Two Faces of Evil: Evil under the Sun by Agatha Christie, the 1941 Novel and the 1982 Film Adaptation, Part One

Agatha Christie's single greatest period as a mystery writer, in most people's estimation I would imagine, extended from 1932, with the publication of Peril at End House, the Crime Queen's first Hercule Poirot mystery in four years, and 1944, with the sinister Superintendent Battle mystery Towards Zero, one of my personal Christie favorites.  

Let's list the crime novels she published in these years:

Peril at End House 1932 (Poirot and Hastings)

Lord Edgware Dies 1933 (P and H)

Murder on the Orient Express 1934 (P)

Why Didn't They Ask Evans? 1934 (non-series)

Three Act Tragedy 1935 (P)

Death in the Clouds 1935 (P)

The ABC Murders 1936 (P and H)

Murder in Mesopotamia 1936 (P)

Cards on the Table (1937) (P with Ariadne Oliver, Superintendent Battle, Colonel Race)

Dumb Witness 1937 (P and H)

Death on the Nile 1937 (P with Race)

Appointment with Death 1938 (P)

Hercule Poirot's Christmas 1938 (P)

Murder Is Easy 1939 (non-series)

And Then There Were None 1939 (non-series)

Sad Cypress 1940 (P)

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe 1940 (P)

Sleeping Murder (1940?) (Marple)

Evil under the Sun 1941 (P)

Curtain (1941?) (P and H)

N or M? 1941 (Tommy and Tuppence)

The Body in the Library 1942 (M)

Five Little Pigs 1942 (P)

The Moving Finger 1943 (M)

Towards Zero 1944 (Battle)

25 novels, assuming Christie's later published Curtain and Sleeping Murder were written around 1940/41, in 13 years--an impressive feat indeed, especially considering the high level of technical craft the author evinces in these books.  Of these works fully 17, about two-thirds, are Hercule Poirot mysteries, while three are Marples, one a Superintendent Battle, one a Tommy and Tuppence and three non-series, including possibly the greatest crime novel ever published, And Then There Were None, and the singularly ingenious Poirot mysteries Murder on the Orient Express and The ABC Murders.  

You'll notice that towards the end of this period, Christie moved pretty significantly away from writing about Poirot.  From 1932 to 1938, there were 13 crime novels, all but one of these with Poirot.  The twelve works between 1939 and 1944 are much more evenly divided, with five Poirots, three Marples, a Battle, a Tommy and Tuppence and two non-series.  This indicates the author was indeed getting restive with her greatest detective, having her fiction mystery writing alter ego, Ariadne Oliver, complain about him (or her Finnish detective, Sven Hjerson) in Cards on the Table and actually killing Poirot off in 1940/41 with her later published Curtain.  

In 1942 Christie decidedly altered the style of her Poirot mysteries with one of her most serious crime novels, Five Little Pigs, one of the key modern-leaning "crime novels" of the period with greater emphasis on character, in which Poirot plays something of a subsidiary role as retrospective interrogator.  This change was anticipated in Curtain, one of the Crime Queen's bleakest books, although the general public would not have access to that one until 1975.  (The earlier Death on the Nile and Sad Cypress are definitely have more serious, genuinely tragic elements as well.)

What was the last Poirot mystery before Curtain and Five Little Pigs?  Evidently Evil under the Sun.  This novel definitely feels like a throwback to Christie's lighter Thirties books--and to me it feels a bit tired in some ways.  Yet in modern-day polls, I must admit, it ranks as one of the ten favorite Christies.  

In its day the novel received the Crime Queen's usual good reviews, though one ornery detection purist newspaper critic in Australia accused her of being more a mystery monger masquerading as a true detective writer:

modernistic American first ed. 
by Dodd, Mead

In Evil under the Sun, which unfolds one of the most enterprising foolproof alibis for murder in my recollection, eggheaded, moustached Hercule Poirot solves the mystery of the strangled sunbather only by the exercise of Flemish "intuition."  He wouldn't have been in the race...if had been compelled to rely on crude clues and sordid facts.  

The noble literature of mystery and detection has been reared on the marble pillars of deduction and logic.  Those jerrybuilders who seek to deface the edifice with the scaffolding of guesswork and intuition should be scourged from the temple.  

This critic opined that "Mother Christie's genius is best expressed in such works as [And Then There Were None], when she does not attempt serious detection, but only entertaining mystery."

I think there's some truth in this criticism of Sun as a product of the overly intuitive school of mystery, which I will get into below.  This was an accusation occasionally leveled at Christie in the past.

First, however, let me discuss what I see as the book's deficiencies in characterization, at least by her own standard.  

Like And Then There Were None, Evil under the Sun is set on a resort island in southwestern England.  Would it not have been lovely had the book made mention of a certain ill-starred nearby island where a baffling mass murder of ten unfortunates had recently taken place?

"Had only I been there on Indian Island most assuredly the terrible crime it would not have remained unsolved!" exclaimed Poirot as he puffed out his chest and twirled his mustaches.  But alas, no.  

Christie does, however, have a character, the garrulous Mrs. Gardener, make mention of former spinster Cornelia Robson from Death on the Nile, who we learn married Dr. Carl Bessner from the same novel and moved to his clinic at Badenhof and, when meeting the Gardeners there, "told us all about that business in Egypt when Linnet Ridgeway was killed."  The author also quotes from a conversation which Poirot later has with Hastings about the subathing murder, again referencing the Nile case.  And she even gives a shout-out to John Dickson Carr's then recently published mystery, The Burning Court.  All this is cute stuff, as we Americans say.

strikingly photographed
21st century pb ed.
by HarperCollins

Sun concerns the occurrence of the strangling murder, while Poirot is staying on vac at the local Jolly Roger Hotel, of loosely-moralled, "man-eating" Arlena Marshall, a former musical revue actress, while sunbathing on a strip of beach on Smugglers Island.  Vivacious Arlena is staying at the Jolly Roger with her husband of four years, the once-widowed country gentleman Kenneth Marshall, and his sulky sixteen year old daughter, Linda.  

The actress is entertaining herself with her latest toyboy acquisition, handsome young Patrick Redfern, husband of the pale and enervated Christine, who is wanly unhappy about her husband's rather overt dalliance with Arlena.  Kenneth Marshall, for his part, professes not to take the thing seriously.  Arlena is just a bit flighty, don't you know.  

There are other characters, of course.  There is Rosamund Darnley, a fashionable London dressmaker, a creative genius who nevertheless is unhappy because she hasn't got a loving man in her life.  She was an old childhood friend of Ken, back when she was country too, and she wouldn't mind having Ken in particular around to tickle her tape measure.  

Conversely, there is Emily Brewster, an athletic, hardy spinster, who surely doesn't want a fella.  Then there are the Gardeners, an American couple, the garrulous Carrie and her quiet husband Odell.  

And, let's see, we also have Stephen Lane, an intense retired minister who abominates scarlet women (see Arlena), Major Barry, retired from the Indian army and an all round boor, and Horace Blatt, a self-made businessman of some sort and another boor.  And there's Mrs. Castle, the proprietor of the Jolly Roger, and Gladys Narracott, a maid at the hotel.  

It's a lot of characters, none of them that interesting in my opinion.  A lot of them are pure Christie stock: the mannish spinster, the boring Indian army major (very reminiscent of the more significant character in A Caribbean Mystery), the religious enthusiast who might be a maniac, the garrulous American matron (like Mrs. Hubbard in Murder on the Orient Express), the painfully genteel landlady/hotel owner who says words like "naice" and "quayettest" and "laycessing", and the maid inevitably named Gladys--though here we learn her last name, "Narracott." (I'd love to think Gladys is the bereft daughter of the late sailor Fred Narracott, from And Then There Were None.)

Linda Marshall, the angsty, humorless sixteen-year-old who passionately hates her stepmother Arlena, is somewhat better developed, but she's in perpetual sulk mode throughout most of the book and really not that engaging a character either in my view.  Christie's own daughter Rosalind had just left her teenage years when Sun was written and with these teenage girl characters I always have to wonder how much Christie's relationship with her daughter affected the portrayals.  

Linda "is at the age when one is prone to be mentally unbalanced," declares Poirot. I wonder what Rosalind, then 20, thought of that passage if she read it!  Linda with her idea of dissipating rage against another person rather reminded me of the situation with Caroline Crayle and her younger sister in Five Little Pigs--a much better book in my view when it comes to characterization.  

Pocket ed, early Seventies
cover by Tom Adams

Even Rosamund Darnley is a Thirties "type," the successful career woman who wants to give it all up for a man.  Had Christie been reading Margery Allingham's The Fashion in Shrouds?  Allingham often gets railed for having her dress designer character thankfully give up her profession to take orders for life from a husband, in what has to be one of the most misogynistic passages in vintage crime fiction.  (Today's MAGA incels should love it.)  

Yet here in Christie's book, which followed Shrouds by but a few years, Christie similarly has her male character masterfully ordering Rosamund: "You're going to give up that damned dressmaking business of yours and we're going to live in the country," to which Rosamond meekly responds: "Oh, my dear, I've wanted to live in the country with you all my life.  Now, it's going to come true..." 

(The suspensive dots are not mine, by the by, but rather the author's, who had gotten quite--or should I say quayte-- attached to them around this time.)

Some people think Arlena is an interesting character.  She's certainly an interesting plot device, but an interesting character?  I would say not so much.  She's not around long to be anything more than a construct, though admittedly a clever one.  

Certainly Arlena is not as interesting a character as Linnet Ridgeway in Death on the Nile, a book which Evil under the Sun much resembles but is inferior to, I would say, both in its central characters and plotting mechanics.  At the heart of both books is what the late Robert Barnard called Christie's "triangle plot" (which we also see in the fine Thirties Poirot novella "Triangle at Rhodes"), which explores romantic conflicts among two women and one man.  

SPOILERS BELOW AS I DISCUSS THE MURDER PLOT IN SUN

another seventies Pocket ed.
Want to get your hands on it?

There is a lot of cleverness to the murder plot in Evil under the Sun--there's always cleverness in Christie in this period. The basic idea of the sun-browned bodies deception and the sleight of hand on the beach is brilliant stuff.  (Another Crime Queen many years later used a similar device in one of her books and it works again.)

Yet the charge that Poirot relies to much on intuition here has some merit, I think.  Poirot just knows exactly whom to look at among the suspects, based on his conclusion about their personalities  of the principles in the triangle. He has a hunch that the killer has strangled a woman before.  And of course he is right, this great man with the even greater mustaches!  

I would have liked it had Christie given Arlena some more time actually to reveal her true self.  It feels more like a postulate here: Let's accept that Arlena was really a dumb bunny rather than a man-eating tiger, then obviously Patrick was taking advantage of her and putting on an act with his wife.  

To be sure a lot of the suspects are not presented with much conviction in this book, so I am not surprised Mr. P. did not waste his time on suspecting them.  Is Miss Brewster ever given a real motive to kill Arlena, for example?  The spinster's only purpose in the book seems to be to get giddy when crossing running water and to be narrowly missed when paddling a boat by a thrown bottle. 

Then there's a drug plot dragged in late in the game which I found stank of rancid red herring.  I guess Horace Blatt was the drug runner, but never for a minute does it seem like anything having to do with this plot strand would really produce the solution of the mystery.  Christie does not even both to resolve it fully, unless I missed something.  Uncharacteristically for the author at this time, it felt like a loose end.  

Then there's the motive.  Patrick Redfern we learn had been getting money from Arlena (she had received an inheritance) to "invest" for her.  I guess the implication is that he simply took the money for his own use, which would would definitely be a financial crime, but how was Patrick to know that there would not be any record of this theft?  

35,000 pounds is a lot of money to vanish without a trace.  2.7 million pounds in today's value!  Maybe Arlena was stupid, but investigators after her death would not have been.  Might not dumb Arlena have let slip to someone that she had let Patrick invest money for her?  In short, while it's a most ingeniously concocted murder by our wicked pair of criminals, it seems at the same time like a dumb one to me.  Would taking the risk of killing her really have meant there would no exposure of his financial crime?  

In the real world, Arlena's murder most likely would have been, all too prosaically, the work of a hotel worker who tried to assault her, then panicked and strangled her to death.  But in the novel the servants are dismissed as suspects in one bare line.  That's why in classic mystery you just can't beat murders that take place on trains and boats--it really narrows the field!

A review of the 1982 film adaptation to follow.  

"It's Dark as Pitch Out There": Cornell Woolrich and Dark City (1998/2021), by Eddie Muller

Note from the Passing Tramp: I reviewed Eddie Muller's revised edition of Dark City for an academic journal, Crime Fiction Studies, in 2023. Below you will find the original, uncut version of the review.  

Eddie Muller’s Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, originally published in 1998, was reissued in revised and expanded form in 2021 by Running Press in association with Turner Classic Movies.  Described in the book’s author blurb as “the world’s foremost authority on film noir,” Eddie Muller also hosts Noir Alley on Turner Classic Movies and is the founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to rescuing and restoring “orphaned” noir films.  

Two of these rescued films, The Guilty (1947) and Never Open That Door (1952), are based on the work of Cornell Woolrich and have been released by Flicker Alley and the Film Noir Association as beautifully restored DVDs. 

scene from The Guilty

Over several pages of Dark City, Woolrich, who is mentioned more times in the book than any other crime writer aside from hard-boiled master Raymond Chandler, receives his just due from Muller as the “Bard of the Blind Alley”: that dark dead end where dreams go drearily to die, betrayed by the beckoning finger of fate.  However, Muller’s account of Woolrich’s life and work is not without some factual inaccuracy and erroneous interpretation.

somebody on the phone (Don Castle in The Guilty)

Although original films based on Cornell Woolrich’s crime works mysteriously vanished into thin air in the twenty-first century, over one hundred cinematic films and television series episodes were adapted from the author’s crime novels and short fiction between 1938 and 2001.  It is no exaggeration to say that Woolrich was one of the primary creative wellsprings of film noir.  As Bruce Crowther put it in his book Film Noir: Reflections in a Dark Mirror (1988), among American crime writers “Cornell Woolrich is closest to the bleak mood and distorted vision of film noir.”  The best-known of these many films surely remains the classic Fifties suspense flick Rear Window (1954), director Alfred Hitchcock’s slick, big-budget, color film version of Woolrich’s short story “It Had to be Murder.”

Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window

Yet looking beyond Rear Window, Cornell Woolrich’s crime fiction was a staple of more downscale and gritty Forties and Fifties black-and-white noir films, such as the seventeen flicks which follow:

Cornell Woolrich and his wife, who had their marriage
annulled on grounds of nonconsummation
(see below)

Street of Chance (1942, based on the novel The Black Curtain)

The Leopard Man (1943, based on the novel Black Alibi)

Phantom Lady (1944, based on the novel of the same title)

Deadline at Dawn (1946, based on the novel of the same title)

Black Angel (1946, based on the novel The Black Angel)

The Chase (1946, based on the novel The Black Path of Fear)

Fear in the Night (1946, based on the novelette “And So to Murder” aka “Nightmare”)

Fall Guy (1947, based on the novelette “C-Jag” aka “Cocaine”)

The Guilty (1947, based on the novelette “He Looked Like Murder” aka “Two Fellows in a Furnished Room”)

The Window (1949) was a critical and box
office success, in 1950 winning the Edgar
for best mystery film and earning child star
Bobby Driscoll an honorary juvenile Oscar.

I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (1948, based on the novelette of the same title)

Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948, based on the novel of the same title)

The Window (1949, based on the novelette “The Boy Cried Murder,” aka “Fire Escape”)

No Man of Her Own (1950, based on the novelette “They Call Me Patrice,” later expanded as the novel I Married a Dead Man)

If I Should Die Before I Wake (1952, Argentina, based on the novelette of the same title)

Never Open That Door (1952, Argentina, adaptations of the short story "Somebody on the Phone" and the novelette "The Hummingbird Comes Home")

Obsession (1954, France, based on the novelette “Silent as the Grave”) 

Nightmare (1956, a remake of the film Fear in the Night)

Woolrich works were also adapted for acclaimed Forties, Fifties and Sixties radio and television series like Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock Presents/The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Thriller.

scene from "Momentum," based on the Cornell Woolrich novelette
(Alfred Hitchcock Presents)

During his lifetime Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968) published nearly two hundred crime short stories and novelettes as well as sixteen crime novels and a like number of short fiction collections.  Woolrich attended Columbia University for a short time, leaving after the publication of a couple of successful mainstream novels to become a film screenwriter in Hollywood, where his dreams quickly died.  

The product of an estranged marriage who endured physical and emotional neglect during a lonely, solitary childhood in Mexico and New York City, Woolrich turned to writing crime fiction for the pulps after the failure of both his mainstream writing career and his brief, ill-advised marriage in California to Gloria “Bill” Blackton, who amid much embarrassing national publicity had their marriage annulled in 1933 on the grounds of her husband’s apparent inability to consummate it.

Resembling the proverbial ninety-eight-pound weakling from Charles Atlas’s famous fitness ads, which ran in comic books from the Forties into the Seventies (I personally remember these), Woolrich may have suffered from such maladies as anemia and agoraphobia, crippling his inability to lead a normal life.  He had great difficulty making and maintaining social connections with others and lived unhappily in a codependent relationship for twenty-five years with his mother in a New York apartment, carrying on alone, after her death in 1957, in another apartment in the city until his own lonely demise from a massive stroke at the age of sixty-four.

Based on his miserable experiences Woolrich developed a profoundly pessimistic view of the world, believing himself hindered at every twist and turn by malign fate.  This belief found memorable artistic expression in his crime writing, some of the bleakest in the genre, as over and over men and women due to cruel twists of malign chance lose their stakes in the desperate game of life (and death).

Peter Lorre in The Chase

Eddie Muller discusses the life and work of Cornell Woolrich, whom he rightly deems the “preeminent scribe of noir suspense,” in Dark City’s chapter “Blind Alley,” wherein he relies heavily for details of the crime writer’s life on Francis Nevins’ award-winning yet deeply problematical 1988 biography of the author, First You Dream, Then You Die.  

Barbara Stanwyck in No Man of Her Own

Like Nevins, Muller can be overly dramatic in his pronouncements, as when he declares that Woolrich was “a pathological liar” and “a guy who’d fit any serial killer profile,” and he sometimes gets details wrong.  For example, he states flatly that Woolrich’s parents divorced, although it is doubtful that they ever actually did so, and he asserts that Woolrich’s father took to him as a boy to a performance in Mexico City of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly (a pivotal event in his life by his telling), when in fact Woolrich states that the man who took him was his wealthy maternal grandfather.

modern production of tragic death scene in Madama Butterfly

Drawing on Nevins, Muller confusingly asserts that Woolrich’s “reverence” for his wife “precluded physical confirmation” of his marriage while simultaneously contending that Woolrich, a supposedly gay man, mockingly “married her as a joke.”  These motivations are flatly contradictory.  

Following Nevins’ interpretation of Woolrich’s late crime tale “Story to be Whispered,” about a man’s brutal “panic” murder of a transgender woman, Muller pronounces it an example of the author’s supposed homosexual “self-loathing,” although Nevins clumsily misinterpreted the story to reach this conclusion.  Contrary to Nevins’ and Muller’s contentions, the exact nature of the ambiguous author’s sexuality remains elusive today and it is by no means clear that the crime writer ever had what Muller terms “homosexual encounters” or, indeed, that he ever experienced sexual intimacy with anyone.

Ella Raines in Phantom Lady

Muller mentions fourteen films based on Woolrich’s work.  His most substantive discussions are of these five films 

Phantom Lady (1944), a “classic Blind Alley thriller” produced by Hitchcock protégé Joan Harrison, whom Muller discusses separately in a section of the book entitled “the mistress of suspense”

Deadline at Dawn (1946), dismissed by Muller as a “stilted adaptation” of a novel drenched with “sweaty frenzy”

the critically divisive film The Chase (1946), which Muller argues anticipates the mind bending meta-noir works of director David Lynch

The Guilty (1947), an interesting Poverty Row production that Muller believes compellingly evokes the “fetid milieu” of Woolrich’s crime fiction 

The Window (1949), a low-budget smash hit in which, anticipating Rear Window, an imaginative boy witnesses a murder but cannot get anyone, including his parents, to believe him.

Bobby Driscoll in The Window

No Man of Her Own (1950), a reasonably effective though watered-down version of Woolrich’s novel I Married a Dead Man that starred noir icon Barbara Stanwyck, is briefly discussed in the section devoted to that actress.  

Oddly Black Angel (1946), which features a rare, sensitive turn by noir baddie Dan Duryea (“a serviceable good guy, but a delectable bastard,” pithily observes Muller) and which Francis Nevins deemed the best of the myriad Woolrich film adaptations, goes unheralded.

Dan Duryea in Black Angel

In discussing The Window, Muller notes that two decades later the film’s young star, Bobby Driscoll, who was awarded a special miniature Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his performance, was tragically discovered dead at the age of thirty-one from drug-related causes by two boys playing in an abandoned New York tenement.  His remains were not positively identified until the next year and his death was not reported in the press until 1971.  

former child star Bobby Driscoll. who died tragically at age 31

The former child star, who once poignantly complained “I was carried on a silver platter—and then dumped into a garbage can,” predeceased by just six months Cornell Woolrich himself, who expired in his New York apartment from a massive stroke at the age of sixty-four in nearly as wretched circumstances, despite the relative fortune he had accumulated from film, television and radio adaptations of his work.  

In Bobby Driscoll, who passed away anonymously and miserably alone, his childhood dreams cruelly dashed, Woolrich surely would have discerned another ill-starred brother in misfortune.

Although not without serious purpose, Dark City is primarily an engagingly written and artfully designed coffee table book lavishly illustrated with eye-catching film stills.  It should send the popular audience for whom it is intended eagerly venturing down mean streets and around dark counters in search of these fascinating films--many of which can, of course, be seen on Turner Classic Movies.

see The House of Fradkin-Stein

Lovesey's Bathtub Companion: Reader, I Buried Them (2022), by Peter Lovesey

Back in the 1980s I think my Mom joined a book club of some sort and received as a "free gift" something called The Agatha Christie Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion (1986).  How many people actually read the book while soaking in the bath, I don't know.  I don't believe I ever read any of it in the bath, but I certainly did read it.  

In the Christie Bathtub Companion there was an introduction by Julian Symons, who was everywhere in the mystery world in those days, where among other things he listed his favorite Christies. (The only one of the list which I remember now is The Pale Horse, which I think he called a "goodish late specimen.")  There were also all sorts of odds and ends, including a poem by someone about her saving her last precious unread Christie novel, which she lovingly called "my Agatha Crystal."  (My last unread Christie novel is Passenger to Frankfurt, about which I can't get that effusive, having started and stopped reading it three times now.  Maybe someday....)  

Peter Lovesey's sixth and latest short story collection, the wryly-titled Reader, I Buried Them--the title is a play on the famous line in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, "Reader, I married him."--offers a sort of retrospective look at the English Crime Dean's career as a writer of short mystery fiction, including, among other deadly delights, his very first published crime story, "The Bathroom," which was published in the great British short crime fiction anthology series Winter's Crimes over a half-century ago in 1973.  

This was back when your own Passing Tramp was in the third grade earnestly pledging allegiance to the flag and reciting the Lord's Prayer.  But my heart was really set on murder.  

I would read my first mysteries--Christies, of course--the next year, during the summer of 1974, when my family was living in an apartment in Mexico City.  I also read my mom's Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.  I remember lying curled up on the loveseat by the big window overlooking the street reading a story I swear was called "The Machete Murderer," where the wife winds up getting chopped to pieces at the end of the tale.  Just the reading for an eight year old!  I loved it--it was thrilling stuff for someone who had been reading Sally, Dick and Jane "adventures" not long before.  Sally, Dick and Jane never solved any murders.  They just watched Spot run.  

I also read, in Pocket paperback American editions (you could get them in Mexico City at Sanborns department store), And Then There Were None, Easy to Kill, aka Murder Is Easy, The ABC Murders and Funerals Are Fatal, aka After the Funeral--a pretty sinister quartet of murder tales!

In the only true crime piece in Reader, I Buried Him--which, speaking of bathrooms again, is entitled "The Tale of Three Tubs: George Joseph Smith and the Brides in the Bath" (2015) (there's another literary reference in this title)--Lovesey mentions having first read about famed serial murderer George Joseph Smith back when he was ten years old.  This was in a book detailing notorious English murders (then not nearly so far off in time) that had been salvaged after the Lovesey home had been destroyed in 1944 by a V-1 flying bomb.  Some 6000 Londoners were killed by these bombs, which constituted Germany's last gasp of air terror.  

I think the taste for reading tales of crime and murder frequently develops at a young age.  Indeed, some of us skip right over the anodyne children's mysteries (which inversely I have gotten interested in recently) and go right to the grim fairy tales of adult murder fiction.  

George Joseph Smith, the brides in the bath murderer

I mention Lovesey's "The Bathroom" and "Tale of Three Tubs" because both of these short works are included in Reader, I Buried Them.  They make a natural pairing because the former tale is a nod to the brides in the bath murders, as you will see.  Lovesey tells a charming story about "The Bathroom" in his foreword.  After it was published in Winter's Crimes, he received a letter from Ruth Rendell wherein she praised the story and queried where the house in the story was located.  (It is a real place and Rendell was always interested in creepy houses.)  This collegial praised prompted Lovesey to submit the story to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, but it was rejected.  

During the Seventies, Lovesey devoted his writing primarily to his Victorian era Sergeant Cribb series of eight novels, but in 1978, the year the Cribb series ended, he published his second short crime story, "The Locked Room," in Winter's Crimes.  He likewise submitted this story to EQMM and this time it was accepted and the next year published there under the title "Behind the Locked Door." (Editor Frederic Dannay of Ellery Queen fame loved to change titles.) 

Emboldened by this success, Lovesey resubmitted"The Bathroom" to EQMM but heard nothing back from them.  He assumed it had been rejected yet again and was disgusted with himself for having had the temerity to resubmit a rejected story. Then in 1981 he attended a crime writers conference in Stockholm and found to his mortification that Fred Dannay was among the attendees.  

Embarrassed to meet the Great Man after the peculiar affair of "The Bathroom," Lovesey tried to avoid a face-to-face encounter with Dannay at the conference.  "He was easy to spot in a crowd," Peter amusingly divulges of Dannay in discussing his avoidance tactics, "because he was bald and bearded with thick dark-rimmed glasses.  But he was also a short man who disappeared from view behind more substantial figures like Julian Symons and Christianna Brand."  All was going well, as it were, until the moment when....

Well, I'll leave the rest for you to read for yourself.  I'll just add that as a matter of record "The Bathroom" did appear in EQMM in August 1981, under the title "A Bride in the Bath."  In 1982, Dannay accepted two more Peter Lovesey stories for EQMM: "Butchers," which five years later became the title tale in Lovesey's first short story collection, and "Taking Possession," which appeared in the magazine in November, not long after Dannay's death at age 76. 

There are two additional earlier pieces in Reader: a long overlooked story called "Oracle of the Dead" (1988) and a poem, very nicely constructed, called "A Monologue for Mystery Lovers" (1999), which delves into the question of whether Miss Marple really was, um, a maiden lady, shall we say?

Gas Light in its 1941 Broadway 
incarnation Angel Street
starring Vincent Price 
as the fiendish husband 

The additional fourteen stories are more recent, eleven of them having been published between 2008 and 2020 and three of them--"And the Band Played On," "Formidophobia" and "Gaslighting"--being  original to the volume.  These constitute, I believe, Lovesey's 98th through 100th short stories, making the book quite an occasion.  95 of these stories were published between 1980 and 2020, a rate of over two a year for four decades.  Surely Peter Lovesey is one of mystery fiction's most notable authors, in both its long and short forms.  

"Gaslighting"--about the death by hanging of an actress during a stage production of, yes, Gas Light--is one of the purer detective stories of the bunch and quite enjoyable.  It feels very up-to-date with its depiction of texting and its use of the a term that has become very fashionable of late in its application to the rise of that gruesome gaslighter par excellence, Donald Trump. 

As with several of the best stories in this collection, there's an effective interplay between the title and the theme.  (See also "Sweet and Low" below.)  

"Formidophobia" is an intricately plotted story about--well, I'll let you find out about this one (and what the heck formidophobia is) for yourself.  Don't cheat and google it, now.   

 "And the Band Played On" is about an old man suffering from dementia who returns after a long absence to his family.  He keeps singing that same song.  Why?  My Dad uses to sing a lot in his later years, all these songs from the Forties I had never heard of, like "Six Lessons from Madame La Zonga."  You should write a story about that one, Peter!

There's also a good Christmas murder story with Lovesey's primary series detective Peter Diamond cleverly called "A Three Pie Problem." Yes, there's yet another literary reference there. 

"Remaindered" is the longest story, a novelette really.  It's an entertaining mystery set at a small-town Pennsylvania bookstore.  How can you not like a story with a mobster character (offstage) named Gritty Bologna?  Agatha Christie first editions play a role in the criminal events.  

The shortest tale--an amusing short short--is "Agony Column," about a wife who fears her husband is plotting to murder her. (What else do husbands do in crime stories?)

Of the remaining eight stories, Edgar Allan Poe himself appears in "The Deadliest Tale of All," where the real villain is the detestable Rufus Griswold.  "Ghosted," about a very decent proposal indeed made to a midlist romance writer, reminds me rather of a certain Ethel Lina White novel, while "The Homicidal Hat" has a murder method that challenges John Rhode for originality.  

"Sweet and Low," about the theft of a beekeeper's hives (and much more mayhem) is one of my favorites in the collection, as is the title story, about multiple murder among a group of monks.  It reminded me of the board game Mystery of the Abbey if you know that, as well as a short story by the late Robert Barnard (I forget the name): a sendup of a group of progressive leftists.  Not that Lovesey's story is political.  It manages a contemplative ending, shall we say.  

My hardcover edition of Reader, I Buried Them, published by Soho Press, is a lovely book, harking back to the great days of short story publisher Crippen & Landru.  It's makes a grand tribute to a Grand Master of Mystery. 

An Abbreviated Trip: Charlie Chan's Murder Cruise (1940)

Charlie Chan's Murder Cruise (1940) was the sixth film starring Sidney Toler in the title role of the great Chinese detective; five more Toler Chans were made before Fox dropped the franchise in 1942, so it came midway in the Toler series.  It was the second Chan film based on Earl Derr Biggers' penultimate Charlie Chan novel, Charlie Chan Carries On (1930), recently reviewed here.  

Susie Watson (Cora Witherspoon) gets a shock

The first film adaptation, which retained the book's title, premiered back in 1931 and starred Toler's predecessor Warner Oland; it was, indeed, the very first Warner Oland Chan film.  Unfortunately, it was one of the four early Chan films lost in the Fox studio fire of 1937, though a Mexican version, using the same sets, survives. 

The original English language 1931 film version of Charlie Chan Carries On evidently closely follows the novel, crucially retaining the full world tour plot, while Charlie Chan's Murder Cruise substantially abbreviates it, starting the story in Honolulu with the tour about to commence the last leg of the tour, by boat to San Francisco.  

After a comic bit where No. 2 son Jimmy (Victor Sen Yung) and No. 7 son (Layne Tom, Jr., who played sons of Charlie in two previous Chan films) are caught by Charlie himself in his office while trying to swipe No. 7's bad report card from the mail piled on the great detective's desk, we are introduced to Charlie's old pal from Scotland Yard, Inspector Duff, who has stopped by, halfway around the world, to pay Charlie a visit.  

Charlie's back!

that American slang again

Uh-oh!

Willie in trouble

Inspector Duff makes a brief appearance.  

Inspector Duff informs Charlie that he's hunting for a strangler on board a docked cruise ship among the travelers on a world tour that started in New York, along with the tour leader Dr. Suderman (the redoubtable Lionel Atwill, in full pompous stuffed shirt mode).  A New York judge was murdered by strangulation on the Atlantic leg of the journey and Duff joined the tour in England to investigate, though what his jurisdiction over the case would have been I can't see.  (It's all better rationalized in the book.)  

Duff has a plan to catch the killer and wants Charlie to come along with him to the boat.  Charlie goes alone to get his superior's permission, rather than bring Duff along with him, conveniently leaving Duff to be murdered (strangulation again) by the bearded man with glasses, obviously disguised, who was eavesdropping through a conveniently open window.  Why, it's the strangler!  

Here, in for the killer to get his strangling in, Duff had to go by the window to knock the ashes out of his pipe and then turn his back to the window.  Seems kind of a roundabout way to murder him!  (Duff suggests that the strangler might be a woman, but come on.)  

What's this?

Duff snuffed by strangler!

When Charlie returns to his office and finds his friend dead, he vows to catch the killer himself.  Jimmy and No. 7 son Willie are still hanging around the station too and you can bet dollars to donuts that Jimmy will also be showing up on that cruise ship, "helping" his Dad.

The suspect passengers on the cruise are:

Beautiful Paula Drake (Marjorie Weaver), the female half of the love interest

Handsome Dick Kenyon (Robert Lowery), the male half of the love interest, who is traveling with his wealthy uncle

Susie Watson (Cora Witherspoon), an excitable middle-aged lady boarding with Paula

James Ross (Don Beddoe), a wealthy middle-aged jewelry dealer

Professor Gordon (Leo G. Carroll), a middle-aged scholarly archaeologist

Mr. and Mrs. Walters (Charles Middleton and Claire Du Brey), who seem to be spiritualists (I was never quite sure what their religion was.)

An obviously terrified man named Gerald Pendleton, who won't come out of his cabin (Leonard Mudie).  Could he be our next murder victim?

When Charlie gets on board he finds that Dick Kenyon's uncle has been murdered (strangled!) upping out cruise body count to three already.  After the ship sets sail, Jimmy is caught as a stowaway and put to work, which Charlie allows (denying he knows him) so that Jimmy can hunt for clues at his father's direction. He actually proves pretty useful in this one.  

Some of our suspects: Paula, Dick, James, Susie and the Walters

Nothing to hide here!  Dr. Suderman and Mr. Walters

a pair of master thespians (Lionel Atwill and Leo G. Carroll)

Susie gets dramatic

Jimmy gets manhandled

Gangway!  Jimmy finally got a clue. 

Murder Cruise changes the plot around from the book quite a bit, although the basis of it--another revenge from the past deal--is the same.  Suspense is pretty well-maintained, with a shift of culpritude in the last fifteen minutes or so to three different people.  However, disappointingly for me, the film steals a device from an older Warner Oland Chan film and if you have seen that film you are going to know almost immediately who the killer is.  I'm surprised not to see reviews mention this.

On top of that the main clue to the killer is one of the verbal slip-up variety, where the killer stupidly says something that reveals himself.  Any practiced mystery fan can tell right off when it's happening, even if they do not have knowledge about the subject.  

Despite all that the film is still an enjoyable mid-range Toler Fox Chan, nowhere near the best of them, but not the worst either.  Certainly it's fun to see those fine, frequent film villains Carroll and Atwill in the same film in the same film; they even have a scene briefly just to themselves.  Marjorie Weaver, her southern accent only slightly discernible, and Robert Lowery, both 26 at the time of filming, are stronger than your usual juvenile love interests, though there's only so much you can do with those roles.   

jinx ahoy

Susie gets asked to dance

Uncle Charlie dispenses relationship advice like Papa Poirot

Then there's Charles Middleton and Claire Du Brey as the gloomy religious couple, both of whom have great presence.  Middleton is famous for having played Ming the Merciless in the Flash Gordon serials; out of makeup he looks and sounds a lot like John Carradine, though he doesn't have the latter's charisma.  Claire Du Brey gets all the best lines between the two, however, as his wife who is always portentously spouting spiritualistic hoodoo.  

Du Brey is enjoyably paired off against the film's primary comic relief, Cora Witherspoon, who spends the film either screaming or getting off catty one-liners.  She's a lot of fun and reminded me a lot of Mrs. Howell from Gilligan's Island, the late, great Natalie Schafer.  Unsurprisingly both women frequently played haughty society matrons on film in the Thirties and Forties.  

at the mortuary

Gotcha, biatch!

At the end of the film when Witherspoon tells tells Charlie he can find her at the San Francisco YWCA, day or night, there's a real poignancy to her delivery.  She's had fun on this cruise, even with (or perhaps because of) all the murders, and now it's back to the boring everyday life of the unmarried woman of a certain age.  (On the cruise she even got to dance with hunky Lowery, an actor almost half her age.)  

The lengthy resolution of the film (where a new character is brought in to give necessary exposition) takes place at the San Francisco morgue, allowing Susie to get off her best zinger to Mrs. Walters.  There's also a nice comic turn by Harlan Briggs as the coroner, who just wants to get this all done with and eat his sandwiches.  Jimmy has his best comic "bit" at the very end, taking both the coroner and his pop by surprise.  Detractors can say what they will, I think Sen Yung was a terrific actor.  

Sidney Toler did eleven Chan films for Fox and it seems to me the clear standouts from that tenure are Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939), Charlie Chan in the Wax Museum (1940), Dead Men Tell (1941) and Castle in the Desert (1942).  Pretty close to these are Charlie Chan in Reno (1939) and Charlie Chan in Panama (1940).  All but Reno were written by John Francis Larkin, who really seems to have blossomed with his quintet of Chan films.  Murder Cruise is not in the same league as those but it's still an enjoyable B mystery trip, particularly if you are a fan of the genre, and of the inimitable Charlie Chan.