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Book Review: THE HOUND OF DEATH (1944) by James Corbett

2/21/2021

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Should I be foolhardy enough to read and review another James Corbett novel in the future, let me provide context regarding where I am now in that valiant battle. I have just finished The Hound of Death, a mystery-ish thriller published in 1944 by Herbert Jenkins Limited. Mr. Jenkins may well have had a masochistic streak, as he and/or his company released all of Corbett’s print titles on an unsuspecting British public between 1929 and 1950. My first James Corbett reading experience involved his first published book, The Merrivale Mystery, and it was an unforgettable assault on the senses. You can read my review here, or you can track the book down and be buffeted yourself by the author’s complete incompetence in all matters of character, dialogue, prose, and plot. Suffice to say, after The Merrivale Mystery it has taken me more than a year to recover and check in once more with this remarkable author; The Hound of Death is my second timorous visit to Corbett-land.

It is important to note that 15 years and an impressive 30 published titles in between (!) separate the two books. This Hound, it turns out, could almost have been composed by a completely different writer, one who actually understands the rudiments of narrative structure and has a working command of the English language. Unlike The Merrivale Mystery, where 98% of the story seems to take place in the same manor house study and the chapter rhythms repeat with the endless consistency of a Mobius strip, this later story employs varied settings, a plotline that actually builds to a climax, and characters who, while not exactly dimensional, are at least sketched in with enough detail so the reader can tell them apart. The Hound of Death isn’t a great mystery, but it is a functional entry within the genre, and that alone places it leagues above Corbett’s questionable début.

But then, I shouldn’t be too surprised: one would have to actively work at one’s ignorance to keep writing and still maintain the level of ineptness on display at chez Merrivale. I wondered why William F. Deeck, who was so delighted with/repulsed by this author’s skill set, primarily quoted from only four early titles when making his case for (or against) Corbett. I know now that it is likely because the truly so-bad-it’s-good material is delivered early in the author’s career. And that’s understandable, if a little disappointing, since Corbett can be positively inspired when he reaches his unparalleled heights of poor writing.

Here, we start with Detective-Inspector Jimmy Brigg, a “burly man” with “a fighting chin”, “whimsical grey eyes”, and “strong, capable fingers”, surveying the grounds at the greyhound track. He is collecting information from the bookies about Colonel Trevor, a racing regular who recently killed himself with a revolver. A mysterious dog named “Black Shadow” runs and wins a race, and moments later a man collapses and dies. The astute detective notices there is a recent scratch on the dead man’s hand.

A journalist acquaintance of Brigg’s named Cardew (whose Christian name is also Jimmy for some reason) smells a story and sticks to Brigg, who chooses to give the reporter access to the investigation. During the case, Cardew meets the lovely Cora Dainton, the deceased Colonel Trevor’s niece, and soon Cora is menaced by a “Hindu” in a turban, while the gallant Cardew must fend off a bedroom cobra attack by shooting the snake, which was clearly intended for the ingénue. DI Brigg also keeps his whimsical grey eye on a night club singer, an entertainment manager, a spiritualist who owns the black greyhound, and a pair of on-the-lam racetrack gamblers, and by the book’s climactic séance scene (along with three pages of block explanation from Brigg to tie everything up) the detective has caught his criminal and the reporter has acquired a fiancée.

All in all, comprehensible if disposable genre fare, and Corbett’s approach is suitably melodramatic and stereotypical to make it all feel rather artificial. Here and there, I still found examples of the memorable floridness and not-quite-right wording of the maestro’s early works, as with this description:
Than the hard-boiled Detective-Inspector Brigg, C.I.D., New Scotland Yard, there was no one more prosaic. And as for Jimmy Cardew, wide-ranging reporter, blessed with both innate and hardly-acquired good horse-sense – his very profession had made him more than ordinarily skeptical. Yet both men experienced at the same time a sudden chill, a dampening, deadening influence that seemed to lay a clammy hand upon them. “Haunted!” said Cardew beneath his breath, and strove to laugh at himself, but his forced mirth made him uneasy. Brigg stopped and looked at him curiously.

“Did you say anything, Jimmy?”

“I did not.” Cardew was terse. “I was thinking, instead.”

“Interesting,” said Inspector Brigg.
I love the perfect absurdity of “hardly-acquired good horse-sense”. There’s also the joy of seeing the author sidestep a criminous detail that would have been worth the research to a lesser (or greater) mystery writer. Here’s how Jimmy Corbett handles it:
The pathologists had got it at last – an obscure Afghan poison with some unholy name that he couldn’t pronounce. A clear case of murder, if ever there was one… The effect of this blasted stuff, if one could read between the lines of the mess of high falutin’ technical language was that it brought about an intense depression in the mind of the victim. First, of course, the poison worked its way into the blood-stream via a scratch on the surface of the skin; then it gradually had an insidious and deadening effect on the nerves.
Oh, those awful, unpronounceable Afghan poisons. Actually, Corbett has graduated from the foundational writing failures evidenced in The Merrivale Mystery to some more subtle advanced composition problems, and that is progress. Notice the “blasted” pathology report filled with “high falutin’ technical language”: Corbett uses a mode called third-person limited omniscient throughout The Hound of Death. This means that the reader is aware of the scene character’s perspective and thoughts, even as the narrative stays away from “I” and remains in the third-person. So it is Brigg’s frustration with the technical aspects of the report, and we view it through his eyes. The only problem is that the author sometimes jumps mid-scene to follow another character, and the abrupt point-of-view change can cause a mild literary whiplash.
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In Chapter Ten, for example, we spend three pages looking at the scene as Cardew, who is on the search for Jackson, one of the missing gamblers. Then Cardew meets Jackson and promptly gets punched, and when “the ace London reporter of the Worldwide” drops to the ground, we are suddenly in Jackson’s head, “glanc[ing] down ruefully” and privy to all of Jackson’s thoughts. It’s a bit of a jolt, especially as we have never previously experienced Jackson’s point of view in the story. Conventional narrative rules would suggest ending the scene and starting clean with a new character to avoid this awkward switcheroo.

But who am I to complain? I made it through another JC thriller, betting on The Hound of Death. And if it didn’t exactly win the long shot, it also didn’t stumble spectacularly from the moment it left the starting gate. All in all, not bad for a day at the James Corbett races.

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Book Review: THE MERRIVALE MYSTERY (1929) by James Corbett

9/8/2019

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British author James Corbett, I have learned, was a moderately popular crime fiction and thriller writer in his time, and his books were a staple of subscription library lists in the 1930s and '40s. It also appears that his début title, 1929's breathless and remarkable The Merrivale Mystery, is a fair example of the quality of work he would produce over the next two decades. And that quality is striking indeed, a mix of overheated prose, cardboard characters, and an ineptitude of plotting that will leave the discerning reader delighted, bemused, or in agony. Or possibly a combination of the three.

Full disclosure: I knew what I was getting into with this author. Corbett's reputation and infamy precede him, as Bill Pronzini singles out The Merrivale Mystery as an "alternative" crime classic in his 1987 study of bad genre writing, Son of Gun in Cheek. Even better, the late Bill Deeck has given the world The Complete Deeck on Corbett (2003), where he amusingly analyzes a number of Corbett's titles. The site Mystery*file has a couple wry reviews from Deeck on this singular author, including a very funny look at a very peculiar supernatural thriller called The Vampire of the Skies.

As I have always had an affinity for the earnest but incompetent genre story, likely in part from an adolescence spent absorbing the wonderfully terrible movies featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, I wanted to try James Corbett. I was not disappointed, which is to say that I was thoroughly expecting disappointment in the conventional sense. But what makes this author's work so notably bad? I can't state it any more succinctly and accurately as Mr. Deeck does here, so I offer this quote:

There are certain types of readers to whom Corbett will not appeal. He should be avoided by those who like fine writing; by those who appreciate good description; by those who enjoy characterization and who think it helpful to be able to tell the characters apart; by those who do not appreciate non sequiturs or the almost-right word; by those who think real clues are essential in a mystery; by those who want detection and fair play; and by those who expect a writer to remember what he has written just a page before.
Deeck covers all the bases when it comes to Corbett's shortcomings, and in The Merrivale Mystery these failures are on abundant display. If it were merely lackluster prose or poor plotting, the work could be dismissed and forgotten about. But it takes a special kind of zeal for an aspiring artiste to deliver something that isn't just poor but spectacularly, gloriously unsuccessful; think Ed Wood or the woman who tried to restore a faded Renaissance painting by giving its saint a smiley face. With Corbett, one gets the impression that he's the perfect inexperienced amateur, someone who recognizes the general elements of mystery fiction that create excitement – sensational murders, a brilliant detective, belligerent suspects – but hasn't really thought about how it's all going to work. Accusing Corbett of a lack of talent is too easy; when it comes to mangling plot, characterization, and the English language, he is positively inspired.

Here we have brilliant detective Victor Serge, brought in to investigate the murder of Sir Philip Merrivale of Merrivale Hall. The reader is reminded repeatedly that Serge is "famous", "brilliant", and "an agent of Justice", and perhaps we should be reminded of this, since the great man doesn't really do anything to prove his reputation. Certainly he will solve the mystery (after two more murders occur in exactly the same fashion, with a family member alone in the library killed by a revolver shot to the head through an open terrace door), but his methods of deduction are head-scratchingly incomplete. As Bill Deeck writes, it's tempting to just quote the entire Corbett book and be done with it, but here is one passage that shows the unintentionally comical prose which courses through the entire novel. The author has provided his detective with a sort-of Watson, a credulous and rather ineffective novelist (!) named Ralph Moreton:

Moreton, fascinated by the scene, made no effort to speak, but his brain surged with a thousand ideas. He still watched every movement, saw Serge's wonderful instruments pass over the body, the magnetic lens and gleaming microscope, the powerful hand-torch and measuring tape. During the inspection, Moreton knew he was watching a genius. He saw it in the systematic method of the examination, in every movement of those limbs, in every flash from Serge's eye.
Corbett has a penchant for exclamation points, both in dialogue and in prose, and I found myself wondering how characters might deliver a punctuated statement that otherwise would have warranted a humble period. Apparently, he is also a writer not to turn down a question mark; here we find this interrogative run in a chapter titled, "Bancroft Blunders!" [sic]
"The words were pregnant with meaning, and Serge noted them carefully. What was the pact between these two? Why did they comprehend each other so thoroughly? Were they in league? Was Sybil the helpless agent of this evil genius? Was this helpless, spine-stricken invalid a devil incarnate? Were all these horrible things emanating from his brain?"
PictureVampire of the Skies (1932)
The characters are certainly poorly drawn and alternately melodramatic and wooden, but the sparkling jewel of ineptness is surely the plotting and narrative structure that the enthusiastic Corbett offers up. Apparently, amateur detective Serge has complete run of the murder scene, and the police let him take over the library so he can literally question the suspects while standing over Sir Philip's uncovered body.  (By the way, based on the timeline of when the body was found, the dead man still had not been removed after 12 hours of police investigation…) I was struck early on by the fact that three successive chapters have exactly the same arc: a suspect arrives, doesn't really answer Serge's questions, doesn't acknowledge the dead body on the floor, warns that Serge will never discover the baffling mystery of Merrivale Hall, and then accuses another family member of the crime. Serge starts the next chapter with this new suspect, and the cycle repeats itself.

SPOILER, IF YOU CARE: There's later-chapter talk of a ".449 bullet" that never amounts to anything, and when a gun is found there's no interest in fingerprints: "He held it in one hand." Finally, there's the slap-in-the-face reveal of the murderer, who turns out to be a character who has not been introduced before! The amazing thing about this bit of decidedly unfair play is that the details could have easily been set up and clued so the killer's identity wouldn't feel like a completely arbitrary surprise, although maybe that was what Corbett wanted to do.

(End of Spoiler.) So, if you pick up a James Corbett mystery, this is what you're in for. Me? I find it amusing, in moderation. And you have to admire a neophyte mystery writer who lets his detective dismiss three carousing half-brothers as suspects (more through caprice than any deductive logic) by stating, "They are eliminated from the mystery zone."

I must quote the genius Victor Serge one more time as he evokes the brooding mood of Merrivale Hall as only he (and his creator James Corbett) can do:

"I advanced another step, but it led to a wilderness of suspicion, intrigue, and hate. It is a horrible undergrowth of hate, Bancroft, and the hate emanates from the walls itself!"
I laughed three times while typing those two sentences, and that's pretty darn impressive. Here's the coda: As far as I know, after The Merrivale Mystery, detective Victor Serge never appeared in print again. James Corbett would go on to publish 42 more novels.
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