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Book Review: OBELISTS FLY HIGH (1935) by C. Daly King

8/25/2022

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Obelists Fly High is the third and final entry in psychologist Charles Daly King’s peripatetic mystery series. In previous cases, New York Police detective Michael Lord investigated rather sensational cases of murder while traveling by ship (1932’s Obelists at Sea) and by train (1934’s Obelists en Route); so it is perhaps natural that the only place to go is up. On a small passenger plane traveling from New York to San Francisco, Captain Lord has taken on the role of bodyguard to celebrated surgeon Amos Cutter. The medical man needs to perform a lifesaving and time-sensitive operation on his brother, who happens to be the acting Secretary of State. Before he can make the trip, however, Dr. Cutter receives an anonymous note saying that he will die on April 13th at noon Central Time. The time zone clarification by the assassin is especially thoughtful given that the M.D. will be traveling by plane.

The threat and the stakes are significant enough for everyone except Cutter to view the situation with solemn concern. In the cabin with Cutter’s nieces, research assistant, and a couple scholarly passengers who had already booked their tickets on the commandeered flight, all goes well until the stewardess passes around a box of ampules with liquid designed to combat air sickness. When Cutter breaks his capsule, sniffs, and appears to die from inhaling the vapor, Lord has his hands full keeping the cabin and its occupants under control. After an emergency landing at Medicine Bow’s snowy airfield, Dr. Cutter’s body is removed and placed in the cargo hold by Lord. Attacked from behind, though, the detective is knocked out by a murderer who is eager to ensure that the doctor is truly out of commission.

Admirably plotted and nicely paced, Obelists Fly High is generally regarded as the strongest of Daly King’s three travel stories. It is the only novel of his to date that received a celebratory reprinting, in a Dover trade paperback edition from 1986. It is also a story whose details of 1930s aeroplane flying and functionality feels authentic, tactile, and well-observed. Additionally, the elements of the narrative’s ticking clock – can Lord identify the culprit by journey’s end? – and the claustrophobic atmosphere of suspects trapped in a darkened airplane cabin with a killer are evocative and contribute to the suspense.

Daly King still indulges in a couple of his authorial vices here, which can sometimes test a reader’s patience. As with his other titles, characters are named in a puckishly Dickensian manner that trades on juvenile puns or imagery. The celebrated surgeon is named Cutter, while his nieces are saddled with the names Fonda and Isa Mann. One is a sultry woman whose beauty bewitches Captain Lord while the other is a masculine, off-putting figure; it doesn’t take a detective to guess which is which. And while the multi-page discussions of psychological and economic theory found in the other Obelists books are mercifully absent here, a popular novelist character named Craven talks at length of Fortean paranormal phenomena. Here, he tries to sell Lord on the idea that, through sheer will alone, an absentee murderer brought down the doctor.

It was difficult not to contrast this book with another work with a similar milieu, Death of an Airman (1934) written by Christopher St. John Sprigg, who used his knowledge as a pilot to craft an impossible mid-air crime above an English Aero Club. I mention Airman here because Daly King seems to have delivered much of the authenticity that I found lacking in St. John Sprigg’s story: despite the author’s bona fides, very little of the flying and itinerary evocations felt truthful in Death of an Airman, but rather like someone playing at the scenario as one would stage dolls in a dollhouse. (Airman’s absurdly impractical smuggling plot also didn’t help.) With Obelists Fly High, the reader can feel the weight of the plane and can visualize cabin and cockpit control board through the author’s descriptions. Because of this, the suspense generated from a forced landing due to impaired visibility and freezing ice accumulating on the wings feels authentic.


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But back to the puzzle at the center of C. Daly King’s airborne murder mystery. It’s a good one, and much of the book’s latter half finds Captain Lord fretting over his minute-by-minute suspect timetable, twice reproduced (on pages 175 and 261 of the Dover edition) for the reader to study as well. Obelists Fly High begins with an “Epilogue” – which is actually a spoiler-free glimpse at the climax of the plot right at its crisis moment rather than a true after-events denouement – and ends with a “Prologue”. The “Prologue” is more successful because, in revealing the characters and their mindsets before the fatal flight, it delivers two pieces of information that change our perception of what has happened.

And the author ends with a “Clue Finder” list guiding readers to the pages where motifs and mentions provide the path to the solution. Whether every aspect of the story is genuinely fair play can be debated, but I think most fans of Golden Age Detective fiction will find this journey a memorable one. If you come across the reprint (or any) edition of Obelists Fly High, go ahead and buy a ticket to board.


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Book Review: THE CASE OF THE CARETAKER'S CAT (1935) by Erle Stanley Gardner

8/3/2022

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There is much to enjoy in the seventh published Perry Mason adventure, not the least being the conceit that the celebrated criminal lawyer might take on a Persian cat for a client. In truth, it’s the cat’s owner, a cantankerous older man named Charles Ashton, who visits the office and enlists Mason to help him keep Clinker, his feline companion. Ashton had been the caretaker of Peter Laxter’s city home, and while the late Laxter’s will allows Charles Ashton to continue living at the residence, no such codicil can be found for the cat. There’s an additional angle that attracts Perry Mason: if he chooses to fight for Ashton to keep Clinker, he also has an opportunity to stand up to the shady lawyer Nathaniel Shuster, now representing Samuel Laxter, the dead man’s grandson.

Ironically, it is Clinker who outlives his owner. After threatening to challenge the entire will due to Samuel Laxter’s intolerance of a cat, Charles Ashton’s body is discovered in his room. Clinker’s muddy pawprints lead from the open window onto the bed. The cat’s presence seems to implicate Douglas Keene, a young architect and boyfriend of the disinherited Winifred Laxter. Keene was seen leaving the house that evening as he carried Clinker, and if he left the grounds after the cat came into the room on that rainy night, then he becomes the prime suspect in Ashton’s death.

As it often happens in Erle Stanley Gardner’s busily plotted stories, the entanglements and complications build steadily, and Perry Mason must be both proactive and defensive to arrive at the truth. Among many questions to answer: was millionaire Peter Laxter killed by carbon monoxide gas piped into his bedroom before he perished in a house fire? Who was a man named Clammert, who had access to a critical safety deposit box? And who killed Edith DeVoe, an attractive nurse who might have known more about the Laxter household than was healthy for her?

As with the other series titles first published in the 1930s, The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat is lively in pace and impressively, almost intimidatingly complex in plot. Author Gardner has a marvelous gift for keeping the pot boiling, and I would be hard pressed to recall a single scene in any Perry Mason book from this period that didn’t advance the story and offer a new piece of information to be puzzled over. That breathless pacing can be a bit fatiguing, but it also offers the reader more twists per page than can be found anywhere else.

Even better, this is the first of the early Mason titles whose prose feels unlabored and genuinely effective, as if Erle Stanley Gardner had hit his stride and found a way to balance the writing and characterization to accompany his often brilliant plotting. There seem to be fewer unnecessary “Perry Mason asked” and “Paul Drake replied” dialogue identifiers than in previous books, and some of the author’s paragraph descriptions are nicely evocative instead of feeling stilted.

Caretaker’s Cat is also the first book to fully explore the relationship between Mason and his smitten, capable secretary Della Street. In an entertaining extended storyline, the lawyer asks Della to join him to impersonate a honeymooning couple, and she inhabits the role with verve. If there’s an of-the-era sexism to the stereotype of the pining secretary, it’s nicely offset by Della Street’s fierce intelligence on display. In the courtroom climax, for example, Street is called to the stand to be questioned by opposing counsel and acquits herself admirably, showing that she can parry and equivocate as heartily as her employer.

Speaking of characters and their strengths, Winnie’s Waffles entrepreneur Winifred Laxter may stand as a stereotypical pillar to support the plotline – she’s the respectable ingenue who rejects her amoral family only to find that she and her fiancé are being pulled in once more, this time as murder suspects. But Gardner presents the lovers’ plight in a simple and sympathetic way, and she and Douglas Keene are the innocents that we, and Perry Mason, want to see exonerated and brought together by story’s end.


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On the opposite side lives Nathaniel Shuster, a wonderfully oily creation much different from the long-suffering (but mostly respectable) District Attorney Hamilton Burger. Shuster, by contrast, is a “yapping terrier” of a lawyer with “Franklin teeth”, false teeth so poorly spaced that the excitable man spits when he talks. We learn that Shuster is a fee-chaser, an attorney always looking for ways to add to his clients’ bills. He also holds a grudge against Mason, and all that antipathy promises some delightfully acrimonious exchanges.

Finally, this case offers some wonderfully twisty Perry Mason dodges and courtroom revelations. There’s a doozy of an alibi where Gardner orchestrates a clever reversal, essentially one relying not on where the suspect was at the time of a murder but rather where the victim was.

The reason for Mason’s newlywed masquerade – and his sending of fake telegrams and his reporting of a stolen car that was never missing – is to flush out an incognito character for one last final-chapter surprise. As always, nothing feels particularly true to reality in a Perry Mason case, but we have headlines and Dostoevsky for those types of stories. And when we want muddy paw prints that lead the police to a corpse and Mason to a murderer, then Erle Stanley Gardner will reliably and delightfully deliver.


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