Helen MacInnes' Prelude to Terror

Colin Grant is an art critic. He's recently moved to New York City to work at the Schofeld Gallery. A woman in the art world he knows approaches him on the behalf of millionaire art collector Victor Basset. Could he buy a painting at an auction in Vienna on Mr. Basset's behalf? The painting is a river scene by Salomon von Ruysdael of 1642. It might go for a $200,000, but Basset is worried he has a rival and if it were known Basset was bidding the price would go up.

There's an additional complication. The owner is a Hungarian national who wants to get out of Hungary (this is the 1970s) with this painting that the government would cheerfully confiscate if they knew about it. So for both those reasons it all needs to be hush-hush.

Of course it's Helen MacInnes so there are more complications than that...

This is the first of three spy novels by MacInnes which feature Robert Renwick. He's in Vienna working on a money-laundering scheme run from Eastern Europe. The money's being used to finance terrorist activity in the West. (The Red Army Faction had been in the news in the 70s.) 

I thought this was one of the better MacInnes books. It is fairly dark for MacInnes, though. This is her first novel after her husband Gilbert Highet died. Grant is a widower still in grief when it starts; if you know MacInnes, you won't be surprised that as an American dragged into a spy story, he will be involved in a romance. It doesn't pan out in this one.

It's possible I read this when it came out--both my parents were MacInnes fans--but if so I didn't remember it.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1978). Painting. Is that a von Ruysdael river scene on the left of the cover?   

Ed McBain's Shotgun

"Oh, how they hoped for an original slaying once in a while, a well-conceived murder instead of these sloppy run-of-the-mill crimes of passion that were constantly being dumped into their laps. Oh, how they longed for a killer who would knock off somebody with a rare untraceable poison, Oh, how they wished they might find a body in a locked windowless room, Oh, how they wanted somebody to scheme and plot for months on end and then commit the perfect homicide, which everyone would think was suicide or something." 

"Meyer and Hawes got all the interesting cases."

Carella and Kling are called in when two bodies, a man and a woman, are found by the milkman making his morning rounds. The milkman liked the Leydens--she gave him a cup of coffee when he collected the bill, she didn't have to do that--and he seemed like a very nice man, only he had to travel a lot, missed his wife. "It scares you, you know?"

The first cops on the scene are happy to call it domestic trouble, murder-suicide, and wrap it up at once. But Carella sees through that. (Kling is busy throwing up--he's still new to the 87th--and murders--in this one.) 

Both the victims have been shot in the face, which must mark particular hatred on the part of the murderer. Some sort of creep? (Beyond the usual fact that murderers are creeps, of course...) Carella and Kling are on the track of somebody who meets girls in bars.

McBain's stories often look like they're some sort of random violence--or some sort of creep--but in the end the solution is much more Sherlock Holmes-ish than that--untraceable poison, locked room--and this is no exception. Shooting somebody in the face might be a mark of particular animosity, as they speculate at first, but it just might also be a trick to make indentification difficult, especially for people who've never been fingerprinted...dental records are of no use...and our first cops are happy to think this was suicide or something...

Cotton and Hawes' case is a woman who's stabbed with a bread knife. Was that more interesting? I wouldn't have thought so, necessarily. But it turns out connected to Carella and Kling's case, and that's definitely another sign of a classic puzzle mystery.

Not the best McBain by any means, but a satisfactory entry.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1970). Two People 

 

Dorothy Sayers' Whose Body

"He was so upset, poor little man. He'd found a dead body in his bath."

Mr. Thipps, "the little architect man who's doing the church roof", goes to take a bath in the morning, but there's a dead man in the tub, naked except for a pair of pince-nez. Nobody he knows, he swears. "Uncommonly awkward for him."

That same evening, Sir Reuben Levy disappears. He's a successful financier, with plenty of business enemies in the course of things, though he's considered a sweetheart by his family and domestic staff.

Are the two cases connected? Well...

Parker of Scotland Yard is assigned the Levy case, suspects they might be, and wonders if this unknown corpse is his man. But the dead man was not Sir Reuben Levy.

And Lord Peter Wimsey offers himself to help with the case of the dead man in the bath.

This is the first of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries and comes out in 1923, though we learn he's been involved in an earlier case. that of the Attenbury Emeralds. He took to crime-solving to help with his shell shock after World War I, and turns out to be good at it.

And are the two cases connected? Of course they are.

I've read a bunch of the Lord Peter Wimsey stories before, but not all of them and not this one, I think, all out of order. It is a series that benefits from reading in order, and I might go through the series. It certainly starts off well.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Golden Age (1923). Piece of Furniture: Bathtub.  

The Tragedy of X

"Well," said Inspector Thumm suddenly, "plain or fancy, it's a puzzler, and Mr. Bruno thought you'd be interested."

Inspector Thumm of the New York Police and Walter Bruno, the district attorney, call up on Drury Lane, retired Shakespearean actor, for help in a particularly puzzling murder case. Lane had been a help on a previous case. 

Harvey Longstreet, of the brokerage firm De Witt and Longstreet, was poisoned on the streetcar. He was a travelling with his business partner and other associates, but Longstreet wasn't very popular, and any of them would cheerfully have seen him dead. But how was it done? It was raining and the windows were closed; the streetcar was full after the Longstreet party got on and they didn't make any stops. The poison was fast-acting and everyone who could have done it was there.

The conductor of that street car sends a letter to Thumm saying he had information; his body is found bashed on the head and thrown from a ferry boat. And Longstreet's partner De Witt is murdered on a suburban train. The Commuter Murders! 

After Lane has heard the facts of the first murder, he says he knows who did it, but can't prove it. I read this twenty-five years ago, and I remembered the nature of the clue that Lane sees (though he doesn't disclose it until the end) but had still forgotten who the muderer was. But it is one of the best Queen mysteries, and shows up on best overall mystery lists as well. After reading Drury Lane's Last Case recently, I thought it was time to reread this one. Highly recommended!

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Golden Age (1933). Train. 

Drury Lane's Last Case

    "Sure, sure," said Thumm in a trembling voice. A thousand dollars! Tears of joy gathered in his stony eyes. These were lean days. A thousand dollars for keeping a skinny envelope in his safe!

    "Second," and the man went swiftly to the door, "if I should fail to call on a twentieth, you must not open the envelope except in the presence of Mr. Drury Lane."

 

It's 1933 and Inspector Thumm has retired from the New York police to hang up his shingle as a private investigator. But when he was still with New York's finest he'd solved three earlier cases with the aid of Drury Lane, retired Shakespearean actor. 

On the 20th of May, Thumm receives the needed phone call, but on the 20th of June, nothing. He prepares to contact Drury Lane and open the envelope.

 

But in the meantime he's got another case. Donoghue, an ex-cop, but now a guard at the Britannic Museum, has disappeared. The same day that he disappeared, someone smashed a display case at the museum. At first it seems nothing has happened, but eventually it's discovered that someone replaced a 1599 printing of Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare with a 1606 printing from the same publisher. The 1606 printing is actually rarer, and presumably more valuable.

 

Are the two cases connected? Of course they are!

 

Well, what's in the envelope unsealed in the presence of Drury Lane? It's that note shown on the cover, on Saxon Library stationary, with the mysterious letters 3HS wM. The Saxon Library has just given that 1599 Shakespeare to the Britannic Museum, so there's your connection. But what do those mysterious letters mean? 

 

Actually that was the most disappointing thing about the mystery. Turn the picture upside down--well, since that may be a little difficult unless you're reading this on a phone, let me do it for you. 😉 Ah, now it reads Wm SHe. Since we're dealing with stolen copies of Shakespeare's poetry, you probably can guess the nature of the clue. But Thumm couldn't, and nobody else could either, except maybe Drury Lane, who was coy about what he knew.

 

A second somebody also disappears before a body is found murdered, blown up in a building. First they have to determine just who it is who has been killed, and then who did the killing. The ending was both surprising and satisfactory.

 

The cousins behind the Ellery Queen pseudonym wrote four novels with Drury Lane as the hero detective; they originally came out under the pseudonym Barnaby Ross, though eventually they fessed up it was them. The first two--The Tragedy of X and The Tragedy of Y--often show up on lists of all-time greatest mysteries. This isn't quite in the league of those two, but it's still pretty entertaining.

 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

 

Golden Age (1933). Book.
 

Nicholas Blake's The Worm of Death (#1961Club)

 

Dr. Piers Loudron is a successful and well-to-do doctor living in Greenwich, the eastern end of London. 

Nigel Strageways (our series detective) and his partner Clare Massinger have just moved to Greenwich. They're invited over to meet their new neighbours the Loudrons. Dr. Piers' wife has passed, but there are also his adult children, three sons (one adopted) and a daughter.

Dr. Piers disappears on a foggy night. The Loudron children approach Strangeways for advice. A week later his body is found floating in the Thames. Both wrists have been slashed.

Suicide? But the wrists are slashed in such a way that suicide is unlikely, and if it was suicide how did the body get into the river? (As the cover suggests, a slashed-wrist suicide often takes place in the bath.) And just in case you were inclined to the suicide theory, Dr. Piers' daughter-in-law is strangled halfway through the book.

All four of the children have plausible motives to murder their father as does as the daughter's boyfriend, whom Dr. Piers didn't approve of. Strangeways hints he knows who did it pretty early (and I kind of did, too) but Blake does a pretty successful job of keeping us on our toes. I've had mixed results with the Strangeways series, but I thought this one a pretty good entry.

It was fun as a 1961 book because it makes good use of the old East End of London, which, of course is all changed now:

     "When he [Strangeways] got home, Clare kissed him, 'My goodness you've been drinking port.'

     'Yes, with an old tart in the Isle of Dogs." 

The Isle of Dogs isn't the sort of place old tarts live anymore I think.

 

My original list of 1961 candidates is here. 

Nicholas Blake is a pen name for the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, probably better known now as the father of the actor Daniel Day-Lewis. 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1961). Dead body. 

Ed McBain's The Con Man

"Meanwhile back at the morgue..."

The first chapter introduces two cases: Arthur Brown and Bert Kling interview a young black woman working as a maid who's been conned out of five dollars by a pretend preacher, and Steve Carella is called in where a dead body of a woman is found floating by the docks.

 

Brown is determined to find the con man; Carella first has to determine if what he's looking at is a crime, but it is. His floater didn't drown, but went into the water already dead from arsenic poisoning. ("Back at the morgue...")

 

Then a second woman is found floating in the harbor, also dead from arsenic poisoning. Both women have tattoos on their hand.

 

This is the fourth of McBain's series of 87th Precinct novels. I enjoyed it, but I don't think it was a particularly strong entry in the series. McBain can occasionally be didactic about police methods--he does famously precede his novels with:

 

"The city in these pages is imaginary.

The people, the places are all fictitious.

Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique."

In this one, we learned how fingerprints are taken from dead bodies, which was grisly, and maybe interesting? At least relevant to the plot. But there was too much about how con men do their thing, which didn't have much to do with our particular con men. But the final chase was certainly thrilling enough...

 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

 

Golden Age (1957). Policeman.

 

I suppose that's Steve Carella on the cover in plainclothes, and Fred di Angelo, the beat cop to whom the body was first reported behind him.

 

Peter Dickinson's The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest

     "We've got a lovely little set-up here, all airy-fairy. Just the thing for Pibble, I said, the moment I'd seen the Kus."

    "Coos?"

    "Every single member of the household, my dear, is called Ku. They're a tribe from New Guinea, somewhere. Deceased's a Ku, suspects all Kus, witnesses all Kus. Except there aren't any."

 

This was totally bats. But I really mean that in the best possible way...

 

During World War II, the Ku tribe sheltered a downed Australian airman. The Japanese found out and killed everyone they could lay their hands on, and this included the British anthropologist studying the tribe. The anthropologist's daughter Elizabeth has brought the remains of the tribe to London, where they live in a house, attempting to keep up their tribal customs in an alien environment. They all take the last name Ku.

 

Then the chief of the tribe, Aaron Ku, is bashed over the head by a lefty at the top of the stairs.

 

Elizabeth has gotten her own Ph.D. in anthropology after the war, and this arrangement will enable her to keep up her father's work more comfortably, with the tribe arranged for viewing like ants tunnelling in a kid's glass terrarium. And one of the things she tells Pibble is that, while the Kus don't approve of murder, of course, if they were to murder someone, they would naturally use the left hand, because that's the hand of evil deeds.

 

Most of the clues kind of go like that. This is the first case (out of six) with Chief Inspector Jimmy Pibble by Dickinson, but in his world he's already got a reputation. We're told he's the one who gets these kind of cases. He interviews an old lag at one point:

    "Hope you don't mind me asking, but are you Pibble?"

    "Yes," said Pibble. "But how did you know?"

    "Kinky little case like vis. Vey wouldn't send one of the ver big boys out on it--too much to lose, nuffing to gain. Good luck, ven."

There is a lot of slang and dialect. Pibble himself uses "Crippen" as an oath amusingly enough, but a fair amount of it might be easier for a Brit...

A second murder is in progress when it's thwarted by Pibble discovering the culprit.

Pretty entertaining. I'd read another from the series. Do you know it? Is this representative? 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1968). Staircase. 

 

 

Jan Hilliard's Morgan's Castle (#readindies)

 "What a lot of ways there are to murder someone, she thought..."

Oh, what fun this one was! 

The sixteen-year-old Laura Dean had thought she might work at the local five-and-dime for the summer; there were supposed to be some college boys in town with summer jobs of their own. But her Aunt Amy has other plans, any local boy is bound to be heedless, and Laura's father Sidney is not to be trusted.

Aunt Amy's school friend Charlotte Morgan is writing a book about the Morgan family wine business and needs a secretary, she says; her daughter-in-law has recently died in a tragic accident and maybe she needs a new daughter-in-law, too. 

In fact there have been quite a few tragic accidents in recent memory at Morgan's Castle. And just how heroically well poor Charlotte Morgan has held up in the midst of all these *accidents*...it's no wonder everybody admires her so...

There's not a lot of mystery in this crime story--even if you managed to miss the word 'murderess' in the blurb on the cover--but there is a lot of humour. It's quite darkly funny, a bit Arsenic and Old Lace, though with more real suspense than that. You suspect somebody will be murdered during the book (and somebody is) but who will it be, and how will our murderess be stopped? That's assuming she is, of course.

There's also a fine romance budding, just not the one Aunt Amy and Charlotte Morgan have in mind. 

Jan Hilliard is a pseudonym for Hilda Kay Grant (1910-1996). She was born in Nova Scotia, but lived most of her adult life around Toronto. Morgan's Castle came out in 1964 and is set in the Niagara area. Her first novel won the Stephen Leacock Award for best humorous book of the year, and this one ought to have been in the running, too. The book was reissued last month by the Montreal-based independent Véhicule Press, as part of its Ricochet line of Canadian Noir reprints, edited by Brian Busby. 

Brian kindly supplied me with a copy of the book, and I am very glad he did.

February is #readindies month, hosted by Kaggsy at Bookish Ramblings. 

 

It also fits the My Reader's Block challenge: 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1964). Damsel in Distress.
 

van de Wetering's Hard Rain

 "It was a regular Dutch summer with heavy rain and fog."

There's corruption in the Amsterdam police force!

 

Martin IJsbreker is dead and it's ruled a suicide; a second bullet was spotted but somehow lost in the investigation. Three junkies died of a heroin overdose in a houseboat across the canal from IJsbreker's house on the same day, and those are ruled accidental death. You don't believe any of that, of course.

 

And neither did Grijpstra and de Gier. They go to their boss, the unnamed Commisaris, and he authorizes reopening the case. But soon the Commisaris is facing an investigation for financial misdeeds; Grijpstra and de Gier are nearly killed in an auto accident, and are then suspended because they were purportedly at fault. (The stop sign had been covered up.)

 

There's not actually much mystery. The bad guys corrupting the police force are big time drug runners; their leader is a childhood schoolmate of the Commisaris (and distinctly not a friend). The story is who can be trusted and who not, and how they're going to do down the bad guys. And it's a pretty good one! That's partly because there's more of the Commisaris in this, and I generally find him the most entertaining character in the series. We even learn his first name: Jan.

 

Janwillem van de Wetering wrote fourteen novels and two volumes of stories about the Amsterdam police detectives, and this, from 1986, is the 11th. 

 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

 

Silver Age (1986). Body of Water. 

H. R. F. Keating's Inspector Ghote Draws a Line

     "'Threats to my life, Doctor? And how old am I? Eighty-two years of age. No, it is Allah himself who threatens my life now.'

     'Nevertheless, sir, the issuing of a threat to a person's life is a criminal offence.'"

It's the 1970s and Sir Asif Ibrahim is a former judge receiving death threats. He's long since retired, and is living in a falling down house a bullock's cart ride away from some place in India that's already nowhere. Sir Asif would just as soon live--or die--with no fuss. But his cousin is a member of parliament and the daughter who lives with him is worried. So Inspector Ghote is sent to see what he can do. He can expect no assistance from Sir Asif.

The threats reference the Madurai Conspiracy Case. Forty years earlier, just before the British finally quit India, a group planned to assassinate the governor of Madras but failed. Nevertheless, Sir Asif convicted and issued the death penalty for the conspirators. The death threats reference that ancient case.

 

There are servants in the house, but the main suspects are four: that daughter, still living at home; an itinerant Buddhist mystic who comes and goes; an American left-wing Catholic priest, foisted on the judge by a different cousin; and a local journalist who publishes the judge's musings, and is in love with the daughter. Remember that the house is remote. No one else could drop off those notes.

 

Is one of these four connected somehow to the Madurai Conspiracy Case? Or is that ancient case just a cover for some other motive? Or is it not even one of the four obvious suspects? And does Ghote save the judge in the end? Well, I'm not going to tell you any of that...😉 I will only note that the book does violate at least two of S. S. Van Dine's rules for writing mysteries...  

 

Despite those violations I found this pretty entertaining (though not amazing). Once upon a time I read Keating's list of the hundred best mysteries and like any serious reader of books approaching such a list I gobbled it down, while at the same time quibbling at the margins--The Green Ripper is the best Travis McGee book? How can you say that when it's actually the worst! etc., etc.--but this is the first of his mysteries I've read. If you've read him, how does it rank? 

 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

 

Silver Age (1979). Spooky House or Mansion.

Death in Fancy Dress

"Blackmail on a tremendous scale? I see. A dirty business."

The Spider is running a blackmail ring right across England. Jewels are being replaced with paste and victims are committing suicide. The newest target seems to be Hilary Feltham, a young girl with a mind of her own, living with her stepparents at Feltham Abbey. Philpotts of the Home Office needs somebody unofficial on site, and Tony Keith, a lawyer and a World War I veteran has a family connection to the place. Could he just?

Of course he can. He brings along his friend Jeremy Freyne who intends to marry Hilary, even though she's already got two other fiancés in the offing, one of whom is Philpott's official man on site, Arthur Dennis.

It's the other fiancé, Hilary's distant cousin Ralph Feltham, who's murdered on the night of a fancy dress ball.

Was it one of those suitors did the job? Or was someone associated with The Spider's gang?

The solution surprised me, which is always a good thing, but on the whole the setup both took too long and was confusing. It was a hundred pages in (out of a novel of 220 pages) before we got on to events, and even then I had to make a chart of the family relations. I don't know Anthony Gilbert (a pen name for Lucy Malleson) all that well, but is this one of the more highly regarded ones? It did get a British Crime Classics Library reprint. But her more famous detective Arthur Crook came later (and from what I've read, seems better.)

This edition also had two short stories featuring Inspector Field of London. I enjoyed those more than the novel itself.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Golden Age (1933). Performer (Dancer)