#14: Agatha Christie is 125 today…

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Agatha

It is very difficult for me to explain the influence that this woman’s writing has had on me over the last 15 or so years.  Since I’m neither famous nor important no-one will be that interested, either, so I shall not try.  I’m going to leave it up to you, the discerning reader – if you understand, you understand – but I wanted to at least mark the occasion.

#13: Five to Try – Non-series Christie

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With 80 crime novels and story collections to her name, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Agatha Christie had quite a few repeating characters to call upon: Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, and Superintendent Battle all got to be the focus of several books.  Ariadne Oliver, Colonel Johnny Race, and Mr. Satterthwaite cropped up a few times each, as arguably did James Parker Pyne and Mr. Harley Quinn through their short stories.  But then what about the others, the one-offs, those sleuths who strutted and fretted their hour upon the stage and then were heard no more?  What immortality do they get?  Well, since you ask…

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#12: The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962) by Agatha Christie

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Mirror Crackd“Write what you know” is the kind of aphorism doled out to aspiring authors like public money at a bank’s board meeting, and aged 72 Agatha Christie – world’s biggest-selling author of crime fiction, with a West End play entering its eleventh consecutive year – knew a lot about being old and a lot about crime.  So is it any surprise that this return to crime-solving elderly spinster Miss Jane Marple is so damn good?  It’s the first Miss Marple book to actually feature the wily old fox with any regularity since They Do it with Mirrors (1952) as she only really put in a cameo in both A Pocket Full of Rye (1953) and 4:50 from Paddington (1957).  Of the 16 books Christie would publish from this until her death six of them would feature Marple, composing practically half of the canon, and arguably a familiarity with her subject helped; it’s an impression reinforced by the opening pages of The Mirror Crack’d… wherein the indignities of old age are charmingly laid out from Aunt Jane’s perspective and you can almost see Christie winking at you while she writes.

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#11: Five to Try – Non-Carr impossible murders

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Simple criteria: novels only, readily available, not conceived in the fertile ground of John Dickson Carr’s imagination.  I’ve also restricted the impossible crime to being the comission of the murder – people stabbed or shot while alone in a room, effectively – more to help reduce the possible contenders than anything else.  Several stone cold classics are absent through the inclusion of other invisible events but that’s a future list (or five…).

Carr – doyen of the impossible crime, responsible for more brilliant work in this subgenre than any other three authors combined – will eventually get his own list (or five…), I just have to figure out how to separate them out; restricting it to five novels was hard enough for this list, but if you’re looking to get started in locked room murders these would be my suggestions:

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#10: The Incredible Adventures of Rowland Hern [ss] (1928) by Nicholas Olde (Part 2 of 2)

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Ready?  Okay, deep breath, here we go…

9: The Man with Three Legs

I was sold on this before the end of the first page.  It’s a wonderfully-realised story that, had Olde written more like this, would have us dismissing the later Father Brown tales as an attempt to recreate the spirit of Rowland Hern.  My one niggle is that the mystery of three disappearing left boots hardly seems worthy of the supposed genius of Hern, but everything else – from the hinted wider setting to the chrarmingly philosophical nature of the solution, and putting aside a single incongruity – works very well indeed.  Oh, and the penis joke you want to make was made here in 1928 (by the bishop of Wimbledon, no less), so you may wish to consider working on some new material…

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#9: The Incredible Adventures of Rowland Hern [ss] (1928) by Nicholas Olde (Part 1 of 2)

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Incredible Adevnture of Rowland Hern, TheNicholas Olde, who presumably published this under a pseudonym because his real name was Amian Lister Champneys and that’s simply too awesome, left us only this one work of crime fiction to remember him by.  It’s presented in 17 chapters of about ten pages each with most being a distinct story, except ‘The Two Telescopes’ which has three chapters to itself. To avoid hideous verbosity, I shall split this review over two posts and rate each story separately to see how I like doing things that way.  No spoilers, of course.  Both covers I’ve seen for this book – my Ramble House edition (shown here) and the Heineman first edition I’ll attach to the next post – have a semi-supernatrual flavour that isn’t really accurate.  Hern is a genius detective in the classic mould, fond of obscure pronouncements and startling logical connections and always privy to more information than he lets on to his unnamed chronicler, and therefore the reader, until the closing explanation.  It would be very easy to compose him of shades of other fictional detectives, but these stories are interesting enough that they really should be allowed to stand on their own.  That said, I may need to make some such comparisons below just to give you an appropriate flavour without spoiling anything…

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#7: Five to Try – Golden Age crime fiction

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So I love my classic crime, we’ve established that, but where does this leave you?  After all, having someone go on about themselves all the time gets a bit boring.  You’re always saying that, aren’t you?  Sensible person that you are.  So, just for you – yes, you – here’s a list of five books I’d recommend if you’re thinking of getting started reading classsic crime fiction but are a little overwhelmed by all these books by dead authors (I feel the same about classical music, for what it’s worth).

My criteria are fairly simple: novels only, first published between 1920 and 1950, and widely available for purchase now.  It’s all very well having someone recommend the most amazing book ever, but if it was last in print in 1932 and only changes hands in book-fair back rooms for the kind of money that it takes to keep your kids in shoes for a decade…well, that’s just someone showing off, isn’t it.  Why share a love of something that can’t itself be shared?  The list is alphabetical by author, too, because that just seems sensible:

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#6: The Phantom Passage (2005) by Paul Halter [trans. John Pugmire 2015]

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Phantom Passage, TheUnder the guise of Locked Room International, John Pugmire has been providing English translations of (among others) Paul Halter’s impossible crime novels for a few years now, and there can be little more fitting than his latest effort as the opening salvo in my cataloguing of the undoable provably done.

It really is time we started appreciating Halter on his own terms, so let’s mention John Dickson Carr now – hey, I adore the man, so don’t think I’m being dismissive – and look at what makes Halter stand apart.  Carr undoubtedly revolutionised the impossible crime/locked room genre and left a wake that it’s sill virtually impossible to sail in these waters without disturbing, but Halter is increasingly showing himself capable of the impossible.  After some nice touchstones in the earlier LRI works – murderers leaving no footprints in snow or mud (The Lord of Misrule/The Seven Wonders of Crime), impossible body-swaps in locked rooms (The Fourth Door) – we’re now getting to see a greater diversity in Halter’s imagination and smoothness in his realisation.  The ‘murder by genie’ in The Tiger’s Head was a lovely riff, the central idea of The Crimson Fog was superbly realised (please don’t find out what it is in advance, you really should read the book in total ignorance), and now The Phantom Passage goes even futher.

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#5: Why I love… classic crime fiction

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I am not the most practical of men.  Put me in the garden and ask me to dig you a hole of any size, I’ll do so happily.  Give me an unlimited supply of timber and ask me to build a rabbit hutch, however, and you’re going to be waiting a very long time indeed.  I’d theorise the hell out of it – internal height = average rabbit height + 3 standard deviations + largest recorded vertical rabbit hop from rest – but the application of saw to wood is going to go very wrong.

I remember reading an interview with Lee Child in which he likened writing mystery novels to designing a house; if you decide you want an extra window in a room then that’s going to involve moving the sockets you’ve got on the wall, possibly moving the door and so the light-switch, etc.  If when writing the final chapter of your novel and suddenly decide someone else should be the killer but you change nothing in the preceding pages…well, catastrophe.  My love of theory married to this appreciation of plot construction is what drew me to crime novels in the first place, and the more I read the more I liked it.  I began to recognise that, the further back you went, the more of a factor the plotting became and that for sheer joyous planning you really couldn’t beat the classics.  There’s a moment in Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun where a bottle being thrown out a window is surprisingly significant – remove that one simple action and a lot of stuff elsewhere doesn’t make sense.  Honestly, I think that’s awesome.

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