Much like you – well, exactly like you, I’d imagine – there are authors I love and authors I don’t. Almost as a counter-point to last week’s My Blog Name in Books, here is my list of nine ‘classic’ crime authors whose work I’m unlikely to ever touch again and – in some cases – whose continued popularity is, in all honesty, a complete mystery to me. I cast no aspersions by this, it’s just interesting to throw some ideas around and get a sense of people’s tastes and preferences.
As ever, there are rules: they must be dead (I’m not one for trolling), I must have read at least four of their books (to give them a fair chance) and they must fall into my self-imposed 1920 to 1950 envelope. Presented alphabetically by surname, too.
Nicholas Blake
Cecil Day Lewis, as poet laureate, was responsible for some wonderful and moving work with the English language. As Nicholas Blake he mainly wrote turgidly and indefensibly dull mysteries that often required contortions considered too outré by Cirque du Soleil in order to fit together; his plots always discard their sole interesting hook in favour of stilted and awful dialogue, and Nigel Strangeways is less a sleuth than a pompous collection of quotations and unhelpful observations. Blake’s novels are the kinds of books you write when you don’t know any real people, or when all your friends are politicians (same thing, really). Lovely descriptions, atrocious everything else.
James M. Cain
Cain is the only author on this list because he was too good, but too good once. My first Cain – Double Indemnity – astonished me, it was honestly like being cracked in the face by a bucket of ice, and everything since has been a pale and disappointing toe into a puddle in comparison. I simply cannot read him again, because nothing – no, not Mildred Pierce, not The Postman Always Rings Twice, not Serenade, nothing – even touches that first peak, and the disappointment each time weighs increasingly heavy in my soul.
Raymond Chandler
“We danced around like some hoo-haa boys trying to flip a penny switch while a piano-player ate glass on the sweepstake, and just as I was about to launch the ticker he took one high-handed and scrammed like a hard-time dingo dusting his wheels on a flapper girl’s curling tongs”. Reads everything Chandler ever wrote. Some wonderful quips (I seem to remember ‘She was pushing 40 backwards hard enough to break a wrist’) do not make up for his inability to simply and clearly describe people and their actions. That may be the point, but it’s not what I’m looking for!
G.K. Chesterton
Chesterton’s whimsy and verbosity rile me like little else; case in point, ‘The Queer Feet’ contains one of the single-most brilliant examples of ratiocination the genre has ever seen (yes, ever. No argument) but, dear crikey, can the man not just tell the story? The verbiage present in everything makes getting to his points agonising work. Gets kudos for inspiring Gideon Fell, but that was passive rather than active and so doesn’t really count. And he gets far too much leeway for ‘The Invisible Man’, too, which is surely one of the most frustrating detective stories ever written (though with a wonderful final sentence).
Dashiell Hammett
The plotting on Red Harvest is about as dense and amazing as they come – virtually every short chapter changes the structure of the plot in a meaningful way – but the blandness of Hammett’s expression makes it difficult for me to get too involved with his guys and dames as they scheme, fight, and kill each other. It’s more noticeable in his shorter works, I feel, because you get to the end of a story without anything approaching an interesting idea well expressed. As soon as I noticed it there, it killed his novels for me, too. Yes, even The Thin Man.
Ngaio Marsh
I love Marsh’s cattiness, but she’s probably the only detective author I’ve read whose books become less interesting once the crime is committed. Her detective Roderick Alleyn is pretty much just some dull questions wearing a coat and, and might just be the only detective whose appearance in books I’m mentally hoping is put off for as long as possible. If Marsh ever introduced him in the last 30 pages like Christie did with the later Poirots, it’d probably be the exact book I was looking for from her.
Gladys Mitchell
I don’t like anything about Mitchell’s writing. Her characters are annoying, her sleuth is infuriating, her settings are dull, her plots are hokey, her clues are astonishingly poor, her chain of reasoning is diabolically bad…I’m amazed she was allowed to get away with this for as long as she did. I’m sorry to be so negative – there is at least something that I can say is good about everyone else on this list – but the time I’ve wasted trying to like Mitchell, or even find one redeeming thing about her writing, is one of the bigger regrets of my reading life.
Dorothy L. Sayers
I know, I know. I want to like Sayers, I really do, and I love the way we started off with Peter Wimsey as this shell-shocked, devastated ex-soldier occasionally affected by panic attacks, but she increasingly struck me as a detective novelist who disdained the ‘detective’ bit. I’m aware of the research that went into The Nine Tailors, but to write a crime novel just to prove how much research you’ve done would get you castigated these days (and I can’t help but feel that none of Sayers’ peers would have been allowed to get away with it). An innovator, a lady of letters, no doubt, but I’ve yet to read her without getting the impression she’s just slumming it to show that she can.
Josephine Tey
The Franchise Affair is an excellent book, everything else by Tey (I’ve only The Singing Sands left to read) is bland, overlong, and marked by an absence of real character. More than anyone else on this list I struggle to come to any opinion on Tey’s work, because it’s simply too uninteresting for that lack of interest to even make it noteworthy. Yes, yes, Richard III and all that, but if Barbara Cartland had been the one to discover water on Mars it wouldn’t have made her books any better. ‘Significant’ and ‘good’ are not the same thing.
The Invisible Event 
You are a brave blogger my friend and I imagine that you might get some very ‘specific’ feedback on this, JJ! I take your point completely though as there are some popular authors, like Marsh especially, that I have never been able to appreciate (Patricia Wentworth is another). However, i shall, to my dying breath, remain a massive fan of Chandler, Hammett and Chesterton and have enjoyed plenty of books by Blake and Cain. Mitchell is very, very variable but I did enjoy DEATH AT THE OPERA (I’m reviewing that one over at Fedora shortly in fact). Tey I am not crazy about either but Sayers was a very fine prose stylist and I really like some of her books, such as NINE TAILORS, MURDER MUST ADVERTISE and UNNATURAL DEATH (despite her snobbery and racism, of which I believe there is no doubt, though plenty insist otherwise)
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The importance of Chandler, Hammett, Chesterton, etc. is beyond dispute. But, like Poe, I can’t help but feel that their starting something doesn’t mean they were necessarily going to stand the test of time. I’m honestly more curious than anything else over this type of point, however. Will look forward to your views on the Mitchell – not that I’ll read it, but you take things apart very well and it’ll be interesting to see what you make of it.
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Yup, you’ll get some feedback on this, if the reaction to my query at Bodies From The Library at to why Marsh is considered on a par with Allingham, Sayers & Christie is anything to go by. And I completely agree on Marsh – she could write the pre-murder bits as well as anyone but after the crime is committed… Not read enough on most of the others but I’m with Sergio on Blake. The Mystery Of The Abominable Snowman is great.
As for Tey, not convinced she was the first to speculate on Richard III’s innocence but I suppose that she may have been the first to popularise the theory. It’s a decent read but the evidence is weak. After all, those idealised portraits are such convincing evidence…
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See, Doc, this is what I find so interesting; I’ve been following yours and Sergio’s blogs for over a year now and we agree on so many fundamentals, and yet there’s still such scope for differing opinions over things like this. I’m not saying it’s an original realisation, far from it, but it’s something I’m interested in exploring in some way. …Abominable Snowman was the Blake that finally broke me, I found it so dry and dull and poorly-constructed, but what particularly about that book results in different opinions when we agree about so much else? It remains a cause of great curiosity to me, though there’s no way of answering that question, of course, beyond vagueries about different interpretations, etc.
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Different interpretations are what drives me to revisit authors that I don’t haven’t enjoyed. I’m sure I’ll go back to Marsh, Beaton, Peters etc at some point because I have a fascination with what people find popular about them, even though I know that I’ll probably be disappointed. There are always books that divide like-minded people – search my blog (or possibly Sergio’s – forgot where it ended up) for our joint review of Crooked Hinge or the one I did with Patrick of Ellery Queen’s Cat of Nine Tails. After all, if we all agreed , we’d be out of a “job”!
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I agree on Marsh, Tey and Mitchell. And to a considerable extent I agree on Sayers as well. In general I think the female writers of the golden age are ludicrously overrated (apart from Christie). Mitchell is particularly bad – quite unreadable.
My major problem with Sayers is Harriet Vane – a character I simply can’t abide.
You’re quite right about Sayers and her growing disdain for the genre, or rather her growing desire to be takes seriously as a Real Writer. I have an aversion for writers of detective stories who want to be seen as writers of Serious Literature. The problem with books like GAUDY NIGHT is that they’re not very good detective stories and they’re not very good as Literary Fiction either.
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Have you read any Margery Allingham? She’s not as textbook “classic detective” as the others, but some of her Campion books – Flowers for the Judge, for example – are wonderful puzzles and arguably border on pieces of art.
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I’ve read Allingham. She’s OK but I’d rate her as a minor writer. I’m afraid that Christie remains the only female writer of that era whose reputation seems (to me at least) to be deserved.
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Haha, fair enough. I shall see if I can uncover anyone else to entice you…
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Good post to set us all thinking, though could cause a blood bath if read out at the next Bodies from Library conference! I’ve never been a fan of hardboiled detective fiction so I didn’t find your apathy towards them too startling. Again I have quite enjoyed some of Blake’s works and some of the Father Brown stories are really good, but I can see why they would not be everyone’s cup of tea. I think the only two authors I feel sufficiently strong about are your last two. I can understand that the Harriet Vane quartet is a bit like marmite for Golden Age readers, though personally I really like the development of Vane and Wimsey’s relationship, but there are other ones outside of those four which I think are really strong such as Whose Body?, Documents in the Case, Unnatural Death and Murder Must Advertise. Glad you enjoyed The Franchise Affair as that is one of my favourites by Tey. Also really liked A Shilling for Candles and The Singing Sands. I’m not sure how you think Tey’s novels are overlong as they mostly around the mid 200s mark, which I’ve always thought rather an average amount. A writer who really needed to cut down was P. D. James as many of her novels (some 400-500 pages long) just seem to go on and on telling you everyone’s back story and then spending ages having Dalegish find out that information. She also commits the faux pas Sayers does in The Nine Tailors (not a favourite of mine) by including way too much research knowledge such as in A Taste for Death, which also seems to double up as a dummies guide to architecture.
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Ah, you see, that’s my exact problem with Tey – even at only a sniff over 200 pages her books are still too long, in the sense that there’s not enough in them to justify even that relative paucity of paper. Miss Pym Disposes is an Enid Blyton book until about 40 pages from the end when the mystery finally runs in profusely apologising for the terrible traffic, Brat Farrar is far more interested in breeds of horse, The Man in the Queue doesn’t even contibute anything to its own solution (though that’s perilously close to a spoiler), To Love and Be Wise goes to such efforts to set up its unlikely conclusion that it loses an interesting short story amidst pages where absolutely nothing happens. Horses and courses once again. And I didn’t mind Harriet Vane at all, I get the impression she’d actually be good company, but the impression of Sayers looking down her nose at me while she writes is now too strong to be easily banished!
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Yeah I really wanted to slap Miss Pym, a very frustrating amateur sleuth. I don’t feel like Sayers is looking down at me (or perhaps she is and I haven’t noticed!) when I’m reading her books.
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Definitely a bold post, and thanks for sharing your anti-recommendations. 🙂 I read one Marsh – ‘Died in the Wool’ – in my younger days, and recall nothing beyond the fact that I kept falling asleep.
I was slightly saddened to see Nicholas Blake heading up the list as I have high hopes for him given his Poet Laureate credentials. To date I’ve only read ‘Abominable Snowman’, and am looking forward to trying some of the other Vintage re-releases of his works. I didn’t find ‘Abominable Snowman’ to be a bad read at all, but I would concede that it was stronger in its writing than its puzzle.
I tend to be kinder to mystery writers who craft good puzzles at the expense of eloquence, than the reverse. Hence I would take Ellery Queen above P. D. James. I definitely agree with Armchair Reviewer on James – looking back, I’m not sure how I survived the one or two James’s novels I’ve read!
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Blake only heads the list on account of his surname, don’t forget! I’m certainly with you on craft over expression, and share your enthusiasm for Queen for that reason. The Greek Coffin Mystery, for instance, is not well written and far too long, but my word what a mystery you get!
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The Nicholas Blake books are dull but I have much bigger problems with them. It’s the moral nihilism I dislike. In one book he seriously argues that it’s OK for poets to get away with murder because they’re poets so they’re special. It’s always amusing to see a communist like Day-Lewis revealing his inner elitist. I’m surprised he didn’t argue that it was OK to commit murder if you were Oxford-educated.
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I kinda agree on Marsh. I’ve only read two short stories (“I Can Find My Way Out” and some Christmas story) and found the former to be incomprehensible and the latter duller than lead dishwater.
Ah, “The Invisible Man”. I’d actually go as far as to say that the trick doesn’t even work as presented. Don’t know if I should detail or not.
And Mitchell…not sure, I can’t decide if I’d like her or not. I do enjoy somewhat absurd things…
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If I sound crabby here, I’m dealing with a walloping case of insomnia this evening! But I can’t say you’re right or wrong, as everyone is entitled to personal tastes and opinions. I read almost all of Marsh and enjoyed her, but I agree that the best parts are before the interviews! I read most of Blake many years ago. I think I enjoyed him, but I can’t remember him at all. And when I recently tried to read the first one, I couldn’t get into it. We share the same opinion about Sayers, unfortunately, and you are a better critic than I am for having read four of hers. The only other one on the list that I feel I can talk about is Hammett, and there I disagree with you, having truly enjoyed Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, and The Maltese Falcon. I am not in any way a lover of the hard-boiled school, but I thought these three were cleverly plotted and that Falcon was especially well-written.
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The style of Maltese Falcon really struck me – the way you’re never let into anyone’s thoughts, only their actions, as if Hammett is sitting in the room and describing what’s going on around him – but it became very distracting once I dwelt on it because it’s so unlike other books in that you don’t have any idea what’s happening until the final scene. And as for the ending…well, I’m just glad I’d already seen the film and knew what was coming!
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Wowee and also eep! Blake, Chesterton, Marsh, Sayers and Mitchell? Faints in the direction of down.
I’d urge you to give Blake another go. Abominable Snowman is terrific – country house at Christmas with interesting characters – but if you’re after puzzles, try The Widow’s Cruise, which is very tricky, clued like a Christie, delightful to read, and set on a cruise ship in Greece. Head of a Traveller is more sober, and has one of the all time great endings in detective fiction (although Berkeley got there first).
Which Mitchells have you read? And which Chestertons? Have you read “The Sign of the Broken Sword”, “The Mirror of the Magistrate”, “The Dagger with Wings” or “The White Pillars Murder”?
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Ah, see, now Abominable Snowmanwas the book that convinced me to give up on Blake – it has that lazy strucutre of “great first chapter, then jump back in time for very little to happen for the rest of the book, then the random incidents are loosely tied together in time to go back to the interesting beginning”. Someone had the temerity to compare it the The Problem of the Green Capsule. The mind boggles.
However…I’m a sucker for a promising puzzle *shakes head* I’ll investigate Widow’s Cruise…not urgently, I’ve been bitten too much by Blake to rush back in just yet, but I’ll definitely flag it up for consideation once my TBR is reduced. My thanks in advance, just in case it is awesome. 🙂
As for Mitchell, I know I’ve listed the books I’ve read elsewhere but I don’t want to go back and check – there were about six, I think: Saltmarsh Murders, Twenty-Third Man, Watson’s Choice, Butcher’s Shop…the others elude me. Too little in the way of what I look for – not that I’m moribund by conventions, but she strays really too far out of the bounds of what’s even permissable as detection and fair-play at times, detection and fair-play are pretty much the only things I do require!
Chesterton I’ve not read ‘The White Pillars Murder’ (or I don’t remember it at least). I particularly hated ‘The Dagger with Wings’ in much the same way as I hated ‘The Invisible Man’ – people talk about these as if they’re impossible crimes, but they’re not; it’s just lazy plotting and characters jumping to premature conclusions! Love the spirit behind a lot of them – ‘The Hammer of God’ is wonderful, and ‘The Queer Feet’ is a marvellous idea that’s simply horribly realised – but his sesquipadalian verbosity slays me practically every time.
Wow, this is a lot of negativity for one reply – my apologies! I think I’ll go and do something nice for someone just I don’t start suspectng that I’m this much of an arsehole in real life…
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I get the feeling that I enjoy the literary, arty detective writers more than you do!
What did they think Snowman and Capsule have in common?
Blake’s first three novels all have strong plots and puzzles. Carr praised the second murder in A Question of Proof; and Thou Shell of Death has a really ingenious method and a humdinger of an ending. There’s Trouble Brewing is clever but a bit transparent.
I wouldn’t recommend Watson’s Choice, which is fairly average. I’d suggest Death at the Opera, in which Mrs Bradley solves the mystery twice from a psychological and a physical angle; The Devil at Saxon Wall, which is very elaborate and fairly clued, and is set in a drought stricken village with pagan survivals; and St Peter’s Finger, set in a convent, one of her most sober and straightforward works, with a clever double solution. Brazen Tongue is very clever, too.
Chesterton, I think, is an author one either loves or hates, and much depends on how one takes his style. I like it – it’s a virtuoso display of language, eminently quotable and often thought provoking. “Dagger” blew my socks off; it’s one of the classic “turn the story on its head” tales, and some of the clueing is brilliant. Is it an impossible crime?
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From what I remember, it was the small circle of suspects that was proffered as the similarity. NOw, I didn’t see the Snowman circle as particularly small given the conceits of classic crime, but then my memory of that book is starting out intrigued and getting increasingly angry as I read…
Possibly it’s Blake’s writing, as I couldn’t finish Thou Shell of Death; if the ending’s that good then tit’s a shame I’ve missed out on something. Let’s see how Widow’s Cruise goes and then I may reconsider and be asking for further suggestions, so it’s good to know that there are enough books out there to get excited about if one enjoys his writing.
Mrs. Bradley and I are done, I’m afraid. Life is too short!
Of course, now I need to find out who you won’t go near so that I can possibly attempt some counter recommendations (though your choices in your “best mysteries” list speak of excellent taste for the most part).
I’ve seen people try to pass off ‘Flying Dagger’ as an impossible crime but – SPOILERS – I don’t see how “I was the last person in that room and I definitely didn’t kill him. Oh, and the window’s open” really qualifies. Certain impossible crime plots rely on witnesses lying about what they saw to make something appear impossible – John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man, grand-daddy of them all, is a perfect example – but the situation for me has to extend beyond simply the word of one person. Physical evidence, other statements from people who have been misled, something about the situation, must combine to make it appear impossible; one person alone isn’t enough.
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That’s a whole load of sacred cows you’ve slain!
The only one I can agree with you on is Chandler – I bought six in one volume (fortunately for just 50p) but after The Big Sleep would only return once my TBR pile is exhausted.
However, I love GKC, DLS and Tey. I think what I read as a teenager sunk in and I have enjoyed all three again in re-collecting their books in the last few years.
I enjoyed two Blake’s enough to get another ten and I’ve got five Mitchell’s in my TBR which I am intrigued by.
Allingham is the one that I have written off after reading Black Dudley and something about a Cup.
Now is there any genuine GAD fan who would put Christie on this list?
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Sayers, I must confess, has grown on me through her short fiction — ‘Behind the Screen’, ‘The Scoop’, ‘The Poisoned Dow 08’, her contribution to The Floating Admiral and Six Against the Yard…I’ve even bought a collection of her complete short stories on account of how much more I appreciate her use of language in shorter form, and I’m hoping to warm to her that way (how else am I going to get through Have His Carcase?!?!).
Chesterton I really want to love, but his lyrical bombast is too much. Perhaps in later life — I’m increasingly becoming a crime fiction fan, after all, and eventually I’m sure the deliberate absurdity of his ideas will win me over in the face of his wandering prose.
Blake I continue to valiantly struggle with — The Widow’s Cruise shall be attempted as soon as the memory of The beast Must Die is sluiced off — and Mitchell I can’t believe I’ll ever see any merit in. As for Tey…perhaps a reread of The Daughter of Time is on the cards. It’s unusual enough in the annals of GAD that it’s got to be worth checking out again.
Christie is an interesting one — does anyone else legitimately capture the spirit of GAD as thoroughly? She’s written some duff books, and I can understand there being elements of her writing people wouldn’t like, but if one doesn’t like her can one truly like GAD?
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Wholeheartedly agree on Marsh(endless interviews) and Sayers(fat books on slim plots) . I read only one Mitchel(Saltmasrh) and hope the next one is not so loopy dopey . I liked Tey’s “Daughter of Time” and “To love and be wise” but hated singing sands & man in the queue (exactly same reason as yours..oveeeerlooong) .I read all the father brown short stories at a stretch 20 odd years ago ..but remember almost nothing .I guess I was too young to appreciate them .I adore Chandler .. its so much more than the mystery ,not only metaphors though as you seem to indicate . Of Hammet I have read a couple of short stories of Continental op ..liked them but did not get hooked. But I plan to read his novels which I have seating on my shelf .
Blake .. I have read 4 novels and while I liked some aspects , I agree that Strangeways has all the annoying nature of Fen without having any redeeming features at all but he is clearly a leftist poet with high class education.. there is no way I am going to like him as I hate hypocrisy (I am okay with snobbery or communism but not snobbery punched with communism) .
Since I like happy endings , I finish my long post with some names I really like .. Allingham, Crofts, Carr , Christie, Chandler, Stout,Simenon, Crispin & Rhode . 🙂
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Sorry to comment on such an old post, but I recalled this as I work on my G. K. Chesterton reviews (I’ve noticed so few bloggers have even tried to review his works) and I’m of the same mind of you, though a bit softer. I generally enjoy his plots, but I agree his writing is only occasionally charming. At his worst he manages to make 11 pages feel long…
Also, excuse my French, but I’m choosing the language that most honestly communicates my feelings on the story: I *fucking* detest “The Invisible Man”. I can accept the principle of incongruity in any other situation, but the fact the story both specifically asks those people to watch the house and asks them if anyone walked in, and they answer the way they do, makes it egregious and frustrating. The fact it’s as ubiquitous as it is is a mystery to me, because I know that if I ever make a list of “least favorite locked-room mysteries” that one sure as Hell is going on it. I’ve heard it called “audacious” and “brilliant”, and I only agree with *one* of those.
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Don’t worry about commenting on an old post, it’s always nice when something that’s been hanging around for a while generates some interest from someone.
I remain a little cool on Chesterton, but have found more appreciation for him since reading a bunch of his stories to discuss with John as part of a podcast episode. The popularity of the likes of ‘The Invisible Man’ does baffle me, but try ‘The Blast of the Book’ or ‘The Vampire of the Village’ for what I’d call a better experience of the man’s approach.
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*sighs wistfully and yet forlornly* Yes, your podcast… I’m not going to say my biggest regret in life will be that I failed to be a prominent enough member of the GADosohere to be on In GAD We Trust before you shut the podcast down, but I’m definitely not saying that it ISN’T my biggest regret. 😛
Glad to hear you’ve liked some of the better stories you’ve read from him! Frankly this post is the only reason I feel comfortable posting my lukewarm review of his stories at all, since I know I’m not the only one who isn’t deeply enamored with him.
So far of the five I’ve read, I only really like “The Queer Feet”, which is fantastic. My only gripe is I wish that Father Brown revealed that a crime was committed before we, the audience, were shown that a crime had occurred. It’d make his solution so much more shocking if he just came out and said a crime was committed while we were still totally in the dark about everything.
I appreciate the attempt to be subversive with “The Blue Cross” by making you believe Aristide Valentin is the protagonist, but it’s a gambit that only works if you read the story in the few weeks between it being published and the second story being published. Knowing that this is a Father Brown story deprives the plot of all its impact, and the central mystery becomes pretty redundant as a consequence.
“The Secret Garden” is good, not great. I appreciate the clever way a very old decapitation principle was utilized to create an impossible crime, as I’ve never seen that trick utilized in that way, but a clever application of an obvious trick is still an obvious trick. The killer’s motivations are ludicrous and based on a very bizarre image of atheists, and kind of random given the kind of character the killer was supposed to be.
“The Flying Stars”… is decent, I guess.
I have a feeling I’d appreciate the Chestertonian style of plotting when detached from Chesterton. There’s a Father Brown-esque series in Japan called A Aiichirou that I think would be more my speed, which uses the Brown style of plotting but with denser stories and less showy verbiage. Father Brown but with twice the plot in every story! Sounds fantastic!
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I’ve previously called the piece of deduction in ‘The Queer Feet’ “perhaps the best piece of reasoning in the whole of detective fiction”…and I’m not entirely sure I’d back down on that, though I’d need to reread the story again to be sure. It’s a genius little problem, expounded beautifully.
‘The Secret Garden’ I admired more on rereading, I have to say, though, yes, GKC clearly has a very dim view of atheists — much as ACD clearly has a bee in his bonnet about Mormons 🙂
I’d appreciate the Chestertonian style of plotting when detached from Chesterton.
Yes, this, I feel, was a driving force behind a lot of the authors he influenced. Chesterton’s perspective on paradox and confoundment was superb, but his ornate ways and circuitous plotting probably undid him where pure detection is concerned. There’s an argument that a lot of GAD is simply people trying to improve on Chesterton’s…Chesterton-ness.
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While I’m already here I will note- if you’ve read The Meiji Guillotine Murders, a book I have very very mixed feelings about (as I discuss here https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/86c0bc63-3bb3-4b78-8d95-2b793305f740), it feels really clear to me though I’m not sure if others would agree that the author read Chesterton at a formative age, and not quite just because of that one shtick. I happen to love The Secret Garden because I loved the way it turned the first story on its head- with (and of course spoilers for a gazillion year old short story collection here) the detective from the first story becoming a murderer and the criminal from the first story becoming a detective/the Watson.
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I read the first two stories in The Meiji Guillotine Murders, thought “Is this it?”, looked up some comments from others online, and felt disinclined to read any further. I still have the book, so might yet return to it, but I feel my interests will have to shift significantly to get through it with anything like enthusiasm.
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This is probably a blast from the past, but after skimming your blog for recs as someone who has found that our tastes often align, I ended up here trying to figure out why I wasn’t seeing much mention of Sayers. I love her, lots of people don’t, and I figured that you were one of them and found this post which confirmed it.
That said, I’m curious whether in the last decade you’ve revisited her at all. Lots of people don’t like the Harriet Vane books (even if I disagree with them) but, say, Bellona Club is fantastic and doesn’t mess around in the way that some of her later books do. I also think you might have misdiagnosed her a bit- my read as someone who is fascinated by her and in the middle of a project related to her is that she loved mysteries as a genre so much but wasn’t as good at writing them per se as she may have thought. She wanted to expand what the genre meant- and I do agree with those who say that you can trace the detective-centric, less puzzle-y later version of the genre to her influence- but she was still stuck between the puzzle mystery and the novel and she wanted to do both at once and had mixed results.
Bellona Club, which I mention above, is IMO one of relatively few books of hers that completely nails the blend of puzzle mystery and novel in a way that feels organic (Murder Must Advertise does too but I hate the dumb drug bits- incidentally, why do so many “comedy” 30s mysteries have dumb drug bits? Death of Anton and Death of an Airman did too and that kind of subplot tends to take me out of it completely). Most of her books I see as either puzzle-first or novel-first, and while I do think that her most mediocre is better than most people’s best as she’s just that good a writer and that good at characters, I completely acknowledge that she had a tendency to muddle things up tonally sometimes in the puzzle-first books (like the flawed-but-interesting Unnatural Death, or my admittedly weird fave Have His Carcase) and that you have to like her as a novelist rather than a detective writer to like The Nine Tailors and Gaudy Night (which I do).
I will also add- I HATE info-dumpers and while I don’t love the bell-ringing section of The Nine Tailors because I’m terrible at both math and spatial/visual problems, I thought she overall did a great job at fitting the info she dumped into the natural boundaries of the story and characters, which the average info dumper sucks at.
I also would really recommend some of her short stories, but while they’re all interesting, some are genuinely awful and I kind of wish someone would do a Lord Peter Wimsey- The Actually Good Stories collection because I’d recommend it to everyone I know. Good wouldn’t always mean “good mystery” but actually it pretty often would.
That said, I do agree with 85% of the rest of your list (of those I’ve read). I overall liked The Beast Must Die even if the diary conceit was a complete disaster of a plotting mistake that made the identity of the murderer obvious, but Blake has otherwise never set my hair on fire. Double Indemnity was fine but the ending was put on a better book by Francis Iles, and the rest of Cain seemed kind of repetitive. I DO actually love Chesterton (possibly because I read and imprinted on him at a young age) but I will completely concede that the writing is kind of insufferable- I have mixed feelings about Case for Three Detectives but the Chesterton parody made me cry laughing. The Dain Curse was my favorite Hammett because it may be ridiculous, but that makes it jump off the page in ways that the other books don’t. Franchise Affair was good but I’ve liked nothing else I’ve read by Tey, especially the insipid and predictable Miss Pym Disposes, which read like Tey read Gaudy Night while drunk and was like “I can do this better” and proceeded to do the actual writing of it while hungover.
Anyway- thanks for bearing with me on a ten year old post- really enjoying your blog and have ordered a bunch of recs from the library! A bit annoyed that I missed what seems like it was the golden age of mystery blogging but at least I get to reap the fruits of all of you guys’s labors as I choose what to read.
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To take Sayers first, I’ve generally really enjoyed her short fiction: when you see her mixed in with other authors, you really come to appreciate how refined and precise her language can be, and how much more richly she paints things. Her contributions to round-robin works like No Flowers by Request really do outshine her contemporaries, and I’ve revisited her short fiction in many an anthology with great pleasure.
So, about three weeks ago, I thought I’d give her another go in the long form and would read Five Red Herrings. And, long story short, I couldn’t get through the first chapter. Why can’t I make her work for me, Hannah? Why?!?
I agree, too, that Bellona Club is a successful attempt at what she’s trying to do…until the end, where she clearly can’t figure out how to make her detective, y’know, detect, and so just has two people speculate within earshot and happen upon the right answer. That infuriates me 🙂
Regarding those others, I have, of course, gone back and read some of them in the decade since, and found at least something to enjoy. Like you, I really enjoyed The Dain Curse, but then I tried Red Harvest again and…bleuch.
And I reread The Franchise Affair and it completely blew me away with how awesome it was. So I picked up The Daughter of Time again and…gleeps.
I’m actually reading some Chesterton at present — working my way through The Wisdom of Father Brown collection, to be reviewed on here at a later date — and it’s going reasonably well. I have, however, just reached ‘The God of the Gongs’ and, oh lord…why?!
Love your appraisal of Miss Pym, by the way. Some in the community venerate that book, but I never got it myself. Takes all sorts.
And please don’t worry about commenting on a old post — the point of writing a blog is arguably so that people can find and comment on posts years after the fact. It’s lovely to think of those dusty corners still attracting some attention.
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Well I mean your first mistake was choosing Five Red Herrings as the Sayers to revisit… the only book of hers I just straight up never finished. SO so dull. That’s an example of her being puzzle-forward and as a result basically losing the whole thing, and the main gimmick is one she’d already used in Bellona Club (an item being missing). If you want to revisit one, no idea if you’ll like it or not but try Clouds of Witness. I kind of love it as an early manor house mystery that just handles things totally differently than the soon-to-be-standard “houseguest detective at a random family’s party” take by having the central figures be Wimsey’s own family. Flawed for sure, but her first steps at that integration of mystery and novel/characterization that she could be really good at when she tried.
I don’t know, incidentally, that I agree with your conception of the solution of Bellona Club, especially given how it’s in some ways more realistic than lots of the other coincidences that get put in mystery novels but which are waved off because they’re part of the problem rather than the solution, but either way I think his triumph is less in identifying who the murderer was per se but in trying to protect the people who he believed couldn’t have done it. And yes, he definitely does it as less of a science and more of an art, and yes, like so many early Sayers books there’s nothing to go to a jury so it has to be “handled” some other way, but overall the plot is incredibly clever (I love that midbook twist) and the characterization and plot subtleties are really well constructed.
So glad you like her stories though- and yes, as part of other collections is the best way to read them as they tend to pick out the best ones. Her best books are definitely better than her best stories, but her best stories are excellent. (And speaking of the round robins, it is so clear that she basically wrote The Floating Admiral in her chunk, even if at the end Berkeley then tried to un-write and re-write it for fun. Her entry to Six Against The Yard was good but I agree with the cop, it was so subtle that there was no actual crime to charge him with, even if a moral issue.)
Glad you liked my appraisal of Miss Pym- I was so excited to read it after seeing so many great reviews and was incredibly disappointed.
Re Chesterton… oh man. I do not pretend to endorse his weird little turns of mind lol. True story- I have a MA in Jewish history and one of the things that got me into reading about the topic was reading The Golden Cross (in Incredulity) and being, to pun a bit, incredulous at his description of the situation of Jews in medieval England and doing some reading about that. It was my first real exposure to medieval English Jewish history and I was hooked, and while I now am more of a modernist, and while I enjoyed history before, my first foray into scholarly Jewish studies as a middle/high school student, who otherwise just enjoyed history as a bunch of stories, was definitely prompted by Chesterton, to his dubious credit…
(Separately- and so I consolidate things rather than clog up your mentions- I will say that re my other comment on this post, I do recommend revisiting Meiji Guillotine Murders without massively high expectations because it DOES have an overall narrative and one that I do think is worth checking out. Is it a great book? No, but it does something interesting with its setting that I’ve never seen anywhere else- explore what it actually means to do policing in a society with no real due process.)
(Also separately, I want to compliment you on your series of posts about the Decalogue, which I have pulled out a bunch of times recently to try to explain to people why they don’t know what they’re talking about when they refer to it, especially Rule 5. You did a great job. Incidentally- I know a few other bloggers did, but did you ever read Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson? Read it and disliked it, partly due to outrageous misuse/misunderstanding of the Decalogue IMO, and was curious what you thought.)
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Clouds of Witness; got it. I will find a copy, I will read it. I might hate it 🙂
I’m willing to accept there may be a more positive spin to put on Bellona, given that it’s 20+ years old in my memory. But having heard so much about Sayers and that being the first one I read…it left a scar.
Meiji Guillotine: it was so completely not the book I was expecting — I recently gave up on The Curious Casebook of Inspector Hanshishi for the same reason: lots of historical stuff, not so much actual baffling crimes. Probably faithful to their setting, but my interest is in the crime-solving alongside the history, with a strong preference for criminous shenanigans.
Glad you enjoyed the Knox Decalogue stuff. I can’t deny that I frequently wonder how I could write more about it, because it’s honestly one of my favourite things about GAD fiction. And, yes, I saw Stevenson’s frank misrepresentation of rule 5 and suspected I wasn’t going to like his book; three chapterts in, I gave up on it
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So curious if you’ll like Clouds! The ending is divisive and it’s imperfect but I’ve read several “best books” by other writers that I like less than it.
Re Bellona Club- I will say, and after this I’ll stop bugging you about it, but I think the key is that (ROT13) gur crbcyr jub Jvzfrl vf gnyxvat jvgu jub fnl “gur tvey naq gur qbpgbe jbexrq gbtrgure” ner jebat. Jvzfrl nyernql xarj gung Naa naq Craoregul xarj rnpu bgure orpnhfr bs cevbe vairfgvtngvba/gur cbegenvg, naq nalbar jvgu n oenva pbhyq pbapyhqr gung bapr Craoregul pbhyq or yvaxrq jvgu n fhfcrpg ur unq havdhr bccbeghavgl gb pbzzvg gur zheqre- jung ur xarj gung gur bguref qvqa’g vf gung Naa jnfa’g cneg bs gur zheqre cybg. It might be worth a revisit, but I’m sure you have long reading lists so obviously make your own priorities!
And re Meiji Guillotine, agreed overall. Once you get past the first bit- specifically once you get to the end- the reveal of the overall mystery is actually pretty excellent and is definitely clue-based, but you do have to get through a LOT of other stuff first, and at first it seems like there isn’t real crime solving- that comes at the end mostly.
Re Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone… thank you, the reviews online were so positive that I thought I was going crazy. Apparently the later books were better but I couldn’t steel myself up enough to try them. I wrote my very exasperated review here https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/6736ab15-0978-4b10-bce6-f6211999ad39.
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