Category: Book Review

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

2/18/2019

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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Book Review: THE LUZHIN DEFENSE (1930) by Vladimir Nabokov

2/10/2019

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To readers familiar with the work of Vladimir Nabokov, it may not come as a surprise that the most revealing element of his 1930 novel The Luzhin Defense is the author Foreword written to accompany his 1964 English translation. At the center of the story is the chess-obsessed "creature" Aleksandr Luzhin, a character who is somewhat sympathetic (principally because his outsider eccentricities make him incapable of functioning in conventional society) but who remains more of a psycho-scientific specimen than a flawed hero. In contrast, Nabokov's congratulatory Foreword reveals much about the author's pride (or hubris) in his own literary cleverness and his antipathy for any anti-intellectual readers, be they from the public or the critic set.

I mention this because the Foreword, I think, points to my fundamental problem with The Luzhin Defense, often published in English as The Defense. In his introduction, Nabokov goes into great detail about the conceptual moves he has made as the author, ostensibly because he is worried that readers can't be trusted to recognize such masterful planning on their own:

"I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers—and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading and cannot be expected to tackle a dialogueless novel when so much can be gleaned from its Foreword—by drawing their attention to [the following details]…"

And without doubt there is thoughtful structural planning as Nabokov delivers a story about the destruction of a man who can only experience reality through his genius talent as a chess prodigy. As Luzhin's outer world—from awkward adolescence to lonely young adulthood, never happy or "normal"—becomes consumed by his need to solve tournament-level chess problems, we see how such a dogmatic perspective and pursuit blinds and cripples him to the potential enjoyments of being alive: a loving wife, a varied lifestyle, the arts and the philosophies. Luzhin can't lower his guard, can't mentally walk away from the unfinished game that triggered a breakdown, and ultimately can't find relief as the pieces, real or imagined, continue to calculate, circle, and attack.

It's a fine, reasonably engaging thematic idea, delivered in precise, sometimes humorous prose and explored and staged successfully. But Nabokov wants to make sure he receives credit for the grander literary strategies he employs as well. After pointing out for us some symbolist imagery that has been laid in during the early chapters (thus making it intentional, you see), he makes sure we appreciate the recurring notion of a checkerboard pattern from which our protagonist cannot escape. Again from the Foreword:

"….That floor with the white and blue squares where he found and scanned from his throne imaginary continuations of the match game in progress; or a teasingly asymmetrical, commercially called 'agate,' pattern with a knight move of three arlequin colors interrupting here and there the neutral tint of the otherwise regularly checkered linoleum between Rodin's 'The Thinker' and the door; or certain large glossy-black and yellow rectangles whose H-file was painfully cut off by the ocher vertical of the hot-water pipe…"

Would the average lip-moving reader pick up on such deliberate metaphorical prose writing? Perhaps, perhaps not. But The Luzhin Defense doesn't feel especially thematically challenging, and unlike, say, Joyce's Ulysses or Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, this Nabokov novel at least doesn't require careful annotation or greater analysis to be appreciated and understood, in my opinion. It is accessible even as it is not particularly engaging, since the main character is consumed by a complex that makes him largely more passive than active. The novel's second half is given over to seeing the world from Luzhin's increasingly claustrophobic point of view, as Mrs. Luzhin (never given a first name) tries to care for her troubled husband and chess-infused totems—a floor pattern here, a newspaper's games article there—continue to pull Luzhin further into his paranoid nightmare.

What we (the readers) are left with is a story that is often handsomely written and sturdily crafted, but which rarely has energy or narrative drive. I turned the pages as a matter of duty rather than from a desire to see what will happen next; that impish Foreword also chooses to reveal the novel's concluding, climactic moment in its fourth paragraph. Nabokov wants us so ensconced in the descriptive details of the scene—all the better to paint Luzhin as a slobbish, sad figure when contrasted against comfortable, elegant settings—that there is little urgency to most of the moments, either mental or physical. Luzhin's Chapter Eight tournament confrontation of his nemesis Turati marks a high point, and here the reader feels Luzhin's tension and disorientation brilliantly. For a novel where the author revels in his chess-like manipulation of thematic ideas, it is ironic that the book might have been more effective at half its length; doing so might eliminate the feeling that we move from one emotional plateau to another and instead give Luzhin's arc and descent some streamlined immediacy. But what do I know? I'm a terrible chess player.

Let me note two things: I haven't read much of Nabokov, but what I have experienced (aside from the lesser Luzhin Defense) has been beguiling and memorable. Lolita (1955) truly is chess-like in its allusions and masterful in how the author builds Humbert Humbert as a delusional narcissist who is somehow both pathetic and strangely charming. And the slim 1930 novel The Eye is both a satire of detective fiction and a playful meditation on how (and why) to validate individual existence. I'm sure I will read more Nabokov, but this particular book felt superficial and precocious.

Yet I chose it because the plot sounded intriguing—it was more so in concept than in languorous execution—and because Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd called The Luzhin Defense one of the author's "most heartwarming works, and the one I often recommend to wary readers as the place to begin." If so, then those neophytes (who may very well move their lips as they read) will need to exercise patience, as characters, plot, and prose alone are hardly gripping enough to keep one interested in the moves on the board as we advance listlessly toward checkmate.

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Book Review: THOU SHELL OF DEATH (1936) by Nicholas Blake

2/3/2019

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In Nicholas Blake's second mystery to feature his amateur sleuth Nigel Strangeways, the thoughtful academic is summoned by Fergus O'Brien, a fighter pilot who has been receiving anonymous letters which say that he will be dead by Boxing Day. O'Brien seems to find the threats more amusing than alarming, and to call fate's bluff – a gambit often evident in his flying days – he invites a group of people who might each be nursing a lethal grudge to a Christmas celebration at his home.

Indeed, Nigel has his hands full analyzing O'Brien's guests and learning their histories with the ex-airman. Uncharacteristically, the detective (and others) sleeps through the night's events, and Strangeways wakes only to discover O'Brien dead in a hut separated from the main house.

Only one set of tracks in the snow leads to the hut, yet other clues – a broken cuff button, shoes that are absent but reappear later – point to murder. This suspicion is quickly confirmed when one houseguest is nearly killed from a blow to the head by an unseen assailant, while another dies from cyanide poisoning. It's a complex, confusing case, but Nigel works with the amiable (and quite generous, as GAD police figures go) Superintendent Bleakley to untangle the tale and identify motive, means, and murderer.

Thou Shell of Death is great fun for classic mystery fiction fans, since it delivers on multiple counts: it is a sneaky fair-play puzzle with all of the clues and character psychologies offered up to the reader to organize and theorize about; it is spiritedly written and often quite humorous in description and design; the suspects are distinct personalities and used within the plot to good effect; and Blake (the pen-name for poet Cecil Day-Lewis) seems to be more comfortably familiar with his protagonist here than in his previous title, A Question of Proof. The character is now less of an eccentric for the sake of color – we learn in Proof that Strangeways has to sleep under a weight of bedcovers and must constantly drink tea, quirks that are thankfully not stressed here – and instead is a man intrigued foremost by people and their motivations and mannerisms. it's a better choice and it gives Nigel some humanity, while at the same time defining him not by his quirks but rather by his intellect.

Another aspect of Thou Shell I greatly enjoy is the author's handling of the fateful backstory that explains, among other things, O'Brien's wartime recklessness in combat, the murderer's relationship to the victim, and the body count resulting from that holiday house party. The way I view it, a mystery writer can use one of three general approaches to give the reader information about Past Events that tie directly to present deeds: 1) the detective can reveal the connection and explain the significance during the iconic end-of-chapter dénouement; 2) the author can dramatize the Past Event in separate chapter sections, with the reader understanding the significance toward the end; 3) the detective (and the reader) can learn details through interviews of witnesses or contemporaries as the story progresses.

There is no right or wrong choice regarding delivery of the Past Event, but it's instructive to note how each approach affects the narrative. Thou Shell of Death uses the third method, where Strangeways starts to understand the deceased O'Brien first through a lengthy anecdote from suspect and explorer Georgia Cavendish, and then from an interview with an elderly family nurse. In both sections, Blake recreates those moments of memory and allows the characters' stories to bring the Past Event into the present. In my opinion, it's a very effective approach, as it invites the reader to add these long-ago moments to the sum of the tragedy taking place now. There's a deeper resonance because we are allowed to understand the emotions and mindsets of the characters involved.

This also made me reflect on my frequent dissatisfaction with Approach #1, wherein the detective reveals the Past Event at the conclusion of the mystery story. It often feels to me as a narrative opportunity missed, as the result runs counter to the fundamental writing maxim of "Show, don't Tell." The reader may be surprised at the revelation, but he or she is largely denied the emotional catharsis (or generation of empathy) that might occur if one is invited to experience the event via flashback or retelling.

Right away, such contemplation brought me to the literary doorstep of the formidable Agatha Christie. It seemed like a number of her mysteries favored the last-chapter reveal to unveil the significance of a past event, but my Christie reading is far from complete and my memory of her stories (read decades ago) blurry. So I consulted AC expert Brad, whose ahsweetmysteryblog is a must-read for classic mystery fans, and I asked him to weigh in on Christie's handling of past events in her books. Boy, did Brad deliver.

He reminded me – for which I'm very grateful – that Agatha Christie was a constantly experimenting and creative structurist who varied her methods to meet her story needs. I feel that her classic 1939 tale And Then There Were None is profoundly resonant in part because some of her characters are haunted by and are reliving these past moments, and because Christie allows us to access some of those memories, most notably with Vera Claythorne. While some titles do deliver the Past Event as a drawingroom surprise, many others use tragic previous events to great dramatic effect as Christie concentrates on how the past ensnares and envelops those who are unable to break free. Ordeal by Innocence (1958) and Cards on the Table (1936) are just two examples that explore this past/present frisson, while 1943's Five Little Pigs (whose alternate title, appropriately, is Murder in Retrospect) is a particular favorite of Brad's, with the author using the specter of family tragedy to haunt the lives of their now-adult characters decades later.

The discussion was a fruitful and informative one, and I'm thrilled to see that Brad has decided to share his thoughts on the intersection of past and present in Christie's work in this excellent blog entry.

One additional note: Thou Shell of Death introduces the character of Georgia Cavendish, described through most of the book's first half as having a monkey-like face and perambulating with a parrot on her shoulder. Nigel becomes smitten with the adventuress here, and, like the transformation he undergoes from his début to his follow-up, Georgia will shed her eccentricities to become a more attractive figure in future installments. Her shining moment is certainly 1939's The Smiler with the Knife, a thriller in which she inhabits the leading role.

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Book Review: A QUESTION OF PROOF (1935) by Nicholas Blake

12/30/2018

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The English boys' or girls' preparatory school has proven to be an irresistible setting for Golden Age and contemporary writers of murder mysteries. Some authors were career educators, and were able to bring to life the conflicts large and small found when a group of adolescents (and their often equally childlike instructors) is forced to share a closed community. As a result, many writer/teachers have used their on-campus observations and understanding of the milieu to create some memorable campus-set detective stories, including Michael Innes's The Weight of the Evidence (1944), Josephine Tey's Miss Pym Disposes (1946), and Gladys Mitchell's Tom Brown's Body (1949), to name a few.

The début title in Nicholas Blake's series featuring the eccentric detective Nigel Strangeways can be added to this list. Blake was the pseudonym of Cecil Day-Lewis, an Irish-born writer who worked as a schoolteacher in Scotland and, in 1968, was named Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. Fortunately, Day-Lewis chose to supplement his income by writing mystery fiction, and 1935's A Question of Proof is the book that introduces readers to his unassuming but quirky sleuth. I will let Michael Evans, a character in Proof who has become the prime suspect in the murder of an unlikable student, offer his description of Strangeways:

"Could not stick two years [at Oxford College], the spectacle of so many quite decent youths being got at and ruined for life was too much for him. Heard that at Cambridge the hearties were still heartier and the intelligentsia even less intelligent, so decided to dispense with any further education… Traveled about for a bit, learning languages. Then settled down for a bit to investigate crime; said it was the only career left which offered scope to good manners and scientific curiosity. He's been very successful; made pots of money. He did all the stuff in the Duchess of Esk's diamonds affair and several high-hat blackmail cases which have figured less prominently in the press."

"But what's he like?"

"Like? Oh, like one of the less successful busts of T.E. Shaw. A Nordic type. He's rather faddy, by the way; his protective mechanism developed them, I daresay. But you must have water perpetually on the boil; he drinks tea at all hours of the day. And he can't sleep unless he has an enormous weight on his bed. If you don't give him enough blankets for three, you'll find that he has torn the carpets up or the curtains down."

Bust of T.E. Shaw (Lawrence)... but is it successful?

What's curious to me is that Nigel Strangeways comes across as rather a default eccentric in these mysteries; perhaps he is odd because the genre expects it. His "fads" are laid on the thickest in this début novel, but they are a collection of habits and don't better define the character's personality, which for me has always been more tabula rasa (or contemplative sponge) than memorably garrulous. Unlike, say, Hercule Poirot's fussy, precise mannerisms or Mrs. Beatrice Lestrange Bradley's physical and verbal assaults on those around her, Strangeways' behavior is not really in active service of his role as detective, nor does it physicalize his mental processes; it is peculiar to sleep under multiple blankets, but the fact doesn't really change or inform his introspective approach to investigating a crime.

There's another benefit to staging a murder mystery at a school, and it has to do both with a ready stable of on-hand suspects and the excellent narrative move of bringing chaos and disruption to a locale that operates on the regimentation of strict order and control. When Sudeley Hall student Wemyss disappears during a Sports Day exhibition and turns up dead, buried in a haystack in which Michael Evans was canoodling with the headmaster's wife, the tragic event threatens the reputation of the school and casts suspicion on the gossiping schoolmasters. Strangeways is called in to help clear his friend's name, but he is also seen as a mechanism to restore order to the troubled school by identifying the culprit. This he eventually does, but he is frustrated by a lack of empirical evidence – hence the title – and the killer is given enough rope to strike a second time.

There is a lot to appreciate in A Question of Proof, including lively comic descriptions and characterizations, literary and historical allusions, smart observations about British public school practices and quirks, and (perhaps most importantly) a mystery puzzle plot that stays busy and draws in several suspects before the detective reveals his final-chapter solution. Whether the reader feels that Blake has provided a fair-play puzzle experience will depend largely on how satisfied one is with the stated motive of the murderer. To his credit, the author makes sure all loose ends are tied up and explanations of the red herrings are provided.

While not the very best of the series, Day-Lewis/Blake nevertheless delivers an impressive first mystery and a worthy introduction of his capable, but always a little clinical and distant, detective. For me, the best Nigel Strangeways novels appear in the first half of his publishing output, and his creator should be celebrated for his enthusiasm for experimenting with style and structure within the series. Personal favorites include 1938's The Beast Must Die, a suspenseful version of the inverted-mystery tale, The Smiler with the Knife (1939), in which Nigel's wife Georgia is caught up in wartime espionage and intrigue, and Minute for Murder (1947), a clever meditation on the act of eliminating suspects.

Nick Fuller over at The Grandest Game in the World has also examined A Question of Proof (I would expect nothing less!) and has collected contemporary reviews of the book on his site.

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

Book Review: THE LUZHIN DEFENSE (1930) by Vladimir Nabokov

Book Review: THOU SHELL OF DEATH (1936) by Nicholas Blake

Book Review: A QUESTION OF PROOF (1935) by Nicholas Blake

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