Posts Tagged ‘ Mysteries ’

A Classic Christmas Mystery: ‘Mystery in White’

December 28, 2011
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A Classic Christmas Mystery: ‘Mystery in White’

“It snowed all day and all night.  On the 22nd it was still snowing.  Snowballs flew, snowmen grew.  Sceptical children regained their belief in fairyland, and sour adults felt like Santa Claus, buying more presents than they had ever intended.  In the evening the voice of the announcer, traveling through endless white ether, informed the millions that more snow was coming…. More snow came.  It floated down from its limitless source like a vast extinguisher.  Sweepers, eager for their harvest, waited in vain for the snow to stop.  People wondered whether it ever would stop.” –Jefferson Farjeon, Mystery in White (1937) People stranded in a country house cut off from the outside world by snow, with murderous events afoot.  It’s a classic and beloved Golden Age murder mystery scenario and it’s one Jefferson Farjeon used in his 1937 thriller Mystery in White.  To top it all off, the tale takes place over Christmas eve and Christmas day. As the splendid dust jacket reveals, a train is involved too, albeit briefly.  Like Agatha Christie’s Orient Express, this train gets stalled by snow.  Five passengers–a clerk, a chorus girl, an elderly paranormal investigator and a genteel brother and sister–make their way off

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Good Cop, Bad Cop: Crime Tales of Two Eras

December 13, 2011
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Good Cop, Bad Cop: Crime Tales of Two Eras

To be sure, Ian Rankin, the leading figure in the so-called “Tartan Noir” movement, has been a powerful force in moving British detective fiction away from its cozy, genteel, village and country house gentry stereotype, but in his own day Freeman Wills Crofts did much the same thing, albeit more gently, decades earlier. Both series are well worth reading and discussing today—the two detectives share a defining quality, one that readers will find bracing in an era seen as rife with immorality and excessive concentration of power.

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A Marriage of Reason and Horror: ‘The Burning Court,’ by John Dickson Carr

October 3, 2011
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A Marriage of Reason and Horror: ‘The Burning Court,’ by John Dickson Carr

Halloween approacheth, a season in which it is particularly appropriate to read horror stories. One of the more unusual sub-categories of such tales is the one that melds the supernatural tale with the detective story (e.g., the Dr  Taverner series by the occultist Dion Fortune). The fact that these elements are essentially incompatible make the successful ones rather remarkable.  Perhaps the best one is the 1937 novel The Burning Court, by John Dickson Carr, republished this year by Langtail Press (www.langtailpress.com). Carr (1906-1977) is one of the giants of the detective story, on a par with Agatha Christie.  He wrote well and specialized in seemingly impossible crimes, like corpses found in locked rooms, and often combined this with an eerie atmosphere.  However, he rarely wrote tales that partook of the supernatural. I would say The Burning Court is Carr at his best.  There is no impossible murder; instead, the body of a man, possibly murdered, impossibly disappears from its tomb.  Ted Stevens, the central character, whose friend’s uncle is the dead man, winds up being concerned about his French Canadian wife, Marie, who seems to be the descendent of two murderous witches.  The love between Ted and Marie is depicted

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Raymond Chandler and British Detective Fiction (Part 2)

August 11, 2011
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Raymond Chandler and British Detective Fiction (Part 2)

Clearly the sophisticated and genteel milieus found in the detective novels of Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham could not have been much better designed by deliberate intent to grate on Chandler’s class-sensitive nerves. The testy hardboiled author felt much differently, however, about the plainer mystery fare offered by Freeman Wills Crofts and, especially, R. Austin Freeman. Even in “Simple Art” Chandler praised Crofts, best known for his methodical tales of patient criminal investigation and determined alibi busting, as “the soundest builder of them all when he doesn’t get too fancy”; and in his correspondence Chandler admitted that he knew Crofts’ work (and Freeman’s) “very well.”

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Elizabeth Daly: One of the Last, and Best, of Golden Age Mystery Writers

July 26, 2011
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Elizabeth Daly: One of the Last, and Best, of Golden Age Mystery Writers

Blessings be upon Felony and Mayhem Press (http://www.felonyandmayhem.com), which is currently engaged in reprinting all sixteen of the detective novels of Elizabeth Daly. (They are now up to seven.) Daly (1878-1967) ought to be even better known than she is. She came along at the tail-end of the so-called golden-age of detective fiction which emphasized puzzle plots and brilliant detectives, and she was one of the finest practitioners of that style. She was of a privileged background. Her father, Joseph, was a judge of the New York County Supreme Court, and her uncle, Augustin Daly, was a prominent theater owner and producer. She received a B.A. from Bryn Mawr and an M.A. from Columbia University. She was a reader in English at the former from 1904 to 1906. Although she did some other writing before embarking upon her career as a mystery writer, she reached her prime as an author when in her sixties and early seventies. Her seventeen novels (all save one a detective story) were published between 1940 and 1951. All of Daly’s detective novels feature Henry Gamadge, a wealthy expert in manuscripts and rare books who does detective work as a sideline. He is highly cultivated though

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The Authoritarian Crime Drama ‘Law and Order: Criminal Intent’

June 27, 2011
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The Authoritarian Crime Drama ‘Law and Order: Criminal Intent’

I suppose that I am somewhat unusual in never having liked the lead characters of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, nor thought the performances of Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe particularly appealing or praiseworthy. D’Onofrio, of course, was known for his excessively exaggerated performing style in his portrayal of the show’s lead character, Detective Bobby Goren, and I thought that Kathryn Erbe did a good but unimpressive job of depicting an essentially unappealing and uninteresting character in lead detective Alex Eames. Both characters annoyed me in essence, I suspect, because they were such perfect specimens of a particularly common and grating type of contemporary American: the Priggish Urban Liberal-Progressive Busybody Knowitall Pseudointellectual Snob. And in doing so, the show conveyed a point of view based on authoritarianism, exemplifying the contemporary worldview that the political writer Jonah Goldberg calls liberal fascism. I imagine that the unappealing character type at the center of Law and Order: Criminal Intent hardly requires any further description for most readers, as it thoroughly infests current-day TV news and talk shows, newspaper columns, Slate and the Huffington Post and other fashionable politico-cultural websites, contemporary art shows, your neighborhood Starbucks, and other such locales made repellant by their

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The Murder of Mystery Genre History: A Cautionary Tale About the Perversion of Cultural History

April 5, 2011
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The Murder of Mystery Genre History: A Cautionary Tale About the Perversion of Cultural History

Review of The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, edited by Catherine Ross Nickerson By Curt Evans On the back cover of The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction (2010), the blurb tells us that the fourteen essays contained therein represent the “very best in contemporary scholarship.” If so, this should be a matter of grave concern to people interested in the history of the American mystery genre before World War II, or in the preservation of what is best in the culture and fostering of good works in the future. As the Companion is a skimpy book of less than 200 pages and it has fourteen essays, potential readers should be immediately clued in to the fact that the essays tend to be rather cursory. A listing of the topics further reveals that the book’s coverage is esoteric, leaving noticeable gaps: Introduction (4 pages) Early American Crime Writing (10 pages, excluding footnotes) Poe and the Origins of Detective Fiction (8 pages) Women Writers Before 1960 (12 pages) The Hard-Boiled Novel (15 pages) American Roman Noir (12 pages) Teenage Detective and Teenage Delinquents (13 pages) American Spy Fiction (9 pages) The Police Procedural on Literature and on Television (13 pages)

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Halter’s Impossible Crime Mystery a Brilliantly Plotted Page-Turner

March 9, 2011
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Halter’s Impossible Crime Mystery a Brilliantly Plotted Page-Turner

By Barry Ergang Review of The Lord of Misrule, by Paul Halter My favorite kind of traditional mystery is the “impossible crime” tale. You know,  the kind of story in which a crime is committed in a room later found to be locked from the inside, from which there is no apparent means of egress for the criminal. Or the one in which someone is murdered in a field of snow or on a sandy beach—killed in a manner that requires his assailant to be up close and personal—but the only footprints in evidence are the victim’s. Or any other kinds of seemingly impossible situations writers can invent and solve. Writers who specialized in impossible situations included Hake Talbot, Clayton Rawson, Herbert Brean, Joseph Commings, Edward D. Hoch, and the acknowledged all-time master, John Dickson Carr. Many others have contributed impossible crime stories to the genre, but few outside of those mentioned above have specialized in them. One notable modern exception is Carr disciple Paul Halter, an award-winning French author whose work, thanks to translator John Pugmire, is starting to become available to those of us who don‘t read French. Having previously translated some of Halter’s short stories and brought

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The British Golden Age of Detection’s Deposed Crime Kings (Part 1 of 2)

March 1, 2011
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The British Golden Age of Detection’s Deposed Crime Kings (Part 1 of 2)

By Curt Evans In the introduction to a recent academic monograph on nineteenth-century women writers of crime fiction, the well-known British crime novelist Val McDermid noted in passing, “And, of course, whenever the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction is mentioned, the names associated with it are female—Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh.” Critic Sarah Weinman illustrated McDermid’s contention in the January 29, 2011 ”Reputations” column of the Wall Street Journal, in an article about Golden Age detective novelist Allingham. Weinman declared, “Four ‘queens of crime’ dominated the Golden Age of the mystery novel, the years just before and after World War II: Agatha Christie … Dorothy Sayers … Ngaio Marsh … and Margery Allingham.” Examples abound of this insistently gendered approach to the mystery genre’s history, by which the numerous works produced by a vast multitude of men and women during the Golden Age of the British detective novel are distilled into the product of four celebrated “Crime Queens.” One academic authority, for example, asserts that the Golden Age of British detection is “commonly conceived” as having run from “the first novel of Agatha Christie (1920) to the last novel by Dorothy L. Sayers (1937),” while another writes that the Golden Age “is generally

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The Man Who Was Leo Bruce

November 13, 2010
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The Man Who Was Leo Bruce (Rupert Croft-Cooke, 1903-1979) By Curt Evans Rupert Croft-Cooke, who published thirty-one admired detective novels between 1936 and 1974 under the pseudonym Leo Bruce, was during this same period a respected middlebrow “straight” novelist. Yet he came to place his greatest hope for posthumous fame—however modest a portion—as a writer on the series of memoirs he began publishing in the 1950s, collectively titled The Sensual World. Despite considerable contemporary critical encomia won by the series (the Times Literary Supplement praised Croft-Cooke’s “almost faultless sense of period,” for example, while the Sunday Times found the series “valuable and engrossing”), Croft-Cooke’s memoirs, like his mainstream novels, have been almost entirely forgotten, while his detective tales, barely mentioned in The Sensual World, still claim a following, largely due to the reprinting, beginning in 1980, a year after Croft-Cooke’s death, of twenty of them by an excellent small publishing house, Academy Chicago. In short, today Croft-Cooke is remembered, if at all, as a writer of detection, rather than as a mainstream novelist or memoirist. Yet Croft-Cooke’s memoirs are valuable to the student of British detective novels for the searching light they shed on the mind of one of the

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Will the Real Sherlock Holmes Please Punch Somebody?

September 11, 2010
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Will the Real Sherlock Holmes Please Punch Somebody?

Would G. K. Chesterton have liked Robert Downey Jr.’s depiction of the great detective in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes? A Chesterton admirer suggests the answer is yes.

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Weak Resolution Mars ‘Rizzoli and Isles’ Episode

July 27, 2010
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Weak Resolution Mars ‘Rizzoli and Isles’ Episode

Yesterday, you may recall, I pointed out two TNT crime dramas with overt political messages parroting Democrat Party/Obama administration talking points. So, naturally, TNT ran another such program last night. First, I will note that last night’s episode of The Closer was free of any political posturing. It’s good to see the program back on track after the previous week’s nonsense, and the episode was far more dramatically effective than its predecessor, as should be expected given the way didacticism tends to ruin fiction narratives. That happy event was followed by episode three of the new crime drama series Rizzoli and Isles, about a Boston homicide detective named Rizzoli (Angie Harmon, Law and Order, The Women’s Murder Club) and her friend, Isles (Sasha Alexander, NCIS). Each episode follows the two characters as they try to solve murder mysteries in Beantown. Last night’s episode dealt with the murder of a black teenage male. Intimations are made that he may have been murdered by a street gang with which he may or may not have been involved. Also under suspicion is a weird, local West African church which engages in rituals with voodoo overtones, the pastor of which is an ex-con who

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