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Book Review: THE KNIFE (1933) by Herbert Adams

5/22/2022

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For fans of detective fiction, The Knife begins promisingly. Over the first fifty pages, Fullock Park houseguest Mark Braddon is party to the theft of Mrs. Rawland’s emeralds and uncovers a blackmail scheme hatched by an unscrupulous foreigner. Braddon resolves the latter by kidnapping the culprit, tying him up, and threatening him with a red-hot branding iron. A little later, when Wilfrid Hatton, King’s Counsel, is found murdered in notably gruesome fashion – stabbed with a decorative dagger through the eye – the sensational death by letter-opener feels a bit like an anticlimax. In author Herbert Adams’s hands, Fullock Park Manor is positively abustle with criminal activity.

This is the third title by Adams that I have tried, and it seems to be a good representation of the writer’s style and sentiments. For as much action and mystery that The Knife’s plot offers the reader, at heart is a love story: Mark Braddon’s growing attraction to Ruth Hatton, despite the woman being courted by millionaire M.P. Roger Malden. The plotting and pacing are engaging, but there is something formulaic at play, even within the genre of mystery fiction with a purposeful infusion of young-lovers romance. Adams’s stories remind me of the enjoyable but forgettable B-movies from Hollywood’s silver screen heyday: a perfectly pleasant way to spend some time, but a couple of clicks removed from better quality, more ambitious fare.
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There’s also an aspect of The Knife that is simultaneously admirable and unfortunate. Adams provides a clue to the K.C.’s killer shortly after the body is discovered, one that is seeded with fair-play noblesse. The problem is that it’s one of those clues delivered in a way to make any reader of mystery puzzles pay immediate attention… and then the item is never mentioned again until Braddon realizes its significance at the story’s climax, which is several chapters after the penny drops for the reader. A true mystery fiction literary magician like Agatha Christie or Nicholas Blake would surely have performed a more successful legerdemain, such as first offering a convincing but false explanation of the clue or burying it among other details to disguise its damning relevance. In their encyclopedic Catalogue of Crime, Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor also mention the book’s clueing that allows the reader to “guess the concealed culprit around page 100”.

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To his credit, Herbert Adams does provide a colorful group to stock his cast of characters. From the ex-Parisian dancer married to the several-decades-older murder victim to the deceased’s ne’er-do-well gambler cousin and his bitter spinster sister, these are solid if stereotypical characters efficiently used by the author in this melodrama. There is a nice variety here, with Braddon working to solve a mystery in one chapter, engaged in a deadly duel with the criminal near the climax, and rushing to join the object of his affection and declare his love by the story’s end. If Herbert Adams’s stories lack literary weight, they deliver busy, breezy plotlines, lucid writing, and respective dashes of suspense and romance. Which, for this genre, is better than a poke in the eye with a decorative dagger.
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The U.S. edition by J.B. Lippincott Company (also 1933) was retitled The Strange Murder of Hatton, K.C. A strange rebranding indeed, since the new moniker lacks the elegant brevity (with its enticing promise of malice) of The Knife and supposes that American readers will recognize the British barrister’s significance of K.C. after the name.

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Book Review: THE CHIEF WITNESS (1940) by Herbert Adams

6/5/2021

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The mysteries of Herbert Adams, whose writing spans a career from the mid-1920s to the late 1950s, fall into that comfortable category of the unremarkable but generally enjoyable cosy. In effect, he was a genre manufacturer, and one whose titles – or, admittedly, at least the two I have tried so far – are easy to read, fun in the moment, yet rather forgettable. Fellow “humdrum” colleagues Cecil John Charles Street (writing under the John Rhode and Miles Burton names) and Freeman Wills Crofts have fared better over the years, in part because their stories focus on the puzzle and the detection process. Adams’s tales occupy that space incorporating detective fiction, thriller, and burgeoning love story between a pair of innocents, all mingled together and not aging particularly well. Added to this, there is not a lot of surprise to be offered through dazzling deduction or bold narrative experimentation; the risks and rewards generated by the works of Anthony Berkeley or Philip MacDonald are a world removed from the predictable one that Adams’s detective Roger Bennion inhabits.

Such criticism and unflattering comparison may make one conclude that I am anti-Adams. But I am not at all; it is simply difficult to be passionately pro-. The Chief Witness from 1940 is my second sampled book from this author (after 1936’s A Word of Six Letters), and I will likely go on to read more. Like dozens of other Golden Age writers who busily published mystery fiction for decades and are largely forgotten today, Herbert Adams’s flaw is likely that his stories aren’t distinctive enough to be memorable. They have decent plots and pacing, the characters are agreeably drawn, and there is a dispassionate investment generated in the reader to see how everything shakes out. But it is damning with faint praise, I fear. I enjoyed The Chief Witness; the problem is that I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as my last Agatha Christie or Rex Stout, or even as much as my last Crofts or Rhode story.

Witness has an intriguing set-up: two brothers die on the same evening, almost at the same time, in their respective homes. Both appear to have shot themselves with a revolver, and both are in rooms where a smashed timepiece hints at the time of death. As Roger Bennion follows Inspector Goff around on his investigation, he learns that the details don’t quite add up for a double suicide verdict. Each man has a possible enemy or two who would like to see either Alexander or Frederick Curtis dispatched, but no one appears to have a strong enough motive for killing both brothers. And if murder, then why the choice for one hand to dispatch both men on the same night, a move calculated to arouse suspicion?

Bennion (and the reader) soon discovers that there are male suspects who might be unscrupulous enough to kill and female ones who are emotionally tied to the victims. To his credit, Adams excels at presenting sympathetic, larger-than-life female characters that evoke a response in the reader. One example is Margot Watney, a commanding young woman whose argumentative attitude masks a vulnerable fear that her fiancé, Wilfrid Mounsey, may be arrested for the crimes. Another beguiling woman is Alexander Curtis’s wife, Helen, who was never legally married and is now fighting with her stepdaughter Delia for control of the estate. While these women characters will never be confused for fully rendered creations, they do resonate in the book to a much greater degree than their male counterparts, who are heroically dull or villainously melodramatic as called for.

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The climax here is also well done: it’s a serviceable if clichéd mix of menace to the detective and braggadocio from the killer. It involves a naked Bennion tied to a wheelchair, forced to listen to the Auric-Goldfinger-explains-all speech from the villain, and then thrown unconscious into a lake. While there is no uncertainty of the story’s ultimate outcome – perhaps another reason why Adams’s books feel predictable and prosaic to modern readers – the scene is engaging in the moment and kept me turning pages. The Chief Witness is also just enjoyable enough (but, sadly, only just) to make me return to the author in the future… although I’m in no great hurry. I shall try next one of his many mysteries involving golf and bodies on the links; they are reputed to be entertaining and readable, and with Herbert Adams, that is what one can reasonably expect.

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

1/24/2020

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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.
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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.
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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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