JASON HALF : writer
  • Home
  • Full-length Plays
    • The Community Play
    • Kate and Comet
    • Sundial
    • Tulip Brothers
  • Short Plays
    • Among the Oats
    • Holly and Mr. Ivy
    • Locked Room Misery
  • Screenplays
    • The Ballad of Faith Divine
    • My Advice
    • Finders
  • Fiction
  • Blog

Book Review: MINUTE FOR MURDER (1947) by Nicholas Blake

1/26/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Until a recent reading remedied it, I had only read Minute for Murder once years and years ago, but the attributes of this mystery’s clever plotting and balanced structure had stayed with me. True, I could no longer recall the details, but the cleanness and unity of the story impressed me: what I remembered was a murder mystery where the detective drained the pool of suspects from six people to four to three, until just two remained to face each other in a deadly standoff. Revisiting the tale, I found that these satisfying elements were still there, and that the book remains (for me) one of the author’s best crime stories.

Knowing that the 16 detective novels featuring Nigel Strangeways were penned by British poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis as a way to generate income, I’m always more surprised than I should be that the author crafted his mysteries with such careful attention to detail and fair-play vigor. His best puzzle plots are as devious and deliberate as anything Agatha Christie would create, filled with notably individual and occasionally sensational crime scenarios and employing a cast of characters built to keep armchair sleuths guessing as the chapters flash by.

In short, the best mysteries published under the name Nicholas Blake play the game as spiritedly and as soundly as anything in Golden Age detective fiction. Day-Lewis wasn’t cynically churning out books within a popular, populist genre just to collect a paycheck; he seems genuinely interested in playing the game, using all his skills and talents to spin his stories and beguile his readers. Minute for Murder, with its intriguing office setting, colorful cast, tactile clues, and active logic intermixed, is an excellent example of the author’s abilities.

We are in the days following the allied victory in Europe, and the Ministry of Morale where Strangeways works will be dissolving soon. He has come to know his wartime colleagues well, and the Visual Propaganda Division is expecting a visit from Charles Kennington, a chatty extrovert who managed to ensnare a top Nazi official while fighting abroad. Charles brings a grim souvenir back with him and passes it around at the reunion party: an intact cyanide capsule to be hidden in a spy’s mouth and used in case of capture. Cups of coffee are passed around, and beautiful secretary Nita Prince chokes and dies after a fateful sip. The capsule can’t be found after a search, and Nigel worries that the young woman’s death may only be the beginning of a dangerous crime spree.

He is soon proven right: another office worker is stabbed while working late and a deliberate blaze destroys a photograph room containing negatives of thousands of classified pictures. As the criminal acts multiply, Strangeways must find answers to several key questions. Was the secretary the intended victim or was the poison meant for another person at the party? Was the fire meant to destroy incriminating evidence, and if so, what? And how to untangle the relationships of people connected to Nita Prince: the pretty secretary was having an affair with department director Jimmy Lake, yet the man is married to Alice Kennington, Charles’s sister. Ministry copy writer Brian Ingle was also in love with Nita, but he knew that she would never break with Jimmy, even if Jimmy could ultimately never leave Alice for her...

Picture
There are many incidents and events, and many plots and subplots, in Minute for Murder. While this creates a busy (and at times breathless) story, it never becomes overcomplicated or spins out of control. Some of this management is due to the aforementioned logic of it all – when a new action appears, it is handily examined and placed into context by the author through his detective. In that regard, Day-Lewis is an excellent organizer and presenter; it is not difficult to imagine how effective he was in his real-life wartime position as publications editor within the Ministry of Information. That experience provided the background that he utilizes so well here, creating a fictional Ministry of Morale to stage his story of murder. (“The government department in which the action of this book takes place never did, or could, exist,” writes Blake in an introductory disclaimer. He adds amusingly, “Whereas every disagreeable, incompetent, flagitious or homicidal type in it is a figment of my imagination, all the charming, efficient and noble characters are drawn straight from life.”)

The winnowing of viable suspects from many to few to one, a trait mentioned at the top, still occurs, even if it’s not quite as geometrically ordered as I remembered it. This is also one of the best middle-period Blake books, of kindred spirit with End of Chapter (1957) and The Widow’s Cruise (1959), later entries that show the author’s ongoing interest in crafting engaging and viable fair-play puzzle stories. Among frequent readers and reviewers of classic mystery fiction, Minute for Murder has a reputation as a very good, if not stellar, series entry. I think it still satisfies and plays the game with admirable success.

Additional reviews can be found from Tracy at Bitter Tea and Mystery and Nick at The Grandest Game in the World.

0 Comments

Book Review: UNNATURAL ENDS (2022) by Christopher Huang

1/17/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
There is much to admire in Christopher Huang’s new mystery novel Unnatural Ends, available in May from the writer- and reader-focused publishing group Inkshares. Featuring Gothic gloom, a fair-play murder mystery, and a twisted history of psychological abuse within a family, there should be something to appeal to almost all readers of crime fiction. What impressed me the most, though, wasn’t the plot or the atmosphere but the author’s excellent attention to the details.

Three adopted siblings return to the chilly landscape of North Yorkshire upon learning of their father’s death. All three have proven themselves in places purposely far away: oldest brother Alan Linwood is an archaeologist, studying civilizations exotic and now extinct; Roger is a brilliant engineer, his talents spent perfecting innovations of air and road travel; and Caroline is a journalist in Paris, covering international news. Each of the Linwood siblings should be well-equipped to investigate their father’s murder, and in fact that is what Sir Lawrence Linwood commands that they do in his will. Should he meet an unnatural end, whomever of the three finds Father’s killer will inherit the ancient family home.

Huang divides his book into multiple third-person limited POV chapters, with each character providing a piece of the puzzle, either through experiences occurring in the story’s present time (April 1921) or years earlier (in 1904, when the three siblings were children and their personalities were being formed through internal logic and external pressures). This back-and-forth temporal structure was the primary reason why Unnatural Ends never really gained momentum for me: the present didn’t have much urgency when past events are given equal weight and page time.

There are two other elements that kept me reading more as an objective observer than as an engaged participant. First, in building his cast and shaping his story, Huang has set himself a paradoxically difficult task. We are supposed to invest in the investigation of Sir Lawrence’s murder, but from the start (and supported by each family member’s past and present experiences) Sir Lawrence is a cruel despot who enjoys making others suffer and bend to his will. His death by violence – bludgeoned by a spiked mace – is fitting, to say the least. While there is the dubious impetus of inheriting a family estate that is as cold and inhospitable as Father himself, there is no initial reason, whether rivalry, curiosity, or justice, for Alan, Roger, or Caroline to seek answers. Sagely, Huang soon gives them appropriate motivation: investigating the murder will provide answers to their own identities. It’s not Father who needs liberating but the adult children who can finally break free. 

Picture
Granted, a mystery story does not need an alliance of sympathy with the victim to be effective. And the other characters do become less archetypal and more individual, but the journey is a long one. At 450 pages, Unnatural Ends needs its share of twists and turns, and on paper they are there. The problem is that the reader can get ahead of the plot, especially if one incorporates the detective fiction reader’s maxim to not take the truth as it is presumed to be. The author is scrupulously fair with his clues, and I found them easy to collect along the way. The clueing of culprit(s), motive, and mechanics is largely in place by the book’s midpoint, which is when I connected the dots. I then needed to wait for Inspector Mowbray and the sibling sleuths to catch up, and that – along with the vacillating between present and past – diminished the journey.

It is still a story worth recommending. The book’s prose is excellently crafted and presented; when it comes to historical details and literary syntax, the author rarely sounds a sour note or takes a wrong step. He is particularly good at using specifics to make his characters’ world believable and engaging. He describes the Yorkshire moors and the family’s looming stone castle, with its draughty servant passageways and its cliff-hugging sheer stone facade, in convincing sensory detail. The siblings bring elements of their global lives back with them: engineer Roger has tried to partner with Sopwith Aviation while Alan sees parallels between his native landscape and his vistas at Machu Picchu. The historical context is impeccably researched and vividly used; along with Huang’s confident prose, the contextual details make the book a success.

The author’s previous novel, 2018’s A Gentleman’s Murder, is also set in 1920s England and appears to offer a similar winning mix of history and mystery. Unnatural Ends has a U.S. release date of May 10. I received an advance reading copy through NetGalley in exchange for a forthright review.

0 Comments

BLACK CAT WEEKLY - Current issue features my short story!

1/9/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
What a lovely way to kick off the New Year! 

Author and editor Barb Goffman contacted me a short while ago and asked for permission to feature a short story of mine, the Maine-set "The Last Ferry", in an upcoming issue of Black Cat Weekly. The e-zine is a marvelous mix of science fiction and mystery stories, and features both short pieces and two novels in this issue. 

It is always exciting and humbling to have one's work singled out by another writer, and it certainly doesn't happen every day. I'm especially honored that the person taking an interest is Barb Goffman, whose lively crime fiction stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and scores of anthologies and themed collections.

Readers can purchase individual issues of Black Cat Weekly or subscribe for the year. "The Last Ferry" is featured in Issue #19, and you can visit the BCW site by following this link.

0 Comments

Book Review: CONFESS, FLETCH (1976) by Gregory McDonald

1/3/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
To start off the New Year, I wanted to revisit a book I had read and greatly enjoyed just a short while ago: Confess, Fletch, Gregory McDonald’s second entry in his amusing and energetic series featuring journalist Irwin Maurice Fletcher. In many ways, Confess, Fletch improves on the eponymous first book: the crime story is twistier, the plot doesn’t signal its destination before arriving, and McDonald provides two memorably engaging supporting characters for his quick-witted antihero to joust with.

The author wastes no time in holding his protagonist’s feet to the fire. On Page One, Fletch arrives in Boston from Italy and finds the body of an attractive but dead young woman in the apartment he has been loaned for his visit. The victim was a stewardess from the airline Fletch had used and the murder weapon turns out to be a whiskey bottle, one that sports Fletch’s fingerprints due to a post-discovery drink as he waited for the police. The journalist, incidentally, uses the precinct’s business number to report the murder, much to the desk sergeant’s irritation. Their exchange offers an excellent example of why McDonald’s writing is so consistently enjoyable. Fletch, who should be feeling nervous as a murder suspect, shows a likeable grace and humor under pressure:

“This is the Police Business phone.”
“Isn’t murder police business?”
“You’re supposed to call Emergency with a murder.”
“I think the emergency is over.”
“I mean, I don’t even have a tape recorder on this phone.”
“So talk to your boss. Make a recommendation.”

Note too that Gregory McDonald, a career journalist himself, pares his writing down to the bare minimum, with short, staccato sentences and snappy dialogue runs that keep the reader zipping through the short chapters. The lines above are representative of the text to be found throughout the Fletch books, with much more white space per page than your typical crime story. Such brevity has its rewards, and despite its multiple plot threads and incidents, Confess, Fletch is remarkably lean yet feels paradoxically rich as a genre reading experience.

As it turns out, the body in the apartment is just the beginning. I.M. Fletcher has a fiancée back in Italy, Angela, and her father, Count Clementi De Grassi, has been abducted and held for ransom by kidnappers. Months earlier, the family’s art collection was stolen, and Fletch has been tasked with trying to track down the missing paintings. One artwork, a presumed Picasso nicknamed Vino, Viola, Mademoiselle (“What else would you call it?” asks Fletch) has shown up for sale through a Boston broker named Ronald Horan, and this prompts Fletch to investigate whether the art collection is intact and who might be holding the paintings.

Enter Boston police inspector Francis Xavier Flynn, a deceptively benign man with the Irish gift for turning a phrase and a keen interest in others, both the guilty and the relatively innocent. Flynn is a wonderful creation, his quietly poetic outlook on life serving as a perfect complement to Fletch’s more obviously ironic worldview. Flynn tows around a long-suffering sergeant he calls Grover (but whose name is not Grover) and asks Fletch, gently but persistently, whether he is ready to confess to Ruth Fryer’s murder. And yet Flynn doesn’t arrest I.M. Fletcher, even though the evidence is stacked against him. A few too many details – not least of which being Fletch’s counterintuitive actions if he were actually a murderer – just don’t add up.

Starting with a book called Flynn published in 1977, McDonald featured Francis Xavier in four stories of his own, and I will certainly track down these titles and enjoy the continuing adventures of this unique Boston homicide detective. It’s not just the droll dialogue that makes F.X. Flynn so memorable; even as a supporting player here, the author gives his humble cop opportunities to surprise and charm the reader. In Confess, Fletch, two scenes stand out as moments that humanize and define a character who, in less artful hands, could have easily been a tired Irish stereotype. Frank’s surprising story of his teenage years spent as an enthusiastic youth in Nazi Germany and the charming moment when Fletch attends a family music concert in the Flynn living room are true highlights, the scenes atypical perhaps but organic and perfectly pitched.

(One exchange I especially love occurs between Frank and his son after completing the rather arduous string quartet: “Da?” Todd said. “That should never have been in anything other than F Major.” “We all make mistakes,” said Flynn. “Even Beethoven. We all have our temporary madnesses.”)
Picture
The other character to make a memorable splash – for different reasons – is the larger-than-life Countess de Grassi, who descends upon her stepson-to-be in Boston and commandeers the apartment. Fiancée Angela can’t stand her stepmother, and both claim a right to the art collection despite a contested estate and the still-missing works. Sylvia is brash and manipulative, out to seduce Fletch – or, in her pronunciation, Flesh – so he can do her bidding. She is a lively comic creation, but that seduction and Fletch’s comic(?) defense that he was raped and powerless to refuse her advances lands uncomfortably, to say the least.

Indeed, the Fletch books are often problematical regarding the portrayal of women characters, whether it is the two alimony-hungry ex-wives he is constantly dodging in the début book or the protagonist’s willingness to use and discard a woman for a newspaper story, as he confesses to here in Confess, Fletch. Gregory McDonald may be writing characters for a male-driven (and presumably male-reading) mid-‘70s era, but the stereotyping is regrettable, considering the author is certainly capable of creating surprising people when he wants to. There is one female in the book who is written with sympathy and insight; surprisingly, it is Lucy Connors, the ex-wife of the man who owns the Boston apartment. Lucy recognized her lesbianism only after their disastrous marriage, and Fletch’s interview with her and her partner – in the guise of writing a discreet article for a tony magazine detailing her awakening while keeping her identity a secret – is handled perceptively. So the author can elevate women past comic harpies when he chooses to.

As I write this book review, the Internet tells me that a film adaptation of Confess, Fletch is in post-production and likely due out later this year. It is directed by Greg Mottola and will star John Hamm of Mad Men fame as the title character. The book offers an excellent story ready for the screen, so as long as the adaptation isn’t messed up thoroughly – with Hollywood, one never knows – it should be an enjoyable incarnation. Speaking of adapting the books, Chevy Chase was a logical choice for the pair of mid-‘80s movies, although the Fletch of McDonald’s stories is less shticky and more rounded (and also a more interesting person to be around). As for John Hamm, he seems miscast to me. At one time, Jason Sudeikis was rumored for the role, and I think he would have carried the perfect mix of general handsomeness, ingrained quick-wittedness, and most importantly a talent for comic line deliveries that would have fit Mr. I.M. Fletcher like a glove.

0 Comments

    BLOG

    Lots of book reviews and discussion of classic and contemporary mystery fiction. I welcome comments and continuing conversation.

    Subscribe below to receive updates!

    Subscribe

    Categories

    All
    19th Century Novels
    Andrew Garve
    Anne Morice
    Anthologies
    Anthony Boucher
    Appalachian Authors
    Bill James
    Book Review
    Catherine Dilts
    C. Daly King
    Craig Rice
    David Goodis
    E.C.R. Lorac / Carol Carnac
    Erle Stanley Gardner
    E.R. Punshon
    Freeman Wills Crofts
    French Authors
    George Bellairs
    George Milner
    Gladys Mitchell
    Golden Age Mystery
    Gregory McDonald
    Hardboiled Detectives
    Helen McCloy
    Henry Wade
    Herbert Adams
    Hugh Austin
    James Corbett
    J. Jefferson Farjeon
    John Bude
    John Rhode/Miles Burton
    Leo Bruce
    Maj Sjowall / Per Wahloo
    Margery Allingham
    Martin Edwards
    Michael Gilbert
    Michael Innes
    Mignon G. Eberhart
    Milward Kennedy
    Mitchell Mystery Reading Group
    New Fiction
    New Mystery
    Nicholas Blake
    Nicolas Freeling
    Noir
    Philip MacDonald
    Play Review
    Q. Patrick / Patrick Quentin
    Rex Stout
    Richard Hull
    Ross MacDonald
    Russian Authors
    Science Fiction
    Vernon Loder
    Vladimir Nabokov
    William L. DeAndrea
    Winifred Blazey
    Writing

    Mystery Fiction Sites
    -- all recommended ! --
    Ahsweetmysteryblog
    Beneath the Stains of Time
    Bitter Tea and Mystery
    Catherine Dilts - author
    Countdown John's Christie Journal
    Classic Mysteries
    Clothes in Books
    ​A Crime is Afoot
    Crossexaminingcrime
    Gladys Mitchell Tribute
    Grandest Game in the World
    In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel
    The Invisible Event
    Martin Edwards' Crime Writing Blog
    Mysteries Ahoy!
    Noirish
    The Passing Tramp
    Past Offences
    Pretty Sinister Books
    Tipping My Fedora
    

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015

    RSS Feed

Unless otherwise stated, all text content on this site is
​copyright Jason Half, 2023.