Category: Golden Age Mystery

Book Review: A WORD OF SIX LETTERS (1936) by Herbert Adams

1/24/2020

Just last year a handsome and beguiling coffee table book was released. The Hooded Gunman, assembled by John Curran, collects and presents dustjacket covers and blurbs from every title published through the Collins Crime Club imprint, from its inaugural year of 1930 to the 1990s. It is a wonderful reference book full of striking images and enticing comments on the many books and authors represented within the Crime Club's catalog. And for readers and fans of classic detective fiction like me, it is also a dangerous tome, as it introduces me to one new author after another, enticing me with beautiful and mysterious cover art and seducing me with tantalizing plot descriptions. As someone who has more than enough mystery books waiting to be read on my bookshelves and stored up on my Kindle, I hardly need to race off to collect another dozen series from another hundred writers, all new to me. I also, alas, have a rather limited expense account, and by definition the Crime Club titles of the 1930s and '40s are highly collectible and increasingly rare.

But of course this complaint is not wholly ingenuous. It is very exciting to sample newly discovered authors, even those initially published 80 years ago and only new to me. (But still: J.V. Turner? Hulbert Footner?) And so The Hooded Gunman has brought to my attention the first of likely many, many new-to-me authors whose titles and output sound intriguing. I start at the beginning of the alphabet with Herbert Adams, a Golden Age-era crime writer with more than 50 books to his credit, and A Word of Six Letters (1936) from the genre's halcyon decade. To be honest, it was the breathless Lippincott American edition title that intrigued me as I ordered Murder Without Risk! through my college's interlibrary loan. (We Yanks are not known for being subtle; just look at our current president.)

The plot: Family members gather to celebrate the 70th birthday of irascible patriarch Bartholomew "Barty" Blount. There have been rumors of a new will, and the assorted relations are restless. After downing a few toasts, Barty mounts his horse and takes his afternoon ride through the woods. But the horse returns with no rider, and a search uncovers both the dead man and a mysterious woman in a cottage, whom Blount visited and who was the last person to see him alive. As the story continues and suspicions grow – it turns out the patriarch was drugged with the sleeping draught sulphonal prior to his fatal ride – the reader's sympathy aligns with Ella Chilcott, the inheritor of the vast portion of Blount's estate, and Bruce Dickson, an earnest young doctor in love with the young lady. But someone in the family is still determined to inherit, even if it means others will need to be eliminated.

Based on some perceptive reviews from other readers (see the links below), A Word of Six Letters seems to be a nicely representative example of Adams's work, both in quality and in theme and structure. (There are some casual mentions of golf playing here, but Adams enjoyed the sport so much that several of his books, such as The Golf House Murder (1933) and The Nineteenth Hole Mystery (1939) feature the game front and center.) The author has a penchant – and, I would argue, a talent – for weaving a thread of romance into his plotlines. The young lovers in danger here, Ella and Bruce, are likeable and practical, and the ingénu doctor serves as the nominal detective. While the author doesn't have Bruce Dickson actively searching out clues, he is nonetheless given a driving motivation to uncover the killer and keep his beloved Ella safe.

The lack of a central detective and the staging of incidents instead of the deliberate interviewing of suspects and accumulation of evidence are notable, aligning this story (and, it appears, Adams's others) more closely to a whodunit-thriller hybrid than to a challenge-to-the-reader puzzle. Starting with a simple genre storyline, Herbert Adams spins a narrative that is nicely paced and populated with engaging, if hardly original, characters. There is a straightforward simplicity to the prose and dialogue that I found agreeable, and the crossword motif alluded to by the UK title and dustjacket appears in the book not as a typical clue to the murderer's identity but as a shared bond between Dickson and Isabel Aird, an ailing niece confined to the Blount estate.

If there is the slightly stale air of melodrama to the tale, it is faint and fleeting. For me, the familiar arc carries the easy comfort of a favorite sweater. Trajectory and outcome are never really in doubt; the villain will be revealed and punished while the lovers will be united, their bond stronger for their struggles. Still, there is both a market and an appetite for such comfort writing. Herbert Adams may never reach the lasting legacy of a true genre innovator like Agatha Christie, but his stories are still very enjoyable and satisfying in their simplicity, and were well worth the seven shillings and sixpence to those original, lucky members of the Collins Crime Club.

You can find other reviews of Herbert Adams mysteries around the 'Net:
JF Norris explores The Secret of Bogey House (1924) at Pretty Sinister Books
Aidan interrogates The Chief Witness (1940) at Mysteries Ahoy
TomCat reads The Writing on the Wall (1945) at Beneath the Stains of Time
and Curtis Evans swings for Death on the First Tee (1957) at The Passing Tramp

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Mitchell Mystery Reading Group: DEAD MEN'S MORRIS (1936) - Post #3

12/30/2019

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And then there were two: Joyka and I are responding to the final chapters of Dead Men's Morris in this post. Martyn and Catherine may be sharing their thoughts in the days to come, and I will be happy to add their observations in an additional post. This was my first Mitchell Mystery Reading Group event to take place in the month of December, and traveling, visiting families, and the holidays likely do not encourage weekly reading and responses for many.

Still, there are some interesting topics to explore as Gladys Mitchell's Christmastime mystery now jumps forward to Easter (in Chapter 15) and the men prepare for the village's Whitsun Morris dance. Maurice Pratt, we are told, has improved, and the usually taciturn pigman Priest will play the Fool and collect coins from the audience. The final chapter also places both Mrs. Bradley and a second target in jeopardy as the murderer of Fossder and Simith is flushed out.

Joyka writes that "characters are very important to me in a book, second only to use of language. Gladys Mitchell hits all of my buttons. I have to say, however, when she is ready to wind up a story, it moves fast. If you want to know more about Carey, Jenny, Denis and the Ditches you will need to read more books. As for the murderer, don’t expect to know the ultimate outcome. Mrs. Bradley has already moved on!"

All of this is true, and yet the ending of Dead Men's Morris, for me, is somewhat atypical of the author's usual choice of presentation. I refer to the moment that serves as climax, where an attempt at a third murder – rather quixotically telegraphed through multiple clues by the clever but apparently mentally imbalanced villain – is a rare in-the-present scene of suspense and revelation. Many of Gladys Mitchell's stories are concluded with a dialogue debriefing from Mrs. Bradley rather than a situation where the reader is invited to be witness to action and arrest, so the Morris dance mayhem here feels both satisfying and novel. The psychoanalyst still gets the opportunity to talk in the final pages, but she also physically sidesteps an attempt on her own life and thwarts the attack of another in the previous scene. Personally, I like the choice, and it helps allay my earlier complaint (see Post 2) that the reader is kept at a distance from moments of important action, such as the murders of Simith and Fossder.

The killer's personality remains, by the end of the book, rather inscrutable, and we are invited to literally take Mrs. Bradley's psychological profile of the culprit as the unquestioned truth. I keep returning to the tantalizing comment Mitchell once made about not knowing exactly who the murderer will be when she sets out to write, and that her choice of villain may change as the book forms. Interestingly, the physical clues that point – some would argue that they point too obviously – to the murderer's identity here are established in the first chapters, and no other characters fit the bill quite so well. Yet there is a feeling that, narratively, the killer could have been revealed as one of the other male characters and a few of the female characters as well, and the climax would have been just as, or more, effective than the printed one.

Both of the book's victims, lawyer Fossder and farmer Simith, receive cards before their deaths showing heraldic crests. So it is a tense moment when we see, prior to the dance, both Mrs. Bradley and Priest receiving similar cards. (The image accompanying this paragraph is a scan of the illustrations found on the endpapers of the Michael Joseph edition.) Such a decorative and genealogical plot development is not a surprise, since Gladys Mitchell has always celebrated history and setting in her mystery stories. From the Scottish Border Ballads that feature heavily in 1941's Hangman's Curfew to the Neolithic-era Rollright Stones at the center of 1980's The Whispering Knights, GM loves to incorporate UK history and topography elements, and Morris – with its ritual dance traditions and its Oxfordshire countryside exploration – is a good example of this.

Joyka was not satisfied with the author's use of the crests and their meanings. "The heraldic crests as part of the solution are a mystery to me. They seem a minor clue at best then all of a sudden they assume a major role. Maybe you need to be English to understand what they are and what they mean. I found them a confusing addition." On the other (sinister?) hand, I did not find their meaning problematic, but their use as a calling card to signal the recipient's doom feels unbelievably ornate. This returns us to the earlier point that you either accept Mitchell's sketch of the murderer's psychosis – that he is in the grip of an academically inclined mania – or you do not.

Another observation from Joyka: "My classical literary education sadly pales next to not only Mrs. Bradley, but also Mrs. Templeton, Priest’s landlady. I have no idea which young man pushed a volume of Aristotle’s philosophy down the boar’s throat to escape death. And Mrs. Templeton is a philosopher in her own right, 'Supper first, and gals come later.'"

If additional conversation arrives about Dead Men's Morris in the days to come, I will certainly report it in a separate post. I am grateful that I chose to revisit this story, as it was in some ways more satisfying and thought-provoking than the previous group reading title, 1937's Come Away, Death.

Joyka offers this suggestion for the next reading event: "I think Laurels are Poison (1942) would be a good follow-up book. We meet Jonathan, Deborah, Laura, Kitty and young Alice. And there is a brief Christmas gathering with Carey, Jenny, the Ditches, Denis, Ferdinand, and his wife, Caroline, who has been renamed. I have always thought this book was a pivot point for Gladys Mitchell." I will definitely consider it, and will announce both book choice and reading month once I have settled on them. September or October might prove agreeable, but December will likely be avoided… Happy New Year to all!

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Book Review: THE ALLINGHAM MINIBUS (1973) by Margery Allingham

12/28/2019

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A few stories into Agora Books' 2019 reprint of The Allingham Minibus, I realized I had read this collection before, although the rather cute title was new to me. A quick search of my bookshelves revealed the answer: the set of stories had previously been released under the title Mr. Campion's Lucky Day and Other Stories, and some years ago I had procured and read a Carroll & Graf paperback edition from the early 1990s. Margery Allingham was and is a solid writer and storyteller, so revisiting the tales – which contain a mix of crime and supernatural thematic elements – proved not to be a hardship.

There are many more successes than misfires here, although I found myself wishing that the organization of the stories and their order were a bit less haphazard. Personally, I would have curated these pieces so they were grouped by general subject into categories such as "The Humans", "The Spirits", and "The Criminous", understanding that Allingham's characters can move between these labels with admirable ease.

Three tales feature the author's series detective Albert Campion: "…Lucky Day", "The Unseen Door", and the longer Christmas adventure, "The Man with the Sack". ("Sack", by the way, was collected in the British Library Crime Classics anthology Crimson Snow in 2016.) The single novella in the bunch, the non-Campion "A Quarter of a Million", is an interesting cops-and-robbers tale where Allingham switches between perspective views of the dogged detective and the duplicitous (and dangerous) kidnapper, building suspense as she places protagonist and antagonist on a collision course.

It is the tales of ghosts and avenging spirits, however, that I found more resonant than the traditional crime stories. "The Sexton's Wife" is particularly good, a simple but effective tale of an old woman relating the details of a tragic triangle and beyond-the-grave revenge that occurred when she was a youthful bride. With the other supernatural stories here, atmosphere and mood are always solid, but the plots occasionally slip into cliché that allows the reader to get ahead of the simple story, as with "The Secret" and "'Tis Not Hereafter".

The author is arguably at her best with the stories that focus on the vulnerabilities of everyday people; these short pieces take an observational, reflective approach similar to de Maupassant, and some don't even feature a traditional crime element. "The Correspondents" follows a man who must reconcile his effusive friend's written adventures with a far different reality, while in "The Pioneers", a couple about to dissolve their marriage finds their perspective forced by visiting friends. And "Publicity" is a likeable underdog story about an actor who is prematurely pronounced dead and, because of this, discovers a new life with realigned values. All of these "Human" stories I found thoughtful and often elegiac.

I need to voice one criticism, as Agora seems to have chosen to alter a tale for the sake of political correctness, with no mention made that the text has been censored. The change made to a story about a celebrated Asian academic and a manor-house jewel robbery is no minor one: the final paragraph (containing the "twist" that explains the thief's ideology) is omitted, and without it the story ends abruptly and rather pointlessly. That original final-sentence sting helps to define the casual cultural racism ingrained in the Anglo-Saxon hosts, which gives an uneasy justification to the person taking their possessions and makes the story's moral landing more stubbornly ambiguous. If you are wondering what social comment that original paragraph contained, look to the story's title for your clue: "The Same to Us".

As always, I'm very happy to see so many authors and titles from the Golden Age of Detection in print (or eBook form) and readily available to a new generation of mystery readers. The Allingham Minibus is a worthy story collection, and will be especially satisfying for those who look for variety and character definition in the genre. This was a preview edition offered by Agora Books via NetGalley.

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Mitchell Mystery Reading Group: DEAD MEN'S MORRIS (1936) - Post #2

12/22/2019

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Pictured, left to right: Martyn H., Jason H., Joyka. Front row: pigs.

This second group discussion of Gladys Mitchell's Dead Men's Morris is posting a little late, as I bounce back from a bout of food poisoning. (Not from Oxfordshire boar, but likely from Wensleydale cheese.) It is just Martyn Hobbs, Joyka, and me covering the second section of the book, Figure 2: Shotover Simith, Chapters 7 through 12.

Instead of organizing the conversation loosely by topic, I will let each reader have their own section, and I will throw in my own observations where they are suitable. All of us have found much to discuss and highlight in Gladys Mitchell's prose, so this installment will feature quite a few direct quotes from the lively text.

Joyka, who confides that she "could write pages on this book," begins with a reference to the previous week's note on the narrative following the form of a Morris dance. "I am grateful to Martyn for pointing out the interplay between the story and the dance. I was feeling the movement in the story but had not made the connection. It is interesting to see almost every interaction happens between pairs: Carey and Mrs. B, Fay and Jenny, Tombley and Simith, Tombley and Fay, Priest and Lender, Mrs. Ditch and Mrs. B. There are very few group scenes in this book."

That couples comment nicely introduces an element I have been tracking and ruminating on since I started Dead Men's Morris. For me, this book is sometimes quite patience-testing in its approach to the detective story template, in that we are nearly always once removed from any moment of primary importance. This, of course, is traditional to any mystery puzzle, where the murder has already occurred and the sleuth must by necessity interview suspects and witnesses and try to recreate the past to understand what happened.

But Mitchell sometimes delivers stories that can feel like the theories and conjecture are dealt out too quickly to carry weight. The reader tries to keep track of all of the potential combinations and their merits, but the discussions remain between Mrs. Bradley and the person in whom she is confiding (often her nephew Carey here). The result can be quite fatiguing, especially as a particular theory is sometimes not followed up with a present action or exchange with the person under suspicion.

To this point, Dead Men's Morris still indulges in this limitation while succeeding as well as any book can do that puts dialogic theorizing in place of genuine, in-the-present suspense and plot advancement. Chapter 11 is particularly good, a twisty (if tiring) bout of theorizing about character movements and nocturnal pairings. For other examples where Gladys Mitchell uses this talk-it-all-out approach, see Death and the Maiden or the final chapter of Brazen Tongue. Her books from the 1960s on also incorporate two-person character conversations about past action to drive the plot far more often than any present action narrative scenes. (Mitchell can write marvelously in the moment as well, however: The Saltmarsh Murders, The Rising of the Moon, and Laurels Are Poison are just three examples where scenes of incident propel the present and exchanges are not relegated to discussions of the past.)

Joyka offers an intriguing hypothesis when she contrasts Mrs. Bradley's nephew Carey with the psycho-analyst's barrister son Ferdinand Lestrange. "I believe that Mitchell created Ferdinand and he turned into an intellectual stuffed shirt – no fun at all. Mrs. Bradley needed a more likeable, human relative. His mother admires Ferdinand’s brains and his cleverness but no way could one imagine this interaction with her son:

Mrs. Bradley, with a veil tied under her chin to keep her hat on, and fur-lined gloves on her hands, sat patiently in the sidecar...
“Garsington!” screamed Mrs. Bradley, above the noise of the engine. “Garsington ho!” bellowed Carey, as he turned the corner and slightly opened the throttle.

Also from Joyka: "Mrs. Ditch is my favorite after Mrs. Bradley. Her speeches are pure gold. I wonder if GM didn’t know someone who actually did talk like this. A few of my favorites in this section:

“I don’t thenk at all,” said Mrs. Ditch, eyeing him calmly. “Tes a bad ’abit, and shouldn’t be encouraged en nobody. Ef us didn’t thenk, us wouldn’t make oursen miserable. That’s what I ben sayen to our dad.”

and

“Our Lender... trapsen and trollopsen over the country...”

Mrs. Bradley does some trapsen too (if not necessarily trollepsen) as she visits a psychologist colleague and a forensics analyst in London. The latter meeting is singularly notable because Mitchell stages it at The Detection Club, the real-life gathering place for many of England's most famous authors. Martin Edwards has assembled a fascinating and informative history of The Detection Club in his book The Golden Age of Murder. Here are the references within Dead Men's Morris, taken from Chapter 9:

"Blood," said the analyst, two days later. He had met Mrs. Bradley, by appointment, at the Detection Club, of which she had been made an honorary member, and they sat in armchairs in the larger of the rooms which overlooked the street.

The brief scene continues with the analyst confirming that the blood in the soil under old Simith's body was likely pig's blood, and Mrs. Bradley explains that the local inspector in charge of the case "came to a series of popular lectures I gave at the Oxford City Y.M.C.A. a year or two ago, and we get on famously together. I teach him the art of knife-throwing and explain Lombroso's theories, and tell him why most of them are discountenanced to-day." Then, with the meeting over,

They descended the dark and ancient staircase past the haunts of industry, pleasure and mystery which made up the remainder of the house and, turning into Shaftsbury Avenue, were soon at the entrance to Piccadilly Tube station, where they parted.

Joyka finds one interview moment particularly "ridiculous": Mrs. Bradley talks with Jenny while the healthy young woman is taking a bath. "She wanted a private talk, I understand that, but surely this is way beyond normal behavior for this decade." It certainly seems an unusual choice, especially as there is nothing psychologically beneficial to the setting, such as advantageous use of power and vulnerability. Jenny here is just as amiable and guileless as Carey, and the interview could easily have waited (or have been set elsewhere). And while there is no inference in the text, either of adverb, description, or dialogue, to turn the scene sexual or voyeuristic, neither is it completely innocent, particularly when factoring in the author's probable sexual orientation. A male detective interviewing a male suspect as he showers, in the 1930s or today, would have the same strange frisson, however innocently the scene was presented.

Joyka: "The murder puzzle is a good one in Dead Men’s Morris. The use of the boars is unique as far as I know and creates an interesting conundrum: could someone who doesn’t handle boars have committed this murder? Interestingly, GM uses a boar at Carey’s farm again to kill in a later book" [in 1981's The Death-Cap Dancers, which features Carey's daughter Hermione Lestrange in her own outdoor adventure].

Next, we hear from Martyn, who shares some of his favorite literary moments. His comments this week are largely in celebration of Gladys Mitchell's wit, which, he writes, "is intelligent, playful, bountiful and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny." I quite agree – it's certainly one of the qualities that most endears me to her work. Martyn recognizes the voice of P.G. Wodehouse in Carey's reply, "If I heard pigs in trouble, I should hasten pigwards without a second thought. The whole thing is unhealthy and morbid, and strictly on the lines of the so-called maternal instinct…"

The author's descriptions of her elderly sleuth continue to be worthy of study. Martyn: "The saurian Mrs. Bradley is often compared to a boa constrictor, but these allusions become increasingly elaborate. 'Mrs. Bradley… [was] eyeing him with the maternal anxiety of a boa-constrictor which watches its young attempting to devour their first donkey.' The visual absurdity of the image is a joy. She can even include two beasts in one sentence, '…looking like a benevolent alligator and then suddenly screeching like a slightly demented macaw.'"

Martyn notes Mitchell's empathy for children and animals alike through her descriptive imagery. "Describing Nero’s discontent at the presence of humans, 'his ears were cocked like those of a suspicious, unfriendly dog, and even his tufted tail lacked that air of roguery inseparable from the appendages of pigs in general.'" Also worth honouring is the author's "artistry in depicting all registers of speech, in this case, the disintegration of grammatical laws in the sergeant’s laborious attempts at logic":

"Well, you onderstand, I can’t say in words what I mean (…) As I tell ee, u knows her work, and if us didn’t, Sir Selby do, too and all, don’t him?"

Martyn notes that Mrs. Bradley's quotation of "Proceed, moon," to her nephew is from A Midsummer Night's Dream ("and just to say, there are an awful lot of strange goings on and the misadventures of mismatched lovers in GM’s Midwinter Night's drama"). He also points to Mitchell's skill at pastiche, as the reader is treated to some "very modern verse" in the form of a pig-centric poem:

…The fat-stock prices, Oxford-on-Cam pronounced.
(Strattford-atte-Bow, quoth Chaucer)
Fie, for shame!
Hoodoo, or Voodoo – same?
Shame, same; same shame as
Eve’s.
Significant form? What else?
Squirms matter? All her dugs?

"There’s more than a hint of Pound’s Cantos here," observes Martyn of the satiric poem, "or even Samuel Beckett’s Whoroscope (1930)." To me, the fact that Gladys Mitchell includes such amusing digressions and has faith that her readers will also enjoy the joke sets her apart from her genre writing contemporaries who never chose to break convention or experiment with content. Of course, the opposite case can be made that such additions create only frustrating distractions for the puzzle-minded reader… but I have never been solely a puzzle-minded reader, as GM has never been a solely puzzle-minded writer.

Mitchell even provides those turns of phrase that make us groan, notes Martyn: a pig farmer with "piggish" eyes; the inspector declaring the case "a rare old dance." But he also points out the author's "brilliant evocation of the wintry Oxfordshire landscape, brooding, dark, low and damp." One example:

The woods were the colour of woodsmoke, and had almost the same dense obscurity… a line of trees, a thin straggle of windblown trunks and leafless arms, stood up on the crest of a ridge like ragged clouds in the wake of a windblown storm... a scarecrow brood with menace in their very shapelessness.

Martyn: "And after all the indirections, the endless discussions and possible explanations, suddenly, at the end of this section, there is a moment of real peril – with the secret tunnel inexplicably close, Carey trapped underground, and Mrs Bradley alone. The mood changes again, but for just that moment, the threat of physical danger was a welcome intrusion." This is an uncommon instance of present action rather than past-events discussion in Dead Men's Morris, to recall my earlier criticism. The good news is that the third and final section delivers a notably sharp in-the-moment finale, if memory serves.

The post for Figure 3: Parson's Pleasure will be delivered on or about December 30. I look forward to finishing the dance!

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Book Review: A WORD OF SIX LETTERS (1936) by Herbert Adams

Mitchell Mystery Reading Group: DEAD MEN'S MORRIS (1936) - Post #3

Book Review: THE ALLINGHAM MINIBUS (1973) by Margery Allingham

Mitchell Mystery Reading Group: DEAD MEN'S MORRIS (1936) - Post #2

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