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Book Review: THE MORNING AFTER DEATH (1966) by Nicholas Blake

11/29/2020

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The final mystery to feature Nigel Strangeways, 1966's The Morning After Death is the very definition of a literary mixed bag, and in the final analysis there is more disappointment than delight. I will start with the point that we have a lackluster mystery presented against an engaging setting: Nigel is visiting Cabot University, a fictional New England ivy league school, and makes the acquaintance of the academic Ahlberg brothers. Mark, a professor of English, has a reputation for puckish practical jokes while Chester, teaching Business, is both pragmatic and dull. But it is their step-brother Josiah whose body is found stuffed into a locker, and it does not appear that much love is lost among the group of people who knew and worked with him. Nigel investigates, and two more murderous attempts are made before the killer is exposed and brought to justice. 

Unlike so many other entries in this entertaining series, The Morning After Death is pinned onto a relatively weak and unsurprising puzzle, and although Nicholas Blake's detective does a fair amount of theorizing, neither the characters nor the mystery itself are particularly memorable. It is not an impossible slog, just one that never rises above mediocrity. Near the story's climax, Strangeways presents his accusation and explanation of events in the form of a letter to the murderer, and the reading and reaction by the guilty party provides a very welcome thrill. Blake seems quite interested in character psychology in his later novels, and while Morning strikes some tone-deaf notes in other places, the intellectual failing of the killer, literally spelled out with cruel precision by Nigel’s superior mind, is quite fascinating.

The Massachusetts college setting is also enjoyable, and although Nigel (and his creator, poet Cecil Day-Lewis) is quite at home among the halls of academe, the trip across the pond is a productive one. In part, this is due to the cultural differences between the English detective and the American academics he interacts with. For example, he must remind himself to check for traffic coming from the left and contrasts his own college days with those of the largely joyless students surrounding him:

Policemen stood talking together at each of the two gates that came within Nigel’s vision. Students, released to their normal tasks, brushed past them, carrying their books in canvas bags. They look so young, thought Nigel: can I ever have been as young as that? There is a firm intention in their walk – they neither saunter nor run, as we used to do, enjoying our brief spell of freedom between school and job: they are already seriously committed to the future.
He also tags along on pilgrimages to Walden Woods and Emily Dickinson's home in Amherst. (Indeed, Blake borrows his book's title from the latter's brief but striking poem "The Bustle in a House.")  In the final pages, Blake even has Nigel attend a Boston football game, with Yale battling Cabot University... standing in, one inevitably assumes, for Harvard.

But back to that mention of misguided psychology: along with The Worm of Death (1961), this title presents relationships between men and women that are often uncomfortable and chauvinistically facile. Easily the most ill-served is the character of Susannah "Sukie" Tate. (Why the reductive nickname? Answer that, and you can guess where my criticism is going...) Sukie, we are told, was once the target of an attempted rape by one drunken male character, and later, after a discussion about Clare, Nigel’s girlfriend in London, she seduces our intrepid detective, who is all too willing to yield to her charms and vulnerabilities.

It's an odd choice for Blake's detective nearing retirement to get physical with another woman with no guilt or remorse; it is his relationship with Clare Massinger that readers have been following and investing in over the past seven books. But equally troubling is the fact that Sukie is really the only female character of substance in The Morning After Death, and she is both stereotyped and sexualized. There are other women academics introduced, but they are rather interchangeable. For Sukie to be used as both vixen and victim to define the men in the story is troubling, even when one remembers the time (the "liberated" '60's) and place (hedonistic America) in which she appears.

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While I don’t want to presume that the detective’s morals and beliefs are completely aligned with the author’s in mouthpiece fashion, I do wonder what the ratio of personal viewpoint and concession to genre expectations might be. That Blake had a consumer readership in mind is rather obvious, so a little sex and vulgarity mixed in to balance (or to make more attractive?) a puzzle’s cerebral aspects is likely intentional. With the same wary caveat of presuming protagonist as author proxy, I end with an early-chapter exchange between Strangeways and a housemaster’s wife on the pitfalls facing both the classic and contemporary mystery writer:

Mrs. Edwardes bent forward and eyed Nigel solemnly. “Considering what I’ve heard of your background,” she said, “tell me, do you read detective fiction?”

“Sometimes,” said Nigel.

“I hope you are sound on it.”

“Sound?” asked Nigel.

“As an art form.”

“It’s not an art form. It’s an entertainment.”

May nodded approvingly. “Excellent. I have no use for those who seek to turn the crime novel into an exercise in morbid psychology. Its chief virtue lies in its consistent flouting of reality: but crime novelists today are trying to write variations on Crime and Punishment without possessing a grain of Dostoevsky’s talent. They’ve lost the courage of their own agreeable fantasies, and want to be accepted as serious writers.” This seemed to annoy her.

[Nigel:] “Still, novels that are all plot – just clever patterns concealing a vacuum – one does get bored with them. I can understand readers getting sick of blood that’s obviously only red ink.”

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Book Review: MURDER IN CROWN PASSAGE (1937) by Miles Burton

11/22/2020

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Before I begin my review of the very enjoyable detective story Murder in Crown Passage, let me take a moment to celebrate and recognize the importance of comforting genre fiction in these turbulent times. Rather than trying to keep up with increasingly depressing news headlines, the Golden Age mystery puzzle may be the ideal tonic to provide a few hours of worry-free reading. This embrace of escapist entertainment has been especially welcome in recent months; I appreciate the invitation to a world that rewards intellect and where our protagonists strive to deliver justice and bring villains to their reckoning. There may be shadowy figures and menacing situations in store for our detective, but the Golden Age mystery is blissfully free of global pandemics or demagogic politicians trying to hold on to power by destroying the tenets of democracy.

It was with particular delight, then, that I travelled with Inspector Arnold to the charmingly between-the-wars rural village of Faston Bishop. A man’s body is found in a passage off the High Street, and a couple points soon become clear: villagers identify him as Walter Middleton, a casual laborer who only arrived recently. He has strange tattoos on each cheek, and he seems to have had far more money at his disposal than his collection of odd jobs should have allowed. The inspector sends for his friend Desmond Merrion, and soon Arnold builds a case against Jim Crudwell, whose wife operates the store beside Crown Passage. It appears that Mrs. Crudwell may have been more friendly with Middleton than she was first willing to admit, and her husband may have known about it. How else to account for Crudwell’s abandoning of his delivery route shortly before the murder?

Much to the inspector’s frustration, Merrion assesses the situation and believes that the key to the mystery lies in the dead man’s life and actions before arriving at Faston Bishop. Why did he choose this village? How did he come by this reserve of money? And what would explain those tattoos on his face? The amateur theorist begins an investigation of his own, one that takes him to London’s Chinese dock districts, where he is able to find the evidence he needs to return to Faston Bishop and flush out the murderer.  

Note that I have only read around twenty mysteries from the prolific Cecil John Charles Street, but from that sampling I tend to enjoy his Miles Burton titles featuring Arnold and Merrion more than his John Rhode entries featuring Dr. Lancelot Priestley. (The Rhode plots are more prone to involve “scientific investigation” and testing of conditions to simulate the crime; I also find the stolid doctor’s personality both uninviting and rather generic.) In Crown Passage, there is an interesting rivalry between Scotland Yard official and amateur sleuth that was not as pronounced in the other Burton books I have tried. That small clash of personalities is welcome, as Street’s mysteries sometimes leave characterization (of both detective and suspects) a little too bland to stir a reader’s engagement.

Additionally, while the circle of suspects is small, the author allows his cast to have backstories and emotions – including potential or actual jealousy, grief, guilt, and anger – which helps make the plotline more immediate and gives the characters dimension. Although essentially pieces on the chessboard for Arnold and Merrion to study as they try to figure out the endgame, Mr. and Mrs. Crudwell still elicit sympathy as a couple struggling in their relationship and caught up in a crime that will shine a harsh light on their domestic troubles.

Street as Burton paces the clues and the revelations well, and Desmond Merrion’s arrival at the halfway mark is welcome, largely because the reader knows Arnold’s initial theory is earnest but almost surely in error. (For whither the next hundred pages if the policeman solved it out of the gate?) My chief criticism with Murder in Crown Passage, then, comes in the form of Sergeant Dobie, a career copper with an encyclopedic memory of city criminals. He arrives a few chapters before the finish and gives the detectives all the background they need to place the enigmatic victim in the proper light. Without this late-arriving information by this very convenient visitor, the reader would not be able to arrive at the same destination by clues alone; in that respect, Crown Passage falls short of fair play. Dobie is employed rather like Sophocles uses The Messenger, who catches King Oedipus up on some family details right before the climax.

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Enjoyable while not truly remarkable, Murder in Crown Passage is a solid entry in the Miles Burton series, offering up a puzzle at the outset, dogged investigation, accumulating clues, and the solving of the mystery. And for this world-weary reader heading into 2021, often times a Golden Age detective story provides exactly the escapism one desperately needs.

This book was published in the U.S. as The Man with the Tattooed Face (Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1937).


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Book Review: THE SAD VARIETY (1964) by Nicholas Blake

10/25/2020

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Nigel Strangeways is spending the Christmas holiday with his artist partner, Claire Massenger, in a snowbound country house in the West Country. His true purpose, though, is to keep fellow guest Alfred Wragby and his family out of harm’s way. The professor has just completed some valuable formula work for the British government, and foreign countries would welcome the chance to pressure him into spilling his secrets. Indeed, a Russian agent named Petrov is making plans to do just that: when he and his gang kidnap Wragby’s young daughter Lucy, Strangeways must figure out both where the child is hidden and how to rescue her, all while keeping the professor from acting rashly as the hours stretch into days and hope seems to wane.

The Sad Variety is one of Nicholas Blake’s last Strangeways novels; author Cecil Day-Lewis would be appointed England’s Poet Laureate four years after this book’s publication. We are fairly far removed from the Golden Age of Detection, and Variety presents a story that is more of a thriller and potboiler than a classically clued mystery like the ones Strangeways encountered in his early career. This 1964 offering resembles another youth-kidnapped-by-international-villains tale, The Whisper in the Gloom, published a decade prior. In both books, Blake handles the suspense elements well, but neither can escape a feeling of manufactured melodrama, and a story that the reader knows instinctively will still adhere to genre conventions (i.e., the “good guys” of Britain will beat the foreign baddies just in time). It also doesn't help that the professor's valuable mental military knowledge is pure MacGuffin, barely defined and purposely vague, so the reader must just accept that enemy confiscation of it will be Very Bad Indeed.

With the moral and commercial outcome predestined – and perhaps I should be fair and note that nearly all of the 1950s and early ‘60s U.S. and UK-produced spy stories, even the James Bond books, are of the good-beats-evil, happy ending variety – it is interesting (if not especially appealing) to see where Blake allows the rawness of “realism” to creep in. For starters, there’s a sprinkling of profanity on the page, mostly coming from the generically sadistic Russian baddie Petrov. Coming across the occasional four- and five-letter swear words here, their inclusion feels anachronistic, as does the villain’s vulgar threats of rape and body mutilation to keep his enemies/victims in line. Blake also has Petrov blackmail one of his reluctant helpers, a self-loathing male college instructor, with photographs of a homosexual tryst; it’s a detail that would surely have been handled differently, if at all, in the more implicit era of puzzle mysteries 30 years earlier.


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Still, the author’s pacing and plotting are solid enough in The Sad Variety, even if they come nowhere near the heights reached in the best Strangeways books. And to its credit, Freudian psychology and sexual candor are not quite as intrusive as in some of Blake’s last mysteries, as with 1961’s The Worm of Death. I only wish the narrative and events felt more spontaneous and less conventional. There is a character who dies rather pitiably, mainly because he is one of the story’s only True Innocents. This death by freezing gives Variety a brief resonance that, for once, feels aligned with the more gritty “reality” that Blake has chosen to construct. But by the tale’s conclusion, which finishes vis-à-vis good v. bad genre expectations, that sting has been dulled in order to wrap everything in a tidy Christmas bow. Worth a look for Strangeways completists or for those seeking a literary segue from Ian Fleming to John le Carré. 

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Book Review: DEAD MONEY (2021) by Srinath Adiga

10/11/2020

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The most powerful element of Srinath Adiga's debut novel Dead Money isn't merely its ripped-from-the-headlines global timeliness, but that it serves as a parable and cautionary tale for a world that is quite likely past the point to reverse course and avoid destruction. So while the book, which presents three interconnected stories of young men caught up in a global marketing gimmick that creates religious and political shock waves for individuals and nations, is not light-hearted or especially pleasant to experience, it is smartly written and has much to say about the dangers of 21st century capitalist and nationalist trends.

We start with Raymond Li, a power broker who has played fast and loose with a gangster's investments and now faces a loss of millions of his client's Hong Kong dollars. In desperation, Raymond tries a side hustle: for a small sum, a person can convert their worldly cash to AfterLife Dollars, suitable for spending once one has died and moved on. Pitching this mix of religious dogma and ultra-insurance proves to be a success, and Bank of Eternity branches sprout first in China and then take root in other countries, the sales portfolio adjusted to reflect the beliefs of the land. Dead Money's middle section follows Sanjit Sharma, whose diagnosis of a terminal illness leads to an obsession with next-world security and karmic justice. The book concludes with Theo Van Aartsen, an AfterLife Dollars day trader who tries to speak out against the product that, left unchecked, will cause economic and social devastation.

Author Srinath Adiga keeps his grim stories pushing relentlessly forward, and there is a fascination in the details and the larger ideas that makes the dystopic world of each main character truthful and engaging. Indeed, the story's narrative unfolds over the last 18 years, and it is not coincidental that tragic global events of those two decades act as touchstones: the World Trade Center attacks, the stock market collapse, growing civil unrest, and even the rise of Fascism. The author has much to say about these turbulent times and where we are going as humans, and he uses his central premise – those in power cynically taking advantage of those without, fomenting division and false hope along the way – to create a very believable chain of cause and effect.

I also appreciated reading a story whose central characters were genuinely cross-cultural (read: not American), with settings in Hong Kong, Mumbai, and Amsterdam. Here, too, Adiga crafts his specifics to make the neighborhoods and supporting players feel truthful. The challenge is that so many of the characters are not likeable by design, which makes for a sometimes alienating effect. But this is a necessity based on the cautionary parable being told; people are not trustworthy and systems (and sometimes, it seems, life itself) are built to penalize the innocent and enrich the guilty. The lesson may be unpalatable, but that doesn't make it less true or less important to face.

Note that there is a fine streak of dark humor running through Dead Money, and even better, the reader is shown pockets of humanity to contrast against the cynicism and avarice that fuels so many of the characters within these pages. It's enough to make us want to stand with Theo and reject the most damaging and corrupt ideologies by those in financial and political power. But, as Theo suspects, it seems that these systems are increasingly impossible to fight once they are established.

I received an advance copy of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Dead Money, from Central Avenue Publishing, will be available in the United States in January 2021.

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