Mini reviews #31

Death at Breakfast (1936) by John Rhode

I downloaded this a couple of years ago as part of a commissioned project looking into literary estates but only got around to reading it this year. Let me tell you, tracking Rhode’s estate on Google is a nightmare: his real surname was Street and his descendants are called Green and Park, meaning I ended up with a lot of roadmaps (should that be rhodemaps?). Anyway, Death at Breakfast is enjoyable. It’s very much a puzzle and little more. I didn’t solve it, because I was so convinced I’d spotted something (either a red herring or plain irrelevant) on page 2. So… Rhodes did his job well!

The Pale Horse (1961) by Agatha Christie

One of Agatha Christie’s finest novels and convincing evidence that she was an author, particularly in her last decades, of biting social relevance.  A series of apparently unconnected deaths may have at its heart ancient witchcraft or something much more modern and equally sinister. Shed your preconceptions about Christie as a writer, laser away any television adaptations from your retinas, and enjoy.

The Sixth Window (2017) by Rachel Abbott

The sixth book in the DCI Tom Douglas series, and my introduction to both the character and the author, The Sixth Window is an excellent psychological thriller/police procedural hybrid. A twisty and compelling narrative about a woman discovering her husband’s dark side and feeling she has nowhere to turn. If the twists are predictable, that doesn’t matter: as is so often the case, it’s the journey that compels.

Deadly Scholars (2018) directed by Danny J. Boyle

Quite possibly the worst, most pointless piece of drama ever committed to film. It’s an American high school slasher mystery and I get that I’m not in the target audience but who is…? There’s a real mystery.

Identity Crisis (2019) by Ben Elton

After reading and loving David Nicholls’ The Understudy, I was in the mood for more satire. So, I picked up this book (remembering that Dead Famous by the same author was recommended to me a lot when it came out in 2004 but I never got round to reading it). Well, I was disappointed. It’s probably unfair to compare them, but it does show the difference between the two writers. Nicholls’ satire plays into universal tropes/types/themes, whereas Elton has specific contemporary targets. There is a lot of thin veiling here – Brexit, Boris Johnson, Germaine Greer, Cambridge Analytica, etc. As such, it all becomes a bit gestural and ultimately quickly dated. The concept is that the twin evils of social media and political correctness are stifling a murder investigation that ultimately exposes sinister cabals at the heart of capitalism itself.

Cain's Jawbone by Edward Powys Mathers

Six murders. One hundred pages. Millions of possible combinations... but only one is correct. Can you solve Torquemada's murder mystery? 

In 1934, the Observer's cryptic crossword compiler, Edward Powys Mathers (aka Torquemada), released a novel that was simultaneously a murder mystery and the most fiendishly difficult literary puzzle ever written.  

The pages have been printed in an entirely haphazard order, but it is possible - through logic and intelligent reading - to sort the pages into the only correct order, revealing six murder victims and their respective murderers.  

Only two puzzlers have ever solved the mystery of Cain's Jawbone: do you have what it takes to join their ranks? 

Please note: this puzzle is extremely difficult and not for the faint-hearted.

This beautiful limited edition box from Unbound has the 100 pages on individual cards and if you’re like me, you will spend hours finding links between pages. After a couple of weeks, I’ve now managed to get everything into some kind of order — but definitely not the right one — and some light is emerging.

It’s infuriating and wonderful. I don’t want to give anything away because I’m aware that there’s a competition attached to this and we're not allowed to share our insights, but you have to think laterally, as you would with a cryptic crossword.

On which note, Alan and I often mark ourselves out as possibly the only couple under 50 in the world who like to sit in cafés doing cryptic crosswords. But, as any Unbounder who sponsored this project will know, early twentieth century cryptic such as Torquemada's were significantly more cryptic than those we have today. It is, in many ways, a whole different language. Aargh!

Cain’s Jawbone is a hard one to review, because while there is a solution, I haven’t arrived there yet and, as far as I know, no one has. I have hope, though! It just needs a lot of time and dedication.

This is proper, old-school puzzling and I’d heartily recommend it to the dedicated player of mental games.

Mini reviews #30

My Sister, the Serial Killer (2018) by Oyinkan Braithwaite. This is truly a stand-out debut. A short and witty novel written as part of an undergraduate creative writing degree, it tells the story of Korede, who constantly finds herself cleaning up (literally and figuratively) after her beautiful, pampered serial killer sister, Ayoola.

Secret Obsession (2019), directed by Peter Sullivan. I hope SJ Watson is suing Netflix over this production. It’s like someone has seen Before I Go to Sleep, missed the point entirely, and decided to rewrite it.

The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective (2019) by Susannah Stapleton. An entertaining and illuminating look at the life and career of Maud West, who is probably well-known to geeks like me (and, let’s face it, you) but now unknown to most of the world. We get a glimpse here, not just of how  the detection business worked, and how a woman succeeded in a man’s world, but also at the fuzzy lines between criminality and respectability, between ethics and expediency. It’s an eye-opener and an etertaining read, interspersed with West’s florid accounts of her own cases. It’s also a beautiful book to behold.

Escape Room (2019), directed by Adam Robitel. There are a lot of films (and books) called Escape Room, and this is the only one I’ve experienced. It’s dumb as hell but oddly compelling and enjoyable. You can guess the premise. Apparent strangers are invited to experience the toughest escape room of them all, and they soon find out that the challenge has deadly implications… Will the real And Then There Were None please stand up?

The Turn of the Key (2019) by Ruth Ware. Ruth Ware is the writer I find myself recommending to other people more than anyone else. She really is the closest thing we have in print to a love child of Agatha Christie and Daphne du Maurier. And I don’t think she’s ever written a bad book. Her latest, as you can guess from the title, is a bit of a ghost story, but at its heart it’s a mystery thriller. And, in grand tradition, it’s epistolary. A nanny with a secret gets a suspiciously cushy job in Scotland, where she immediately gets charged with looking after three problem children for a week. And, possibly, a ghost. And, in the meantime, she tries to solve the mystery of why all the previous nannies have scarpered so soon after taking up their posts. It all takes her back to old myths and tragedies surrounding the property, a gothic building converted into a smart house, and the tension is palpable with every flying page.

The Eleventh Little Indian by Jacquemard-Sénécal

This is a fascinating French novel from the 1970s and, although I read the first English translation, I’ve given it its slightly less offensive US title here.  The Eleventh Little Indian (1979) is currently out of print, but hopefully it will be picked up by one of the small presses with a suitable new title. The edition I have was published by Agatha Christie’s own literary home, the Collins Crime Club.

Yves Jacquemard and Jean-Michele Sénécal were established playwrights when they wrote the book as their debut in 19976 and submitted it as a candidate for the Prix du Quai des Orfèvres. The prize committee - or possibly the publishers - rejected the novel as ‘too daring’, possibly because of its offhand dealing with homosexuality (that’s purely a guess), and the authors dashed off another novel, by all accounts inferior, which won. Sadly, Jacquemard died in 1980 at the age of 37, cutting short an interesting partnership.

I’m currently rehearsing for an amateur production of Christie’s And Then There Were None, using the book’s ending as opposed to the play’s traditional one, so the premise for this was irresistible.

A French theatre company is performing a special new adaptation of And Then There Were None, using the book’s original ending. One evening, the actor playing the murderer turns up late to the dressing room and finds all ten fellow cast members dead. At his own dressing table is an eleventh victim — someone apparently unknown to everyone, wearing theatrical make-up.

What follows is an often witty and generally enjoyable investigation into a complicated backstory, as the central character, Paul Samson, and policeman Hector Parescot (note the initials) join forces to uncover the link between these apparently unconnected actors, the identity of the eleventh corpse, and the murderer’s name.

The solution — and the several red herrings and backstories — owe a lot to Agatha Christie, whose books weave in and out of the plot through indirect or direct nods.  I particularly enjoyed the character of the gay director/writer who has a cherished collection of Christie’s novels, because he reminded me of so many real Christie fans. This is the first time I’ve seen authors address Christie’s camp legacy so directly, and the fact that the book was published so soon after her death and — in English, at least — by her own publishers, is rather nice.

My only gripe was that the narrator does not play fair, and I don’t mean that in any artificially indignant Roger Ackroyd-y way. The narrator actually lies us, the readers, at a key moment. Perhaps that was an issue of translation. There’s only one thing to do … I must learn French and read the original!

As several characters promise throughout the course of the investigation, you will find the solution in the pages of Agatha Christie. But it won’t be one of the more famous ‘twists’ you’re being pushed towards at every turn. I put down this novel with a very specific feeling of ‘How could I not see that?’ that I haven’t had since reading Christie in my pre-teens. All in all, The Eleventh Little Indian is thoroughly recommended.

While there are several titles in French apparently by Jacquemard-Sénécal, all but one (which has also been translated, as The Body Vanishes) were written exclusively by Sénécal. It’s a shame, but perhaps this novel deserves to stand alone as a curiosity and a one-off.

(In cast anyone’s wondering, I’m playing Lombard.)

META MATTERS

See above(!)

Death in a Desert Land by Andrew Wilson

 Welcome to my one-hundredth post on A Sign of the Crimes! 

Andrew Wilson’s series of mysteries featuring Agatha Christie as a detective are hugely escapist and enjoyable. They stand not just as curiosities but as decent novels in their own right. While Agatha Christie has solved several crimes in print and on screen – especially in the last few years – Wilson’s series is set apart from the others by the skillful blend of three key components: historical research, literary research, and genuine affection for the author and her legacy. 

I count Andrew as a personal friend, and he’s been in my life longer than he knows: one of his first books, Voices from the Titanic, provided a hefty chunk of the backbone to my MA dissertation. So I am delighted to report that Death in a Desert Land (2019) lives up to its Golden Agey title and the beautiful dust-jacket artwork. I read it in one sitting, appropriately enough on what felt like the hottest night of all time and, perhaps less appropriately, to the backdrop of a thunder and lightning storm. 

This third instalment in the series sees Agatha Christie in 1928, encouraged by the Secret Service to travel to Ur in Iraq, investigating the death of Gertrude Bell (Bell, who helped found the modern state of Iraq, was, in real life, found dead of an overdose in 1926). At Ur, she meets an eccentric and international cast of characters, and discovers that no love was lost between Bell and the dig’s own ‘belle’, a certain Katharine Woolley. 

At this stage, the committed Christie enthusiast will squeal with recognition, because the real Mrs Woolley has made almost as much of an impact on us as she did on the real Agatha Christie. It is common knowledge – so common that no one bothers citing a source – that the first victim in Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) was based on her.  If you are a die-hard Agatha Christie fan, you will spot the murderer a few chapters in, simply by whittling out the real people and identifying applying a bit of plot insight gleaned from Christie’s own work. This does not in any way spoil the clue-hunt, as knowing what you’re looking for is just as enjoyable as, if not more so than, going in blind. 

There is a subtle shift in scope between Wilson’s previous two novels and Death in a Desert Land. While A Talent For Murder and A Different Kind of Evil reminded me in many ways of Nicola Upson’s Josephine Tey Mysteries – even having similarly titled first instalments (Upson kicked off in 2008 with An Expert in Murder) – this third entry harks back to the technique David Pirie applied in his Murder Rooms series. In Pirie’s books, and the television series, Arthur Conan Doyle solves various mysteries that bear striking similarities to the Sherlock Holmes stories he would go on to write. In Death in a Desert Land, Agatha Christie inhabits a mystery that bears more than a little resemblance to Murder in Mesopotamia and, surprisingly, to one or two of her later novels including A Caribbean Mystery (1965). 

In fact, I wondered if there was a bit of sailing close to the wind. When a water glass filled with hydrochloric acid turns up on the camp site – exactly as it does in Murder in Mesopotamia – ‘this’, Christie says, ‘is beyond anything even I could have dreamt up’, which might suggest that she couldn’t have thought it up; that her creative genius has to be rationalised with external influences. But the last thing Andrew Wilson or indeed Agatha Christie would want us to do is to take their work too seriously. 

It is, though, extremely fun and thoroughly satisfying to be in the company of Wilson’s Agatha Christie once again. She is a warm and human character, who gives a voice to those of us who shyly observe life from the sidelines. I am looking forward to the next instalment, Who Saw Him Die?, which has already been written for publication in 2020. In particular, I’m hoping that a certain Max Mallowan might crop up…

Meta Matters

The whole thing is a meta moment.

High Seas (Netflix, 2019)

I have often wondered what an Alfred Hitchcock adaptation of Agatha Christie would look like, and I think that we've got closest to an answer in the most unexpected thing: a Spanish Netflix miniseries. Netflix has released High Seas (or Alta Mar) worldwide with dubbing - but do yourself a favour and stick to subtitles. The English dubbing is so, so unbelievably bad that I was praying the traffic accident in the first 20 seconds would be the end of the story. However, once I'd switched to Spanish, I happily endured the remaining 9 hours of silliness.

It’s the late 1940s, and a bunch of rich pretty people with dark secrets board a majestic ship sailing from Spain to Brazil. On the way to the harbour, two young women, Caroline and Eva, almost run over a third, harassed and anxious young woman, who says they need to get her on board or she will die. A tricky enough proposition but ten times trickier when Caroline is engaged to marry the owner of the sealine (is sealine a word? I mean the maritime equivalent of an airline).

Of course, no sooner is the intruder safely stowed when she starts acting very suspiciously, and then disappears. There’s a scream, a splash, and a murder investigation. Then, despite the close quarters in which all action takes place – namely, a moving ship – we also manage to plough through more murder, manslaughter, arson, divorce, adultery, rape, fraud, dancing, identity theft, suicide, deformity, false imprisonment, corrupt police investigations, and, of course, lashings and lashings of Nazi gold, all culminating in an on-board wedding at which, somehow an elaborate antique wedding dress that had burnt to a cinder has been repaired below-deck in two days to look even more stunning than before. Do not take High Seas seriously. It is the very definition of escapism, and all the better for it.

There is absolutely no innovation in this story. All the women are young and beautiful. LGBTQIA people do not exist. The rich are kind and clever or corrupt and greasy and the poor are either simple-but-honest or resentful-and-destructive. It's set in the late 1940s, and in many ways feels as if it was made in that time, although there is a bit of standing up to abusive men. The main thing here is getting swept up in the pretty sets and costumes, the swinging melodrama (exhibit A is the bride's arrival at the wedding), and the many out-of-field plot twists.

In the final episode, about sixty per cent of loose ends have been tied up but we still have a lot of questions. And then, in the last two minutes, everything changes again and about a zillion new storylines are opened up. Spanish media reports that the second series of HIGH SEAS is currently being filmed, and the telenovela-style storytelling combined with Hitcockian suspense, silliness, and cinematography will ensure a loyal audience.

META MATTERS

Eva is a writer.

Mini reviews #29

Murdering Mr Monti (1994) by Judith Viorst. Judith Viorst is best-known as a self-help author, which is also the profession of this novel’s narrator. The opening gives you a good idea of the tone of the book, and also its American-ness: ‘I am not the murdering kind, but I am planning to murder Mr Monti because he is doing harm to my family. I don’t look like the murdering kind, being a short, blond, rounded very married lady, with bifocals and a softness under the chin. On the other hand, I don’t look like the kind who, just a few weeks before her forty-sixth birthday, slept with three different men within twenty-four hours. And since I did indeed do that, I might indeed be able to murder Mr Monti.’ A fun opening, and I bought the book on the strength of it, but the whole thing progresses along those lines and never really gets any further.

Deal Breaker (1995) by Harlan Coben. Harlan Coben is a guilty pleasure for me, and I justify it by reading the novels through a Sedgwickian lens. That is to say, I follow the theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to read homosociality and what she called homosexual panic in masculine relationships. So, it is interesting that in Deal Breaker, two men — one preternaturally good looking — are allowed to bond intensely with shared memories of sleeping in a bunkbed at university, as long as a woman crops up on the next page and one of them talks about sex with her. There’s a lot of that sort of thing in Deal Breaker. It’s the first to feature Myles Bolitar, a sports agent whose client is horrified to discover his dead girlfriend apparently alive and advertising her services in a pornographic magazine. This is an easy read that you can whizz through in one sitting without thinking too deeply about it.

Hollow Crown (2002) by David Roberts. It’s 1936. Lord Edward Corinth (a pound shop Lord Peter Wimsey) is joined by left-wing journalist Verity Browne (a pound shop Harriet Vane) to investigate a murder, having originally been commissioned by Wallis Simpson, mistress to King Edward VIII, to recover some compromising letters.  This is a cosy, mindless mystery, peppered with references to the coming war. We know a character is stupid if they say stuff like ‘Hurrah for the blackshirts!’ and insisting, almost unprovoked, that there won’t be a war. They will of course always be challenged by a level-headed aristocrat who sees what we, with glorious hindsight, see: that war is coming and that it’s not necessarily a good thing. David Roberts has also developed a knack of getting in cliches by the back door. He simply ‘puts them in inverted commas’ and adds the words ‘as people say’, which somehow stops it from being bad writing. Not my cup of Ceylon, I’m afraid.

A Woman Unknown (2012) by Frances Brody. Kate Shackleton, Frances Brody’s northern interwar detective, is a delight. Here, she is roped into investigate the mysterious activities of a young wife and ends up looking into the murder of an American banker. One thing I particularly enjoyed about this novel was the focus on cameras and photography, which is not presented disingenuously as a new technology but showcased as a fashion. People collect cameras and boast about the comparative pros of their preferred models — which is how it must have been, of course — and the whole photography craze becomes important towards the end.

The Zig Zag Girl (2014) by Elly Griffiths. The first Stephens and Mephisto mystery showcases Elly Griffiths’ Golden Age influences, and proves that she is a rounded novelist who can master the detective genre from a range of angles. Set in Brighton in 1950, this novel is completely different in tone to the Ruth Galloway series. The opening line — ‘“Looks as if someone’s sliced her in three,’ said […] the police surgeon, chattily’ — introduces us to a narrative thats lightness of tone leaves the gives the understated darkness more power. The plot here takes us into the world of stage magic, with some absorbing, linger-in-the-mind characters, and a few caustic references to my home town, Great Yarmouth, which are always welcome.