TALES OF MYSTERY AND CRIME by William Wallace

I know, I swore I was back, but I've been sidetracked this month by a big spring cleaning project at home and a bustling new life at the job. But now things are going well, and the kitchen floor is clean enough to eat from, so I can get back to blogging.

This was a gift from some friends who went on vacation in London. And damn, that cover!

William Wallace is credited as "Sometime Undersheriff and Deputy Coroner for the County of Leicestershire" and very little else is given out about him. There's a forward by George Pleydell Bancroft, and I think that dates this book to the late 30s or 40s, as no publishing date is given. Plus, the overall look of the thing is very early 20th century.

So how is it?

Well, Wallace was not a gripping writer. At his worst, he's turgid and melodramatic. His first story, "The Manley Mystery," is a bit of a slog as dissects a rather unintereating crime, the murder of a former soldier in the 1860s. It's got a framing story of a doctor reading an old manuscript at Christmastime, but the framing story serves no purpose and adds nothing to it. It's followed by "The Monk of Millford Abbey" which is a pure fiction about a monk who seeks to avenge the dissolution of his abbey by getting close to the king and assassinating him. It inspired the cover but it drags a lot, and it has a horrible "it-was-all-a-dream" ending that infuriated me.

"The Mystery of Melton Wood" is another slog, this time the murder of a young woman, complicated by the execution of an innocent man. The last story, "The Ghost of York Minster," is the best, largely because it's the shortest, and it has a genuinely macabre resolution in its story of a haunted choir loft in an old church. Again, this isn't brilliant, but an amiable read on a slow winter afternoon.

So....great cover....so-so execution.

WHOSE BODY? by Dorothy L. Sayers

In my teens, when other boys were reading Playboy or Penthouse, I was reading Dorothy L. Sayers. That explains a lot about my adolescence. Lord Peter Wimsey was my sort-of-role model for a while, although it never quite fit...I got tired of him after a while.

Lord Peter hasn't aged well...many modern readers find him annoying. And, I have to say, he kind of is. In the 20s we had a rash of aristocratic detectives, like Wimsey and Philo Vance, who would adjust their monocles and say a problem was "quite vexin'" and all that. It probably seemed terribly sophisticated and up-market at the time, but now seems cheap.

Still, Sayers had her strengths, and while Lord Peter is grating at times, there's enough here to draw a reader.

Lord Peter Wimsey gets a call one morning; a friend of his mother has a rather bizarre problem, in that there's a body in his bathtub, wearing nothing but a pince-nez. Peter joins with a policeman friend to look in on the situation....at first, they think the body is that of missing financier Sir Reuben Levy, as it really looks like him...but then closer examination reveals that the body is that of a poor man with bad teeth, not that of a wealthy upper-class gentleman. (A deleted bit of dialogue has Lord Peter glancing at the nude body and saying at once that it couldn't be Levy, as the man was clearly not Jewish...at the time, a reference to the foreskin's presence was considered too racy.)

Thus follows an investigation all over 1920's London to discover the identity of the corpse, and what really happened to Levy. Lord Peter is quite bright in spots, and has a temporary attack of PTSD (his "shell shock" is mentioned here but I don't recall it popping up later in the series). It's also here that one of Sayers' signature touches comes into play....Lord Peter identifies the killer at about the 2/3 or 3/4 mark in the book, and then spends the rest of the novel piecing his case together. No last-second revelations here!

So, despite an annoying central character, it's still a worthwhile read. There's some uncomfortable anti-Semitism here and there, but it's in the mouths of some unlikable people, so I'm willing to put that down to characterization. (In fact, anti-Semitism was one of the motivators for the murder.) Sayers has been accused of anti-Semitism in the past, although at least in this book she doesn't seem to paint all Jews with the same stereotypical brush.

I think I'll try to go through all the Wimsey books, in time. It'll be interesting to revisit them, and read the one or two that I missed so long ago...

BULLDOG DRUMMOND by "Sapper" (aka H. C. McNeile)

Capt. Hugh Drummond is bored. The Great War is over, he craves excitement, and places a tongue-in-cheek ad in the paper offering his services to anyone needing an adventurer. And then the story gets rolling....he's called in by a damsel in distress, who needs help in untangling her father from the influence of Carl Peterson, an international criminal and schemer. It proceeds from move to counter-move, with a heinous conspiracy unmasked at the end.

Published in 1920, "Bulldog Drummond" is notorious for being a shining example of the patriotic two-fisted adventurer types that populated British pulp fiction between the wars. Politically, Drummond would horrify some modern readers, as he functions largely to preserve a conservative status quo, and I've read that in later books he becomes a sort of Ayn Rand-ian Rugged Individualist. But in this book he's palatable; he's doing what he's doing for the sake of adventure and excitement, and I was impressed about halfway through when he starts to wonder if he's not in over his head and should bring in the police. He decides against it, of course (because otherwise there's no story) but that moment of reflection and self-doubt is something you don't see often, especially in macho fiction of this era.

Drummond was also famously xenophobic in later works, but in this one it's not visible aside from a certain pro-British jingoism that's par for the course in this era. There's a peripheral character who's referred to as a "Jew" but not disparagingly so; it's just that they felt it necessary to include that. Yeah, it's not the most enlightened, but it's extremely mild for those days.

It was also interesting to pick up on ways it influenced other works, and was influenced by others. Villain Peterson keeps a number of exotic poisonous animals in his house, and has a number of elaborate traps, all of which were reminiscent of Sax Rohmer's "Fu Manchu" novels....and Rohmer had been writing of the Devil Doctor since 1913, so it's likely Sapper read them. And some of the goings-on here reminded me of some of the early Saint stories by Leslie Charteris, and Simon Templar didn't appear in print until 1928, so it's likely Charteris was influenced by Sapper. (And The Saint is much more compassionate than Drummond on any day of the week...)

Overall, the story is sometimes a bit muddled and is preposterous as hell, but it is entertaining enough in a sort of idealized picture postcard England kind of way. We know from the start that Peterson is trying to bring about a Communist revolution in England and reap millions as a result (yeah, it's vague) and I actually agreed with Drummond's speech that capitalism is badly flawed but at least it works halfway, and communism simply won't work. (Liberal as I am, I do have occasional flirtations with socialism, but consider communism and Marxism to be failed philosophies [there are differences, look them up if you think they're all the same], and while capitalism has serious problems it's likely the best system we have.) I can imagine this getting more conservative and right-wing as times go by, but I enjoyed this enough to want to continue with the series.

Wordsworth Editions has an omnibus of the first four books (all of which feature Carl Peterson) and there's some ebooks out there; otherwise, check your used bookstore. McNeile died in 1937 and this work is in public domain in the US and can be downloaded for free from the usual suspects, but the rest appear to be still protected by copyright here.

RESORTING TO MURDER, edited by Martin Edwards

This is another excellent anthology by Edwards, who's turning out to be one of the great powerhouses of traditional British mystery scholarship; he's edited a number of anthologies and written a history of them.

The running theme here is mysteries taking place on vacation, and it's quite a mixture of material. It kicks off with an old warhorse, "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot" by Arthur Conan Doyle, which takes place while Sherlock Holmes is on vacation in Cornwall. The next story, "A Schoolmaster Abroad" by E. W. Hornung, is not one of that author's better works, and doesn't linger long in the memory.

Arnold Bennett's "Murder!" is an OK story, kind of a macabre comedy where we witness a murder being committed, then watch a pompous police officer botch the investigation. "The Murder on the Golf Links" by M. McDonnell Bodkin showcases his now-forgotten sleuth Paul Beck, in a murder on a golf course; not great, but a serviceable story of its time. The next tale, "The Stone Finger" by G. K. Chesterton, is subpar; it's not a Father Brown story, and the method used to hide the body is so utterly daft I wanted to hunt down Chesterton's grave to spit on it.

"The Vanishing of Mrs. Fraser" by Basil Thomson is a journalistic recycling of the old "so long at the fair" urban legend. R. Austin Freeman gives us his medical sleuth Dr. Thorndike in "A Mystery of the Sand Hills," which has an unsatisfying plot but at the same time is a good (and well-written) look at Thorndike's deductive reasoning.

Then we get to the really good stuff. H. C. Bailey's Reggie Fortune turns up in "The Hazel Ice", investigating a murder in the Alps. It's a cracking good story, and I'm quickly becoming a fan of Bailey and Fortune. Then we have Anthony Berkeley's rarely-reprinted story "Razor Edge," which has sleuth Roger Sheringham looking into a suspicious drowning by the seaside. Then we have Leo Bruce's Sgt. Beef in the short-short "Holiday Task", looking into a strange death along the cliffs in Normandy (with a very clever twist at the end!).

A now-forgotten author, Helen Simpson had two works filmed by Hitchcock (MURDER! and UNDER CAPRICORN), and died young. She is represented in this collection by her rare story "A Posteriori," a comic tale of a tourist in France who becomes reluctantly embroiled in espionage, and has a hilariously ribald twist at the end that I don't dare spoil. "Where is Mr. Manetot?" by Phyllis Bentley is another rarity, written for an anthology of missing-persons stories. This one's about an academic who goes on an unexpected holiday and wanders into the midst of a heinous plot.

The next author, Gerald Findler, is an enigma; nothing is known of him, and there's only a couple of brief stories and a pamphlet credited to him. But "The House of Screams" packs a whallop, a haunted-house story which conceals an ingenious murder. And the anthology wraps up with Michael Gilbert's "Cousin Once Removed," a tale of murder with an ironic twist.

Despite a sluggish start, and some stuff you've seen before, this is still a superior anthology and a great way to sample some of the golden age's best mystery writers. Check it out!

CAPITAL CRIMES: LONDON MYSTERIES, edited by Martin Edwards

This delightful collection, from the Poisoned Pen Press' "British Library Crime Classics" series, is simply top-drawer stuff, with stories ranging from the Victorian age to the mid-20th century. Martin Edwards has put together a jewel box here.

It kicks off with one of Arthur Conan Doyle's non-Holmes horror/mystery stories, "The Case of Lady Sannox," an old familiar favorite for me, and then to an abridged version of a serialized story, "A Mystery of the Underground," about a serial killer stalking the subway. The author, John Oxenham (pen name of William Arthur Dunkerly), is almost forgotten today, but in its time the story was a sensation and actually caused a dip in Underground ridership.

Richard Marsh's "The Finchley Puzzle" is fun and interesting, yet utterly preposterous, while R. Austin Freeman's "The Magic Casket" is much more grounded....and yet even more interesting and exciting. You don't mess with Freeman. "The Holloway Flat Tragedy" by Ernest Bramah is him at his best, writing about blind sleuth Max Carrados. I'm not a fan of Bramah; I read his first book of Carrados stories, hailed as classics of detection, and found them poorly written and unengaging, but this story was pretty good.

"The Magician of Cannon Street" by J. S. Fletcher is different from the rest, not quite a straightforward crime-and-detection story, and because it's so different it makes me want to look into Fletcher's work more. Edgar Wallace's "The Stealer of Marble" is a rather good story, impressive as it comes from an author infamous for cranking out stories at an amazing and rapid pace, and often tone-deaf as to quality. Up next, "The Tea Leaf", by Robert Eustace and Edgar Jepson, is a minor classic and a darned good read.

Thomas Burke's "The Hands of Mr. Ottermole" is good melodrama and a fun read, if slightly overwrought, and an example of another author with uneven output. "The Little House" is a great story by H. C. Bailey, an author I've recently discovered, who wrote a very highly-regarded series around medical detective Reggie Fortune. (And everything I've read so far is just delightful.) Hugh Walpole's "The Silver Mask" is a classic cruel tale, and actually pretty unsettling.

"Wind in the East" by Henry Wade is a good police procedural, but the real jewel of this collection is "The Avenging Chance" by Anthony Berkeley. This story is a genuine classic. Inspired by the real-life Christiana Edmunds case (and even mentioning it), a women is poisoned by fatal chocolates. The twist? The box had been sent to someone else and when the recipient wasn't interested, a friend took it home, so its seems as if the wrong person died. The real solution is pretty devious....and the story was later expanded into a novel, "The Poisoned Chocolates Case," which has a different solution.

"They Don't Wear Labels" is a darkly subtle tale from an author better known as a humorist, E. M. Delafield, author of "Diary of a Provincial Lady". Margery Allingham's "The Unseen Door" is a short-short with her series detective, Albert Campion. "Cheese," by Ethel Lina White, is a wryly humorous suspenser from the author whose work inspired the films "The Lady Vanishes" and
"The Spiral Staircase." And winding it up is "You Can't Hang Twice" by Anthony Gilbert, in which a not-always-ethical (but still battling for the right) lawyer plays cat-and-mouse with a murderer in the London fog.

I can't speak highly enough of this collection; this is a great candybox of some of the best British crime writing out there, and a good way of being introduced to some of the best Golden Age detectives. This is a recent issue, still out there in bookstores and available in libraries. Required Reading.

DEATH IN THE GARDEN by Elizabeth Ironside

A rawther genteel book cover belies a novel full of vintage suspicions and modern-day drama.

In 1925, beautiful Diana Pollexfen is celebrating her 30th birthday with a group of bohemian friends at the country house owned by her wealthy husband George, who himself is a bit of a stick in the mud who disapproves of her friends and of his wife's attempts at independence. Diana is actually a very talented photographer, and her friends number some writers and artists.

In the midst of all the Bright Young Things having fun, there's tension in the air as George wants Diana to give up photography once and for all and be a good submissive wife. But at the end of the long weekend party, George is found dead in the garden, poisoned by Diana's photography chemicals.

Fast-forward 60 years. Helena Fox is turning 30 with little fanfare. A lawyer in a London firm, she's having an unsatisfying affair with a married MP and desires a break from it all. She's thinking of going to visit her great-aunt Fox, only to learn that her beloved great-aunt, who had practically raised her, has died. Helena goes to her house in Rutland and starts to attend to the formalities...and makes some surprising discoveries. Her great-aunt had once been a famous photographer (under another name) and had been acquitted of murder! Examining her great-aunt's diaries, she gets a sense of guilt but is unable to get any resolution to the problem. So, she starts off trying to piece together the remaining bits to see if she can find out the real story....

So what we have is a story taking place in two timelines, with varying points of view involved. It's a good story overall, although I was a bit disappointed in the ending. However, it's got some ponderings about women's roles in society in the different eras, and how they can be shockingly similar. The 20's milieu is beautifully described and laid out before us, frankly presented although not entirely glamorized. (I mean, come on, any representation of the wealthy Bright Young Things of the Roaring 20s is going to be somewhat glamorous.) The language is lovely and the plot moves along from one Rashomon-style story to another, until the Truth is revealed.

A very pleasant read, and worth checking out.