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MItchell Mystery Reading Group: April event announced!

3/16/2023

It has been a while since I hosted the Gladys Mitchell reading group. The last go-round was in December of 2021, when observant readers weighed in on 1950’s snow-covered Groaning Spinney. The last year and three months have been personally busy and sometimes burdensome (including some health and energy issues), and that feeling persists now. So once more I paused to consider before offering to moderate another month-long reading group event.

I have decided to take this approach: let’s keep the group reading of The Echoing Strangers (1952) for April. The group discussion – always lively and illuminating – will be available for all who want to contribute. Readers can send me comments on a section of the book every Wednesday, which I will organize and present for a weekend blog entry over at www.jasonhalf.com . The reading and response schedule is listed below.

This time I plan to take a step back as editor, however. Previously, much of my time was spent reading all the entries, then categorizing the comments into topics and carefully writing transitional text that allows me to quote each respondent in flowing paragraphs. I will still be very interested to read and group the comments by topic, but I choose to list each person’s writing separately with attribution, as you might find with a group interview. So the new format would be along the lines of:

THE TOPIC OF TWINS
Kitty T. – “Kitty’s thoughts.”
Ferdinand L. – “Ferdinand’s two cents.”
Laura G. – “Offering a new idea on the subject.”

This takes some pressure off of me while the contributors get a chance to share their views. There will also be few or no archival images to accompany the conversation, alas. Recent skirmishes and payment demands from holders of copyrighted images have discouraged the use of found photos, even as this post and discussion are presented for educational, non-profit purposes. Such distinctions don’t matter to Internet copyright trolls.

I still believe we can have a spirited group discussion of The Echoing Strangers, and I am excited to organize and contribute to the posts. If you want to send me your thoughts on each section (or if you just want to read the book and enjoy the comments of others), here is the timeline for April’s read. Thank you for understanding, and I look forward to learning what you think about this wonderful mid-period Mrs Bradley mystery!

Mitchell Mystery Group Reading Event – April 2023
THE ECHOING STRANGERS (1952)

Chapters 1 – 6, “Deaf and Dumb Alphabet” to “Mede”
Comments due Wednesday, April 5 for weekend post
Chapters 7 – 12, “The Questing Fairy” to “Castor and Pollux”
Comments due Wednesday, April 12
Chapters 13 – 17, “The Echo Under the Bridge” to “The Echo from the Past”
Comments due Wednesday, April 19
Chapters 18 – 21, “The Echo of a Crime” to “The Echo of Gemini”
Comments due Wednesday, April 26

Please email your comments about each section by the date listed to jason@jasonhalf.com . Try to avoid spoilers in your comments if you read ahead. Happy reading and I look forward to hearing from you!

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Book Review: THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE (1966) by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

2/20/2023

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In the second detective story featuring Martin Beck, the quiet and capable investigator looks into the disappearance of Swedish journalist Alf Mattson. Mattson seems to have vanished after checking into a Budapest hotel, and the details that surface from interviews with colleagues and relations define him as a combative man with possible ties to the drug trade. That gives Beck a geographical and psychological starting point, and the detective’s time in Communist Hungary is not without danger: he warily befriends a Hungarian policeman and is followed throughout the city by men who want to put an end to the investigation, even if it means further violence.

The Man Who Went Up in Smoke, by the Swedish writing (and marital) team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, continues the series presenting crime narratives in a contemporary and realistic way. Martin Beck’s investigative methods certainly ring true, involving much communication with multiple police departments and interviews with witnesses that offer either a new avenue of exploration or, just as likely, a dead end. As with the previous year’s début entry Roseanna, days and weeks can go by with no breakthrough, and Beck must wait for the results of another routine enquiry before the trail becomes active again. The verisimilitude is admirable, but adhering to reality also translates to a lack of drama in some chapters.

I think, too, that Smoke suffers from the authors’ choice to keep the reader intentionally distant from the emotions of both detective and victim. In his use and the genre world in which he operates, Martin Beck reminds me of Georges Simenon’s great Chief Inspector Maigret. But where Monsieur Maigret carries his personality and his power into each investigation, Sjowall and Wahloo’s Martin Beck is the opposite. Beck is a combination of bureaucrat and tabula rasa, with no strong attributes or eccentricities to coax him into focus. (Beck has a strained relationship with his wife; little is explored internally.) He does not have Maigret’s bearish manner or black pipe or evocative response to each landscape he visits. Instead, Beck is patient and competent, which are useful virtues for an investigator but hardly the stuff to promote a personal bond between reader and character.

For this reason, the people around Martin Beck often make a greater impression than he does, even when they only appear for mere pages. There is an amusing encounter with a detective named Backlund, whose frustration builds to anger when Beck wants him to provide impressions of Alf Mattson that go beyond the exhaustive, multi-page police report of a drunken fight that Backlund wrote months before the journalist’s disappearance. Inspector Szluka, Beck’s Hungarian police counterpart, is also intriguing because of his tactics: we must decide, as Beck must do, whether his invitation to the baths or recommendation for a great out-of-the-way Hungarian restaurant is offered with a friendly or a more sinister motive.

Smoke’s slow pacing and plainly presented central character are purposeful choices, and the approach makes the story more believable but less engaging. It doesn’t help that the missing man at the heart of the case is also unattractive, and that the cause of his disappearance is largely academic for both detective and reader. (The authors underline Martin Beck’s lack of enthusiasm, noting that “it was only with the greatest effort that he could summon up any interest for his assignment”.) Also academically, the plotting is solid and the solution, when it arrives, is interesting – with parallels to Simenon’s first published Maigret mystery, Pietr the Latvian (1931). It is also a solution dependent on getting the full story through the words of the killer (that is, learning key details from a confession), and this is also very much the domain of Georges Simenon and his pipe-smoking detective.

So I am left meditating on an interesting paradox: if so many fictional police characters are unbelievable or fall victim to that “broken-soul” cliché so popular with writers and readers today, we should cheer representations on the page and screen that reach for realism and truth. And yet, as with Inspector Martin Beck in his first two appearances, sometimes such quiet, sad but stoic figures leave little impression, while their cases are filled with the banal but honest activities of investigation – writing and reading reports, interviewing dozens of people, waiting weeks before a break comes along, et cetera. Such realistic representations should be welcome, with the caveat that reality can be both rewarding and perilously slow.

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Book Review: THE DETECTIVE IS DEAD (1995) by Bill James

2/8/2023

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Regular readers of Bill James’s crime series featuring Detective Sergeant Colin Harpur and Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles will know that the author returns often to this presumed paradox of effective policing: in order for justice to be carried out, the rules must be bent, by the police, in favor of the police. If not – if, for example, Harpur and Iles don’t occasionally skirt protocol and take matters into their own hands – then the criminals benefit from a legal and social system that protects them at every turn. Like all thorny conceits, there is some truth to this view: a drug dealer or bank robber can often avoid punishment with the right lawyer pointing out a procedural oversight or a technicality. But the opposite idea is equally messy: once those sworn to uphold the law bend the rules, where does the lawlessness end?

All that to say that The Detective Is Dead, James’s twelfth book in his consistently excellent and surprising series, once more spins a plot of policemen behaving darkly and criminals working hard to gain social acceptance. At the story’s start, two mid-level drug runners have been murdered and Claud Beyonton, a rival dealer, stands trial. The case is dismissed on lack of evidence when Harpur refuses to name his informant. The protection is noble but irrelevant, as Beyonton and his gang know the source is a cocky young man named Keith Vine, who would happily move up the ladder to fill the vacuum left by the dead dealers and an incarcerated Beyonton.

The character of Keith Vine, an optimistic buck with more swagger and self-confidence than he has a right to own, proves one of the most satisfying aspects of the book. Harpur feels a pang of responsibility when it becomes clear that Claud and his partners are gunning for Keith, and yet the informant has no intention of being relocated to France when there is money to be made in the local drug trade, especially if he pairs up with the knowledgeable Stan Stansfield. But Keith’s pregnant and pragmatic girlfriend Becky recognizes the danger and futility of drug dealing as a profession, and Harpur thinks he may be able to rescue the girl and her child from their circumstances even if Keith himself proves to be a moral (and mortal) lost cause.

The conflict between these two characters, with their radically different notions of family security, gives the story its beating heart. Once more, it’s difficult to bet just which characters will survive, let alone triumph, by the book’s end; in this author’s world (as in life), occasionally the innocent are slain and the villainous are rewarded. But when it arrives, the ending is satisfying and beautifully aligned with the tone of the series.

One minor quibble is that this is the second title, following the previous year’s In Good Hands, that allows the melodramatic ACC to land the book’s theme in a ponderous way. Here, Iles lies across three chairs at the precinct, arms folded across his chest, as he eulogizes about the death of the detective due to strangulation from the courts and the criminal code. Desmond Iles can act ostentatious and poetical – the performance surely appeals to his character – but it also feels a bit heavy-handed, like underlining a passage for mock emphasis. Still, it’s a minor irritant compared to what the ACC’s colleagues, Harpur and Chief Lane, have to put up with.

The Internet Archive features a 70-minute BBC 4 radio dramatization of The Detective Is Dead, and its plot and dialogue are reasonably faithful (if streamlined and slightly sanitized) to Bill James’s text. Listening to the radio drama points to a key element in James’s printed fiction: the book stories are so tactile and alive because of the author’s brilliant ability to conjure up character perspective through limited omniscient narrative.

Most commonly, we see the story through one particular player’s point of view within a chapter. While it is sometimes Colin Harpur and his worldview that we experience, other chapters will let us access the thoughts and emotions of fascinating, flawed characters like Keith Vine or Panicking Ralph Ember. A performed dramatization can’t provide that inner perspective, since it is in James’s glorious, sharply funny prose that an individual's worldview comes alive. Dialogue and plot can be borrowed, but if we are not inside a character’s head, then we lack that true knowledge of, and emotional and intellectual connection to, him or her.

It's also instructive to note that the author (wisely) never lets the reader view certain characters through this inner P.O.V. technique. For example, ACC Iles is a truly menacing figure in part because his mind continues to safeguard its secrets. While we know all about Harpur’s doubts, desires, and dislikes – from a Harpur-oriented chapter, the prose offers this: “Christ, Becky was wasted on that sad little jumped-up nothing, Vine. Would Keith know how to reverence her and what she told of?” – Iles keeps his cards dangerously close to the vest, giving little away until it comes out in a spate of suppressed rage. James also never allows us to get inside of Harpur’s most essential informant, the gregarious art dealer Jack Lamb, thus only allowing us to see Jack the same way as the detective who relies on him.

There is art to this vivid exploration in prose of some (but not all) characters’ psyches, and it is certainly one reason why Bill James’s books are so memorable, enthralling, and unique within the police crime genre.

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Book Review: MURDER AFTER CHRISTMAS (1944) by Rupert Latimer

1/10/2023

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Let me start with the good: it is always a pleasure to celebrate the efforts of Martin Edwards and the British Library Crime Classics series. For years, Edwards and the imprint have been unearthing, securing, and presenting several unjustly neglected, long out of print titles from mystery fiction’s Golden Age of Detection. (Poisoned Pen Press has made several of these UK books available to U.S. readers, as well as spotlighting classic American mystery authors in their own Library of Congress Crime Classics series.) So it is wonderful to see a book like 1944’s high-spirited holiday whodunit Murder after Christmas returning to print after being unavailable for decades.

We learn from Edwards’ useful introduction that Rupert Latimer was the pseudonym of Algernon Vernon Mills, an occasional stage actor who was plagued with health problems stemming from a childhood illness. Mills would die in 1953, less than a decade after the publication of Murder after Christmas, but retained a cheery perspective in those years that informed his wryly comic prose style.

In Christmas, Frank and Rhoda Redpath await the yuletide arrival of Rhoda’s rich and eccentric stepfather, Sir Willoughby Keene-Cotton, dubbed more ironically than affectionately “Uncle Willie”. The couple exchange winking ideas about how best to dispose of their relation to gain an inheritance, and as often happens in this type of story, Frank and Rhoda soon find themselves hosting other guests and relatives that could stand in the way of obtaining Uncle Willie’s legacy. When the designated victim finally meets his end – his body is found outside in the snow, lying beside a snowman that contained a box of chocolate as part of a holiday scavenger hunt – it is up to Superintendent Culley to interview the suspects, sort through the colorful clues, and make sense of it all.

I sincerely wish I had responded more favorably to Latimer’s prose, plotting, and characters. Other reviewers seem to have done so, from Kate at crossexaminingcrime, who enjoyed the book’s humour and characterizations, to Sarah over at On: Yorkshire Magazine, who found the book “charming and delightful”. My disappointment stems from the author’s handling of the genre’s three crucial elements: I found the prose forced and overwritten, the puzzle’s late-chapter twist telegraphed from the start, and the characters and investigation wearying over time.

And yet it shouldn’t be so. Latimer has worked hard to adopt a buoyant, comic worldview that should be inviting, not off-putting. And it’s very possible that this prose engages some readers; it just doesn’t cast the same spell over me. Instead, I find myself wading through the words, encountering phrases that often require a cerebral translation before I’m able to form a picture. Often it feels like the author is constructing his sentences and shaping his tableaux in an effort to display his very determined wit. Consider the passage below; to me, it feels too calculated and puckish to truly bring these characters to life.

The Coultards arrived first of all, with their two horrid little boys; then came the Howard Wortleys, with Esther Hobbs and three well-washed, adolescent evacuees. Rhoda tried to stir up these preliminary guests to be going on with, but they weren’t immediately mixable. The Coultards accepted the Wortleys as equals, but the Wortleys weren’t able to place the Coultards at all, having merely been told that he was a schoolmaster, which gave him no social status at all. Mrs. Coultard, well-dressed, stout, and cheery, bustled about helping Rhoda and calling her my dear (but in Scotch, which told one nothing), while Mr. Coultard referred to Frank and Howard as Sir (but in a cherubic and public-school sort of way, which told one even less).

Paragraph after paragraph, page after page – Murder after Christmas runs 350 pages, by the way – and this sheer volume of determined description becomes a weight. The author also never passes up an abstract adverb/adjective combination and often follows it with another dependent clause, adding ponderously to the sentence. Used sparingly, the indulgence wouldn’t add up to much, but as nearly every other dialogue line featured this addendum of overwriting, it became defeating for me. I give you one exhausting example: on a single page within Chapter 16, characters do not speak without having “explained firmly”, “ejaculated prefatorially”, “wheedled hastily, averting another gust of laughter”, and “appended cautiously, reviewing the episode and finding it mellowed with time; then hoiking his thoughts sternly back to present realities”.

I get it, you say (and rightly so). You don’t like his writing style. It’s not to your taste. So what else? As Martin Edwards and other reviewers note, Latimer’s references to British country life during wartime give the story a welcome angle of interest and lend an authentic anchor to an otherwise fantastical plotline. As a reader, though, it was frustrating to be able to guess the “twist” element and the underlying motive for the actions creating the “twist” almost as soon as poor Uncle Willie’s body is discovered. I claim no special perspicacity at all; indeed, I’m easily bamboozled by these things. But the author leads us there with the book’s title and then underlines the concept by having his characters discuss a certain pertinent issue again and again. At least Rupert Latimer cannot be accused of hiding clues or sidestepping fair play.

Such an early but strong suspicion of the solution meant that I felt consistently ahead of the ruminating Superintendent Culley, who pushes through 100 additional pages before arriving at the same conclusion. It gave me time to ponder another weakness in this lengthy mystery story: after Uncle Willie’s demise, Latimer never complicates his plot by adding another victim to the roster, thus injecting some energy into an otherwise flagging story. There is the offstage death of another relative – by natural causes or foul play? – and I did enjoy some of the singular clues, such as mince pies sown into a seat cushion and the disappearance of a detective novel called… Murder after Christmas. The story has potential, and at half its length and stripped of its jungle of prose it would be a fun seasonal read. Like those mince pies, I think it’s ultimately a matter of taste.

I received an advance reading copy of Murder after Christmas from NetGalley in exchange for an honest (perhaps too honest) review.

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MItchell Mystery Reading Group: April event announced!

Book Review: THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE (1966) by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

Book Review: THE DETECTIVE IS DEAD (1995) by Bill James

Book Review: MURDER AFTER CHRISTMAS (1944) by Rupert Latimer

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