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Book Review: EIGHT FACES AT THREE (1939) by Craig Rice

7/29/2021

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​I start with the appreciative acknowledgment: on August 3, Otto Penzler returns to print another mystery from detective fiction’s Golden Age. Craig Rice’s first book, 1939’s Eight Faces at Three, will be available as part of Penzler’s American Mystery Classics series. The very busy story presents the murder of an elderly aunt just before she has a chance to change her will. Newlywed Holly Inglehart finds herself in the clifftop house in the middle of the night with all of the clocks stopped at 3:00 am, the men of the family out on a wild goose chase, and a knife in the chest of Aunt Alexandria, her body parked in front of an open window. Holly had just married band leader Dick Dayton, but their honeymoon is postponed when the bride is arrested for murder. 

This is my first Craig Rice read, courtesy of an advance reading copy through NetGalley. It is not uncommon for an otherwise entertaining mystery to disappoint with a weak puzzle; it is less common, as I found it here, for a strong (if unbelievable) puzzle plot to be undermined by a prose style and characterization that alienated instead of entertained. My reaction is due in large part to an artificiality – in the banter, in the emotions, in the constant consumption of alcohol as a charming social quirk – that I couldn’t surmount. It is as if Rice, a pseudonym for the hard-drinking journalist Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig, tried to reproduce the chemistry of The Thin Man’s boozy socialites Nick and Nora Charles but only succeeded in building a hollow Hollywood imitation. (Craig was also a screenwriter.) I had little interest in or affection for Helene Brandt and Jake Justus, with the former cracking wise and the latter talking tough but carrying a torch for his Belle Helene. It is possible that other readers may find them charming, or at least less irritating. It is also possible that the couple may become more well-rounded and less relentlessly Hollywood screwball as the series progresses.
 
A few details or caveats, as the case may be: Helene and Jake drink a lot, rye mostly, but they’re not too picky. Helene calls for a new bottle after she finishes her current one while driving on icy Chicago streets. They arrive at Dick’s nightclub mid-bender with Helene in a fur coat and blue silk pyjamas. And upon waking, to clear their heads, one’s hand reaches for the rest of the rye, naturally. My criticism may sound prudish – lots of male PIs hug their whisky bottles – but Rice turns inebriation into an idée fixe. I want to believe it’s a misguided attempt at parody, yet the author struggled with alcoholism, which factored in her death at 49. Her characters’ obsession with booze may have been more amusing 90 years ago; observed today, it’s hard not to feel at least a little censorious.  
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​This is also the book that introduces the author’s crafty lawyer, John J. Malone, a figure who fares better in part because Rice doesn’t enforce endless witty dialogue upon him. The plot and its attendant clues are engaging, and the lovers’ plight and Jake and Helene’s attempts to help them give the story some forward momentum. In spirit, Eight Faces at Three could easily be envisioned as a B-picture, banter and clifftop climax and all. And there are worse ways to spend a Saturday matinee. 

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Book Review: THE LOLITA MAN (1986) by Bill James

7/25/2021

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After reading You’d Better Believe It (1985), Welsh writer Bill James’ enjoyable first book in his Harpur & Iles police procedural series, I was very curious to try his more famous (or perhaps infamous) follow-up, The Lolita Man. Its plot, about the hunt for a killer of young girls, is certainly a nightmare scenario for parents and communities alike. But this book, like James’ previous one, seems designed to subvert genre expectations, and the emphasis isn’t so much on a sadistic serial killer and a race against time – a trope replayed ad nauseam by bestselling practitioners like Jeffrey Deaver and James Patterson – as it is an exploration of the delusions and weaknesses of killer, victim, and cop. To me, that makes Bill James’ investigation into the psyches of the people involved far richer than those authors who just fill in a formula and cash in their checks.
 
As with Believe It, the arrhythmic heart of this story is detective Colin Harpur, a flawed but essentially good person who wants to see justice prevail but knows well that the machines by which to work and live are blinkered and corrupt. It is Harpur who takes on the burden of guilt and the accompanying emotional baggage to find the criminal. In contrast, Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles is motivated by the pressures of press and publicity and by a pissing-match rivalry with the County police force to end the case, while outgoing Chief Superintendent Cedric Barton complains with self-pity that a serial killer has messed up his planned retirement. When a friend of Harpur’s two daughters is abducted, Iles insists on a humiliating hourly countdown on a whiteboard to shame and spur on his team, but it is Harpur who takes the crimes of the Lolita Man personally.
 
Although the book presents the principal narrative from Colin Harpur’s perspective (through third person limited P.O.V.), we are also given excerpts from separate diary entries written by the killer and by the targeted victim, Jennifer “Cheryl Ann” Day. This certainly allows us to learn the mindset of two crucial characters, but I feel like the choice dilutes the power of viewing the investigation solely through the protagonist’s eyes. The early-chapter diary entries mean that readers have more information than the police, and while that can generate suspense – we know which evidence is important when it is discovered, for example – it also splinters the world-building: now the narrative is not just Harpur’s but rather shared between Harpur, Cheryl Ann, and the man his hostage has nicknamed Dark Eyes.

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​Still, there is much in The Lolita Man to engage and entice, and James is puckish enough as a writer to constantly surprise, to zig when you most expect a zag. One remarkable surprise for me is the character of Iles himself. While he was only an incidental and largely offstage character in the series début, he comes into his own here, and he is far from commendable or kind. Desmond Iles is the embodiment of the political animal: one eye on promotion, constantly assessing his colleagues to see if they are allies or threats to his power. The most unflattering trait is Iles’ obsession with two commanding officers from the neighboring County force, who could become squad captains if they should arrest the killer before Iles’ men do. Much of his anger manifests as constant verbal attacks on his rivals’ Irish Catholic heritage, and when we learn at the end that at least one of the captains has just as much prejudiced bile for Iles and his Protestantism, the fact does little to absolve Iles and his bad-faith tirades.
 
Because he is a political animal, Desmond Iles takes care to (usually) cloak his anger and epithets in either cold reasonableness or boys’ club jocularity. James builds into this character’s communication with others an ability to change tone and sincerity on a dime; he can berate Harpur with one sentence and be matily confidential with the next. It is as if Iles is always calculating his speech so that the words that seem most heartfelt are the ones that should be most suspect. A novice writer wouldn’t touch such contradictions, and indeed wouldn’t create a character with such a chasm between speech and intention. But in Desmond Iles, Bill James can deliver false piety, blarney, and blame in one paragraph. The result is quite humorous and makes Iles a slippery and dangerous conversationalist, the cogs always turning, the accusations always ready:

When the Chief had gone, Iles said quietly: ‘It distresses me to see him suffering. In a way, he’s too fine for this job, Col. There’s true nobility in him, a rich grandeur. Of course, that will go unrecognized by those above, and someone like [rival CO] Ethan will pick up the honours. Arise, briefly, out of your dung-heap, Sir Vincent Ethan. Incidentally, Harpur, it looks to me as if there’s been a fucking leak from here to next door.’
For the second time, the author chooses to deny the troubled Detective Harpur the final decisive act in the case; perhaps true to life, Harpur is not Mickey Spillane, sending his quarry to Hell with a burst of gunfire on the final page. Once more it is events beyond his control that conclude the story and cast Harpur ultimately as an observer and recorder rather than an instrument of justice. He is allowed a small satisfaction in going against Iles’ orders and working with a County detective, an uncertain collaboration that helps both sides close in on the criminal. But like life, Bill James lets his story zig where it would otherwise zag, and whether you find that liberating or frustrating will help determine whether these lively crime stories are for you.
 
Me? I’m looking forward to the third Harpur & Iles book, The Halo Parade, which is already ordered and on its way.
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Book Review: THE SMILER WITH THE KNIFE (1939) by Nicholas Blake

7/23/2021

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The Smiler with the Knife is the first and best of the three spy-themed thrillers Nicholas Blake presented as part of his Nigel Strangeways fair-play mystery series. The other stories to deal with espionage and great danger to Great Britain are 1954’s The Whisper in the Gloom and The Sad Variety published a decade after that. It is also the only one where Blake (the pen name for poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis) wrested the protagonist detective post from the cerebral Strangeways and gave it to another character. It is not Nigel but his wife Georgia Strangeways, celebrated explorer and adventurer, who rises to the occasion and saves England from being dominated by Fascist right-wing powers trying to shatter Parliament and control the country by a coup.

I initially read The Smiler with the Knife more than 15 years ago, but that one reading has always stuck with me. It is a successful book on all fronts, as great entertainment, as a propulsive exercise in episodic and through-arc suspense, and as an engaging character study of allies and enemies featuring Georgia at its center. In some areas it surpasses John Buchan’s cornerstone man-on-the-run spy thriller The 39 Steps (1915), as Blake makes sure to define the very high stakes of the game and underscore the very real possibility that Georgia could lose the battle against an alert, wide-reaching, and formidable opponent. By the way, the narrative from the first chapter and throughout the story assures the reader that the heroine’s success is an eventual fait accompli; as early as page 14, for example, we learn that

...while it was not reasonable to suppose that a notice from a Rural District Council could cause anyone much trouble — let alone alter the course of history, or that England might be saved by the cutting of a hedge -- yet so it turned out.
I wonder if the choice to narratively reassure readers of a triumphant English outcome was due to the uncertainty and unease surely felt around the globe in 1939. Blake/Day-Lewis was very much a political being, and it is notable that the insidious enemy of Smiler is not a bomb-throwing radical leftist but a populist conservative planning to harness the working man’s anger at an ineffective government as a way to gain power, not through democratic means but by an insurrection approved and encouraged by his enthusiastic base. The people might see their new self-appointed leader as a patriot and a hero – after all, he is doing all this for his country and the people, or so his propaganda will claim – but a Fascist dictator by any other name still smells of rot.

That said, The Smiler with the Knife works even better as a grand entertainment than as a political cautionary tale. For it is a story that pushes forward, one adventure following the next, with wonderfully assured pacing and plotting. Nigel and Georgia Strangeways are first pulled into the mystery after finding a rather ordinary cameo locket along the hedgerow of their house in the country. An oddly acting neighbor arrives to claim it, and the photo of the middle-aged woman inside the locket proves the unlikely catalyst that soon has Georgia investigating a secret society called The English Banner.
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Smiler is fashioned so that every chapter has a curious new puzzle to solve or piece of the conspiracy to collect, and chapter titles prove both accurate (if abstract) and delightfully enticing: “The Episode of the Clock-Golf Course”, “The Episode of the Nottingham Earthquake”. Resourceful, instinctive, and smart, Georgia Strangeways covers a great deal of ground figuratively and literally as she first infiltrates the inner circle of the powerful cabal and then must escape with what she knows. But the E.B.’s webs stretch far, and no one can truly be trusted until she reunites with Nigel and Sir John Strangeways, the latter in his capacity as head of C Branch at Scotland Yard.
 
Characterization is particularly good in this adventure, and Blake allows some of the heroes and villains that Georgia encounters to make a strong impression on her and the reader. As the suspected leader of the government uprising – the secret society is keeping both plans and players a mystery from the public until the time to act – the dangerously soft-spoken Chilton Canteloe makes a worthy target of investigation, while the charming cricketer Peter Braithwaite becomes one of Georgia’s few trusted confidantes, demonstrating his courage and duty to country to the end. Smiler can also claim to be one of those rare thrillers that is genuinely page-turning. If, like Georgia, the reader gets fully immersed into the tale, the conclusion will likely be a race to the finish for all involved.
 
The prolific GAD genre bloggers Kate and Nick also have reviews of The Smiler with the Knife. Check out crossexaminingcrime and The Grandest Game in the World.  

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Book Review: DEATH AT THE HELM (1941) by John Rhode

7/13/2021

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Cecil John Charles Street published more than one hundred mystery novels under his two main pseudonyms of John Rhode and Miles Burton. While genre critic Julian Symons dismissed Street and fellow puzzle crafters Freeman Wills Crofts and J.J. Connington as writers of the “humdrum” school, I continue to find the Rhode and Burton books highly enjoyable and immensely readable. But why exactly? What makes Street’s unadorned, straightforward murder investigations so engaging?

It appears to be partly the embracing and expert use of those very elements Symons was quick to relegate as humdrum. These are narratives that offer prose rarely ornamented with literary flourishes or digressive social or cultural commentary. Focus is less on the nuanced psychological study of people than on the puzzle at its core, with suspect alibis, opportunities, and motives driving the detective’s whodunit quest. Characters are given enough flesh and detail to personalize and individualize them, but there is little need for elaborate detail to provide either satiric color or kitchen-sink verisimilitude. The humdrum approach, one could argue, is closer to a solve-for-X algebraic formula than to any novelistic exploration of guilt or justice.

It is bracing, then, when an author like Street delivers not only a first-rate mystery in the humdrum style but also an engaging character drama that fully supports the puzzle journey at its heart. 1941’s Death at the Helm strikes exactly this satisfying balance, and succeeds on two levels: as a whodunit with a streamlined group of suspects that keeps the reader guessing at the solution until the book’s final pages; and with enough emotional intrigue and empathy built into the characters and their plights that at least two of them stay with you after the story concludes. Helm has two beautifully delivered surprises at the story’s resolution. I don’t want to elaborate on these for fear of spoiling the journey, but I will say that one is integrated into the murder puzzle’s solution and the other involves an ethical point that is delivered compellingly and memorably by the author.


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The plot: Inspector Jimmy Waghorn investigates the deaths of two people found onboard a motor cruiser that has run aground near a fishing village on the English coast. George Farningham and Olga Quarrenden appear to be victims of poisoning, with a highly suspect bottle of a novelty cocktail called Hampden’s Gin Blimp as a possible vehicle for murder. Learning that the fated couple was trapped in an impossible affair – the woman’s husband, unyielding King’s Counsel barrister Hugh Quarrenden, had refused to grant a divorce and a public scandal would likely destroy Farningham’s business career – Waghorn is inclined to believe the secret meeting aboard the boat and the subsequent deaths were a result of a planned suicide pact. But Dr. Priestley recommends that the inspector keep digging, and this he does literally, finding a beach that the couple visited the day of their deaths and discovering beside a stream a spot where the roots of the deadly hemlock water dropwort plant had been dug out and collected.

All component elements of Death at the Helm work perfectly here, and Street’s pacing is typically agreeable. His plots tend to be procedural in the sense that we usually view the investigation through the perspective of his worker-bee policemen, and the discovery of new evidence or information will dictate the detectives’ next moves. The narrative takes some very satisfying twists and turns, and unlike some of the Rhode or Burton stories, for once the reader likely won’t get ahead of the inspector by spotting the solution early. Deliciously, Helm tantalizes us with a prime suspect in the form of the formidable, cagey Hugh Quarrenden, the one man with a clear motive for both murders and the legal intelligence to commit the perfect crime. But Waghorn and the reader are hesitant to accuse, and in the final chapter the barrister springs an unexpected but very satisfying surprise.

As to the murder method employed, Street has done his homework. The all-knowing Internet explains that the hemlock water dropwort oenanthe crocata is indeed native to British waterways and resembles a harmless herb leaf plant like parsley or cilantro, with its roots forming a parsnip-like vegetable. It is also “the most poisonous plant in the UK” and has been responsible for multiple deaths from ingestion over the decades. One website notes that the phrase “sardonic grin” refers to hemlock dropwort poisoning of criminals in ancient Sardinia, as the facial muscles constrict from asphyxia.

Uncomfortable death throes for its unfortunate victims aside, Death at the Helm is one of the best John Rhode stories I have encountered, as sure in its sailing as ever a humdrum mystery navigated its course. I managed to find a Dodd Mead U.S. edition copy through a college interlibrary loan; one hopes that this title finds its way to a reprint publisher very soon!
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