The Wailing Rock Murders (1932), by Clifford Orr

Clifford Orr's second detective novel, The Wailing Rock Murders (1932), has many of the features classic mystery fans love: a mysterious country house (actually, two of them), murder in a locked room (actually, two of them), a map, a floor plan and lots of shuddery atmosphere, including a rock formation the "wails" of which are said to foretell death.  The Rock certainly got it right in this case!

The events of the novel take place one late evening and early morning after Great Detective Spaton Meech discovers his beautiful young ward, Garda Lawrence, with her throat cut in the cupola room at Creamer and Vera Farnol's Victorian monstrosity of a mansion, perched on a cliff near Ogunquit, Maine. (This mystery takes the cake for odd names.)

Spaton Meech certainly is an unusual sleuth: he is nicknamed "Spider" on account of his hunched back, gangling arms and large head which he rests on his chest when he walks. Yet though his form is unprepossessing, to say the least, he is renowned here and yon as a Great Detective and he soon is essentially running the local sheriff's investigation, in the fashion of so many Golden Age mysteries.

Clifford Orr
(1899-1951)

Like a John Dickson Carr novel, The Wailing Rock Murders excels in atmosphere and brisk narrative pace, though it lacks, it must be admitted, the marvelous mechanical complexity of a Carr mystery. On the whole the novel strikes me as something of a Carr--S. S. Van Dine mashup (think The Greene Murder Case), though in fact Carr at this time (1932) had not achieved the outright mastery he soon would.

Unfortunately, just as Orr was really hitting his stride (his previous mystery was The Dartmouth Murders, reviewed here), he stopped writing detective fiction. Happily, however, both of Orr's detective novels will soon be available from Coachwhip, in a twofer edition with an introduction written by me.  And more is to come!  More on that soon, plus detail on the new book.

The Return of Patrick Quentin! Crippen & Landru's The Puzzles of Peter Duluth (2016)

I'm pleased today to be able to post the cover art for The Puzzles of Peter Duluth, publisher Crippen and Landru's collection of all the Patrick Quentin short fiction devoted to the exploits of Peter Duluth and his wife Iris, Quentin's series characters in nine novels, including the famous Patrick Quentin "Puzzle" series. The book will be released in just over a month, on March 25.

"Patrick Quentin," as I've discussed before on this blog, for much of his crime writing career was actually two British expatriates, Richard Wilson Webb and Hugh Callingham Wheeler.  (Wheeler later continued the series solo.)

Patrick Quentin was one of the most popular and critically-acclaimed authors of mid-century American crime fiction, so it's a bit "puzzling" why his novels remain out-of-print (and have been so for about a quarter of a century), when so many less prominent vintage mystery writers are being brought back into print.  This lapse makes Crippen & Landru's new book even more welcome.  The premier publisher of short crime fiction, Crippen & Landru can always be counted on by mystery fans.

Puzzles collects two dramatic Peter Duluth novellas and a couple of short stories, including the very charming "Puzzle for Poppy."  Three of these works were written by Webb and Wheeler in the 1940s, while the last was written by Wheeler solo in the 1950s.

The interesting collection of objects you see on the cover all are integral to the stories contained therein.  A gun surely comes as no surprise to readers of crime fiction, but a Saint Bernard? Read it and see.  (A hot dog could have been included on the cover as well, but that would have been even more puzzling perhaps!)

I wrote a 3000-word introduction to Puzzles, and there's also an amusing postscript by Mauro Boncompagni and a wonderful afterword by Joanna Gondris, Hugh Wheeler's great-niece. Scholarship finally is making great strides with Webb and Wheeler (I have a new essay coming out on them later this year); let's hope a publisher catches up and reissues the PQ novels, one of the major bodies of American crime fiction.

In the meantime, you should tide yourself over with The Puzzles of Peter Duluth, a collection of really first-rate short crime fiction by a couple of masters of mystery.  Doug Greene at Crippen & Landru did a great job getting this book put together.  On a personal note, I wrote Doug, who also is the biographer of John Dickson Carr, what you might call a fan note at Crippen & Landru about twenty years ago, back when I was graduate student; and it's exciting after all these years to have had the chance to write an introduction to one of his books!

An Echo of Eliot (Not to Mention Nabokov)

Paul Grimstad's recent New Yorker essay, "What Makes Great Detective Fiction, According to T. S. Eliot" is an interesting and well-written piece, to be sure, though it tends to fall into the standard pattern of reflexively contrasting "quaint and artificial" "British murder mysteries"--"decorous country house puzzles"--with the "meaner, starker, bleaker kind of urban crime thriller" "taking shape across the ocean" from Britain in the United States.

Of course Grimstad means by the latter American hard-boiled crime fiction. T. S. Eliot's admiration for the classical, clue-puzzle detective novel (by no means always British) Grimstad suggests stems from Eliot's "sharp turn to the right politically," "his conversion to a man of royalist proclivities and religious faith."  Eliot liked classical detective fiction, in short, because it provided order in a "fractured modern world."

The view that classical detective fiction and its audience are right-wing and hard-boiled detective fiction and its audience are left-wing is a common one, though in fact one familiar with the genre can easily find examples of left-wing writers and readers of detective fiction and right-wing writers and readers of hard-boiled crime fiction.  Dashiell Hammett's left-wing sympathies are well-known, but Raymond Chandler himself is on record as criticizing Franklin Roosevelt and the Soviet Union and declaring that he would have fought for the Confederate States of America during what he termed the "War Between the States."  Some of the attitudes he evinced toward homosexuals and racial and ethnic minorities have caused even some of his fans (I like a good deal of his work myself) to squirm.

Similarly, in Britain the leftist intellectuals GDH and Margaret Cole were great fans of classical detective fiction, and began writing it themselves in the 1920s.  Indeed, one could argue, I think, that the Socialists and Communists of the 20s and 30s had quite an interest themselves in instituting order in the world, albeit an order of a different sort.

So perhaps the popular right-life binary view of "cozy" and hard-boiled crime fiction is in need of some revising, but that I will save for a later day.  I touch on some of this in an essay on Chandler called "The Amateur Detective Just Won't Do: Raymond Chandler and British Detective Fiction," published in Mysteries Unlocked: Essays in honor of Douglas G. Greene (2014).  I recommend it to Grimstad.

Incidentally, I wonder whether Grimstad read some of my work already?  I first wrote on Eliot and his detective fiction criticism in The Criterion, a surprisingly neglected subject (usually one just reads about his admiration for Wilkie Collins and The Moonstone), in an article in CADS in 2011, which I expanded into an essay, "Murder in The Criterion: T. S. Eliot on Detective Fiction," also published in Mysteries Unlocked.

I discussed my essay on my blog last June, including in this piece a discussion of T. S. Eliot's detective fiction rules (rules of "detective conduct"), which he set down in The Criterion in 1927.  I had earlier discussed Eliot's great interest in classical detective fiction of the Golden Age on my blog in May of that year.

I don't know whether Grimstad has read any of this work--there's certainly no mention of it in his New Yorker piece--but what was even more striking to me when I read his essay is that he opens it discussing the correspondence concerning detective fiction between Russian author Vladimir Nabokov and American author and critic Edmund Wilson, the latter notoriously a detective fiction hater.  To this subject I devoted an entire February 2015 blog piece, "The Bells and the Bees: Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov Discuss Detective Fiction."

Here's Grimstad in the New Yorker:

Yet everyone [Wilson] knew seemed to be addicted [to detective fiction].  His wife of the time, Mary McCarthy, was in the habit of of recommending her favorite detective novels to their emigre pal Vladmimir Nabokov; she lent him H. F. Heard's beekeeper whodunit "A Taste for Honey," which the Russian author enjoyed while recovering from dental surgery. (After reading Wilson's essay, Nabokov advised his friend not to dismiss the genre tout court until he'd tried some Dorothy L. Sayers.)

I discuss all these points, and more, in my blog piece.  It's the fifth most-read blog piece in my blog history, on account of the fact that Michael Dirda linked to it in a Washington Post review article he wrote on the crime writer Todd Downing and my book about Downing, Clues and Corpses: The Detective Fiction and Mystery Criticism of Todd Downing.

On other matters, I have about completed my current book project and there will be more about this soon on the blog, as well as some other projects of late and another book review.  I hope it will be as interesting as discussions about Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson and T. S. Eliot!

A Hanging at Hanover: The Dartmouth Murders (1929)

Could there be a thriller
in this gent's pocket?

After a long hiatus the Passing Tramp has returned!  I have a bit of news about this year's writing projects, but I will let that wait for a few days, because I think a review is long overdue.

And since in the United States the New Hampshire primary for both major political parties is today, what better choice than a vintage detective novel set in New Hampshire?

I think many people today regard classical, or so-called "cozy" detective fiction, as something appealing more to middle-aged and older readers, so it's interesting to note that during the Golden Age of detective fiction, between the two world wars, classic mystery was seen as something of a college campus craze, like wearing raccoon coats and swallowing goldfish.

In the United States, detective novelists John Dickson Carr (1906-1977), Todd Downing (1902-1974) and Milton M. Propper (1906-1962), for example, were avid mystery readers in college, as was another detective novelist I hadn't written about on the blog before, Clifford Orr (1899-1951), Dartmouth, Class of '22.

Clifford Orr (1899-1951)

All four of these men published their first detective novels at relatively young ages for neophyte authors, as you can see by the publication years:

Carr, It Walks by Night (1930)
Downing, Murder on Tour (1933)
Propper, The Strange Disappearance of Mary Young (1929)
Clifford Orr, The Dartmouth Murders (1929)

Carr was only 23 when his first novel detective novel was published, Propper a year younger.

Downing and Orr, on the other hand, knocked about a bit after college before settling down to novel writing: Downing attended graduate school, earning an MA, and became an instructor at the University of Oklahoma, while Orr after college worked for the Boston Evening Transcript newspaper and the publishing company Doubleday, Doran before going freelance as a writer in 1928.

After publishing The Dartmouth Murders, Orr would publish The Wailing Rock Murders  in 1932 and the same year he was said to have The Cornell Murders in preparation, but the latter novel never appeared (too bad, a line of college titled mysteries could have kept Orr in gravy for some time).  Orr later went on to become an editor at the New Yorker, where he remained until his untimely death in 1951.

The Dartmouth Murders was filmed as A Shot in the Dark in 1935, a poverty row production that nevertheless has its modern admirers.  Orr's first novel holds up well for fans of classic mystery, though his second one, Wailing Rock Murders, is, in my view the superior book of the pair. The latter novel is extremely rare, but happily a new edition is forthcoming from Coachwhip, who will be publishing the novel as a twofer with The Dartmouth Murders.

North Mass, Dartmouth
(setting of the first death in
The Dartmouth Murders; note modern fire escape)

The Dartmouth Murders starts with the suicide--or is it?--of well-liked student. Rather gruesomely he is discovered hanging from a rope fire escape outside his living quarters (the real life North Mass, where Orr himself was a resident). Somewhat like the Ellery Queen mysteries, which debuted the same year, we have something of a father-son investigative team, the son being the dead boy's roommate and best friend and the father a rather meddlesome and officious attorney who just happens to be visiting the Dartmouth campus on the fatal weekend.

In classic tradition, the local sheriff allows the father to more or less run the investigation for him, Ellery Queen or Philo Vance presumably not having been available for amateur consultation that week.  Unfortunately, two more deaths will follow the first before a murdering fiend is found.  In classic fashion, the trail of the mystery seems to lead to Boston and old sins that have cast long shadows....

Rollins Chapel, Dartmouth
(scene of the second murder in
The Dartmouth Murders)

The Dartmouth Murders is an enjoyable mystery tale (one key element in the murders anticipates a John Dickson Carr novel, as I recollect) and, better yet, fans of classic mystery will soon be able to read it right in the same volume with The Wailing Rock Murders, one of the rarest Golden Age mystery titles around.

I'll have a separate post on the latter novel coming soon!

Past and Presents: Christmas Mourning (2010), by Margaret Maron

A few days after Christmas I reviewed Margaret Maron's Sigrid Harald Christmas mystery, Corpus Christmas (1989), promising to review Maron's Deborah Knott Christmas mystery, Christmas Mourning, next.  And here it comes, admittedly a bit late. (Okay, yes, if Santa Claus ever were this late with the presents, there would be a major shakeup at the North Pole.)

With the final book in the Deborah Knott series having appeared last year, there are now and ever will be precisely twenty installments of her investigative adventures.  As fans of the series know, Knott, a North Caroline judge and most spirited individual, married sheriff's deputy Dwight Bryant in 2005's Rituals of the Season (another Maron Christmas mystery), midway though the series, somewhat changing the dynamic of the books, in my view.

Longtime Maron fans already were used to the veritable cast of thousands that comprised Deborah's kinfolk, but now Deborah had a husband and stepson, Cal, to balance with her professional life as a judge; and they might well have wondered how Deborah, efficient multi-tasker that she is, ever could find time as well to solve the murder mysteries that invariably come her way.  I would say, however, that Deborah, to stay in the idiom, manages pretty fine.

I wasn't too crazy about Maron's Corpus Christmas, but certainly by the advent of Deborah Knott in the world of crime fiction, Maron had become an extremely efficient series mystery writer, usually managing in each book deftly to couple character with an interesting mystery problem.

Admittedly, I wasn't sure whether Christmas Mourning would wear well on me.  At times a Maron Deborah Knott novel, especially one of the later ones, feels something like the works of another popular North Carolina author, Jan Karon, who writes those non-criminous and quite cozy--one might say quilting bee cozy--Mitford books. (Karon's series commences a couple of years after Maron's.)  But Maron's books are spikier--blessedly so to this reader--and of course there's always that manna to a mystery reader, a juicy murder (or two or three) in the offing somewhere in the narrative.

In Christmas Mourning the Reaper's first victim is lovely Mallory Johnson, cheerleader, homecoming queen, teetotaler and virgin, who is killed in a nighttime car wreck on a lonely stretch of highway. She was driving alone after a party and it's unclear why exactly she crashed her car (everyone insists Mallory didn't drink or drug), but despite this mystery no one suspects murder.

Why should they?  Everyone loved Mallory, right?

Two more deaths, these unquestionably murder, take place, when a classmate of Mallory's and his elder brother--both, unlike saintly Mallory, bad sorts--are shot down by an unknown assailant.

Deborah's husband, deputy sheriff Bryant, has his hands full indeed, what with homicide investigations, Christmas festivities and planning for his and Deborah's first wedding anniversary. (From Rituals of the Season to Christmas Mourning there are six novels, published over five years, but in Maron-time only a year has passed between the first and last book.)

Deborah sometimes feels a bit tangential to the murder mystery, as about the middle of the book Maron periodically switches to a third person narrative detailing with the investigative activities of Dwight. (The Deborah sections have always been told in first person.)  I suspect we see more of Deborah making Christmas cookies or pizza runs with her myriad nieces and nephews (most of whom were a faceless blur to me), than actually trying to solve a mystery. However, Maron manages to have Deborah play a central role in the culmination of the affair; and the mystery I found a sufficiently engrossing one, with actual clues in the text.

To longtime devotees of the Knott series, Deborah's interactions with her kinfolk are the high point of each book.  It's not quite that way with me, but I did find them enjoyable enough (though my favorite human interest stuff was the developing inter-relationship of Deborah, Dwight and their son, Cal). I also was intrigued by the way Maron hints at introducing Sigrid Harald into the Deborah Knott series. (Christmas Mourning, it seems, sets up events in the next two Knott novels, Three-Day Town and The Buzzard Table.) I found Christmas Mourning a welcome gift from this reliable series author.

It's the Final Countdown! Best Books Blogged 2015

At least for this year.  With luck, The Passing Tramp and the world will still be around a year from now for yet another countdown of the best books blogged.  In the meantime, here's #'s 5-1. #'s 10-6 can be found here.

#5 The Night of the Fog (1930), by Anthony Gilbert (reviewed 27 July)

The best detective novel that I have read by the prolific second-string English mystery writer Anthony Gilbert (Lucy Beatrice Malleson) is this tale of murder at a moldering, candlelit manor house--enshrouded, on that fateful night, in fog.  A highly atmospheric setting, with more realistic (if glum) characters and a good mystery plot (with true detection), Fog is a real winner from the dark heart of the Golden Age of detective fiction.

#4 The Listening House (1938), by Mabel Seeley (reviewed 3 June)

More squalid realism--though urban and American in this case--is found in this intelligent and spirited updating of the old HIBK novel by Mabel Seeley, once considered one of the brightest rising stars on the horizon of mystery fiction.  Real-life events are referenced to great effect in the novel, which is set in a fictionalized St. Paul, Minnesota.  Seeley believed terror was more terrible, because more credible, if "aroused by incidents which are within the reader's possible experience."  Certainly this formulation triumphs in The Listening House, an atmospheric, eerie and well-plotted mystery with memorable characters and a compelling heroine acting as amateur sleuth.

#3 Banshee (1983), by Margaret Millar (reviewed 21 August)

Ingenious plotting coupled with insightful explorations of troubled human emotional states makes Margaret Millar one of the all-time greats in crime fiction.  Banshee is an excellent late novel by the Canadian-American author, the wife of Kenneth Millar (aka Ross Macdonald), combining a tricky plot with a moving look at modern childhood.  One hopes that Margaret Millar's inclusion in Sarah Weinman's new Library of America anthology of women suspense fiction writers will give this talented author more of the attention that she deserves.

#2 Black Money (1966), by Ross Macdonald (reviewed 18 October)

And here is Mr. Millar, with what is, I think, my favorite novel by him from the 1960s: his moving meditation on the Great Gatsby legend, something which clearly touched a deeply personal chord of memory within him.  Complexly plotted yet not nearly so reliant on the inter-generational family dysfunction plot that came to so preoccupy him (see my discussion of Macdonald's The Instant Enemy in the linked piece), Black Money represents Macdonald at the apex of his considerable abilities.

#1 The Last Talk with Lola Faye (2010), by Thomas H. Cook (reviewed 8 March)

Thomas H. Cook's novel belongs here, in the august company of the Millars, one of mystery writing's all-time "power couples."  Cook resembles the Millars in his ability to construct complex, compulsively page-turning plots that include insightful examination of the human condition in the manner of the mainstream novel.

Cook, an Alabama native, is especially fine when when he looks at the American South, as he does in Lola Faye. The sense of place in the novel, which dexterously weaves back and forth from the past to the present, is palpable, as in the best suspense novels of the late, great Ruth Rendell. Lola Faye is a superb novel from one of our finest modern crime writers, satisfying the desires of crime fiction readers for a story that is both deftly plotted and emotionally affecting, touching both the mind and the heart.

Well, there you have it.  I just noticed that this is my most temporally diverse "best" list ever, with three books from the Thirties, one from the Forties, one from the Fifties, two from the Sixties, one from the Eighties, one from the Nineties and one from the new century.  Just shows you the great riches of crime fiction over the last hundred years.  A Happy New Year to you all!  I hope to discuss many more books on the blog in 2016.

Waiting for the Countdown: Best Books Blogged in 2015

It's that time of year again, where we count down the best books blogs the past year at The Passing Tramp.  As Lindsey Buckingham sings, I've been waiting for the countdown. But then haven't we all?

Typically I count down the top twenty crime novels annually blogged here, but in past years I have reviewed over 100 such books annually on the blog, while this year, busy as I have been with other projects, I probably only achieved about half that.  Plus, 2015 is fast ebbing. So I'm doing just ten this year. So, let us begin with #'s 10-6.  I'm leaving out of consideration books I have written introductions for and discussed on the blog this year (quite a few), but they are of course recommended to vintage crime fiction fans.

#10 Meet Me at the Morgue (1953), by Ross Macdonald (reviewed 29 August)

In this, Ross Macdonald's centenary year, there has perhaps been a tendency to undervalue the author's Fifties crime writing in favor of his Sixties work. However, the author produced some excellent work in this earlier decade. Macdonald later disparaged the novel in a letter to Eudora Welty, but at the time of its publication he had seemed rather pleased with Meet Me at the Morgue, a dexterously-plotted tale that signaled an early, notable move by the author away from the Chandler-Hammett tough school of hard-boiled mystery toward a more humanistic vision.  The younger Macdonald was right to feel so.

#9 The Player on the Other Side (1963), by Ellery Queen (reviewed 10 November)

The sleuth Ellery Queen returned in novel form after a five year hiatus in The Player on the Other Side, in one of his most interesting performances.  Here the author devised a deliberately artificial tale about members of a wealthy New York family being bumped off one by one, with an ingenious variation on a favored gambit.  Here sleuth Ellery encounters, as he so fervently desires, a murderous opponent truly worthy of his mettle.

#8 The Grindle Nightmare (1935), by Q. Patrick (reviewed 28 November)

A notable Thirties fictional excursion into the dark criminal bypaths of horrific sadistic violence, The Grindle Nightmare, by Richard Wilson Webb (probably with some collaboration from his young living partner and future full time fictional collaborator, Hugh Callingham Wheeler), at times feels like a precursor to certain critically-lauded sicko suburbia novels by Patricia Highsmith.  But don't worry, fainthearted readers, the whole thing is properly intellectualized as a formal problem detective novel, in fine Golden Age tradition.

#7 Wisteria Cottage (1948), by Robert M. Coates (reviewed 11 January)

If Violence peaked out at us from behind a curtain in The Grindle Nightmare, in Robert M. Coates's Wisteria Cottage it rips away the curtain and pursues the reader with a bloody butcher's knife.  This dark novel about the descent into madness of a dangerously disturbed young man is a deeply unsettling novel, even in 2015, and it reminds us that mid-century "domestic suspense" was not entirely the demesne of women crime writers. Stir in as well some of Jim Thompson's hell's broth and you get Wisteria Cottage.

#6 A Sight for Sore Eyes (1998), by Ruth Rendell (reviewed 13 December)

The late and much missed modern mistress of psychological suspense, Ruth Rendell, produced one of her finest essays in the art of unease with A Sight for Sore Eyes. Ultimately less cold and clinically bleak than Wisteria Cottage, the novel nonetheless boasts a memorably creepy climax and is, like all the best Rendell, compulsively readable throughout its considerable length.

RIP Ruth Rendell.  Happily for Rendell's readers her fine work lives on after her, to be read and reread.

Numbers 5 to 1 are coming soon!