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Book Review: MURDERER'S FEN (1966) by Andrew Garve

8/31/2021

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​At least crime and espionage writer Andrew Garve had an enthusiastic promotional department to sing his literary praises. On the back of the dustjacket of the Harper & Row U.S. edition of his 1966 suspense story Murderer’s Fen (retitled as Hide and Go Seek), no less a figure than Eudora Welty shouts, “Give us Garve!” The Buffalo News breathlessly exclaims with questionable grammar that “Garve in top form is untoppable” while a publisher’s sticker on the spine confirms that “Garve is Great!” If there was a clergyman critic to be found, doubtless he would announce with spirited heresy, “In Garve we trust.”
 
There’s nothing wrong with good, hyperbolic promotion, and often such matters are out of an author’s hands. But it does make one curious to see just what is so great and praiseworthy, and the best way to do that is to ignore the publicity blurbs and settle in to read the book. What I found with Murderer’s Fen was a collection of strengths and weaknesses that add up to an enjoyable but ultimately unbelievable and disposable little story.
 
Andrew Garve was a foreign correspondent based in Moscow during World War II, and some of his most lauded spy stories, including Murder in Moscow (1951) and The Ashes of Loda (1965), use his political experiences to present the brutal reality of Stalinist Russia. According to Curtis Evans’ overview at his site The Passing Tramp, genre critic Julian Symons labeled Garve as an “entertainer”, an author who had no greater objective than to keep a reader turning pages.
 
The pages of Murderer’s Fen turn easily, but I’m not sure if they add up to much. Evans also writes that he appreciates Garve “kept his books short”, and this one runs only 182 generously spaced pages. In theory, I agree: brevity is usually welcome in a mystery story, as all too often period authors can digress into cul-de-sacs of unneeded setting description and dialogue mannerisms. But at times the author’s narrative style here feels too brief, or more accurately too hurried. Large portions of the action are given almost in summary form. Rather than taking the required paragraphs to effectively present a scene or moment, the reader is given a removed précis of events: to prepare his plan, first the murderer does this, and then he goes there, and then he does that. It’s too breathless in places, and I sometimes felt I was reading a treatment instead of a novel.

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​The plot is cleanly simple, even clichéd: an amoral man meets a lovely teen virgin on a Scandinavian vacation and times it so that he seduces her the evening before he leaves. Empty promises and false addresses are exchanged (at least on his part), and caravan salesman Alan Hunt is astonished weeks later to find conquest Gwenda Nicholls outside his van near the wetlands, telling him that their baby is on the way. Thinking fast, Hunt hides Gwenda on a boat and hatches a busy (and logically wobbly) plan that will remove the burden(s) and clear the way to marry the wealthy but plain fiancée he has been courting. Chief Inspector Nield and CID Sergeant Dyson take an interest, and the cat-and-mouse game begins.
 
The strengths: the plotline bubbles along, and it is clear the author takes great care to make sure that any dull moments are few and far between. According to a reader who commented over at crossexaminingcrime, Andrew Garve was an “ingenious plotsmith” who specialized in “unbreakable alibis and how they get broken.” This latter is what we have with Murderer’s Fen: Alan Hunt pursues a scheme to build an airtight alibi that will exonerate him even as the generated clues identify him as a prime suspect. Such a gambit may exist elsewhere in detective fiction, but I can’t recall a Christie or Crofts villain who played the game in just this way. Full marks for an imaginative new approach to alibi construction.
 
The problem is that the “brilliant scheme”, to use Inspector Nield’s admiring phrase, is also one that doesn’t hold up to too much close scrutiny. It relies on a lot of assumptions, the biggest of them being that the police will never return to search the fens for a missing girl if they have done so once, briefly, with no results. And if the girl’s body is found in the marshlands behind Hunt’s caravan, even years later, the once-prime suspect immediately becomes Suspect Number One again, as no other person in the case has a link to that location other than Hunt. Garve couldn’t even claim that his killer plans to elude police by disappearing and changing his identity, since he’ll be wed to the heiress.
 
My other difficulty is that, in addition to feeling like the reader is sometimes distanced from the action, the dialogue and characterization is rather one-dimensional and never surprising. They are the pieces to be duly moved around and brought into expected conflict with one another. I could never quite forget that they exist as components of a suspense story, not as actual people. There are no real shades of grey here, and I know it might be unreasonable to expect such nuance. 

PictureU.S. title: Hide and Go Seek
But the effect is that I really didn’t care about any of the characters for two reasons: all of the genre and prose evidence signaled that the story will conclude in formulaic good-routs-evil fashion, and none of the characterization was complicated or truthful enough to regard these figures as anything other than storytelling elements. I will also fully admit that my recent diet of stories by Ross MacDonald, Nicolas Freeling, and Bill James – three extraordinary crime writers whose characters are alive with tics and contradictions – means that my sampling of vanilla genre writing suffers in contrast.
 
Andrew Garve’s espionage stories may have a bit more depth and reward to them, and if I do “Go for Garve” once more, I will surely try one of his international spy titles. I can also report that several detective fiction readers on social media say they enjoy this author, although many in the same breath add that they don’t remember his books after reading and don’t really seek them out. And that seems to be my assessment too, regardless of what Eudora Welty might say.

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Book Review: HALO PARADE (1987) by Bill James

8/26/2021

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​The first two books in Welsh novelist Bill James’ compulsively readable Harpur & Iles crime story series set a high standard. 1985’s You’d Better Believe It introduced detective Colin Harpur as he navigated the class divisions and political minefields found among the demimondes of cops and criminals alike. In the follow-up The Lolita Man, lines of ethics and empathy blur to a hazy grey as the force tries to catch a killer preying on schoolgirls. Both of these early entries are filled with observational detail and populated with characters for whom conventional morality applies only when there’s not a more satisfying alternative. Throughout, the author never judges his creations; his policemen may be biased, prejudiced, and coarse, but they are also pushing against a justice system (and a reactionary media) designed to favor the criminal at every turn. Harnessed by departmental restrictions and scrutinized by an often hostile citizenry, it is perhaps not surprising that Harpur and his colleagues often shed any altruistic motivations/delusions they might have, preferring to meet the world on its own amoral terms.
 
Even knowing this, James’ third entry Halo Parade (1987) packs a cynical punch so fierce that it takes the reader’s breath away. More accurately, it offers several punches, including a barrage of blows upon Harpur's body by a group of off-duty police wearing Balaclava masks intent on delivering a message. With Halo Parade, Bill James hits his stride: the cause-and-effects story is fast, funny, tragic, and wholly surprising. The catalyst is a young officer named Ray Street, who has gone deep undercover to cozy up to an exacting drug kingpin named Jamieson, known to everyone in the business as You-know-who. When an airline pilot and smuggler is run down by a rival gang and his goods are stolen, a turf war escalates. The undercover cop is certain he can handle the heat, but both Harpur – feeling guilty for putting the rookie constable in this dangerous position – and Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles want him to abort the mission.
 
What happens next deserves to be discovered and appreciated by reading this book. I marvel at Bill James’ ability to craft wonderfully evocative dialogue for everyone in his gallery, from the perceptive wives and restless mistresses of the men in law enforcement who are searching for an ever-elusive human connection to the petty bourgeois criminals who build their dirty moneyed respectability on the backs of the addicted and the trapped. One of this series’ strongest elements is its world building, its intersection of police and politicians and sadists and lawbreakers mixed and mingled to the point that it’s hard to tell who is who.
 
Unpredictable plotting is also a sublime quality of the Harpur & Iles books, and yet each curve and reversal feels authentic in the moment. Halo Parade boasts a couple twists that are nothing less than exhilarating, and James pushes his characters to and over their breaking point with a confidence and clarity that is sometimes shocking (and also intensely satisfying). It is in this book that ACC Desmond Iles becomes fully defined as a character. While Colin Harpur and the pressures placed upon him continue to act as anchor for each story, it is his career-minded supervisor who emerges here as a cunning, calculating force to be reckoned with. In this author’s hands, Iles is a master at text and subtext, delivering a seemingly benign speech that can actually draw blood in its inference. (Think Marc Antony’s acid refrain of “But Brutus is an honourable man” in the famous Julius Caesar speech.) It is a talent not lost on his colleague:

Harpur saw the girl was studying Iles’s face, obviously amazed that he could pile on the piss-taking but betray there no evidence of his rage and bristling contempt. Somehow in his career Iles must have learned to keep the savagery in him decently screwed down and disguised, or he would not have made it to ACC. If he was able to reduce sex to crossword puzzles he could probably transform his anger into charm.
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​The term halo parade refers to a memorial ceremony for a fallen officer, and there will be more than a few fallen figures by book’s end, both mortally and morally. That rather cynical phrase also points to an edgy hypocrisy throughout the tale where a willful sanitization helps to hide truths that are too messy or inconvenient to confront in the raw. (To give just one example, Iles suppresses important evidence against Jamieson that could publicly reveal the sexual relationship between undercover officer Street and the drug dealer.)
 
Halo Parade is a stunner of a book, a crime story expertly told. While readers new to the series can start here with little narrative trouble, I recommend reading the two titles before this one first for maximum impact. 

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Book Review: ROBBERY WITH VIOLENCE (1957) by John Rhode

8/23/2021

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At first, it was a bank theft with no violence at all. Overnight, someone removed nearly £ 9,000 from a locked holding room of a bank in the town of Fendyke using no force and leaving no clues. Suspicion fell on the staff, but no single worker had all of the keys to access the room and the safe at one time. The violence came months later: one rainy night, police discover the body and motorcycle of a widely disliked businessman named Edgar Chelmsford in a ditch. The petrol line on the cycle had been smashed loose and the spilled gasoline had rather surprisingly caught fire. The victim had apparently received a blow to the head that had stunned him. Superintendent Jimmy Waghorn is called in to investigate both crimes. Are the two incidents linked, and if so, what was the chain of cause and effect that led to murder?
 
First, the good news. This late-period John Rhode title incorporates an agreeable and rather faultless (from a logical puzzle standpoint) minor mystery. There are no loose ends, and the psychology driving motives and mea culpas, both for the theft and the murder, is straightforward and effective. As with nearly all of the many mysteries produced by Cecil John Charles Street over more than three decades (including his miles of Miles Burton books), Robbery with Violence is an easy and enjoyable read. It is certainly not one of Street’s strongest books, but it has an admirable clarity and cleanness in its plotting and prose.
 
However, two criticisms can be leveled at this title, and perhaps at much of the author’s 1950s output in general; both elements threaten to reduce the reader’s satisfaction with the story. First, we learn from Curtis Evans in his immersive overview volume Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery (2012) that, by the late 1940s, Street was narrating the texts of his books into a Dictaphone, which a secretary would then type out. As one can imagine, this verbal approach changes the prose structure, and Robbery with Violence is filled with character monologues that spill on for paragraph after paragraph and page after page. Actual dialogue – a back-and-forth of questions and answers between detective and suspect or witness – is supplanted by a speech where the character inevitably covers all the relevant information with no prompting.
 
Added to this, the later Rhode/Burton books have a dogged devotion to formula that can make the proceedings feel uninspired. Street was dismissively classified by critic Anthony Boucher as a “Humdrum” detective fiction writer, a craftsman only interested in replicating a story from a genre template (here, a crime, a police investigation, and interviews and clues that lead to a solution) with no greater literary aspirations. It is admittedly difficult not to view the author’s prolific oeuvre as a “cranking out” of books, especially in the later years. Curtis Evans offers this quote from Barzun & Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime regarding a 1947 Rhode title:

"Rhode now goes about his plots like a contractor; the deliberate laying out of equipment on ground carefully surveyed generates a powerful tediousness."
There is one more criticism to level at poor Mr. Street and his rather myopic Superintendent, and it is one that readers may understandably find hard to forgive. I still contend that Robbery with Violence is an enjoyable read, BUT it is a mystery that most readers will be able to solve the moment enough information becomes available. (And the author does play fair and present all the straw with which to make the bricks, as usual.) 
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Golden Age detective fiction fans far more astute than I will have no problem identifying culprit(s) and intuiting motives and means for both crimes long before Jimmy Waghorn manages it. (Most of it came together for me as early as Chapter Five.) It doesn’t help that the policeman spends many middle chapters building a case against a suspect with a motive and little else to tie him to the murder. Even the sedentary Dr. Priestley, who does nothing here but sits after dinner with eyes closed and drops hints that Waghorn misinterprets or ignores, seems a little exasperated. It is never good when the reader is waiting for the detective to catch up, and this too is not unique in the Street canon. One can sympathize with the author trying to lead us up the garden path, but doing so means his detective can’t be blind to obvious questions and details the reader is tracking all along.

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Book Review: CASSIDY'S GIRL (1951) by David Goodis

8/18/2021

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​Take a look at the cover art for Cassidy’s Girl, a short gut-punch of a pulp novel by David Goodis. It seems to check most of the boxes for noir fiction: a slow seduction by a sleek and dangerous woman, whisky bottle nearby to blur good judgment, and a fall guy who is wary and resisting for now, but who won’t need much convincing to do whatever the femme fatale ultimately wants. Tonally, this is far removed from the emotional world of the Harlequin romance covers, and the reader knows (or should know) that the story won’t end happily.
 
What’s interesting is that the scene is simultaneously a fair and a false indicator of the story that follows. Indeed, the plot involves a brawny bus driver, Jim Cassidy, who can’t seem to escape the lure of his fleshy wife, Mildred, despite the fact that their relationship has curdled to the point of hateful and abusive rage. But Jim and Mildred are far away from any living space with curtains, a cushioned settee, and a bright vase of flowers. Instead, the author traps his characters inside a seedy apartment and a broken-down saloon.
 
These people are not living inside a liquor ad; Jim, Mildred, and almost every other character in Cassidy’s Girl is a lost and incapacitated alcoholic. These are people who drink quarts of rye just to push through the day, and their home is really Lundy’s Tavern, where they can continue drinking in the cracked-plaster private rooms upstairs when the 2 am liquor curfew threatens their lifestyle. And Jim is constantly picking fights and under attack: in an early chapter, he loses three teeth in a bar fight, a detail you also don’t see on the alluring book cover. 

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​An atypical pulp writer, David Goodis seems to be genuinely interested in dissecting the lives and choices of his end-of-the-line characters. I was reminded throughout of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh (which premiered in 1946), another story with career alcoholics who have trouble leaving the bar. Goodis delivers a pulp plotline up to a point, but he takes the time to explore the painful psychology of his trapped protagonist. Jim Cassidy knows he’s hitting bottom and looks for a reason to rise up again, leaving behind the bottle and his abusive marriage. He thinks he finds it with a woman named Doris, a nondescript and passive being who is drinking herself to death to numb the pain of her past. Jim believes that he can divorce his wife, save Doris and himself and start over, but Mildred and her amoral boyfriend Haney Kenrick want to see Jim destroyed out of spite.
 
Cassidy’s Girl delivers two intense story turns in its compact narrative. The first, a gruesome event that makes Jim once again guilty of the deaths of innocent people, aligns with the book’s grim, fatalistic tone. (Years earlier, Cassidy had been an airline pilot who everyone blamed for a deadly runway crash, even though it was due to a co-pilot’s suicidal breakdown. This started his self-loathing downward spiral.) The second turn – essentially the book’s final chapter – goes against the noir mythos and rather unconvincingly presents a complete turn in Mildred’s personality as she becomes savior to the man she has spent the book trying to destroy.
 
It is only Chapter Fifteen that feels like a cop-out, a rushed resolution that doesn’t square with the tough, trapped reality of the rest of the novel. I would really like to know whether Goodis was acting from an editor’s notes, some outsider who wanted him to deliver a more upbeat ending with an eye on copy sales. The author has spent so much time building the reality and psychology of characters who are determined to stay numb at the bottom, it is truly hard to believe, for example, that they would all pour onto the floor the contents of a full whisky bottle just on someone’s liberating command, as happens here. 

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One more observation: for most of the book (until that unconvincing final chapter), the title is neatly ambiguous. Cassidy’s current girl is Mildred, yet their toxic and physically/verbally abusive relationship is at an end. Mildred revels in cuckolding her husband with the fat, cowardly, and cruel Haney Kenrick. But Cassidy’s other girl, the blank slate Doris, is only an object of affection because Jim declares her to be. David Goodis cannily refuses to give Doris any empathetic attributes; she is passive and shows no interest in Jim or the world around her past her glass of booze. So while Jim believes his life will be better with Doris when the two sober up and start a new life, the reader is much more wary. Doris gives no indication that she wants to find sobriety, and there is also little evidence that she cares whether she continues to live or quietly drinks herself to death.
 
Much more of an unvarnished character study than a typical thrills-and-action pulp drama, Cassidy’s Girl is well worth reading, both for Goodis’ blunt noir poetry and its unflinching depiction of people trapped between bottle and bottom. Stark House Press reprinted this story along with Nightfall and Night Squad in a 2018 anthology.

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