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Book Review: MURDER AFTER CHRISTMAS (1944) by Rupert Latimer

1/10/2023

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Let me start with the good: it is always a pleasure to celebrate the efforts of Martin Edwards and the British Library Crime Classics series. For years, Edwards and the imprint have been unearthing, securing, and presenting several unjustly neglected, long out of print titles from mystery fiction’s Golden Age of Detection. (Poisoned Pen Press has made several of these UK books available to U.S. readers, as well as spotlighting classic American mystery authors in their own Library of Congress Crime Classics series.) So it is wonderful to see a book like 1944’s high-spirited holiday whodunit Murder after Christmas returning to print after being unavailable for decades.

We learn from Edwards’ useful introduction that Rupert Latimer was the pseudonym of Algernon Vernon Mills, an occasional stage actor who was plagued with health problems stemming from a childhood illness. Mills would die in 1953, less than a decade after the publication of Murder after Christmas, but retained a cheery perspective in those years that informed his wryly comic prose style.

In Christmas, Frank and Rhoda Redpath await the yuletide arrival of Rhoda’s rich and eccentric stepfather, Sir Willoughby Keene-Cotton, dubbed more ironically than affectionately “Uncle Willie”. The couple exchange winking ideas about how best to dispose of their relation to gain an inheritance, and as often happens in this type of story, Frank and Rhoda soon find themselves hosting other guests and relatives that could stand in the way of obtaining Uncle Willie’s legacy. When the designated victim finally meets his end – his body is found outside in the snow, lying beside a snowman that contained a box of chocolate as part of a holiday scavenger hunt – it is up to Superintendent Culley to interview the suspects, sort through the colorful clues, and make sense of it all.

I sincerely wish I had responded more favorably to Latimer’s prose, plotting, and characters. Other reviewers seem to have done so, from Kate at crossexaminingcrime, who enjoyed the book’s humour and characterizations, to Sarah over at On: Yorkshire Magazine, who found the book “charming and delightful”. My disappointment stems from the author’s handling of the genre’s three crucial elements: I found the prose forced and overwritten, the puzzle’s late-chapter twist telegraphed from the start, and the characters and investigation wearying over time.

And yet it shouldn’t be so. Latimer has worked hard to adopt a buoyant, comic worldview that should be inviting, not off-putting. And it’s very possible that this prose engages some readers; it just doesn’t cast the same spell over me. Instead, I find myself wading through the words, encountering phrases that often require a cerebral translation before I’m able to form a picture. Often it feels like the author is constructing his sentences and shaping his tableaux in an effort to display his very determined wit. Consider the passage below; to me, it feels too calculated and puckish to truly bring these characters to life.

The Coultards arrived first of all, with their two horrid little boys; then came the Howard Wortleys, with Esther Hobbs and three well-washed, adolescent evacuees. Rhoda tried to stir up these preliminary guests to be going on with, but they weren’t immediately mixable. The Coultards accepted the Wortleys as equals, but the Wortleys weren’t able to place the Coultards at all, having merely been told that he was a schoolmaster, which gave him no social status at all. Mrs. Coultard, well-dressed, stout, and cheery, bustled about helping Rhoda and calling her my dear (but in Scotch, which told one nothing), while Mr. Coultard referred to Frank and Howard as Sir (but in a cherubic and public-school sort of way, which told one even less).
Paragraph after paragraph, page after page – Murder after Christmas runs 350 pages, by the way – and this sheer volume of determined description becomes a weight. The author also never passes up an abstract adverb/adjective combination and often follows it with another dependent clause, adding ponderously to the sentence. Used sparingly, the indulgence wouldn’t add up to much, but as nearly every other dialogue line featured this addendum of overwriting, it became defeating for me. I give you one exhausting example: on a single page within Chapter 16, characters do not speak without having “explained firmly”, “ejaculated prefatorially”, “wheedled hastily, averting another gust of laughter”, and “appended cautiously, reviewing the episode and finding it mellowed with time; then hoiking his thoughts sternly back to present realities”.

I get it, you say (and rightly so). You don’t like his writing style. It’s not to your taste. So what else? As Martin Edwards and other reviewers note, Latimer’s references to British country life during wartime give the story a welcome angle of interest and lend an authentic anchor to an otherwise fantastical plotline. As a reader, though, it was frustrating to be able to guess the “twist” element and the underlying motive for the actions creating the “twist” almost as soon as poor Uncle Willie’s body is discovered. I claim no special perspicacity at all; indeed, I’m easily bamboozled by these things. But the author leads us there with the book’s title and then underlines the concept by having his characters discuss a certain pertinent issue again and again. At least Rupert Latimer cannot be accused of hiding clues or sidestepping fair play.

Such an early but strong suspicion of the solution meant that I felt consistently ahead of the ruminating Superintendent Culley, who pushes through 100 additional pages before arriving at the same conclusion. It gave me time to ponder another weakness in this lengthy mystery story: after Uncle Willie’s demise, Latimer never complicates his plot by adding another victim to the roster, thus injecting some energy into an otherwise flagging story. There is the offstage death of another relative – by natural causes or foul play? – and I did enjoy some of the singular clues, such as mince pies sown into a seat cushion and the disappearance of a detective novel called… Murder after Christmas. The story has potential, and at half its length and stripped of its jungle of prose it would be a fun seasonal read. Like those mince pies, I think it’s ultimately a matter of taste.

I received an advance reading copy of Murder after Christmas from NetGalley in exchange for an honest (perhaps too honest) review.

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Book Review: THE LONG BODY (1955) by Helen McCloy

12/23/2022

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While cleaning out her husband’s desk, newly widowed Alice Hazard makes a discovery that should be innocuous but raises much troublesome speculation. The thin, foreign-looking green envelope is empty and still fastened with red string. On the front, so faint that the lettering could have been easily overlooked, are the words Papers Pertaining to Miss Lash. Alice’s late husband John was a diplomat based in Washington, D.C., and there is indeed a Teresa Lash who recently moved into the Connecticut town with her father and has been socializing with Alice’s son. But was this dossier part of John’s political business or information collected for a more personal reason? And where are the missing papers, and why does the envelope smell faintly of a woman’s perfume?

From this relatively benign starting point, author Helen McCloy puts her protagonist through the crucible. For two-thirds of the tale, we follow Alice as she shares her suspicions and doubts – these sections are very much offered from a first-person limited omniscient perspective, so we know only what Alice herself thinks and observes. The tactic is a smart one, as it allows the reader to experience the character’s increasing paranoia (all the more potent since her fears seem to be partially anchored in truth) while also being invited to look critically, outside of the character, and wonder about the soundness of the excitable woman’s mental state.

It is an understatement to say that incidents and revelations manifest quickly. After an attempt on her life sends Alice to the hospital, the traumatized patient sneaks out of her private room and walks (sleepwalks?) to Teresa Lash’s cottage with murder on her mind: she is certain that Miss Lash was driving the car that tried to kill her, although her son and the police are less sure. In her drugged and distraught state, Alice Hazard sees her plan as a way to protect her family and, just possibly, to avenge her husband’s death; John’s fall from a cliff on a foggy New England evening might not have been an accident after all.

With nightmare logic, Alice enters the cottage and finds her quarry already killed in exactly the fashion she had planned to use. Is someone trying to frame the hapless widow or help her? Or could Alice have done the deed herself, with her conscious mind refusing to process and claim the act? It’s a fortunate coincidence that psychiatrist Basil Willing lives in the neighborhood and decides to take an interest.

At 136 pages, The Long Body is slim and propulsive; its plotline covers an impressive amount of ground and generates an admirable amount of suspense. Rather than crafting a fairly clued detective puzzle, Helen McCloy delivers a psychological thriller that seems to be winking occasionally at its own unbelievable melodrama. It is one of those flights of fantastical fiction that seems to exist only on the page or on the screen. If credibility hasn’t been stretched to the limit with the story’s premise and complications, by the time the heroine decides to sneak out of the hospital and kill her nemesis the reader is more curious than concerned. To be fair, dozens of Hollywood crime film scripts from the 1940s and ‘50s play a similar game, gleefully choosing unbelievable but entertaining fantasy over a more logical reality.

The book’s title refers not to an in-the-moment corpse but instead to Dr. Basil Willing’s macroscopic view of a subject’s cumulative personality shaped by age and over time. As Willing explains to Alice, who has sought his counsel:


“Ordinarily we think of growth as changes the body makes in itself. But the Hindus think of the body as a whole including infancy, middle age and old age – a whole that stands still while the motion of time reveals various aspects of that whole which is called the long body – the body that is long in time, stretching all the way from birth to death.”
And a little later:
“When you seek a murderer among people who are superficially incapable of crime, the answer must lie in the long body of one of those people – the true shape of a character as it is revealed over a long period of time.”
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For the record, McCloy’s doctor detective doesn’t appear officially until page 100, and his sleuthing is largely limited to finding the missing papers which provide the backstory, the text of which is presented in one block over the book’s last 20 pages. With the connection between all parties made clear, the motive for murder (and attempted murder) comes into focus, although – as it is for Dr. Willing – the reader ultimately relies on a delivery of details rather than a deduction from clues to reach a solution. The limited cast of characters (those still alive, at any rate) also makes the identity of Cristina Lash’s killer fairly obvious, even if motive is obscured until that backstory is provided. Measured out, The Long Body is an enjoyable little tale, even with its shortcomings. 

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Book Review: MURDER IN ABSENCE (1954) by Miles Burton

11/1/2022

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One of the most curiously structured crime stories in the voluminous John Rhode/Miles Burton canon, 1954’s Murder in Absence spends its first half investigating the death of an unlucky estate agent in the market town of Hembury and its second half onboard a freighter helmed and staffed by Norwegians in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Inspector Arnold looks into the strange circumstances of the murder of Rufus Jones, a realtor who disappears for several days. Eventually, his body is found in a storage building on one of the available properties. Jones’s automobile is found abandoned on farmland away from the building where his body was discovered, but the car’s interior appears to have been the scene of a mighty struggle. Arnold strongly suspects Tom White, Jones’s cousin and business partner, who has motive and opportunity for dispatching his relative.

And then, starting in Chapter 10, we leave the inspector to his suspicion and his procedure and instead board The Ballerina, a commercial freighter that also accepts a limited number of tourist passengers to accompany the crew on their business voyage. Desmond Merrion and his wife Mavis find themselves well suited to the unfussy arrangements, and plan to travel for six weeks while High Eldersham Hall undergoes renovations. Dozens of pages go by with no apparent mystery in sight, although the reader knows enough to keep an eye on Mr. Jasper Wilberton, an outspoken older man who has his nephew, Horace Bewdley, in tow. What we know that Merrion does not is that Mr. Wilberton had called on H. Jones and Son Estate Agents the day that Rufus Jones went missing.

The mystery story connecting the two sections is interesting but not exceptional, and as sometimes happens in the Miles Burton books, two things occur: poor Inspector Arnold becomes focused on a single, incorrect suspect and finds it hard to look past him; and the reader is denied an important piece of information (here, the relationship between killer and victim and the motive for murder) until it is revealed near the end of the book. Somehow, such withholding of details, which muddies the fair-play waters, never really frustrates me when I read a mystery story by the prolific Cecil John Charles Street. I think it is because Street always practices forthright, clear-eyed procedural storytelling, and that style is compulsively readable even if it lacks surprise or filigree. (There is a reason why he is identified as a writer belonging to the “humdrum” school of detective fiction.)

But the mystery plot is not the most memorable and, yes, surprising part of Murder in Absence. That honor goes to the author’s detailed and affectionate evocation of the Merrions’ cruise experience aboard that Greece-bound freighter. Street doesn’t merely offer up general details; rather, there are dozens of observations about life aboard a working cargo ship for both passengers and crew that the author delivers with a reporter-like authenticity.

The specifics are quirky and fascinating and must surely have been collected from real life. Merrion’s mischievous tricking of a Norwegian waiter into believing the ship is three miles out from shore so drinks can be ordered; the pulley system used – and the accompanying clamor – when cargo is swung from the dock to the loading bay; even the descriptions of the rocky Greek islands and the novelty of the on-ship smorgasbord are presented with a knowing, experiential touch. I found these passages a delight, largely because it felt like Street was taking pleasure to share his own recent adventures. In his biography and genre study Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery, scholar Curtis Evans writes that Murder in Absence “draws on the peripatetic John and Eileen Street’s practical knowledge of realtors and freighters to provide a convincing and original Miles Burton tale”. Such well-observed specifics definitely make Absence one of Street’s most evocative stories, and an enjoyable one at that.

The late-period Miles Burton editions are quite difficult to find. While the books Street wrote in the 1950s under his John Rhode pseudonym saw print in both Great Britain and the United States, the Burton stories were only published through the Collins Crime Club in the UK. I am grateful, then, for the wonderful library collective over at Internet Archive, which allows free digital lending of hundreds of mystery and crime books that might otherwise prove challenging and cost prohibitive to track down and read. The information page tells me that the Archive’s full-text scan of Murder in Absence was added in August, and such active curating is very exciting indeed.

Perhaps predictably, Internet Archive now must defend the legality of its online book loan practice in a lawsuit brought by four litigious, notably for-profit publishing companies. As the website claims to own a copy of every digitized book and has a clear electronic lending policy – upon checkout, users get access to the text for a limited time and never own a downloaded or printable copy during or after use – I don’t see how the Archive’s program differs from other e-lenders like Hoopla and OverDrive or from the beloved patron borrow-and-return traditions of our brick-and-mortar libraries. Until Internet Archive can no longer offer this wonderful service (and I hope that day never comes), I am excited to fully explore its growing online catalog of crime and mystery novels from previous eras.

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

8/25/2022

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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.


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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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