Speaking of Agatha...Nicholas Blake Reviews Some Crime Fiction

No doubt being the mystery fanciers that you are, you've all heard the news by now that crime writer Sophie Hannah will be publishing an authorized Hercule Poirot mystery next year.

I view this with some trepidation, but will hope for the best.  Expect to see a review from me coming soon of a Sophie Hannah novel!

Hannah, who like The Passing Tramp and I'm sure many others who read this blog, read Agatha Christie voraciously as a youngster, regards the Queen of Crime as "the greatest crime writer of all time"--putting her at odds, I suspect, with many of her fellow crime writers (including her second favorite crime writer, Ruth Rendell), who take a more condescending view.

I had been planning to post this piece anyway, oddly enough, but it may have special interest now.

It's drawn from a review article that crime writer Nicholas Blake (poet C. Day Lewis, who also wrote the well-regarded Nigel Strangeways mysteries) did back in 1936 in the Spectator.  He reviewed seven novels:

The ABC Murders, by Agatha Christie
Murder Isn't Easy, by Richard Hull
Scandal at School, by G. D. H. and Margaret Cole
A Word of Six Letters, by Herbert Adams
Who Killed Gatton?, by E. Charles Vivian
Vultures in the Sky, by Todd Downing
The Nursing Home Murder, by Ngaio Marsh

Here are some choice bits from Mr. Blake:

On The ABC Murders: "The characters, particularly that of the murderer, are rather too perfunctorily sketched.  Apart from this, one can have nothing but praise for The ABC Murders, which is really a little masterpiece of construction."

one of the great plots

On Murder Isn't Easy: "Mr. Hull, on the other hand, as we realised in his first book, The Murder of My Aunt, has great gift for character; and here again he gives it full scope by recording events in the first person....holds the interest throughout....

a few years later Christie countered that, actually, Murder Is Easy

On Scandal at School (The Sleeping Death in the United States): "The Coles have paid much more attention to character than in some of their earlier books.  The dialogue is consistently lifelike, the setting, too, is well done....Less convincing is the character of the victim....This weakens the motive....The plot, also, rather resembles a clockwork mouse: erratic in direction, and requiring too frequent winding-up."

leftist intellectuals like the Coles (and C. Day Lewis for that matter)
read and wrote detective fiction too

On A Word of Six Letters: "Must be criticised on the following counts: (1) Supineness of police (2) Padding: there is too much superfluous eating and drinking; this is only permissible when the author (cf. Mr. H. C. Bailey passim), and therefore the reader, gets a kick out of it (3) Title: crosswords play a very subordinate part in the plot (4) Archness: e.g., "Ramp it was.  There can be some merry doings in searching pretty girls for an elusive slipper."

over his long life Herbert Adams (1874-1958) published numerous mysteries and thrillers

On Who Killed Gatton?: "We turn from the arch to the heroic-on-stilts style....The book also contains a great deal of cap-lifting whenever England, the dead, &c, are mentioned, a magnificent 1890 vintage proposal-of-marriage scene, and a ditto never-set-foot-in-my-house-again one.  Those who, like myself, revel in this sort of thing will be rewarded as well by an exciting and cleverly worked-out tale."

On Vultures in the Sky: "I have not read The Cat Screams, but if it is as good as Mr. Downing's new book it is very good indeed.  He has that command of tempo without which a detection writer can never rise into the first class.  He avoids the American tendency to overwrite the trivial, yet he can write up to the dramatic situation when it comes.  He has the sotto-voce, ungesticulating way of leading one up to the edge of a precipice which makes a walk with Dr. M. R. James so deliciously uncomfortable.......This book puts him into the Van Dine--Ellery Queen class: I do not expect to read a better detective novel for a long time."

the third of Todd Downing's Hugh Rennert detective novels

On The Nursing Home Murder: "sound motives....a charming detective, local colour obviously put on by a professional hand, a pretty wit, and a perfectly reasonable solution...unreservedly recommended...."

While Blake certainly paid Christie and Marsh their dues, he seems to indicate his favorite of the lot (and his favorite for some time) was Todd Downing's Vultures in the Sky.  As old hands here will know, I have taken some interest in Downing, publishing the book Clues and Corpses on his life, crime fiction and crime fiction reviews.  Vultures in the Sky also is available in a very nice edition from Coachwhip.

I happen to have read six of the seven books reviewed by Blake and I would rank them as follows, in terms of personal favorites (please note that I recognize the brilliance of the plot of The ABC Murders, but it is not a book I as much enjoy rereading as Vultures, after knowing the twist):

1. Vultures in the Sky
2. The ABC Murders
3. Murder Isn't Easy
4. The Nursing Home Murder
5. Scandal at School
6. A Word of Six Letters

As for the E. Charles Vivian novel, I have no idea who killed Gatton!

Tempests: Murder on the Yacht (1932), by Rufus King

As I write this post Hurricane Isaac is making landfall in Louisiana as a minimal (75 mph) hurricane.  It's much a much weaker storm than Hurricane Katrina, but let us hope the rains it brings don't produce anything close to a repetition of Katrina's flooding in New Orleans.  I lived in Baton Rouge for some years and my thoughts are with you, Louisiana.

stormy weather

The second of Rufus King's trio of Lieutenant Valcour maritime mysteries--Murder by Latitude (1930), Murder on the Yacht (1932) and The Lesser Antilles Case (1934)--involves a hurricane.  Adding a natural disaster to a mystery seems an obvious way of increasing the suspense quotient, but Murder on the Yacht is the first case I am aware of where a mystery author does this.

The next year Ellery Queen produced in The Siamese Twin Mystery a tale of people trapped in a house on a mountain gradually being engulfed in a forest fire who just happen to have on their hands a murder case as well; while in 1934 and 1935, respectively, Todd Downing (whose favorite mystery writer was Rufus King) and Newton Gayle (an American-English duo) produced mysteries, Murder on the Tropic and Murder at 28:10, in which hurricanes played major roles in the story lines.  Since then, I suppose the device has been using many times, but these are some of the most important early instances.

Will Crusader make its destination?

In some ways, Murder on the Yacht is imitative of Murder by Latitude.  Valcour thinks a murderer is on board the yacht Crusader and he joins its voyage to try to spot the killer.  This time a smaller craft is involved, but still there is clear similarity between the two books.  Yet King succeeds in creating another fantastic mystery, full of suspense and genuine detection.  

Crusader is owned by New York millionaire Anthony Bettle.  He is on an unspecified mission to the Ragged Island of Jumento Cays, "a forgotten group of islands rimming the southern edge of the 330-mile-long great Bahama bank in a hundred mile arc."  Only Ragged Island is inhabited (by fewer than 100 people).  What is Bettle up to?  Valcour doesn't know.

Also on the ship are Bettle's wife Helen (a society matron type who married Bettle in the classic exhange of position for money); their son John; Helen's dilettantish brother Wharton Luke; Horatio Barlowe and his lovely red-haired daughter Freda; Freda's companion Miss Singlestar; Peter Moore, nephew of Bettle's attorney Waverly Hedglin; and Carlotta Balfe, famous medium and spiritual guru of sorts to Anthony Bettle.  There's also a complement of crew, several of whom are quite nicely sketched in as individuals and not the usual comic "servant" throwaways that you find all too often in Golden Age mysteries.

Waverly Hedglin was on the yacht but apparently disembarked and has since disappeared.  Valcour thinks Hedglin was murdered on the yacht.  Is he right?

many dangers fill the deep

Two-thirds of Murder on the Yacht passes before an "on-stage" murder takes place (although Hedglin's body briefly appears on a deck chair--or does it?), but this murder, of one of the passengers listed above, is a real doozy, occurring in a chapter that would have graced a first-class horror tale.

From this point on, this narrative never lets up and the suspense is something extra.  Soon the hurricane strikes and Valcour is left giving the traditional drawing room exposition in truly unique circumstances.

Characterization again is excellent, with each named person distinctive, and some quite memorable.  Dialogue is sparkling, descriptive writing evocative.

There's an interesting theme too about the hubris of the American moneyed class in the 1930s.  Rufus King himself came of money, of parents who lived in a posh Manhattan townhouse and wintered in Florida and could send him to a fine prep school and to Yale (where King most distinguished himself playing women's parts in Yale Dramat. musicals.); but in this novel, published in the early throes of the Great Depression, King takes a dim view of the mental effect that masses and masses of money can have on people:

Porpoises looped slickly at the bows, looping, looping, strange projectiles hurtling, all with incredible swiftness and grace, an amusing circus with the Gulf Stream for their rings.  But Valcour was not amused.  Sunlight sank richly with its glow and heat, jading blue water and adding soft glitter to creaming crests, but he saw no beauty in it and felt no warmth.

He thought: Just as love makes you blind so does wealth, and of the two blindnesses wealth is the worse because of the incalculable harm it is able to do to people other than yourself.  Bettle was wealth.  And Bettle was stone blind.

This is mystery genre writing of unusual sophistication, either in the Golden Age or today or any other age, in my view.  Why on earth (or sea) have Rufus King's books dropped out of the canon?

Maneaters: Murder by Latitude (1930), by Rufus King

Valcour sat beside Captain Sohme at the forward end of the small lounge.  The leaden sky and air made of it a cubicle of murk which the ceiling lights, that had been turned on, scarcely affected at all, and the sea was a woman's glass with the ship a tense, unhappy atom creeping, turn by turn, along its flat insensate floor.... (Murder by Latitude, 1930)

For a short period in the early to mid 1930s there were, in the eyes of a number of mystery critics and readers of the time, two reigning monarchs of American classical detective fiction, Ellery Queen and Rufus King.  If Ellery Queen's reputation has faded (most unjustly) among the mystery masses, Rufus King's has vanished into air. I have only read a few novels by Rufus King, but in my view on the strength of his fifth mystery novel, Murder by Latitude, his name should be not merely recollected but lauded.

Certainly Murder by Latitude at least should be in print!  It's one of the major American works within the detective fiction genre from the period between the two World Wars.

a novel as stylish as its dust jacket

Murder by Latitude is one of those novels with a plot so suspenseful that one really must be careful in the name of aesthetic justice of writing too much about it.  Broadly speaking, Murder by Latitude, as the title indicates, is an ocean liner mystery, one of early vintage.  There is a very early yacht mystery, The After House (1914), by Mary Roberts Rinehart and I know Carolyn Wells did one typically mediocre effort in the 1920s called The Bronze Hand that takes place on an ocean liner. There also are a number of later examples, including several others by King himself.  One of the best known of these is John Dickson Carr's The Blind Barber (1934).  However, King's maiden effort in this sub-genre made a great splash at the time--and deservedly so.

On the ship in Murder by Latitude is a remarkably ruthless murderer.  He--or she?--has killed once already and kills again on board the liner Eastern Bay as it makes its tortured way from Bermuda to Halifax.  Indeed, the novel opens in quite an attention grabbing manner with a description of the strangling of the ship's wireless man.  This savage slaying has the effect of preventing the ship from getting messages from the New York police, who now have a description of the murderer for Lieutenant Valcour, King's series detective, who is also on board the ship, trying to catch the culprit.  Now Valcour is left groping in the dark, and the murderer has not yet completed his (her?) work....

the English edition of King's novel

Murder by Latitude is something one doesn't come across every day: a real page turner.  I read over 200 pages in one sitting, something I very rarely do these days.  It's superbly suspenseful (why are those objects disappearing?), evocatively written (you really get the sense of a ship at sea), modern in tone and well-characterized (more below) and, best of all for a 'tec fiction fiend, it boasts a really clever solution, masterfully twisted by the hand of a storytelling virtuoso. 

in the book it's the stiff that's deshabille
--though the dame indeed is a blonde

Mike Grost, who has written rather extensively on the internet about Rufus King (Grost and other bloggers who have written about King are linked below), argues that Latitude is also notable for its "gay sensibility."  I have to say I agree with Grost's assessment.

For example, the middle-aged, much married Mrs. Poole is a maneater who harpoons (Valcour's word) much younger men as husbands.  She is on board with husband number five, Ted Poole, who is constantly portrayed in an objectified manner by the author. "It was a pity he had his clothes on," thinks Mrs. Poole, as she looks over at her much younger husband "wriggling" on a deck chair.

There is also a movingly portrayed relationship between two crewmen on the ship that is, as Mike Grost has written, rather Melvilleian in tone.  Then there's that queer Frenchman, Mr. Dumarque, a remarkable epigram-tossing aesthete.  Latitude is not a "gay mystery," but it does seem as though it might have been written by a gay man.

Currently very little is known about Rufus King, even though he was a popular and prolific writer within the mystery genre for many years, publishing twenty-three mystery novels and short story collections between 1927 and 1951 and three more genre books between 1958 and 1964.  He died two years late in 1966, at the age of 73.
 
King graduated from Yale in 1914, then spent a few years at sea, enjoying "a romantic life of rolling ships and strange ports."  He also spent some time as a workman in a Paterson, New Jersey silk mill.  When the United States entered the Great War he served in it as an artillery lieutenant. King's first mystery novel did not appear until ten years later, when King was 34, but he quickly made a name for himself in the field.  His breakthrough detective novel, Murder by the Clock (1929), was adapted into a well-regarded film in 1931 (the other best-known Rufus King film is the Fritz Lang directed The Secret Beyond the Door, 1947).

the derelict Delaware and Hudson Railway Station at Rouse's Point, New York
where Rufus King regularly would have stopped off

During his life King annually resided part of the year at Rouse's Point, New York, located on Lake Champlain a mile south of the United States-Canada border.  He was a good friend of the Oscar-nominated gay actor Monty Wooley, a fellow New Yorker and Yalie.  I believe both his life and his books are worth exploring.

Links to other bloggers on Rufus King:

Mike Grost (detail on plots)

John Norris (Murder by the Clock)

TomCat (The Case of the Constant God)

Pietro De Palma (Murder by Latitude--SPOILERS!!) Pietro calls it a "masterpiece" and I agree!

"The Artistic Superstructure of the Epoch of Labor Unionism and Socialization": Ludwig von Mises on the Detective Story

My blogger friend Patrick Ohl recently posted a piece on his At the Scene of the Crime blog on critic Edmund Wilson's famous anti detective fiction diatribe
"Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" 

To be sure, Edmund Wilson was of a leftist political orientation, but to demonstrate that ill-informed criticism of detective fiction knows no ideological bounds, I direct you to famous libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises' contribution to the subject, "Remarks about the Detective Stories," from "Literature under Capitalism," a chapter in his book The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (1956) (the whole piece can be found here on the Ludwig von Mises Institute website). It certainly offers a different take on the subject, but it also illustrates the pitfalls inherent in heavily theory-driven, insufficiently researched approaches to the study of detective fiction.

One suspects that Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) and Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) had little in common, but they did have this: they didn't think much of detective fiction.  Oh and this: neither man seems well-informed about detective fiction--a failing which nevertheless did not prevent them from making sweeping pronouncements about it (famous intellectuals often don't seem to have qualms about such things).

Forget revolvers and daggers,
watch out for hammers and sickles!

Typically, Golden Age detective fiction has been condemned by leftist-oriented critics like Julian Symons and Colin Watson--not to mention a number of Marxian 1970s academics--as a conservative literary genre promoting "bourgeois hegemony" (not being academics, Symons and Watson don't use that term, but it's what they mean too).

Now, Ludwig von Mises is having none of this!  None at all.

Much, much to the contrary of the Symons-Watson view, Mises sees detective fiction as an essentially  leftist literary genre crafted to undermine capitalism. "The artistic superstructure of the epoch of labor unionism and socialization," he calls it (whew!).

Ludwig unloads: detective fiction
appeals to those afflicted with a
"latent anti-bourgeois tendency"

Mises starts his discussion of detective fiction with what seems to me to be a mistaken notion: that because the Golden Age of detective fiction coincided with the rise to power of Communism and Socialism (not to mention Fascism), there must be some sort of causal relationship between detective fiction and anticapitalism.  He writes:

The age in which the radical anticapitalistic movement acquired seemingly irresistible power brought about a new literary genre, the detective story.  The same generation of Englishmen whose votes swept the Labour Party into office were enraptured by such authors as Edgar Wallace.  One of the outstanding British socialist authors, G. D. H. Cole, is no less remarkable as an author of detective stories.

I'm not sure when this piece on detective fiction was actually written by Mises (the references to Edgar Wallace, who died in 1932, and Douglas Cole, who hadn't published a detective novel since 1942, were dated in 1956, or even 1945, when Labour came to power), but there are some notable errors here:

• Detective fiction was not a "new literary genre" in the 1920s (although it did achieve new popularity).
• Edgar Wallace for the most part did not really write true detective fiction, but thrillers, which true detective novelists of the period believed appealed to a less intellectually sophisticated audience.
• Many Golden Age British detective novelists (and even more so thriller writers) were politically conservative and averse to leftist ideology in their books. Moreover, they often were hostile to the Labour party when it came into power in the 1945-1951 period. The prominent Socialist G. D. H. Cole (apparently Mises did not deem it necessary to mention Douglas Cole's accomplished wife Margaret Cole) was exceptional in this regard.

Mises notes that "many historians, sociologists and psychologists have tried to explain the popularity of this strange genre [yes, Mises means detective fiction!--TPT]. For his part, Mises breezily explains that the reader of "this strange genre"

is the frustrated man who did not attain the position which his ambition impelled him to aim at....he is prepared to console himself by blaming the injustice of the capitalist system.  He failed because he is honest and law abiding.  His luckier competitors succeeded on account of their improbity; they resorted to foul tricks which he, conscientious and stainless as he is, would never have thought of.  If people only knew how crooked these arrogant upstarts are!  Unfortunately their crimes remained hidden....

Did this man inspire the
Golden Age of detective fiction?

Mises then goes on to explain what he terms the "typical course of events in a detective story."  It seems that generally the guilty party in mysteries is a successful businessman type--"an impeccable citizen"--who is revealed as a scheming, fiendish hypocrite.  Thus, the detective's motive in hunting down the criminal, according to Mises, is "a subconscious hatred of successful 'bourgeois.'"

Having established to his satisfaction this "latent anti-bourgeois tendency" in detective fiction, Mises goes on to explains that this "is why the detective story is popular with people who suffer from frustrated ambition."

Recently I did a blog piece on a mystery publisher promotional work called "Successful Men Read." Mises turns this round: it's unsuccessful, embittered men doing the reading!

Now, I won't say Mises' analysis is absolutely worthless.  Indeed, in my book Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery (2012) I note, for example, how after the Wall Street Crash prominent Golden Age British mystery writer Freeman Wills Crofts began portraying aggressive businessmen remarkably unsympathetically, though he was no Marxist--far from it! (indeed, Crofts' famous series detective, Inspector French, is a highly bourgeois police inspector).  And Anthony Wynne, who I last blogged about, was very dubious about modern finance capitalism, though he was a successful surgeon and no Marxist but, rather, a Christian monarchical feudalist.

Can you really imagine Miss Marple knitting
with this group of revolutionary ladies?

On the other hand, Mises' formulation seems to me an implausibly (to say the least) oversweeping generalization about a literary genre.

It's certainly interesting, even amusing, to think of such privileged fictional Golden Age 'tecs as Lord Peter Wimsey, Roderick Alleyn, Albert Campion, Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, Philo Vance, Ellery Queen, Nero Wolfe, etc., as an envious gang of anti-capitalist agents!

Typically the view of the Golden Age detective novel is that it's all about the restoration of the traditional (capitalist) order at the conclusion of the tale, after a disruptive murderer has been cast out of Eden, so to speak. Is it possible that Miss Marple was really a Madame Defarge at heart, or that Hercule Poirot was inspired by little red cells?  Mon dieu!

Literary Dynamism: Knight's Gambit (1949)--William Faulkner

When a literary titan deigns to dabble in detective fiction, it's always of interest, on account of this question: Can the Great Personage perform the challenging feat of combining traditional "literary" appeal with a competent puzzle?

Could that be a detective story he's reading?
I can't tell, but William Faulkner did read them.

It used to be considered axiomatic by aestheticians of the detective story that the genre could not absorb what were called the higher literary values.  Too much emphasis on character interest would wreck the "glittering mechanism" of the puzzle plot, declared Dorothy L. Sayers, the great Golden Age Authority on such things, at one point (she later Changed Her Mind).  Modern mystery genre critics tend not to concern themselves overmuch, if at all, with mere "glittering mechanisms" and thus are free to praise anything that the Literary Titan might produce in a vaguely mysterious line, whether or not it offers an interesting puzzle plot.

a Queen's Quorum title

William Faulkner, one of the greatest figures in twentieth-century American literature, published Knight's Gambit, a collection of what are called "six mystery stories," in 1949, though they were written at various times in the 1930s and 1940s.  The publication history is as follows:

"Smoke" (Harper's Magazine, 1932)
"Monk" (Scribner's Magazine, 1937)
"Hand Upon the Waters" (Saturday Evening Post, 1939)
"Tomorrow" (Saturday Evening Post, 1940)
"An Error in Chemistry" (1941, published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in1946)
Knight's Gambit (1942, rejected by Harper's and subsequently revised for Knight's Gambit, 1949)

In 1949, the same year Knight's Gambit was published, Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Ellery Queen gave Knight's Gambit a place in the Queen's Quorum of the 125 most important collections of shorter detective fiction works (however, when Faulkner a few years earlier entered "An Error in Chemistry" in the premier Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine short story contest, ironically the story only took second place, losing to "A Star for Warrior," by Manly Wade Wellman).

Is Knight's Gambit one of the cornerstone mystery short story collections? Personally, I would say no. First, half the stories are not even really detective, or even mystery, stories. Second, one of the three that is a mystery/detective story is not very good. The remaining two, "Smoke" and"An Error in Chemistry," are great, but a two out of six success rate means that the majority of Faulkner's plotting gambits fail. There's a lot of literary dynamism in Faulkner, God knows, but also fatal structural weaknesses, if one is looking at him as a detective fiction writer.

grisly crimes

To be sure, in some respects Faulkner and the mystery story seem like a natural fit. Sanctuary, the Mississippian's 1931 self-described "potboiler," had a great impact on American crime writing, with its unsparing and for the time quite explicit combination of violence, sex, and violent sex (the corncob rape sequence has lived in infamy right up to this day, when infamy seems commonplace).  It's visceral stuff indeed.

Moreover, Absalom, Absalom! (1936)--arguably Faulkner's greatest work--seems to me essentially a Gothic novel, with its dark, decaying southern mansion, enshrouded in a complex and horrid history of moral transgressions and murders.  One could say, I think, that Absalom, Absalom! is perhaps the greatest Gothic novel ever written.

Faulkner also worked on Hollywood film scripts in the late 1930s and the 1940s, including most famously the script for Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (Faulkner couldn't figure out who killed the chauffeur either).  Additionally, according to Blood on the Stage, Faulkner voraciously read genre fiction and admired, besides Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, John Dickson Carr and Rex Stout (in the 1950s he also confessed to admiring Georges Simenon, though that in itself is not necessarily a guarantee that one likes true detective stories).

Yet despite all this, Knight's Gambit doesn't quite come off in full, at least for a detective fiction fan.

Gothic horrors

The stories in Knight's Gambit are unified by the setting--Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi--and by the presence of the garrulous county attorney Gavin Stevens and his nephew, Charles ("Chick") Mallison.  Stevens and nephew appeared in the (successfully filmed) novel Intruder in the Dust (1948), as well as The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959), the concluding volumes of the Snopes trilogy.

Stevens had been called by literary critic Irving Howe "surely the greatest wind-bag in American literature" and I have to admit that I tend to agree with this assessment.  The lawyer, who became kind of a fictive alter ego for Faulkner, speaks in this incredibly, implausibly ornate, oratorical fashion that Faulkner himself increasingly adopted for his own third person narration in his novels (one is also unfortunately reminded of John Dickson Carr characters in Carr's later novels).  This ornate style works in the highly Gothic and sensation-ridden Absalom, Absalom! but is too heavy a burden, I think, for a ratiocinative detective story to bear.  Simply put, the detective story is too slight a structure to withstand the crushing weight of all Gavin Stevens' (and Faulkner's) rhetorical baggage.

This narrative style prevents me from enjoying as much as I would like the Gavin Stevens novels and the Stevens novella Knight's Gambit.  At about 120 pages Gambit makes up about half the length of the Knight's Gambit collection.  The basic plot might have made an interesting short had Faulkner kept it to forty pages or less or--dare I suggest it--just handed it over to Mignon Eberhart to write.  A wealthy, word-traveling plantation widow at the dangerous age in those days for women (she's nearing forty) has brought back from her South American tour an Argentinean house guest, one Captain Gualdres.  She also has two young adult children: a daughter who may love the captain and a son who definitely hates him.  And there's the local farmer's daughter in the mix.  Faulkner himself refers in the story to the characters being "like the stock characters in the slick magazine serial, even to the foreign fortune hunter."  He's certainly right about that, so why try to dress it up as Great Literature?

The prolific American mystery writer
Mignon Eberhart
could have made aces with the plot of
Knight's Gambit

None of the characters in the novella every become really interesting, though Faulkner makes some effort with Captain Gualdres.  There's also a lot of coming-of-age/World War Two stuff for Gavin's nephew (the novella is set in 1941-1942) and the story of an old romance for Gavin himself (I think this uninteresting plot line was ditched by Faulkner when he came to writing The Town and The Mansion in the late 1950s).  And way too much overwriting, like the 300+ word sentence describing the approach to a plantation (at least I think that's what it was describing).

Basically Gambit could be called an inverted crime story, I suppose (or an inverted attempted crime story), but there's way too much else going to sustain much interest in the basic plot line.

The remaining works in the collection are much shorter pieces, and benefit from being such (Faulkner disciplines himself rhetorically). However, two of them, "Monk" and "Tomorrow," are not even really detective, or even mystery, stories, but, rather, character studies ("Tomorrow" was made into an excellent though quite depressing Robert Duvall film in 1971)--though "Monk" interestingly does use a device associated with several Ellery Queen novels.  Another of the stories, "Hand Upon the Waters," is a detective story, but a weak one, slight as a puzzle and as character study alike.

Yet fortunately there are two grand successes: "Smoke" and "An Error in Chemistry."

"Smoke" (1932)

Anselm Holland came to Jefferson many years ago.  Where from, no one knew....

Melville Davisson Post
creator of Uncle Abner

This story of the accidental (?) death of the tyrannical farming family patriarch Anse Holland and the shooting murder of Judge Dukenfield, the man appointed to be Chancellor of Anse Holland's heir-taunting will, is a delight. With its rural courtly formality it rather reminded of the classic Uncle Abner tales of Melville Davisson Post.

Although regrettably it is not really a fairly clued detective story, we do at least get to see Gavin Stevens legitimately ratiocinate and spring a tour de force trap for the killer.  I enjoyed it immensely and even found that old gasbag Gavin Stevens appealing.

This exchange reminded me of John Rhode's series detective Dr. Priestley, who loathes conjecture with an abiding passion:

"Conjecture is all well enough--"
"All right," Stevens said.  "Let me conjecture a little more...."

Gavin Stevens is no Dr. Priestley, and I don't believe Priestley would tolerate the garrulous gasbag at table for a minute, but he's a whole helluva lot of fun in this tale.  This most definitely is the closest Gavin Stevens ever comes in the short tales to being a Great Detective.  He most certainly is a great showman.

"An Error in Chemistry" (1946)

It was Joel Flint himself who telephoned the sheriff that he had killed his wife....

Faulkner, cigarette in hand,
 closer to the time he wrote "Smoke"

It's not surprising Faulkner submitted "An Error in Chemistry" to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, because it's the best detective story he wrote.  This one concerns Joel Flint, Yankee and "outlander" who marries the spinster (nearly forty again!) daughter of yet another tyrannical farming family patriarch (the county seems to have these in abundant supply) and admits to shooting her a couple years later.  But the crime makes no sense!  What is going on here?

Gavin Stevens finds the answer by means of a (nicely presented) accident, but an astute, experienced reader likely can deduce what's going on beforehand, because wily William Faulkner employs numerous classic mystery devices like a genre fan of long standing.

There also is some definite similarity in theme with Faulkner's brilliant Gothic story "A Rose for Emily," but honor compels me to refrain from saying more.

In "Error" Stevens has an interesting friendship with a Bible-quoting sheriff. I particularly liked this exchange, on the nature of truth versus justice.

"I'm interested in truth," the sheriff said.
"So am I," Uncle Gavin said.  "It's so rare.  But I am more interested in justice and human beings."
"Ain't truth and justice the same thing?" the sheriff said.
"Since when?"  Uncle Gavin said.  "In my time I have seen truth that was anything under the sun but just, and I have seen justice using tools and instruments I wouldn't want to touch with a ten-foot fence rail."

The question of what is true justice and just truth sometimes gets addressed in regular old detective stories by regular old detective writers as well, but it's pleasing to see a leading literary light like Faulkner address it.

So would you want to buy Knight's Gambit?  I'm glad I did, for these two stories are very good indeed. Take a chance on it if you haven't read them--you might even like some of the others better than I did.

By the way, here's an interesting paper on Faulkner's use of detective story devices, by Makoto Ohno:

"Faulkner in Mystery" (big spoilers to "An Error in Chemistry," "Monk" and Intruder in the Dust.)--TPT

Death in the Deep South

John Updike on Mystery Fiction

Perusing Due Considerations (2007), the recent essay collection by the late, great American writer John Updike (1932-2009), I spotted a few nuggets on the mystery/detective novel/thriller that I hope are of interest to mystery fans (they were to me!).

In a piece on his childhood reading that he wrote for the New York Times in 1965, Updike reflected on what he calls his "inability to read bravely as a boy":

My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, as it is yet.  I was afraid of encountering, in any book, something I didn't want to know....O. Henry was the only recommended author unreal enough for me to read with pleasure.  Having deduced that "good books" depict a world in which horror may intrude, I read all through my adolescence for escape.  From the age of twelve I had my own user's card to the Reading (Pennsylvania) Public Library, a beautiful, palatial haven....I read all the books the library had by Erle Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, and John Dickson Carr, in that order....Also humorists....Fifty books by P. G. Wodehouse I must have consumed....Science fiction just barely escaped being too alarming; I read of it copiously until its implications--of time and space so vast that the individual life is as nothing--began to sink in.

John Updike

Reading Public Library: "a beautiful, palatial haven"

The young Updike saw the mystery genre as the great genre of escape and thus he embraced it wholeheartedly.  "With such books," he writes, "I dissipated my youth, while my contemporaries were feasting on classics."  Updike recalls at age fifteen experiencing his "last vivid boyhood fright from books" when he visited his uncle and aunt in Greenwich, Connecticut and discovered their copy of James Joyce's Ulysses:

The whiff of death, God's death, that came off those remorseless, closely written pages overwhelmed me.

So back the young Updike went to "soluble mysteries, as in mystery novels...."

the "whiff of death, God's death" in the
"remorseless" pages of James Joyce's Ulysses 
gave the young Updike a genuine "fright"

John Updike

In a review forty years later of a spy thriller, Robert Littell's Legends (2005), Updike recalled being

a fourteen year old boy lying on a red caneback sofa in Pennsylvania eating peanut-butter-and-raisin sandwiches (a site-specific ethnic treat) and reading one mystery novel after another.  Not just mysteries--Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Ngaio Marsh, Erle Stanley Gardner--but an occasional international thriller, like Eric Ambler's A Coffin for Demetrios and Graham Greene's The Third Man.  The idea of reading a non-genre novel, with its stodgy domestic realism and sissy fuss over female heartbreak, repelled me then, but I could lose myself all morning and afternoon in narratives of skullduggery, detection and eventual triumphant justice.  And, so, to judge from the best-seller lists, can millions still.  Thrillers, as we shall call them, offer the reader a firm contract...The reader's essential safety, as he reclines on his red sofa, will not be breached.

Gardner evidently goes down great with
 peanut-butter-and-raisin sandwiches

Updike goes on to note that modern crime writers  like P. D. James "give signs of wanting to be 'real' novelists, free to follow character where it takes them and to display their knowledge of the world without the obligation to provide what William Dean Howells disapprovingly called 'a complicated plot, spiced with perils, surprises and suspenses'."

American realist author William Dean Howells
wrote disapprovingly of complicated plots
"spiced with perils, surprises and suspenses"

So, is Updike condemning his childhood mystery reading as the dissipated escapism of youth?  As a great literary eminence, did Updike feel contempt for the classical mystery genre?  Not so, I would argue.  He seems finally to have regarded the books with genuine warmth and affection.

Updike admired Christie's
"brilliantly compact, stylized and efficient mysteries"

Considering Agatha Christie specifically, Updike writes of the Crime Queen's "brilliantly compact, stylized and efficient mysteries."  He adds that "the genre in its lean classic English form fit [Christie] like a cat burglar's thin black glove."

credibility over ingenuity?

Updike sounds much more respectful of Agatha Christie than many modern journalists and crime writers!  Judging from the above I am not altogether certain Updike believed that P. D. James necessarily got the better of Christie when in her mysteries she traded ingenuity for credibility (as James herself has put it). Updike seems to recognize that there is a respectable place in the world of literature for the classical detective novel of the sort associated with Christie, Carr, Queen, Gardner, Marsh and others.

I suspect those of us who devoured classical mystery at a young age, like John Updike and Michael Dirda, never forget the youthful pleasure of it, even if we "outgrow" it.  And, for better or worse (personally, I'm in the better camp), many of us, like the great intellectual Jacques Barzun (age 104), never outgrow it.

Jacques Barzun
mystery reader of nine decades standing

Addendum: Here's a great 2004 interview with Updike where he refers to his childhood love of classical detection--The Passing Tramp

http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/upd0int-1

I loved Agatha Christie, of course. And also, an American team called Ellery Queen. I read a lot of Ellery Queen. Erle Stanley Gardner. I must have read 40 books by Erle Stanley Gardner before I was 15 or so. 

Writing the Impossible: A Review of More Things Impossible: The Second Casebook of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2006)

If any single person were to get my vote for the "greatest modern master of the mystery short story," it would have to be the late Edward D. Hoch, who passed away four years ago at the age of seventy-seven, up to the very end an astonishingly prolific author.  What would have been Hoch's eighty-second birthday was just three days ago, so I thought it would be especially appropriate now to do a piece on this great mystery writer.

Although at his death Hoch amazingly was nearing the 1000 mark in mystery short stories authored and had created an impressive array of series investigators, my favorite Hoch detective has remained Dr. Sam Hawthorne, the country physician who during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s solved a really quite surprisingly large number of impossible crimes (usually murders) in his not so peaceful little corner of New England.

Crippen & Landru, that wonderful mystery short story publisher, produced the first "Dr. Sam" story collection when it published the original dozen Dr. Sam stories as Diagnosis: Impossible in 1996 (this volume was the fourth book done by Crippen & Landru, after books by John Dickson Carr, Margery Allingham and Marcia Muller).  Ten years later C&L followed with More Things Impossible, a collection of the next fifteen Dr. Sam tales (these originally appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine between 1978 and 1983).

Edward D. Hoch

The appeal of Hoch's Dr. Sam stories is twofold, I think.

First, they offer a dazzling mother lode of miracle problems--the sort of superbly ingenious, densely clued mystery puzzles associated most prominently in mystery genre history with the brilliant locked room novels and stories of John Dickson Carr.  When I bought my copy of the first Dr. Sam collection way back in 1996, I was moved to write Professor Doug Greene, the distinguished mystery scholar and Crippen & Landru guru, an Edward D. Hoch fan letter, telling Doug that Hoch seemed to me "a certain mystery author reinCARRnated."  The puzzles Dr. Sam confronts often are that clever.

Second, however, the stories have a great deal of appeal for their local and period color. Though Hoch never forgets he is presenting readers with a puzzle, he nevertheless manages as well in each story to give an appealing and convincing portrait of a time and place (charmingly, Dr. Sam's Northmont is a neighbor village to Ellery Queen's Shinn Corners--see EQ's The Glass Village).  Indeed, I would say that the Dr. Sam stories not only boast many marvelous puzzles, but also that they constitute one of the mystery genre's finest collections of local color fiction.

More Things Impossible offers readers a bounty of fifteen mystery stories, dated from 1927 to 1931.  In each one Hoch presents a fairly clued miracle problem.  Only one of them I managed to fully deduce--and that was one Dr. Sam's not over-keen Watson, Sheriff Lens, managed to solve, which may tell you something!  Opinions will vary, but my favorites are:

"The Problem of the Revival Tent"--Dr. Sam himself is the suspect when a revivalist huckster is stabbed to death in a tent which only he and Dr. Sam occupied.  The man had a faith healing son who was filling some of Dr. Sam's incurable patients with false hope, enraging Dr. Sam.  This is one of my very favorites in the collection, because the clueing to method and motive is so masterful (also it bears a certain resemblance in its subject matter to an important episode of the fine American television mystery series "The Mentalist").

"The Problem of the Whispering House"--Dr. Sam solves a murder in a sealed secret room in a haunted house.  What more could you ask for than this highly Carrian setting?

"The Problem of the Courthouse Gargoyle"--Who poisoned the judge during the murder trial?  And how?!  Just how did the poison get into the glass?  It seems impossible, but Dr. Sam deduces.  This one reminded me a bit of John Dickson Carr's The Black Spectacles.

"The Problem of the Pilgrims Windmill"--This one introduces the Pilgrim Memorial Hospital, which is frequently mentioned in the stories.  It also is one of Dr. Sam's most bizarre cases: a Satanic windmill that sets people in it afire.  Though the setting is Carrian or Chestertonian (the author specifically references G. K. Chesterton), the problem itself is like one out of John Rhode, another clever creator of impossible crimes. There's also a bit of a lesson in social justice.

"The Problem of the Octagon Room"--Sheriff Lens is getting married!  His fiancée has chosen to have the ceremony in the famous Octagon Room of a Cape Cod mansion. There's a bit of an impasse, however, when a corpse is found in that very room (when locked, naturally).  Here Hoch references S. S. Van Dine's locked room murder in The Canary Murder Case, but even those who have read that classic crime novel may not deduce the solution!

"The Problem of the Bootlegger's Car"--Dr. Sam goes hard-boiled when he confronts an impossible vanishing while being held prisoner by a group of bootlegging gangsters. Carr crossed with Dashiell Hammett.

"The Problem of the Hunting Lodge"--"Who could have done it?...A tramp passing through the woods?"  "A tramp who didn't leave footprints?"  Dr. Sam's visiting parents appear in this one, which involves another clever impossible killing.  No one on earth would really try to accomplish a murder this way, I suspect, but it's all fairly clued!

"The Problem of Santa's Lighthouse"--Perhaps my favorite story in More Things Impossible is this Christmas tale of an impossible murder in a haunted lighthouse (a man is stabbed and thrown down to the ground but it appears certain that no one else was near him at the time).  In succession Hoch provides not one, but two, brilliant solutions.  I dare you to get even one right (I partly did)!

By my count Edward Hoch wrote 72 Dr. Sam tales before his death, taking the brilliant amateur detective medico up to the end of World War Two.  I so would have liked for Hoch to live to tell us of some of Dr. Sam's Cold War exploits, but what he gave us is, as is, one of the very finest bodies of short fiction in the history of the mystery genre.

Crippen & Landru has a third Dr. Sam collection in the planning stage, I understand.  All devotees of classic puzzle and local color mystery fiction will love it, I am sure.  Indeed, one might say that it would be impossible for them not to love it.

Note: A few hardcover copies of More Things Impossible are still available from Crippen & Landru (the first collection is out of print).  It's a high quality limited edition, with a frontis of Edward Hoch, and it's numbered and signed by him.  There's also a tipped-in booklet with an additional Hoch story.  See http://www.crippenlandru.com/books.php?bookID=75 --The Passing Tramp

Killing Cousins: A Review of Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen, 1947-1950

Writers of biographies and/or critical studies know what a thrill it is to discover caches of personal letters written by one's subjects.  The dead people about whom one writes sometimes can become almost as real as living ones.  In Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen, 1947-1950, Joseph Goodrich has reproduced some fascinating material: a group of letters--culled from the Frederic Dannay Papers in the archives at Columbia University--exchanged over a four year period between Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, the two cousins once well-known to the world as the mystery writer "Ellery Queen."

Ellery Queen arguably is the greatest American exponent of the classical (puzzle-oriented) detective novel that we associate with the Golden Age of detective fiction (c 1920-1940).  Without a doubt Queen also is one of the great figures in the entire history of the mystery genre.

In addition to producing some of the most acclaimed works in the classical tradition--novels such as The Greek Coffin Mystery, The Tragedy of X, Calamity Town, Ten Days' Wonder, and Cat of Many Tails, for example, and the novella "The Lamp of God"--Ellery Queen also was, through Frederic Dannay, of huge significance in the genre. 

As an "editor, anthologist, collector and critic" Dannay was hugely important in his own right.  His "four decades at the helm of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine would be enough to insure his immortality in mystery publishing," Joseph Goodrich rightly avows.

I have to commend Perfect Crime Books, the publisher of Blood Relations, for printing a collection of letters by an author who, despite his undeniable importance to the mystery genre, is currently mostly out of print and sadly short shrifted by academic scholars in modern studies of the genre (three EQ novels currently are available in print on demand format from Langtail Press and Crippen & Landru offers two fine collections of shorter EQ works, The Tragedy of Errors, 1999, and The Adventure of the Murdered Moths and Other Radio Mysteries, 2005).

Although admittedly Blood Relations is of special interest to those who have read works by Ellery Queen, there nevertheless is to be found within its pages fascinating detail about the views of the two cousins, Dannay and Lee, on the mystery genre in general; and I wholeheartedly recommend the book to all lovers of Golden Age mystery.  Let us hope more reprints of the EQ books soon follow.

After a charming forward by William Link, producer of the television detective series Columbo, Ellery Queen and Murder, She Wrote (and author of The Columbo Collection, a short story volume published by Crippen & Landru), Goodrich provides an introduction explaining the historical significance of Ellery Queen and the nature of the interest of the published correspondence between the two cousins.  First, the letters highlight a highly contentious, even "vitriolic" (to use William Link's word) working relationship between the two passionately opinionated cousins.  People who think authors of "mere puzzles" are hacks who do not feel deeply about their work should think again after reading these letters. Second, the missives give great insight into the thinking about the mystery genre by two of its great men.

Dannay plotted the books and came up with the characters while Lee fleshed everything out in prose. Dannay was the one with the puzzle brain, Lee the one with the grand ambition to be, as Goodrich puts it, "the 20th Century's Shakespeare."

"That [Lee[ failed to do this," continues Goodrich, "is no shame, but the gap between desire and achievement" was a "source of torment" for Lee.  Lee's son Rand, notes Goodrich, admitted that his father "was one of the unhappiest men" that he had ever known.  Where Dannay believed that the detective novel could be raised to the level of literature, Lee had his doubts. Lee was, writes Goodrich, "far less interested in the form per se, and conflicted about expending his literary energies on something critics like Edmund Wilson held in contempt.  As good as he was at it, he didn't like what he was doing."

By the 1940s both men wanted to move beyond their glittering puzzles of the thirties (the brilliant succession of four-word nationality mysteries--The French Powder Mystery, The Greek Coffin Mystery, The American Gun Mystery, The Spanish Cape Mystery, etc.--and the "Barnaby Ross" Tragedy series), with their fiendish problems and flimsy characters, toward something more resembling mainstream literature.  In 1942 they produced Calamity Town, a more naturalistic work with greater character and setting interest.

During the time of the correspondence Goodrich has collected, Dannay and Lee were working on two of the mysteries commonly regarded as among their greatest, Ten Days' Wonder and Cat of Many Tails, as well The Origin of Evil.  The heated arguments the cousins got into over the composition of these books are fascinating.

Dannay insisted to Lee that with these books he was "trying to get away from material clues and positive, ultra-logical deductions." But Lee still tended to find situations in them false and artificial, and he let Dannay know this in no uncertain terms. He identified something that I have felt is true of the Ellery Queen books in general: even the ostensibly naturalistic ones are not all that naturalistic; most of them have implausible, anti-realistic elements imposed on them by the puzzle structure (I would say this is true to some degree even of Calamity Town).

Lee wrote a particularly thoughtful and incisive letter to Dannay on January 23, 1950 highlighting this "problem":

As I see it, what trouble exists between us on this question of fantasy in plot stems from our opposing points of view....I have a drive toward "realism"--conformity to the facts and color of life and the world as we live in it--in story; you have a drive to a sort of "superman" psychology in plot, in which vastness and boldness of conception is nearly everything--the colossal idea, planned to stagger if not bowl over the reader....While recognizing, even applauding all this, I still look at the result and I must say, "But how fantastic.  Who would--could--do such a thing?  Nobody human.  It doesn't ring true to life in exactly the proportion in which it is brilliantly conceived.  The more brilliant, the less convincing.  Yet I have to write the story in terms of people, in recognizable "realistic" background.

Dannay retorted that there "is more realism in good fantasy than in bad realism"--a point I would have loved to see him develop in the correspondence.  As it is I can sympathize with what Lee must have felt when he was presented with books like The Origin of Evil and The Glass Village.  The latter book, for example, is meant to be a savage satire of 1950s American McCarthyism, yet it is continually undermined, in my view, by its wildly unrealistic aspects. Trying to make all the plot points plausible must have been a real strain for Lee.  This is why I on the whole prefer the EQ books from the thirties, which are unashamedly artificial.  If the situation in The Siamese Twin Mystery, say, is contrived, so what?  It's not aiming at realism.  These 1930s tales are some of the most splendid examples of Golden Age Baroque in existence.

"Bad Realism" according to Ellery Queen

Both Dannay and Lee found an example of "bad realism" in the 1949 serialized version of hard-boiled master Raymond Chandler's novel The Little Sister.  The comments by both cousins concerning Chandler's work are strikingly splenetic (in their defense I should note that Cosmopolitan, the magazine that serialized The Little Sister, has just turned down the highly regarded EQ serial killer novel Cat of Many Tails, a book the cousins had figuratively sweated blood over in composing).

Of the Little Sister serialization a baffled and demoralized Dannay begged Lee:

Please read the Raymond Chandler story in the current issue of Cosmo and tell me how in the name of all that's reasonable, [Herbert] Mayes could buy the Chandler shit and reject the cat story? How? How?

Lee responded with another extraordinary missive, one that demands to be read in full.  It's an amazing jeremiad against what Lee derisively terms the "slick" school, with its

hard, millicron-thick veneer of sophistication-leer-tongue-in-cheek-we're-hep-boys-worldly-wise-night-club-stripper-rod-"quietly"-obscure-dialogue-reeferaddictswhoreshomosmobsters....

"Recognize facts," Lee lectured thunderingly of the slick magazines.  "They want shit, they are shit, and it takes a shit expert to satisfy them."

Like Dannay's and Lee's letters, Chandler's
"Simple Art" reflects resentment over rejection by the slicks

The supreme irony here is that "The Simple Art of Murder" (1944), Raymond Chandler's famous (or infamous) attack on the traditional puzzle detective novel (the sort Ellery Queen produced in the 1930s), surely was motivated to some extent by Chandler's own resentment over his novels and stories not being serialized in the highly remunerative slicks up to that time.  Now in the late 1940s Chandler's stuff was on the inside track and the EQ cousins feared that they were the ones being pushed to the outside.  That all Chandler's fictional works are in print and selling well while Ellery Queen books have faded shows Dannay and Lee were right to be concerned.

Modern critical opinion tends to see Raymond Chandler as a legitimate "serious" novelist, someone who raised the detective novel to the level of "literature," while dismissing Ellery Queen as a gimmicky purveyor of mere puzzles.  But anyone who does not believe that the cousins who comprised Ellery Queen were major creative artists in their own right, men who put a terrific amount of thought and labor as well as consummate skill into the composition of their mysteries, should read Blood Relations and learn something.  "Ellery Queen is the Forgotten Man of the mystery world," laments Goodrich in his conclusion.  While there actually are numerous undeservedly forgotten men (and women) from the Golden Age of the detective novel, certainly Ellery Queen is at the very top of the list of mystery writers who merit revival.