Mini Reviews #21

‘Too Clever by Half’ (1939) by G.D.H. and M. Cole. A short story featuring a locked-room puzzle, although we are told the murderer at the outset. In what would become a Columbo-style set-up, we follow the detective as he unravels the clues. The idea is that if the killer hadn’t been so attentive in trying to cover up the crime, he’d probably have gotten away with it; the extra touches were his undoing. If any real murderer made any one of this killer’s five mistakes (e.g. leaving a ‘suicide note’ but neglecting the pen), then ‘clever’ is not the word one would use.

Busman’s Honeymoon (1940) directed by Arthur B. Woods. Competent film adaptation of the novel by Dorothy L. Sayers and the play she co-wrote with Muriel St Clare Byrne, featuring Robert Montgomery as Lord Peter Wimsey and Constance Cummings as Harriet Vane. Yes, Americans! Take it as a period murder mystery, rather than as anything to do with Sayers’ ambitious (and, arguably, unsuccessful) novel, and it’s thoroughly enjoyable.

A Simple Favour (2018) directed by Paul Feig. This movie, based on Darcey Bell’s debut and starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, is absolutely marvellous. I haven’t read the novel, and, candidly, I’m not keen to because it looks like a serious thriller, and the plot is an utterly ridiculous elevation ofGone Girl. However, the film is so splendidly camp – every scene contains one of those cringy stress-release gags that appear once an hour in normal thrillers – that it works brilliantly. Kendrick gives her best ever performance as a single mother-turned-YouTuber and Lively plays her mysterious rich new friend in a way that will make everyone recognise someone they know. The whole thing is very slick and very entertaining.

Bodyguard (BBC, 2018). Honestly, I don’t know why you’re all raving about this, or why you’re all complaining about the last episode. It starts as it means to go on: as a pretty standard BBC political thriller. That is, very gripping, quite preposterous, and mildly jingoistic, like London Spy. The final episode which disappointed so many viewers (seriously, I don’t know why?) is exactly what the first five episodes promised.

Nine Perfect Strangers (2018) by Liane Moriarty. Moriarty’s new novel is a satire that is sometimes witty and sometimes poignant. Set in an unorthodox health resort, it features an engaging and very believable villain, and a nice range of annoying rich protagonists. There is a delightful meta moment in chapter 58, in which a middle-aged romantic novelist trips out on LSD and realizes that she is a character in a poorly written detective story in which no one has yet died. The move towards satire in what used to be called ‘grip-lit’ is very reassuring, although I’ve not yet seen it perfected; Moriarty veers from dark humour to ‘I’m being serious’ moments – and she isn’t alone in that.

Mini Reviews #16

Each of these texts is one I wanted to devote a whole post to, but, unfortunately, time and energy are not on my side.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963) by Ian Fleming. Probably the most palatable of the James Bond novels, but that's not saying much. The second in the Blofield trilogy, this has some genuinely exciting moments and excellent location-building but the whole vibe of these books is something I can't get behind.

The Secret History (1992) by Donna Tartt. Iconic as an inverted mystery story and as a campus novel, I think it's impossible to deny that The Secret History is a masterpiece.

'Old Boys, Old Girls' (2004) by Edward P. Jones. A short story published in The New Yorker, this is everything twenty-first century crime fiction should be. Powerful and evocative, it voices a perspective that mainstream - white - American fiction cannot emulate.

Gaudy Bauble (2017) by Isabel Waidner. I am obsessed with this avant-garde queer crime novella, published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe. Nothing is defined in Socialist Britain in the year 201x: people, objects, events, and language all merge and blend and interact. In its extraordinary humour, the text reveals how far identity politics and crime fiction have yet to come.

Six Degrees of Assassination (2017) by M.J. Arlidge. This is a six-part political crime drama with an all-star cast, available for free on Audible. Arlidge's script is cliche-ridden but slick enough. The performances suffer from Extremely-Talented-Actors-Reading-A-Script-For-The-First-Time Syndrome.

Mini reviews #11

A festive-themed look at five short stories!

‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’ (1892) by Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes is at his best and his worst in this story, which involves a mysterious stone being smuggled in a Christmas goose. There is an element of Dickensian goodwill in the resolution, which is more satisfying than usual.

‘A Christmas Tragedy’ (1930) by Agatha Christie. On holiday, Miss Marple suspects that a man is planning to murder his wife — because that’s the natural conclusion to draw from other people’s marital disputes. Part of The Thirteen Problems, ‘A Christmas Tragedy’ isn’t very Christmassy but it’s a decent, substantial story with a surprising emotional punch.

‘The Murder of Santa Claus’ (1984) by P.D. James. A gloriously self-referential, if annoyingly conservative, country house mystery featuring Adam Dalgliesh, with a bit of reflection on the death penalty thrown in.

‘Saint Nicked’ (2002) by Ian Rankin. A fun, festive, and insubstantial Rebus story, written for the Radio Times. The reader should not exert too much energy on this one, and I strongly doubt the author did.

‘The Tennis Church’ (2015) by Sophie Hannah. Charlie Zailer and her past are at the centre of this psychological mystery story. It bears all of Hannah’s signature wit and pith. You can read it, nicely illustrated, here.

Striding Folly by Dorothy L. Sayers

Lately, I’ve not had much time to read crime fiction. My two jobs – lecturing at a university and doing admin for a novelist – have meant reading a hell of a lot of books in completely different genres. That’s why my last two posts have been – cringe – recycled versions of reviews that are nearly five years old. I have, however, been getting my criminal fix by regularly checking my favourite blogs and also by dipping in and out of books. Today, I’ll be looking again at Dorothy L. Sayers; this time at a short story.

The three stories collected in Striding Folly (1972) are among the only pieces of Sayers’ ‘detectivism’ (her word) that I still had left to read. So I had a go at the title story, originally published in a 1939 anthology. Technically, this is a Lord Peter Wimsey tale, although His Lordship only appears three quarters of the way through, and doesn’t do much except polish his monocle and reference the classics. Then he identifies some hitherto unintroduced culprit, despite never having been given any details of the case, and disappears – a deus ex machina created by someone who no longer believes in that particular god.

We follow an evening in the life of Mr Mellilow, who is waiting for his friend to arrive for a game of chess. While he waits, a stranger pays a visit – a man called Mr Moses who endures that smarmy middle-class condescending antisemitism (on the parts of both the protagonist and the author) that certain other minorities experience today. The two men play chess for a couple of hours. Realising that his expected guest is a no-show, Mellilow goes to bed. He wakes up, prompted by a violent dream, and rushes out to a folly, where he finds that his friend is not just late for chess, but late as late can be.

When he tells the police about his alibi – he can’t have killed the man because of Mr Moses – nobody believes that Mr Moses exists … until Wimsey rolls up and sets everything right. The solution Wimsey expounds is amazingly flimsy. You know how, when you read a murder mystery, you can spot some bits but generally not work out a whole conclusive solution? Well, Sayers gives us the bits we can easily work out and anticipate and does nothing with them. It literally goes no further.

Personally, I had a much more elaborate solution in mind when I read this story, and I am fairly sure that Sayers was thinking of something along those lines. I wonder if she got bored writing ‘Striding Folly’ and just dashed off the ending, from Wimsey’s entrance onwards? I’m not sure of the circumstances of commission and publication, but I would be genuinely shocked if she wrote this story for anything but stone-cold cash.

                                                             

As you might have gathered, I wasn’t wildly keen on this story, finding it a little pointless. Sure, there is something going on with chess: the self-conscious presentation of a strategy game in a genre that Sayers perceived to be reprehensibly fixated on puzzles at the expense of social and literary imperatives. However, she did something along these lines but with crosswords much more effectively in ‘Uncle Meleager’s Will’. All in all, ‘Striding Folly’ strikes me as uninspired, and little more than a Golden Age zombie.

Only read this final bit if you’ve already read the story, or don’t care how it ends:

If you would like to know the solution I think Sayers might have planned:  I think that Mr Moses had some kind of remote control device hidden in his left glove – hence keeping his gloves on and only using his right hand to play chess – which he triggered at ten minutes to nine (the exact time he fell into his first trap in the chess game, because his mind was elsewhere).  I think this set off some kind of electrical charge in a chess piece that the victim was holding, or which was in his boot, and which was later found by the body, or possibly switched with an identical piece by Moses after the event. There is precedence for this kind ending with Sayers; 'The Cave of Ali Baba' (1929) hinges on voice recognition software. Anyway, just a theory!

Greedy Night by E.C. Bentley

A curio today, and one of the shortest texts I've reviewed so far. 'Greedy Night' (1936) is a short send-up of Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey, which appears in Parody Party, a fascinating volume edited by Leonard Russell and printed on what looks like watermarked writing paper by Hutchinson. Russell's 'introductory note' seeks to trivialise the book as the result of a weekend parlour game, and makes what I think is a wonderful point.

Responding to what he sees as the inevitable criticism that 'post-war novelists and people haven't sufficiently distinctive styles to admit of the better sort of parody', Russell points out that parody as a 'critical' tool serves to draw out these distinctive styles that are otherwise invisible in a contemporary world. It is, of course, heartbreaking to realise that people living in what we now call the interwar period described themselves as living 'post-war', and even more so to reflect that the unique and specific prose styles we so readily associate with those years are themselves defined by the passing of one war and the anticipation of another.

It's a really interesting book, which is sometimes available online and cheap. And there are some great contributors including Rebecca West (parodying Charles Morgan), Rose McCaulay (Ernest Hemingway), Francis Iles (Hugh Walpole), Cyril Connolly (Aldous Huxley), John Betjeman (various Russians), and more.

Before going any further, a note of warning: this post contains spoilers. Personally, I find it difficult to discuss the joys of detective fiction without blabbing about the solutions, because often the story of the crime itself is essential to whatever contribution the text is making. In a similar vein, I don't mind a jot if I read a book already knowing whodunit. For me, it really isn't a case of 'animated algebra.' But I know that many people disagree, so accept this spoiler warning, the only intimation!

Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956), as if you needed to know, wrote Trent's Last Case (1913), a comic country house mystery that many have credited with spawning the British murder mystery as a distinct literary genre. He also invented the appropriately-named clerihew, a form of verse that haunts me from my student days, when our poetry tutor regaled us with an assortment of his own miniature masterpieces, from which I have yet to recover.

In this intriguing send-up of Dorothy L. Sayers, Bentley contributes a clerihew of his own which appears both in the text and ahead of it, accompanied by an image attributed to Bentley's famous son ('Nicolas Bentley drew the pictures', runs the credit line). I quote the clerihew in full because it reveals the story's charms and its limitations:

Lord Peter Wimsey 

May look a little flimsy, 

But he's simply sublime 

When nosing out a crime.

Charming because it's a clerihew by E. Clerihew himself, and it's clearly done in a spirit of great affection. Limited precisely because it's clearly done in a spirit of great affection, and, technically, it's not very good. These four lines alone tell us that there's not going to be any serrated criticism in the story -- and that's fine, of course. By its very nature, parody tells us something about contemporary reception and interpretation, even if this has been carefully controlled. I'm looking forward to reading the chapter parodying Hugh Walpole by Francis Iles (aka Anthony Berkeley, aka A.B. Cox), who was not well known for softening the blows to his peers.

The opening scene has Bunter, Wimsey's faithful manservant, bringing his master breakfast in bed. When they discuss the unfortunate substances that His Lordship imbibed the previous night, and when Bunter casually lets drop that he has 'always taken an interest in the technical study of medieval calligraphy', it's clear that the character here is early Wimsey, not late Wimsey. This is the character Sayers described as a cross between 'Fred Astaire and Bertie Wooster' and not the introspective married feminist that Wimsey was about to become at the time of the story's publication.

Another figure soon arrives on the scene: no less a personage than the Bishop of Glastonbury. A mysterious death has taken place, and His Grace invites His Lordship to investigate. The investigation takes Wimsey into an academic setting -- of course -- where everyone starts to talk about eating. There is a curious exchange between Wimsey and a young admirer called Mitchell:

Wimsey laughed. 'I must go. But do you and your friends really read the chronicles of my misspent life, then?' 

'Do we read them?' cried Mr Mitchell. 'I should say we do read them! We eat them!' 

'How jolly for you -- I mean for me -- that is to say, for her -- oh well, you know what I mean,' Wimsey said distractedly.

There is a nod here to the grand generic tradition of acknowledging the artificial status of the narrative; to Sherlock Holmes' many remarks about the people who read his adventures in The Strand. And the reference to 'her' takes it one step further.

The words 'we eat them' become relevant, too.  At the end of the book, Wimsey opens up the corpse's mouth -- God knows what the corpse is still doing there -- and removes several pages of a book. That book is Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers (with a handy footnote explaining the publisher, and just falling short of 'available in all good bookshops'). Wimsey explains:

Strong Poison! [...] Too strong indeed for poor Dermot. Such is the magic of that incisive, compelling style that even the very printed word is saturated with the essence of what it imparts. Others eat her works in a figurative sense only; Dermot began to eat this one in truth and in fact and so rushed, all unknowing, on his doom.

Do we detect here a josh in the direction of Sayers, who sought to elevate the intellectual standing of a detective novel and was about to give it up all together? Is the hyperbole mere sycophancy or is it a ruthless critique of what many people still consider pretension? What I really want to know is -- what did Dorothy L. Sayers think of this story? I'm sure she will have read it.

There are also some hints here -- as there are in Trent and much of the fiction it inspired -- of what we now call postmodernism. I think that we can expect a po-mo crime revival one of these days. But I'm rambling, and in discussions of this nature, that's not a good thing.

Mini reviews #5

Death on the Cherwell (1935) by Mavis Doriel Hay. A whodunit published in the same year as Sayers’ Gaudy Night and, like that novel, set in a fictional Oxford college for women. But unlike Gaudy Night, Death on the Cherwell might as well be set in a boarding school, and is riddled with every cliche that Sayers tried to fight. It’s cruel to compare a minor name to a titan, but given the timing, comparisons are inevitable, and Hay comes out of them much worse.

Deep Water (1957) by Patricia Highsmith. A loveless marriage in a small town provides the backdrop to an utterly chilling, sophisticated thriller with every ingredient that makes Highsmith the foremost voice in 1950s American disillusion. I have no idea why this fantastic novel is not better known.

The Last Woman in His Life (1970) by Ellery Queen. Extremely disappointing novel that is offensive both in terms of its content and its quality. Apparently this one was ghostwritten.

'Inside Story' (1993) by Colin Dexter. I genuinely — and unpopularly — think that Inspector Morse is at his best in short stories. This might have something to do with the author not trying so hard to write, or to plot. You’ve probably guessed the set-up from the title: a contained narrative holds the clues to the surrounding mystery. Recommended.

The Golden Age of Murder (2015) by Martin Edwards. A majestic history of crime fiction in its heyday, and essential reading for fans and scholars of the genre.

Death and Aunt Fancy by Edmund Crispin

A delightful and very brief short story that is collected in Fen Country, 'Death and Aunt Fancy' (1953) is being issued to readers for free by Peters Fraser Dunlop on behalf of Edmund Crispin's estate. To read the story, simply sign up to their newsletter.

The story was first published in Colliers Magazine in 1953, and has been reproduced a few times since, perhaps because it's conveniently short. But it's also very good.

'Death and Aunt Fancy' is only four pages long and as a mystery it's satisfying without being challenging. A 'tubular' man in his mid-fifties, George Gotobed, visits his long-estranged aunt and her companion. Within minutes, his aunt has uttered some cryptic words and George departs, confused. Not long later, there's a murder...

Gervase Fen, the eccentric Oxford don whom I fell in love with as a boy, appears in a wonderful sketch, hearing the problem and solving it on the spot. I am so pleased that something is being done with Crispin's estate, and hoping that the BBC TV project by Mark Gatiss, which was supposed to happen in 2016, materialises one day. There was something magical and frustrating, as a teenager, in trying to gather together as many Crispin books as I could, because nobody had heard of him and only The Moving Toyshop was in print.

If you're new to Crispin, or to Fen, 'Death and Aunt Fancy' is a good -- free -- place to start. If you're an aficionado, or just a fan, I'd love to chat. My favourite Fen mystery is Love Lies Bleeding. What's yours?