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.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all my lovely readers! If you had a great 2015, congratulations and keep up the good work! If your 2015 was bad or so-so (mine definitely on the lower end of so-so; this was a bad year for me at work), then here's hoping for a better year to come.

So, to get the year off on the right foot, here's a popular march from Strauss...

A December Night at the Movies

We take refuge from an unseasonably warm and uncomfortable December night in our favorite restaurant, with our usual lamentations of shopping and holiday bustle and the dreadful weather. The only thing worse than a bitter cold and snowy December is one that's unusually warm and springlike, oppressively humid, and carrying with it the threat of a blazingly, hellishly hot summer.

After our meal, we head up the street to that romantically rundown movie house we go to so much. Tonight's show is a lovely old black & white mystery movie MURDER ON THE CAMPUS.



The thrills and chills of the old movie's twists and turns are a potent antidote to the cynical, cookie-cutter, trying-too-hard-to-be-heartwarming holiday fare we can't escape from.

Our spirits raised, we head up the street for a final drink before parting for the night...and to exchange some small presents, just for fun....

THE DEVIL'S BRIDE by Seabury Quinn

Another adventure for occult detective Jules de Grandin!

"The Devil's Bride" is the only full-length novel to feature de Grandin, and is surprising in that it contains almost no supernatural content. Instead, de Grandin fights an evil cult with aims more political and earthly than otherworldly.

Pretty young Alice Hume is celebrating her upcoming marriage, but her happiness is only slightly marred by strange messages coming from a ouija board she and friends are toying with, giving messages saying "ALICE COME HOME." Madcap Alice also plans to marry while wearing a strange family heirloom, "the luck of the Humes," a strange jeweled girdle that was worn by Hume women for generations to marry. Alice shows off the girdle to her friends (including de Grandin and his Watson, Dr. Trowbridge), and recounts a story of an odd man who tried to buy it a few days before. And before the first chapter is over, Alice is kidnapped.

De Grandin reveals that he's seen girdles similar to that before; they're made of human skin and used by "Yezidee" cultists when choosing a woman for human sacrifice. And the strange cultists seem to use an arcane powder that causes paralysis and memory loss to cover their tracks.

And we're off on an adventure with de Grandin and Trowbridge battling cultists, infiltrating ceremonies, rescuing Alice, losing her again, and finally a climax in the jungles of Africa.

It's good, rip-roaring read, but the racial politics and views are sometimes appalling. Quinn depicts his "Yezidees" as a group of evil Satanists, but the real-life Yazidi people are a religious/ethic group related to the Kurds, with unique religious beliefs derived from Zoroastrianism and ancient Mesopotamian mythology, who are monotheistic but honor a "peacock angel" named Melek Taus who can be a bit ambivalent and ambiguous, and this has led to other groups, like Muslim fundamentalists and obtuse modern Christians, to assume the Yazidis are devil worshipers. Yazidis are quickly fleeing their homes in the Middle East and Central Asia for more tolerant refuges in the West; they are targets of present-day menaces like ISIL.

De Grandin also reveals that many of these Satanic schemers are being financed by Russia; obviously, since the commies are atheists, they want to undermine religion worldwide, and de Grandin cannily wonders if Christianity's more extreme elements are also being manipulated by the Reds....which would actually make sense, similar to those who suspect Donald Trump is really a liberal ringer trying to make Republicans look bad and guarantee a Democratic president.

De Grandin (and implicitly Quinn) do seem to equate battling Satanism with defending the American way, which reminds me of a book I read long ago, "Slayer of Souls" by Robert W. Chambers, which featured Secret Service agents who were more concerned with defending Christianity than they were with protecting the United States....or considered them equivalent. An early example of American exceptionalism?

One element of the story was a bit touching, of a woman who works for the cult, but eventually flees them after refusing to participate in an infant sacrifice. She is bumped off by the cult, but her history is later revealed by her brother, a tale of abuse and rejection by an intolerant religious maniac parent driving her to the arms of the Satanic cult. It's a nice bit of balance, with Quinn (through de Grandin) pointing out the destructiveness of Christian fundamentalism.

But, all in all, "The Devil's Bride" is a decent pulp read, despite some troubling political stances and sad ethnic ignorance...which was unfortunately common back in the days it was written. It's got overtones of Sax Rohmer here and there (Fu Manchu's cult honored a white peacock), but also with some unique Quinn flair. If you can find it, it's entertaining, but steel yourself for some outdated viewpoints.

December at the Phantom Concert Hall

Early in December, we gather together after the Thanksgiving holiday for an evening out. We're already tired of Christmas music and are leaping at an opportunity to hear something other than the billionth rendition of "Jingle Bells."

So, at that rehabbed concert hall in the old part of town, we're gathered for an orchestral performance...and up is James Bernard's "Vampire Rhapsody"!



After the show, we walk in the cold winter air to that pleasant Spanish restaurant up the street, hoping none of us fall victim to any vampiric villains along the way....

Sorry I've been quiet for so long; Thanksgiving was a big deal and work was taking a lot out of me. I'm back and am rarin' to go!

No Zombies Allowed

I'm tired of zombies.

There. I said it. I'm tired of them. The whole apocalyptic, walking dead, zombie plague thing? I'm done. Don't bother me. I'm sick of it.

I've seen some of "The Walking Dead" and found it a colossal bore. I've watched some modern zombie films (most recently "The Dead," a zombie film set in central Africa), and they just don't engage me at all.

I mean, what ARE they, anyway? Are they normal humans with a disease? Are they actually animated corpses? So many films show them as not bleeding, basically being dead, all that...but why do they never decompose? Why aren't they ridden with maggots? How do their muscles continue to work without any blood circulation to bring oxygen? Why do animals never attack them? Why do they never dehydrate or desiccate?

OK, sure, I'm told that in "The Walking Dead" they claim the zombies have a toxin in their bodies that destroys the decomp bacteria....but any toxin powerful enough to do that will destroy human cells and cause their bodies to fall apart. But otherwise, zombie movies and TV shows never really address all the scientific aspects of how a zombie apocalypse would fail quickly. As I've seen it said, if a real zombie apocalypse happened, we'd just have to hunker down for a few weeks and let nature take care of the zombies for us, and then just go out and rake up the remains.

But really, I'm tired of how bleak it all is. Horror films used to have a contract with the audience: we'll give you something terrifying, but at the end everything will just about be set back to rights. Zombie films? Fuck that....we'll give you something terrifying, and by the end everyone will be dead and humanity doomed. How delightful.

I'll make exceptions for things like, well, voodoo cults in Cornish tin mines, or Bela Lugosi in a castle in Haiti, or the like, but unless someone actually manages to do something very daring and different with the zombie genre, I'm done with it.

Belated Musical Interlude for November

Sorry, folks, got caught up in a post-Halloween scramble, including a brief illness, drama at work, and I just started physical therapy for shoulder pain that may be from a swollen disc. Ow.

So I'm not much for the usual scenarios I do, but I want to share this delightful animated short I just discovered...



Hope everyone is having a good month so far!