordon-Smith as a writer following in the tradition of the Golden Age of Detection. It’s taken me longer than it should have, but I’ve finally gotten around to reading the fifth in her main series, set in the 1920s and starring Army major and mystery writer Jack Haldean.

Off the Record doesn’t refer to reporting, but to recording. Specifically, to advances in sound recording. According to the author’s note, after fifty years of dominance, gramophones were challenged by radio, which easily surpassed them in sound quality. The only hope for them was to embrace electrical recording. Such is the issue facing Charles Otterborne, president of New Century Works. His salvation is in the form of Professor Carrington, who has invented a new method of electrical recording. Unfortunately, on the day he arrives to negotiate, things go horribly wrong. Otterborne is shot to death and Carrington is on the spot. His belligerence and history of mental problems do not serve him well, and he kills himself in his cell. The only salve for his reputation is that Otterborne’s death is ruled a suicide, as he was on the verge of being exposed for embezzling from his own company. That’s the end of it, as far as the police are concerned, but the "Stoke Horan suicides" cast a shadow over events to come.

A few weeks later, Hector Fergeson comes to Haldean with some concerns. His stepfather is Stephen Dunbar, the owner of the company that would have produced Professor Carrington’s machine. Oddly, even though his scientist and potential business partner are both dead, Dunbar is cheery, acting like he has an ace up his sleeve. Fergeson knows his stepfather is a ruthless man and asks Haldean to see what he can dig up. Haldean doesn’t get very far before someone shoots Dunbar in his hotel room.

The best suspect is Gerry Carrington, Professor Carrington’s son. He has a temper to match his old man’s and met with Dunbar minutes before his death. Half of the other suspects seem to think he’s guilty as well, but they dance around it out of sympathy. What about Dunbar’s wife, an actress and daughter of a murderer? She’s quick to challenge all suspicions against her in a dramatic monologue that’s one of the funniest scenes of the book. And then there’s Steven Lewis, Otterborne’s son-in-law, and his wife, Molly. And what does a violent assault on Lewis’s uncle have to do with this? Honestly, this is quite a violent book. There are six deaths by the end of it!

Gordon-Smith does a good job with a complex mystery. She has a firm grasp on pacing and doling out suspicion. Multiple times when reading I thought to myself, "You know, X hasn’t been mentioned in a while, I wonder if…" and lo and behold, every time, by the end of that chapter or the next, X had shown up and had plausible suspicion attached to them. Her characters are sympathetic enough that you can’t quite pin down who would be the best suspect. I know that some mystery fans will be on their guard as soon as the phrase “recording device” is mentioned, and while Gordon-Smith doesn’t do anything innovative with the idea, it’s still woven well into the plot.

The story isn’t perfect mind you. I had an issue with how Gordon-Smith uses a certain something. (ROT13: V qba’g guvax fvyrapref jbex gung jryy.) Also, while I thought that the plot was genuinely clever and that the main clue pointing to the big reveal was very good, it also felt to me like that was the only major clue. Once you realize X the mystery falls into place, but it didn't feel like there was as much pointing to X as there could have been.

My griping aside, I enjoyed this book. Gordon-Smith does an excellent job of writing a Golden Age-style novel that will challenge and entertain the reader. After I read it, I immediately wanted to pick up another one, and in light of that, I can safely Recommend this book.

Other Reviews: In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel and The Invisible Event.