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Book Review: VEGETABLE DUCK (1944) by John Rhode

2/8/2022

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Of the 80+ books I managed to read last year, the majority were from authors of classic detective fiction and five of them were penned by the prolific Cecil John Charles Street. Under the pseudonyms of John Rhode and Miles Burton, Street wrote (or, in the later half of his career, dictated) about 140 mysteries, and I find myself returning every couple months to try another title on this lengthy and impressive list. Why do I keep traveling these Rhodes, covering these Miles? What’s the attraction with this particular Street?
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With 1944’s Vegetable Duck, generally acclaimed as one of the author’s greatest successes, I am reminded again about the supreme comfortability generated when I read a story featuring Dr. Lancelot Priestley or Inspector Jimmy Waghorn. First, the writing is clear and forthright; Street’s prose stays away from any clutter, whether literary or introspective, that may slow the storytelling.

Next, the puzzle and its attendant questions – whodunit, how, and why – drive the plot with few, if any, detours or cul-de-sacs. Additionally but importantly, the crimes on display fully meet the spirit of classic detective fiction: they are usually curious and colorful, and the death of a character (and that character’s personality) is considered and dispassionate enough that the dispatching can be viewed as part of the puzzle and not as a grievous loss to humanity. In short, the Rhode and Burton stories are often extremely pleasing examples of the genre, comfortable and competent and very easy to process and enjoy.
 
There is another admirable asset on display in Vegetable Duck that kept this reader engaged and turning the pages. As mentioned, the inciting puzzle at the start of the story is specific and central: how was Letty Fransham fatally poisoned during dinner, and who is responsible? But the author quickly provides multiple related mysteries, equally intriguing, that will help answer these questions and that need to be investigated on their own merits. And Street weaves his principal and supporting puzzle threads masterfully throughout the tale. Who provided a mysterious phone message that called husband Charles Fransham away just before dinner was served? What connection might the country shooting death of Mrs. Fransham’s brother years earlier (with fellow hunter Charles a prime suspect) have to the poisoning? And who has been sending crude letters to Charles promising revenge for the brother’s death? Could it mean that it was Charles and not his wife who was the intended victim?
 
All of these tangential mysteries pop up in the book’s first chapters, with more taking shape as the story continues and another murder is committed. The most celebrated aspect of Vegetable Duck is the clever method employed to saturate a marrow with digitalis, but its brilliance in revelation is dulled somewhat because the enigma is not teased or solved through reader-collected clues. Instead, it’s presented as a show-and-tell demonstration by Dr. Priestley in Chapter 12, and thus takes on the quality of a lecture instead of an intellectual question for the reader to pursue. The many other clues that line Duck’s garden path –from a belated letter in the post that might have rescued Letty Fransham from her deadly dinner to a disguised visitor to that Mundesley Mansions flat days earlier – are relevant and fair-play, and their contributions give the plot a satisfying and propulsive fullness.
 
What’s more, Street incorporates elements of one of the most perplexing true-crime stories ever told, the 1931 murder of Julia Wallace in her home. According to his testimony, a phone call from a stranger arranging an after-hours business meeting with William Herbert Wallace led him on a fruitless search for an address that didn’t exist. Upon returning home, he recruited a neighbor to help him with a front door that would not open. They found Julia Wallace dead by the hearth, her head battered and lying on her husband’s raincoat. The case seems to turn on the strange summons that got William out of the apartment: if the call was genuine, who would have arranged this? Or was the message – taken down the day before by a fellow member at Wallace’s chess club and given to him – from Wallace himself, setting up an alibi so he could commit murder? That alluringly mysterious phone call clearly intrigued the author; he used the concept here and in his later novel The Telephone Call (1948).

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And if you are not from the United Kingdom and wonder about the book’s curious name and this era-specific recipe (and even what a marrow is), I am happy to share my findings. It turns out that vegetable duck need not contain duck; it is instead the filling and baking of minced meat inside a hollowed-out marrow. A marrow is similar to a zucchini, but larger with stripes and a thicker skin. Get yourself a lovely Churchyard Salad courtesy of Malcom Torrie to accompany, and John Rhode’s Vegetable Duck will surely be satisfying, if lethal. In the U.S., Dodd, Mead & Company published the book under the rather generic and not very apposite title Too Many Suspects as part of their Red Badge Mystery series a year later.
 
TomCat reminds me that botanical shenanigans can also be found in The Man Who Grew Tomatoes by Gladys Mitchell in his Duck review at Beneath the Stains of Time. Other blogs that have sampled this John Rhode dish include The Grandest Game in the World, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Martin Edwards’ Crime Writing Blog, The Passing Tramp, and Pretty Sinister Books.

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Book Review: MINUTE FOR MURDER (1947) by Nicholas Blake

1/26/2022

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Until a recent reading remedied it, I had only read Minute for Murder once years and years ago, but the attributes of this mystery’s clever plotting and balanced structure had stayed with me. True, I could no longer recall the details, but the cleanness and unity of the story impressed me: what I remembered was a murder mystery where the detective drained the pool of suspects from six people to four to three, until just two remained to face each other in a deadly standoff. Revisiting the tale, I found that these satisfying elements were still there, and that the book remains (for me) one of the author’s best crime stories.

Knowing that the 16 detective novels featuring Nigel Strangeways were penned by British poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis as a way to generate income, I’m always more surprised than I should be that the author crafted his mysteries with such careful attention to detail and fair-play vigor. His best puzzle plots are as devious and deliberate as anything Agatha Christie would create, filled with notably individual and occasionally sensational crime scenarios and employing a cast of characters built to keep armchair sleuths guessing as the chapters flash by.

In short, the best mysteries published under the name Nicholas Blake play the game as spiritedly and as soundly as anything in Golden Age detective fiction. Day-Lewis wasn’t cynically churning out books within a popular, populist genre just to collect a paycheck; he seems genuinely interested in playing the game, using all his skills and talents to spin his stories and beguile his readers. Minute for Murder, with its intriguing office setting, colorful cast, tactile clues, and active logic intermixed, is an excellent example of the author’s abilities.

We are in the days following the allied victory in Europe, and the Ministry of Morale where Strangeways works will be dissolving soon. He has come to know his wartime colleagues well, and the Visual Propaganda Division is expecting a visit from Charles Kennington, a chatty extrovert who managed to ensnare a top Nazi official while fighting abroad. Charles brings a grim souvenir back with him and passes it around at the reunion party: an intact cyanide capsule to be hidden in a spy’s mouth and used in case of capture. Cups of coffee are passed around, and beautiful secretary Nita Prince chokes and dies after a fateful sip. The capsule can’t be found after a search, and Nigel worries that the young woman’s death may only be the beginning of a dangerous crime spree.

He is soon proven right: another office worker is stabbed while working late and a deliberate blaze destroys a photograph room containing negatives of thousands of classified pictures. As the criminal acts multiply, Strangeways must find answers to several key questions. Was the secretary the intended victim or was the poison meant for another person at the party? Was the fire meant to destroy incriminating evidence, and if so, what? And how to untangle the relationships of people connected to Nita Prince: the pretty secretary was having an affair with department director Jimmy Lake, yet the man is married to Alice Kennington, Charles’s sister. Ministry copy writer Brian Ingle was also in love with Nita, but he knew that she would never break with Jimmy, even if Jimmy could ultimately never leave Alice for her...

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There are many incidents and events, and many plots and subplots, in Minute for Murder. While this creates a busy (and at times breathless) story, it never becomes overcomplicated or spins out of control. Some of this management is due to the aforementioned logic of it all – when a new action appears, it is handily examined and placed into context by the author through his detective. In that regard, Day-Lewis is an excellent organizer and presenter; it is not difficult to imagine how effective he was in his real-life wartime position as publications editor within the Ministry of Information. That experience provided the background that he utilizes so well here, creating a fictional Ministry of Morale to stage his story of murder. (“The government department in which the action of this book takes place never did, or could, exist,” writes Blake in an introductory disclaimer. He adds amusingly, “Whereas every disagreeable, incompetent, flagitious or homicidal type in it is a figment of my imagination, all the charming, efficient and noble characters are drawn straight from life.”)

The winnowing of viable suspects from many to few to one, a trait mentioned at the top, still occurs, even if it’s not quite as geometrically ordered as I remembered it. This is also one of the best middle-period Blake books, of kindred spirit with End of Chapter (1957) and The Widow’s Cruise (1959), later entries that show the author’s ongoing interest in crafting engaging and viable fair-play puzzle stories. Among frequent readers and reviewers of classic mystery fiction, Minute for Murder has a reputation as a very good, if not stellar, series entry. I think it still satisfies and plays the game with admirable success.

Additional reviews can be found from Tracy at Bitter Tea and Mystery and Nick at The Grandest Game in the World.

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Book Review: UNNATURAL ENDS (2022) by Christopher Huang

1/17/2022

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There is much to admire in Christopher Huang’s new mystery novel Unnatural Ends, available in May from the writer- and reader-focused publishing group Inkshares. Featuring Gothic gloom, a fair-play murder mystery, and a twisted history of psychological abuse within a family, there should be something to appeal to almost all readers of crime fiction. What impressed me the most, though, wasn’t the plot or the atmosphere but the author’s excellent attention to the details.

Three adopted siblings return to the chilly landscape of North Yorkshire upon learning of their father’s death. All three have proven themselves in places purposely far away: oldest brother Alan Linwood is an archaeologist, studying civilizations exotic and now extinct; Roger is a brilliant engineer, his talents spent perfecting innovations of air and road travel; and Caroline is a journalist in Paris, covering international news. Each of the Linwood siblings should be well-equipped to investigate their father’s murder, and in fact that is what Sir Lawrence Linwood commands that they do in his will. Should he meet an unnatural end, whomever of the three finds Father’s killer will inherit the ancient family home.

Huang divides his book into multiple third-person limited POV chapters, with each character providing a piece of the puzzle, either through experiences occurring in the story’s present time (April 1921) or years earlier (in 1904, when the three siblings were children and their personalities were being formed through internal logic and external pressures). This back-and-forth temporal structure was the primary reason why Unnatural Ends never really gained momentum for me: the present didn’t have much urgency when past events are given equal weight and page time.

There are two other elements that kept me reading more as an objective observer than as an engaged participant. First, in building his cast and shaping his story, Huang has set himself a paradoxically difficult task. We are supposed to invest in the investigation of Sir Lawrence’s murder, but from the start (and supported by each family member’s past and present experiences) Sir Lawrence is a cruel despot who enjoys making others suffer and bend to his will. His death by violence – bludgeoned by a spiked mace – is fitting, to say the least. While there is the dubious impetus of inheriting a family estate that is as cold and inhospitable as Father himself, there is no initial reason, whether rivalry, curiosity, or justice, for Alan, Roger, or Caroline to seek answers. Sagely, Huang soon gives them appropriate motivation: investigating the murder will provide answers to their own identities. It’s not Father who needs liberating but the adult children who can finally break free. 

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Granted, a mystery story does not need an alliance of sympathy with the victim to be effective. And the other characters do become less archetypal and more individual, but the journey is a long one. At 450 pages, Unnatural Ends needs its share of twists and turns, and on paper they are there. The problem is that the reader can get ahead of the plot, especially if one incorporates the detective fiction reader’s maxim to not take the truth as it is presumed to be. The author is scrupulously fair with his clues, and I found them easy to collect along the way. The clueing of culprit(s), motive, and mechanics is largely in place by the book’s midpoint, which is when I connected the dots. I then needed to wait for Inspector Mowbray and the sibling sleuths to catch up, and that – along with the vacillating between present and past – diminished the journey.

It is still a story worth recommending. The book’s prose is excellently crafted and presented; when it comes to historical details and literary syntax, the author rarely sounds a sour note or takes a wrong step. He is particularly good at using specifics to make his characters’ world believable and engaging. He describes the Yorkshire moors and the family’s looming stone castle, with its draughty servant passageways and its cliff-hugging sheer stone facade, in convincing sensory detail. The siblings bring elements of their global lives back with them: engineer Roger has tried to partner with Sopwith Aviation while Alan sees parallels between his native landscape and his vistas at Machu Picchu. The historical context is impeccably researched and vividly used; along with Huang’s confident prose, the contextual details make the book a success.

The author’s previous novel, 2018’s A Gentleman’s Murder, is also set in 1920s England and appears to offer a similar winning mix of history and mystery. Unnatural Ends has a U.S. release date of May 10. I received an advance reading copy through NetGalley in exchange for a forthright review.

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BLACK CAT WEEKLY - Current issue features my short story!

1/9/2022

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What a lovely way to kick off the New Year! 

Author and editor Barb Goffman contacted me a short while ago and asked for permission to feature a short story of mine, the Maine-set "The Last Ferry", in an upcoming issue of Black Cat Weekly. The e-zine is a marvelous mix of science fiction and mystery stories, and features both short pieces and two novels in this issue. 

It is always exciting and humbling to have one's work singled out by another writer, and it certainly doesn't happen every day. I'm especially honored that the person taking an interest is Barb Goffman, whose lively crime fiction stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and scores of anthologies and themed collections.

Readers can purchase individual issues of Black Cat Weekly or subscribe for the year. "The Last Ferry" is featured in Issue #19, and you can visit the BCW site by following this link.

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