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April 2021 Mitchell Mystery Reading Group event: SUNSET OVER SOHO

3/4/2021

I am pleased to announce the next Mitchell Mystery Reading Group title! This April, I will moderate weekly discussions of Gladys Mitchell’s moody 1943 wartime mystery, Sunset over Soho. This is currently one of the author’s more elusive books -- translation: out of print -- but when I asked the site subscribers, most of those interested in taking part said they have or will be able to obtain a copy. (Apologies to those who said they will need to wait until the next group reading this winter.) American Kindle owners can download the ebook from Amazon inexpensively, but print editions are costly to obtain.

Sunset over Soho has long been an enticing title to revisit, and I have been meaning for years to take another look. If you would like to be part of the discussion over the month of April, I ask readers to please send me your observations (e.g., a couple paragraphs of observations or opinion) for a targeted group of chapters each Tuesday, and I will curate, assemble, and share them in a post by that weekend on this www.jasonhalf.com blog. My email is jason@jasonhalf.com .

Many intriguing conversations have resulted from previous group title readings, and there is much to discuss with this one. You can view past blog entries by clicking on the Mitchell Mystery Reading Group link in the right side Categories column accompanying this post.

Let’s look at Sunset over Soho using this reading schedule:

TUES. APRIL 6 – Comments due for Chapter 1 “Blitz” through Chapter 6 “Mermaid”
TUES. APRIL 13 – Comments due for Chapter 7 “Fugitive” through Chapter 12 “Tryst”
TUES. APRIL 20 – Comments due for Chapter 13 “Castaway” through Chapter 18 “Angels”
TUES. APRIL 27 – Comments due for Chapter 19 “Prodigal” through Chapter 23 “Meeting”

Of course, readers are welcome to read ahead, but please make notes of future chapters and send those comments on the appropriate week. And if you would rather read along with us but not send in weekly comments, that’s fine too!

Let me know if you have any questions. I look forward to revisiting this Mrs. Bradley mystery, and I promise that December’s chosen title will be one that is currently in print and available to all!

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Book Review: THE Z MURDERS (1932) by J. Jefferson Farjeon

2/28/2021

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Richard Temperley arrives at London’s Euston Station in the “cold grey hour… the tail-end of a tired blackness.” Looking for a place to spend the pre-dawn hours before the city awakens, he chooses the smoking lounge of a nearby hotel on a porter’s advice. The choice is fateful on two counts: there he will first glimpse a lovely young woman, and there a fellow train passenger will be shot in an armchair, with a strange metal “Z” found beside him. Detective-Inspector James interviews Temperley, who was dozing before the fire at the time of the murder, and Temperley finds in the room – and decides not to tell the police about – the mystery woman’s abandoned handbag. Instead, he visits her address, and the chase across England begins: Temperley in search of Sylvia Wynne, who seems frightened and may be involved; and D-I James in search of them both. Also en route is a criminal with a chilling plan and a collection of metal Zeds to distribute.

I found The Z Murders to be great, outsize fun, but puzzle purists should note that we are now in breathless thriller territory rather than keeping to the manicured lawns of ratiocinative mystery fiction. Farjeon backloads his plot points so the reader understands the situation only in the book’s final third. There are no clues to gather, as the killer’s motivation and Sylvia’s role in the affair aren’t really seeded ahead of the reveal. That didn’t matter to me, since the journey itself is lively (deadly?) and the author manages to keep the reader, with Temperley as the P.O.V. proxy, uncertain of where the dangers lie and of whom to trust. There are elements here that compare favorably with John Buchan’s chase narrative in The 39 Steps as well as another letter-centric crime spree title, X v. Rex by Philip MacDonald (writing as Martin Porlock).

One has to admire J. Jefferson Farjeon’s full-hearted effort to make The Z Murders appealing to his contemporary readership by offering something for everyone. The protagonist’s actions place chivalry above all as Temperley tries to rescue the Damsel from the Danger that stalks her. (The burgeoning romance between the two is as inevitable as the villain’s comeuppance.) The antagonist, when revealed, is a convincing caricature of Evil personified, with a backstory of pain and criminality that leaves him irredeemable and deadly. In this entity, whose physique is an extension of his hatred for mankind, Farjeon presages some of the more flamboyant henchmen one finds within the James Bond franchise.

So there’s young-couple romance, snarling villainy, a well-compressed race against time to prevent more murders, and a world where (at least for a time) we are not sure where the next deadly peril may arise. In his introduction to the British Library Crime Classics reprint edition, Martin Edwards writes (not dismissively) that “the plotting is melodramatic, and the portrayal of the principal villain lurid, while there are regular cliff-hangers similar to those in the Paul Temple stories of Francis Durbridge.” About those cliff-hangers: the author generates some very effective suspense scenes, with one of the best occurring midway through the tale. While Richard and Sylvia have enlisted a comically reluctant cab driver to bring them to the next destination, the killer has forced a more unscrupulous cabbie to make the same journey. The confrontation between the two men in that second car – and especially the driver’s dawning realization of his fare’s identity and how much danger he is in – builds to an unnerving climax that resonates through the following chapters.

For me, The Z Murders proved an exciting and entertaining early example of the serial killer thriller plotline. There is the caveat for the mystery-minded that it is not whodunnit? but whathappensnext?, and readers interested in that second type of storyline will have much to chase after here. Other reviews are found at my colleagues’ sites Classic Mysteries, crossexaminingcrime, Pretty Sinister Books, and In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel.

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Book Review: THE HOUND OF DEATH (1944) by James Corbett

2/21/2021

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Should I be foolhardy enough to read and review another James Corbett novel in the future, let me provide context regarding where I am now in that valiant battle. I have just finished The Hound of Death, a mystery-ish thriller published in 1944 by Herbert Jenkins Limited. Mr. Jenkins may well have had a masochistic streak, as he and/or his company released all of Corbett’s print titles on an unsuspecting British public between 1929 and 1950. My first James Corbett reading experience involved his first published book, The Merrivale Mystery, and it was an unforgettable assault on the senses. You can read my review here, or you can track the book down and be buffeted yourself by the author’s complete incompetence in all matters of character, dialogue, prose, and plot. Suffice to say, after The Merrivale Mystery it has taken me more than a year to recover and check in once more with this remarkable author; The Hound of Death is my second timorous visit to Corbett-land.

It is important to note that 15 years and an impressive 30 published titles in between (!) separate the two books. This Hound, it turns out, could almost have been composed by a completely different writer, one who actually understands the rudiments of narrative structure and has a working command of the English language. Unlike The Merrivale Mystery, where 98% of the story seems to take place in the same manor house study and the chapter rhythms repeat with the endless consistency of a Mobius strip, this later story employs varied settings, a plotline that actually builds to a climax, and characters who, while not exactly dimensional, are at least sketched in with enough detail so the reader can tell them apart. The Hound of Death isn’t a great mystery, but it is a functional entry within the genre, and that alone places it leagues above Corbett’s questionable début.

But then, I shouldn’t be too surprised: one would have to actively work at one’s ignorance to keep writing and still maintain the level of ineptness on display at chez Merrivale. I wondered why William F. Deeck, who was so delighted with/repulsed by this author’s skill set, primarily quoted from only four early titles when making his case for (or against) Corbett. I know now that it is likely because the truly so-bad-it’s-good material is delivered early in the author’s career. And that’s understandable, if a little disappointing, since Corbett can be positively inspired when he reaches his unparalleled heights of poor writing.

Here, we start with Detective-Inspector Jimmy Brigg, a “burly man” with “a fighting chin”, “whimsical grey eyes”, and “strong, capable fingers”, surveying the grounds at the greyhound track. He is collecting information from the bookies about Colonel Trevor, a racing regular who recently killed himself with a revolver. A mysterious dog named “Black Shadow” runs and wins a race, and moments later a man collapses and dies. The astute detective notices there is a recent scratch on the dead man’s hand.

A journalist acquaintance of Brigg’s named Cardew (whose Christian name is also Jimmy for some reason) smells a story and sticks to Brigg, who chooses to give the reporter access to the investigation. During the case, Cardew meets the lovely Cora Dainton, the deceased Colonel Trevor’s niece, and soon Cora is menaced by a “Hindu” in a turban, while the gallant Cardew must fend off a bedroom cobra attack by shooting the snake, which was clearly intended for the ingénue. DI Brigg also keeps his whimsical grey eye on a night club singer, an entertainment manager, a spiritualist who owns the black greyhound, and a pair of on-the-lam racetrack gamblers, and by the book’s climactic séance scene (along with three pages of block explanation from Brigg to tie everything up) the detective has caught his criminal and the reporter has acquired a fiancée.

All in all, comprehensible if disposable genre fare, and Corbett’s approach is suitably melodramatic and stereotypical to make it all feel rather artificial. Here and there, I still found examples of the memorable floridness and not-quite-right wording of the maestro’s early works, as with this description:

Than the hard-boiled Detective-Inspector Brigg, C.I.D., New Scotland Yard, there was no one more prosaic. And as for Jimmy Cardew, wide-ranging reporter, blessed with both innate and hardly-acquired good horse-sense – his very profession had made him more than ordinarily skeptical. Yet both men experienced at the same time a sudden chill, a dampening, deadening influence that seemed to lay a clammy hand upon them. “Haunted!” said Cardew beneath his breath, and strove to laugh at himself, but his forced mirth made him uneasy. Brigg stopped and looked at him curiously.

“Did you say anything, Jimmy?”

“I did not.” Cardew was terse. “I was thinking, instead.”

“Interesting,” said Inspector Brigg.

I love the perfect absurdity of “hardly-acquired good horse-sense”. There’s also the joy of seeing the author sidestep a criminous detail that would have been worth the research to a lesser (or greater) mystery writer. Here’s how Jimmy Corbett handles it:

The pathologists had got it at last – an obscure Afghan poison with some unholy name that he couldn’t pronounce. A clear case of murder, if ever there was one… The effect of this blasted stuff, if one could read between the lines of the mess of high falutin’ technical language was that it brought about an intense depression in the mind of the victim. First, of course, the poison worked its way into the blood-stream via a scratch on the surface of the skin; then it gradually had an insidious and deadening effect on the nerves.

Oh, those awful, unpronounceable Afghan poisons. Actually, Corbett has graduated from the foundational writing failures evidenced in The Merrivale Mystery to some more subtle advanced composition problems, and that is progress. Notice the “blasted” pathology report filled with “high falutin’ technical language”: Corbett uses a mode called third-person limited omniscient throughout The Hound of Death. This means that the reader is aware of the scene character’s perspective and thoughts, even as the narrative stays away from “I” and remains in the third-person. So it is Brigg’s frustration with the technical aspects of the report, and we view it through his eyes. The only problem is that the author sometimes jumps mid-scene to follow another character, and the abrupt point-of-view change can cause a mild literary whiplash.

In Chapter Ten, for example, we spend three pages looking at the scene as Cardew, who is on the search for Jackson, one of the missing gamblers. Then Cardew meets Jackson and promptly gets punched, and when “the ace London reporter of the Worldwide” drops to the ground, we are suddenly in Jackson’s head, “glanc[ing] down ruefully” and privy to all of Jackson’s thoughts. It’s a bit of a jolt, especially as we have never previously experienced Jackson’s point of view in the story. Conventional narrative rules would suggest ending the scene and starting clean with a new character to avoid this awkward switcheroo.

But who am I to complain? I made it through another JC thriller, betting on The Hound of Death. And if it didn’t exactly win the long shot, it also didn’t stumble spectacularly from the moment it left the starting gate. All in all, not bad for a day at the James Corbett races.

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Book Review: THE IVORY GRIN (1952) by Ross MacDonald

1/27/2021

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For anyone searching for a representative Lew Archer mystery from Ross MacDonald, for a title that showcases the author’s considerable literary merits and shows just how masterfully he could plot and write, one need look no further than 1952’s The Ivory Grin. Speaking personally, I find it a stronger and more intriguing book than the three novels preceding Grin, although they each have much to recommend. This one starts as so many do, with a woman who can’t (or shouldn’t) be trusted visiting Archer’s office and commissioning him to find somebody. In this case, the petitioner is a brassy nouveau riche who wants the private investigator to find a black maid who, she alleges, absconded with some jewelry. Archer sets out to tail Lucy Champion, an attractive young African-American with a nursing certification, and soon discovers that there is more to the story than missing bracelets. The detective finds Lucy in a motel room, dead on the floor, and the case soon takes on more suspects as Archer works to link the recent murder with the prior disappearance of Charles Singleton, a war veteran and heir to a considerable fortune.

MacDonald is known for his complicated narratives and wry humor, and both are to be found in abundance here. What I find admirable is that this tale’s plot is indeed complex, but just labyrinthine enough to keep the reader always attentive but never actually lost along the way. One scene propels the P.I. into his next encounter, which allows the story to unfold at a steady and carefully crafted clip. With Grin especially, the author achieves a highly satisfying symmetry by the plotline’s conclusion, with character actions and reactions creating a tragic inevitability. There’s also a triangle with a fourth character at its apex that gives the outcome a geometric neatness; to say more, or to identify who occupies which corner, would spoil the surprises in store.

But what elevates The Ivory Grin from its pulp origins into a more literary arena is MacDonald’s no-nonsense observations and descriptions that provide a very believable snapshot of American race relations in the early 1950s. There’s no preaching here, and no didactic moral, just dozens of details: the casually dismissive sheriff of a young black woman’s murder; Archer’s belief (via evidence and logic) that Lucy’s boyfriend Alex did not kill her, even though he fled from the scene; client Una's initial accusation of theft, meant to be taken without question by the upper-class accuser; and the cold truth that Lucy’s death is ultimately insignificant to the cast of wealthy white people who have larger, class-rooted secrets to conceal. The story may have been written by a white man and might feature a white protagonist (and ultimately tell a white story), but Ross MacDonald is intensely interested in exploring this culture of double standards. If he wasn’t, he would not have bothered to deliver consistently illuminating descriptions in his prose. Take this sketch of a "beautiful" city divided by race and class:

The highway was a rough social equator bisecting the community into lighter and darker hemispheres. Above it in the northern hemisphere lived the whites who owned and operated the banks and churches, clothing and grocery and liquor stores. In the smaller section below it, cramped and broken up by ice plants, warehouses, laundries, lived the darker ones, the Mexicans and Negroes who did most of the manual work in Bella City and its hinterland.

And in the next paragraph, the author describes the denizens of East Hidalgo Street:

Housewives black, brown, and sallow were hugging parcels and pushing shopping carts on the sidewalk. Above them a ramshackle house, with paired front windows like eyes demented by earthquake memories, advertised Rooms for Transients on one side, Palm Reading on the other. A couple of Mexican children, boy and girl, strolled hand in hand in a timeless noon on their way to an early marriage.

That last line is a sweet, poetic turn of phrase, made nicer because it allows a moment of happiness to visit a few souls from a population otherwise defined by toil and troubled living. Understand that The Ivory Grin isn’t a racial or sociocultural polemic; it is first and foremost an absorbing mystery, well worth finding and experiencing seventy years later. It shows a hard-boiled crime writer at the top of his game, and gives the always introspective but never opinionated Lew Archer a reason to be an anthropologist just as much as a gumshoe. It is Archer’s, and MacDonald’s, keen understanding of people and their often contrary, petty, and pitiable ways that allows him to solve the mystery while recognizing enough of humanity (in Lucy, in Alex) to not give up on the human race for good. Highly recommended.

Tracy K. has reviewed this title over at her great blog, Bitter Tea and Mystery.

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April 2021 Mitchell Mystery Reading Group event: SUNSET OVER SOHO

Book Review: THE Z MURDERS (1932) by J. Jefferson Farjeon

Book Review: THE HOUND OF DEATH (1944) by James Corbett

Book Review: THE IVORY GRIN (1952) by Ross MacDonald

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