Mini reviews #4

The Saltmarsh Murders (1931) by Gladys Mitchell. An absolutely delightful, waspish parody of village mysteries, most obviously The Murder at the Vicarage, featuring the captivating Mrs Bradley.

The Labours of Hercules (1947) by Agatha Christie. Hercule Poirot decides to retire with twelve cases, each resembling one of his namesake's labours. These cases prove to be hit-and-miss, but overall an excellent bridge between the carefree early Poirots and the sombre late Poirots. Needless to say, he doesn't retire.

Tim Frazer Again (1964) by Francis Durbridge. The thing I like about Durbridge is his innocence. When he tries to write cynically, with a tough secret agent protagonist, the whole thing falls flat. Tim Frazer is not an impressive creation.

Derailed (2003) by James Siegel. Forgettable, well-plotted and poorly-executed thriller which has, I think, been filmed. Reading it, one gets the impression that the author would rather be writing a treatment for Hollywood. Assuming that all women exist only to annoy men, the twist is quite obvious.

A Talent for Murder (2017) by Andrew Wilson. A thriller in which Agatha Christie herself is blackmailed into a murderous conspiracy. Wilson's page-turner is grounded equally in extensive research and an expansive imagination.

In Peril of His Life by G.D.H. and M. Cole

Something has always confused me about G.D.H. and M. Cole. It's simply this: nobody seems to agree on them. Some people think they authored golden age crime fiction's most neglected gems, while others consider their corpus an absolute snooze fest best consigned to the dustbin. For my part, I have little knowledge of them beyond the interesting information about their lives in Martin Edwards' The Golden Age of Murder and the fascinating insights that Curtis Evans gives on his blog.

In fact, I haven't been able to work out a coherent view of their work myself, and I think I've stumbled upon the reason. For context: in my head, I've read loads of their books, but in fact In Peril of His Life (1938), which I read three days ago, was my first.  I've been getting them mixed up with E. and M.A. Radford and with the very un-similar Richard and Frances Lockridge. All I had actually read by the Coles before this one was a chapter in The Floating Admiral, which I hated (the chapter, not the book), and a short story called 'In a Telephone Cabinet', which I adored. I wonder if G.D.H. wrote one of these and M. wrote the other.

Anyway, who were G.D.H. and M. Cole? They were a husband and wife team whose claim to fame was scholarly socialism, and whose chief source of income was crime fiction. The general consensus is that their early novels are good if unremarkable and their later novels are a bit dull. The Coles' marriage was ... interesting ... and that's fodder for another blog, not this one. As for the work, in his glorious 1941 volume, Murder for Pleasure, Howard Haycraft wrote of the Coles that:

In recent years the tales have shown a lamentable tendency in the direction of slovenly construction. [...] Without doubt the public-minded authors have laudable uses for the pecuniary rewards that their detective novels bring. Nevertheless, one can not help wishing they would abandon their schedule of two or three books a year [...] in favor of some less taxing method of work that might permit them to approximate their early achievements in the field. At best, they are a credit to their avocation; at their least, they represent the British police novel at its most British -- and dullest.

At 126 well-spaced pages, In Peril of His Life is less a novel than a novella, and, after discovering J.F. Norris' excellent Pretty Sinister blog, I now know that it was originally published with two others in a single volume, Mrs Warrender's Profession. These reissues were committed (I think that's an appropriate word) by other publishers -- in this case, Hennel Locke -- to turn a fast buck when the Coles continued to dominate sales but had slowed down their output. Honestly, though, I thought 126 pages was more than enough.

Here is the plot: Lady Robinson is the wealthy patron of a mysterious organisation known as the New Money League. Nobody really knows what the league does, except rearrange money in some socially conscientious way. I take this as a satire on the various left wing organisations springing up around the authors. Certainly, they make no effort to describe the workings of the group; they simply state in a tongue-in-cheek way that the sole 'reason why the millions of [Lady Robinson's] fellow countrymen were not supporters of "New Money" [was] that they had not heard of it.'  Those who had heard of it, they add, did not 'know what it meant.'

The New Money League is forgotten about half way through as the plot progresses. Lady Robinson is murdered and the police make a cast-iron case against a young hanger-on, Charles Cornford, who has been moping about confused by Lady Robinson's claims that he was out to kill her. As the evidence builds up, a rather earnest detective, James Warrender, is commissioned to clear Cornford's name. In this, he is greatly influenced by his mother who is determined -- for reasons known only unto herself -- to set up the accused's girlfriend with another more suitable man: 'You must get him out of danger, James', she tells him, 'and then she won't be interested any longer.'

I quite enjoyed Mrs Warrender's bluntness. She introduces characters in a way that tells us more about her than it does about them. For instance:

Leslie Jameson. Oh, you do know her, James! Dr Jameson's daughter, who quarrelled with her father because she became a socialist or a vegetarian or something of the sort, and went to work in an office! The pretty girl in pink, who came to tea the Sunday all the Bankses were there and the light fused. Yes, I knew you'd remember her...

It's often struck me that left-wing authors write decent right-wing crime novels, and right-wing authors write decent left-wing crime novels. From my limited experience of the Coles' crime fiction, the narratives -- and the heroes of these narratives -- seem quite intolerant towards un-landed diversity. I wonder if this is about letting out the side of us that we don't want to present in real life: like Val McDermid's thesis that the gorier the fiction, the kinder the author. McDermid is another socially liberal person who writes conservative novels.

James Warrender is really a terrible detective (this isn't a bad thing, because he has his mother to steer him). Despite years of professional practise his only apparent knowledge of the industry comes from the pages of detective fiction. He ends up using the fiction of R. Austin Freeman to quite ingeniously explain how Cornford's fingerprints at the crime scene were forged. I do enjoy self-referentiality in crime fiction, but other writers do it a bit better and less clunky. Perhaps we can blame the shortness of the narrative?

Perhaps we can also blame length for the fact that the mystery itself doesn't really go anywhere. I kind of enjoyed the bored and blatant way the authors get down to facts. For example, here, on page 83, when we finally get a list of suspects:

'Can you remember who else took part in this experiment, for example?' 

'Well ... There was Charles, and Frank, and me for a start. And--' gradually she recollected two or three other names. 

'And Ralph,' Frank supplied.

Cut out the middle men -- literally! This feels silly to read but it's not a million miles off Ngaio Marsh saying, 'Of course the servants can't have been involved,' and leaving it at that. When forced by relatives to watch reality TV, to make the inane on-screen comments bearable I pretend that everyone taking part is high and it becomes much more entertaining (the best one for that is Project Runway ... it becomes so much more worthwhile). In these literary scenarios, I imagine that the authors were postmodern geniuses ahead of their time and the whole thing ends up rather bracing.

The final twist is alright. It's not original. It was done much better in one of the better-known Agatha Christie novels. But, to respectfully disagree with Pretty Sinister, I think it's explained here in a perfectly satisfactory manner. One note of caution: if you get hold of the copy I'm working from -- that in the picture -- and if you want to treat this as a whodunit, don't read the blurb! It's two lines long, and manages to reveal both the identity of Lady Robinson's killer and the clue that condemns them!

I bought In Peril of His Life because it was the cheapest full-length [sic] Cole book that I could get my hands on -- and I'm not about to rush out to buy another, more expensive one. But all in all, my view hasn't changed. I'm staying open minded for the time being.

Murder Gone Mad by Philip Macdonald

This might or might not be interesting: while most images on this blog are shamelessly sourced from other websites, I always make an effort to illustrate the exact edition I read. If that makes sense. So the cover image here is the same as the one I'm working from. If I've read the book more than once, I'll try where possible to illustrate the edition I first read (in some cases, e.g. proofs or manuscripts, or if it's visual or audio media, this won't be possible and the nearest approximation will be found). Perhaps that knowledge has made you richer. Perhaps it hasn't.

All of which brings me to the beautiful books that have been issued by Collins Crime Club since 2015 under the revived banner of ‘The Detective Story Club’. The brainchild of David Brawn, this revival project is very much in the vein of the British Library’s ‘Crime Classics’ series, bringing back neglected gems of the golden age with — where possible — adapted original cover art.

The books themselves are absolutely exquisite to behold. The boards are black and gold, emblazoned with the famous ‘man with the gun’, evoking this precursor to the world-conquering Crime Club — although not all the titles were originally Detective Story Club books.

Philip Macdonald features prominently in this series. He was a relatively prolific writer, and you will know some of his work even if you don’t know the name. That’s because, as well as writing detective novels, he wrote screenplays for Hollywood, where his efforts included Love From a Stranger and Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Rebecca. Macdonald didn’t think much of his fiction and, for a good many years before and after his death, critics and readers agreed. But now, it seems, we’re coming round to a different opinion. The Rasp, The Noose, and The Maze are all being reissued for the first time in years (he did like his two-word titles, did Macdonald) and, of course, the subject of today’s review, Murder Gone Mad (1931).

This thriller, my first experience of the author, is apparently unusual among his work. For one thing, it doesn’t feature his usual sleuth, Colonel Anthony Gethryn, but, instead, a likeable Scotland Yard inspector called Arnold Pike. The criminal under investigation is a serial killer apparently motivated by nothing but the love of killing. Hence the title: there’s no way the detectives (or we) can remove or focus suspicions on the grounds of motive. In the blurb, Murder Gone Mad is described as ‘the first Golden Age crime novel to feature a motiveless serial killer prompted only by blood lust’ and that is a telling expression.

Because blood lust, of course, is a motive. But for the purposes of this novel, for the reasons outlined above, it isn’t. That is to say, questions of psychology are irrelevant. Macdonald is concerned with one thing: telling an entertaining story. His fiction or, at least, this example, carries no baggage of any sort and in that respect, Murder Gone Mad is more perfectly like the popular conception of a Golden Age crime novel than anything else I’ve read.

The serial killings take place in the peaceful town of Holmdale and the targets are completely unrelated and from a range of social backgrounds. They are killed in absolutely brutal ways. Meanwhile, the killer, known as ‘The Butcher’, sends duplicate letters to the police and the newspapers. The letters are sadistically playful and erudite, and they remind me of the shameless exhibitionism in Jack the Ripper’s notes. There’s a particularly sinister way  in which these notes mock the bureaucracy at the heart of the novel. One ends like this:

I hate causing unnecessary pain to others and am, therefore, undertaking to give you warning wherever possible of any future little jobs which I may be contemplating. This will, don’t you think? add quite another spice of excitement to our game? 

Believe me, Police, 

Yours tolerantly, 

THE BUTCHER 

They also made me think of the letters which appear in Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders, published a few years after Murder Gone Mad (but in ABC, of course, there is absolutely a motive, and there is some brilliant psychology).

According to the blurb, and to L.C. Tyler’s introduction, the crimes in this story are inspired by the Dusseldorf killings of 1929 but beyond a passing reference in the text I can’t see much evidence of this. It’s possible, of course, that the discussion of localised serial killings which arose from the incidents sparked something in Macdonald’s brain, but beyond the use of sharp instruments and specific geography I can’t see any similarity between the two cases.

At a loss to explain the crimes, and with the media breathing down their necks, the police agree that ‘[t]his isn’t a job for a man so much as a job for an organisation’, and they call in Scotland Yard. The Yard takes the form of Inspector Pike, who single-handedly proves that is is, after all, a job for an individual. It’s fascinating to watch the process as Pike whittles down six thousand suspects to just four, with his investigations punctuated by police reports and newspaper clippings.  He even introduces an early example of CCTV monitoring. There is also a nice amount of observation, as we watch the town enjoy its new chaotic infamy. ‘Holmdale’, writes Macdonald, ‘would have vilfied you for making the allegation, [but it was] very delightfully excited.’

It’s also easy to rattle along with Macdonald’s unpretentious prose. You can tell that he’s cut out for screenwriting, for instance when we follow one victim in his final moments:

He thought he saw, dimly through the dark, a figure leaning against the rail to one side of the stile, but he was not certain until, from just behind him, there came a voice. It said: 

‘I wonder whether you could help me.’ 

Albert Rogers turned, swaying a little with the movement. [He] started to say — he was always a civil boy — ‘I beg your pardon…’ But he got no further than the ‘beg’. 

[…]  A little stifled cry, like the squeak of a small injured animal, came from his mouth. He doubled, his hands clasped vainly to his stomach. His knees crumpled beneath him. He felt light, light …

The flip side of this writing style is that Macdonald has a tendency to, (a) jump into dialogue before introducing the characters, and (b) give us bizarrely thorough descriptions of the characters including their exact weights and measurements. I don't hate this; I find it weird and interesting.

What does infuriate me is a habit Macdonald has of presenting dialogue. AB, said X, CD. So, here are some irritating examples:

‘Right,’ said Anton Rogers, ‘the very first time, my dear ‘Olmes. Your methods are astonishing.’

See, there are two better places the break could have occurred. Here’s another example, which occurs when an apparently homeless woman is asked if she’d like some cocoa and snacks:

‘Not ‘arf,’ said the visitor, ‘I wouldn’t! You jest show ‘em to me, missus.’

Again, and I’m not going to mention the irksome accenting, the division of the sentence is not quite logical. In fact, it almost ends up presenting the opposite of what it's meant to.

But the thing that really riles me is the ending. The whole thing just ends too abruptly, with the killer being identified and caught — in a very cinematic and extremely gripping sequence — but with absolutely no explanation. Not for the motive — okay, it’s ‘blood lust’ but even this isn’t explained — not of the murderer’s response to being caught, not of the repercussions for victims and their families. The clues and red herrings are never explained. From Chapter Two onwards, I was convinced that one of the crimes under investigation had not been committed by the Butcher, and although I must have fallen for a red herring, I feel that this matter should at least have been dealt with in some sort of summary. But in the end we get nothing. Just a villain carted away by the law. Compare to The ABC Murders.

Although I hardly ever read crime stories specifically to tackle the puzzles, I am looking forward to reading Macdonald’s The Maze, which is told as a set of archived documents and interview transcripts and was designed to be an exercise in fair play. The author prefaces it with a claim to being ‘absolutely fair to the reader. There is nothing — nothing at all — for the detective that the reader has not had’, he writes.

This is a fair story. [Whether] you get the right answer [or not,] you should be satisfied — unless of course, you find the whole business too impossibly easy, in which case you ought […] to became a really big noise in Scotland Yard.

Such a gauntlet is impossible to ignore.

These niggles might present an unfair image of the book. I really did enjoy reading it and am glad that it’s back in print. I’m certainly happy to have read it and did not have a single dull moment turning the pages. It’s just that the ending left me a little less than satisfied.

And while we’re on the subject of minor disappointments — the sour cherries on the top of splendid cakes — I’d like to return to the matter of the publishers. These books are, as indicated, physically beautiful, but they have been barely proofread. The pages of an old manuscript were presumably scanned and reset, resulting in some typos, odd word choices, or missing words. And then there are the blurbs which are not always brilliantly written (this one isn’t that bad, but the one for The Maze, in the same series, is almost illiterate). The worst example of such inattention that I’ve seen so far is in the Crime Club edition of News of Paul Temple by Francis Durbridge, which also has a horrible, stock-photo-ish cover. I wish that a little bit more effort would be invested into these wonderful and significant projects.

To return to Murder Gone Mad, I found it thoroughly enjoyable. The author comes across as being as experimental as CHB Kitchin and as accessible as Ellery Queen, and I’d like to read more. This might not be the most substantial serial killer thriller around, and is not without its faults, but I don’t think anyone could call it forgettable.

Mini reviews #3

The Agony Column by Earl Derr Biggers (1916). Enjoyable enough romantic thriller. Very much of its time -- in fact, very much of an earlier time.

Death of a Hollow Man by Caroline Graham (1989). Funny, intense, disillusioned, and puzzling. Peak Inspector Barnaby, and peak Caroline Graham.

The Stepmother by Simon Tolkein (2003). An ambitious novel about a criminal trial, which plays out as sadly unmemorable. Tolkein is JRR's grandson, and one wonders if this book would have been published in other circumstances.

My Husband's Wife by Jane Corry (2016). An impressive debut psychological
thriller, cleverly written to build up suspense and discomfort.

Deadlier: 100 of the Best Crime Stories by Women edited by Sophie Hannah (2017). A majestic hardback volume, over 1,000 pages long featuring a range of established, lesser-known, and brand new stories by women from the 19th century to the 21st.

Body Language by Michael Craft

I want, desperately, to like gay detective fiction. But most examples that I've read are just very, very bad. I'm looking forward, in the near future, to reading the classic The Heart in Exile by Rodney Garland, but until then I'm stuck with books that I simply don't like.

If you can recommend a good gay detective story ... please do!

Anyway, here is Body Language (1999), a Mark Manning whodunit by the American writer Michael Craft. It's generally considered one of his best -- probably because it's got the makings of a good mystery hidden somewhere beneath the ridiculous prose. And that mystery was dreamt up by Agatha Christie. To give the author his due, he credits 'an Agatha Christie play' with providing him 'the inspiration' (i.e. the solution) for this book in an afterword.

When I could switch off enough to get past the writing (and Craft isn't that bad, really; he's just more Archer than Amis), the narrator's arrogance would pop up like an untended pimple.  Every other page Mark Manning is telling us how everyone fancies him, how hardworking he is, and how he can outrun youths. Despite this, he seems to do very little but flounce around, graciously accepting adulation, conveniently summarising everything that's just happened to his boyfriend who was there anyway, and failing to grasp the screamingly obvious solution to the crime until a second murder has happened. The arrogant sod even works out that someone doesn't fancy men because they don't orgasm when he touches them. Seriously.

It's like a bad midlife crisis fantasy. The only piece of writing with any drive or animation is a sex scene towards the end -- which makes one wonder how excited the author was, when writing it. But the worst crime between these pages is the author ripping off Christie's at-the-time little-known The Unexpected Guest. Worse, though, he doesn't actually follow all the threads of the story he's ripped off, so we have plot points leading up to certain expositions and ultimately not resolved.

If the mystery is, as Amazon's army of gushing reviewers claim, this book's redeeming feature, then I advise all readers to go and read or watch the Christie play to see the same mystery better-developed and more engagingly worded. Even Charles Osborne's disappointing novelisation of The Unexpected Guest is better than Body Language. But if you're looking for a badly-written cringe fest which is also quite incesty, or you want to see how to hash a decent idea that was never yours in the first place, then I thoroughly recommend Body Language.

A Spot of Folly by Ruth Rendell

October 2017 sees the publication of a brand new book by Ruth Rendell, tantalisingly subtitled ‘Ten and a Quarter New Tales of Murder and Mayhem.’  The collection is introduced by one of Rendell’s biggest fans, Sophie Hannah, who is clearly influenced in her own work by Rendell at her peak. It includes previously uncollected short stories by this unquestioned titan of the genre.

When the news of Baroness Rendell’s death broke in 2015, I was working an evening job as a Sandwich Artist™ in order to pay for the un-funded writing-up year of my PhD. I switched off Twitter and put down my phone with a trembling hand. My manager, who was two years younger than me, rotated his baseball cap and asked, ‘What’s up?’

‘Ruth Rendell’s died,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ he shrugged. ‘Is that your aunty?’

There followed a mini-lecture from me on Rendell’s contribution to the modern crime novel, and an angry advancement of customers who were not quite convinced that sandwich artistry should take its time. I didn’t stay long in that job.

The ‘quarter’ of a tale is perhaps unfairly described. It opens the volume and it’s very good. Originally published in the Telegraph, ‘Never Sleep in Bed Facing a Mirror’ is three lines long – the length of a joke – but contains a whole, complex story in those very few words. In her introduction, Hannah compares it favourably to Hemmingway’s ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ But it’s more than that: it’s a genre story in three lines, which is kind of incredible.

The other stories, dated from 1974 to 2006, showcase Rendell at her best and her worst. In different ways, each tale collected in A Spot of Folly is quintessentially Rendellian. She always creates extremely plausible characters that we can understand and believe in without particularly liking, and makes brutal actions the natural next step in their thought processes. That is so dark, so pessimistic, and so insightful that it’s terrifying. She has a beautiful grasp of the English language and a healthy scepticism towards the myth of the happy family. People emerge as grim, selfish, and always flawed.

Many of the protagonists are successful married men who are utter douches, and who tend to get their come-uppance. A big theme in this book is marriage, which for Rendell is tied to money and ‘[t]he cumbersome and frightening machinery of the law which keeps many ill-matched couples together.’ Another theme is the compulsion to lie. Every page is clever, suspenseful, and twisty.

There are absolute kickers of opening lines, like:

I murdered Brenda Goring for what I suppose is the most unusual of motives.

And:

You won’t believe this, but last Monday I tried to kill my wife.

There are fantastic one liners like:

Honestly, Hedda treats me the way some men treat their wives. 

And:

No nation had ever perfected a weapon and not used it.

There are overworked one-liners like:

the awful irony that runs through [events] like a sharp, glittering thread.

And:

Sleep [comes] like warm sweet milk pouring into an empty cup.

There are stories written as Barbara Vine, including the weirdest, least interesting one, ‘In the Time of His Prosperity’, and there is a ghost story, ‘The Haunting of Shawley Rectory’, which reminds me (don’t tell Rendell’s ghost) of Agatha Christie’s ‘In A Glass Darkly’, in that it’s actually a psychological thriller in disguise as a ghost story.

There is also a late novella, ‘The Thief’ (2006) which is a character study of Polly, a compulsive liar and thief who takes and destroys things from people who displease her. We follow Polly from childhood to adulthood, as she tries – and inevitably fails – to pursue normal relationships. It ends with her spectacular downfall. I think ‘The Thief’ would make a great film. It showcases Rendell’s razor-sharp skill for plotting (even if she did claim never to plan a piece of writing. I don’t believe her). But it also showcases Rendell’s decline as a prosist: the writing is not pithy or shocking, but sadly repetitive.

In most of the stories collected here, there is a twist that you see coming a mile off, and just as you’re patting yourself on the back for outsmarting the author, there’s a second, more devastating twist that knocks you for six. The final story, ‘Trebuchet’ (1985), is altogether different, and is an absolute gem. It has another intriguing opening line – ‘This is the most important thing in life, she thought on waking – yet we never talk about it’ – and slowly, inevitably, it becomes clear that this story is about nuclear war.

Inevitably, there’s not much cohesion in A Spot of Folly, because the publishers have collected what they could – but they’ve done a great job of arranging the stories in a striking and memorable order. This collection is ultimately satisfying in that it gives you the roundest possible view of Rendell as a writer – brilliant but flawed, inconsistent, profoundly misanthropic, and twistier than a motorway in Wales. An intoxicating helter skelter of a read.

Mini reviews #2

Death of an Airman (1935) by Christopher St John Spring. Murder in an amateur flying club. I don't know why I love this novel so much. It's not massively well-written and the killer is easy to spot, but there is some sheer fun and benevolence in the writing that makes it one of my favourite of all golden age mysteries.

Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) by Agatha Christie. A marvellous outing for Hercule Poirot, who finds himself among archaeologists with more buried secrets than the civilisations they're uncovering. Suspend your disbelief -- especially when it comes to the solution -- and enjoy this mystery with the perfect balance of dark psychology and light fun.

The Python Project (1967) by Victor Canning. A predictably unworldly, testosterone-filled, forensically heterosexual secret service outing for P.I./semi-spy Rex Carver. Suspicious foreign officials abound. It's not my thing, but is the best of the series.

The Ice Princess (2003) by Camilla Läckberg. This debut novel from 'Sweden's Agatha Christie' took some markets by storm. I have no idea why because there's nothing very exciting about it, and I'm kind of irked on Agatha Christie's behalf.

Hardball (2009) by Sara Paretsky. Reliable Chicago atmosphere in the thirteenth V.I. Warshawski novel. This time, our hero has to dig into her father's past to solve a complicated, long-running mystery. If you like Paretsky, Hardball won't disappoint.