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Book Review: RE-ENTER SIR JOHN (1932) by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson

5/5/2024

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The inciting criminal act of 1932’s Re-Enter Sir John is one of the most singular to be found among the plots of Golden Age detective fiction, and I just wish that an absorbing (and logical) story had come out of such an odd premise. Celebrated actor and manager Sir John Saumarez feels paternal pride for Peter Varley, an aspiring young thespian in his troupe, “for who but [Saumarez] had taught the boy to walk and wear his clothes and keep his hands still?”

Sir John invites Varley to his club, but a friendly game of cards turns scandalous: the young man is accused of cheating, and a search of his suit jacket reveals a stitched inner pocket in the sleeve hiding additional aces. Although Varley denies any wrongdoing, the following day’s performance shows that the theater audience has already learned of the episode and has turned on him. Sir John cannot believe his honest ingenu has stooped to cheating. When the man flees the company and his rooming house like a fugitive, Sir John vows to clear Varley’s name and restore his reputation.

Two other people are affected by Varley’s Exit Stage Left. First, he leaves behind his love interest, an earnest and attractive journalist named Jill. Second, his landlady Mary Lake has become fond of her lodger and is upset by the accusation against him and his abrupt departure. Sir John makes an appointment to meet the plump Mrs. Lake, but she dies (presumably of a heart attack) in Piccadilly right before the scheduled meeting. Did the observant landlady know more than she realized? And why was Varley’s vacant room searched by an unknown visitor?

Re-Enter Sir John is the second and last novel by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson to feature their amateur detective and professional actor/manager. His first outing, 1928’s Enter Sir John, holds up a bit better, in part because the stakes seem higher. In that story, Sir John Saumarez (né Simmonds) saves an actress accused of murder by investigating the crime and identifying the guilty party; he soon marries the exonerated and now-smitten Martella Baring. Sir John has no more than a social-party cameo in Printer’s Devil (1929), a novel that appeared between these two tales, and one where the murder mystery feels secondary to its strained run of comic romance.

Each of these books demonstrates that the authors can craft entertaining, evocative prose. As writers, Simpson and Dane are strongest when they are establishing settings or shading in their characters. They can also stage a climactic moment effectively, such as the scene in Re-Enter where Sir John attempts to force a reaction from a murderer. Instead of Prince Hamlet’s “Mouse-trap” play-within-a-play, the actor collaborates with a film director to create an avant-garde silent short designed to place psychological pressure on a certain member of its audience.

With those authorial strengths acknowledged, I also found it difficult to overlook the weaknesses within the pages and plot of Re-Enter Sir John. As the conclusion is reached and all is revealed, certain aspects of the story still feel illogical or bewildering. To take one example, framing young Varley by planting cards within the stitching of his suit jacket is an odd and awkward gambit; I don’t understand how the culprit had the opportunity to do such a thing and, perhaps more practically, why he would use this method to disgrace the man and get him out of the way when other solutions – including murder – were possible. (And Varley did not know playing cards were concealed in his jacket sleeve until he was searched?)

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Once revealed, the identity and motive of the criminal don’t seem revelatory so much as arbitrary and, ultimately, inconsequential. To be fair to Dane and Simpson, there is some light clueing to lead us to the relationship between Varley and his nemesis, but arriving there in the final chapters still feels unsatisfying.

Perhaps I am being too critical, especially as there are far worse Golden Age artifacts out there. At least Dane and Simpson offer agreeable prose and an enjoyable glimpse of characters working in the theatre, from the actors and agents to the dressers and understudies who appear on the stage and behind the scenes.

Knowing that this will be the final performance of Sir John Saumarez, I shall clap politely at the curtain even as I hardly regret the lack of opportunity for an encore.


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Book Review: The Hypnotic Tales of Rafael Sabatini (2024) edited by Donald K. Hartman

4/7/2024

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More than a decade ago, I sampled a few of the sea stories of English-Italian author Rafael Sabatini and enjoyed them greatly. It was easy to see why adventure novels like The Sea Hawk (1915) and Captain Blood (1922) were so well-regarded and widely read at the time: they combined a winning mix of colorful characters, engaging melodrama, exotic locales, and daring action that would make most contemporary genre writers envious. In two senses, Sabatini’s stories were products of their time, both with their romanticized view of an earlier chivalric era when heroes, villains, and damsels all knew their place – it is no accident that the author’s famous tales seem to be direct descendants of the Dumas adventure/morality epics The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers – and in their often historical settings, whether on land or, stirringly, on sea.

With the new collection The Hypnotic Tales of Rafael Sabatini, crime and mystery fiction fans have another opportunity to discover this writer’s work. Editor Donald K. Hartman collects two intriguing long stories here, both featuring Roger Galliphant, a medical man with a keen interest in the power of hypnosis on human subjects. Galliphant is introduced in “The Avenger”, originally published in Gunter’s Magazine in March 1909 (that issue’s cover promises “Up-to-date Stories of Romance & Adventure”).

This tale begins with our narrator, an amusingly obtuse Watson figure named Martin Scholes, doubting the veracity of the events presented in the (real-life) stage sensation Trilby. It is from this play adapted from George Du Maurier's novel, Hartman’s helpful introduction explains, where the master power manipulator Svengali originates. A demonstration of hypnotism on their friend Frank Voysey makes Galliphant conclude that someone else is dangerously manipulating the man through his subconscious.

Two mysterious deaths within Voysey’s family – including one cousin’s somnambulistic fall from a high tower hill – makes Galliphant suspect James Chester of exerting a Svengali-like evil influence over his unknowing subjects. Chester has a deep (and likely dark) interest in the study and application of hypnosis, and he also gains an inheritance if a few of his relatives are conveniently removed. The battle of wills that follows between Galliphant and Chester drives the rest of the story, as do the conceptual-turned-literal notions of morality and justice.

In my opinion, “The Dream” works even better as a study in suspense. In this second novella, first published in 1912, Roger Galliphant is asked to help the troubled protagonist Francis Orprington, an ex-soldier disturbed by a realistic dream in which he kills his father in a frenzy. Upon awaking, however, it is not Orpington who has been killed but Stanley Bickershaw, his cousin. When Galliphant realizes that another lady of the house, Major Orpington’s love interest, also shows signs of being under a hypnotic spell, he is able to regress her mind to a point where she can unlock some important details and shine light on the Major’s strange dream and lethal intentions.

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It's a subtle difference in approach, but “The Dream” is the story that has a more sympathetic central character (the agonized accidental murderer, Orpington) and the less obvious narrative path. That is, the focus isn’t on defeating the villain but instead on enlightening the afflicted patient, and for that reason I preferred the second tale to the first. Both are well written and enjoyable, and whether a mesmerist can induce a person to commit murder or self-harm while in a hypnotic state is a question you can argue with Martin Scholes, along with the truthfulness of Trilby.

This collection is the third in a series edited by Donald K. Hartman and published by Themes & Settings in Fiction Press. The earlier volumes are also well worth seeking out, and reviews and an overview of the stories can also be found on my blog: Death by Suggestion (2018) and The Hypno-Ripper (2021). Crippen & Landru Press also released an anthology of Rafael Sabatini crime stories in 2006, called The Evidence of the Sword.

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Book Review: LOVELY MOVER (1998) by Bill James

1/28/2024

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Although Lovely Mover gets its title from the London syndicate outsider who glides into Bill James’s unnamed English city and disrupts the criminals and dealers there, the author is very much focused on the familiar figures he has crafted and whom readers (through 15 books) have come to know well. James’s series earns much of its power through this effect of cumulative narrative, as each book picks up roughly where the last one left off, and tensions and grudges built up in an earlier tale are continued – and sometimes lethally concluded – in the current one.

Another Jamesian practice is at play: Lovely Mover begins and ends with a murder, which is not uncommon for stories taking place on Detective Sergeant Colin Harpur’s patch. The initial victim is Eleri ap Vaughan, a drug dispenser to the socialite set and one of Keith Vine’s most successful dealers. It is Vine himself who decides she must be eliminated for the sin of entertaining a bid from a more lucrative London house. Her death, Vine reasons, will keep out the foreign suppliers trying to gain ground while sending a clear message to any within his stable who may be longing to stray. Meanwhile, rival rising kingpin Ralph Ember must contend with a mutiny among his business partners, and the resolution of that conflict ratchets up tensions between Ralph and his own supplier. Harpur himself is still undercover as a crooked cop on Vine’s payroll, but the risks of continuing are quickly outpacing any judicial rewards.

As I wrote in a previous review, there are some entries in the Harpur & Iles series that operate very well as standalone tales. Lovely Mover, on the other hand, feels like an insider piece, and its readers certainly benefit from drawing on the psychologies and drives of these criminals as James has painted them over the books and years. The narrative does have standalone shape – certainly there is a beginning with complications and escalations that build to the irreversible actions found in the conclusion – but there are better places for casual readers to start.

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Which is not to say Lovely Mover doesn’t deliver lots of familiar pleasures: most characters have a wonderfully witty and blinkered way of thinking and scheming, and the aspirations and Achilles’ heels of many – Panicking Ralph’s vanity, for instance, or Keith Vine’s ambition and hubris – continue to fascinate and bring these figures to life (until someone else cuts that life short, at any rate). Newly added to the already colorful cast are a highly entertaining and irritating trio in the form of Ember’s drug supplier Barney, with his two “fifty-plus flotsam women” Maud and Camilla in tow. Their telephone banter is tortuous and hilarious, and indeed Bill James’s dialogue runs, no matter who is paired or what is discussed (or not spoken of), are always highlights that make his fiction quite sui generis.

The ap of Eleri ap Vaughan, we are told, means “child of” in Welsh, although it is more traditionally defined as “son of”. Keith Vine could be forgiven the imperfect translation, as he both admires and plans to kill the woman. “Eleri,” Vine hypothesizes through James’s writing, “probably meant a clear mountain stream or female peregrine falcon, something entirely lovely.” It is the presence of the Lovely Mover who has everyone agitated here, and pushes many of them to do some very unlovely things.

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Book Review: PRINTER'S DEVIL (1929) by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson

1/22/2024

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There is a rather unique reason why Printer’s Devil, the second criminous collaboration from Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson, kept me guessing until the end. Because of the tone and the plotting, I – and I suspect other readers as well – never felt certain whether the novel was a whodunit at all. Upon reaching the end, it turns out that there is a suspicious death (a little over halfway through the book) and a motive that implicates a handful of suspects who had reason to stop the publication of a scandalous memoir. But the authors appear to be equally interested in the budding romance of a headstrong young editor’s assistant and the publicist who has fallen for her, and chapters are devoted to their wooing: in an apartment, on a bus, and at the symphony, among other locales. The result has detective story and comic romance wrestling awkwardly for dominance, and it seems that, by the final page, hearts beats clubs.

Such commingling of genres might not be a problem, but Printer’s Devil never quite manages to fuse the two approaches into a cohesive whole. This makes for a rather schizophrenic, if occasionally interesting, reading experience. The ambiguity isn’t helped by the way the character of Sir John Samaurez is used (or is underused) here. Samaurez, an actor and theatrical producer, assumed the central role of amateur sleuth in Dane and Simpson’s first effort, the previous year’s Enter Sir John, where he was kept busy saving an innocent actress accused of murder. In Devil, Sir John is present but treated like nearly all of the other supporting characters: he and they appear at social parties and are given just enough description and dialogue to fill the void, but scarcely more than that.

The mystery plot, when it finally activates later in the book, concerns the death of a powerful female publisher, Horatia “Horrie” Pedlar, who has the misfortune to fall from her fire escape one fateful night. Found among the ashes of the fireplace grate is the scrap of the cover page to Reflections, a manuscript by literary enfant terrible Marmion Poole that promises to reveal the embarrassing secrets of several prominent people.

It seems, then, that Horrie may have been killed to stop the memoir’s publication, and so far so good (and better late than never). But suspects prove elusive for the reader who wishes to play armchair detective, largely because the authors don’t seem interested in presenting a puzzle or a clear pool of supporting players. Rather, we are invited to spend our time with the budding young lovers, secretary Gilda Bedenham and publicist K.K. “Koko” Fry, two characters who are so indulgently, quirkily rendered that you know their creators would never implicate them in such a distasteful deed.


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Paradoxically, Printer’s Devil is modestly successful and intermittently engaging when approached as a light prose novel. That is, if you explore it as a story of characters rather than expecting a detective fiction puzzle, there is some enjoyment to be found and evocative, often playful writing threaded throughout. But lovers’ interludes get tedious quickly when you are waiting for something more portentous to happen, especially if a reminder is needed as to why you are reading this story.

Martin Edwards, the prolific mystery author and crime fiction archivist, provides an illuminating review of this title on his blog (and has also acquired a dustjacketed edition of the book signed by Helen Simpson, the lucky devil). He suggests that ultimately the book is a failed experiment “because the authors strike the wrong balance between people and plot”, and I agree. Printer’s Devil was published in the U.S. by Cosmopolitan Book Corporation as Author Unknown. Thanks to the shared library network at Internet Archive, curious and intrepid readers in the U.S. can sample this semi-mystery’s text here.

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