G.D.H. and M. Cole | Ellen Wilkinson | Arthur Durham Divine | Father Ronald A. Knox | Thomas Kindon | Sir Basil Thomson | H.M. Richardson | Ernest Robertson Punshon | Christopher Bush | Josephine Tey | Cyril Hare | Henry Wade | Rupert Penny | Clifford Witting | George Goodchild | Edmund Crispin | Belton Cobb | Richard Keverne | Dermot Morrah | Herbert Jenkins | Geoffrey Household | Eric Ambler | Arthur Williams | Vincent Cornier | Arlton Eadie | Georges Simenon | Seicho Matsumoto | Kyotaro Nishimura | Shizuko Natsuki | Norizuki Rintarô
A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page
The Brooklyn Murders (1923)
Superintendent Wilson's Holiday (collected 1928)
"The Motive" (1937)
McLean Investigates (collected 1930) (Chapters 2, 8, 11, 14, 15)
The Mummy Case (1933) (Chapters 1 - 7)
The Case of the Good Employer (1966)
Tenant for Death (1937) (Chapters 1 - 10, 14 - 17, 23, 24)
Death Is No Sportsman (1938)
An English Murder (1951) (Chapters 1 - 13, 18)
Death Among Friends / The Best Detective Stories of Cyril Hare
Beware of the Trains (collected 1953)
Fen Country
"Keep Walking" (1968)
Suna no utsuwa (Inspector Imanishi Investigates) (1961) (Chapters 1-9)
Koe (The Voice)
"Divine Punishment" (translated 1991)
This article discusses various British writers in the realist school, and some non-English language writers influenced by the British Realists, such as Simenon and Matsumoto. For an article on the realist school as a whole, click here. Certain writers listed above are discussed in other articles: Arthur Upfield in the section on Tribal Detective Fiction.
One of the Coles' strengths was their sharp characterization; despite a somewhat dry writing style most of the characters in their stories "come through". Superintendent Wilson seems much more vivid than Crofts' Inspector French, for example. So do the various victims, killers and suspects. Wilson is not a plodder, like French too often seems like. Wilson has very intense curiosity, combined with the professional skills that help him to analyze and investigate problems. His character is convincing as a "thinker".
There is usually a note of satire in the Coles' characterizations; it is quite sharp, but it is only one element of a realistic portrait, and restricted to specific aspects of the characters' personalities and behavior. The Coles' satire can be profitably compared to that of their contemporary and fellow Croftsian Henry Wade. The different attitudes of the Coles and Wade can be summarized as cynicism (The Coles) and despair (Wade). The Coles believe that there is a lot of corruption in England, and that many people are practicing it. All of the Coles' characters have free will, and they choose to engage in bad behavior or not, according to their moral fiber. In the Coles' villains one or more aspects of a character has gone rotten, made wrong choices, and is now engaging in corrupt activities. The same person could easily have chosen a more honest route. The Coles are eager to expose these corrupt activities, satirize them in detail, and hope that society will do something about them.
The Coles' writing never turns into the all encompassing picture of moral and practical failure found in Wade's work. Nor do the Coles' characters represent such absolute social types as do Wade's. In Wade's world, people, especially men, are falling to pieces after World War I. Their immense failure on all levels leads them into crime and other social problems. Crime reflects systematic failure in the relations of society, especially in war, race relations, and the support owed the young by the old. The failure of a Wade character is almost structural, representing their role in a dysfunctional society, rather than personal, as it is in a Coles story.
The Coles' storytelling style has some paradoxes. It often seems plain and unadorned, but it can make for very interesting reading. One reason for this is the amount of sheer mystery in the Coles' tales. The detectives are always investigating some mysterious situation, and the mysteries once solved lead to more mysteries to investigate in turn. There is an effect of continuous unfolding, especially in some of the Superintendent Wilson tales.
"Superintendent Wilson's Holiday" is a tracking of trails of evidence story, in the realist school tradition. It also shares some imagery with an Australian detective story, Randolph Bedford's "The Bardoc Finn", from his omnibus Billy Pagan, Mining Engineer (collected 1911). Both stories build up an elaborate outdoor landscape, complete with map.
The other three stories are reprints from the Coles' earlier collection, Wilson and Some Others (1940). "A Tale of Two Suitcases" is a police procedural, whose best aspect is its political background. The tiny "Glass" is just an anecdote, built around another of the Coles' "sinister machine" ideas. "The Motive" is the weakest tale in the collection. It has some plot similarity to Loel Yeo's "Inquest". In fact one wonders if the apparently pseudonymous Yeo is really the Coles, although what motive two professional writers like the Coles would have to disguise their identity is beyond me. Elements of liberal satire in Yeo's work seem consistent with the Coles' approach. However, Yeo's literary style seems very different from the Coles'.
The Brooklyn Murders is a novel of considerable charm. We watch as both the police and the couple follow up clues, explore timetables, and try to either validate or explode alibis, all features of the Crofts tradition. The novel also has good characterization and storytelling, although like most of the Coles' work, it is fairly slow moving. The Coles' steady methodical pace of plot unfolding, and lack of padding do help sustain interest throughout their narratives, however. So does the fact that the story sticks relentlessly to detection. The Coles seems genuinely interested in mystery and detection, here and in their other works. The tale builds up an mandala like effect, with each bit of alibi together with its witnesses and locations becoming part of the design. The locations in the tale involve the Golden Age enthusiasm for maps and architecture. The initial crimes show the Coles' love of symmetrical plot constructions, which appear again in their Counterpoint Murder (1940). The sheer size of the story, and the feel of being plunged into a complex, highly imagined world, recall Cleveland L. Moffett's Through the Wall (1909).
Wilson's relationship with his wife anticipates that of Crofts' Inspector French, who makes his debut one year later in Inspector French's Greatest Case (1924). So perhaps the influence between the writers was a two way street, with Crofts influencing the Coles, and vice versa.
The end of Death of a Millionaire has Wilson resigning from the police, and The Blatchington Tangle shows him working as a private investigator. This is a decent idea, but one wishes were in books better than these. The portrait of the private investigator's life and work in The Blatchington Tangle is in the low key, small businessman style of PI's that is conventional in British novels, and has little interest or imagination.
Worse, Wilson's resignation is prompted by his protest against the evil influence of what Death of a Millionaire depicts as Evil Jews Corrupting Britain Behind the Scenes, one of the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes of the era. This book is just really trashy.
Wilkinson's novel has a Background: The House of Commons, and government ministries that relate to it, such as the Home Office and Number 10 Downing Street. Wilkinson knew this background from first hand, from sitting in Parliament. Like other authors of the Realist school, she drew her Backgrounds from her own personal experience.
The solution to the murder in the novel also recalls the Coles' techniques. It is perfectly sound technically. However, it is unbelievable that Scotland Yard would not have found the solution long before they do in Wilkinson's story. In fact, without giving away the solution of the story, the Yard's failure to find the missing clue right away seriously misleads the reader, and functions as a failure of fair play. Because of this, no one can consider Wilkinson's book a landmark in the history of impossible crime fiction.
Much better handled is the subplot about the notebook. The notebook business is also better integrated with the political Background in the story, leading to some of Wilkinson's best satirical chapters.
Many of the political attitudes of the Tory M.P. hero seem annoying today. His passivity in terms of doing any political action for anyone seems defeatist. He seems to believe, that since the glory days of the British Empire are over, that there is no point in doing anything for anybody. All he seems to value is the raw power the Empire once had. He is also merely perplexed by the poor people marching for bread in the story, regarding them as a conundrum. But he regards the fall of Britain's great country houses due to taxes and modern expenses a cultural tragedy. This genuinely upsets him. One can see that we are in a country, that even in the throws of the Depression, that still regards the upper classes as more real and more important than the lower. One wants to shake this guy, and tell him the real cultural tragedy is the way Britain never educated its poor people.
There are three woman characters in the story:
Divine was a South African who lived in England, according to Michael Cox' anthology The Oxford Book of Spy Stories (1996), where this short story is reprinted.
Knox's detective fiction is uneven. The puzzle plots tend to be labored, and nowhere as clever as Carr, Christie and Queen, but with some interesting ideas. Many of his books have long dull passages, but they also have lyrical sections of nature writing, and occasional sparkling social satire. None of the Knox novels I've read is a gem, the kind of book you want to recommend to other people to rush out and read. But the best things in them are worth remembering.
All of these books involve their heroes with popular-among-amateurs British sports: golf in The Viaduct Murder, boating in The Footsteps at the Lock, fishing in Double Cross Purposes. Upper class British of the era were sports crazy, something one can see from the enthusiasts in Knox's novels. Sports were perhaps also seen as a wholesome, healthy activity, a welcome alternative to unhealthy-but-popular activities like drinking or playing cards for money. One suspects too, that sports were regarded as an acceptable, morally sound interest for a British clergyman like Father Knox.
All of Knox's detective novels are narrated in the third person. Knox adheres to 19th Century practice, in making the author's presence "visible". There will be brief asides from the author, discussing story telling approaches or mystery conventions. Knox's comments tend to be witty and verbally adroit, and intended to amuse the reader.
The two young men in the story seem to be "doubles" for each other as well, something that also unlocks a whole world of symbolism for the author.
A personal note: I found reading this book stimulating to my imagination, a very good thing. It is far from perfect, but it seems to suggest vistas and encourage one's flight of fantasy. This is especially true of the opening chapters.
The satirical description of Venron Lethaby (Chapter 1) recalls that of power broker Cecil Worsley in The Body in the Silo (Chapter 3): both men are celebrities, but neither has any significant public accomplishments. Both men are described in satiric terms, with a long list of their behaviors, and how these appear in the press. The literary techniques used to describe the two men are similar. A difference: Cecil Worsley is mainly political, with Knox making points about British politics, whereas Lethaby is a frivolous figure who is mainly apolitical. Paradoxically, Worsley doesn't have any explicit party politics, left, right or center, being a deal-maker, while the Society butterfly Lethaby is a declared Communist, something fashionable among his Chelsea set. After a brief mention (Chapter 1), Lethaby's politics never re-emerge in the novel.
Mystery Plot. After the opening, Knox propounds a very long drawn out story. There are some mild moments of ingenuity in the puzzle plot, which is set forth in Chapters 7-8, and solved at the end (Chapters 18-20). Both of the best ideas in the puzzle, those concerning the map and the body, are somewhat in the tradition of R. Austin Freeman; so is the novel's theme of a search for antiquarian treasure.
Sleuth Miles Bredon does sound detective reasoning, looking at the position of a boat on the shore (Chapter 4). This recalls in overall structure his detection involving the thermometer in The Body in the Silo. Both have him measuring something along a linear axis (distance in Double Cross Purposes, temperature in The Body in the Silo), comparing this to real-world weather conditions in the recent past, then making deductions.
The solutions at the ends of The Body in the Silo and Double Cross Purposes are provided with a series of footnotes. Each footnote links the solution, to a page early in the story, that has a clue to this aspect of the solution. In The Body in the Silo, these tend to be very systematically, hidden clues; but in Double Cross Purposes, some of these are more simply references to where story material was first introduced. Other authors sometimes did similar things with an appendix: C. Daly King has a Clue Finder at the end of Obelists Fly High (1935), and more distantly, Gladys Mitchell includes her sleuth's Notebook at the end of The Saltmarsh Murders (1932).
SPOILERS. The subplot about the chauffeur (stated in Chapter 5, solved in Chapter 18), involves the Realist School approach of the "breakdown of identity".
The small "ferry" made of a single boat (Chapters 18, 20), is an example of "machinery based on pulling large objects with ropes" found in Knox. Other examples include the silo in The Body in the Silo, and the device in "Solved by Inspection". In "Solved by Inspection", such a device is used to construct a first rate puzzle plot. Elsewhere in Knox, these machines add some color to the tales, but contribute more modestly to the mystery and its ingenuity.
More trenchant are an encounter with an unsympathetic British military Intelligence official (Chapter 15), and comments by the locals in a pub (Chapter 16). The right wing official's comments are politically appalling, and suggest the iron hand with which the 1930's upper classes went after Socialist political dissent. Knox indicates the total contempt his sleuth has for this official. Knox earlier made a similar but briefer satire about a Military Intelligence figure in The Viaduct Murder (Chapter 1). This World War I official was not interesting in going after German spies. Instead, he wants to target British labor leaders as subversives. These are the only scenes I can remember in pre-1945 British mystery novels, in which a Government Intelligence agent is not treated with fawning patriotic respect. While Knox neither embraces nor attacks another character's Socialism, scenes like this cannot help express at least some sympathy for such left wingers, or at least concerns over their civil rights.
The working class villagers' comments in the pub are treated with odd ambiguity. The villagers are introduced satirically, and one expects them to make inane remarks that are disconnected from reality - the working class frequently gets portrayed that way in older British crime fiction. Instead, the characters' mainly left wing comments seem oddly accurate. Knox presents these comments without endorsing or condemning them.
Mystery. SPOILERS. The Body in the Silo has an odd construction: one which weakens the novel as a mystery. At the solution, the sleuth reveals that many of the book's events relate to a planned murder attempt that never actually took place. The very existence of this attempt is a surprise to the reader, who was not before aware of it. There are a large number of clues relating to this attempt, but far fewer to the actual killing. Much of the book's elaborate solution (three whole chapters of detail!) relates to this attempt, rather than the actual murder. The Body in the Silo is not the only book to have such a construction: the year before Stuart Palmer's Murder on the Blackboard (1932) also stressed a similarly unsuspected murder attempt in its puzzle.
Unfortunately, Knox's strategy seems "unfair": the reader tries to fit the book's events to the crime that took place, while they really relate to the unknown attempted murder. The Body in the Silo would be a more satisfying mystery, had the attempted crime succeeded, and Knox had not included the book's current killing. Then the focus of the book's clues and the main murder mystery would have been aligned. As it is, the potentially impressive dovetailing of numerous clues at the solution, is not linked to anything that the book has presented as a mystery.
Other aspects of the mystery puzzle present problems. The murder method using a silo is bizarre, and the reader expects some explanation of the why the silo was used at the end. However, the only reason that the killer uses the silo turns out to be a dubious, briefly explained psychological quirk. It would be better if there were some ingenious plot reason for the silo's use - but there isn't.
Another problem (and BIG SPOILER): Knox does not explain a technological fact till the solution, about the trunk of a car. Since 1933, car design has changed, and very few contemporary readers will know this fact - I didn't. This technological change is not all Knox's fault, and it only partly harms what is a clever murder method. The clues to the method, about how the victim was dressed, are clever.
The puzzle has interesting elements about the killer being able to control and manipulate the "elopement game", bending it to the murder plot. The killer also has control over the organization of the house party as a whole. There is some good detective reasoning about this early on (Chapter 8), a section that also discusses the issue of "accident, suicide or murder" in inventive ways. Sleuth Bredon suggests the lines between accident and murder are not as clear cut as one might think, in some ingenious comments.
His late Sherlock Holmes pastiche, "The Adventure of the First Class Carriage" (1947) is charming, but less personal in its plotting than the other two tales. It shows Knox's faithfulness to the tradition of "the breakdown of identity" right into the late 1940's. It also contains some of Knox's evocative descriptive writing.
Murder in the Moor has not one but two Backgrounds:
There is a good deal of rollicking humor and wit in the novel. The use of such unforced humor reminds one of Agatha Christie. So does the gently satirical, good natured evocation of various British types among the suspects. It fact, Kindon's characters in the early chapters are in general so likable that one hesitates to call them "suspects". They seem more like nice people who just happened to be around when the murder occurred.
One of the absurd characters Kindon's hero meets, at the start of Chapter 6, reminds us that X-File type believers in the paranormal are not just a phenomenon of the 1990's, but were present waiting to be satirized in the 1920's as well. Here this true believer is fascinated by the ruins of ancient British stone circles, a subject Agatha Christie handled in a rather similar fashion in "The Idol House of Astarte" (1928) the previous year (in The Tuesday Club Murders). Christie was also Devonshire born and raised, not far from the setting of Kindon's novel, and such remnants of ancient British paganism were probably a prominent subject of inquiry among local residents.
Thomson's tale reminds one of Anna Katherine Green's "Room No. 3" (1909), which takes place in a country inn in Ohio. Here the mother is found dead outside the hotel; but just as in the Thomson and Carr tales, everyone in the hotel claims not to have seen her. Green's version, probably the earliest of the three, shows an abundant, overflowing storytelling imagination, and is one of her best thrillers.
This story ultimately anticipated a whole lot of other writers as well. Evelyn Piper's Bunny Lake is Missing (1957) explores a similar situation, for example. I haven't read this book, but I have seen Otto Preminger's great film version: certainly the finest achievement in Preminger's distinguished career. Preminger is not interested in ingenious solutions, but has an emphasis instead on the social and moral implications of the plot. In the film, when the young woman reports that her daughter is missing, no physical evidence remains that the daughter ever really existed. Only the mother's love for the child has any survival into the present. The cold hearted police inspector doubts the child is real, and considers her a figment of her mother's imagination. He completely discounts the importance of the mother's feelings. This allows Preminger to explore his central personal theme of the privacy of subjectivity, the idea that people fail to penetrate to other's personal views (see Andrew Sarris' article in The American Cinema for a broader discussion of this theme in Preminger's movies). The mother's personal feelings fight a tremendous duel in the film with the impersonality of Society, in the form of the police. We see two worlds in conflict: an impersonal one, where society dictates what roles people are to play, and a personal one, where feelings of love are all-important.
On a more mundane level, Green's tale, and Thomson's after it, is the first I know of to contain a common suspense situation: people see something in a room, rush out and bring back the police, but when they return the room has been entirely redecorated, with new furniture, wallpaper, etc. This plot has been used a million times on TV, and is especially popular on spy shows. It is quite photogenic, and very effective in the film medium. However, there was already a long tradition of British thrillers and American dime novels when Green and Thomson's tales were published, with Edgar Wallace, J.S. Fletcher, Buchan, etc., and it is possible there are earlier appearances of this idea as well. (I also like that Green's story is one of the few classic detective works to mention my home town of Lansing, Michigan.)
Thomson's story is also an early burlesque of detective fiction. Mr. Pepper's dogmatic detectival pronouncements, half-wrong and half-right, and their collision with the ultimate realities of the case, reminded me more that a little bit of Jack Ritchie's 1970's Henry Turnbuckle stories. The comic tone nearly exactly matches that of Ritchie. I wonder if there are other good natured spoofs of detective stories in early Golden Age fiction. Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime were collected in book form in 1929; reportedly they appeared in magazines in 1928.
Thomson was a real life member of Scotland Yard, and most of his books are now considered to be early police procedural works. Like Freeman Wills Crofts, another early author of police fiction, he enjoyed writing about France. Here Britishers traipse over to Paris to investigate a crime, just like in Crofts' The Cask (1920).
The title character blows smoke rings - he is not a jeweler. The story is fairly well crafted, and contains some mildly surprising twists and turns. However, it seems to lack brilliance.
Also, it assumes that crooks are almost superhumanly gifted at impersonation and disguise, being able to fool a man's valet of many years. This skill at impersonation seems to be common in English detective stories of the 1920's, and is a convention one just has to accept.
This story, like the first chapter of Philip MacDonald's Murder Gone Mad (1931), offers a vivid portrait of England's commuter train system of the era.
Owen is an Oxford educated young man who has been forced to take up police work by the Depression. He seems like a cross between the Scotland Yard heroes loved by the Crofts school, and the sort of gentlemanly figures found in writers like Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh. Edgar Wallace also included a young policeman with an upper crust background in Sergeant Sir Peter (1929 - 1930). Unlike the unglamorous Sgt. Bell, Owen is handsome, well educated and socially sophisticated. He is much more of what Englishmen of the time would consider a romantic lead. He also seems younger, and much less experienced as a detective than the highly intelligent Sgt. Bell.
Owen has a superior, too: Superintendent Mitchell. Unlike Bell's obnoxious Chief Inspector Carter, who is always grabbing credit for his work, Mitchell is a decent person, although a bit intimidating at times. Mitchell is also openly skeptical of the police system, more than Owen is, and often gets off humorous one-liners containing Punshon's satirical thrusts.
Some of his plot twists are surrealistic. There is a pleasant sense that genuinely odd, unexpected things are coming out of nowhere. The connections that keep getting established between different sections of the plot, and remote characters in the book, are also fun reading. There is a rich history of surrealism in detective fiction, one that that cuts across all schools of mystery literature.
Realist School Traditions. Punshon's book has some of the earmarks of the Crofts school. Its detectives are Scotland Yard policemen; they are not eccentric and use plenty of leg work and investigative persistence. The admirably complex plot, made up of a combined, interlocking series of crimes, resembles somewhat the jigsaw construction of Crofts. There is some impersonation in the story, and some concerns over a character's dubious identity - this latter material involving Mr. Codrington is among the book's best. Mild attention is paid throughout to alibis and to alibi busting. A villainous fence in the tale reminds one a little bit of such characters in Crofts, although we never get an elaborate Croftsian criminal Scheme.
The early scenes in the book involving a family crypt near a country house mansion recall R. Austin Freeman, and such works as Dr. Thorndyke's Discovery (1932). These scenes have one of Freeman's common plot motivations: the disposal of the body. A later setting in an isolated woods near the house also recalls Freeman and his fondness for country paths. A printer character recalls Freeman's many craftsman, and there is also a landscape painter - another Freeman favorite. There is also a secret code in the story - Punshon manages to throw in everything but the kitchen sink.
Background and Social Satire. There is a Background of sorts - many of the characters are involved in a stock transaction involving the Crude Metals Corporation, and we get an inside view of some of the financial and business practices of the era. While the characters have their foibles, and are often engaged in fairly shady transactions, no one is especially eccentric in the often surrealist intuitionist tradition. This sort of detailed look at British business is a Crofts specialty.
We also get a satiric inside look at life in Scotland Yard in the 1930's, which Punshon depicts as involving endless jockeying for position among mediocrities, while lower downs do all the hard work. This satiric skepticism is very different from the idealizing of the police we get in Crofts. Indeed, Punshon's bubbling comic tone and sustained comedy of manners resemble such intuitionist writers as Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh more that it does Crofts and his school. Both the lower downs at the Yard, and the lower and lower middle class characters among the suspects, are seen as engaging in all sorts of sneaky survival strategies to help them cope with an intransigently hostile British society and its upper crust rulers. Punshon shows a lot of sneaking sympathy for such characters. As in Crofts, the viewpoint is closer to the middle class and tradesman than it is to the aristocracy. There is a strong sense of dissatisfaction in Punshon's work, a sense that Britain could be a much better place for the small businessman.
The opening of Chapter 2 of Genius in Murder contains a funny but sympathetic look at how modern technology has transformed the life of a "typical" English village, putting its once isolated inhabitants in touch with the world. Such high tech media as radio and movies are emphasized, along with that favorite mode of transportation of the Realist School, motorcycles. Interestingly, Punshon mentions that many of the radio sets in the village are hand made.
Police Procedure. A limiting feature in Punshon's work, and oddly enough, in Crofts' too: the amount of actual detective work done seems limited to the personal efforts of one policeman. In Van Dine school writers, there are whole teams of highly effective police, who vacuum up huge quantities of information about the suspects. They can also call upon police in other regions to carry out investigations. By contrast, here Sergeant Bell's own shoe leather is used to find anything out. His police superiors are so busy playing politics and jockeying for position that they never have time for any real detective work. So Bell is something of a one man band. The same often seem to be true of Crofts' Inspector French. Although the police are much better human beings in Crofts' world, Inspector French too is good at politics, and knowing how to get along with his colleagues.
Realist School Traditions. The first half of the novel features Owen's sleuthing at a country house. It is a comedy of manners in the tradition of Agatha Christie. These sections have plenty of charm. While Owen is a policeman, he is undercover here, and essentially operates in the same manner as the amateur sleuths beloved by Golden Age intuitionist writers. Numerous mysteries pile up; in the second half of the work, these are eventually explained as being the result of various Croftsian Schemes. This second half of the work is darker in tone. It is much closer to the traditions of the Crofts school. The seaside setting of the book, its detailed landscape topography complete with map, its occasional interest in alibis, radios and clocks, and the motorcycle ridden by hero Owen, also seem like Croftsian features.
Also involving Realist School traditions: the book contains a complete crossword puzzle, one in which clues to the mystery are concealed. It seems directly in the tradition of Dorothy L. Sayers' "The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager's Will" (1925). Even the sort of definitions used in the crosswords in Sayers' and Punshon's works seem similar. The 1948 British paperback edition of Crossword Mystery contains a brief rave review by Sayers praising Punshon's novels, by the way. This is probably an excerpt from one of Sayers' 1930's newspaper columns.
The subplot about the resort hotel seems directly anticipatory of the cruise ship sections in Crofts' Fatal Venture (1939) (known as Tragedy in the Hollow in the United States). It is hard to believe that Crofts did not read Punshon's story. So the influence between the two men runs both ways.
Background and Social Satire. Crossword Mystery continues some of the social and political points of view found in Genius in Murder. Once again, Punshon knows a lot about business practices of the time. The activities of the two brothers who are retired stockbrokers are at the center of the book's plot, as is a financial speculator who wants to build a large resort hotel. Also in Punshon traditions: concern about lost business opportunities for Britain's lower and middle classes.
Punshon extends his satiric scalpel here to foreign regimes. The book's characters are horrified by the rise of both Communism and Fascism abroad. A late chapter in the work has a brief but savage satire of the then one-year-old Hitler regime in Germany.
Mystery Plot. This minor mystery has complex goings-on, but shows little real imagination or cleverness of situation or solution. It is one of those books with lots of suspects wandering around the crime scene before the murder.
A subplot with some mild ingenuity: the mystery of how the local barmaid is involved with the plot. Punshon comes up with a different sort of connection than I suspected.
The puzzling alibi of the woman secretary also gets a mildly inventive explanation.
Politics. One of the suspects is involved with a radical political movement, that promotes worker ownership of businesses. Punshon is mildly sympathetic, but also a bit non-committal. Owen is unsure, for example, whether the movement is "left, right or centre" (Chapter 5), and the reader never learns either.
The radical movement, Common Wealth, was a real-life left wing political party, then at the height of its influence. After the war ended in 1945, much of its membership would abandon it, in favor of the Labour party. The two parties differed, in that Common Wealth advocated worker control and ownership, while Labour favored nationalization and government control of enterprises.
The best political part of Night's Cloak is not the political movement, strictly speaking, but a look at the hard lot of the British working class that caused the suspect to join the movement. This section (Chapter 13) has some emotionally powerful writing. It partly bases arguments in favor of better treatment of the working class, in their fine performance in defending Britain in World War II.
Social Satire. The novel opens with a brief inside look at the local police politics of a country police Inspector and his men, and their relationship with less-than-pleasant local bigwigs (Chapter 1). This look is both comic and realistic. It is in the Punshon tradition of showing likable lower-downs coping with comically sinister bosses playing political games.
Eventually we get a detailed comic look at a sinister scam perpetrated by the local business millionaire on Inspector Bobby Owen himself (Chapter 4, start of Chapter 11). This has elements of the "clever swindler" tradition.
Also fun: the easy chairs the same nasty business executive reserves in his study for visitors, designed to place them at a disadvantage (start of Chapter 3, start of Chapter 4). This shows such chairs were not invented in Wall Street in the 1980's, where they were much commented on in books and magazine articles, but were already in use in 1940's Britain. See Howard Kaplan, "Confessions of a Headhunter", (GQ magazine, 1988). Owen is the target of the deceptive chair, recalling the overwhelming cigar he is lured into smoking by his superior in the comic opening of Crossword Mystery.
The young scientist-inventor is depicted as willing to do anything, perhaps even murder, to get funds to pursue his invention. This is a type and a motive that also appears in Agatha Christie. On a more positive note, the inventor is handsome and classy, and also functions as the book's "young hero", even if he is possibly a murder suspect.
The novel contains an homage to G. K. Chesterton, who was a master of the impossible crime. The Case of the Chinese Gong is an example of how Bush's interest in alibis reaches the borderline of the impossible crime tale. Bush here also shows an interest in stage trickery, just as did his contemporaries, John Dickson Carr and Dorothy L. Sayers.
Despite doing detective work as a hobby, the two men seem serious, even a bit solemn, about the actual work. One might expect a bit of comic sass, given this premise, but it doesn't materialize. They are straightforward workers, and they want their detective agency business to be a commercial and popular success.
Various bad guys seem perturbed when the private detective hero shows up at a seance conducted by the phony medium of the title. He can't figure out why: nothing criminal or even interesting happens at the seance. This reader couldn't see anything significant about the seance either!
This rather poor book unfortunately contains an ethnic stereotype.
The private investigation firm run by Travers often investigates its own customers - Travers is afraid they are lying to the firm, and attempting to either swindle it, or get it involved in illegal business. This gives Bush a justification for such Freeman-like investigation of the lives of the hero's acquaintances. It is not just curiosity, but a urgent attempt to detect if any hidden problems affect the firm. Bush shows a fascination with surveillance devices, used to observe the customers and other suspects in hidden ways. These perhaps reflect the scientific detection tradition of Freeman, although such devices were rarely used by Freeman himself.
There are also features that recall Freeman Wills Crofts. Bush's series detective hero, Ludovic Travers, is a non-hard-boiled private inquiry agent, recalling the equally middle class private investigators that run through Crofts. Travers' detection takes him through a realistically detailed France, just as in Crofts' The Cask (1920). If the book's medical characters and knowledgeability about painting and the art world recall Freeman, the depiction of an English gaming establishment and a French engineering concern echo Crofts, and his skill at depicting small businesses. Travers' own detective firm is given a full small-business treatment, showing both the mechanics of its operation, and its occasional attempts to outwit the official police to collect rewards for recovering property before the police do it. The reward-collecting schemes of Travers' firm, recall a bit the schemes of the bad guys' businesses in Crofts, although Travers' firm always stays within the law. In both Crofts and Bush, there is a sympathy for the money making schemes of middle class, small business tradesmen. Both authors' characters show plenty of get up and go.
Bush shows skill in depicting the different kinds of mental operation of the firm's different detectives. Each has their own "cognitive style". The suspects in the tale and their own mental approaches are also well characterized, and furnish a key clue at one point. These mental styles of detectives and suspects tend to relate to how they carry on their business and professional activities.
As in Crofts, everything that the hero thinks is fully shared with the reader at all moments. Both authors perform detection throughout, with the solution being revealed step by step throughout the story, rather than being saved up for the last chapter finale. Bush's detectives are always comparing what people tell them, with a logical analysis of what reality actually is, looking for discrepancies and hidden patterns. Bush encourages the reader to do the same. Both detectives and reader are constantly analyzing the events in front of them, in the true, admirable detective tradition.
Miss Pym Disposes is full of detail about the women's college, in the Background mode of the Realist school. People who have an interest in such institutions, will perhaps enjoy seeing how life was lived in such athletic schools. The fictitious school in the book is called the Leys Physical Training College. Its purpose is to train women to be schoolteachers of athletics, what are called "gym teachers" in the US, and "games mistresses" in Britain. In real life, Tey graduated from such an institution, and taught physical education herself. Presumably the novel is based in part on first hand experience.
In Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1992), William L. DeAndrea praises Miss Pym Disposes highly, especially for its depiction of the "closed woman's society" of the college. The college, where the teachers and students are all female, is one of the main examples of such an all-woman institution in British Golden Age fiction. Gladys Mitchell wrote another with St. Peter's Finger (1938), a look at a convent whose nuns run a girl's school and orphanage for girls. St. Peter's Finger includes a woman athletics instructor at the school, and Mitchell taught physical education in real life.
As a novel, I would describe Miss Pym Disposes as mainly competent but undistinguished. Its modest virtues of recording a time and place are not enough to awake any deep interest or enjoyment.
SPOILER. Any account of "women without men" is going to raise the issue of Lesbianism. Miss Pym Disposes has a full agenda on this topic. It depicts homosexuality as an evil force, one that harms people and destroys lives. Miss Pym Disposes is an example of the ugly anti-gay hatred that sometimes appears in older mystery novels.
The characters in the books are involved in a series of businesses, and Hare provides inside looks at how these run, in the Crofts tradition of Backgrounds on the world of work. Instead of one business forming the entire Background of the novel, however, as in most of the Crofts school, Hare offers of series of mini-portraits of several different enterprises, at several different class levels of British society. We see the big time financier running an elaborate scam in the City, London's financial district; middle class workers at a housing agency; and a working class newspaper seller. This series of mini-backgrounds is somewhat unusual in the Crofts school. So are the humor and social satire with which Hare conducts his narrative. The financier, and the massive scandal his frauds invoke, recall the victim in E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1913), another pioneering book in the Realist School tradition.
The mystery technique of the novel's puzzle plot also recalls Realist School traditions, with a standard approach of the School used in the book's ingenious finale (not named here to avoid spoilers). The book involves an alibi, of a sort, but one of a different kind than usually seen in mystery novels. On the down side, the book has too many coincidental relations between the characters, that turn out to be just that - coincidences - rather than being logically explained as part of the mystery plot.
There are also R. Austin Freeman-like aspects of the book. The plot centers around a mysterious personage, about whose life other people only get fragmentary glimpses. Such dimly observed events at the center of a mystery occur in many late Freeman novels. As in Freeman, the person comes out of nowhere, and even the details of him renting his house or opening a bank account are only glimpsed partially.
Hare's largely conservative political ideas are full of contradictions. Although this is poor logic, it also makes some interesting reading. Hare shows colonialism and Empire building as admirable, and seems to have no realization that the British Empire was less than ten years from disintegration, at the time of his writing. Hare treats the financial setbacks of upper class characters as tragic, but snobbishly views the hard working efforts of working class characters to better themselves as mere uppitiness (the book's least pleasant aspect). Conversely, there are a lot of signs that British society is full of dissatisfaction at all levels, from upper-middle class people who want to emigrate, to lower class radicals. The "good breeding" of the upper classes is always being compared favorably to the ill breeding of the lower here. Apparently, any sort of style or gracefulness was a monopoly of the rich in 1937 Britain. No wonder the British people later so enthusiastically embraced the Mods, the Rockers, the Teddy Boys and the Swinging Sixties, all movements that allowed working class Brits to show some style and flair.
Death Is No Sportsman is at its best in its storytelling, which is absorbing throughout, and poorest in its solution, which is not that inventive. In this it resembles his later An English Murder. Both books are fun to read, but neither offers much in the way of puzzle plot ingenuity. Hare mainly follows his characters all over his wonderfully imagined river landscape. He eventually comes up with some mild surprises about their movements, but never actually turns his story into one of those intricate alibi plots beloved by Realist School authors. This is both good and bad: Bad in that Hare never creates much of a puzzle, and perhaps good in the sense that such alibi-time table stories can get awfully wearying! Still, this Inspector Mallett book can be seen as belonging to the Crofts tradition, with a policeman hero, a Background of fishing, a detailed topography and map, a setting on the water, and much information about business.
The characters and social background recall the preceding Tenant for Death: we have corrupt businessmen and their sinister schemes, a young Gentleman who gets involved in some two-bit plotting himself over his lady love, and a well-to-do, sophisticated woman involved in affairs. However, the actual intrigues of all of these people are subtly different than in the first book, making for pleasant variations. The crooked business schemes are especially juicy, in their satirical depictions of moral rot in British business of the time. They form a scathing look at the upper classes.
Hare also expresses some ecological concerns, that seem more relevant today than ever. The obnoxious, upper class murder victim here is obsessed with power and control over others, at all levels. In this he resembles the politicians to come in An English Murder. Hare links his desire for control over money and business, control over nature and the environment, and control over women as sinister actions with a common root cause. In this, Hare anticipates many current social critics.
Hare's story also briefly condemns his lower class villagers for lacking sexual morality. Hare echoes in a mild way Gladys Mitchell's The Saltmarsh Murders (1932), which also depicts a traditional English village whose peasant inhabitants are sexually uninhibited. Both novels feature a village girl who has a baby out of wedlock, both feature the vicar's dominating battle-ax of a wife as a character, a woman who runs the village with an iron hand. However, Hare's attitude towards his village is far more indulgent than Mitchell's ferocious tome. His biggest satire is directed at the village's upper class Chief Constable, a memorably awful expressor of upper class attitudes.
The lawyer, Stephen Smithers, is interestingly characterized. Abrasive, rude, high-handed and egotistical, one first suspects that Hare is setting him up as a villain. However, as the tale progresses, one gradually discovers that he is among the most honest and truthful of the characters, virtues that compensate a bit for his outrageous personality flaws. He and the police are also about the only people who can offer any effective resistance to the book's upper class monsters.
The carefully elaborated Background involves politics and the English class system. It is set forth with a wealth of absorbing detail, and is unusually trenchant for a mystery novel, which often deals with politics in vaguer and less forthright terms than Hare does here. Hare also, like his model Freeman Wills Crofts, and Ngaio Marsh, offers deep opposition to anti-Semitism. Hare has plainly progressed since his early works, and thought much more deeply about political issues. The story has the multiple-class perspective of Tenant for Death. The various portraits of the characters and their lives also have somewhat of the same "series of mini-portraits" structure of that earlier novel. As in Tenant for Death, movement of characters between classes is a focus; so is a portrait of Britain as full of political radicalism.
In the Internet discussion group GAdetection, Tony Medawar revealed that An English Murder was based on Murder at Warbeck Hall, a half hour radio play first broadcast by the BBC on 27 January 1948 as Play No. 2 in the series "Mystery Playhouse presents The Detection Club, a series of plays specially written by its members". The story's politics do seem somewhat more appropriate to the immediate post-war period in Britain, 1947-1948, than to 1951.
Neither An English Murder nor Death Is No Sportsman are at all mainstream like. Their storytelling very purely follows the narrative conventions and structures of traditional Golden Age fiction. In An English Murder, we have all the suspects gathered into an isolated country house; in Death Is No Sportsman, we follow the characters around one of the beautifully executed, map-based country landscapes beloved by Golden Age writers. Yet both books offer so little in the way of puzzle plot that they seem on the margins of what I value so highly in traditional mystery fiction. They seem more like eccentric curiosities than true classics. Both could use some of the plotting ingenuity that marked Hare's first mystery, Tenant for Death.
Hare also wrote a series of six mini-mysteries based on the "Monday's Child" nursery rhyme. All but one are genuine mystery tales, and most are pretty good, showing concision in their telling. They tend to deal with crimes short of murder, a welcome change of pace more authors should try.
Among the non-mystery crime tales that turn on "twists", "Line Out of Order" has one of the more inventive plots. It also offers a portrait of government agents versus political radicalism, to go along with An English Murder.
"A Life for a Life" is not any sort of crime or mystery tale at all. Yet it is a good story. It concentrates on the serious problems of an "ordinary" middle class Englishman, and relates these to political difficulties of history.
In general, I have disliked most of what I've read so far by Henry Wade. But he was a well-known author in his time, and he needs some coverage in a history of mystery fiction. His discussion here should NOT be taken as any sort of recommendation.
I didn't like Wade's The Dying Alderman (1930).
The novel is also steeped in Wade's gloomy attitude towards life, society and people. This attitude might be justified: the British upper classes were probably as immoral and selfish as he makes them out.
The other problem in No Friendly Drop is the minimalistic plotting. Wade does the absolute minimum he can, and still manage to write a formal detective story. SPOILER. The murder puzzle plot seemingly shows that one character had no motive to commit the crime; the main plot twist shows that that character was indeed lured by circumstances into committing the crime. That's it: that's the murder puzzle plot. The twist has some ingenuity. But still, it is a tiny idea on which to base a whole mystery novel.
On a positive note: the way the sleuth finds a new piece of evidence towards the end of the book, that turns his understanding of the case around, is the kind of development that will later occur in Ellery Queen novels. In both No Friendly Drop and Queen, the sleuth and the reader are long since convinced they know all the circumstances of a case, when suddenly a new detail emerges that has escaped massive investigation up till that time.
No Friendly Drop is in the Crofts tradition:
SPOILER. The Duke of York's Steps (1929) is a particularly nasty example of a detective novel of the era with a Jewish murderer.
To be fair to Wade, the short story "The Three Keys" contains what seem to be non-stereotyped Jewish characters.
The strongest feature in the Penny mysteries I've read is the explanation of how the mysteriously-done crimes are committed: the howdunit in Policeman's Holiday, the solution to the locked room in Policeman's Evidence. By contrast, the rest of the mystery plotting in these books is ordinary. As a whole, Penny seems like a fairly minor writer.
Policeman's Holiday is a howdunit: it is not at all clear at first how the killing took place. The best parts of the puzzle plot of Policeman's Holiday deal with howdunit: two later sections (Chapters 7, 17) offer ingenious ideas, on how the crime was committed. The chapters reveal everything about howdunit long before the end of the novel. The clever ideas in Chapter 7 go beyond just how the crime was committed, involving alibis as well. SPOILER: The ideas in Chapter 7 have links to those in John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933). END OF SPOILER.
By contrast, the solution at the novel's end to the mystery as whole, is a mess. More than one person is wandering around, coincidently committing sinister actions. Nothing is ingenious or clever. The killer also implausibly employs an accomplice who could easily betray the killer later.
Policeman's Holiday is more a curiosity than a classic. The best sections (Chapters 1-5, 7, 17) take up 70 pages, a little more than one-third of the book. They have merit, but not enough that you should rush out and read Policeman's Holiday.
The brief look inside the victim's career as a puzzle-monger, and the sample acrostic, form a sort of mini-Background. It is very short compared to the elaborate Backgrounds of other Realist School writers. Penny is also less sympathetic to business than many Croftsians: the victim is a swindler, not an honest businessman.
Chief Inspector Beale seems a bit more gentlemanly and upper class than the middle class Inspector French in Crofts' books. This is not necessarily a good thing. One also gets tired of the upper class characters endlessly complaining about how "common" the victim's second wife is - meaning she lacks upper class mannerisms and attitudes.
The murder and its locked room puzzle finally occur at the start of the Second Part (Chapters 11-12). The solution seems unbelievable, at least to me, and hence unfair (Chapter 24). However, it also shows some imagination. Maybe a variation on this approach would actually work, under somewhat better conditions. It would be a bit more plausible, for example, if the main witness were some dizzy, naive, easily fooled amateur, rather than the experienced Scotland Yard inspector who is actually on the scene in the story. In any case, the locked room puzzle is better than the novel around it.
Policeman's Evidence is less Croftsian than Penny's previous Policeman's Holiday. This is partly due to the construction of the two books. In Policeman's Holiday, the tale opens with the murder, and a Crofts-like police investigation. By contrast, in Policeman's Evidence the crime does not occur till half-way through the novel. The whole first half of the book is taken up by an account of the people staying at a country house, looking for an alleged hidden treasure. This is a variation on the British country house mystery, complete with butler, secretary, chauffeur and house guests. The characters are singularly unpleasant people, and make a miserable experience to read about.
John Dickson Carr's The Three Coffins / The Hollow Man (1935) is explicitly mentioned, invoking that book's Locked Room Lecture. H.C. Bailey's detective Mr. Fortune also gets a reference. Beale also separates genuine detective fiction from "mere thrillers of the Bulldog Drummond type", a widespread distinction in his era (end of Chapter 14).
Policeman's Evidence gets its title, from the second half of the book being narrated by Chief Inspector Beale himself. He is given a logical, precise narrative voice, distinct from the jaunty tone of regular narrator Tony Purdon. The previous year Margery Allingham's "The Case of the Late Pig" (1937) experimented with the detective Albert Campion narrating his own case.
Clifford Witting created his own imaginary town of Lulverton, and surrounding county of Downshire, used as a setting of his tales. This is perhaps near the real life county of Kent, in Southeast England.
Witting incorporates features of Crofts tradition:
In addition to a large cast of middle class characters, Witting also includes a sympathetic and skilled working man, Archibald Hobson. As a technically skilled representative of the working class, Hobson recalls Polton in R. Austin Freeman, although Hobson is a handyman, not a professional technician like Polton. One wonders if Witting is trying to appeal to a broader audience, by featuring a man showing the abilities of the working class.
The mainstream novel-like aspects of Measure for Murder continue with a long, not very good section on the characters' romantic problems (Chapters 6-11). These problems are unpleasant and dull. This section does introduce a new character, Franklin Duzest (start of Chapter 8), and resolves some minor mysteries (start of Chapter 9). It also includes observations about Shakespeare's play Measure for Measure (1604), which the Little Theater is rehearsing. This mainly consists of jaunty and often sarcastic comments on the characters in Measure for Measure, and their feelings and motivations. It does not seem deep or interesting, but it does show Witting giving the play close study.
Two sympathetic middle class characters involved with the arts (architect Paul Manhow, literary journalist Matthew Kelso) are left-wing politically, something one doesn't always see in Golden Age British novels. Kelso is described as a "redhot Socialist" (Chapter 15), Manhow's precise politics are unspecified (Chapter 2). By contrast, the book criticizes the Hitler-Stalin pact (end of Chapter 4). A comic note: the intellectual Kelso is partly characterized by his broken-and-mended-with-tape glasses, decades before this became part of the stereotype of the "computer nerd".
Architecture. The opening chapters show the Golden Age interest in architecture. They describe in detail the architectural layout of the theater, including a floor plan (Chapter 3). There is also some description of the boarding house's unusual architecture (Chapter 4), which later plays a mild role in the solution of the mystery (Chapter 21).
The former industrial bakery or "bakehouse" where the theater is located, has a bit of a resemblance to the food factory in Rex Stout's "Bitter End" (1940): both have tunnels going into the buildings, where vehicles can be driven. The resemblance is perhaps just a coincidence: this was a common aspect of industrial architecture. The two staircases in the bakehouse leading to the theater also have a bit of a tunnel-like feel.
Mystery Plot. The mystery solution is not very good. It brings in far-fetched material, that is also not related to most of the previous novel.
The single simple clue to the killer's identity is based on a piece of history that was obscure at the time, and which now will be unknown to most readers. The fact that it involves the history of technology reflects the interest in science of the Realist School.
Better: a subplot about one of the suspects (end of Chapter 18, start of Chapter 19). This idea isn't original, but it did surprise me. This subplot has a bit of an Edgar Wallace feel: Wallace sometimes included similar gambits, as in The Green Archer (1928) (Chapters 3, 6).
Detectives. We only learn a little about Witting's series sleuth Inspector Charlton. He seems bright, cheerful, brisk, persistent, smart, highly competent and good at summarizing data in police reports. He's also bland, smooth and misleadingly affable and "civil", in the Crofts tradition, but rather more intimidating than Crofts' Inspector French. In Measure for Murder (Chapter 11), Charlton is around fifty, big and with a "rather fine face". He is also highly literate and knows a lot about Shakespeare. He believes the key to detective success is interviewing countless witnesses, rather than police lab work (start of Chapter 15) - and indeed much of the second half of Measure for Murder consists of such interviews.
One of his constables is young Peter Bradfield. In later novels, Bradfield becomes the series sleuth in Witting. In Measure for Murder (middle of Chapter 17), we learn that Bradfield is from a good family, son of a London solicitor, but is starting out at the bottom to learn the policeman's trade. He choose not to go to Police College, but began as a beat cop; he's now in plain clothes. In a general way, this recalls other sleuths who combine the "upper middle class young hero" with the "working cop", such as Bobby Owen in E.R. Punshon's novels, and Sgt. Johnny Lamb in Nigel Morland. Like Bobby Owen, Bradfield is noticeably attractive to women, in a refined way.
None of them are earth shaking, though, and this book is far from being "essential reading", let alone some sort of classic. Also, some of the poorer tales in the book - but not those recommended here - include racial or ethnic stereotypes.
Detective Work. The tales have a Scotland Yard policeman as sleuth, and hence fall more-or-less into the Crofts tradition. However, the resemblance to Crofts is not close. McLean does a share of routine sleuthing, like Crofts's Inspector French and other fictional policemen of the era. But there are few clever alibis, breakdowns of identity, ingenious criminal enterprises, or other Croftsian plot feature in McLean Investigates. As in Crofts, we usually follow all of the sleuth's thoughts throughout the tale, rather than being surprised by his deductions at the end.
In some of the better tales, McLean goes undercover in various roles. Often times, he is trying to get close to crooks. His undercover work often takes up just a section of the story, an episode where he learns something and has a brief adventure, rather than lasting the duration of the tale.
We learn nothing about McLean's personal life, and only a little about his skills as a policeman. In #11, we see that he knows French: a fairly common skill in educated Englishmen of the day, France being England's neighbor, and one that shows up in other authors' policemen of the era. He also knows a little Italian. In #8, McLean drives a motorcycle, a form of transport beloved by Realist School British writers of the period.
The Better Stories. The tales have no titles, only chapter numbers. They will be referred to here by these chapter numbers.
#2 is about one of those master jewel thieves. This tale reflects the Rogue tradition. Its thief is suave, very well-dressed in upper class clothes, and passing for a gentleman, in the Rogue manner. The story is also more light-hearted than many of the other tales. The finale has the crook coming up with a mildly ingenious scheme for a robbery.
#8 is a tale about a convict who knows where loot is hidden, and has Inspector McLean going undercover at the prison as a convict, to ferret out the secret. This plot was hugely common in US movies and even comic books. I was startled to see it in a British author, and at this early date. I don't know who was the first to use it. The storytelling is vivid, with just the right amount of location detail. The prison is the most famous in England, and there is an evocation of the Dartmoor moors around it, a location regularly used by British crime writers.
#11 is an "international thriller". It is fun. It also has a plot twist I didn't expect, that can be considered a form of whodunit. Unlike most of the good stories in the collection, this one is not about robbery.
#14 is a robbery, at a wealthy man's home. It has some interesting high tech aspects, in the anti-burglar devices at the house. The story follows these, and McLean's search for the gang of crooks that pulled it off. Like #2, this features a mildly ingenious scheme for a robbery. Edgar Wallace also sometimes included such schemes in his tales, such as "The Stolen Romney" (1919).
#15 is also a robbery, but this time in the household of a middle class businessman. It turns into a domestic drama. It also has elements of whodunit, and is probably the most enjoyable whodunit in the book. It is not a fully fair play puzzle though.
It seems unfortunate that the gimmicky anti-detective story, "Who Killed Baker?" (1950), is probably Crispin's best known work in the short form. Such real detective story gems as "Beware of the Trains" (1949) and "Black for a Funeral" should be much better known. On the average, the earlier stories in Beware of the Trains are better than the later ones in Fen Country. Too many of the latter do not really create a full puzzle plot mystery. They also tend to be shorter and less substantial than the earlier tales.
Mainly, it is one of those psychological mysteries, in which the characters' unpleasant emotions and personalities are analyzed to death. The motive is one of those "psychological ones" of built-up frustration on the killer's part, that would never be an adequate motive in real life.
The main merit of Like a Guilty Thing is in its opening chapter, which centers on a middle-aged nurse, Emma Claypole. It convincingly shows her ever greater panic and despair at growing old, poor and jobless, in a society without any sort of government social safety net. It is a nightmarish and truly frightening piece of writing, and must have described the feelings of millions of working people. Like a Guilty Thing was written at a time when social insurance programs were being developed and debated, such as Social Security in the United States. Agatha Christie would soon follow with a similar portrait of a middle-aged woman's economic crisis in The Labors of Hercules (1939). They followed such mainstream writers as John Steinbeck in Of Mice and Men (1937) and films like Make Way for Tomorrow (1937). All of these works are sobering reminders of what life was like before social safety nets. They remind us of the deep folly of right-wing Libertarians, who are determined to repeal such programs.
This story's plot is fairly clever, but easily guessed.
According to Jack Adrian, Keverne shared a publisher with both the realist Henry Wade, and E.C. Bentley. The title of Keverne's 1934 collection, Artifex Intervenes, anticipates that of Bentley's Trent Intervenes (1938), by four years.
The mummies and Egyptology aspects of the novel show the influence of R. Austin Freeman's The Eye of Osiris (1911). So do some plot twists in the book, and the intellectualism of the characters. The amateur detectives in the tale are two dons. They include an archaeologist, who uses his professional skills to help solve the case; these scenes in Chapter 4 are the most inventive part of the novel. The book is at its most Freeman-like in these scenes, which show scientific skills carefully applied to crime solving.
The solution of the story involves the "breakdown of identity", although not for the purpose of alibi construction. The "breakdown of identity" is a plot approach, found in both Freeman, and many other Realist School writers.
There is no sign whatsoever of any Croftsian influence: no police detectives, no timetables, no alibis.
Another mystery novel set at Oxford appeared the same year as Morrah's book, J.C. Masterman's An Oxford Tragedy (1933). It is nowhere as pleasant, mainly being a gloomy and depressing psychological study, whereas Morrah's novel is a complexly plotted mystery story. Both novels focus on a group of dons, both administrators and professors, with the students having a small supporting role in the background. Both take place at a single, fictitious Oxford college. Both have plots about academic disputes concerning a scholar's life work. It is unclear which book was published first.
Morrah's novel was known to Dorothy L. Sayers, who reviewed it for her newspaper column. Sayers would soon produce her own novel of University life, Gaudy Night (1935). Before any of these writers, the American Croftsian Milton M. Propper published The Student Fraternity Murders (1932).
Jenkins' work has some similarities to R.Austin Freeman's. Malcolm Sage, like Thorndyke, is a private investigator; he is hired by the insurance companies, similar to the arrangement in Thorndyke's books. Sage, like Thorndyke, emphasizes photography in his work, and also like Thorndyke, he is skeptical of fingerprints. Most of the clues he follows up on in his cases fall within the parameters of Freeman's world:
There is no sign of any Croftsian influence in Jenkins' book, such as police detectives or emphasis on routine; this lack of influence is not surprising, given the publication date of just one year after Crofts' debut in The Cask (1920).
As Sage points out, he is sometimes more interested in setting traps for the villain, than in detecting his original crime. This is true in the best of these tales, "The Surrey Cattle-Maiming Mystery" and "The Stolen Admiralty Memorandum". This gives a flavor of the inverted story to these two works. More ingenuity is expended in the net spread to catch the criminal, than on the original crime itself. These traps often involve considerable social comedy.
"Challonner" could be a model for Christie's "Dead Man's Mirror". Both are locked room stories, both have mechanical solutions, both have a similar floor plan and approach. The article on Christie also suggests that the Sage tales influenced the framework of her Partners in Crime (1924).
The whole structure of Rogue Male has a format similar to one of Freeman's inverted detective tales. We see the hero trying to commit a crime, the assassination of Hitler. Then we see the Nazi police try to track him down. The moral point of view is the direct reverse of Freeman's: here the man who attempts the killing is the good guy, and the Nazi secret police who try to track him down are bad guys. But the form is similar to Freeman's. There are differences: in Freeman the point of view shifts from the criminal at the beginning, to the detectives in the second part of the tale, whereas Household keeps the point of view on the hunter throughout.
Rogue Male also has a finale at one of Freeman's favorite locations: a country lane. The hero living outdoors in the countryside seems an echo of Mr. Pottermack, as well as Thomas Kindon's Murder on the Moor (1929). Also Freeman-like is the crafts work in the book's finale, finding a solution through technology to one of his problems.
There is an emphasis on daily life in Household's tales. His heroes, now being stalked by monstrous conspiracies, would give anything to be able to settle down and enjoy their former existence as ordinary people. Their encounters with daily life throughout their adventures have a poignancy. It is as if they are locked out of the Garden of Eden. This too is rather Freeman like. Mr. Pottermack wants nothing more than to be able to cultivate his suburban garden. Taking part in ordinary daily life is his highest dream. But unfortunately he is being hounded by a vicious blackmailer. One also recalls the hero of Freeman's A Silent Witness, who is actually being stalked throughout the book by a nameless conspiracy, who want to kill him for something he innocently witnessed. This too is very Household like.
The subject matter of Ambler's novel is the hero's attempt to research the life of the criminal Dimitrios. Attempts to reconstruct the complex past history of a series of events, such as the life of Dimitrios, also have predecessors within the Croftsians - see Crofts' The Cask (1920) and Sayers' The Nine Tailors (1934). Such jigsaw like putting together of past events is an especial characteristic of Croftsian writers.
The sleuth of the story is a professor of political economy turned author of detective fiction. As a former professor and expert on European politics, he is typical of the scholar sleuths of the Realist school. As a detective story writer, he seems to be the author of British Country House, Golden Age style fiction, which he is always contrasting with the "realistic" crime story he is investigating in the novel. Such distancing of one's own realistic work from the fantasies of the British Country House mystery are not too uncommon among Croftsians. Crofts himself portrayed his work as an attempt to add realism to the genre. Such Croftsian writers as Dorothy L. Sayers and George Simenon attempted to bring further literary values to the detective story, beyond the escapism of their contemporaries.
There is only a little commentary on detective stories. At the start of Chapter 4, Ambler refers to East Lynne (1861) by Mrs. Henry Wood, a further example of the affinity of Realist school writers to the Sensation novelists. Colonel Haki much prefers American and British detective stories to those of the French.
The Mask of Dimitrios eventually turns into a sordid and unpleasant book. Despite its fame, it cannot be recommended.
The Mask of Dimitrios has some plot affinities with Mr. Arkadin (1955), an excellent mystery film directed by Orson Welles. Welles also worked on a version of Ambler's Journey Into Fear (1940).
This is the only known story from this writer; "Arthur Williams" is a pseudonym of a South African writer whose identity has apparently never been published.
The story was adapted as Arthur (1959), a half hour episode of Hitchcock's TV show - please see the article on Alfred Hitchcock for a discussion.
"The Duel of Shadows" (1934) is a very creditable scientific detective story in the Hildreth series. It is also a well-done impossible crime tale. The science is a lot more plausible here than in many Cornier works, and the plot is ingenious. As in many of the Hildreth works, there is much emphasis on crafts work, here wood working, furniture restoring, and bullet manufacture. Both the crafts work, and the antiquarianism here and elsewhere in Cornier, come out of the Freeman tradition. When he reprinted some of Cornier's tales, Ellery Queen pointed out their influence from Freeman. By the way, Ellery Queen wrote that Cornier's name is pronounced in the French manner, cor-nee-ay.
Some of the Hildreth's are much more science fiction stories than they are mysteries. "The Catastrophe in Clay" (1935) is a routine high-tech weapon story in the tradition of H.G. Wells and Richard Marsh' The Beetle. It is hardly a mystery at all. Agatha Christie also wrote stories in this tradition, including the Poirot play Black Coffee (1931) and the Mr. Quin story "The Face of Helen". The best parts of Cornier's tale are the descriptions of a golden body. Cornier had elaborate descriptive skills, and a bizarre imagination.
The first Hildreth story "The Stone Ear" (1933) is another minor tale that is more sf than mystery. It anticipates the glass work in the Coles' novella, "The Toys of Death".
Mystery elements in Cornier's "The Mantle That Laughed" (1935) are present, but very perfunctory; mainly this is another tale centering on technology. The description of the golden "mantle" (or cloak) itself is the high point of this otherwise ordinary tale. It is an elaborately thought through object, worthy of one of the symbolic romances of Hawthorne. Unlike Hawthorne, however, it does not seem to symbolize anything. A basic theme in Cornier's fiction is the union between the natural and the mechanical. Many of his plot ideas involve mechanical objects that behave like living things ("The Mantle That Laughed", "The Stone Ear") or living organisms that develop mechanical features ("The Duel of Shadows", "The Catastrophe in Clay"). The mantle is an especially complex fusion of the natural and mechanical in this regard. One wonders if Cornier had read Hawthorne's "The Artist of the Beautiful", which also deals with the natural and the mechanical.
Cornier continued to produce new Hildreth works into the 1950's, for EQMM. The late Hildreth story "The Monster" (1951) is full of "sick" material, and makes grim, unpleasant reading. It does have a fairly clever mystery plot, however, one than is based on that Realist School approach, the "breakdown of identity". The tale also shows the influence of Seamark's "Query", reprinted in EQMM during the era in which Cornier was writing for that magazine. Both stories deal with the question: under what circumstances can someone commit a murder, and be free from any punishment from the law? Cornier develops a very different answer from Seamark. But his story treatment is similar, with a chorus of baffled legal observers in both tales. A much earlier American work, Charles Felton Pidgin and J. M. Taylor's "The Affair of Lamson's Cook" in The Chronicles of Quincy Adams Sawyer, Detective (collected 1912), deals with similar issues, and provides a third solution to this problem.
Cornier's "O Time, in Your Flight" (1951) shows his faithfulness to the Realist paradigm, 22 years after "The Flying Hat". (It is reportedly a rewrite of a 1935 non-Hildreth story.) It focuses on that Croftsian staple, the alibi, and an alibi based on a clock, just as in some of Dorothy L. Sayers' Montague Egg stories. Cornier also includes some "science" in the tale; his explanations of the origin of chicken pox seem like delirious pseudoscience, not real science. They continue the Camp-like nuttiness of his earlier fiction.
Weird sociological question: why is the British scientific school so interested in freezing? Robert Eustace, Freeman, the Coles, Valentine Williams and Cornier in "The Flying Hat" are all into freezing as the technological marvel of the age. Their interest stretched at least from 1901 to 1937. American scientific detective writers are all into lie detectors, instead.
Some of Cornier's 1930's works were much better. The non-series story, "The Courtyard of the Fly" (1937) is a clever impossible crime tale. It is less science oriented than much of Cornier's work, as well as being shorter than the typical Hildreth tale. "The Courtyard of the Fly" (1937) is in the anthology Murder Impossible (1990), edited by Jack Adrian and Robert Adey. (This anthology is known in Britain as The Art of the Impossible.)
While Simenon's works reflect Crofts' in their detective work, characters, and social background, their plotting technique does not completely follow the standard interests of the British realists. There is little emphasis on alibis, or on the "breakdown of identity" used to create them - although Simenon characters often have more than one identity, often to aid in their criminal activities. Science and engineering play a smaller role in the Simenon stories than in Crofts, although there is the murdered man's interest in mechanical gizmos in M. Gallet décédé. Simenon will later introduce a doctor detective, Jean Dollent, in the book The Little Doctor (collected 1943). Physician detectives are part of the traditions of the realist school. The careful account of Simenon's characters' financial status and activities, also reminds one of such British realist writers as Crofts and, especially, Henry Wade. Simenon's characters are often middle class, just as in the realists. Crofts included a portrait of adultery in The Cask; Simenon has may unhappy couples in his novels. Simenon's non-mystery works in which guilty people are psychologically pursued by their crimes perhaps owe something to the inverted detective stories of which the British realists were so fond. The gloomy, downbeat tone of some of Simenon's work also reflects the tragic tone of much British realist writing.
Many of Maigret's interviews with suspects are essentially psychological portraits of the characters in the book. This technique is very popular in modern mystery fiction, especially private eye tales, and one associates it with Raymond Chandler, and even more with Chandler's follower Ross MacDonald. But here it is in Simenon, in a fully developed form in the first Maigret novel M. Gallet décédé (1931), long before either Chandler or MacDonald. This gives this Simenon book a peculiarly modern flavor. Many of the chapters seem more like the detective fiction of the 1990's than of the 1930's.
The many complex, original criminal schemes in Simenon's tales remind one of the similar criminal operations in Crofts books like The Pit-Prop Syndicate (1922) and The Box Office Murders (1929). Simenon's plotting style often involves two separate plots. The first is a scheme by some crook; the second is a counterscheme developed by a second crook in response to the first. The detective and the reader only see a confused trail of evidence left by the two schemes. Their job is to try to see into the two level scheme behind it. Sometimes this works brilliantly, as in "Death in a Department Store". (This story has also been anthologized by Ellery Queen as "The Slipper Fiend".) But all too often, it results in a non fair play mystery. It is hard to see how any reader could deduce the real nature of the plot and counterplot from the clues given. They are just too complex, and largely hidden from the reader, with only a handful of scattered clues suggesting what is really going on. And M. Gallet décédé, while it starts out with some vivid writing, eventually devolves into a series of tangled coincidences.
La Nuit du carrefour (Maigret at the Crossroads) (1931) is one of Simenon's most Croftsian works. Maigret eventually uncovers a criminal scheme similar to those Crofts wrote about in The Pit-Prop Syndicate and The Box Office Murders. As in Crofts, this scheme is more oriented to fraud than murder: it's a commercial enterprise. And as in Crofts, it centers around a technological location. What seems less Croftsian is the extraordinarily creepy atmosphere of the opening sections (Chapters 1 - 6). Reading these chapters made me extremely nervous. I have no idea of how Simenon achieves this effect, because there is nothing overtly sinister going on. There are no supernatural events à la John Dickson Carr, and no conventional suspense technique or events. There is just an apparently normal middle class suburb. But the reader constantly waits for some totally ominous catastrophe to erupt. The sheer placidity of everything is frightening. Maigret himself seems to do no real detection, but rather to just stand around and observe the suspects. His lack of action engenders a helpless feeling in the reader. So do the hints that something monstrous or abnormal is going on at the house of The Three Widows in the tale. Paradoxically, when the solution finally comes, it is far less frightening than the body of the story. It deals with mere criminality, something that seems far more familiar to the reader than the nameless dread which dominates most of the novel. Also, here Maigret finally takes action and does things.
The great director Jean Renoir filmed La Nuit du carrefour the next year (1932), in collaboration with Simenon as a scriptwriter. I have never had a chance to see this film. Andrew Sarris thought it was botched, Jean-Luc Godard thought it the greatest French detective film, and André Bazin ignored it entirely in his book on Renoir. One could see why it would appeal to Renoir: the character of Else and her relations to the men in the tale recall Renoir's previous film, La Chienne (1931). Also, the story involves a complex cat's cradle of relationships among the characters, looking forward to Renoir's Toni (1934) and The Rules of the Game (1939).
The film director Akira Kurosawa was a big fan of Simenon, and he reportedly wrote his detective movie Stray Dog (1949) first as a novel, before shooting it as a film. Kurosawa's detectives are policemen, like Maigret, who engage in realistic, ploddingly detailed police work. Like Simenon, and the British realists before him, Kurosawa explores a great many locations, in this case, the poorer districts of Tokyo. The extreme heat, which constantly afflicts the characters, also is present in such Simenon novels as M. Gallet décédé, where it affects his heavily built Maigret perhaps more than it would Kurosawa's athletic star Toshiro Mifune.
Matsumoto's story unfolds against the background of a government scandal, involving bribery between businessmen and government officials. This is exactly the sort of situation featured in Akira Kurosawa's film, The Bad Sleep Well (1960), which makes an interesting cross reference to Matsumoto's novel. Kurosawa's treatment is very melodramatic and adventure oriented, whereas Matsumoto focuses on a straightforward realism, never losing focus on the detective work in the book.
Matsumoto's tales tend to focus on sinister murder conspiracies against the innocent. The conspiracies tend to be worked out in great detail, often involving faked alibis. There is a pleasing sense of mathematical symmetry in Matsumoto's plots.
The second half of the book is more of a pure thriller or suspense story, with only a little mystery left. It reminds one of some of the suspense short stories in Koe (The Voice). I like the second half of the book much less than the first, and in general do not enjoy Matsumoto's thrillers anywhere as much as his mystery stories.
The story also shows Matsumoto's gift for misdirection. Several times Matsumoto makes it look as if his plot were going one way, only to pull off the opposite direction a few chapters later.
Some of the reviews quoted on the back of Suna no utsuwa occasion some comment. It has become a truism of criticism that police procedural writers are trying to paint a picture of their society, and more than one reviewer duly states this about Matsumoto. I don't agree. While Matsumoto is indeed realistic, it is hard to see that he is attempting to build up a systematic picture of Japanese society, à la Balzac. Instead, Matsumoto mainly seems concerned with creating mystery plots, together with exploring a few specific subjects that seem to interest him: policemen and their wives, train travel, men with hidden mistresses, bar hostesses, stage and film actors, newspaper reporters, life in South Western Japan, where Matsumoto grew up.
The unnamed reviewer for The Milwaukee Journal compares Matsumoto to Anton Chekhov. This is very true. Matsumoto, like Chekhov, often creates a character by revealing some small aspect of their behavior or personality. This small piece somehow evokes a whole person, in ways that are mysterious, yet somehow very effective. There is also a low keyed intimacy of tone that recalls Chekhov, at once realistic and sensitive, and a gift for lyrical description of both scenery and everyday life.
"The Cooperative Defendant" also shows Matsumoto's fondness for waste spaces: railroad yards, industrial lots, lonely road sides, country areas that are just being built up into cities, deserted beaches are all favorite Matsumoto locales. These are all areas that have some small aspect of human occupation, but which are typically nearly deserted, and almost in their natural state. There often seems to be water nearby, whether the sea, a famous waterfall, or just a small irrigation pond, as in this tale. Such American pulp writers as Norbert Davis and MacKinlay Kantor also were fascinated by such spaces, although one doubts either had any direct influence on Matsumoto.
Matsumoto's characters often have complete life histories, something one also finds in Hugh Pentecost. Their various professions can show unexpected links to the murder plot.
"The Cooperative Defendant" is in the anthology Ellery Queen's Japanese Golden Dozen (1978). Ellery Queen's introduction says that Freeman Wills Crofts was at that time the third most popular Western mystery writer in Japan, right after Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen.
There are also ways in which Nishimura directly reflects Matsumoto, but not necessarily any earlier Croftsian traditions. Both authors have corpses without any ID found near rail road yards. Both like to include magazine writers and actors among their characters.
Above all, detection and detective technique shows similarities between the two authors. Both try to reconstruct elaborate criminal schemes. They do this bit by bit throughout the book, instead of all at once at the end. They use much imagination to come up with possible descriptions of the bad guys' activities. These imaginative ideas are often proven correct. Logic and reasoning is extensively employed. Sometimes reality seems to contradict them, however, or they reach a point beyond which they have not yet reconstructed, with no clue to get them any farther. Both policemen often find themselves up against a blank wall in their sleuthing. They get a bit discouraged, but persist. They keep investigating and learning more details. They also keep chewing over ideas in their mind, trying to find solutions to things that puzzle them. Suddenly, insight occurs, and they discover some new fact, or come with a new hypothesis, that explains away their difficulties. These moments are the most exciting in their books. They are the emotional and intellectual climaxes of their stories. These moments of insights allow a great deal of further reconstruction. Ideas start flowing, and more fruitful detective work also is enabled, allowing them to build a much more detailed picture of the criminals' schemes.
This process has analogues in the books of Crofts. For example, in Mystery in the English Channel (1931), Crofts' detective Inspector French comes up with a hypothesis, finds it looks good, then does a lot of investigation on it. He eventually will conclude it is wrong, and then start over with a new hypothesis. Crofts devotes some ingenuity to making a hypothesis originally look true, and then turn out to be false. Also, French eventually doubles back on some discarded ideas, and shows that they are true after all. This too takes ingenuity. French devotes much effort to reconstructing the crime. The reconstructions are very detailed models of what possibly happened. They can be modified as French gets new ideas and new data. Building such reconstructions is a key part of Crofts' technique. All of this is fairly similar to the approach used by Matsumoto and Nishimura. Matsumoto and Nishimura place more emphasis on the moments of insight that extend their original ideas, then do Crofts. Also, Crofts tends to contradict an original idea, and start over, while Matsumoto and Nishimura tend to extend and build upon earlier concepts.
Matsumoto's stories involve Croftsian style alibis, and are closer to the classical puzzle plot detective novel. Misuteri ressha ga kieta, by contrast, involves reconstructing how a Big Caper was done. This gives it much less of a puzzle plot feel.
I cannot read Japanese, and my knowledge of Japanese mystery fiction is restricted to the handful of novels translated into English. So it is impossible for me to build up any detailed map of the influences among Japanese mystery writers. Based on my very limited state of knowledge, one could guess that the relationship between Matsumoto and Nishimura was one of direct influence. Matsumoto (1909 - 1992) is of an earlier generation than Nishimura (1930 - ), and it is very common for a younger writer to show the influence of a famous older one. Although both writers show features that ultimately derive from Crofts, there is no sign of any Croftsian feature found in Nishimura which is not found earlier in Matsumoto. This suggests that these features could have transmitted to Nishimura directly from reading Matsumoto.
Misuteri ressha ga kieta refers to Akira Kurosawa's classic ransom film, Heaven and Hell (1963) (often known in English as High and Low).
Shizuko Natsuki's detectives use techniques familiar from Seicho Matsumoto. They try to reconstruct the crime, employing a great deal of reasoning about how it might have taken place. They also gradually get ideas which take them to a deeper and deeper level of insight to the crime. Watching the police as they mentally grope towards that insight is one of the main dramas of the tale.
Shizuko Natsuki (1938 - ) is also of the same generation as Kyotaro Nishimura (1930 - ), and one suspects that this era of Japanese writers was strongly influenced by Seicho Matsumoto.
Also like Matsumoto, Shizuko Natsuki's tales embody a great deal of sociological detail about Japanese life. This detail is fascinating to read. "Divine Punishment" and "The Sole of the Foot" offer an inside look at Japanese temples, and their social and financial relationships with the public. This is a subject of deep interest to the author. "The Sole of the Foot" is not as puzzle plot oriented as "Divine Punishment", but it goes even deeper into its social analysis.
Another Shizuko Natsuki specialty: the public inquiry, in which police and public collaborate to provide information about wanted men, stolen money, and other investigation foci. She weaves ingenious plots out of the different ways information flows between the public and police during such investigative campaigns. The events in such campaigns usually occur over a considerable period of time. She shows step by step how more and more information is accrued, and from a huge variety of sources. The kinds of information that appear are often quite different from each other; so are the kinds of people that provide them, their motives, and the different approaches they use to uncover the data.
But the actual content of the mystery is squarely in the Crofts-influenced tradition of Seicho Matsumoto and his successors. The plot deals with alibis and timetables. Also, as in Matsumoto and his followers, the truth emerges after a long discussion between the detectives on the case, in which they grapple with alternative ideas and approaches to the case, and only gradually come up with new ideas, after much mental struggle and effort. These discussions involve reconstructing the activities of various potential criminals among the suspects. They also emphasize logic and reasoning. All of this is very much part of the Matsumoto school approach.
"An Urban Legend Puzzle" can be found in the anthology Passport to Crime: Finest Mystery Stories from International Crime Writers (2007), edited by Janet Hutchings. It also appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 2004.