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Book Review: OBELISTS EN ROUTE (1934) by C. Daly King

11/30/2021

With much fanfare, The Transcontinental is set to begin a three-day non-stop train journey from New York to California. There are many people on board, of course, but the reader of Obelists en Route is conveniently allowed to dismiss the majority and focus on a handful of essential travelers. Specifically, they are the employees, relatives, and attendants orbiting the powerful banker Sabot Hodges, a man who has the personality and attributes that make him a suitable murder mystery victim. Hodges is very wealthy, there are rumors of a recent change in the particulars of his will, and he has made at least one onboard enemy. So it is perhaps not a surprise when the man’s body is found at the bottom of the train’s novelty boxcar-length swimming pool.

But an en route autopsy reveals that Hodges didn’t die by drowning and may have had a heart attack on or near the pool prior to an early morning swim. No poison is detected in the dead man’s system. As a police detective wonders whether the banker’s death was due to an accident, an illness, suicide, or something more sinister, a dangerous bout of gunplay involving Hodges’ secretary, his daughter, and a potential son-in-law points to murderous intentions.

Obelists en Route improves greatly on the formula American psychologist Charles Daly King employed for his nautical predecessor and début detective novel, 1932’s Obelists at Sea. The critical change is this: instead of drafting a quartet of psychologists to interview suspects and investigate the crime (with a passive ship’s captain acting as baffled referee), this train-set mystery appoints and stays with one capable and active policeman. Lieutenant Michael Lord assumes the role of sleuth, and the story is all the better for it. While I wasn’t sure whom to follow as leader at Sea – and in whom to place confidence, if anyone – there is no such problem en Route. Additionally, the murder mystery seems cleaner and the scenario doesn’t evoke quite the disbelief that is generated by the previous story’s plotline and events.

It is true that we are still comfortably traveling the terrain of Crime Fictionland, and the central mystery – was the financier murdered without a mark on his body, and if so, how and by whom? – is a suitable and enjoyable puzzle for the genre. King plots and writes his murder mystery well, and the trainbound investigation has a lot of period charm. (In later paragraphs I explore King's literary Achilles’ heel.) And true to American form, the author adds in almost as much gangster-like gunfire here as he featured in Obelists at Sea.

It is also one of those stories from mystery fiction’s Golden Age that offers some very entertaining anthropology when read more than 80 years later. The eager to please, dialect-sporting “colored” porter James may be an unfortunate characterization (though common for its time in U.S. fiction and film) but other details of the cross-continental rail trip are very instructive. Modern-day comforts made me ignorant of the realities of a 1930’s “non-stop” train journey, for example, which would need to switch out locomotive engines as well as conductors. The former would need changing to undergo maintenance and inspection – coal- and oil-burning engines would overheat on a cross-country trek – and the latter would swap as one conductor’s familiar route territory ends and another’s begins.

When he learned that I had acquired a copy of Obelists en Route (thank you yet again, academic interlibrary loan!), my well-read mystery fiction colleague Nick Fuller told me, “Watch out for the economics lecture.” So I thought I was prepared when self-described “technocrat” and argumentative passenger Noah Hall began to engage Sabot Hodges in a heated debate about “the Energy Survey” and “greenback inflation”, a mélange of ideas that continues on for eight pages. Little did I know that this passage was just a preamble, and that it is, surprisingly, Lieutenant Lord who talks about economics for an additional ten pages mid-book (p. 198-208), trying to make sense of “social credit” and “national dividends”!

To say that the crime plot stops during these strange and circuitous conversations is an understatement; they are so inorganic to an otherwise forward-moving mystery that there is little to do other than attend the lectures or skip over them. No diabolically nested clues to the crime or killer's motive are to be found therein. And as on the pages when his psychologist characters take the lectern and explain at length their field of study, the economics dialogue is augmented by multiple footnotes and text citations, in case the besieged reader is interested in learning even more about the subject.

Mystery author and psychologist Charles Daly King.

One has to wonder just how successful (or useful) King thought these heady digressions were. I suspect any editor who wasn’t purblind or spineless would clear his or her throat and tactfully suggest omitting the chapter. Or perhaps his publisher felt indulgent, or even rationalized that the economic theorizing was value added. Even so, it is amusing to see a footnote from C. Daly King that directs the mystery reader to a book called Integrative Psychology (1931) which is co-written by someone named Charles Daly King and is, in the author’s own estimate, “entertaining and instructive with many practical hints”.

Fortunately, the digressions are limited and Michael Lord’s investigation into murder on the train (when he isn’t holding forth on economic theory) is focused and engaging. The author’s practice of fair play is indeed scrupulously fair, with a Clue Finder indexing all the clues and revealing page, paragraph, and line where they can be found. I was even able to guess the means of murder of the otherwise undrowned and unmolested Sabot Hodges, and being the dope that I am, I usually don’t tumble to those things. Obelists en Route proves a genuinely agreeable journey, should you manage to find a copy of the book and can afford the ticket. Just watch out for the economics lecture.

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Book Review: CLUB (1991) by Bill James

11/25/2021

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Writing as Bill James, Welsh novelist James Tucker continues his incisive, morally murky, and darkly funny series featuring Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur and the many scheming lawbreakers he interacts with, whether as crooks or colleagues. The books continue to build towards a fascinating cumulative effect: while the plot of each novel can stand on its own, the characters and conflicts carry over in serial fashion and past sins reverberate in new ways. This is especially true with Club, the seventh book, in which the author selects an interesting but incidental figure from past volumes and lets him writhe and wriggle in the unforgiving spotlight as a central character under pressure.

Ralph Ember runs the Monty, a pub with a dodgy reputation whose owner and clientele have both seen better days. Ralph is another of James’s upwardly mobile-looking petty criminals, a man who takes pride in his family and his once solid social reputation. His daughters attend an expensive school where Ralph campaigns (a little too personally) to keep Latin in the curriculum; in the pub, it’s no cheap beer for him when a sip of Armagnac will show the right touch of class. When Caring Oliver and Pete Chitty begin to put together a team for a bank job in Exeter, they reach out to Ralph because he’s a pro from the old days. But left unspoken is his reputation cemented from a job gone wrong years ago, where he was known thereafter as Panicking Ralphy.

Club is one of the series’ most visceral stories to date, not because it is overly violent or agonizing but because the author uses his third person prose to get inside and lay bare the psychosis of Ralph Ember, whose vulnerability and anxiety can produce outright claustrophobia in the reader. In James’s hands, the character is a completely believable straw man, working very hard to convince himself that he is still in complete control under pressure while his sweating limbs and shaking hands and lurking doubts scream otherwise. We spend the most time with Ralph in this book, very much inside his head, and it is company with an unlikable but completely believable flawed man, a graying dog who still tries to bark to show his status but doesn’t know if he’s fooling the rest of the pack or even himself.

Getting inside the mind of Sarah Iles, Club’s other truly troubled character, is even more unsettling. The Assistant Chief Constable’s wife is grieving the death of her lover Ian Aston, whose body is found on a trash heap near a pay phone. Aston may have been ambushed on his way to make a prearranged call to Sarah… and it’s possible that he may have been killed by her husband, pushed past the breaking point. With grief, uncertainty, and tension swirling within her – and the knowledge that the police would close ranks to protect their own – Sarah begins to break down and entertain very dark thoughts, with her hatred of life extending to her newborn baby girl.

What continues to amaze me about this crime series is how deftly and successfully Bill James explores his fictional world and the characters caught under the dome. As with Panicking Ralph Ember, the reader is given entrée into some of the cast’s perspectives, with the limited character views fully explored by the text. So we look at the situation through Ralphy’s eyes in his chapters, and know his every irritation and fear – and indeed his personality and belief system – through the third-person commentary. The same is true when a chapter focuses on Sarah Iles or Colin Harpur: we are in their world, feeling their emotions. (By contrast, the author never lets us share ACC Desmond Iles’s inner thoughts, and that’s a wise rule; neither reader nor colleague nor spouse knows what this potentially dangerous lawman is really thinking.) Crafting an interior point-of-view through prose is hardly a new literary tactic, but Bill James does it beautifully, and his characters are truly memorable and affecting because of this.

It’s also a marvel that so much wit and humor is infused into stories that often charge toward unhappy, painful conclusions and truths. I am amused by a turn of phrase or a wry description on every page and manage to laugh aloud from a detail or line of dialogue on every other. Consider this simple and sincere analysis through Ralph’s eyes as he makes an obligatory visit to case a bank:

Ralph Ember walked through the customer area of the bank at Exeter, trying to appear loaded and troublefree, and helped himself to a meaty handful of leaflets about special deposit account interest rates. His hands shook a little and he dropped a couple. They dived and carried like paper darts and he left them on the floor. He wanted no long scene here. If banks had any sense at all they would do sneak pictures of everybody who came in to collect investment brochures: no better way to get a nice view of the interior, and bank robbers’ cars and houses were waist-deep in the things.

James’s dialogue is equally effective in building character and exposing artifice. At its best, it also carries a mischievous, higher-minded ring, a play of language and expression reminiscent of Tom Stoppard. In this run, Harpur and Iles joust with a reality-television producer who believes his crime reenactment program is altruistically noble:

Yare-Gosse declared: “With respect, may I remind you, Mr. Harpur, gentlemen, that our programme is called Where Is Truth? Our obligations are inescapable.”

“We have a maxim here: truth is what the jury says,” Harpur replied.

In the corridor afterwards, Iles snarled quietly, “Since when have you been up to epigrams, Harpur? You got that stuff about truth and the jury from me.”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”

“True about truth? Are we moving into philosophy?”

“It’s a philosophical show he’s trying to put on, yes?”

“Oh, yes, he’s fucking dangerous all right. He believes he’s the people. All media do. Yet most of them are hardly even persons.”

As with the previous one-word book titles Protection (1988) and Take (1990), Club is loaded with multiple meanings. Ralphy thinks of his ailing bar as a club for the almost-respectable set, while the police fraternity forms a club that will look the other way when the lawbreaking is their own. The word is also used as act and weapon on Sarah Iles’s lover and will be used again on another character within the twisty story.

Perhaps James rings the bell – or hits the reader over the head – a little too often with his chosen word, which appears more than two dozen times before this tale concludes. But it is a minor criticism; characterization, psychology, plotting, and wit are handled so winningly that a writer can be forgiven a bit of heavy symbolism. James must have enjoyed exploring the faults and fissures of his unsteady main character here: Panicking Ralph gets to headline his own story a decade down the road, when a 2001 series entry will bear his name.

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Book Review: OBELISTS AT SEA (1932) by C. Daly King

11/21/2021

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What a strange, contradictory maiden voyage Obelists at Sea is! American psychologist Charles Daly King launched his first detective novel in 1932, and it proves to be a reading experience quite unlike any other mystery novel from the genre’s Golden Age. Obelists at Sea (for me, anyway) is a study in qualitative contrasts: it is by turns engaging and alienating, intelligent and sophomoric, tantalizing and tedious. The author embraces the best, but also the most artificial, qualities of the pure puzzle story and pushes one’s suspension of disbelief – always indulgently permissive with mystery fiction – to the breaking point. The result is that I can appreciate and admire the game being played, but I don’t believe it for a moment. In that regard, Obelists at Sea is almost a meta-mystery, one that claims to search for a solution through the careful application of human psychology and then offers up a cast of clichéd and unreal characters.

But is it a good detective story, worth tracking down and reading? Yes, for its delirious, sensational setup and its unconventional approach to the detective investigation format. We are onboard the Meganaut, an enormous cruise ship filled with pleasure seekers traveling from New York to Paris. As tensions mount during an auction where passengers bid on travel pool numbers, the power fails and the smoking room plunges into darkness. A gunshot rings out. When the lights return, a millionaire named Smith is slumped over his table, dead. But an autopsy reveals that he has two bullets in him, not one – both following the same trajectory – and he apparently also ingested cyanide seconds before he was shot. Although Captain Mansfield has two ship detectives on board, for some reason he places his faith in four psychologists traveling to a conference and encourages them to employ the tricks of their trade to interview suspects, expound theories, and uncover the killer.

Fun? Yes, but Obelists at Sea is also a slog, full of endless interviews and ultimate solutions that aren’t so much satisfying as anticlimactic. The U.S. edition published by Alfred A. Knopf is 330 dense pages, and although the prose reads well enough, the story arc itself feels a bit of a marathon as it moves from one episodic event to another. I appreciated the Aristotelian unity of a crime commission, investigation, and resolution happening during a voyage, as setting, time, character, and plot are neatly aligned. But that unity also invites stasis and repetition.

By making the amateur detective not one figure but four psychologists with competing analytical theories, it seems King had in mind a satire of his profession. It is a genuinely fertile idea, but the author only gets halfway there: each doctor first delivers pages of monologue explaining his area of study. Dr. Frank B. Hayvier describes the concept of subject conditioning, for example, while Dr. Love Rees Pons holds forth on dominance psychology. And yes, this is how C. Daly King chooses to name his characters, and not just his medical men. Among the passenger suspects are a seemingly trusting soul named John I. Gnosens and a man who doesn’t get in the way, Mr. B.Y. Stander. And might Miss Sudeau be traveling under an assumed identity? The name game is either a strange or appropriate piece of pastiche, depending on how engaged you hope to be by the narrative.

It is also disappointing to find that the two most dazzling details of the plot – how did the victim receive two bullets along the same trajectory, and how was a man both poisoned and shot as soon as the lights went out? – are explained early and shrugged off with little fanfare. (Weapon capability and coincidence, respectively.) Instead, the story focuses on the hunt for Smith’s killer. By contrast, the author provides a delightful appendix called a Clue Finder where a dozen categories of incrimination, from X’s “opportunity to commit the crime” to “victim’s fear of” the murderer, are referenced by page and paragraph lines. One would conclude that such fastidious presentation of multiple clues within the text would vouchsafe the story as fair play, and yet I’m not fully convinced. Complete details of the relationship between killer and victim are offered only in the book’s final pages, courtesy of another multi-page expositional confession from another character.

It is comforting to know that I’m not the only one who finds the stories of C. Daly King a mixed bag. Sergio posted a smart, fair, and comprehensive review of Obelists at Sea a decade ago on his now-retired site Tipping My Fedora. Over the years, crime fiction historian and mystery novelist Martin Edwards has also been reading and reacting to King’s “barmily implausible” books, and his comment on 1939’s Arrogant Alibi seems equally appropriate here: “It’s one thing to have all the right ingredients for a whodunit, quite another to make best use of them.” Obelists at Sea indeed has the very ingredients that stir the senses of the classic mystery reader; it’s how they’re used – and the incidental discourse the reader must push through – that makes the voyage strangely uneven.

An obelist, a separate page note tells us, is “one who harbours suspicions.” It is a term the author made up and used in three book titles. Although Obelists Fly High has been reprinted in trade paperback, the other two Obelist books are difficult to find and prohibitively expensive when run to ground. As usual, I am grateful to a vibrant college and university interlibrary loan system that selflessly makes these books available (temporarily) to curious travelers like me.

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Book Review: STREET OF NO RETURN (1954) by David Goodis

11/13/2021

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Recently I watched the 1994 biopic of New York’s Algonquin Round Table founding member Dorothy Parker, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. After that, I revisited some of the acerbic writer’s poems and short stories, many featuring characters sporting wit worn as armor and wrestling with world-weary fatigue, just as the author had done. Despite a relatively meager and thematically limited literary output, Parker’s place as an important American writer is not in question: her work is anthologized and contextualized, celebrated and studied.

But it also made me think about a writer whom literary history has largely chosen to ignore. In Street of No Return, pulp writer David Goodis delivers an astonishing odyssey of a loner continually, quixotically seeking out the worst situations and the most Hellish landscapes, flirting with self-destruction while following a stubborn, almost suicidal personal code. It is a novel that expertly employs all of the tricks of a great novelist – tactics of structure, of sensory description, of enigmatic characters and against-the-odds stakes – to deliver a story and mood that stay with you for days after finishing it. In clichéd terms, Goodis transcends his genre; just as Waiting for Godot isn’t merely about travelers trapped on the road, Street of No Return is about so much more than a bum from Skid Row looking for trouble.

At start, Whitey (nicknamed for his snow-white hair) shares an alley with two boozers who stare longingly at an empty bottle, chiding each other in a Beckettian rhythm about needing to get a full one but making no effort to move. It is Whitey who moves, following a man wearing “a bright green cap and a black-and-purple plaid lumber jacket” from the relative safety of Skid Row three blocks south into the Hellhole, where a race war between Americans (read: whites) and Puerto Ricans has been violently blazing for five weeks. In true pulp noir fashion, Whitey loses the man he was following but comes across a dying police officer in an alley and is quickly arrested for the crime.

What follows is an absorbing and atmospheric nightmare of a tale, with danger and violence swirling around the protagonist and The Fates (or are they Furies?) determined to give Whitey a finish to his quest that ends with his obliteration. And as he moves from one perilous situation to another – with the Hellhole, it is almost literally a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire – this reader became psychologically and emotionally invested in Whitey’s survival to an unusual degree. Like any effective work of literature, that bond with the story’s hero builds cumulatively. I want to know not only how he is going to escape his current high-pressure trap, but also what scenarios lie in store for him around the corner.

And Goodis ratchets the suspense like a master, as Whitey must navigate a world with very few allies and many deadly enemies. Through it all, Whitey is never afraid and certainly never surprised at his circumstances or at the cruelty of men and women; this is just the way the world operates and it would be foolish to expect otherwise. The colorfully dressed man who lures Whitey into the inferno is a fragment of Whitey’s past life: at one time, the Skid Row resident was a Sinatra-like crooner on the rise. But an obsession with a gangster’s girl and a refusal to exit the picture brought about the end of his career and pretty much the end of his life. Now he thinks the man might lead him back to Celia…

The author makes clear that Whitey is standing alone, caring nothing about taking sides in the race war or fighting out of some clouded ethnic ideology. Only one character offers a temporary oasis for the restless loner: Jones Jarvis is an elderly African-American who makes moonshine using scrupulous standards and offers Whitey his shed to recover in after a beating. Like Whitey, Jones is an independent man with his own quiet philosophy, and someone who has found a way to survive despite the violence and corruption all around. As he explains to a recovering Whitey by way of introduction:

“Once when I had a phone they’d get it wrong in the book and list me under Jones. Did that year after year and finally I got tired telling them to change it. Got rid of the phone. Man has a right to have his name printed correct. It’s Jones first and then Jarvis. The name is Jones Jarvis.”

The dialogue in Street is evocative and captures the souls of its speakers well, but it is David Goodis’s use of description and scene building here that shape a demi-monde of dreams and nightmares. Strutting and squirming against these settings, the book’s most memorable characters take on an almost mythic quality. Take Bertha, for example, a 300-pound force of nature who lives to inflict pain as a bone-breaking minion for the soft-spoken criminal Sharkey. Or Carlos and Luis, two memorably sketched Puerto Rican hoods who lead prisoner Whitey into a tenement teeming with cockroaches, rats, and hungover addicts.

It is a character named Kinnard, the beleaguered captain of the Hellhole’s precinct, who makes the most visceral impression. A bruiser who is rapidly losing control, Captain Kinnard is a powerhouse of almost expressionistic proportions, dealing blows to anyone in his path with no regard to legal protocol. Taming this roiling whale is essential for Whitey on his path to redemption, and two lieutenants – one or both of which may be crooked – are accompanying sharks just waiting for blood to stain the waters.

The conclusion of Street of No Return is elliptical and fitting, and it feels truthful to the stylized odyssey that has run its course. It is a story whose details are often punishing and grim: no one in crime fiction takes a more palpable pulp beating than a Goodis protagonist. Teeth are lost, eyes are swollen shut, and vulnerable parts of the body are crushed, literally and metaphorically. There is also little to reassure about the human race and its often dark motives. But David Goodis deserves to be recognized for his writing, a deceptively unadorned prose that comes nearer to delivering a kind of gutter-life poetry. He might not have been a celebrated member of New York’s literary set, but the Philadelphia crime writer undeniably had chops of his own.

Street of No Return is available in a 2007 reprint from Millipede Press.

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Book Review: OBELISTS EN ROUTE (1934) by C. Daly King

Book Review: CLUB (1991) by Bill James

Book Review: OBELISTS AT SEA (1932) by C. Daly King

Book Review: STREET OF NO RETURN (1954) by David Goodis

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