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Book Review: HALF-MAST MURDER (1930) by Milward Kennedy

9/18/2016

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While aspiring to meet the reading challenge for Crimes of the Century, a wonderful endeavor orchestrated by Rich at Past Offences to collect new reviews of crime and detective fiction (and other media) by year of publication, I have been able to sample four “new” authors in quick succession. My 1954 choices proved highly enjoyable: Henry Wade delivered a winning combination of classic mystery and police procedural formats in Gold Was Our Grave, while George Milner’s Shark among Herrings updated the house party murder scenario with a dash of acerbic satire.

This month the focus is 1930, and my first foray, Mignon G. Eberhart’s While the Patient Slept, never quite overcame its heavy Gothic tone and melodramatic storyline. For my second 1930 mystery, I went in the opposite direction: Milward Kennedy’s Half-Mast Murder is first and foremost a puzzle story, so much so that the novel unfortunately offers little beyond its plotting to engage the reader.


There is nothing wrong with a pure puzzle story, of course. One can read it and derive from it the same satisfaction that the completion of a well-constructed and challenging Crossword puzzle might provide. One can admire the cleverness of the creator in the plot’s construction and take delight in the way in which the reader is led up the garden path. There’s an appreciation to be found, just as the best demonstrations of stage magic and legerdemain engage their audiences with a combination of artistry and technical craft.

Half-Mast Murder (an appealing title, at least) offers very few literary attributes beyond its detailed, timeline-centric plotting. The first pages start promisingly, with various family members and guests at Cliff’s End racing to the summer house only to find Professor Harold Paley locked inside the room and dead from a knife to the chest. Niece Cynthia notes that the flag above the building is flying at half mast, and promptly faints from the sight.

It is soon thereafter, during the introductions and interviews of the suspects conducted by the nondescript Superintendent Guest, that tedium begins to descend. Each character — from the matronly sister of the victim, Mrs. Arkwright, to the young relative George Shipman and the older business acquaintance Bertram Trent to the undefined American Mr. Quirk — is questioned in turn, and the absence of personality from each speaker makes these conversations as interesting as reading a court transcript after a trial.

Further, there is no real dramatic shaping for these interviews, which is to say that questions start, answers are given, and the superintendent moves on. The information and revelations should lead somewhere compelling on a character level: by the end of the scene, the reader might feel, for example, that the person is highly suspicious or completely innocent, or perhaps a curious statement is made which begs closer scrutiny. This Kennedy does not do. In fact, those early interviews create distinct narrative plateaus, and when he divides an interrogation between chapters, the ending moment that is chosen often feels arbitrary and pointless.

Ending lines from Chapter Three:

“Oh, but I wasn’t the last person [to see Paley alive].”
“Then who was, sir?”
“I haven’t the least idea.”

And the conversation continues along the same pedestrian lines at the start of Chapter Four. Milward Kennedy’s prose and organization are competent – the book is readable – but it never rises above its mediocrity. Characters are generally stock types and indistinctly drawn; the writing style is reporter-like and lacks personal appeal and wit; and perhaps most damning, the puzzle at its center – the story’s reason for existing – is ultimately an unsatisfying one due to withheld information and a preposterous bustle of activity at the scene of the crime.

(Minor, non-specific spoilers ahead, but ones I submit as evidence to show why it is hopeless for a reader to arrive at a fair-play solution ahead of the author.)

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Let us take the bustle first. This is a mystery story where a raft of incriminating clues are presented and the solution is tied to an incredible series of well-timed entrances and exits by multiple parties around the victim or victim-to-be. As many as five persons, we eventually learn, visited the professor in the summer house just before, during, or after his death, doing so with clockwork efficiency – 2:30, 2:45, 3:12, 3:17, 4:30, et cetera – and leaving all manner of physical evidence behind. To me, it’s another recipe for tedium, as the gathering and sorting of clues becomes tiresome when a muddy footprint and a pair of blood-smeared swimming trunks serve to cancel each other out when it comes to identifying the murderer. A few red herrings in any mystery are welcome, but this puzzle’s artificiality and inconsequentiality are made apparent with the explanation of each (eventually unimportant) clue.



After all this fussy obfuscation is dealt with, Superintendent Guest announces the killer’s identity… and it is at once unsatisfying, anticlimactic, and quite unfair. Kennedy chose to hide the crucial information that reveals the true motive for Professor Paley’s death until the book’s final pages. Because of this, there is literally no way to ascribe a motive to the guilty character, an underwritten cypher who has no tangible alternate connection to the crime. The author anticipated this objection, and makes his detective (unconvincingly) defend himself during his explanation of the solution: “I don’t hold with using motive as your starting point. I say you should use the evidence, and check it by motive.” The problem is that, unless we understand why the killer grabbed an impromptu opportunity to commit murder, the “evidence” – one tiny, meaningless detail among a dozen others – remains valueless and devoid of meaning.

I am thrilled to keep discovering new authors from mystery fiction’s Golden Age, but it will be a while before I raise the flag on Milward Kennedy again.
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R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril Book Challenge XI

9/10/2016

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I'm fairly new to the world of addicting and highly enjoyable reading contests and challenges that Internet communities provide. I've become a quick fan of the Crimes of the Century challenge from Past Offences, and now Tracy at Bitter Tea and Mystery -- whose acquaintance I made through that contest -- has brought my attention to a new online party, the RIP R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril project. 

Here's how RIP host Carl Anderson introduces this year's celebration:

"Eleven years ago I embarked on a quest to bring a community of readers together to enjoy the literature most associated with the darkening days and cooling temperatures of Autumn:

Mystery
Suspense
Thriller
Gothic
Horror
Dark Fantasy


I wanted to be able to use the well-worn graveyard acronym, R.I.P., so I came up with the name R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril. And for over a decade that is what we have done, imbibed together."


Please visit Carl's website at Stainless Steel Droppings and learn more if you're interested. There are many sizes of challenges you can undertake, including reading books and short stories -- you choose the amount -- watching films and/or playing video games that connect with one or more of the genres listed above. If you create reviews, you can post links on an RIP community page.
For my part, I am going to accept PERIL THE SECOND, which allows me to select and report on TWO BOOKS that fit into the genres, and they are titles that I read specifically for the challenge. The books will be:
  • THE GRINDLE NIGHTMARE (1935) by Q. Patrick
  • THE JUDGE AND HIS HANGMAN (1955) by Friedrich Durrenmatt

The contest is open now and (aptly) closes on October 31st. I look forward to discovering the pleasures of these two books and participating in a new reading challenge!
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Book Review: WHILE THE PATIENT SLEPT (1930) by Mignon G. Eberhart

9/10/2016

2 Comments

 
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Taken on its own terms, the Gothic melodrama of the late 19th and early 20th centuries can be an enjoyable genre when sampled today. For me, the challenge for both writer and reader lies in finding something more in the text to raise it above the trappings of its trade. Because the literary Gothic formula functions on tonal excess – rooms are relentlessly dark and shadowy, the weather stormy and inhospitable, the characters orbiting around the emotionally honest protagonist secretive and suspicious – the work can only rise above cliché and develop depth if this tone is put to some original use.

If a greater philosophical theme or social or cultural commentary emerges from this melodramatic foundation, then the results often become exponentially more interesting. Marie Belloc Lowndes' classic 1913 suspense story The Lodger, which presents the tale of a landlady who suspects that her tenant might be a Ripper-esque serial killer, neatly uses its plot to explore the alarmingly knife-thin line between public, societal respectability and private, destructive criminal deviance.

Mary Roberts Rinehart, a pioneering turn-of-the-century writer whose stories mixed crime and melodrama in entertaining fashion, brings Gothic elements to The Case of Jenny Brice (also 1913). This novel features a headstrong Pittsburgh working woman whose house sits on the bank of the Allegheny River and who must contend with a dead body that gets washed into her basement by the seasonal flood waters. The more sensationalistic genre elements are tempered by brilliantly observed (and historically interesting) details that showcase the personalities, geography, and daily living of the author's carefully chosen and drawn subjects.

And when there is not an added element to allow Gothic melodrama to transcend its genre and work on higher levels, you are left with an offering like While the Patient Slept by Mignon G. Eberhart. In her second published novel, appearing in 1930, the stoic traveling nurse Sarah Keate – whose name would almost certainly be modified to Para Keet if the book were important or original enough to justify a Holmesian pastiche – accepts a post at the perpetually gloomy and cavernous mansion of old Jonah Federie, who is in a coma. He is also surrounded, vulture-like, by his immediate family, including suave Eustace and sympathetic March, Jonah's offspring, and slimy uncle Adolph and mysterious wife Isobel, the latter burning with an inner fire. Shadowy business acquaintances Deke Lonergan and Elihu Dimuck are also near at hand, unusually anxious to be present in case the sleeping Jonah should ever awake, and tight-lipped cook Kema and curiously tough butler Grondal are also slinking silently around the house. On a dark and stormy night (naturally), Sarah Keate hears a gunshot and discovers Adolph Federie sprawled on the staircase. A jade elephant figurine lies below him.

Police detective Lance O'Leary arrives on the scene and, through the course of a second murder and the repeated purloining and recovery of the jade elephant, manages to spend a remarkable amount of time on the spooky Federie property. Eberhart dresses her haunted house with dusty, heavy curtains that partition most of the rooms (unless one needs to be locked to further the plot) and no electricity, allowing oil lanterns to regularly grow dim and fill the rooms with oppressive shadows and darkness.
The book's sturm und drang genre tone is so determinedly consistent that its author doesn't really have anywhere else to go. When every scene is fraught with potential menace and suspicion, only moments of action and occurrence can offer a true effect, such as an attack on the heroine or the discovery of a body. The pitch of melodrama is usually notoriously high, and as such is often hard to sustain effectively. The simple act of looking out a window now calls for prose at once atmospheric and needlessly hyperbolic:
From the window in the hall, beyond the wet path and dreary iron gate, I caught a glimpse of an ambulance. It loomed coldly white through the dismal, gray dawn. The sleet was turning again to heavy fog. The shrubbery, bare and brown and dripping, mingled indistinctly with the shadows of the fog. Toward the north of the house the dense thickets of evergreens made black blotches. And all about the place reared that solid wall, hemming in the evergreens and the shadows and the lifeless garden and the grim old house in which I stood, where murder had walked that night.
For this reader at least, the deliberately melodramatic style is too constant (and too thickly applied) to be organic and emotionally effective. But let us move from prose to puzzle plotting, which is an even more unsatisfying aspect of While the Patient Slept. Here we have an exemplary holdover of the early thriller style seen in crime fiction from the early 1900s, when the genre was gradually but inevitably transforming from suspense and women-in-jeopardy stories to the fair-play puzzles we recognize as classic Golden Age Detection today. Simply put, Patient's essential puzzle clues are not provided to the reader (and often not to the detective or narrator) until the book's final chapter. For example, if you had only been aware, dear reader, that the killer's motive was anchored in an agreement created between two people years before the events of the plot, you would have had a reasonable opportunity to connect the dots and identify the murderer. But as we are given this information only in the book's last pages, no fair-play armchair sleuthing can occur.

This is not the only frustrating transgression to be found within Eberhart's plot: the final-chapter reveal that a character owned an unknown duplicate set of house keys renders the earlier mystery of access to locked rooms irrelevant; and, amusingly, we learn only at the very end that two characters possess similar sounding voices, and that an early conversation heard by the observant Sarah Keate is actually now attributed to a different individual than she had claimed. How any reader is supposed to get ahead of this bit of transcribed aural trickery is beyond me.

If a contemporary puzzle fan has not yet launched the book across the room in frustration, he or she is treated to this stratagem from the handsome Lance O'Leary. After the murderer repeatedly rebuffs the detective's accusations by saying "You can't prove anything," O'Leary lays this cunning trap (the dual pronoun use to avoid revealing the villain's gender in the excerpt is my own addition):

"There is only one thing I am curious about," said O'Leary quietly. "How did you get that revolver over in the corner of the vacant bedroom upstairs without entering the room yourself?"

[The murderer] smiled; it was an ugly smile.

"I threw it!" [he/she] said with a grisly touch of triumph in [his/her] voice. "Had you there, didn't I! I simply opened the door, rubbed the fingerprints off the revolver, and threw it." A look of terror came into [his/her] face. "No, I didn't! No, I didn’t! You can't prove anything."

"You've confessed, you fool," said O'Leary in a tone as near savagery as I've ever known him to use.

And a witness to this exchange actually manages to comment, "You're a smart man, O'Leary."
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With the Gothic atmosphere creating a tonal plateau and the book not delivering anything beyond a busy and far from fair-play crime plot, While the Patient Slept should only be resuscitated by those readers seeking out this style of melodrama.

An interesting and equally unbelievable postscript: according to the image at right, this title received the Scotland Yard Prize for best detective story of the year, ostensibly beating out several other titles in the running for 1930.

This review was inspired by the Crimes of the Century year-by-year reading challenge, which can be found on Rich's great mystery fiction community website Past Offences.



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