When we talk about examples of the classic novel of detection being treated as a knowing parody of itself, titles oft-mentioned include The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) or Jumping Jenny (1933) by Anthony Berkeley. But I’ve just read The Body in the Library (1942) by Agatha Christie for the first time in 25 years, and, like, her tongue is positively bulging through her cheek at times, no?
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Last year my book club picked our favourite 1930s mysteries, and earlier this year we moved on a decade and each selected a top 10 for the 1940s. So, well, here’s mine.
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I’d previously read just one book by Cecil M. Wills, the Ramble House edition of Fatal Accident (1936), about which I remember nothing — though the fact that I didn’t review it might be telling. So when Galileo Publishers sent me an advance copy of Midsummer Murder (1956), I was intrigued to see how it stacked up: one (possibly) poor book does not a bad author make, and Galileo have shown some good taste in their unusual selections to date. And, well, I don’t know quite what to make of this, to be honest — Wills writes charmingly, and the enjoyable plot is communicated in easily-digested prose that flies by…but, equally, there’s a massive flaw at the core of this which can’t have passed by everyone else who’s read it…right?
“This is the sort of thing we came to the country to get away from,” Jake Justus laments when, being given a tour of the Jackson County Courthouse in Wisconsin, the dead body of ex-Senator Gerald L. Peveley rolls down an emergency stairwell and lands at his feet. And with the D.A. insisting that “nobody here could have murdered him [because] we all know each other” it’s only a matter of time before Jake finds himself arrested and his wife Helene must enlist the services of Chicago-based lawyer John J. Malone, who has joined the Justuses on four previous murder investigations, to dig them out of trouble…a task that will only get harder as the murders in the town multiply.
I had intended to review Behind the Crimson Blind (1952) by Carter Dickson this week, but the opening chapters of that puzzled my will and so I’ve taken the coward’s way out and opted to reread what I remembered as a stone-cold classic: village poison pen tale The Moving Finger (1942) by Agatha Christie. My recollection was that this both made the threat of nasty letters actually seem like something to fear and provided a superb reveal of its guilty party through one of the best pieces of negative evidence in the genre…and, in these regards, it stood up. It also fell down in a couple of others, but we’ll get to that. Headline: this is a great example of what the Golden Age did so well, and comes highly recommended.
Man, I’m conflicted on this one. For sheer giddy authorial overlapping of people and events, Villainy at Vespers (1949) by Joan Cockin is an absolute delight, giving us all manner of coming and going in a slightly down-at-heel Cornish village as plenty of people find themselves with plenty to hide in the wake of an unknown man being found naked and apparently ritually slaughtered on the altar of the local church. Cockin, nom de plume of Edith Macintosh, is clearly a woman with a superb wit and a keen eye for detail, but what she really needs is a hard-as-nails editor to bring her events into sharper focus, because there’s a huge amount of charm here but it takes some getting to.
If you’re reading this in the Southern Hemisphere — or in the year 2047, when global warming has reduced the planet to a scorched wasteland — then the raft of snow-bound mysteries reviewed in the run-up to Christmas might seem a little odd. Nevertheless, this snowswept tale of impossible murder, which came recommended by Tom Mead, has been reserved for this precise season so that its twofold chills — physical and atmospheric — might be better appreciated. Gerald Verner wrote so much that it would be easy to believe that quality wasn’t high on his agenda, but he does good work in They Walk in Darkness (1947) even if the overall edifice doesn’t quite live up to its promise.
I love a good village poison pen mystery but, as I’ve said before, they’re difficult to write because both the village and the mystery must convince and compel. Night at the Mocking Widow (1950), the twentieth book written under John Dickson Carr’s Carter Dickson nom de plume to feature Churchillian sleuth Sir Henry ‘H.M.’ Merrivale, starts off seeming like a great example of both…but once we hit the halfway stage and the impossible appearance and vanishing of the sinister Widow presents itself, the life rather goes out of things. From that point on, it feels more like a writing exercise than a novel, and one that Carr is forcing himself to complete.
If you’ve met me, firstly I apologise, and secondly it’ll come as no surprise that I have a tendency to ruminate on that which many others pass over without so much as a backward glance. Previously this resulted in me writing something in the region of 25,000 words on the Knox Decalogue, and today I’m going to turn my eye upon the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones list. Prepare thyself…
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Here we go: another Agatha Christie-centred, spoiler-filled discussion betwixt Moira, Brad, and myself, this time looking at her highly-regarded Jane Marple mystery A Murder is Announced (1950).
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