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Book Review: MURDER AT THE 'VARSITY (1933) by Q. Patrick

2/21/2022

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Perhaps better known by its American title Murder at Cambridge, 1933’s Murder at the ‘Varsity is the third mystery novel to be published under the Q. Patrick name. It is a breezy and enjoyable fair-play affair, even as its central puzzle – who shot exaggeratedly Teutonic student Julius Baumann in his room and made it look like suicide? – is not especially confounding. Curtis Evans at The Passing Tramp has sorted out the authorship of the many books written as Q. Patrick, Patrick Quentin, and Jonathan Stagge and marks ‘Varsity as a solo effort by Rickie Webb when he was between writing partners. (Webb wrote the first two with Martha Mott Kelley and would write the next entry, S.S. Murder, with Mary Louise White [Aswell].)

So it seems fitting that this story is narrated by Hilary Fenton, an American male who observes the British college environment with an outsider’s delight akin to an anthropologist. I suspect that Webb was more at home in England than his protagonist here: while the author was born in Somerset and moved to the United States when he was twenty-five, the fictional Fenton is a Yankee abroad. The book boasts a four-page glossary that defines “some of the local colloquialisms and other quasi-technical terms” to bring the uninitiated up to speed. A gyp, we learn from this addendum (although it is also clear in context), is “a male college servant assigned to take care of a certain set of rooms or the rooms on one particular staircase”. And in this story, there is a lot going on in those rooms and on those staircases.

But it is in an ordinary lecture hall that young Fenton first spots his romantic ideal, Camilla Lathrop. He spends the early chapters learning her identity and stage managing another encounter. Fenton also spots her – or thinks he spots her – on the landing outside Baumann’s room on the stormy night of the murder, and it is from a muddled sense of chivalry that Fenton hides evidence that might point to her at the crime scene. He launches his own amateur investigation, all in the name of clearing Camilla, and a second murder at the college builds to a tea party with the Don where one cup is laced with strychnine.



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I found the style and pacing of Murder at the ‘Varsity agreeable, although other readers might describe Hilary Fenton’s conversational, even chatty narration and the wooing of his inamorata as elements that detract in a mystery tale. The story is decently paced, and if the college setting (despite its definitions) is not quite as engagingly built as the ant’s-nest world found in the previous year’s Murder at the Women’s City Club, it is a more cohesive experience than the Q. Patrick debut title, Cottage Sinister.

The glossary also informs me that ‘Varsity is “simply an abbreviation of the word University” that has “no athletic or other sinister significance”. This is useful to know, especially when reading a book with an uncertain word in the very title, such as Obelists or Furlong. 

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Creating greater cognitive dissonance for a reader, perhaps, are the sometimes surprising illustrations of characters that might accompany a Golden Age mystery story. I discovered that the U.S. edition by Farrar & Rinehart features this tableau of its cast, an artist’s rendering that was at odds with the characters as I had imagined them. In quarter profile, the exuberant Hilary Fenton looks like a middle-aged village doctor, while rugged athlete Stuart Somerville reminds me of a young Brian Dennehy. To credit the tableau, I will add that there is an implicit clue to the killer in the caricatures, if only you know where to look. 

Murder at Cambridge ('rah 'rah 'Varsity) is available in the UK through Ostara Publishing and available as an eBook in the U.S. through Mysterious Press/Open Road Media.
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Entrees and Side Dishes

2/13/2022

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Life seems best when you're able to serve up both a main course and a variety of side dishes. Not only does that provide variety at the table, but you are bound to receive a more nutritious meal because of the choices.

Extending that metaphor, it seems like life will be more appetizing if I don't focus on one pursuit to the exclusion of others, but if I agree to sample new dishes as they become offered to me. Time to extend my tastes and challenge my pallette!

Best wishes and Bon Appétit to all the gourmets and gourmands out there. 
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FAR AWAY THOUGHTS

2/12/2022

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Life seems to be pulling me in multiple directions these days. Some of this has to do with the chasing of goals, other times it feels like external forces are trying to push us onto one path over others.

2022 is shaping up to be a reassessment year: thinking back to the many past accomplishments (such as a teaching opportunity at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, whose campus is pictured above) and looking forward with excitement to the many opportunities to come.

Indeed, a lot seems in flux but rife for potential. Pursuit of a new job has been in progress for a few months, and I am starting to return to the society found in theater, academics, and, well, society. So I am cautiously optimistic, and I am excited to find a satisfying path in an increasingly divided and fractious world. 
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Book Review: VEGETABLE DUCK (1944) by John Rhode

2/8/2022

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Of the 80+ books I managed to read last year, the majority were from authors of classic detective fiction and five of them were penned by the prolific Cecil John Charles Street. Under the pseudonyms of John Rhode and Miles Burton, Street wrote (or, in the later half of his career, dictated) about 140 mysteries, and I find myself returning every couple months to try another title on this lengthy and impressive list. Why do I keep traveling these Rhodes, covering these Miles? What’s the attraction with this particular Street?
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With 1944’s Vegetable Duck, generally acclaimed as one of the author’s greatest successes, I am reminded again about the supreme comfortability generated when I read a story featuring Dr. Lancelot Priestley or Inspector Jimmy Waghorn. First, the writing is clear and forthright; Street’s prose stays away from any clutter, whether literary or introspective, that may slow the storytelling.

Next, the puzzle and its attendant questions – whodunit, how, and why – drive the plot with few, if any, detours or cul-de-sacs. Additionally but importantly, the crimes on display fully meet the spirit of classic detective fiction: they are usually curious and colorful, and the death of a character (and that character’s personality) is considered and dispassionate enough that the dispatching can be viewed as part of the puzzle and not as a grievous loss to humanity. In short, the Rhode and Burton stories are often extremely pleasing examples of the genre, comfortable and competent and very easy to process and enjoy.
 
There is another admirable asset on display in Vegetable Duck that kept this reader engaged and turning the pages. As mentioned, the inciting puzzle at the start of the story is specific and central: how was Letty Fransham fatally poisoned during dinner, and who is responsible? But the author quickly provides multiple related mysteries, equally intriguing, that will help answer these questions and that need to be investigated on their own merits. And Street weaves his principal and supporting puzzle threads masterfully throughout the tale. Who provided a mysterious phone message that called husband Charles Fransham away just before dinner was served? What connection might the country shooting death of Mrs. Fransham’s brother years earlier (with fellow hunter Charles a prime suspect) have to the poisoning? And who has been sending crude letters to Charles promising revenge for the brother’s death? Could it mean that it was Charles and not his wife who was the intended victim?
 
All of these tangential mysteries pop up in the book’s first chapters, with more taking shape as the story continues and another murder is committed. The most celebrated aspect of Vegetable Duck is the clever method employed to saturate a marrow with digitalis, but its brilliance in revelation is dulled somewhat because the enigma is not teased or solved through reader-collected clues. Instead, it’s presented as a show-and-tell demonstration by Dr. Priestley in Chapter 12, and thus takes on the quality of a lecture instead of an intellectual question for the reader to pursue. The many other clues that line Duck’s garden path –from a belated letter in the post that might have rescued Letty Fransham from her deadly dinner to a disguised visitor to that Mundesley Mansions flat days earlier – are relevant and fair-play, and their contributions give the plot a satisfying and propulsive fullness.
 
What’s more, Street incorporates elements of one of the most perplexing true-crime stories ever told, the 1931 murder of Julia Wallace in her home. According to his testimony, a phone call from a stranger arranging an after-hours business meeting with William Herbert Wallace led him on a fruitless search for an address that didn’t exist. Upon returning home, he recruited a neighbor to help him with a front door that would not open. They found Julia Wallace dead by the hearth, her head battered and lying on her husband’s raincoat. The case seems to turn on the strange summons that got William out of the apartment: if the call was genuine, who would have arranged this? Or was the message – taken down the day before by a fellow member at Wallace’s chess club and given to him – from Wallace himself, setting up an alibi so he could commit murder? That alluringly mysterious phone call clearly intrigued the author; he used the concept here and in his later novel The Telephone Call (1948).

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And if you are not from the United Kingdom and wonder about the book’s curious name and this era-specific recipe (and even what a marrow is), I am happy to share my findings. It turns out that vegetable duck need not contain duck; it is instead the filling and baking of minced meat inside a hollowed-out marrow. A marrow is similar to a zucchini, but larger with stripes and a thicker skin. Get yourself a lovely Churchyard Salad courtesy of Malcom Torrie to accompany, and John Rhode’s Vegetable Duck will surely be satisfying, if lethal. In the U.S., Dodd, Mead & Company published the book under the rather generic and not very apposite title Too Many Suspects as part of their Red Badge Mystery series a year later.
 
TomCat reminds me that botanical shenanigans can also be found in The Man Who Grew Tomatoes by Gladys Mitchell in his Duck review at Beneath the Stains of Time. Other blogs that have sampled this John Rhode dish include The Grandest Game in the World, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Martin Edwards’ Crime Writing Blog, The Passing Tramp, and Pretty Sinister Books.

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