Category: Book Review

MITCHELL MYSTERY READING GROUP - Come Away, Death - Post #2

4/14/2019

As we explore Chapters Six through Ten of Gladys Mitchell's 1937 crime story Come Away, Death, our contemporary travelers in the reading group have lots of ground to cover. The dark clouds of Greek tragedy, simmering tensions between the characters, and Mrs. Bradley's relationship to reptiles are all points of interest…

ON GREEK TRAGEDY (AND WELSH MARTYRDOM)

Nick Fuller, who provided so much great information to me last time about the Mysteries of Eleusis and the Demeter/Persephone myth, calls our attention to the doomed figures in the House of Atreus:

"The gods ordered Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to summon a wind to bring the Greek fleet to Troy. (In some versions, Artemis rescues the girl at the last moment, and brings her to her temple in Tauris.) When Agamemnon returned from the Trojan Wars 10 years later, his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus murdered Agamemnon in his bathtub. To avenge his father, their son Orestes then killed his mother and her lover, with the help of his sister Elektra and his friend Pylades... Mitchell refers to Aeschylus's Oresteia - Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers (Choephori), and The Eumenides; Mrs Bradley mistakes Megan on the battlements for Clytemnestra watching for the beacons at the start of Agamemnon."

Martyn Hobbs noticed Gladys Mitchell's winking juxtaposition of the tragedies found in the ancient and current worlds. He observes: "While the threat of murder hangs over Sir Rudri’s motley crew, there is a contrast between the rather petty enmities of the moderns and the tragic passions of the ancients, whose ruins they tread among:

"The legends of the Atrides hung brooding over the heavy, broken walls of the Lion Gate, and round the unguarded graves. The dark passion of Clytemnestra, the anguish of young Orestes, made heavy the lowering atmosphere, soaked beyond bearing already, with the heat of the dead air before a storm.

Sir Rudri was not [Mrs Bradley's] only source of anxiety. The little boys, bored, and tired… had been by turns listless and tiresome. Alexander Currie had been severely attacked by flies… Armstrong, too, was a perpetual menace… and Gelert had given up any attempt at cheerfulness…"

And, while far removed from the time and setting of Hellenic mythology, JF Norris of Pretty Sinister Books informs us of the Welsh inspiration for one of Mitchell's more intriguing character names. JF says that the following is "taken verbatim from the English inscription (it's also in Welsh) on a monument in Beddgelert in Wales":

"In the 13th century, Llywelyn, prince of North Wales, had a palace at Beddgelert. One day he went hunting without Gelert "the faithful hound" who was unaccountably absent. On Llywelyn's return, the truant, stained and smeared with blood, joyfully sprang to meet his master. The prince, alarmed, hastened to find his son, and saw the infant's cot empty, the bedclothes and floor covered with blood. The frantic father plunged the sword into the hound's side thinking it had killed his heir. The dog's dying yell was answered by a child's cry. Llywelyn searched and discovered his boy unharmed but nearby lay the body of a mighty wolf which Gelert had slain. The prince, filled with remorse, is said never to have smiled again. He buried Gelert here. The spot is called Beddgelert."

JF concludes that "Mitchell's hotheaded Gelert is aptly named – quick to throw a punch, but always as a means to defend and protect just like his namesake." I add that knowing this background also makes clearer the author's descriptive choice of Gelert as like a lean and angular greyhound!

ON STORY SATISFACTION

Having delved into some historical background, what do readers make of this section? We approach the novel's midway point but, despite Cathleen's premonitions of death, some bitter professional rivalry, and occasional knife fights, we have yet to claim a murder victim. Examining the initial chapters, this delayed approach to a detective story was frustrating to some. I was heartened, then, to see JF's opening remark for the current section: "It’s picking up in intrigue and gaining my interest. There is actual crime in this crime novel!"

Tellingly, Gladys Mitchell's choice to focus on character friction and conjure an uncomfortable, even hostile setting in this 1937 Mrs. Bradley story is exactly in keeping with her historical and contemporary fiction novels she wrote in this decade under the pseudonym Stephen Hockaby. In my opinion, the Hockaby books are some of her most accomplished works, and they share many of the elements found in Come Away, Death. In the Hockaby stories, death, violence, and character conflict are treated as everyday and natural occurrences. There is something similar at work here: the characters are at the mercy of the land and the fates; animals such as vipers (and, later, hyenas and savage dogs) are mere extensions of the arid and inhospitable landscape; and murder, when it does occur, is a necessity of the world order rather than an obscene sacrilege against it, as most moral Golden Age mysteries present the act.

From Nick: "The Mycenae section is stifling and oppressive. The attempted sacrifice is one of my favourite scenes in Mitchell; Mrs Bradley, "like some ancient prophetess", menaces Sir Rudri "with her hideous, leering lips". Mitchell often hints that Mrs Bradley is more than mortal. She's compared here to the Pythoness of Delphi; in other books, she's a witch (Tom Brown's Body), or the crone aspect of the Triple Goddess (The Whispering Knights)."

Our previous group of chapters ended with an act of violence against Armstrong, the photographer with blackmailing tendencies, and now, at the end of Chapter 10, there is another moment of impromptu violence, this one involving a knife fight between Gelert and an angry Greek man. Given that pattern, one can reasonably expect Chapter 15 not to end happily…

Speaking of which, JF is tracking the foreground villain's misfortunes: "I was delighted to watch Armstrong the vile sadist, way too vain and handsome for his own good, get beaten up by both Ian and Gelert. Nothing more I like than to see bullies get a taste of their own medicine." He adds, "I peg Armstrong to be the murder victim. He certainly seems destined for a cruel Fate if not a cruel murder."

Another interesting detail is that Gladys Mitchell has purposely varied the size of her chapters here. (In most of her mysteries they are fairly uniform.) Martyn observes that "a formal pattern is suggested by the lengths of the chapters. Up to now, they have been long and leisurely, subdivided into numbered sections. Now, suddenly, in this tenth chapter, it is all over after just four pages. The preceding chapter also stretched to only six. Glancing ahead (without reading!), Chapter 11 reaches up to nine, Chapter 12 makes it to five at a pinch, Chapter 13 hardly gets to page 3, while Chapter 14 recovers to achieve a more familiar extent. Does this compression portend an acceleration of action, of significant events, of that long-awaited crime?"

More from Martyn: "The symmetry of the groups of five chapters and the succession of brief chapters suggest GM is playing with the structure of her tale. It reminded me (vaguely, because I read it long ago in the last century) of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones where the central chapters of his huge novel cover the shortest periods of time in his narrative – the opening and closing chapters extend over years but at the heart of the book they cover only hours. I may be wrong on the precise timings, but the pattern is definitely there."

ON THE SNAKES AND THE SLEUTH

JF gives us a thoughtful text analysis and ties the book's slippery snake imagery into a neat bow. "I’m very taken with the snake motif running throughout," writes JF, "and it started on Page One: the ship that brings Mrs. Bradley to the shores of Greece is the Medusa. There is a section back in Chapter 4 where she talks about her affinity with the reptile world and how she is often likened to a lizard. When she shows concern for the snakes Sir Rudri brought for his odd rituals, noting that they should be exercised, he asks if she is afraid of snakes and she replies: 'I am almost the incarnation of one' and goes on to describe herself as 'definitely reptilian', 'sometimes saurian', but at least 'one or the other'. First time I’ve ever read the words from Mrs. Bradley's own mouth rather than being described as such by others."

He continues, "Later, when Mrs. Bradley is talking to Alexander Currie, Mitchell writes that 'she grinned disarmingly at him, as a cobra might possibly grin before it struck.' The section where all the snakes decide to curl up in bed with many members of the group as they try to seek warmth is one of the more surreal moments. Mrs. Bradley even puts her hand on the snake in her bed as if it’s her companion! I wish there was more of this in the book. This is what I read Gladys Mitchell for – the eerie touches, the bizarre moments, the nearly supernatural events that defy logic."

Martyn adds on: "The short early morning scene with the boys and the snakes makes me feel that GM could have written some great adventure stories for children. Incidentally, Mrs Bradley displays perfect (and fitting) sangfroid in her dealings with the serpents, entering with one coiled about her skinny arm – they even share a similar grin."

My note to Martyn's children story mention: she did write some entertaining, if not too remarkable, adventure stories with young readers in mind. The closest in spirit with the boys of this book may be 1940's The Three Fingerprints, where a trio of curious lads finds themselves investigating Nazi spies and avoiding an alligator in the course of their travels!

Next week we look at Chapters 11 through 15. Fewer pages but closer to that inevitable murder...

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Book Review: THERE'S TROUBLE BREWING (1937) by Nicholas Blake

3/19/2019

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My recent revisiting of the Nigel Strangeways detective series has brought great enjoyment and a new appreciation of Nicholas Blake's work. As I (vaguely) remembered from my first exposure more than a decade and a half ago, the earliest books offer a playful, humorous spirit whose plots are full of incident and striking demises: a body in a haystack at a boys' school in A Question of Proof (1935); death by poison-injected walnut in Thou Shell of Death (1936). And now, in 1937's There's Trouble Brewing, a particularly disagreeable brewery owner appears to meet a particularly disagreeable fate: being boiled in a sealed copper vat.

One aspect I find especially admirable is how thoroughly Blake – the pseudonym for writer and future Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom Cecil Day-Lewis – commits to the fair-play mystery format, a path he traveled to augment his income while he crafted poetry. While these GAD books are filled with good humor and a fair dose of literary asides and allusions, the author never shorts the elements expected for a rousing fair-play puzzle. There are alibis to be shaken and confirmed or broken, odd clues (bits of a signet ring, a missing report) to be pondered, and a healthy variety of suspects, many whose prospects would improve with the victim handily out of the way. The reader is given access to the thoughts and tabulations of Blake's amateur detective protagonist Nigel Strangeways, and we see what Nigel sees... until the pieces rearrange to form a clear picture for him, and then we might have to wait a bit longer before Strangeways provides a final-chapter dénouement explaining it all.

In other words, Blake's 1930s titles deliver exactly what a classic mystery fan has come to comfortably expect from the genre. There is also the benefit that Blake/Day-Lewis writes very enjoyable, sometimes wry prose, and he does not shy away from extending a metaphor or making literary references. (Thou Shell of Death, especially with its title, turns partly on Strangeways' knowledge of Jacobean Revenge stage drama.) These (for me) are always amusing rather than obstructive, as when Nigel muses that being a Classics scholar was fine preparation for his current role as an investigator of murder:

"If ever, in your salad days – as one of my comic uncles calls them – you were compelled to do a Latin unseen, you'll know that it presents an accurate parallel with criminal detection. You have a long sentence, full of inversions; just a jumble of words it looks at first. That is what a crime looks like at first sight, too. The subject is a murdered man; the verb is the modus operandi, the way the crime was committed; the object is the motive. Those are the three essentials of every sentence and every crime. First you find the subject, then you look for the verb, and the two of them lead you to the object. But you have not discovered the criminal – the meaning of the whole sentence yet. There are a number of subordinate clauses, which may be clues or red-herrings, and you've got to separate them from each other in your own mind and to reconstruct them to fit and to amplify the meaning of the whole. It's an exercise in analysis and synthesis – the very best training for detectives."

In There's Trouble Brewing, Blake also adroitly handles a murder-mystery archetype, and one for whom I have a particular (masochistic?) affinity: the gleefully malevolent patriarch. Here, Eustace Bunnett is a hated town scion, an unscrupulous and lecherous old man who, as owner of the brewery, uses his power to make his workers submissive and quell complaints about dangerous work conditions and outdated equipment. It might have been out of revenge that Bunnett's innocent (and victimized) dog Truffles disappears, and his remains are found later in an open vat. The poor pet's demise could have inspired a second pressure-cooker killing, as human bones and rags are found, with all signs pointing to Eustace as the victim... while his brother Joe is nowhere to be found.

The inspector believes it's a straightforward case: Joe killed Eustace and escaped on his boat. It's possible, but Nigel wonders why the murderer subjected the victim to boiling when it wasn't necessary. He also worries about town resident and old school friend Herbert Cammison, who, with his wife, seems to be concealing a secret about Bunnett that might lead the police to their door.

And that leads me to sound one more note of admiration regarding the author's handling of genre elements. Blake assumes the puzzle-pursuing reader is smart enough to make connections and draw conclusions, so certain inferences of details that other writers might have tagged for a late-chapter reveal are offered up at the start. Through his protagonist, Blake makes no bones (!) of the fact that boiling obscures a body's fleshly identity – which may or may not be a red herring here -- and, likewise, he lets Nigel become suspicious of his amiable school friend right away. If either of those details had gone unremarked, the veteran mystery reader would be instantly on guard, but because the detective comments early on these points, we are left (rightly) wondering what Strangeways may have deduced that the armchair enthusiast has not.

A very good entry in the series, There's Trouble Brewing is worth sampling for Golden Age Detection imbibers. My fellow pub crawlers Kate at Crossexaminingcrime and Nick at The Grandest Game in the World offered their reviews too; just follow the links!

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Book Review: GUN BEFORE BUTTER (1963) by Nicolas Freeling

3/10/2019

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At the end of the 1990s, when I was out of college and had time to truly read for pleasure (rather than for quiz answers and course completion), I made a couple author discoveries that would result in a deep appreciation and a lifelong affection for their works. Certainly Gladys Mitchell was one of these authors, and I have since read and provided summaries and reviews of her 84 novels over at The Stone House. P.G. Wodehouse, whom I also discovered around that time, brings great delight, generally in moderation; A Wodehouse book or two every six months strikes the right balance. And a third name from that era comes to mind: European chef turned author Nicolas Freeling.

Freeling introduced his most memorable protagonist, Dutch Police Inspector Piet Van der Valk, in 1962 with Love in Amsterdam. I quickly read through the series of 11 novels – 13 if you count the two titles featuring Van der Valk's headstrong French wife Arlette – and was delighted by many elements that Freeling explored, in structure and psychology and even the subversion of genre expectations. While there is always crime (and usually murder) at each story's center, nothing else is guaranteed. But Freeling is such an excellent, observational writer that I always feel fully engaged and am willing to accept any narrative path he offers.

Such unconventionality may not be welcomed by fans of Golden Age Detection puzzles, exactly. In Criminal Conversation (1965), for example, most of the novel is a dialogue between the inspector and a suspect in the case; with Over the High Side (1971), Van der Valk advances theories about what happened to a patriarch who disappeared from the family boat, but as the members refuse to share their knowledge of the night and incriminate one of their own, a definitive resolution is never stated. And in the story I am reviewing here, 1963's Gun before Butter, the Dutch policeman has several notable interactions with Lucienne Englebert stretching over years – first as a teenager involved in a car crash that kills her father, then in the company of Italian boys arrested during a knife fight, next as a defendant of a theft complaint – before she surfaces as a young woman working as an auto mechanic and marked as a potential suspect in a murder investigation.

I'm tempted to advise that Nicolas Freeling's writing (like Gladys Mitchell's) may be an acquired taste. His mysteries are very reminiscent of Simenon and his proletariat detective, Inspector Maigret, but they incorporate an even more philosophical tone. As a law officer, Piet Van der Valk is an iconoclast, and indeed a reader should not expect "justice" to be served by having the figure that pulls the trigger or pushes in the knife to be inevitably arrested, tried, and convicted. That isn't the world that Freeling creates – indeed, it's not true of our own reality, then or now – and for me it is a more interesting one because such a world is not bound be the strictures of moral or genre formula.

The Van der Valk novels are not formless, however; they each have narrative and tonal logic that feels highly satisfying (and rather unique) to me. The case progresses, threads are followed, the picture forms. But it's the choices that are made and the worldview of this literate and atypical policeman that make the difference. I have encountered detective characters as outside-the-box thinkers many times, but no sequence has lodged in my memory more than the way Freeling frames a certain scene in Gun before Butter; it has stayed with me for almost 20 years.

In it, Van der Valk wants to question Lucienne Englebert, but she works at a service station in Belgium, where the Dutch detective has no jurisdiction. He tries anyway, and blusters a bit too much to overcome his legal vulnerability. Enter Bernard, the garage owner and an ex-prize fighter, who, after telling Van der Valk to leave with no result, hits him efficiently in the face and escorts him to his car. The policeman leaves the premises, only to drive directly across the road to an unused lot, park, and wait. Eventually, a Belgian patrol officer checks out the parked car, and upon learning that Van der Valk is also police, gives him his blessing to remain as long as he wants. Soon thereafter, a slightly sheepish Bernard crosses the road to ask Van der Valk to return to the station. He accepts, and the two talk about Lucienne (whom Bernard loves unrequitedly) over bottles of Belgian beer.

It's a bravura scene, one of many to be found in Freeling's books, and I'm amazed by it for two reasons. First, it runs completely counter to the expectations of a traditional action crime thriller, and neatly deconstructs its elements. It is a scene of menace and brief violence carried through in a fully understated way; the moment is grounded in the present, but the action is over as soon as it begins. Any other writer would be tempted to stretch a few paragraphs out of the confrontation, with the hero cracking wise and mounting some sort of defense to show his capabilities. Nothing of the sort happens here. Second, the choices all the way down the line – Van der Valk's atypical bluster as overcompensation, Bernard's use of a single punch to get rid of the trespasser, the parking across the road and the guilt-tinged half-apology – are genuinely surprising and yet fully, psychologically sound. It's a sequence that's completely unexpected and deeply satisfying, not least because the action of each person feels so truthful to the character the author has shaped him to be.

It is only in the final moments that Freeling's understanding of his characters falls just short of convincing. Still, it's a masterful journey, told with a great amount of wit and humanity. The rather evocative title is given meaning by story's end; the phrase guns and butter is most often connected with the political/economic question of what a society should choose to produce, assuming it has a choice. (The American title, Question of Loyalty, is far less evocative.) Revisiting this author – who produces literate, highly enjoyable novels with criminal themes more so than traditional mystery stories – was greatly rewarding, and I look forward to (re)discovering this series anew.

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Book Review: A MATTER OF NERVES (1950) by Richard Hull

2/18/2019

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Let's start with the gimmick. In the books of accountant-turned-mystery writer Richard Hull, there's often some sort of engaging narrative gimmick at play, whether it's an inverted Howdunit format (as in his début novel, 1934's The Murder of My Aunt), a roundelay of character perspectives (1936's enjoyable Murder Isn't Easy), or opening with the final chapter first (1947's Last First, naturally). Hull was nearing the end of his literary run by 1950, when A Matter of Nerves was published by the Collins Crime Club, but he was still experimenting with the form and the game between mystery writer and reader. Here, the narrator is the murderer, and the story opens with our storyteller recalling the night he (or she) killed the village butcher with an axe. The crime, he or she confides, was one meant to look like an accident, but after an unfortunate attempt to remove a trying grin from the dead man's face with the edge of the axe blade, the murderer decides to forget the accident scenario and dismember the body, distributing the various parts throughout the village.

The gimmick, I should clarify, is not so much that we follow the murderer's first-person point of view throughout, but rather that Hull playfully does not reveal the person's identity until the final pages. Thus, we are reading the criminal's "diary," and the writer has chosen to relate the events that follow by including and referring to himself in the cast of suspects as a third-person participant. It's a gambit that never really convinces, and the benefits (aside from having your first-person cake while delivering the intrigue of a traditional Whodunit) are negligible. Still, A Matter of Nerves is darkly humorous and entertaining throughout, and it is an absolute winner compared with the other Hull book published that year, the interminable Invitation to an Inquest.

As Hull employs his gimmick for Nerves, one of the most intriguing aspects becomes looking for clues within the text where the unknown narrator may show favoritism when describing a particular villager. One would, after all, expect the killer to reference himself in a more flattering light than his peers, especially as we can tell through tone and worldview that we have yet another Richard Hull misanthrope at the center of the tale. Personally, I felt more could have been done with this idea, which would lend itself nicely to some misdirection that the author doesn't seem interested to explore. Similarly, while I would love to continue to say "he or she" in reference to the murderer's gender, the two women characters Hull offers up are each handled so dismissively by the narrator that it's hard to imagine either Delia Keyes (portrayed as a lustful, roaming housewife) or May Benson (drawn as a prudish, humorless spinster) writing about herself in the third person and painting such an unflattering picture, even in private or in jest.

So that leaves the men of Losfield End. Timothy Venner is a nerve-ravaged ex-soldier now engaged in a personal war with the village's extremely loud clock tower; Reverend James Young is a long-winded but cheerful clergyman with a fondness for black-market handkerchiefs; Carlisle is a London broker with questionable prospects and a penchant for model trains; Smee, a farmer now set upon by inspectors from the Ministry of Food, kept losing his livestock until butcher John Hannon disappeared. Delia Keyes' cuckolded husband Norman, the blustering Colonel Waring, and May Benson's long-suffering brother Alec – who is not averse to slipping his sister a sedative in exchange for an occasional night of peace and quiet – also take pleasure discussing the ongoing village events down at The Green Man over a pint.

A Matter of Nerves proves to be a very readable story, but not a great one. I am always a fan of self-contained English village mysteries, where the visitor gets to view the occupants and their running about as if they were a colony of ants under glass. The many British irritations and obsessions on display strike me as one of the book's most engaging elements: for example, the Reverend prides himself on the fact that the entire village turns out for his sermons, when in fact the unknown narrator (and, one suspects, many more in the congregation) uses the time in church to muse on personal and criminal matters. May Benson's insistence that everything should happen on a precise schedule, even sinning and time-wasting, is a humorous conceit, and the subplot of a one-man post-war black market that traffics in stolen sheep, Persian rugs, and silk handkerchiefs lends a lighter flavor to a story that starts, and ends, with death.

Finally, I enjoyed the fact that the first-person storytelling allowed me to connect the narrator's guilt of his crime with the very troubled boarder trapped in Poe's famous story, "The Tell-Tale Heart." There's just enough evidence in the text to draw parallels, but not enough to glean anything significant from the comparison. That feeling of missed opportunity and potential present but untapped runs throughout A Matter of Nerves. It's enjoyable, but with a steadier hand and a little more literary ambition, it could have been a late-period classic of detection fiction.

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MITCHELL MYSTERY READING GROUP - Come Away, Death - Post #2

Book Review: THERE'S TROUBLE BREWING (1937) by Nicholas Blake

Book Review: GUN BEFORE BUTTER (1963) by Nicolas Freeling

Book Review: A MATTER OF NERVES (1950) by Richard Hull

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