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Book Review: FURIOUS OLD WOMEN (1960) by Leo Bruce

11/30/2024

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Furious Old Women. What a wonderful crime story title, both evocative and a great antonymic turn on the phrase “angry young men”. Indeed, an infuriated 71-year-old named Mrs. Bobbin accuses an unknown group of male hooligans of waylaying, robbing, and clubbing her sister Millicent to death on her way to church. But as schoolmaster and amateur detective Carolus Deene listens to the tale, he concludes that the killer’s gender, age, and motivational outlook might not be so obvious. He takes the case with reservations, and starts not by harrying the town’s juvenile delinquents but by investigating the assorted characters who had appeared in the wealthy victim’s life.

Although I had hoped this mid-career mystery from Leo Bruce would start off with an energetic flourish, the first chapter – consisting almost exclusively of dialogue between detective and client – is one of those where the author chooses to introduce the entire cast to come over a few preliminary pages. (I counted eleven future suspects namechecked and described, superficially and in turn, by Mrs. Bobbin in Chapter One.) The effect of this type of everyone-all-at-once opening frustrates me because there is no room for the reader to meet characters initially on their own defining turns. Ideally (and in my opinion), suspects in mystery fiction should be introduced sequentially in settings that let us infer personalities and relationships in a more organic, and less compacted, way.

Far more satisfactory is the author’s handling of the revelations and solution in the book’s final chapter, which is arguably what matters most in this genre. Not only do the clues of timeline and character that Bruce’s detective gathers during his investigation prove to be scrupulously fair play, but Carolus Deene arrives at his conclusion and then decisively walks away from the case. He only reveals his findings to friends at an informal dinner party months later, after no arrest has been made and interest in the tragedies at Gladhurst has abated within the village. Deene’s parting shot to Detective Inspector Champer, a hostile Yard official who treats the amateur sleuth with contempt throughout the book, scores a bullseye with the reader:

[Champer, after learning that Deene accepts the Inspector’s general view of the case:]
“We don’t seem to disagree on a point.”
“I don’t think we do,” said Carolus; then, unable to resist a somewhat petty triumph he added: “There’s only one difference. I know who was the murderer and you don’t. Good-bye, Inspector. We shan’t meet again, on this case, anyway.” 

Like any good murder mystery, as the plot progresses other dangerous and deadly incidents occur, and Deene (and the reader) seeks context for these new events that stems from our initial victim’s fate. One middle-aged villager, once seen as a rival of the dead Millicent Griggs, dies from poisoning, while another is injured after a fall inside the church’s bell-tower. And the author lets his detective end the tale with a clever bit of summary that shows how a simple shift in perspective makes all the evidence align.

Leo Bruce has always enjoyed approaching his mystery stories from a comedic, often satiric perspective. He is most well known for his books featuring the stolid Sergeant Beef, with the most famous being Case for Three Detectives (1936). His output of the Carolus Deene series nearly triples that of the Beef books, however, and those titles featuring the Senior History schoolmaster who is an amateur investigator on the side – or is it the other way round? – may be underrated by many fans of mystery fiction.

Perhaps the humor is not for all tastes: there is a Dickensian trend to use evocative surnames that can promote caricature more than characterization. In this book alone, we find various souls named Mugger, Slipper, Rumble, Stick, Chilling, Slatt, and Waygooze, whose personalities are all given a comically broad varnish. Then there is Flo, a denizen of the pub who is always up for a laugh – anyone who discusses her to Carolus invariably adds, “But Flo doesn’t mind.” And apparently she doesn’t, as the boastful poacher and philanderer Mugger, proud of both vocations, occasionally steps out with Flo:
“This is a handy place,” confided Mugger, “if you’ve got one with you on a wet night. No one’s going to disturb you here. They keep away from churchyards after dark. I remember…”
“Come along,” said Carolus.

And speaking of churches in their more traditional, respectable role: in Furious Old Women, Leo Bruce amusingly pits a Catholic-influenced “High Church” mentality against a Protestant-practical “Low” one as Grazia Vaillant and Millicent Griggs each battle to bend the parish church to their own desired image. Vicar Waddell explains how he kept the more ornate additions away while appeasing both ladies:
“Well, I had liturgical colours, you know, and we turned to the East for the Creed. I had to draw the line at holy water but I allowed those of the choir who wished it to make the sign of the cross. I had six candlesticks on the altar but kept a plain cross and felt bound to refuse the large crucifix presented by Miss Vaillant… I agreed rather reluctantly to the choir wearing the lace cottas which Miss Vaillant presented after their surplices were worn out but I would not go so far as scarlet cassocks…”
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Personally, I appreciate the playfulness of the writing, although often less is more. Bruce is not immune from overplaying his joke, as with a repetitive gag where Constable Slatt insists that Deene use the term “police officer” as a title of respect, even when the “copper” in question refers to the mineral or “policeman” pops up in a Kipling quotation.

Taken in all, though, Furious Old Women is an enjoyable tale from detective fiction’s Silver Age with an admirably uncomplicated and satisfying fair-play puzzle at its heart. Leo Bruce’s witty mysteries, and perhaps the Carolus Deene books in particular, deserve to be rediscovered.

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Book Review: CASE WITHOUT A CORPSE (1937) by Leo Bruce

3/31/2017

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Picture1937 U.K. Cover
My second title to celebrate the year 1937 with Past Offences is also Leo Bruce’s second title to feature his amiable people’s policeman, Sergeant Beef. As provincial and solid as his name, Beef likes nothing more than a good game of competitive darts, preferably with a glass of beer standing nearby.

The previous year’s Case for Three Detectives is a minor classic of the satiric mystery genre, pitting the unassuming (and, by contrast, coarse) Beef against three caricatures of Brilliant Literary Sleuths, only to show them all up by the end. Case without a Corpse treads some of the same ground, but with somewhat diminishing returns.


The story’s clever premise proves to be its best feature: one blustery evening during a game of darts, a young man named Rogers enters the pub, gets the sergeant’s attention by stating, “I’ve come to give myself up. I’ve committed a murder,” and promptly dies after drinking from a bottle containing cyanide of potassium. This leaves Beef in a bit of a predicament. An examination shows fresh blood on Rogers’s sleeve, so the man appeared to have committed (or thought he had committed) a crime. But who is the victim, actual or intended? The answer proves oddly elusive.

There are some candidates, however. Rogers was seen by a witness with a young woman named Stella Smythe on the back of his motorcycle. Rogers had purchased a curious length of clothesline rope prior to the ride, and now the woman cannot be traced. A questionable acquaintance, Fairfax, has also disappeared, and a strange foreigner, perhaps “half-Indian”, had been spotted in the area, seemingly trailing Rogers on that fateful day. A search of the moors only turns up a scrap of burnt paper in the dead man’s handwriting, and the small-town sergeant reluctantly looks to the metropolitan police and the efficient figure of Scotland Yard’s Detective-Inspector Stute for help.

Leo Bruce – the pen name of Rupert Croft-Cooke – clearly enjoys exploring the comical possibilities of mystery fiction, almost equally in plot, character, and prose. Case without a Corpse has its healthy quota of lively, folksy villagers, even with Sergeant Beef excepted. Take this conversation between Stute and Mrs. Walker, the too-talkative owner of Rose Cottage where Stella Smythe had been staying:

“In the meantime, you had heard nothing of what had passed between them?”

“Certainly not. I never listen to other people’s conversation, besides the wall between the tea-room and the kitchen is too thick to hear anything and whenever I went into the room they shut up like deckchairs and waited till I’d shut the door before they went on with what they were saying.”

The story is narrated by an earnest (and often amused) mystery writer named Townsend, who is quite aware of his Watson status. Even more, Bruce folds in a few references to his puzzle-crafting colleagues and the genre itself, as with this exchange between Townsend and the urbane Detective-Inspector:
“Thank you so much,” I said, “for letting me come round with you to-day.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” [Stute] returned with something approaching a smile. “We’re used to that, you know. A crime wouldn’t be a crime nowadays without half a dozen of you literary people hanging about after it. Why only the other day… But perhaps I’d better not tell you about her. She’d put me in her new book. Good night.”

Intriguing to me in a way that perhaps the author had not intended was the contrast between the two detectives here. Stute – I would wager his middle initial is “A” – is presented in a surprisingly sympathetic light, considering that he exists to arrive at an incorrect solution before the stage is cleared for Beef to provide the proper one. Yet Detective-Inspector Stute is admirably competent, and manages to make all of the right steps regarding the gathering of evidence and the interrogation of suspects. While not exactly humble, he is also not conceited or a blindly bound apostle of his modern detection methods. It would be easy to cast him as the fatuous urban rival, contemptuous of Beef and his small-town ways, but Leo Bruce refrains from this, and the book is stronger for the choice.

Even with these strengths of tone and character, also present are weaknesses in plotting that might frustrate a constant reader of classic mysteries. GAD scholar Nicholas Fuller notes that Corpse has “one of those plots which hinge on the victim’s stupidity,” and indeed this is a point that feels particularly unsatisfying, sorely straining (if not entirely breaking) one’s suspension of disbelief.
Picture1937 U.S. Cover
The final actions of the hapless Rogers are quite incredible and there is a quaintly naïve subplot involving “drugs smuggling” that fails to convince. When you add in the fact that Beef’s damning evidence is a witness who just happened to overhear a criminal conversation (which is unknown to the reader until the dénouement), the tale feels a bit too wobbly for its own good.

Still, Leo Bruce’s comic touches make this a breezy read, and a curious one at that, with the failed detective pleasantly likeable and the successful sleuth not as well done as his name might imply.



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