Rex Stout's Where There's A Will

Two Nero Wolfe novels came out in 1940; this was the second. Where Over My Dead Body was very much a novel of its year, with contemporary political concerns, Where There's A Will feels much less fixed in time. As you might guess, the case turns on a will; by the standards of Golden Age Mystery wills, this will isn't completely crazy, but it does leave all the money to Noel Hawthorne's mistress and not to his wife. The wife plans to raise holy heck to get her money, and the family, mostly in the form of the dead man's sisters, the fabulous Hawthorne girls, engage Wolfe to solve the problem without scandal.

Within pages District Attorney Skinner announces that Noel Hawthorne was murdered, and didn't die in a hawk- or crow-hunting accident. All hope of avoiding scandal is out the window.

Wolfe, who famously never leaves his home, (except when he does) heads off in a taxicab, unescorted by his goad and chief assistant Archie Goodwin, to the house of one of those fabulous Hawthorne girls. There he asks questions until a second murder occurs and he sneaks off back home, letting Archie deal with the irruption of policemen investigating the second murder.

In the end, of course, the suspects are assembled in Wolfe's office, a trick is played, and the murderer revealed.

For me, this one didn't work as well as the previous. The introduction the Hawthorne sisters was not as witty or as swift as that of Carla Lovchen in Over My Dead Body. Some elements seem oddly unnecessary: there's confusion whether the dead man was out to shoot a hawk or a crow, a confusion that has no bearing on the plot. (It's clearly a crow on the cover.) Nearing the end, in a ploy that Stout uses elsewhere, Wolfe keeps secrets from Archie for no particularly good reason, but so that he can also keep them from us. Oh, well. Even on a bad day, there's nothing quite like a Rex Stout novel.

I'm seeking out well-paced, comic mystery novels, more even than usual, at the moment to distract myself from reading the news. Alas, in a novel written in 1940, with an introduction by Dean Koontz from 1992, it's not entirely possible to escape:

Twenty years ago, when I was struggling to find my own voice as a writer, I was reading five novels a week in addition to putting in full days at the typewriter. (We didn't have the great blessing of computers and word-processing software back then. But we didn't have freeway shootouts or Donald Trump, either, so it wasn't altogether a less appealing era.)

I'd definitely trade away my computer and word-processing software if we could roll back six months...

Whether Noel Hawthorne went hunting for a hawk or crow, there's definitely a bird on the cover.

Golden Age. Bird. My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery Scavenger's Hunt.

Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male

Rogue Male came out, according to Wikipedia, in May of 1939. Geoffrey Household must have been writing it in 1938, I guess. This will be very important.

The unnamed narrator, a well-known, big game hunter, decides on a whim to stalk a dictatorial leader from a country near Poland. He has this leader in his sight and could have pulled the trigger, but he wasn't that serious about it. It was all just a game he was playing to see if he could do it. Or was it just a game?

In any case, he's caught. He's tortured to make him confess that he was an agent of the British government, which he wasn't, and which he won't confess to. The dictator's henchmen stage an accident, but the narrator survives it and escapes back to England. The villainous Quive-Smith leads a team of agents in an attempt to kill him off for real. The novel is mainly a story of running away from killers.

And a very good story of running away it was. All the running away, all the clever dodges that enable him to either escape or the turn the tables on his pursuers kept me turning the pages.

The difficulty was that it wasn't all that. Though unnamed, it's pretty clear that the dictatorial leader that the narrator could have, but didn't, assassinate was Hitler. (In the film Fritz Lang made from the book in 1941, Lang is not so coy: it's clearly Hitler; Lang had reasons to dislike Nazi Germany.) The narrator hems and haws about whether he really meant to kill, whether he should even admit to what happened abroad, whether he can invoke the aid of his own government when he returns to England. From where I stand, it's hard to see why not: he avoids English police with as much zeal as he runs from Quive-Smith, but was his passing thought of killing Hitler really so awful as all that?

Well, I suppose. It was 1938 when he was writing it. Chamberlain had announced peace in our time in Munich, and there was still a significant anti-war faction in England, not to mention outright support for Germany. It was an odd historical moment. A little after three months from when the book came out, England would be at war with Germany, and then there presumably wouldn't have been any compunction about killing Hitler. But I kept getting distracted by his psychologizing, and his guilt about the fact that he had thought about doing the thing he hadn't, a thing which in a year everyone would agree would have been a good act.

I bought it a while ago, because it was a New York Review Books reissue, and I've had good luck with those: Bengtsson's The Long Ships, the J. G. Farrell empire trilogy, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Olivia Manning have all ended up being books I've really enjoyed. So now when they show up on the remainder table, I buy them if they look at all interesting, even if I don't read them right away. This one has been on the shelf since 2013, meaning it counts for My Reader's Block Mount TBR Challenge. This wasn't as good as those, but it was definitely fun.

Andrew Greeley's Happy Are The Meek

Happy Are The Meek is the second outing from 1985 in Andrew Greeley's John Blackwood "Blackie" Ryan mystery series. In this volume, Fr. Blackie is a mere Monsignor. In later mysteries, he advances to bishop, and then archbishop. Had Greeley lived long enough, Fr. Blackie would no doubt have become Chicago's mystery-solving cardinal, and possibly even the first murder-solving Pope.

I've read a bunch of Blackie Ryan mysteries completely out of order; they're set in Chicago, my home town, and so, like the V. I. Warshawsky series, for example, they have a certain appeal for me. My father was fond of the series and after he'd read one, I read it. Not infrequently he received the book as a gift from me...

Most of the events in this one take place in Long Beach, Indiana, a resort town for wealthy Chicagoans on the shore of Lake Michigan. (I've never been there.) Wolfe Tone Quinlan is the victim, he owns the house where the crime takes place, the suit of armor, the sword of which is the murder weapon, and it's not inappropriate to say he owns half the suspects, who in one way or another are all dependent on him.

Quinlan is a complete villain. He's abusive to his family (and by the end, we learn even worse.) His partners are criminal or abused. He's a drunk. He supports some sort of creepy devil-worshiping cult. By the end of 40 pages, I was ready to murder him myself. I understand the convenience for plotting of having a thoroughly detested victim, but by then I was half-hoping for an Orient Express-type solution to this one. He was so awful, it was difficult to read about him.

Greeley alternates chapters in Fr. Blackie's voice with chapters in the voice of other characters. The other problem with the novel, I thought, was the other chapters. Blackie Ryan is knowing, arch, amusing. He tends to natter on about his extended Chicago Irish clan who play useful and funny roles in the mysteries: Mike the Cop, his sister Mary Kate the psychiatrist, his various nieces and nephews who refer to him as Uncle Punk. But many (too many) of the early chapters in this were narrated by Lawrence Burke, Quinlan's financial adviser, and desperately and guiltily in lust with the widow. Catholic guilt is completely believable, but it does not amuse.

My preference is also generally for cozy, which the Blackie Ryan mysteries generally are, and this one veers into the grisly.

So all in all, not one of the better Blackie Ryan outings. Without being systematic about it, I would say Greeley improved in the series, but then the very last ones got a little sloppy. The middle ones are the best.

But there's a brunette in a bikini on the cover. I'm not really sure who she's supposed to be, but it takes place in a beach town, so I guess that's OK:

Silver Age. Brunette. My Reader's Block's Mystery Scavenger Hunt.

Also this one has been aging on the shelves here since 2014 when I bought it at the University College Book Sale from the 6 for $5.00 mystery table. So it also counts for My Reader's Block Mount TBR Challenge.