Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (#RIPXIV)

This is a collection of thirteen stories written by English authors from the years 1891 to 1914. The editor of the collection is Hugh Greene, brother of Graham. Hugh Greene seems to have collected old mysteries and, since he worked in television, this collection was a basis for a British television series (which I haven't seen.)

Greene says he limited the selection of mysteries to characters who had an identifiable London address, like 221B Baker Street. But they're not all consulting detectives. Some are; but Lady Molly is with Scotland Yard; the Old Man in the Corner solves crimes for his own amusement, but doesn't worry about bringing the criminal to justice; Mr. Pringle is a con man; and Simon Carne is simply a thief.

I think we can safely say that Sherlock Holmes actually doesn't have any rivals... ;-) but some of these are nevertheless fun. I particularly liked the two by Baroness Orczy, better known as the author of The Scarlet Pimpernel, which is a lot of fun. But her stories about Lady Molly and The Old Man in the Corner are also very good. I also enjoyed R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke story, and Ernest Bramah's story about Max Carrados, the blind detective. Several of these detectives are represented on the Haycraft-Queen list of classic mysteries.

Some of them I'd read before; because they're early, a bunch of these are available at Project Gutenberg, and I'd previously read the first collection of Old Man in the Corner stories and the collection of stories about Max Carnacki, the ghost finder, by William Hope Hodgson.

The Lifted Veil (#RIPXIV)

"For I foresee when I shall die, and everything that will happen in my last moments."

Latimer, the narrator of George Eliot's The Lifted Veil, is, to borrow sci-fi terminology, a precog: he sees (some) events of the future in complete detail. His first vision he treats with scepticism; it is of him standing on the Charles Bridge in Prague at a future date and he considers it at first just a daydream. But then it happens exactly as he foresaw it and he comes to trust that these visions are his real future. Like all accurate visions of the future it turns out to be a double-edged sword.

Latimer is dreamy and poetic, though not, he says, a poet: "You will think, perhaps, I must have been a poet, from this early susceptibility to nature. But my lot was not so happy as that." Indeed, he doesn't seem to do much in his life, but he has an income, he doesn't need to. When we first see him, he's a young man of twenty or so; he has an older half-brother Alfred who's engaged to Bertha Grant. Bertha is beautiful and blonde, witty in company, but perhaps just a bit empty. At least, Latimer is unable to see into her. (As he claims he can with others.) He falls in love with her anyway, or maybe because of his inability she seems mysterious; in any case he never believes Bertha is in love with his brother. They marry, after Alfred dies in a hunting accident.

"[This inability to see into her] only brought me more completely under her power: no matter how empty the adytum, so that the veil be thick enough." 

The lifting of the veil--the revelation of that hidden chamber at the back of the temple--is the climax of the story.

It's an odd piece and unlike most of the rest of George Eliot. It dates from 1859, the same year as her first novel Adam Bede, and appeared in Blackwood's. I wondered to what extent Latimer's uncertainty as to his future, his indecision about his artistic calling, represented George Eliot herself. 

Also I believe it's the only work of George Eliot narrated in the first person, and the aura is that of a Gothic novel, unlike the rest of her fiction. (Especially the spooky ending, which I won't reveal.)  

But it does have at least one element in common with other works by George Eliot. Rosamond Vincy has nothing on Bertha Grant. The wisdom of George Eliot? Boys, don't marry that blonde!

Mystery Mile (#1930Club, #RIPXIV)

Mr. Albert Campion

Coups neatly executed

Nothing sordid, vulgar or plebeian

Deserving cases preferred

Police no object

That's the business card our hero hands out, and it pretty much all applies to the case related in Mystery Mile.

Judge Crowder is the target of the so-called Misfire Murders, in which four other people are murdered, presumably in attempts to kill the judge. Judge Crowder has earned the ire of the Simister gang, and has a clue as to its anonymous leader, though he's not entirely sure what he's got. He heads to England with the idea that being away from the gang's main base of operations will make him safer; but he's unwilling to hide or much change his life, and leaving New York is all he's willing to do. The novel starts when a fifth attempt on his life is made shipboard and is foiled (by accident?) by Campion. 

Since the judge won't put up with police protection, his son hires Campion to do what he can.

This is more adventure than mystery; after those first four murders that occur offstage, as it were, there are no others, though there is a kidnapping; the judge survives; the identity of Simister is only thinly hidden, I thought.

I've only read a few of the Campion stories. This is the second in which he appears, but the first where he's the major figure. Campion is famous for his non-sequiturs, his distracted conversational style. I have the feeling that gets tamed as the series goes along, but he's in full inscrutability here, babbling (or is he?) about his pet mouse's birthday in the first chapter. The world around Campion is still being built: this is the first appearance of his formerly criminal assistant, but now his butler, Magersfontein Lugg. It's also the first appearance of that useful thing, a friend at Scotland Yard, Stanislas Oates.

Anyway, very entertaining, I thought. Made me wonder why I hadn't read more Allingham.

Footsteps at the Lock (RIPXIV)

Ronald Knox is probably better known for his ironic ten commandments on the writing of mysteries than for the actual mysteries he wrote. But he did write some. He also translated the Bible from the Latin Vulgate version. And he's Penelope Fitzgerald's uncle and features in the collective biography she wrote of her father and uncles, The Knox Brothers.

The Footsteps at the Lock is the second of five novels featuring insurance investigator Miles Bredon. It involves two cousins: one going to the bad; the other, to the worse. The bad: drink, debt, and drugs. The worse: poetry, aestheticism, and Oscar Wilde. There's a grandfather who has written a will that contingently leaves a fortune to the older (bad) one of the cousins, if he survives to his twenty-fifth birthday; otherwise the worse cousin inherits. You see where this is going...

The two cousins go on a canoe trip down the upper reaches of the Thames; the older one disappears. Drowned? Drugged? Murdered?

Partway through the novel a second will appears in which a great aunt leaves an even larger fortune to the older cousin on slightly different terms. The aunt has an adoptive son who might stand to inherit depending on the exact order of everyone's death; Bredon's interest is really only in that question. His friend, Leyland, of Scotland Yard, is naturally more concerned to find the body, and the body's killer, should there be one.

Anyway, pretty amusing. I thought it was a bit overwritten at the start, but it settled down. And while I know pretty much nothing about serious drugs, opium being the drug in question here, I think it's safe to say Ronald Knox knows even less. No doubt that's to his credit. But I suspect everything he knows about opium can be derived from some lurid biography of Coleridge.

So, how does Knox do with his ten commandments? Mostly, I'd say he follows his own rules, but he does rather violate number six:

No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.

He goes to a hotel and unexpectedly discovers a letter waiting for one of the suspects. On the other hand, several of his other rules involve prohibitions against unnecessary duplication--no identical twins! no more than one secret passage!--but not against the duplication of wills, so the letter, if not the spirit, of his commandments is (mostly) preserved.

There is, however, another famous list of rules for mystery writers, that of S. S. Van Dine, and he definitely violates number seven. If you want to avoid spoilers, I suggest you don't follow that link...

And while it's not so very spooky, it is a mystery, and so the first of my RIPXIV books!