And Be A Villain

 

A few weeks ago, my "Friday's Favorite OTR" post was an episode of Murder is My Hobby, in which a guest on a live radio broadcast is poisoned while the show is on the air.

Someone on Facebook posted a comment saying that he thought a Nero Wolf novel used the same premise. I've read all the Wolfe novels, but I've never re-read the series methodically. So it's been many years since I've read some of them and simply didn't remember this particular plot.

Well, by brilliant and beautiful wife Angela saw the comment and remembered the novel right away: And Be a Villain. Rex Stout wrote this one in 1948, during the run of Murder is My Hobby. Since the episode I highlighted is undated, it's impossible to know if it was broadcast before or after the Nero Wolfe tale. It's not impossible that the show's writers lifted the idea from the novel, though to be fair, they did wrap an original story around the concept. It could be just a coincidence. I suppose it's not impossible that Stout heard the episode and decided to improve on the premise with a better and more intricate plot. In any case, Murder is My Hobby was an entertaining but still second-tier OTR show. Rex Stout's novel are classics of the mystery genre. 

The novel is unique among most of the other entries in the series for several reasons. First, it's one of the few times that Wolfe goes out looking for a job because he needs the money. He's been hit with a big income tax bill and the fee he asks for in exchance for solving a recent murder will cover that bill.

Second, it's the only time I can think of when Wolfe, after uncovering a key fact, gives this information to Inspector Cramer and then sits back expecting the cops to finish the job. He assumes that the case can be wound up through regular police routine. When he's proven wrong, he gets involved again.

The case involves a guest on a radio show who is murdered on the air, during a bit when the host and her guests drink the product of one of their sponsers. The guest's bottle is poisoned.

It's Wolfe who eventually figures out that the poison was probably intended for the host, which naturally changes the direction of the police investigation. But when Cramer still hits a dead end, Archie uses a clever trick to play on Wolfe's ego and get the corpulent detective working again. Or rather, to get the corpulent detective to think about the case and get Archie to do the legwork.

Another murder, at first apparently unconnected, is carried out, leading to the possibility that the motive is linked to a cleverly run blackmail ring. At this point, Wolfe receives a vaguely threatening phone call from Arnold Zeck, a master criminal that Stout was gradually building up to be Wolfe's Professor Moriarty. 

It's only when a third person is abruptly murdered that Wolfe is able to link everything together and identify the killer. Arnold Zeck calls Wolfe one more time, foreshadowing the day when Wolfe will actually have to leave his brownstone and go into hiding while he deals with the master crook. 

All the usual strengths of Rex Stout's brilliant novels are here--Archie's humorous and mildly cynical narration, his interactions with Wolfe, and a well-constructed murder mystery with a satisfying denoument. And the unusual aspects--primarily Wolfe and Cramer playing nice together rather than clashing--adds additional spice to the tale. 

Reading a classic mystery always makes me want to solve a murder. But I never get to do so.

Cover Cavalcade

 

This 1962 edition of Christie's 1928 novel features a cover by Harry Bennett.

The Mirror Universe Perry Mason!

I have had occasion in the past to post information and reviews about both Erle Stanley Gardner's excellent Perry Mason novels AND about his excellent non-Perry Mason stories. Gee whiz, this guy was a prolific and superb storyteller. Mason deserves his success and his status as an iconic character, but it's too bad that many of his other characters have faded into Popular Culture Limbo. The Gardner Universe is a diverse and endlessly entertaining place.

District Attorney Doug Selby appeared in nine novels (most of them first serialized in magazines before being published as novels) between 1937 and 1949.  I've never gotten around to reading any of the Selby novels--Gardner was SO prolific it sometimes seems impossible to get caught up with all of his characters.

So The D.A. Takes a Chance, first serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in 1948, is the first I've read, chosen because my local public library happened to have that one. It's the 8th in the series, but the stories are self-contained enough so that my usual obsession with reading things in "proper" order really didn't kick in.

It's a good, solid detective story that deals as much with Selby butting heads with obstructive politicians and a sleazy lawyer as with the crime. A woman is stabbed to death while recovering from a gunshot wound. Certain people with political pull want it declared a suicide. But Selby and county sheriff Rex Brandon don't buy this. Getting to the bottom of the case will inevitably mean stepping on a few toes. Selby had only recently been reelected after returning from service during the war, so a misstep could mean the end of his career as D.A.

But dogged investigations by himself, Brandon and lady report Sylvia Martin slowly uncovers interesting clues. Among these is a knife that wasn't the murder weapon having a fingerprint on it that should not be there. A box of chocolates laced with barbituates also play a key role in figuring out whodunit.

Selby, Brandon and Sylvia Martin form a dynamic very similar to the Perry Mason/Paul Drake/Della Street that is so key to the Mason novels, though Sylvia acts independantly of Selby more often than Della did with Perry. Another interesting element is the sleazy lawyer who causes Selby the most trouble during the novel. A.B. Carr (known as "old A B C") is a sort of Evil Perry Mason, clever and able to improvise plans on a moment's notice, but without the ethics and real concern for justice that was an inherent part of Mason's character. As I understand it, Carr is a regular nemesis in the series, which increases my desire to read more of the Selby books. He's an effective villain and nearly (though not quite) matches the protagonist in sheer cleverness.

So I can whole-heartedly recommend The D.A. Takes a Chance. I think Gardner's skills as a storyteller are high enough to take it on faith that the rest of the series is worth reading as well. I really which more of Gardner's stuff would get reprinted.

Lady Molly of Scotland Yard

Well, you know, some say she is the daughter of a duke, others that she was born in the gutter, and that the handle has been soldered on to her name in order to give her style and influence.

That's the first sentence in the short story "The Ninescore Mystery," which is the first of a dozen short stories written by the Baroness Orczy--author of The Scarlet Pimpernel. These stories were first published in 1910.

It's a wonderful first sentence, fun to read and immediately giving us something to latch on to about Lady Molly that easily makes us believe it completely when we are told that she immediately commands the respect of those she meets from the force of her personality and her intelligence.

Who is Lady Molly? She's the head of Scotland Yard's Female Department and she's also the chief's go-to person when the male detectives are stumped on a case.

I didn't know about Lady Molly until recently. This annoys me, because I'm supposed to be a scholar about pre-digital genre fiction. I'm supposed to know everything, darn it!

I found out about her when I was discussing the line-up of books I had selected for an "Adventure Classics of Western Literature" reading group I administer on Facebook. I mentioned that I hadn't initially thought to put The Scarlet Pimpernel on the reading list and was going to do so. She then told me about the Lady Molly stories, which I immediately downloaded onto my Kindle. 

Never go anywhere without your Kindle, children. You never know when there's something you need to read that you want to acquire RIGHT NOW!

Anyway, the Lady Molly stories are very much influenced by Sherlock Holmes in their structure, with the narration provided by Molly's assistant Mary Granard. Molly, though, depends less on deduction based on clues and more on deduction based on a sharp understanding of human nature. 

"The Ninescore Mystery" is a great example of this. A young lady is found dead in the small town of Ninescore. She's been dead for a couple of weeks and is badly decomposed by the time she's found. But her body is identified and an investigation is launched.

It's an investigation that goes nowhere. There's lots of clues--a missing sister; a presumed nobleman who was having an affair with the victim; a presumably illegitimate baby; and a few other items. There's a vague indication of blackmail amidst all this, but the nobleman denies any hanky panky and has a good alibi for the night of the murder.

Molly, though, believes she knows the answer and has a plan for identifying the killer with certainty. Her plan is, in fact, a double-edged sword--designed to both smoke out someone in hiding and force that person to talk.

Lady Molly is a great character--another wonderful addition to the the small but exclusive Canon of Great Detectives. But, by golly, I should have already have known about her! 

The Lady Molly stories are available online HERE.

Solving a Murder 16 Years Late

   I love the way Agatha Christie constructs her 1942 Hercule Poirot mystery Five Little Pigs.

It's all very methodical, with the book divided into three parts.  The first part has Poirot asked to investigate a murder. There's nothing unusual about this in of itself--but this particular murder was committed 16 years earlier. A well-known artist had been poisoned. His wife was convicted of the crime and then soon died in prison.  The evidence pointing to her guilt seems conclusive.

But now the couple's daughter--a 5-year-old at the time of the crime, but now an adult, wants Poirot to look into the case. Based on a letter written to her just before her mom died, the daughter is convinced of her mother's innocence.

Poirot interviews the lawyers and cops who were involved in the case and concludes that there are five other possible suspects. If the mother didn't do it (and if it wasn't suicide, which was the mom's defense at her trial), then one of the other five present in the home where the killing took place must be guilty.

The first part of the novel concludes as Poirot visits each of the suspects in turn. He thinks of them as the "five little pigs," metaphorically assigning each of them an equivalent to one of the pigs in the nursery rhyme.

Poirot gets each of them to write an account of the day the murder happened, though he appreciates that so much time has elapsed that there will inevitably be gaps in their statements. This is Part 2 of the novel.

It's all very methodical, but Christie uses this structure to both paint us a picture of what happened on the day of the murder AND to give us a sense of the personalities involved. I'm not sure Christie gets enough credit for her skill at characterization. Her ability to populate her novels with people we can think of as real is one of the reasons they are so good and still popular today.

Of course, another important reason she's still popular today is her ability to create magnificent fair play puzzles. We hardly ever figure out whodunnit before Poirot or Miss Marple does, but when its all explained to us, we always have to admit the clues were there for us to see.

In this case, some of the clues involve understanding the psychology of those involved in the case, but conclusions made about that are all reasonable and do nothing to distract from the "fair play" aspect of the story.








The last part of the novel is Poiret visiting each of the suspects in turn, asking each of them one additional question. Then he brings them all together to explain what REALLY happened on that fateful day.  The fate of the real killer is an interesting and atypical one, but dramatically satisfying.

Whenever I read a great murder mystery, it always brings back my desire to one day use brilliant deductive reasoning to solve a murder, then do a melodramatic summation with all the suspects listening. But, as I've written before, I have sadly boring friends who regularly fail to get murdered or (at least) get falsely accused of murder so I can save them by finding the real killer. This is a source of unending disappointment for me.

"The Ideal Criminal is a Strategist."

Edgar Wallace should be better remembered than he is. He wrote some mind-numbingly fun mystery and suspense novels. I wrote once about his 1923 novel The Green Archer, Now I've jumped back a few years to read 1917's Kate Plus Ten.

Kate is Kate Westhanger, a very, very smart 19-year-old girl. How do we know she's smart? Because she's a master criminal, commanding a group of 10 older, male criminals who help her commit the crimes she meticulously plans. She and her gang have looted banks and businesses for millions--though the thefts never include acts of violence. Kate uses guile, trickery and clever strategies to achieve her goals.

Scotland Yard knows about Kate. Most specifically, detective Michael Pretherston knows about Kate. But knowing and proving are two different matters. Which makes it hard on Mike--since he kind of likes Kate and would like to see her go straight. But she loves the adventure that comes with her chosen profession.

Kate is in the midst of planning a huge job--robbing a train that's carrying nearly £3 million in gold.

 To get the information she needs to pull off the heist, she needs to pretend to be a confidential secretary to one man, an easily-impressed chorus-girl to another and a Polish princess to a third. This isn't easy, because Mike seems to be underfoot.

And when she does pull off the heist--seemingly making the gold train vanish into thin air--it's Mike who has an idea of just how she did it.

But that puts Mike in danger--because Kate's gang isn't necessarily as adverse to violence as she is. Also, poor Kate might also eventually learn that there really isn't such a thing as honor among thieves...

Kate Plus Ten isn't perfect--there's a sub-plot involving a side character falling in love that's well-written, but doesn't really add much to the main story. The novel's ending is arguably contrived.

But getting to that ending is a lot of fun. Kate's plan for robbing the train really is clever, as is Mike's efforts to pick up the trail and find the train before the crooks get away. Wallace plants an effective "Chekov's Gun" early on that unexpectedly but believably pops up to save the day at the climax. The banter between Mike and Kate is lively and the entire book is fast-moving.

Also, Wallace does a great job of giving the ten gang-members--even those with relatively little "screen time"--distinct personalities. Kate Plus Ten is a fast and merry read.

Besides, who among us doesn't want to spend time with a beautiful but intelligent lady master criminal?

The book is in the public domain, so you can read it online HERE.

Even Perry Mason Messes Up from Time to Time

I enjoy the way Erle Stanley Gardner sets up this particular novel. Most of the time, a client hires Perry for one reason or another, then along the way someone is killed and Perry now has to defend his client against a murder charge.

In 1949's The Case of the Cautious Coquette, Perry is already working on a personal injury case when the novel opens, trying to track down a witness to a hit-and-run accident. This seems straightforward, but then he gets an anonymous tip that a woman named Lucille Barton is the witness, while another woman entirely shows up at his office also claiming to be the witness.

Perry soon realizes that Lucille had nothing to do with the accident, but wants to hire Perry to deal with an alimony situation with her ex-husband. Perry isn't interested, so when he and Lucille stumble across a dead body, he leaves her to report it to the police. He's eager to get back to the hit-and-run case and, besides, he enjoys the idea of being able to tell the cops everything he knows about the body without worrying about protecting a client.

But the body doesn't get reported right away. By the time Perry realizes he made an error in judgment in not following up on this himself, the body has been found anyways and he's tentatively placed at the scene of the crime by a witness.

Lucille is arrested for the crime and Perry has no choice but to take her case. Aside from believing she is innocent, he also needs to claim client-lawyer privilege to keep from answering questions about that pesky corpse. He arranges a complicated trick to keep the witness from positively identifying him, then begins to unravel the case and identify the real killer during the preliminary hearing.

One of the pleasures of reading a Perry Mason novel is the fun of "watching" the cops and Hamilton Burger, convinced they've finally got Perry this time, stand by helplessly as Perry twists everything they try to his own advantage. It makes one wonder how poor Burger kept his job as D.A. But life in the Perry Mason universe wouldn't be anywhere near as fun without him.

Cautious Coquette has the usual entertainment value from the courtroom antics, but it's a particularly strong entry in the series because of the unusual set-up. Perry simply messes up by first making a reasonable but incorrect deduction about Lucille and then by depending on her to report the body. But Gardner understood the characters he wrote about--at no time does Perry seem dumb. He acts intelligently throughout the story, but errs in his judgement a few times along the way.  It's fun to watch circumstances put Perry in a hole, then to keep watching while he uses his brains to think his way out of that hole.

"I then believed that all misguided or cruel people should be shot, and I shot some."

When Rex Stout created the obese detective Nero Wolfe, he was performing a rather delicate balancing act. Wolfe works as a detective only because he needs money to maintain his brownstone, care for his orchids and keep to a gourmet diet. Some of his most obvious traits are less-than-admirable. He's stubborn, sometimes a little childish, and is quite often a quarter-ton pain in the butt.

But if Wolfe was too obnoxious without any traits to balance this out, then we would get tired of visiting him. We might enjoy a few Nero Wolfe novels or novellas simply because they are nifty mysteries or because we like Archie Goodwin, but if we didn't like Wolfe, we wouldn't come back.

Of course, it probably helps that we spend most of our time with Archie and get Wolfe in relatively small doses.

So why do we like Nero Wolfe? There are a number of reasons, but one of them is that he does have a sense of right and wrong. He does have a code of honor, even if he doesn't care to admit to this if he doesn't have to. The novel Over My Dead Body (abridged in American Magazine in 1939; published as a novel in 1940) is perhaps the best example of this.

A recent immigrant from Montenegro needs Wolfe's help--she's been accused of theft by one of the clients of the fencing school at which she works. Wolfe's bank account is full at the moment, so he's not interested. But then it turns out the young lady might be Wolfe's adopted daughter.

We get to learn a little bit about Wolfe's background--that he wasn't always fat and that he spent a few years in what is now Yugoslavia during the World War. ("I then believed that all misguided or cruel people should be shot, and I shot some." One of the best lines ever.) While there, he stumbled across a starving three-year-old girl and took her in. Later, the two lost track of each other. Now she seems to be back.

So Wolfe sends Archie to the fencing school, despite the fact that no fee is likely to be collected. The theft thing is cleared up pretty quickly, but then a corpse turns up and Wolfe's daughter (if she is his

daughter) is a suspect. And the murder weapon turns up in the pocket of Archie's coat. It's the sort of thing that happens with surprising frequency to poor Archie.

What follows is a very faced-paced story. The action covers only two days (with Wolfe and Archie only getting a few hours sleep during this time), so there is an inherent excitement to everything. But the pacing never gets ahead of the story--when the complex mystery is finally sorted out, everything falls nicely into place. The twist at the end  is absolutely wonderful. Oh, and we learn that Wolfe is still perfectly capable of looking after himself in dangerous situations.

Along the way, Rex Stout has fun with his characters. Inspector Cramer realizes that Wolfe's clients always turn out to be innocent and that the corpulent detective often digs up vital information before the cops. So he eventually camps out in the brownstone, even following Wolfe up to the greenhouse during orchid-time.

But the best part comes in the last chapter, when Wolfe finally has time to talk to his daughter without worrying about solving a mystery. Boy, is that awkward. But its also legitimately sweet and if you want to know why people like Nero Wolfe despite all his annoying traits--well, here's your answer. It is this as well as the great mystery that makes it one of my favorite in the series.

The Green Arrow.. No, Darn it! I mean the Green ARCHER!

I've discovered that--if you're a comic book geek--it's impossible to tell people about Edgar Wallace's 1923 novel The Green Archer or either of the subsequent movie serials based on that novel without accidentally saying The Green ARROW at least 50% of the time. I have a lifetime of referring to an heroic archer who dresses in green as Green Arrow, darn it. I can't be expected to change now.

But the Green Archer is a different character from DC Comics' superhero. You could probably consider him an early superhero--he wore a costume and mask, keeping his identity a secret while taking vengence on villains.

Edgar Wallace wrote fun mysteries, full of bizarre twists and turns. The Green Archer is justly considered one of his best. It definitely has its share of twists and turns, as well as a superbly suspenseful climax involving many of the main characters being tossed into a clever death trap.

It's difficult to summarize the novel without giving too much away. The villain is Abel Bellamy, a rich American who has emigrated to England and now lives in the impregnable Garre Castle. He made his fortune in various ruthless and illegal ways and also has a nasty habit of taking vengeance on his enemies by threatening their children. We soon learn that he has been keeping woman prisoner in the castle for the last eight years.

Bellamy is villainous enough to require multiple protagonists, including a Scotland Yard detective, a young lady who may be related to the woman prisoner, an American reporter and--surprisingly--a husband-and-wife criminal team who at first work for Bellamy but discover that there are some things they simply won't do for money.

The most mysterious protagonist, though, is the Green Archer. Suspected by some to be a ghost haunting the castle, he seems to have full access to that castle no matter how well-guarded it is. He helps foil several of Bellamy's schemes and isn't above putting arrows through the hearts of Bellamy's minions. But his identity and his ultimate motivation is a mystery throughout the novel.


It's a lively and enjoyable book. Bellamy is loathsome in just the right way to make him an effective villain. The various good guys are all interesting characters, especially Julius Savini and his wife Faye. This is the husband-and-wife team I mentioned earlier--they begin the book as villains themselves, but to the surprise of everyone including themselves, they develop a tendency to act heroically (though they never do overcome a habit of pocketing any spare cash that might be lying around).










The Green Archer was made into a silent movie serial in 1925, which I haven't seen and I'm not certain if it exists in its entirety. It was made into a serial again in 1940, with the action moved to America. It is an excellent serial, with Victor Jory playing Spike Holland--the American reporter from the novel who is promoted to lead protagonist here. James Craven does a wonderful job as the villainous Bellamy. The story departs from the novel and is largely an original story, but its a good one. There are some great cliffhangers, often involving insidious death traps. In the serial, anyone who doesn't figure out the Green Archer's identity early on isn't really trying, but there are some fun twists involving the motivations of other characters in the last chapter.

But the original novel is still the best version of the story. It hasn't been in print for years, but The Green Arro.. no, darn it! The Green ARCHER is available online HERE.

I Love Me a Good Twist Ending

There's no excuse for the classic mystery novels of Ellery Queen being out of print, but most or all of them seem to have been so for awhile now.

Fortunately, a new publisher has brought a trio of Queen's novels back onto the market, along with some other classic stuff. It's about time, doggonnit.

One of them is The Door Between (1937). I hadn't read this particular one before and it (as Queen's brilliantly constructed mysteries often do) pretty much knocked me on the floor when Ellery reveals whodunit at the end.

That, of course, is followed by another twist. This second twist is then followed by yet another twist. Gee whiz, this is great stuff--the sort of satisfying denouement that only Agatha Christie did better than Ellery Queen.

It's an interesting mystery right from the get-go. A woman is murdered while in her bedroom. The only possible exit is through a door that leads to a sitting room. When the murder occurred, the victim's future daughter-in-law is in the sitting room. She can swear that absolutely no one entered or left the bedroom before or after the murder.

So the only possible person who could have committed the crime is the perspective daughter-in-law.  It's literally impossible for anyone else to have done it. She has to be guilty.

Well, we readers know she's innocent--she's the point-of-view character for much of the novel and we're symbolically sitting beside her when the murder takes place. So who did it and HOW did the crime take place?

Aside from the great plot, there's a couple of other features that make this one stand out. A supporting character--Irish private eye Terry Rig--adds a lot of fun to the proceedings. (In fact, I think Terry would have made a great protagonist in his own right.)

Also, this is one of the few times--if not the only time--that Ellery and his dad (police Inspector Queen) are working at odds to each other rather than working together. The elder Queen is quite justifiably convinced the girl is guilty. Ellery, though, has a feeling she's innocent. The realistic and affectionate father/son relationship between the two men is one of the strengths of the Queen novels, but this time around they find themselves on opposite sides of the fence.

But if Ellery can figure out who the real culprit is, he can see justice done and heal any potential rift with his dad. And if anyone can do it, Ellery Queen can.

By the way, treat yourself to watching the DVDs of the excellent 1970s TV version of Ellery Queen.

Introducing Lt. Tragg

The Case of the Silent Partner (1940) is a particularly interesting entry in the Perry Mason book series.

It’s the 17th book in the series, which began in 1933 with The Case of the Velvet Claws. In the previous books, the policeman that Mason most often ran up against while defending his client was Sergeant Holcombe of the LAPD’s Homicide bureau.

Holcombe wasn’t terribly bright. He hated Mason with a passion and always worked on the assumption that Mason was committing any number of crimes—from perjury to hiding evidence—to protect his clients. But Mason would always run mental rings around the poor guy, outsmarting him at every turn.

Holcombe wasn’t without his good points--in one book, after Mason has identified the real killer, Holcombe brings the guilty man down even after taking a couple of bullets. But his brutishness and slow-thinking didn’t make him much of an adversary.

So, in Silent Partner, Holcombe is transferred (mostly because Mason keeps making him look foolish) and Lt. Tragg is assigned to Homicide.

Tragg’s a good cop. Mason learns this early in the novel when the two have to team up to track down a woman who has apparently been poisoned. It’s Tragg’s skill as a detective that brings them success.

Tragg was played by veteran actor Ray Collins in the classic TV Series

But, as is usual in Perry Mason’s life, a corpse soon turns up. Mason’s client is accused of the crime and there’s good reason to think she’s guilty. Tragg certainly thinks so and even Mason has some doubts at first.

Mason has to pull a few fast ones (including generating circumstantial “evidence” that indicates his client has also been murdered) to identify the real killer. This isn’t easy. Tricks that would have had Holcombe baffled don’t fool Tragg for a moment. Before the novel is reaches its climax, Mason’s shenanigans have nearly gotten both him and his secretary Della Street tossed in the slammer. But Mason manages to stay barely one step ahead of Tragg and the lieutenant is at his side when he confronts the real killer with enough evidence to elicit a confession.

As is typical with Erle Stanley Gardner’s work, the plot is a good one, moving along quickly and giving us a really cool twist at the end. But it’s the dynamic between Tragg and Mason that really makes this novel stand out from the others in the series. Mason now knows he has a wily adversary. He realizes that in the future, when he stretches (but never quite breaks) the law to help his clients, he’s really going to have to watch his back.

Always playing fair

The Dutch Shoe Mystery, by Ellery Queen (1931)



Ellery Queen the author is really two guys--Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay. They used the Queen byline when they write about mystery writer Ellery Queen, who assists his homicide detective dad in solving crimes. The conceit of the novels is that we are reading fictionalized accounts of cases solved by the real "Ellery."

And the cases he solves are doozies. Lee and Dannay were masters at constructing complex but perfectly fair mysteries. All the clues are always there for us to see as clearly as Ellery does. But are we as smart as Ellery? Can we follow the deductive path laid out by the clues and then ourselves finger the killer? Not usually--Lee and Dannay pretty much always turn out to be smarter than we are.


But, gee whiz, we have fun trying.


When we first meet Ellery Queen in the 1929 novel The Roman Hat Mystery, he's a little bit of a pretentious jerk. We're constantly reminded of how smart he is by his tendency to lecture and pull obscure qoutes out of the air. This is fine by itself, but when you add in his annoying habit of calling his dad Pater and using exclamations like "By the Minotaur!" then there are moments when you really want to smack him one.


But Lee and Dannay gradually stripped Ellery of his more annoying habits and morphed him into a logical but still compassionate person-- a perfectly likeable human being who happens to be smarter than everyone else. His most admirable trait--and the real cornerstone of the series--is the affectionate and healthy relationship he has with his father.



The Dutch Shoe Mystery is the third novel in the series and Ellery is already getting more likeable (though he still comes up with a few two many "By the Minotaur"-like exclamations) and the mystery he has to solve is particularly subtle.

A woman is murdered in a hospital, just moments before she was wheeled into the operating room to have a ruptured gall bladder removed. Ellery happened to be at the hospital visiting a doctor friend, so he's on hand from the moment the woman is declared dead.


An investigation turns up several people with motive and opportunity. But some of the suspects are refusing to share information with the police. A set of hospital scrubs and a pair of shoes worn by the killer is found abandoned nearby and Ellery makes several important deductions drawn from the shoes, but it's not enough to identify the killer.


It's not until another murder is committed that Ellery is able to gain enough information to put it all together. And, as always in an Ellery novel, it's all perfectly fair to the reader. We're given all the clues as well. But can we follow the same complex chain of deductions that Ellery does? Probably not. Mandred Lee and Frederick Dannay are just plain too smart for us.


Next month, we'll visit with the social elite in Overture to Death, by Ngaio Marsh, featuring Inspector Roderick Alleyn.

Down the mean streats a man must go who is not himself mean.

The High Window, by Raymond Chandler


Raymond Chandler didn't invent the hard-boiled genre, but he did it better than anyone except (arguably) Dashiell Hammett.


His career as a writer started--as so many of the best hard-boiled writers did--working for Black Mask magazine. But unlike most of the best writers in the pulp era, he wasn't prolific enough to make a living doing short stories. So he began to concentrate on novels. In 1939, he cannibalized the plots of several of his stories, melded his various protagonists into wisecracking P.I. Philip Marlowe, and produced the superb novel The Big Sleep. It was the first of a series of wonderful, evocotive books in which Chandler repeatedly proved himself to be a master of the English language.


Chandler was always more concerned with character and theme than with plot. To be honest, that's why I prefer Hammett over Chandler--if only slightly. Both men would often construct stories with complex plots, but Hammett always managed to tie up all the loose threads in time for the climax. Chandler, on the other hand, almost always left a thread or two dangling.


But this is a matter of pure personal preference on my part. It's unfair to seriously criticize Chandler for considering his plots to be of secondary importance. He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew that what was most imporant was the image of a tough but good man who maintains his personal integrety no matter how much corruption bubbles up around him. Philip Marlowe is a modern knight-in-armor. Not shining armor, perhaps--there are too many whiskey and tobacco stains for that. But he's a knight all the same.


He is, in fact, the perfect example of what makes the hard-boiled genre so valuable. It's a literary form that is inherently cynical about human nature and human society. But the best hard-boiled stories balance this out by reminding us that there are men and women in the world who still live by their word and maintain a viable code of ethics.


In The High Window (1942), Marlowe is hired to recover a rare coin that's been stolen by an errant member of a rich family. Not surprisingly, the case soon expands outward to include jealously, unfaithful spouses, greed and (of course) murder.


Marlowe slogs through it all until he finally gets to the truth, sifting through a cesspool of lies and half-truths along the way. But in the end, we see that Marlowe--tough guy that he is--will always act with compassion and honor as he chooses to look after the welfare of one of the few more-or-less innocent persons he encounters.


The High Window is the only one of the first four Marlowe novels that was plotted out in advance by Chandler as a self-contained story--the others all made use of plot elements cobbled together from Chandler's short stories. Because of this, it's more tightly plotted than the other novels--though one can also argue it's more formulaic.


But it's still a fast-paced, atmospheric tale. However loose or tight his novels were in terms of plot, Chandler's prose is always a joy to read. His ability to use a few sharply worded sentences to both advance the plot and capture the essence of a scene or character never ceases to amaze me. Take these two sentences, for instance, describing a former showgirl who's caught herself a rich husband:


"From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away, she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away."


It's crisp and funny; it literally begs to be read aloud; and it gives us a perfect sense of the character. Chandler was always doing stuff like that. It's why he still remains virtually unmatched as a writer.


Next month, we'll visit with mystery writer Ellery Queen as he solves The Dutch Shoe Mystery.

If it's 9 o'clock, then he's up with the orchids.

The Golden Spiders, by Rex Stout (1953)


It's always a lot of fun to spend some time with Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. The two play off each other so well. In fact, the two men do a remarkable job of combining the traditional whodunit with the hard-boiled detective genre.


The obese but brilliant Wolfe represents the traditional detective. "I have no talents," he once said. "I have genius or nothing!" So he becomes a private investigator, using his genius to earn often very high fees.


Archie represents the hard-boiled P.I. When Wolfe takes a case, it's Archie who does the footwork, collecting facts and interviewing witnesses. Archie is a skilled detective in his own right, quite able to make intelligent decisions while out on his own. But it's Wolfe who puts all the facts together and solves the case.


But it's the prose and the dialouge of the Wolfe stories that really make them the classics they are. Wolfe and Archie are also just plain fun to listen to. Wolfe's grammatically precise sentences, peppered with obscure words, nicely counterpoints Archie's cynical wit. And Rex Stout's excellent storytelling skills allow the sometimes complex plots to unfold in a staightforward and intelligent fashion.


Wolfe and Archie are perfect partners, but often get on each other's nerves. That's pretty much how they got involved in solving a trio of murders in The Golden Spiders. Wolfe had gotten into a snit when his personal chef unexpectedly changed a recipe for the main course at dinner. This leads Archie to decide that Wolfe needs to be taught a lesson.


So when a 12-year-old boy shows up on the doorstep, demanding to see Wolfe, Archie lets him in. But Wolfe gets back in turn at Archie by politely listening to the boy (who thinks he's seen a woman in danger) and obligating Archie to forgo a night out to take notes.


Everything gets a bit more serious the next day when the boy is murdered. A couple of other deaths follow and an odd chain of circumstances (and a $10,000 check) obligate Wolfe to investigate.


What follows is an expertly constructed mystery with a satisfying conclusion. The novel also includes some great scenes with some of the series' regular supporting characters, including the perpetually aggravated Police Inspector Cramer and the three independent private eyes (Saul Panzar, Orrie Cather and Fred Durkin) often hired by Wolfe when they need more help on a case. It all comes to an end, as it usally does, in Wolfe's study, with the corpulant genius explaining to a roomful of suspects and cops who killed whom. It's a great novel from start to finish--one of the best of the series.


Next month, we'll visit with P.I. Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler's The High Window.

The First Forensic Scientist

For the Defence: Dr. Thorndyke, by R. Austin Freeman (1934)


When I sat down to write this post, I tried twice to briefly summerize the plot and provide a little bit of detail. But I couldn't do it without going on for paragraph after paragraph. It's all just too bizarre. Suffice to say that an artist and all-around nice guy named Andrew Barton gets arrested for murder. The oddest thing about this, though, is that he's accused of murdering himself, having been mistaken by the police for being his cousin Ronald.


The book ambles along at a slow but still interesting pace, gradually setting up a series of unlikely events and bad decision-making that lead up to this odd situation. Fortunately for Andrew, he manages to get Dr. John Thorndyke for his lawyer.


Dr. Thorndyke is an interesting figure in the History of Mystery. He first appeared in the 1907 novel The Red Thumb Mark. Created at a time after Arthur Conan Doyle had perfected the traditional mystery story, but before hard-boiled fiction added new blood to the genre, he's one of many pseudo-Holmsian characters that then filled the pages of fiction magazines.


But Thorndyke stuck around for thirty years because he was one of the better creations of the era. He was one of the first of what today would be called a forensic scientist, collecting evidence which he carefully studies and analyzes to get to the truth of the matter. In most of the Thorndyke novels, we know who the real killer is, but the fun is seeing how Thorndyke proves it. (It's a format similar in some ways to what Lt. Columbo would be doing on TV in the 1970s.)


And the author, R. Austin Freeman, is a very good writer. As I said above, the pace of For the Defence is slow. But Freeman keeps us involved. The plot is unlikely, but Freeman doesn't deny this--he instead uses this fact to help make things look grim for poor Andrew Barton. And Barton is a very sympathetic character--a thoroughly decent person who loves his wife and wants to do the correct and honest thing at all times. He does make a few dumb decisions as the story progresses, but they are mistakes we can understand that someone under severe stress might very well make.


This empathy for Barton carries us through most of the story. Then getting to see and hear Thorndyke expertly pick apart the prosecution's case during the trial makes for a satisfying climax.


Yes, Dr. Thorndyke didn't have the staying power in our popular culture that Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot have obtained, but he did all right for himself during his long career.


Next time, I think we'll take a look at a character who's staying power may be equal to that of Sherlock Holmes--corpulant detective Nero Wolfe. The book will be The Golden Spiders.

Hard-boiled tragedy

Black Money (1966), by Ross Macdonald


The case seems to be a fairly straightforward one: A wealthy young man is afraid his ex-fianceé new boyfriend is actually a con artist—and not the French aristocrat he claims to be.


So he hires private eye Lew Archer to look into it. But, in a hard-boiled detective novel, nothing is ever straightforward. The case expands outward to soon include a couple of murders, a seven-year-old suicide that might not be a suicide, and a missing $100,000 in cash.


Archer eventually gets to the bottom of it, but not before having to slog his way past a succession of sad, broken people and ruined lives. The plot is actually modeled after the novel The Great Gatsby (which, I recently learned from Archer’s entry at the excellent web site Thrilling Detective, was Macdonald’s favorite novel)—revolving around people who have everything in a material sense, but still manage to screw their lives up anyways.


Archer sticks with it, though. He’s one of the hard-boiled genre’s great characters—similar to Philip Marlowe in his ability to merge world-weary cynicism with compassion for those in trouble. Archer, though, wears his heart on his sleeve more visibly than Marlowe did. A middle-aged loner, Archer seems to pretty much devote all his time and energy to helping his clients. It often turns out they don’t really deserve help all that much, but Archer keeps slogging along for them regardless.


Aside from strong, well-constructed plots, that’s what makes the Archer novels so appealing. Archer’s empathy is literally contagious—he makes us also care about the people he’s trying to help. No matter that they themselves are often (though not always) pretty sleazy—we end up feeling for them as well.


As a mystery novel, Black Money is perhaps paced a little too slowly as Macdonald introduces us to the various characters and provides us with background information. But once a particular character is unexpectedly killed, the plot rapidly becomes fascinating. There’s certainly no shortage of motives or suspects. The case seems to thread in various directions at once, involving gambling debts, secret love affairs, greed and despair.


It ought to be a depressing book, but it’s not. Archer serves as an effective emotional anchor, reminding us that there are still a few good guys out there. That’s often the role of the protagonist in the world of hard-boiled fiction. Lew Archer plays that part better than most.


Next month, we’ll jump back to 1934 and step away from hard-boiled tragedy to take a look at For the Defence: Dr. Throndyke, by R. Austin Freeman

A dead parrot and a missing body

THE CHINESE PARROT (1926), by Earl Derr Biggers


In Radio by the Book, I start the chapter on Charlie Chan with the sentence “Charlie Chan is always both the smartest and the most likable guy in the room.”


And, by golly, this is true. It’s impossible not to like and admire Charlie—not just because he’s a great detective, but also because he’s a thoroughly decent man who makes friends easily and devoutly loves his large family.


He demonstrates his decency within the first few chapters of The Chinese Parrot. On vacation from the Honolulu police force, he sails to San Francisco as a favor for an old friend, guarding a valuable string of pearls that’s being delivered to its new owner.


But when there are indications that thieves are after the pearls, Charlie readily agrees to sacrifice more vacation time and stay on the job.


He teams up with Bob Eden—the wayward son of the jeweler who is facilitating the purchase of the pearls. The two are soon wrapped up in a strange case in which they are pretty sure they know who committed a murder, but don’t have any idea who was actually killed. Along the way, a parrot is poisoned and a servant is stabbed to death (giving them a body this time, but leaving them uncertain as to who committed the crime on this occasion). Charlie shows he has some fire in him when he has to deal with an incompetent and racist policeman, but he keeps his cool over all, putting the clues together and eventually explaining everything.


It’s a good, solid mystery with an unusual slant to it. There are a few too many instances in which a clue comes Charlie’s way purely by chance for the plot to be perfect, but his deductions leading to the denouement are still clever and reasonable—so it is, overall, a satisfying mystery.


Besides, the fun of a Charlie Chan novel is being able to hang out with the guy for a couple hundred pages. He is—as I believe I’ve already mentioned—the smartest and most likable guy in the room.


Next month, we’ll jump back into hard-boiled territory with a look at Black Money, by Ross MacDonald, featuring P.I. Lew Archer.

Curse you, Agatha Christie!!!!!!

The ABC Murders, by Agatha Christie


No mystery writer was better at twist endings and planting incredibly subtle clues that reveal one of the least likeliest suspects (or, often, someone who wasn’t a suspect at all) turn out to be the killer. It actually kind of gets on my nerves. I can occasionally figure out a Perry Mason solution. I remember being insufferable proud of myself as a 12-year-old when I figured out the solution to “The Red Headed League” right along with Sherlock Holmes.


But I don’t think I’ve ever beaten Hercule Poirot or Miss Marble to the punch. When the solution to the mystery is revealed, it will turn out that the clues were all there right in front of us. But only I’ve never manage to quite figure it all out before the wonderful creations of Agatha Christie do.


The ABC Murders seems to at first be atypical. Poirot receives letters from a madman who signs his name ABC, taunting Poirot to catch him and revealing in each letter the town in which the next murder would take place. The madman seems to have an alphabet obsession—his kills a Mrs. Asher in the town of Andover. Then a Miss Barnard in the town of Bexhill. And so on.


It does not seem to be a matter in which Poirot’s usual deductive genius can really help, since there is no logical motive or method behind it all. But Poirot’s skills do play a part when he gathers the friends and relatives together, questioning them until a certain pattern to the events is made clear.


Then the killer is finally caught. It all seems very straightforward, at least until Poirot suddenly comes forward with the announcement that all is not as it seems…


At which point he gives us a summary of several clues that were right there for us to see as well. But we don’t—at least not until Poirot points them out to us. Agatha Christie, darn her, is far too good at her job to all that. That’s why her often brilliant mysteries are still in print today—over eight decades after she first began to write them. That’s why The ABC Murders is so much fun to read. That’s why she continues to get on my nerves.


Next month, we'll look at "The Chinese Parrot" and visit with the world's most likable detective--Charlie Chan.

If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It.

The Case of the Beautiful Begger (1965), by Erle Stanley Gardner


In the 80 or so Perry Mason novels Gardner pumped out, I don’t think the formula ever varied at all. Someone would come to Mason about a legal matter of some sort. While Mason was dealing with that, someone would be murdered. Mason’s client would be accused and the lawyer would have to uncover the real killer’s identity to win his case.


But if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Gardner was a masterful storyteller, able to concoct infinite variations on this theme. The Mason novels are plot-driven, dialogue-heavy tales that are quick and fun to read, dripping with entertaining plot twists.


In Beautiful Begger, a young woman comes to Mason for help after her rich uncle has been declared mentally incompetent by greedy relatives. Mason, as he always does, goes all out for his client—even when his client isn’t really playing ball with him.


In this case, his client’s primary concern is helping her uncle. To this end, she takes it on herself to pretty much bust him out of the sanitarium in which he’s been confined. This, in turn, makes Mason’s job that much more difficult.


It’s not long before someone turns up dead and the young lady is arrested for murder. But Mason soon comes up with a ploy (involving tampering—but not really tampering—with evidence) to trick the real killer into revealing himself.


Gee whiz, this is fun stuff. Mason is a smart, likable protagonist. There’s not a lot of deep characterization here, but little touches (like Mason giving a large tip and making a special point of verbally thanking his waitress after getting good service in a restaurant) help make the various cast members seem real.


But Gardner’s incredible skills at sound plot construction and basic storytelling are what really carry the novel along. Erle Stanley Gardner could not have written a boring Perry Mason novel if he tried.


Next time, we’ll see what Belgium sleuth Hercule Poirot is up to in The ABC Murders.

Hard-Boiled storytelling

The Big Knockover & $106,000 Blood Money (1926), by Dashiell Hammett


Dash Hammett was the driving force behind the development of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, combining his awesome skill as a writer with his experience as a Pinkerton to add a sense of realism and healthy cynicism to the genre.




But writing for the pulps didn’t always pay that well and Hammett briefly retired from writing in the mid-1920s. Fortunately, the promise of better pay and more creative freedom lured him back to the typewriter.


He soon produced a pair of novellas (published in Black Mask magazine in 1926) that pretty much tell a single story—a very, very hard-boiled tale involving murder, thievery, double-crosses, triple-crosses and (if you counted it out) probably a quadruple-cross or two.


Hammett’s protagonist is the same unnamed, overweight operative for the Continental Detective Agency who had headlined most of the writer’s previous short stories. When a large and very organized band of outlaws knock over two banks at once, he gets involved in the investigation. Soon, though, the field of suspects shrinks considerably as the bad guys begin to whack each other (often in large batches all at once) to avoid having to divide up the loot.


When said loot is recovered, the top crook manages to slip away. The second novella involves efforts to track him down.


There’s so much to enjoy in these two stories. Hammett’s precise, straightforward prose is always fun to read. The names of the various crooks involved in the big robbery are wonderful (The Dis-and-Dat Kid; L.A. Slim; Old Pete Best; Shorty McCoy; etc.) I have no idea if these names come from his own experience as a detective or from his imagination as a writer. I do know that if crooks didn’t have such names in the 1920s, they sure as heck should have. It just sounds right.


There’s a few nifty action scenes and some really good twists at the end of both stories.


The protagonist (referred to by fans—though never in the stories—as the Continental Op) is smart and capable, following up leads in a logical manner and playing intelligent hunches. But there’s another aspect to him that Hammett continued to follow up on in future stories—the idea that a career chasing criminals can drain a person of his humanity. The Op’s boss, for instance, is described thus: “Fifty years of crook-hunting for the Continental had emptied him of everything except brains and a soft-spoken, gently smiling shell of politeness that was the same whether things went good or bad—and meant as little at one time or another.”


The Op is going down the same road. He’s been a detective so long that he really doesn’t have anything else in his life other than detective work. This shows several times in the stories when we see just how ruthless he can be in order to get the job done. It’s an element to the character that adds extra bite to an already sharp story.

Next month, we'll visit the L.A. criminal court room along with Perry Mason in "The Case of the Beautiful Begger."