van de Wetering's Tumbleweed

"Have you noticed that nothing ever happens in Amsterdam?"

Doesn't that just tell you something's about to happen?

The beautiful Maria van Buren is found murdered on her houseboat when a neighbour becomes worried about her cat, who doesn't seem to be getting food at home.

It's Grijpstra and de Gier, Amsterdam detectives, hanging around, bored at the office, who catch the case when the request comes to check up on von Braun. That's Grijpstra complaining above.

But they'd already been keeping an eye on the von Braun houseboat since the Dutch Secret Service had asked them to. So they arrive with a warrant, break a window, and discover the dead woman with a British commando knife that has been thrown, not plunged, into Maria von Braun's back. 

Maria von Braun had her luxurious houseboat because she was sleeping with three well-to-do men, a senior American Army officer, a Belgian diplomat, and a Dutch industrialist. That combination was why the Secret Service was interested. She was estranged from her family in Dutch Curaçao who disapproved of her lifestyle. And she was engaged in sorcery.

All that provides a decently satisfying list of suspects. Who wanted to do it? Who has an alibi? Who had access to a commando knife and knew how to throw it?

Grijpstra and de Gier are protagonists of a series of fourteen novels, plus a volume of short stories, by Janwillem van de Wetering. Grijpstra is the bachelor who likes motorcycles and has a cat of his own; de Gier is the married one, a bit more sensible, though now running to fat. They make a good team. The Commisaris (which, I assume, is Dutch for commissioner) who is their boss, has a significant part in this one. He's never given a name, but he's a likeable character. This is the second in the series and dates from 1976. It was a strong entry, I thought, and may be the best of the ones I've read. I'd say the series is more about mood than particularly tricky or thrilling plots, though this had both some trickiness and thrills.

I haven't been reviewing many books lately (though reading lots) and need to knock off a few for my European Reading Challenge:

Hadn't been to the Netherlands yet this year, but now I have!

 

Patricia Wentworth's Who Pays the Piper? (Mystery, DeanStreetDecember)

"I always get what I want," said Lucas Dale.

That's the opening line of Who Pays the Piper? and it's Lucas Dale who ends up dead. He didn't get what he wanted that time! (And ever is such hubris rewarded?)

Lucas Dale is a Brit who went to the U.S. and made a pile of money, in likely dodgy ways, and returned to England. He's just bought King's Bourne, an old country manor from the nearly bankrupt estate of James Bourne. Bourne is survived by one of his twin sisters, Millicent O'Hara, Mrs. O'Hara's daughter Catherine and Catherine's cousin Susan Lenox. 

Dale falls in love with Susan Lenox--she's one of the things he wants--but she's already in love with Bill Carrick, the son of the local doctor, who's still got his way to make (as an architect).

Dale also comes with a private secretary, an ex-wife who's on the stage, and an American business partner with a grievance. Plenty of suspects, especially after Dale starts using strong-arm tactics to get Susan to marry him.

Some pearls appear to be stolen, then reappear where they're not supposed to be, and then Lucas Dale is found dead, shot in the back of his head. Scotland Yard is called in, in the person of Chief Inspector Lamb, who brings along his dashing sergeant, Frank Abbott.

Now if you know anything about Patricia Wentworth, you'll know the evidence will look bad for Susan and Bill at first, but that it won't be either of them who committed the murder. And it's not.

This is the second (1940) of the Ernest Lamb series, and he's fine form here, curmudgeonly, sexist, and tender:

"He had three daughters of his own, and was sometimes put to it to conceal a most obstinate softness of heart where girls were concerned."

but at the same time quite observant. Later, after Lamb and Abbott are absorbed into Wentworth's most famous detective series, that of Miss Silver, his curmudgeonly is played up, and his observational skills are less used, and he's mostly that useful thing for a PI, a friend on the force, but in this one he and Abbott are on top of all the needed clues. A completely enjoyable entry, though the witness who has the one crucial clue keeps silent until the very end for reasons that seem a little improbable. (Other than the needs of a mystery novel...)

The first Ernest Lamb novel on the blog is here. I've also got the third and final one, Pursuit of a Parcel, as an eBook, and hope to read it this month. 

It's Dean Street December, and Liz is hosting an event.

Also, though I'm already a bit over the top on this challenge, it also fits My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt:

Vintage Mystery, Gold, Hat. Those are some stylish hats, even if I'm not quite sure who the people under them are. Bill and Susan, I guess, though Susan is supposed to be blonde.

Call Mr. Fortune by H. C. Bailey

"You look very young."

"I try to be."

It's Reggie Fortune delivers that snappy (?) comeback.

This is the first book in the series and our hero starts as something of a lazy dilettante. "At Oxford, at his hospital, he did what was necessary to take respectable degrees, but no more than he could help." Now out of school, the first story 'The Archduke's Tea' starts with his father, Dr. Fortune, delivering young Reggie a lecture. Reggie will be taking care of his father's medical practice while the father goes on vacation. And he'd better do it right. His first call is to a Continental archduchess living in the neighbourhood.

"She was a serene Highness of the house of Erbach-Wittelsbach, which traces its descent to Odin, and had an independent realm of nearly two square miles,..."

On the way there Reggie and his father's driver Gorton come across the body of a man killed in a hit and run accident. He looks a lot like the Archduke, but isn't. Is somebody trying to kill the Archduke? Of course they are. So who? The Archduchess? The brother-in-law? The two of them working in cahoots? And will the police actually be able to solve the case, or will the solution be squelched due to political pressure?

The second case 'The Sleeping Companion' has a similar setup: Reggie gets called in on a case in place of his father. A woman is having bad dreams. Why?

By the end of those two cases, though, Reggie is a dilettante no longer and knows this is what he wants to do. He hangs out his shingle in London as a consulting detective, and in the remaining four cases in this book, he's a professional. His medical background comes in handy. In the third case 'The Nice Girl', he's called in by Scotland Yard to investigate the death of Sir Albert Lunt, a businessman with lots of enemies.

Three more cases round out the book. One of the stories I thought weaker, but mostly they're pretty entertaining. As the Wikipedia article on H. C. Bailey suggests, Reggie's education and general demeanour--and maybe the name, too--put him in a class with Lord Peter Wimsey, but I found him less exasperating than Lord Peter. Wikipedia also says the stories are darker and more political, but that really only shows up in the last one of these, which does turn on government corruption. This is the only book of Bailey's I've read, but now I do plan to read more, and the second in the series, Mr. Fortune's Practice, also a collection of stories, is available from Project Gutenberg (as was this one) and is already downloaded to my Kobo.

Call Mr. Fortune came out in 1922, with the stories appearing individually in the year before that. So...

Vintage Mystery, Gold, Piece of Furniture: The picture on the cover above will represent the second story, 'The Sleeping Companion.' That's the murderer's hand creeping in at the side, while Miss Weston has been drugged and is sleeping in the chair.

Erle Stanley Gardner's Shills Can't Cash Chips

"This is an insurance company. They've had their eye on us for a while. It's the kind of business there's money in, Donald, not this wild-eyed sharpshooting you've been doing."

Lamont Hawley of Consolidated Interinsurance comes into the Cool and Lam detective office for extra help on a suspected insurance fraud case. That's Bertha Cool talking above. She's the older, practical, financially-minded half of the partnership.

Donald Lam is the one given to wild-eyed sharpshooting. He's small--their sometime friend in the L.A. police department calls him 'Pint Size'--no good in a fight, but quick-talking and attractive to the ladies.

And there's Elsie Brand, the office secretary, who's more than half in love with Donald.

But before that initial meeting with Hawley is over, he says:

"I may as well tell you, Lam, we think there's an element of danger involved."

"Personal?"

"Yes."

Well, of course there is.

Carter Holgate was driving too fast and smashed into the rear end of Vivian Deshler's car. She's claiming whiplash and looking for the insurance company to pay up. Holgate admits the accident. But now Vivian has disappeared and various people are--not the insurance company--offering cash for witnesses to the accident. Something is fishy. When did the accident occur? Did it occur?

The body is discovered (it's Holgate's) in the trunk of the Cool and Lam Agency car and Donald is wanted for the murder. He would have needed Bertha to pull it off. 

"'Fry me for an oyster!' Bertha said.

'They just might do that."

As an accomplice to murder. 

"Fry me for an oyster!" is one of Bertha's favorite sayings. "Dice me for a carrot," also shows up in this one.

But of course the person who committed the murder is neither Donald nor Bertha. All in all a pretty entertaining entry to the series.

It's a pretty late entry in the series. Wikipedia tells me it's #22 out of the thirty and it came out in 1960. 

Vintage Mystery, Silver, Brunette: We'll go with that 'vivid brunette, who walked impatiently as though her good-looking legs were trying to push the sidewalk out of the way.'

Ngaio Marsh's Death and the Dancing Footman

"'This is most awkward,' said Hart primly."

It's England in 1940, the period of the phoney war before Germany invaded France, and Jonathan Royal has decided to throw a party at his country house Highfold Manor.

Except it's not a fun premise for a party, or fun only for Jonathan Royal, because he invites seven people who don't like each other. There are three Complines, near neighbors, the widowed mother and two sons. William, the elder, would be a momma's boy, but his mother prefers Nicholas, who's a bounder, but attractive to the ladies nevertheless. William's already a soldier, but on leave; Nicholas has scored a desk job in London.

There's Chloris Wynne, formerly affianced to Nicholas, but now engaged to William, after she realized Nicholas would never be true.

There are two rival beauty salons in the neighborhood, Lady Hersey Amblington runs one; she's a distant cousin of Jonathan Royal. Elise Lisse, an Austrian refugee, runs the other. The two are professional rivals, and cordially (?) detest each other. Madame Lisse is also one of those ladies with whom Nicholas was habitually unfaithful to Chloris.

There's a second Austrian refugee, Dr. Francis Hart, a professional (and maybe more?) colleague of Madame Lisse. His specialty is facial plastic surgery, and Madame Lisse recommends him when she can do no more.

Did I mention Mrs. Compline had a disastrous facial surgery twenty years before when that type of surgery was still in its infancy? No? Consider it mentioned...

Jonathan Royal also invites Aubrey Mandrake, an up-and-coming surrealist playwright, mostly so he can show off his cleverness. Mandrake has never met any of the others before.

Several of the characters decide almost immediately to simply leave when they discover the identities of their fellow guests, but conveniently for Jonathan Royal's plans, the house is quickly snowed in. 

Snowed in country house murder. Have you read a few of those before? Me, too.

There are also a few other grounds for hostility that we learn along the way. Quite the motive extravaganza.

Getting us to this place was a bit silly and improbable--Jonathan Royal makes a few noises about reconciling these people, but mostly he's just a mischievous monster--but once we're past the setup, the mystery events move along well. There are two attempted murders before the main event; a couple of duplicate Tyrolean cloaks means not only do we not know who made the attempt, we also don't know who the intended victim was. And when William Compline is finally killed, we're still not sure. Was there yet another mistake?

The obfuscation in this was quite good, I thought. The person I was betting on commits suicide and leaves a note taking responsibility, but it's still fifty pages before the end! That's when I knew I had it wrong... 😉

Mandrake is an acquaintance of our hero Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard and he happens to know Alleyn is staying with his wife at Pen Cuckoo (the location of Overture to Death, a couple of mysteries before this one). Sure it's his holiday, but we'll struggle through the snow to bring him back! (Because, of course the phones lines are all down.) And he'll grumble, but he'll come!

Anyway, I don't mind a little farce in my Golden Age mysteries, and there's romance in this one, too. I think of the late 30s and early 40s as Marsh's strongest period, and this was definitely a good entry.

Vintage Mystery, Gold, Fishing Gear. Pay attention to where that fishing lure goes. It's an important clue!

Andrew Greeley's Happy Are The Clean Of Heart

Lisa Malone is an Irish Catholic girl from the Chicago. She could sing; she was good-looking; so she went to Hollywood and she succeeded. Now it's 1984 and she's nearly 40 and when she comes back to the old neighborhood, they're happy and envious in about equal measure. Make that measure unequal: more envious.

And on her first night back, somebody beats her to within an inch of her life in a hotel. Now she's in a coma.

Her estranged husband is found standing over the body, the cosh in his hand. He 'says' he interrupted somebody. But he's not the only suspect. There's her agent, who felt like he's the one that made her, her understudy for an upcoming Christmas special, her co-star on that special, a woman from the neighborhood, writing a biography with Lisa's approval,  a Mobbed-up bank vice president who administers Lisa's charitable foundation, her jealous older brother, and a nun who knew Lisa as a girl and whose organization is also the recipient of Lisa's charity.

And, well, Fr. John Blackwood "Blackie" Ryan had opportunity, too, and everybody knew he was in love with her when they were in high school. 

Then there's a second and a third attempt on her life in the hospital.

Blackie Ryan is the hero of a mystery series by Andrew Greeley, himself a priest as well as a professor at the University of Chicago. This is the second in the series, though there is an earlier non-mystery novel with Blackie Ryan as a major character. It takes until that third attempt for Blackie to figure out the villain. "Indeed," as Blackie himself might say.

There's some fun things in it for a Chicagoan. Roger Ebert and Richie Daley make appearances. (That's Richard M. Daley, former mayor of Chicago to you.) Richie is Cook County state's attorney that year. The events take place on the near north side, Chicago's Water Tower, the John Hancock building, Holy Name Cathedral, the Drake Hotel, the Playboy Building (as Blackie can barely bring himself to say, not the Playboy any longer). Lisa Malone's daughter plans on St. Ignatius for her high school, my alma mater.

I've read a bunch of the Blackie Ryan mysteries. My dad liked them, and I read them after he did, frequently because I gave him the new one for Christmas or his birthday. I can't say that this was one of the better ones. I find the early ones a bit overwritten, and Greeley's not the psychologist he wants to be. He pared them down later, and they were better for it. Oh, well...

The novel comes out in 1986 and the movie Amadeus has clearly influenced the plotting.

But it was one of the books I put on my Twenty Books of Summer list!

And it counts for Bev's Vintage Mystery Challenge:

Vintage Mystery, Silver, Knife: a knife is used in the third attempt.

Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time

"Truth is the daughter of time."

-Old proverb

Inspector Alan Grant is stuck in hospital after he fell through a trap door in pursuit of a criminal. For now, he can do nothing but lie on his back and look at the ceiling. Nurses, friends, acquaintances bring him flowers, sweets, books to pass the time. None of them particularly engage.

One friend, more astute than the rest, brings him portraits of historical criminals. These portraits include King Richard III, famous for supposedly murdering his nephews, the 'Princes in the Tower.' Grant thinks, that doesn't look like a murderer's face, and becomes interested in the evidence for King Richard's guilt. He gets his friends to bring him a bunch of history books, and eventually Brent Carradine, a researcher. Grant applies his Scotland Yard techniques to working out a solution, while Carradine gathers the evidence.

Now all I know about the case comes from Shakespeare's Richard III: there Richard's a thorough-going villain, and the ghosts of all of the people he'd unjustly killed gather round his bed the night before Bosworth Field and chant, "Tomorrow in the battle think on me." I was prepared to believe he didn't kill his nephews. It turns out Shakespeare got his information from Sir Thomas More, still a child at the time of the supposed murders, and later a partisan of the Tudors, at least until he wasn't. If you've read Hilary Mantel, you'll have no problem imagining More as untrustworthy, but in Tey he's the 'sainted' Thomas More, and Grant has some convincing to do.

Would it be a spoiler to reveal Grant's solution? Well, I won't. Tey, in the person of Grant, makes a pretty good case, but not perfectly convincing. Her evidence amounts to cui bono, who benefits--that was the best part for me--but also she makes considerable use of the absence of evidence. (If X happened, Y should have happened, but there's no record of Y. But the events were in the 1400s. There may just be no record any more.) Still very enjoyable. It would have helped if I'd known more about the period.

It's a celebrated novel--and justly so. Though the British Crime Writer's Association voted it the best mystery of all time in 1990 and that seems a little excessive. (Not The Maltese Falcon, The Murder on the Orient Express, The Hound of the Baskervilles!?!) But it is certainly a classic mystery...

 

For the challenge I'll go with:

Vintage Mystery, Gold, Castle or Ruin. The Tower of London is about as classic a castle as you can find.

Ngaio Marsh's Death of a Peer (AKA A Surfeit of Lampreys) #1940Club

"It was some good-for-nothing out in the street. One of these Nazzys. The police will soon have him locked up."

[Spoiler alert! 😉] It wasn't one of those Nazis.

There are one or two quick allusions to events of the era, but mostly this feels like a interwar book. "The whole thing's lousy with lords and ladies," says Inspector Fox.

There have been ennobled Lampreys ever since one did 'some fishy bit of hanky-panky for Good Queen Anne or one of her ministers.' Lord Charles Lamprey is the second son, improvident, and head of a large family. It's his older brother that's murdered, in the lift at Lord Charles' London apartment. Since Lord Charles was hoping to get cash from his older brother and had not, he's clearly a prime suspect.

The novel starts in New Zealand, though, where Roberta (Robin) Grey becomes friends with the family. In New Zealand Robin's already half in love with Henry, Lord Charles' oldest son and when her parents die and she's sent off to live with an aunt in England, she's not entirely sad. We get a few amusing pages of a provincial's first arrival in London before the main event (together with Superintendant Roderick Alleyn and Inspector Fox and the whole crew) arrives.

The puzzle in this one is pretty successful, and I got to the end without realizing who had done it. Still the best thing in the novel has to be the Micawber-ish Lampreys; they're charming, witty, hapless, and (unlike the Micawbers) compulsively given to fudging the truth. You'd think that last quality might detract from the charm, but they do it to save each other, and it *is* useful in a mystery novel. Not that Alleyn or Fox is ever be-fudged.

A strong entry in the Marsh canon, I thought, though I preferred her other 1940 book, Death at the Bar, that I read earlier this year.

Good for My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery challenge.

Vintage Mystery, Gold, Glove. The gloves are a crucial clue.

And it's the week of the 1940 Club!

Marsh dated the book December, 1939 in New Zealand, at the end. My copy is copyrighted 1940. The Internets are a bit uncertain: some calling it a 1940 book and some a 1941. Publishing was becoming restricted by then and it may very well have different release dates in different countries. But I'm just going to stick my fingers in my ears, and unlike Roderick Alleyn, ignore any facts that contradict what I want to believe. La, la, la. It's a 1940 book!

Leslie Charteris' The Saint in Miami (#1940Club)

"The name is Simon Templar--usually known as the Saint."

A friend of the Saint's girlfriend writes and says there's trouble brewing, and so the Saint heads for Miami.

But when they get to the Gilbecks' house, they're gone. The servants let them in, but are clearly puzzled why these foreigners have come to stay when the owners of the house just sailed away.

That same day a U.S. freighter is blown up off the Florida coast; the Saint spots a submarine; and a body washes up by the Gilbecks' house, a body half-dressed in a British Navy uniform. 

Are these things all connected? Of course they are!

It makes a pretty good 1940 novel (though see Below...) Who exactly would be attempting to drive a wedge between the Americans and the British in 1940? It's not giving much away to say that's exactly who villains are. But just who it is that's the big boss Nazi in Miami and what the Saint is going to do about it are still pretty good questions for a novel.

The Saint's first action is to hide that body, because he (rightly) suspects the British Navy has nothing to do with it.

Leslie Charteris' series is pretty well established by this point. The first Saint novel, Meet the Tiger, came out in 1928 and his crew are present: the Saint's sometime girlfriend, Patricia Holm, doesn't do much in this one except provide the tie-in to the Gilbecks; Peter Quentin does some of the early legwork, but is mostly there to be captured; however, the Saint's Brooklyn-born muscle-man, Hoppy Uniatz, is in fine form: "Welcome him with liquor, and he'll drink out of your hand," Saint tells the Greek, and it's true.

The Saint's a key figure in the long line of guys on the wrong side of the law who still fight for the good: Robin Hood to contemporaries like Andrew Vachss' Burke and Jack Reacher. The Saint hits a sweet spot for me. I find his successors too dark, and their stories too grisly for my taste. He kills one of the 'ungodly', his term for the bad guys, in this, but it isn't dwelt on, and even then it's unusual; mostly the Saint arranges for the ungodly to do themselves in, and that's the way this one ends.

The Saint was once better known than he is now: not only are there the novels, but also stage plays, radio plays, television shows, and movies.

He's also a precursor for James Bond, and Roger Moore played the Saint on TV in the 60s before Moore became (a rather wooden) James Bond. The Saint knows his champagnes and his cars; his suits are good; the ladies (inevitably stunning) are inexplicably drawn to him.

But he does have his troubles with the law; less in this than some others, but there's an FBI agent, a British secret service agent, and an amusing local sheriff. He doesn't want to fight them, but he isn't going to co-operate either: "They had provided the one vital clue, but they still couldn't have his adventures."

Pretty fun stuff. 

[Below] It was such a good 1940 novel, but then, as they're about to slog their way through the Everglades to the ungodly's hideaway, the Greek says, "The quickest way is overland through the swamps. But the only guy who could walk on that stuff died nineteen hundred and forty years ago." Ouch, you'd think a Greek would know better...I believe that gentleman had been *born* nineteen hundred and forty years earlier.

A couple of other Charteris' Saint books on the blog: The Last Hero and Enter the Saint.

Good for the 1940 Club, hosted by Kaggsy and Simon. Thanks to them!

And good for My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt. 1940 makes it Golden Age, and we'll go with:

Vintage Mystery, Gold, Hand Holding Gun. Just whose side is the redhead on? (Because the girl in the bikini has to be the redhead...)

Kerry Greenwood's Cocaine Blues (Phryne Fisher #1)

"A young man in one's bedroom is capable of being explained, but a corpse is always a hindrance."

Phryne Fisher has just moved from London to Melbourne. It's the 1920s and though she's good at it, she's bored with fast life in Europe. (Dinner parties, but also tangoing with gigolos in Paris and exposing crooked cricketeers.) She could afford that fast life because, after the convenient deaths of a few intervening heirs, she came into possession of a fortune in England, but she'd grown up poor in Australia. So she had both street smarts and resources.

The perfect combination for an amateur detective.

As a bit of added incentive, some English acquaintances ask her to look in on their daughter, because they're worried about how she's doing with her husband. 

Now I have to say, as a mystery, this is only so-so. The title rather gives away the motivation for the plot, and I'm afraid I saw the solution to the quest for the cocaine pingpin (to quote a former president) pretty early on. Doesn't matter. Fisher's a character one wants to read about: her affairs, her clothes, her accomplices. It makes a story both witty and engaging.

I don't know the series well, but several of the ongoing characters (though not all) make their first appearance here: her maid Dot, her two wheel/muscle men, Cec and Bert, her friend on the force, always convenient for an amateur detective. A wonderful start to the series.

And what I hadn't realized until I did a little math, it came out in 1989, and so it just squeezes in for the Silver Age Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt.  We'll go with that extravagant strand of pearls.

Vintage Mystery, Silver, Jewelry

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

There's going to be some spoilerish things in this, so be advised.

Gabriel Syme wanders into the London suburb of Saffron Park, a 'place not only pleasant, but perfect.' 'It had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art.' Syme is himself a poet, 'a poet of law, a poet of order; nay, he said he was a poet of respectability.' He gets into a verbal squabble with red-headed Lucian Gregory, the established poet of Saffron Park, who is none of those things, but rather the opposite. (While at the same time, Syme admires Gregory's sister Rosamond, equally red-headed.)

Syme is also a detective, working for Scotland Yard. He was approved at joining by a mysterious man in a dark room.

Gregory proclaims himself a radical anarchist, but Syme accuses him of being a wannabe. Gregory refutes this charge by introducing Syme to a secret society, the leaders of which are named after the days of the week; at the very next meeting, to which Gregory takes Syme, Gregory expects to be elected the new Thursday. Sunday is the leader of this anarchist society.

Syme launches into a speech that results in his being elected the new Thursday. Aha, thinks Syme! I will now be Scotland Yard's man on the inside. But he has confessed his status as a policeman to Gregory, and sworn not to denounce him, so he has to figure out how to use his new insider-dom without breaking his vow.

At the very first meeting of the seven weekday leaders, Sunday announces one of them is a policeman. Yikes, thinks Syme, I've been found out already. But no, it turns out Gogol is also a policeman in disguise, and while Syme is mostly relieved he hasn't been detected, he's also a little ashamed he didn't do more. Gogol is escorted by thugs off the premises to some unspeakable fate.

On leaving that first meeting, Syme is pursued by another anarchist principal, the Professor de Worms. Does the Professor know Syme's a policeman? Syme tries to escape, but is eventually cornered by the Professor, who...reveals he's also a policeman. That makes three out of the seven. If only they'd organized!

I was perfectly ready to generalize after this, and yes, it quickly turns out six of the seven anarchist leaders are policeman in disguise. Is Sunday as well? 

Of course he is. (I have to say I saw that a mile away, or at least 90 pages away out of the 160.) But Chesterton handles it amusingly and suspensefully enough, and, in fact, Sunday is exactly that unseen policeman who first approved Syme's joining the force (and the other five policeman/anarchist leaders, as well.) The six pursue Sunday (or maybe Sunday is pursuing them) until a final recognition and no crime is actually committed, no dynamite thrown, the Czar not assassinated, even Gogol turns out to be alive after all.

It is Chesterton, and the name Sunday might be a clue. This is fairly early in Chesterton's career (1908), Father Brown is in the future, and Chesterton has not yet converted to Catholicism. Wikipedia tells me he was suffering a crisis of faith as he was writing this. Sunday is a deus absconditus. He tells his policemen, "You heard the voice in the dark, and you never heard it again. The sun in heaven denied it, the earth and sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. And when I met you in daylight I denied it myself." Sunday goes on to explain why he allowed this, and so the book is a kind of theodicy, a justification of God, and an explication of why there is evil in the world. Like all theodicies, I didn't find it very convincing myself...

But until it got there it was a pretty amusing thriller.

There are the usual Chestertonian provocations. Only someone who's meat-eating and beer-drinking can be a proper Englishman, and not a lowly anarchist. Well in fact, I eat meat and drink beer, and have no desire to be a proper Englishman, so this should slide right past me, but I admit to being bothered by it, a little. But it is Chesterton, so one has to either not read him, or not be bothered by that sort of thing.

Do I dare call it a crime book? Well, in the end, it is a bit more Piers Plowman than Bulldog Drummond, but it does start with a Scotland Yard man trying to prevent a murder, so...

Vintage Mystery, Gold, Two People.

I actually read it in a copy from Project Gutenberg, but found online the cover shown above which fits the book pretty well.

Ngaio Marsh's Death at the Bar

"If thurr's not a corpse on the premises afore long, I'll be greatly astonished."

Don't you worry...

Abel Pomeroy is the proprietor at The Plume of Feathers and he's got a rat problem. He goes off to buy rat poison, but the ordinary stuff is not in stock; the pharmacist has only got the extra strong. But that's not a problem for Pomeroy: he's got a plan. Locked cabinet, gloves, whatever it takes to keep it safe.

Well, you know how that goes. By the time the lawyer Luke Watchman is dead, we've got a good half-dozen suspects lined up: two beneficiaries under his will, a girl who previously had an affair with Watchman, young Will Pomeroy who's in love with the girl, the cousin of a man whom Watchman sent to prison, and the mysterious Legge, whom Watchman knows from somewhere, but nobody's saying where. 

The murder takes place on the coast of Devon, and the local police officials are good, but not good enough. Abel Pomeroy wants this solved, it's ruining his business. So Roderick Alleyn and his trusty assistant Br'er Fox are sent to have a look:

"Yes, look at the colour of the sea, you old devil. Smell that jetty-tar-and-iodine smell, blast your eyes. Fox, murder or no murder, I'm glad we came."

Me, too, Mr. Alleyn. 

It's the ninth in the series and dates from 1940. It's a pretty good entry, though I preferred the opening drollery about the poison; the unwinding of events I think could have been clearer. But in just now looking at the date, I realized this was the one I meant to save for the 1940 Club in April. Oh, well...

Vintage Mystery, Gold, Bottle of Poison. Yup, there's definitely a bottle of poison in this one...

Patricia Wentworth's The Blind Side (#DeanStreetDecember)

"Oh, I wish Ross was dead!" - Chapter 2

"I won't let Ross so much as cross the threshold. If he tries...There'll be murder done." - Chapter 3

"Mr. Ross, he'll go too far one of these days." - Chapter 4

"Shooting's too good for him--that's what I say!" - Chapter 5

Guess who ends up dead? Shot, in fact?

Ross Craddock has just inherited a block of London flats as well as some other property, so he's well-to-do. He inhabits one of those flats; Lucy, a maiden aunt another. A second maiden aunt recently dead inhabited a third flat. There are a dozen altogether, some unoccupied at the time of Ross Craddock's murder.

Ross is just about to evict Lucy; has just tried to seduce Mavis, a distant cousin; has feuded with Rush, the concierge, accusing him of blackmail. (Rush is important in determining just who can have gotten in and out of this locked-building mystery.) 

Chapter 1 gives a family history, which is important, but so complicated as to be incomprehensible; fortunately Wentworth gives us a table later on. Should you like a romance in your Golden Age mystery (as I do!) there's one on between Lee Stratton and Peter Renshaw (also distant cousins).

Whew!

The mystery came out in 1939. World War I is important, but it's before World War II and no sign of it yet. The economy has begun to recover after the depression.

This is the first of the Chief Inspect Ernest Lamb mysteries; Frank Abbott is his public-school-educated assistant. Wentworth wrote three mysteries with Lamb as the main detective before he was absorbed into her most famous series, which has Miss Silver, former governess, as a professional detective. Two Miss Silver mysteries had appeared before this, but without Lamb or Abbott. I find the Miss Silver series pretty wonderful.

Lamb is much the same as he is in the Miss Silver stories, curmudgeonly, and a bit sexist: "Difficult to stop girls doing it nowadays, but if he found one of his [own daughters] with her mouth made up to look like an orange peel..." Dum, dum, de dum. Abbott is more modern, amenable to women in roles they didn't use to have and admires Miss Silver as a P.I. But Lamb isn't a fool in this or in other books; he recognizes Miss Silver gets results when they're paired together; and he finds the murderer in this one, mostly on his own. (Though with a little help.) Very entertaining.

And that romance? Well, if you've read any Patricia Wentworth, you'll know what happens.

All the non-Miss Silver mysteries were reissued be Dean Street Press a few years ago. And since Liz is hosting a Dean Street Press event at the moment...

Patricia Wentworth's Dead or Alive

Liz at Adventures in Reading is hosting a Dean Street December event. The idea is to read books from Dean Street Press, who republish vintage mysteries. They have a few other categories of books, notably their Furrowed Middlebrow line, but it's going to be the mysteries I will read. (I'm pretty sure.) 

I'm a huge fan of Patricia Wentworth's mysteries: her best-known detective is Miss Silver, a former governess who hung out her shingle as a private detective after she retired. But that's not all Wentworth (1877-1961) wrote, and Dean Street has published all her non-Miss Silver mysteries. I've read a few of those, but this challenge was a good excuse to read another.

Dead or Alive (1936) is the first of two Colonel Frank Garrett mysteries. The Colonel is head of Intelligence for the Foreign Affairs office, but his main function in this is to snark at the people who are actually involved in the case and then in the end to appear (he actually tells us) as the 'deus ex machina.' Except even then he doesn't make a very good deus... (but no spoilers!)

The main characters are Meg O'Hara and Bill Coverdale. Bill was interested in Meg even when they were teenagers, but then Meg married Robin O'Hara, dashing, but not, as it turned out, good husband material. Bill has just returned from several years working abroad in Chile, where he went after Meg married Robin. Robin also worked in Intelligence and had discovered something damning about the Vulture's gang. The Vulture ends up in jail, but Robin ends up dead, or so the report is at the start of the novel. 

But! Somebody keeps hinting Robin's alive. Meg gets a letter saying Robin's alive. Somebody slips into her apartment--only she and Robin had keys--and leaves a message suggesting he's alive. So is Robin 'Dead or Alive'? A body was found, but it had been rolling around in the water for a while, and the identification is likely, but not certain. What to do? Meg always liked Bill, but if her husband's still alive...

This is more thriller than mystery (a thing Patricia Wentworth sometimes does) and the outlines of the solution were pretty clear from early on. For a while I was rather annoyed with Meg, who seemed a bit dither-y. There's nothing worse than a character who makes unnecessary mistakes and then using that as the source of tension. Later it got better, and Bill and Meg's escape from the bad guys at the end was pretty thrilling, and I enjoyed it well enough. Still, while I highly recommend Patricia Wentworth, this is definitely not the one to start with. I don't usually do stars, but this would be 2 out of 5 for me.

In general I've had good luck with Dean Street Press and some others made it on to the blog:

Patricia Wentworth:

Touch and Go - again more thriller than mystery, but I quite enjoyed this one. Non-series.

E. R. Punshon's Bobby Owen mysteries:

Diabolic Candelabra - set early in WWII. I liked this one a lot.

Music Tells All - early post-war. I liked this, but not as well as Diabolic Candelabra.

Winifred Peck (Penelope Fitzgerald's aunt! Ronald Knox's brother!):

The Warrielaw Jewel - (1933) a wacky family murder mystery.

I've got a couple of other unread Dean Street Press eBooks. I'll try to read another one this month.

Thanks to Liz for organizing this.

Emma Lathen's Double, Double, Oil and Trouble

There's been a couple from the John Putnam Thatcher series featured lately at Major Yammerton's, which reminded me I had one I haven't ever read. (Or maybe I have, but it's been a while & I've forgotten. Good enough!)

John Putnam Thatcher is a high-powered executive at Sloan Guaranty Bank on Wall Street. He's in Switzerland for other business reasons when he's called in to make a ransom payoff; Davidson Wylie, a key employee at Macklin Drilling, one of Sloan's clients, was kidnapped in Turkey by 'Black Tuesday.' Macklin will be paying, and Thatcher is asked to hand over the money to a numbered Swiss bank account.

But Wylie isn't released. What went wrong? And who is Black Tuesday? Palestinians? Eco-terrorists? (It is an oil company under attack.) 

It's an important moment for Macklin: they're in the process of bidding for a North Sea oil site off the coast of Scotland; a German company is their main rival. Wylie was crucial to the bid.

Three weeks later, after some half-hearted negotiations, Wylie is released. By then the bid has been decided, and Macklin won even without Wylie's presence. Wylie is terrified and refuses to help police track down his kidnappers. He flies off to Houston (Macklin's headquarters) for some R&R, but is murdered a few days later.

There's another body--this one in London--before Thatcher solves this one. Pretty fun.

This comes out in 1978 when North Sea oil and OPEC are important issues. (That's assuming they aren't always.) But Emma Lathen isn't a writer of political thrillers, or not exactly, instead owing more to Golden Age mystery conventions, and we've met all the possible suspects by about page 40. (Emma Lathen also isn't Emma Lathen. It's a pseudonym for two high-powered professional women: one a New York lawyer; the other an economics professor.) This is the seventeenth in the series. There were seven more to come.

As it is the world of high finance and oil exploration, it moves around: Switzerland, Istanbul, Greece, Houston, New York, London, Scotland facing the North Sea. It was amusing to see Houston in the 70s, where I was for my undergraduate years. (Though this would be a little before my time.) 

And all that traveling means I get to count it for:

Though the chat between the Istanbul cops was pretty entertaining, I think we'll go with that opening scene in the world of Swiss bankers...

The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka

 "An expression of extreme sadness appeared on the lieutenant's face."

Which means Lieutenant Boruvka has solved another case...

Lieutenant Boruvka is a homicide detective in Prague; the twelve stories in this volume date from the mid-60s--it's still communist Czechoslovakia. Lt. Boruvka is saddened every time a death turns out to be a homicide--it's not always clear at first--and then is further saddened when he finds the crucial clue that tells him who the killer was.

The stories themselves are quite funny.

The stories nod to golden age detective fiction (and earlier). Holmes, C. Auguste Dupin, Dr. Thorndyke are all referenced. In one of the cases, Lt. Boruvka gets the needed clue from reading Ellery Queen's The Roman Hat Mystery. (Or maybe Skvorecky got the plot element he needed from Queen?) At one point Lt. Boruvka remarks about possible suspects with the murdered man's servant:

"He and Farina are the only two men in the whole house who can be taken into account because it certainly wasn't me."

The major-domo coughed. He seemed to be offended.

"You don't regard me as a man, sir?"

"But of course I do," the lieutenant hurriedly covered up. "But in any decent murder case the murderer is never one of the servants. That simply isn't done."

Paging Mr. Van Dine! (See number 11.)

There are a few recurring characters. In the office there's Sergeant Malik, officious and a bit blood-thirsty and prone to miss the obvious; there's Constable Sintak, to whom "Lieutenant Boruvka was a wizard." And the beautiful policewoman Eva with her chignon. Lt. Boruvka's wife, and especially his daughter Zuzana, are important. A vacation promised to Zuzana means that two of the cases are set in Italy, where Lt. Boruvka stumbles into a couple of murders (and Zuzana is crucial to finding the solutions.)

There's a plot arc through most of the stories in which Lt. Boruvka is attracted to Eva; in one he's arranged to meet her at the Tomcat (!) Club for dinner and drinks and who knows what, when a couple of accidents drag him into a case in which he manages to prevent a murder only by standing up Eva. Saint Sidonius features in the case in a couple of ways, giving Lt. Boruvka, who's perfectly happy with the official state atheism of Czechoslovakia at the time, a moment of wonder. And keeping him from doing something he shouldn't...

A lot of fun.

Covering the Czech Republic for this years European Reading Challenge.

Summerbooks: Death by knitting needle

We had some friends over last night for drinks and snacks--and mosquitoes. A couple of them were knitters. I couldn't contribute much to that part of the conversation except to say that, in the last two mysteries I read, the murder weapon was a knitting needle...

Patricia Moyes/Night Ferry To Death (1985)

Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett of Scotland Yard and his wife Emmy are able to slip away for a quick vacation to the Netherlands. They see the tulips, visit friends, have a nice dinner out. The last day of their vacation, there's a robbery at one of the major diamond dealers in Amsterdam.

But that's not Henry's concern, right?

Ha. On the ferry back one of the passengers is stabbed in a sleeping cabin with a knitting needle. The body is only discovered as the ship is docking in Harwich. The sleeping cabin requires a special ticket to enter and the purser said no one went in or out all night. So there's a limited number of suspects, though that includes Henry and Emmy.

But where is the knitting needle? And where are the diamonds? (Because of course they're involved.) 

There's a few more bodies along the way before Henry solves this one, and it includes another trip to the Netherlands to meet with the diamond merchant.

Pretty fun. But if I was Emmy Tibbett, I'd be terrified to go on vacation. A bunch of Patricia Moyes' mysteries begin when Henry and Emmy are traveling. 

Ngaio Marsh/Swing, Brother, Swing (1949)

This one starts with an amusing epistolary section to give us the exposition: Félicité has fallen in love with Carlos, an Argentine accordion player in a swing band. Her mother disapproves. Her stepfather, the eccentric Lord Pastern and Baggott is indifferent to the potential marriage; he just wants to sit in with the band. So Félicité's cousin Carlisle is summoned in an attempt to talk some sense into her. Another cousin Edward Manx, plus various swing band members are on the scene as well. Various romance possibilities are in the offing.

Lord P&B's musical debut occurs in a club. They've planned some stage business where our lordship will shoot Carlos in the middle of his hot solo. The gun is supposed to be loaded with blanks...but you know how that goes.

Or maybe you don't, because instead of an actual bullet replacing one of the blanks, the murderer has rigged up a projectile involving a knitting needle. Lord P&B duly kills Carlos, but did he mean to? Or did some other murderer tamper with the gun?

And, as it turned out, Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard and his wife Troy had hoped to slip away for a simple night out at a jazz club...

Alleyn, after the usual banter with Br'er Fox, his assistant, solves this. Of course. Still not sure why the gun was stuffed with a knitting needle rather than just putting a bullet back into it. 

Marsh is knowledgeable about and sympathetic toward performers, and is again here, though her life was more involved with theater than music. But her attitude toward the upper classes sometimes brings out the Marxist in me, and halfway through I was half-hoping one of the aristos had done it. But you can't always get what you want...

One of the last night's knitters asked, so were the murderers women? Now that would be telling...

Ed McBain's Cop Hater (#1956Club)

 

Cop Hater is the first of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series of police procedurals. Somebody is killing cops: first Detective Mike Reardon is shot outside his house on his way to the precinct; then his partner David Foster is killed. The fact that the two were partners results in the investigation pursuing their previous arrests, particularly any recently out of jail, but when a third detective Hank Bush is killed and he doesn't have any particular connection to the first two, maybe there's just somebody out there who hates cops.

I thought this was nicely setup. We see just enough of Mike Reardon to humanize him before he's killed; Steve Carella and Bush are beat detectives who catch the case; they crack wise with the homicide detectives on the scene before they turn the body over and realize it's their colleague who's been killed. McBain's a pro with a crisp prose style. All that's in the first fourteen pages.

My edition is a reprint with an introduction by McBain from 1989. McBain, under his legal, though not birth name, of Evan Hunter, was already a successful author: he'd written Blackboard Jungle, the basis of the 1955 movie. The introduction is fun. McBain touts himself as the originator of the police procedural. Perhaps that's not perfectly true--John Creasey/J. J. Marric's first Gideon novel came out the year before--but it's close to true in any case, and McBain envisioned from the start a sort of collective hero, with different detectives of the 87th Precinct taking the lead in different cases, in different novels, which is pretty unique. He talks about the research he did to start the series, pestering actual New York City cops before deciding--with delight--he would just make up the city of Isola where the series takes place. 

McBain's grittier than the cozies and even most of the PI novels that preceded him; still it's not giving much away to say that the culprit is neither some recent release from the state pen, nor (though Savage the newspaperman promotes this theory) some cop-hating gang member. Those are both red herrings and the solution is more mystery-novel-ish than either of those possibilities. I've read 8 or 10 out of the 55 in the series and I'd say that's generally true of McBain.

But no spoilers. I wish I could say the same of Wikipedia, though. I might have expected (and didn't read until I finished the novel) that the article on the book would include spoilers; I was a little dismayed though that the general article on the 87th Precinct series, which I did look at halfway through, gave away the solution. Grr. Still it was fun, even if I did know--before I was supposed to--whodunnit. 

It was also fun to see the series at the start. Cotton Hawes and Meyer Meyer don't feature in this one but Steve Carella does; he goes on to appear in a number of them. We see him courting Teddy and the marriage is planned, but hasn't yet taken place, before the end of the book. 

It's the week of #1956Club! Thanks to Simon and Kaggsy for hosting.

Two by Patricia Moyes (#20BooksOfSummer)

 

Finishing off my books of summer, though these actually got read a while ago...

Both feature Inspector Henry Tibbett of Scotland Yard, Moyes' regular detective. He's famous because he has a nose for solutions.

Falling Star

The first one I read was the earlier (1964). Bob Meakin is an aging star with some enemies and a tendency to womanize. You know from the moment he appears he's going to be the first victim: he falls in front of a subway train in the course of a movie shoot, possibly accidentally, though of course not.

The fun thing about this one, at least for a while, was the narrator, Anthony Croombe-Peters or 'Pudge.' Moyes' novels are usually told in the third person, but in this one Pudge tells the story. He's the son of a rich lord with some money of his own and he's dragooned into financing a movie by an old school friend with a script. Except Pudge takes his job seriously: he's fastidious about cash flow and is a bit prissy about the bohemian carryings-on around him. He's pretty funny.

Except:

"...if there's one thing I hate, it's the sort of book in which characters don't go to the police when they've no earthly reason for not doing so."

(Which is Cadogan in Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop, and of course it's prelude to Cadogan and Fen not going to the police themselves.) It's true here, too, and Pudge doesn't go to the police when he ought to. He was so determined about not going to the police, I began to wonder if we were going to have the Roger Ackroyd solution. Which the novel does flirt with, and after one particularly Bozo-ish move by Pudge I was even rooting for, but no. Anyway, while some of the suspense was generated by Pudge being more stupid than he ought to have been, it was still fun.

Also, while one ought not complain about the reasonableness of murder methods in cozies, the two in this were particularly silly.

Murder Fantastical

Even better, though, was Murder Fantastical (1967). George Manciple, the eldest male of the Manciple family, owns a decaying country estate in the town of Cregwall. Raymond Mason is a London bookmaker, now attempting to climb the social ladder, and he desperately wants to buy Cregwall Grange. He's already engaged in some shenanigans to drive Manciple and his wife out, but then he's shot dead on the Manciples' driveway in a way that looks impossible. A country house murder.

It was the wacky Manciples that made this one for me. There's George and his wife, but various others as well. Each one of them has their own eccentricity--as well as a reason not to lose the house, or to keep George from losing the house. Raymond Mason's son is in the picture, spouting Marxist nonsense, and amusingly at odds with his late capitalist and social-climbing father. Potential murderers abound.

Is there the possibility of a romance? There is.

It all gets resolved at a comical church jumble. 

If Falling Star played with being The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, then this one nodded to "The Problem of Thor Bridge," but wasn't quite it either. The solution here was both surprising and amusing.

Agatha Christie's By The Pricking of My Thumbs

"We've got far too much of everything."

This was my first of Agatha Christie's Tommy and Tuppence mysteries, and I quite liked them as a detective couple. Tommy is the more pragmatic one; Tuppence (derived somehow from Prudence) the more intuitive one, the one more interested in just having adventures. (It would be dull otherwise to be a housewife...) This one comes out in 1968, and the couple are middle-aged with a grown daughter, but we hear allusions to their earlier adventures. (Espionage in war time!) The story starts when they go off to see Tommy's Aunt Ada, who's declining in a comfortable nursing home.

But as for the mystery! Tuppence says the above of the story at one point and I'm afraid it's true. Dame Agatha must have realized. There's a gang that's been pulling off spectacular heists for years--the Irish Mail, etc.--that Tommy hears about in his professional aspect; there's some maniac who's killing children around Sutton Chancellor; and there's another serial killer doing in elderly women in nursing homes. Because this is Agatha Christie and not, say, Ed McBain or J. J. Marric (John Creasey) I suspected that all these cases would tie together and they do, but it is just a little too much of everything...

Oh, well, it was still amusing, and I would definitely read another Tommy and Tuppence story. In fact I picked up N or M? at the same charity sale as this one and as it's earlier I should probably have read it first, especially as this one refers to it (I think) on several occasions.

Just The Facts Challenge, Silver Era

Who: Professional is the Main Sleuth.

Tommy and Tuppence run a detective agency, though frankly there's not much sign of it in this one.