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Book Review: THERE'S TROUBLE BREWING (1937) by Nicholas Blake

3/19/2019

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My recent revisiting of the Nigel Strangeways detective series has brought great enjoyment and a new appreciation of Nicholas Blake's work. As I (vaguely) remembered from my first exposure more than a decade and a half ago, the earliest books offer a playful, humorous spirit whose plots are full of incident and striking demises: a body in a haystack at a boys' school in A Question of Proof (1935); death by poison-injected walnut in Thou Shell of Death (1936). And now, in 1937's There's Trouble Brewing, a particularly disagreeable brewery owner appears to meet a particularly disagreeable fate: being boiled in a sealed copper vat. 

One aspect I find especially admirable is how thoroughly Blake – the pseudonym for writer and future Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom Cecil Day-Lewis – commits to the fair-play mystery format, a path he traveled to augment his income while he crafted poetry. While these GAD books are filled with good humor and a fair dose of literary asides and allusions, the author never shorts the elements expected for a rousing fair-play puzzle. There are alibis to be shaken and confirmed or broken, odd clues (bits of a signet ring, a missing report) to be pondered, and a healthy variety of suspects, many whose prospects would improve with the victim handily out of the way. The reader is given access to the thoughts and tabulations of Blake's amateur detective protagonist Nigel Strangeways, and we see what Nigel sees... until the pieces rearrange to form a clear picture for him, and then we might have to wait a bit longer before Strangeways provides a final-chapter dénouement explaining it all.

In other words, Blake's 1930s titles deliver exactly what a classic mystery fan has come to comfortably expect from the genre. There is also the benefit that Blake/Day-Lewis writes very enjoyable, sometimes wry prose, and he does not shy away from extending a metaphor or making literary references. (Thou Shell of Death, especially with its title, turns partly on Strangeways' knowledge of Jacobean Revenge stage drama.) These (for me) are always amusing rather than obstructive, as when Nigel muses that being a Classics scholar was fine preparation for his current role as an investigator of murder:

"If ever, in your salad days – as one of my comic uncles calls them – you were compelled to do a Latin unseen, you'll know that it presents an accurate parallel with criminal detection. You have a long sentence, full of inversions; just a jumble of words it looks at first. That is what a crime looks like at first sight, too. The subject is a murdered man; the verb is the modus operandi, the way the crime was committed; the object is the motive. Those are the three essentials of every sentence and every crime. First you find the subject, then you look for the verb, and the two of them lead you to the object. But you have not discovered the criminal – the meaning of the whole sentence yet. There are a number of subordinate clauses, which may be clues or red-herrings, and you've got to separate them from each other in your own mind and to reconstruct them to fit and to amplify the meaning of the whole. It's an exercise in analysis and synthesis – the very best training for detectives."
In There's Trouble Brewing, Blake also adroitly handles a murder-mystery archetype, and one for whom I have a particular (masochistic?) affinity: the gleefully malevolent patriarch. Here, Eustace Bunnett is a hated town scion, an unscrupulous and lecherous old man who, as owner of the brewery, uses his power to make his workers submissive and quell complaints about dangerous work conditions and outdated equipment. It might have been out of revenge that Bunnett's innocent (and victimized) dog Truffles disappears, and his remains are found later in an open vat. The poor pet's demise could have inspired a second pressure-cooker killing, as human bones and rags are found, with all signs pointing to Eustace as the victim... while his brother Joe is nowhere to be found.

The inspector believes it's a straightforward case: Joe killed Eustace and escaped on his boat. It's possible, but Nigel wonders why the murderer subjected the victim to boiling when it wasn't necessary. He also worries about town resident and old school friend Herbert Cammison, who, with his wife, seems to be concealing a secret about Bunnett that might lead the police to their door.

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And that leads me to sound one more note of admiration regarding the author's handling of genre elements. Blake assumes the puzzle-pursuing reader is smart enough to make connections and draw conclusions, so certain inferences of details that other writers might have tagged for a late-chapter reveal are offered up at the start. Through his protagonist, Blake makes no bones (!) of the fact that boiling obscures a body's fleshly identity – which may or may not be a red herring here -- and, likewise, he lets Nigel become suspicious of his amiable school friend right away. If either of those details had gone unremarked, the veteran mystery reader would be instantly on guard, but because the detective comments early on these points, we are left (rightly) wondering what Strangeways may have deduced that the armchair enthusiast has not.

A very good entry in the series, There's Trouble Brewing is worth sampling for Golden Age Detection imbibers. My fellow pub crawlers Kate at Crossexaminingcrime and Nick at The Grandest Game in the World offered their reviews too; just follow the links!
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Book Review: GUN BEFORE BUTTER (1963) by Nicolas Freeling

3/10/2019

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At the end of the 1990s, when I was out of college and had time to truly read for pleasure (rather than for quiz answers and course completion), I made a couple author discoveries that would result in a deep appreciation and a lifelong affection for their works. Certainly Gladys Mitchell was one of these authors, and I have since read and provided summaries and reviews of her 84 novels over at The Stone House. P.G. Wodehouse, whom I also discovered around that time, brings great delight, generally in moderation; A Wodehouse book or two every six months strikes the right balance. And a third name from that era comes to mind: European chef turned author Nicolas Freeling.

Freeling introduced his most memorable protagonist, Dutch Police Inspector Piet Van der Valk, in 1962 with Love in Amsterdam. I quickly read through the series of 11 novels – 13 if you count the two titles featuring Van der Valk's headstrong French wife Arlette – and was delighted by many elements that Freeling explored, in structure and psychology and even the subversion of genre expectations. While there is always crime (and usually murder) at each story's center, nothing else is guaranteed. But Freeling is such an excellent, observational writer that I always feel fully engaged and am willing to accept any narrative path he offers.

Such unconventionality may not be welcomed by fans of Golden Age Detection puzzles, exactly. In Double Barrel (1964), for example, much of the novel is a dialogue between the inspector and a suspect in the case; with Over the High Side (1971), Van der Valk advances theories about what happened to a patriarch who disappeared from the family boat, but as the members refuse to share their knowledge of the night and incriminate one of their own, a definitive resolution is never stated. And in the story I am reviewing here, 1963's Gun before Butter, the Dutch policeman has several notable interactions with Lucienne Englebert stretching over years – first as a teenager involved in a car crash that kills her father, then in the company of Italian boys arrested during a knife fight, next as a defendant of a theft complaint – before she surfaces as a young woman working as an auto mechanic and marked as a potential suspect in a murder investigation.

I'm tempted to advise that Nicolas Freeling's writing (like Gladys Mitchell's) may be an acquired taste. His mysteries are very reminiscent of Simenon and his proletariat detective, Inspector Maigret, but they incorporate an even more philosophical tone. As a law officer, Piet Van der Valk is an iconoclast, and indeed a reader should not expect "justice" to be served by having the figure that pulls the trigger or pushes in the knife to be inevitably arrested, tried, and convicted. That isn't the world that Freeling creates – indeed, it's not true of our own reality, then or now – and for me it is a more interesting one because such a world is not bound be the strictures of moral or genre formula.

The Van der Valk novels are not formless, however; they each have narrative and tonal logic that feels highly satisfying (and rather unique) to me. The case progresses, threads are followed, the picture forms. But it's the choices that are made and the worldview of this literate and atypical policeman that make the difference. I have encountered detective characters as outside-the-box thinkers many times, but no sequence has lodged in my memory more than the way Freeling frames a certain scene in Gun before Butter; it has stayed with me for almost 20 years.

In it, Van der Valk wants to question Lucienne Englebert, but she works at a service station in Belgium, where the Dutch detective has no jurisdiction. He tries anyway, and blusters a bit too much to overcome his legal vulnerability. Enter Bernard, the garage owner and an ex-prize fighter, who, after telling Van der Valk to leave with no result, hits him efficiently in the face and escorts him to his car. The policeman leaves the premises, only to drive directly across the road to an unused lot, park, and wait. Eventually, a Belgian patrol officer checks out the parked car, and upon learning that Van der Valk is also police, gives him his blessing to remain as long as he wants. Soon thereafter, a slightly sheepish Bernard crosses the road to ask Van der Valk to return to the station. He accepts, and the two talk about Lucienne (whom Bernard loves unrequitedly) over bottles of Belgian beer.

It's a bravura scene, one of many to be found in Freeling's books, and I'm amazed by it for two reasons. First, it runs completely counter to the expectations of a traditional action crime thriller, and neatly deconstructs its elements. It is a scene of menace and brief violence carried through in a fully understated way; the moment is grounded in the present, but the action is over as soon as it begins. Any other writer would be tempted to stretch a few paragraphs out of the confrontation, with the hero cracking wise and mounting some sort of defense to show his capabilities. Nothing of the sort happens here. Second, the choices all the way down the line – Van der Valk's atypical bluster as overcompensation, Bernard's use of a single punch to get rid of the trespasser, the parking across the road and the guilt-tinged half-apology – are genuinely surprising and yet fully, psychologically sound. It's a sequence that's completely unexpected and deeply satisfying, not least because the action of each person feels so truthful to the character the author has shaped him to be.

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It is only in the final moments that Freeling's understanding of his characters falls just short of convincing. Still, it's a masterful journey, told with a great amount of wit and humanity. The rather evocative title is given meaning by story's end; the phrase guns and butter is most often connected with the political/economic question of what a society should choose to produce, assuming it has a choice. (The American title, Question of Loyalty, is far less evocative.) Revisiting this author – who produces literate, highly enjoyable novels with criminal themes more so than traditional mystery stories – was greatly rewarding, and I look forward to (re)discovering this series anew.


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