#73: The Murder Room is dead, long live The Murder Room!
Mark Twain-esque, it seems that I may have extrapolated incorrectly from reports that Orion’s e-book initiative The Murder Room was ceasing operations and that the books will in fact be available for a little while yet. Former Murder Room publisher Julia Silk – or someone purporting to be Julia Silk, but it seems an unlikely deception to perpetrate as she hasn’t even requested my bank details – has dropped by to let us know that not only a) will the books be available for a while yet (whew!) but also b) there’s new stuff coming as well.
Happy days!
#72: X v. Rex (1933), a.k.a. The Mystery of the Dead Police by Philip MacDonald
Philip MacDonald first came to my attention for having written a handful of impossible crime novels but this is not one of them, and nor does it feature his series sleuth Anthony Gethryn. I stumbled across my copy of X v. Rex in a second-hand bookshop a good while ago and, as he was out of print at the time (one Gethryn novel, The Rasp, has since been republished by Collins) I picked it up for future perusal. And so, with the Crimes of the Century at Past Offences dipping into 1933, here we are – with policemen in and around London being targeted by a killer, and a government sliding into disarray as the previously unimpeachable bastion of order is attacked seemingly at will.
This is decidedly more of a thriller than a crime novel – no small cast of suspects, no scattered clues, no sudden moment of retrospective reanalysis, no clever misdirection – you just sit and wait for the suspect to be apprehended three pages from the end and then that’s over and done with. There is one piece of sort-of misdirection, but it’s revealed fairly quickly and by that point I wasn’t really all that bothered. It certainly wasn’t clever enough to warrant a closer reading. Honestly, where’s the appeal?
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#71: The Case of the Borrowed Brunette (1946) by Erle Stanley Gardner
There’s an appealing irony in the assertion that you know an author has hit the big time when everyone remembers the name of their characters over that of the creator themself: Lisbeth Salander, Jack Reacher, Tarzan, Jason Bourne, we erudite types remember them, of course, but the world at large – fuelled no doubt by TV and films – associates more with their representations than their origins. Erle Stanley Gardner – a King of Crime, lest we forget – is not just less well-known than his character, but also the piece of music that character is himself overshadowed by; all together now… Frankly, he must be like the biggest-selling author in the world on those terms. Well, uh, yeah, he kinda is, actually. And yet, despite my avowed love of the man and his writing, it’s taken me 70 posts to get round to reviewing him here; what gives?
Well, two things. Firstly, I’d read a lot of Gardner before starting this blog and had sort of lost track of exactly what I had and hadn’t already encountered, and secondly a lot of it was written at high speed and with, er, some quality control issues and so some of what I’ve read since hasn’t exactly covered him in glory. However, The Case of the Borrowed Brunette is about as classic a Perry Mason – oh, yeah, that’s the famous character, but the way – novel as you’ll get, and showcases a lot of what Gardner did extremely well and also a lot of the flaws in his process.
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#70: Five to Try – Starting Paul Halter
After the fun of jointly analysing Paul Halter’s The Seven Wonders of Crime with Kate at CrossExaminingCrime, there’s now collateral damage to tidy up. Namely, that the inevitable question for anyone eager to take the plunge with the French maestro des impossibilités (and, frankly, how can you not be?) will be: Where do I start? Well, start wherever you like, of course, but if I had to pick my first five of the eleven currently available they’d look something like this:
Death Invites You (1998) [trans. 2015]
As I said in my review the other week, if you’re starting completely new with Paul Halter and/or impossible crimes then this is the perfect place to do it. The balance of plot and character is just right, the contortions for the murder of a man over a table set for a meal in his locked study – matching exactly the novel he was writing – are not too outré for the novice and, while the locked room element isn’t completely original, there’s no excess of foliage to obscure your view of what’s going on. This was the first book to feature Archibald Hurst and his harried genius amateur Alan Twist together, and it’s a relationship that feels natural from the very first page of them discussing impossible crimes while drinking in a pub. If Hurst ends up rather abject following his expressed desire for some “really meaty” case to get involved with, the reader is treated to the beginnings of a rather special relationship that will bring a great many hours of reading pleasure.
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#69: Death’s Mannikins, a.k.a. The Dolls of Death (1937) by Max Afford
An isolated ancestral home ruled over by an eccentric patriarch with a keen interest in esoterica and a private museum of medieval weapons, into which an eager young man is brought by an acquaintance only for murder to insinuate its way among the denizens…yup, John Dickson Carr’s The Bowstring Murders (1933) certainly is a classic of the genre. What’s that you say? Death’s Mannikins? Oh, wow, uh, this is awkward. Okay, let’s start again: an isolated ancestral home ruled over by an eccentric patriarch with a keen interest in esoterica and a private museum of medieval weapons, into which an eager young man is brought by an acquaintance only for murder to insinuate its way among the denizens…yeah, no, there’s no getting away from those similarities. And, y’know what? I only bring it up because there’s more than a touch of Carr about this, Afford’s second Jeffery Blackburn novel, and that’s really not a bad thing.
I mean, take the following:
It was as though the second tragedy acted as sudden leaping flames under a simmering pot. The scalding, seething flux exploded and boiled over, galvanizing each person under that roof into an insane panic that throbbed and hummed and zoomed from cellar to tower with the horrible impotence of a monstrous and unclean bluebottle trapped against a window.
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#68: On Racism, Sexism, Xenophobia, and Other Necessary Aspects of the Golden Age
So the other week Kate at CrossExaminingCrime published this interview with one of the editors at Dean Street Press in which it was mentioned that a potentially-offensive racial term had been edited out of one of the DSP books, with said editor saying that doing so was “the right decision”. Being unhelpful as I am, I picked up on this as a sentiment I completely disagree with – I don’t think it was the right decision at all – and a few of us kicked around the points in the comments for a while (I’m sorry to say that it was a very adult and mature set of comments, in case anyone was hoping to encounter a flame war). I’ve been thinking about it ever since, and thought I’d try and get my thoughts into some sort of order over here so that I’m not filling up Kate’s blog with yet more comments on this stuff.
I feel I should make it clear up front that my issue is in no way with Dean Street Press – they’re far from the only publisher doing this, and all are well within their rights to put out whatever material they see fit, I just think it’s a point that needs addressing, that there is a platform in favour of these books being retained in their original form which is too easy to overlook when under the impression that only one course of action is acceptable.
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#67: The Murder Room is closing its doors
Orion’s digital crime arm The Murder Room will apparently be ceasing operations in the near future, meaning to those of us in the UK the loss of high-quality e-books from classic Golden Age authors like Anthony Boucher, Pamela Branch, John Dickson Carr, J.J. Connington, Stanley Ellin, Erle Stanley Gardner, Geoffrey Household, Ronald Knox, John D. Macdonald, Helen McCloy, and E. L. White, and more contemporary fare such as Charles Willeford and many others.
They have excelled in the high standards of their output, the range of authors they promoted, the fact that they made these books available to the widest possible market, and their commitment to the Golden Age long before it was fashionable again. Goddammit, this has really spoiled my day.
#66: The Bride of Newgate (1950) by John Dickson Carr
Existing somewhere between an early 2000s romantic comedy – probably starring Chris O’Donnell or Matthew McConnaughaghay – and The Count of Monte Cristo, John Dickson Carr’s The Bride of Newgate was his first foray into the historical mysteries that would come to typify his later career. You never write Carr off – like Christie he waned as he wore on, but there are enough flashes of fire after his peak for everyone to have two or three Later Carr highlights – but these dalliances with the extra detail required show a different side to our man. Mainly they show that he was a massive history nerd – detailing not just what people are wearing, say, but also what they would have removed from their outfit to be left with what they’ve got on – and that he was able to fit this into his wonderful brain and stir up something both necessarily of its setting that also fulfilled the expectations raised by his name on the cover.
I’m not going to tell you the plot – the opening four or five chapters are full of schemes, plans, and revelations enough that you should really experience completely pure – and will instead focus on the writing. Because while he gradually loses his grip on his narrative, his powers of portraiture are sent to their grandest heights with a renewed enthusiasm that is both this book’s chief joy and its main undoing. In a way it’s like a debut: he gets it wrong, but he tries hard and would improve after a few more attempts.
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#65: On the Loss of the Rue Morgue Press – an open love letter
A little while ago, via TomCat over at Beneath the Stains of Time, I learned to my immense sadness that the Rue Morgue Press has officially shut down and will no longer be publishing books. If you don’t know RMP, then you’ve been missing out: set up by Tom and Enid Schantz, they have kept in print the kinds of classic detective novels that give the Golden Age such a deserved reputation while big-hitters like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers hog all the limelight. The cessation of their endeavours is a tremendous loss, and what follows is an attempt to explain what they’ve meant to me as a reader for several years now.
The Invisible Event 