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Book Review: CASE WITHOUT A CORPSE (1937) by Leo Bruce

3/31/2017

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Picture1937 U.K. Cover
My second title to celebrate the year 1937 with Past Offences is also Leo Bruce’s second title to feature his amiable people’s policeman, Sergeant Beef. As provincial and solid as his name, Beef likes nothing more than a good game of competitive darts, preferably with a glass of beer standing nearby.

The previous year’s Case for Three Detectives is a minor classic of the satiric mystery genre, pitting the unassuming (and, by contrast, coarse) Beef against three caricatures of Brilliant Literary Sleuths, only to show them all up by the end. Case without a Corpse treads some of the same ground, but with somewhat diminishing returns.


The story’s clever premise proves to be its best feature: one blustery evening during a game of darts, a young man named Rogers enters the pub, gets the sergeant’s attention by stating, “I’ve come to give myself up. I’ve committed a murder,” and promptly dies after drinking from a bottle containing cyanide of potassium. This leaves Beef in a bit of a predicament. An examination shows fresh blood on Rogers’s sleeve, so the man appeared to have committed (or thought he had committed) a crime. But who is the victim, actual or intended? The answer proves oddly elusive.

There are some candidates, however. Rogers was seen by a witness with a young woman named Stella Smythe on the back of his motorcycle. Rogers had purchased a curious length of clothesline rope prior to the ride, and now the woman cannot be traced. A questionable acquaintance, Fairfax, has also disappeared, and a strange foreigner, perhaps “half-Indian”, had been spotted in the area, seemingly trailing Rogers on that fateful day. A search of the moors only turns up a scrap of burnt paper in the dead man’s handwriting, and the small-town sergeant reluctantly looks to the metropolitan police and the efficient figure of Scotland Yard’s Detective-Inspector Stute for help.

Leo Bruce – the pen name of Rupert Croft-Cooke – clearly enjoys exploring the comical possibilities of mystery fiction, almost equally in plot, character, and prose. Case without a Corpse has its healthy quota of lively, folksy villagers, even with Sergeant Beef excepted. Take this conversation between Stute and Mrs. Walker, the too-talkative owner of Rose Cottage where Stella Smythe had been staying:

“In the meantime, you had heard nothing of what had passed between them?”

“Certainly not. I never listen to other people’s conversation, besides the wall between the tea-room and the kitchen is too thick to hear anything and whenever I went into the room they shut up like deckchairs and waited till I’d shut the door before they went on with what they were saying.”

The story is narrated by an earnest (and often amused) mystery writer named Townsend, who is quite aware of his Watson status. Even more, Bruce folds in a few references to his puzzle-crafting colleagues and the genre itself, as with this exchange between Townsend and the urbane Detective-Inspector:
“Thank you so much,” I said, “for letting me come round with you to-day.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” [Stute] returned with something approaching a smile. “We’re used to that, you know. A crime wouldn’t be a crime nowadays without half a dozen of you literary people hanging about after it. Why only the other day… But perhaps I’d better not tell you about her. She’d put me in her new book. Good night.”

Intriguing to me in a way that perhaps the author had not intended was the contrast between the two detectives here. Stute – I would wager his middle initial is “A” – is presented in a surprisingly sympathetic light, considering that he exists to arrive at an incorrect solution before the stage is cleared for Beef to provide the proper one. Yet Detective-Inspector Stute is admirably competent, and manages to make all of the right steps regarding the gathering of evidence and the interrogation of suspects. While not exactly humble, he is also not conceited or a blindly bound apostle of his modern detection methods. It would be easy to cast him as the fatuous urban rival, contemptuous of Beef and his small-town ways, but Leo Bruce refrains from this, and the book is stronger for the choice.

Even with these strengths of tone and character, also present are weaknesses in plotting that might frustrate a constant reader of classic mysteries. GAD scholar Nicholas Fuller notes that Corpse has “one of those plots which hinge on the victim’s stupidity,” and indeed this is a point that feels particularly unsatisfying, sorely straining (if not entirely breaking) one’s suspension of disbelief.
Picture1937 U.S. Cover
The final actions of the hapless Rogers are quite incredible and there is a quaintly naïve subplot involving “drugs smuggling” that fails to convince. When you add in the fact that Beef’s damning evidence is a witness who just happened to overhear a criminal conversation (which is unknown to the reader until the dénouement), the tale feels a bit too wobbly for its own good.

Still, Leo Bruce’s comic touches make this a breezy read, and a curious one at that, with the failed detective pleasantly likeable and the successful sleuth not as well done as his name might imply.



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Book Review: THE CASE OF THE SEVEN OF CALVARY (1937) by Anthony Boucher

3/18/2017

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Picture
Part of the allure of the mystery genre is the game played between author and reader. One person tries to present a compelling and perplexing chain of events in a fair and surprising way, while the other actively tries to separate false clues from genuine ones and arrive at the solution before the fictional detective does. There is a lot of charm to this literary pas de deux, and it can be even more appealing when the writer takes up the challenge with a mischievous twinkle and chooses to consistently draw attention to the game being played. With The Case of the Seven of Calvary, Anthony Boucher presents a high-spirited story that manages to provide both a gentle parody of the genre and a satisfying fair-play puzzle.

Due to the amused self-awareness of Martin Lamb, the story’s Watson and the person with whom the reader is most aligned, Boucher’s winking tone could have overcorrected and turned the puzzle into a trifle or an insignificance, but he manages to avoid this problem. Frequent references are made to the traditional structure of mystery literature – and how the current plotline adheres to or veers from the familiar beats of detection – as well as the luminaries (authors and creations) of the time: Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellery Queen, and John Dickson Carr are mentioned, as well as Dr. Thorndyke, Roger Sheringham, Reggie Fortune and Philo Vance. For most mystery fans, the allusions will be more welcome than intrusive.

Boucher was a linguist and, later, a celebrated critic of crime fiction, and he manages to balance the academic setting of UC-Berkeley and a pontificating professor as detective (and expert in Sanskrit!) with an accessible murder mystery that, once the red herrings have been swept away, is not cluttered with clues involving specialized knowledge. I am not a fan of the mystery sub-genre where esoteric facts provide the critical link: “In classical Greek, the word for ‘radish’ is the same as your surname, ‘Rodotheos’, and by clutching the relish tray the victim was naming his murderer!” Boucher does not attempt such a stunt here, thankfully.

The Seven of Calvary moves swiftly and presents its clues and plot twists in scrupulously fair-play style. The visiting Swiss scholar Dr. Schaedel is fatally attacked immediately after asking one of the college students, the attractive Cynthia Wood, for directions at her off-campus apartment. The killer stabs the luckless man in the back with an ice pick, and a piece of paper is discovered near the body; on it is drawn a number 7 atop a series of steps, which could also be interpreted as a cross on the hill of Calvary.

The murder is baffling, both because of the clue and due to the fact that the victim had no enemies or controversies to his name. But could the symbol on the paper be a sign of international intrigue? History professor Paul Lennox recounts the strange history of the Vignards, a shadowy (and largely undocumented) syndicate with roots in Switzerland whose calling card is the Seven of Calvary. Martin Lamb discusses this development with his Holmes, the sedentary but intellectually nimble Professor Ashwin, and soon the symbol makes another appearance. This time it is Paul Lennox who, in the title role of Martin’s translation of Don Juan Returns, downs a strychnine-laced glass of stage wine and promptly dies; another paper is found near the props table. As Professor Ashwin sees the light, one more shadowy murder attempt takes place, this time with a gun and an intended target.

This was my first book by this author – I have since discovered mixed reviews of his Fergus O’Breen stories and later works – and this one is a success on nearly every level. (There remain several troubling misogynist details in Calvary, difficult to dismiss even as a product of its time. Every woman character seems to have pert, noteworthy breasts and a siren-like influence on the male faculty and students. The decision to comment on feminine curves may have been a marketing choice for Boucher, an American author who was competing with the burgeoning femmes fatales of the pulps. Still, the attitude adds an uneasy element, at its worst when our Watson lightly suggests that rape would make a good detail for a detective story.)

But the strengths far outweigh the tonal missteps. Boucher provides a great Queen-like Challenge to the Reader, and guides them prior to the conclusion with a list of eight points (The Point of the Father’s Religion; The Point of the Superfluous Alibi; etc.) that, properly decoded, can untangle the chain of events and define motives and methods. Above all, it’s a puzzle that has been devised especially with mystery fans in mind, and in that respect Boucher arranges his enigmatic pieces of paper very cleverly.

John at Pretty Sinister Books also provided a positive review when he traversed Calvary five years ago; follow the link above to view it. This is the first review I’m submitting to Past Offences for the year 1937, which is in the Crimes of the Century spotlight for the month of March.

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