Category: Book Review

Book Review: OBELISTS FLY HIGH (1935) by C. Daly King

8/25/2022

Obelists Fly High is the third and final entry in psychologist Charles Daly King’s peripatetic mystery series. In previous cases, New York Police detective Michael Lord investigated rather sensational cases of murder while traveling by ship (1932’s Obelists at Sea) and by train (1934’s Obelists en Route); so it is perhaps natural that the only place to go is up. On a small passenger plane traveling from New York to San Francisco, Captain Lord has taken on the role of bodyguard to celebrated surgeon Amos Cutter. The medical man needs to perform a lifesaving and time-sensitive operation on his brother, who happens to be the acting Secretary of State. Before he can make the trip, however, Dr. Cutter receives an anonymous note saying that he will die on April 13th at noon Central Time. The time zone clarification by the assassin is especially thoughtful given that the M.D. will be traveling by plane.

The threat and the stakes are significant enough for everyone except Cutter to view the situation with solemn concern. In the cabin with Cutter’s nieces, research assistant, and a couple scholarly passengers who had already booked their tickets on the commandeered flight, all goes well until the stewardess passes around a box of ampules with liquid designed to combat air sickness. When Cutter breaks his capsule, sniffs, and appears to die from inhaling the vapor, Lord has his hands full keeping the cabin and its occupants under control. After an emergency landing at Medicine Bow’s snowy airfield, Dr. Cutter’s body is removed and placed in the cargo hold by Lord. Attacked from behind, though, the detective is knocked out by a murderer who is eager to ensure that the doctor is truly out of commission.

Admirably plotted and nicely paced, Obelists Fly High is generally regarded as the strongest of Daly King’s three travel stories. It is the only novel of his to date that received a celebratory reprinting, in a Dover trade paperback edition from 1986. It is also a story whose details of 1930s aeroplane flying and functionality feels authentic, tactile, and well-observed. Additionally, the elements of the narrative’s ticking clock – can Lord identify the culprit by journey’s end? – and the claustrophobic atmosphere of suspects trapped in a darkened airplane cabin with a killer are evocative and contribute to the suspense.

Daly King still indulges in a couple of his authorial vices here, which can sometimes test a reader’s patience. As with his other titles, characters are named in a puckishly Dickensian manner that trades on juvenile puns or imagery. The celebrated surgeon is named Cutter, while his nieces are saddled with the names Fonda and Isa Mann. One is a sultry woman whose beauty bewitches Captain Lord while the other is a masculine, off-putting figure; it doesn’t take a detective to guess which is which. And while the multi-page discussions of psychological and economic theory found in the other Obelists books are mercifully absent here, a popular novelist character named Craven talks at length of Fortean paranormal phenomena. Here, he tries to sell Lord on the idea that, through sheer will alone, an absentee murderer brought down the doctor.

It was difficult not to contrast this book with another work with a similar milieu, Death of an Airman (1934) written by Christopher St. John Sprigg, who used his knowledge as a pilot to craft an impossible mid-air crime above an English Aero Club. I mention Airman here because Daly King seems to have delivered much of the authenticity that I found lacking in St. John Sprigg’s story: despite the author’s bona fides, very little of the flying and itinerary evocations felt truthful in Death of an Airman, but rather like someone playing at the scenario as one would stage dolls in a dollhouse. (Airman’s absurdly impractical smuggling plot also didn’t help.) With Obelists Fly High, the reader can feel the weight of the plane and can visualize cabin and cockpit control board through the author’s descriptions. Because of this, the suspense generated from a forced landing due to impaired visibility and freezing ice accumulating on the wings feels authentic.

But back to the puzzle at the center of C. Daly King’s airborne murder mystery. It’s a good one, and much of the book’s latter half finds Captain Lord fretting over his minute-by-minute suspect timetable, twice reproduced (on pages 175 and 261 of the Dover edition) for the reader to study as well. Obelists Fly High begins with an “Epilogue” – which is actually a spoiler-free glimpse at the climax of the plot right at its crisis moment rather than a true after-events denouement – and ends with a “Prologue”. The “Prologue” is more successful because, in revealing the characters and their mindsets before the fatal flight, it delivers two pieces of information that change our perception of what has happened.

And the author ends with a “Clue Finder” list guiding readers to the pages where motifs and mentions provide the path to the solution. Whether every aspect of the story is genuinely fair play can be debated, but I think most fans of Golden Age Detective fiction will find this journey a memorable one. If you come across the reprint (or any) edition of Obelists Fly High, go ahead and buy a ticket to board.

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Book Review: THE CASE OF THE CARETAKER'S CAT (1935) by Erle Stanley Gardner

8/3/2022

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There is much to enjoy in the seventh published Perry Mason adventure, not the least being the conceit that the celebrated criminal lawyer might take on a Persian cat for a client. In truth, it’s the cat’s owner, a cantankerous older man named Charles Ashton, who visits the office and enlists Mason to help him keep Clinker, his feline companion. Ashton had been the caretaker of Peter Laxter’s city home, and while the late Laxter’s will allows Charles Ashton to continue living at the residence, no such codicil can be found for the cat. There’s an additional angle that attracts Perry Mason: if he chooses to fight for Ashton to keep Clinker, he also has an opportunity to stand up to the shady lawyer Nathaniel Shuster, now representing Samuel Laxter, the dead man’s grandson.

Ironically, it is Clinker who outlives his owner. After threatening to challenge the entire will due to Samuel Laxter’s intolerance of a cat, Charles Ashton’s body is discovered in his room. Clinker’s muddy pawprints lead from the open window onto the bed. The cat’s presence seems to implicate Douglas Keene, a young architect and boyfriend of the disinherited Winifred Laxter. Keene was seen leaving the house that evening as he carried Clinker, and if he left the grounds after the cat came into the room on that rainy night, then he becomes the prime suspect in Ashton’s death.

As it often happens in Erle Stanley Gardner’s busily plotted stories, the entanglements and complications build steadily, and Perry Mason must be both proactive and defensive to arrive at the truth. Among many questions to answer: was millionaire Peter Laxter killed by carbon monoxide gas piped into his bedroom before he perished in a house fire? Who was a man named Clammert, who had access to a critical safety deposit box? And who killed Edith DeVoe, an attractive nurse who might have known more about the Laxter household than was healthy for her?

As with the other series titles first published in the 1930s, The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat is lively in pace and impressively, almost intimidatingly complex in plot. Author Gardner has a marvelous gift for keeping the pot boiling, and I would be hard pressed to recall a single scene in any Perry Mason book from this period that didn’t advance the story and offer a new piece of information to be puzzled over. That breathless pacing can be a bit fatiguing, but it also offers the reader more twists per page than can be found anywhere else.

Even better, this is the first of the early Mason titles whose prose feels unlabored and genuinely effective, as if Erle Stanley Gardner had hit his stride and found a way to balance the writing and characterization to accompany his often brilliant plotting. There seem to be fewer unnecessary “Perry Mason asked” and “Paul Drake replied” dialogue identifiers than in previous books, and some of the author’s paragraph descriptions are nicely evocative instead of feeling stilted.

Caretaker’s Cat is also the first book to fully explore the relationship between Mason and his smitten, capable secretary Della Street. In an entertaining extended storyline, the lawyer asks Della to join him to impersonate a honeymooning couple, and she inhabits the role with verve. If there’s an of-the-era sexism to the stereotype of the pining secretary, it’s nicely offset by Della Street’s fierce intelligence on display. In the courtroom climax, for example, Street is called to the stand to be questioned by opposing counsel and acquits herself admirably, showing that she can parry and equivocate as heartily as her employer.

Speaking of characters and their strengths, Winnie’s Waffles entrepreneur Winifred Laxter may stand as a stereotypical pillar to support the plotline – she’s the respectable ingenue who rejects her amoral family only to find that she and her fiancé are being pulled in once more, this time as murder suspects. But Gardner presents the lovers’ plight in a simple and sympathetic way, and she and Douglas Keene are the innocents that we, and Perry Mason, want to see exonerated and brought together by story’s end.

On the opposite side lives Nathaniel Shuster, a wonderfully oily creation much different from the long-suffering (but mostly respectable) District Attorney Hamilton Burger. Shuster, by contrast, is a “yapping terrier” of a lawyer with “Franklin teeth”, false teeth so poorly spaced that the excitable man spits when he talks. We learn that Shuster is a fee-chaser, an attorney always looking for ways to add to his clients’ bills. He also holds a grudge against Mason, and all that antipathy promises some delightfully acrimonious exchanges.

Finally, this case offers some wonderfully twisty Perry Mason dodges and courtroom revelations. There’s a doozy of an alibi where Gardner orchestrates a clever reversal, essentially one relying not on where the suspect was at the time of a murder but rather where the victim was.

The reason for Mason’s newlywed masquerade – and his sending of fake telegrams and his reporting of a stolen car that was never missing – is to flush out an incognito character for one last final-chapter surprise. As always, nothing feels particularly true to reality in a Perry Mason case, but we have headlines and Dostoevsky for those types of stories. And when we want muddy paw prints that lead the police to a corpse and Mason to a murderer, then Erle Stanley Gardner will reliably and delightfully deliver.

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Book Review: GOSPEL (1992) by Bill James

7/20/2022

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With his smart, funny, and addictive series of crime fiction novels featuring Detective-Sergeant Colin Harpur and Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles, author Bill James manages that rewarding literary two-step: the books are sublime when read chronologically as part of a series (as I am doing now) but are also highly satisfying as stand-alone entries separated from the larger arc. If I were to recommend a starting place for readers new to the books and their characters, I would have them skip the first two titles (1985’s You’d Better Believe It and the following year’s The Lolita Man), slightly atypical stories where the author and his characters are still finding their voices.

Instead, knockout entries like Halo Parade (1987) and Protection (1988) make the best introductions to James’s demimonde of cops and criminals. It is true that the chronological reader will find ripples and resonances as recurring characters emerge and collide (or collude) with one another, bringing their baggage and their prior crimes with them. And yet there is a deep satisfaction in following a single self-contained narrative when Bill James is at the top of his game.

My current read, the funerals-and-fêtes tragicomedy Gospel (1992) is a brilliant showcase of the author’s strengths as a storyteller and observer of often crooked, contradictory human nature; it is also a title that can easily stand on its own merits outside of the series. The story begins with a familiar tableau: Harpur and his colleagues wait on a side street outside a bank. Suave art dealer and protected “supergrass” Jack Lamb informed Harpur that the building is the rumored target for a robbery, and right on schedule the doomed criminals arrive.

In the ensuing chaos, Harpur kills Martin Webb, a gangster with good looks but a low I.Q. who takes aim at an unarmed cop. Martin is/was the dim but beloved son of Doug Webb, the volatile head of a second-string crime family. Unsure exactly who killed Martin, Doug sets his vengeful sights on the informants whom he thinks tipped off the police. He becomes obsessed with two targets: Jack Lamb and a college student named Denise Prior, who has befriended Lamb’s equally youthful wife. Denise is also, not quite coincidentally, carrying on an intense affair with the married Colin Harpur.

The joy of each new story lies in seeing how Bill James will shift around and shake up his kaleidoscope of characters. The result is certain familiar terrain traveled expertly – such as the robbery and stakeout or the uneasy alliance of criminals wary of each other but bonding over a shared goal – while the road (i.e., the plotline) offers its share of detours and surprises. James is one of those authors whom I find compulsively readable. He imbues nearly every one of his creations with so much personality and wiseacre, deadpan poetry that I find myself oddly wishing that amoral cops and status-seeking career criminals showed this much wit and winking humor in reality.

Indeed, Gospel offers the largest role to date for one of the series’ most interesting incidental characters. The very successful and largely unflappable art dealer Jack Lamb is a perfect fit within the Harpur & Iles world: he knows how to walk the line between legitimate businessman and back-of-the-van, high-end fence with aplomb, and he knows that Harpur will always look the other way as long as he proves his worth as a confidential informant. It is because of his tony outdoor fête, whose enviable guest list includes no less a dignitary than the Queen’s Lord Lieutenant, that Lamb must find a novel way to temporarily dispose of an uninvited corpse until the festivities are over and he can remove it from his property.

Additionally, the author once again offers a leading-man part to “Panicking” Ralph Ember, an aging bar owner whose handsomely scarred, Charlton Heston exterior masks a world of personal insecurities and self-doubts. Ralphy is pulled in by Doug Webb to plan and execute a new heist, and the author keeps the pressure mounting on all sides to force Panicking Ralph to find his way out before he walks into an ambush as perilous as the one the slow-thinking Martin faced. It is a fascinating crucible to put this long-suffering antihero through, and the resolution and memorable reprieve that Bill James offers Ralphy packs a wonderful final-page punch.

Full of plot twists and wry dialogue while offering an engaging psychological study of every character placed under the microscope, Gospel is the ninth Harpur & Iles book and one of the strongest entries to date. The fact that, like most of the titles, it can be enjoyed on its own and still provides a wild ride is testament to the talents of the prolific (and now 93-year-old) Welsh author Bill James, whose 36th Colin Harpur novel (Low Pastures) was published this year. And that means I’ve got at least 27 more books to go, a rewarding road I fully intend to travel.

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Book Review: MURDER ABROAD (1939) by E.R. Punshon

6/19/2022

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In Murder Abroad, E.R. Punshon’s enjoyable thirteenth mystery in his series featuring Bobby Owen, the career policeman investigates the suspicious death of an Englishwoman among the hilly terrain of France’s Massif Central region. An older woman with an affinity for painting, Miss Polthwaite had been living in a converted mill in the quiet village of Citry-sur-l’eau. She was also rumored to have brought along a collection of uncut diamonds, and after a brief disappearance her body is discovered at the bottom of a well.

With little authority and not overly optimistic, Bobby arrives to find the mill already inhabited by an unfriendly English couple named Williams. But the prime suspect is a young man named Charles Camion, who had a row with Miss Polthwaite the night she went missing. Talking with the villagers adds some details to the picture: the murdered woman appeared to be afraid of someone or something; there was bad blood between Camion and a boxing hopeful named Volny, who might have been competing for Miss Polthwaite’s favor and finances; and a few of the rough diamonds have shown up at the base of the shrine to the Black Virgin, despite the curé’s efforts to conceal the fact from Bobby.

As the traveling detective states it at the end of the first chapter, Owen’s mission is threefold: “the diamonds, the murderer, the truth.” If he can uncover one or more, the same Lady Markham who pulled strings to get him a month’s leave from the force will advance Bobby to a private secretaryship for a chief constable. (One neat detail about Punshon’s series is that Bobby rises in the ranks as his successes and hard work are rewarded through promotions. He is introduced as a rookie Police-Constable in 1933’s inaugural Information Received; eleven adventures later, Owen is now a Detective-Sergeant building up enough career security so he can wed his hat-maker love interest, Olive Farrar.) The fact that Owen is a visitor in France and that his English policeman’s status means nothing offers an interesting twist. As he remarks midway through the mystery, ordinarily he would report his findings to his superior and let those above him decide how best to activate the investigative machine and take the next steps. Alone on the hills and plateaus of Auvergne Bobby can’t rely on a group decision, and each action must be taken by him as a free – and often vulnerable – agent and outsider.

E.R. Punshon’s stories can sometimes feel overwritten and underpaced, resulting in tedium when readers find themselves ahead of the author and his detective. But Murder Abroad delivers one of Punshon’s best tales. It is not so much because the crime puzzle baffles, although the scenario of a spinster thrown into a well generates a haunting sense of the harshness of nature enhanced by the rocky, rough Massif setting. For me, it is largely the lack of divisional police trappings that makes the investigation here more immediate and intriguing than in previous stories such as The Mystery of Mr. Jessop (1937). By Chapter Two, Bobby is in the village and flying solo, and so there are no over-the-desk office conversations with a Superintendent Mitchell type to summarize points and decide what “bears looking into.” Punshon gives his detective a Watson of sorts in the form of Père Trouché, a pontificating blind beggar whose pride and acute sense of hearing help Bobby make connections among the villagers he might otherwise have missed.

I found the stranger-in-a-strange-land aspect of Murder Abroad very effective. While the book’s prose and dialogue are presented almost exclusively in English, we are offered enough evidence of idioms and translations to be reminded that Bobby Owen is conversing in the natives’ language. (One example: the English policeman uses the word assassin when referring to Miss Polthwaite’s unknown killer, a term reflective of the French word for murdered, assassiné.) Bobby himself feels out of place and unfamiliar with the local customs and social psychology of these people. “At home,” writes Punshon, “in England, in London especially, [Bobby] would have been able to place them all much more easily and to form on them a judgment much more likely to be accurate.”

Despite – or perhaps because of – Bobby’s status as an alien, the suspects in this story are delineated well and engagingly drawn, and there is a first-chapter clue to the murderer’s identity hiding in plain sight for those with sharp eyes. The book’s climax is genuinely suspenseful, as the discovery of a second body sends Bobby and the blind man into the hills as night descends, where they have a fateful confrontation with an armed killer.

The excellent Dean Street Press has returned to print and eBook E.R. Punshon’s elusive mysteries, so fans of classic mystery fiction can access them affordably once more (or discover them for the first time). The Goodreads group Reading the Detectives is currently moving through the Bobby Owen series, and this month’s selection coincided with my own Punshon progress, as I had read up to Murder Abroad. I’m glad I made the journey. And this Detective-Sergeant seems to be going places.

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Book Review: OBELISTS FLY HIGH (1935) by C. Daly King

Book Review: THE CASE OF THE CARETAKER'S CAT (1935) by Erle Stanley Gardner

Book Review: GOSPEL (1992) by Bill James

Book Review: MURDER ABROAD (1939) by E.R. Punshon

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