Death Decoded: The Bletchley Circle (2012)

You may recall how I complained about the unlikely revisionist feminist rewrite in the most recent film adaptation of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps.  Well, here is a far superior film mystery series that does something rather more plausible with a period feminist slant, The Bletchley Circle.

The film series is about four women, all of whom were involved with English code-breaking during World War 2 at the government's Bletchley Park complex.  Now it's 1952, and life is much different (duller!) for them.

hail, hail, the gang's all here

The brilliant Susan (played by the always compelling Anna Maxwell Martin, of Bleak House and South Riding), personally unfulfilled with her domesticated life as a 1950s wife and mother, has taken to tracking the activities of a serial killer of women who has baffled police. After her initial advice to police doesn't pan out, they ignore her (Susan's rather patronizing husband, Timothy, who is clearly insecure about himself and less intelligent than Susan, wasn't all that supportive in the first place). 

Susan: wartime codebreaker, peacetime homemaker

So Susan reunites her old Bletchley colleagues--the thoroughly modern (and been around the block a few times) Millie, played by Rachel Stirling (as the fans may know, she played Caroline Crale in the television adaptation of Agatha Christie's Five Little Pigs); their somewhat forbidding former boss at Bletchley, Jean, now a library administrator (Julie Graham); and the young and mousy Lucy (Sophie Rundle), who has computer-like recall--to help her track and catch the serial killer (who is not only a murderer of women, it seems, but also a necrophiliac).

The acting by these four leads is great, as are the period details (desaturated photography catches the austerity hanging on in 1952).  I thought the first part of this three-part series was especially good, as the women use their deductive abilities to find a geographical pattern for the killer.  This part was actually much more like a Freeman Wills Crofts detective novel--say The Hog's Back Mystery (1933)--than an Agatha Christie.

Millie: mapping out a killer's course

Part Two and Part Three felt a bit more cliched.  In Part Two, the Circle attempts to bait the killer.  I was sure I knew how this would go and I was right.  By Part Three the Circle knows the identity of the killer, who sets up a denouement involving Susan that seemed to me unlikely in the extreme.

Also, a problem I had with Susan (or maybe I should say the script) is that what she's doing is quite dangerous, obviously, but she repeatedly misleads her (admittedly kind of wet) husband about it, even though by the last part of the film she has put their young children in potential danger (and brilliant person though she is, Susan seems not to realize this until very late in the game).

To be honest, I didn't like Timothy all that much (though he becomes somewhat more sympathetic over time) and thought surely Susan could have done better in a spouse, but I wasn't comfortable with Susan's deceptions either, not when she had gotten in so far.  This had gone way beyond being an academic sort of puzzle mystery, like the crosswords Susan loves to solve. What would Susan have said to Timothy if their children had been killed by the criminal maniac that she and her friends had been so avidly--and so covertly--pursuing?

Timothy ("Dim Tim") gets suspicious

This may be an issue inherent in the amateur detective sort of mystery The Bletchley Circle represents, when it's combined with a strong dose of realism (the other women in the Circle, by the way, all are, like the classical woman amateur detective Miss Marple, childless; one is married, but to a total creep whose feelings need not concern anyone).

Here we have the classical element of the amateur detective blended with a horrific plot involving a necrophiliac serial killer, no less--something old, something new--and perhaps it doesn't always completely gel (think Tommy and Tuppence versus Hannibal Lecter).

Some reviewers (men!) have complained that the men in this series are all either morons or monsters.  I didn't think it was quite that bad.  Timothy has some potential for an evolving gender consciousness, I believe. Let's hope Susan and he are able to work out a more honest and mutually fulfilling relationship with each other, because otherwise I don't see much of a chance for this marriage! And their two children seem to be adorable (not to mention I love their house).

This carping notwithstanding, I found the film series quite enjoyable and was pleased to learn that another season is to be filmed.  This could be a real winner for English mystery fans, for this initial outing shows a lot of promise.

Bletchley House, where the circle formed

Dying High: Death Rides the Air Line (1934), by William Sutherland

William Sutherland's Death Rides the Air Line, published by Claude Kendall in 1934, is something of an experimental Golden Age mystery. 

Probably what will most immediately strike a lot people is its resemblance to a 1935 Agatha Christie detective novel, Death in the Clouds/Death in the Air.  In both novels, there is a murder of a passenger on an airplane.  Did Christie read Sutherland's novel, which was published in England, or was this just a coincidence (or did she read Freeman Wills Crofts' The 12.30 from Croydon, also published in 1934)?

a very fragile copy of the Death Rides the Air Line dust jacket (Claude Kendall)
note the advertisement for the controversial Twisted Clay on the back panel

Aside from the initial setting, however, there is not much resemblance between the novels.  Christie's tale is a classic puzzle mystery from the 1930s, with a fiendishly clever plot and clueing.  Sutherland's book moves the emphasis elsewhere.

As Sutherland writes in his preface: "I have endeavored, moreover, by the use of a somewhat unusual structural design, to help the reader see the people concerned in it as they really were, rather than as the conventional, puppet-like characters of works of fiction."

After only fifty-three pages--in which Sutherland assembles the crew and passengers on a plane taking off from Boston, murders one of the passengers over New York (stabbing), and brings Detective-Inspector Grady in to investigate--Sutherland leaves the present in order give us flashbacks into the lives of the murder victim, ruthless newspaper publisher Walter Schlaf, and four passengers: Russell DeWitt, New York judge, Marguerite Rose, good time gal, Timothy Cowley, gangster, and August Jensen, pilot.

These flashbacks provide motives for the passengers, but are mostly designed to give the novel greater character interest.  The flashbacks for Schlaf, Rose and Cowley I thought were especially engrossing (Judge DeWitt's was more hackneyed).

the English edition
has a stylish jacket too

In his introduction Sutherland notes that the events depicted in the novel occur "during the final days of Prohibition" and he hopes that this fact will "add some special interest, as well as throw some more light on the conditions which that unfortunate law produced in America."  The Rose and Cowley sections take particular advantage of this setting.

Marguerite Rose is like a character out of the musical Chicago (which doesn't necessarily mean she "done it," mind you, though you can definitely imagine her breaking out into her own personal rendition of "He Had It Coming").  This is one hard-boiled dame!

At sixteen or seventeen, evidently, Rose sidles up to her teenage soda jerk boyfriend, Freddy, and tells him she needs fifty dollars:

"What do you want it for?"
"Well, I'm going to have a baby, and it'll take fifty dollars to get rid of it."
"What?  you don't mean--"
"Yeah.  You're the proud father.  That time at the cottage."

Marguerite eventually ends up as a burlesque performer in New York.  In one of her acts she appears as the Statue of Liberty:

The latter production was raided by the police, who seemed to think that the torch, the only thing she had on, gave too much light to the scene.  The legal proceedings lasted long enough to enable Joe Biggum to parade his whole chorus in the court-room.  Then he agreed to give Marguerite a smaller torch, and the case was dropped.  After that the theatre was full every night.

title page (Claude Kendall edition)

I think an entire novel devoted to Marguerite Rose, with or without her torch, might have been interesting.

After the flashbacks the last seventy pages are again devoted to the present, in which Inspector Grady providentially finds one material clue that lets him solve the case.

As a mystery, Death Rides the Air Line is hardly one of the classics, but there is more character interest than one often finds in books from this period, and the Prohibition setting is well done.  The flashbacks actually left me wanting more, however.

So I would say that Air Line something of a neither-fish-nor-fowl book, though it is not without appeal.

The Magic Flute Mystery: A Hard-boiled Tale

With the opera (or singspiel) The Magic Flute (1791) did a certain Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his librettist Emanuel Schikaneder originate hard-boiled mystery?

Let's think about this.  In The Magic Flute we have this woman who calls herself the Queen of the Night (you can't get much more noir than that), who comes to the hero, Tamino, to tell him that she has a job she wants him to do for her.

the Queen of the Night
you don't wanna mess around with this dame

It seems that her daughter, Pamina, has fallen in with a bad lot, led by some sort of big crime boss, Sarastro.  She tasks Tamino (a real prince of a guy, by the way) with extricating Pamina from the evil clutches of Sarastro and his criminal gang.  Could they be dope merchants?  White slavers?

it seems that Pamina has fallen into the clutches of
Boss Sarastro and his criminal gang 

WARNING: A SPOILER FOLLOWS!

But, wait, it turns out that the Queen of the Night's story is a pack of lies!  It's all a set-up.

Like the classic hard-boiled femme fatale, this double-dealing dame has duped our Tamino. The more he investigates and interviews people, the more falsehoods he discovers that he's been told.

END SPOILER

But Tamino will keep at it, getting to the truth whatever mean streets he must go down, because he's a tough customer, see?  He's also packing a piece that has a way of persuading people.

Yup, he's got a magic flute. And you don't want to be on the business end of that flute, let me tell you.  Tamino doesn't talk much, but he lets the flute do the talking for him, and what it says goes, got me?

Tamino: on the job, packing a flute

Although this bit comes more from classical detection, Tamino even has a sidekick, a "Watson" if you will. His name is Papageno and he's none too bright!  He provides some needed comic relief in this dark tale of deceit, treachery and high-level corruption.

Papageno: birdbrained?

So there you have it!  Step aside, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and let's give three cheers for Wolfgang Mozart, master of hard-boiled mystery.

The Mystery of The Mystery of The Multiplying Mules

No that's not a typo in the title!  Willoughby Sharp was scheduled to produce a third detective novel in 1935, The Mystery of the Multiplying Mules.  It would have been the second Sharp novel, after Murder of the Honest Broker, to feature Inspector Bullock.  A short description of the book was actually given in promotional material.

Here is the description:

Inspector Bullock is called in by the Logans not because something has been stolen, but because something has been added to their household.  On three successive Friday mornings they have found in their locked barn, mingling with their own animals, two strange mules.  Before the reason for the multiplying mules is found, three deaths follow in rapid order.

Maybe we'll get lucky and this will turn up somewhere.  It's odd that it was never published, when they got this far with it.  Interestingly, Kirke Mechem, whose 1936 novel The Strawstack Murder Case (A Frame for Murder) was reprinted by Coachwhip recently, also has a "lost" mystery novel, one that was turned down by his publisher, Dodd, Mead, his son, the composer Kirke Mechem, tells me, because it dealt with "miscegenation" and was then shelved by the author.

Here's hoping those mules turn up again!

Puzzling Behavior: Jigsaw (1970), by Ed McBain

One of the interesting aspects for me about the novels in Ed McBain's long-running 87th Precinct series is the glimpse they provide of the transformation of American society over several decades.  Just in the seven years from Ten Plus One (1963) to Jigsaw (1970), we see tremendous changes, which echo real-life events from that time.  Ten Plus One feels more like a fifties McBain, but with Jigsaw we are in the modern era (with one big exception; see below).

Can you put the solution together?

Jigsaw is a short novel (even by McBain's standards at the time) that is devoted to a treasure hunt.  Yes, it's the old plot about some lost loot from a heist for which a number of people are searching.  Some of these people are willing to kill to get what they're after.  And, oh boy, they sure do!

Characteristic of McBain, Jigsaw is smoothly told and generally quite entertaining.  There are clues to the location of the loot in the form of the torn pieces of a photograph (the jigsaw of the title), and one of the clever things McBain does is to show us the pieces of the photo as the police discover them and try to fit them together. This is like something you would find in an Ellery Queen mystery. (I did find myself wondering, however, why no one was consulting a photography expert).

The comedy team of Monoghan and Monroe appears in the beginning and we see that, in an attempt at attaining groovy seventies high style, Monroe is growing a mustache (or attempting to).  Or perhaps I should say pornstache.  McBain is very funny about this.

Sadly, for me the book undergoes something of a collapse in the last chapter, of just a dozen pages. Catching a certain criminal depends on the breaking of an alibi.  In a novel by Freeman Wills Crofts (The Cask, say), this would be very cleverly done.  In Jigsaw it's done through police intimidation, played for laughs (contrast this with McBain's painful and scathing depiction of police brutality in Ten Plus One).

It's also done as a way of allowing McBain to denounce racism.  In Jigsaw black police detective Arthur Brown is the lead character (with Steve Carella in support).  "Detective Arthur Brown did not like being called black," McBain announces in the first sentence of the novel, and then proceeds to show how various people in the case respond to Brown's skin color.

In an interesting aside on changing fashions in racial nomenclature, McBain writes that Brown "considered the word [black] derogatory, no matter how many civil rights leaders endorsed it."  Of course calling his "black" character "Brown" is another one of McBain's little jokes.

Racism mostly comes in the form of three women in the novel: hot dish Geraldine Ferguson, who may have a piece of the photo and crudely taunts Brown with sexual come-ons; an aging, blowsy hooker who announces bluntly when she sees Brown at her door, "I don't suck no n-----s" (yes, McBain's writing had gotten much more explicit by 1970); and an alibi-providing girlfriend.  Carella comes up with a plan to break this latter woman, based entirely on the fact that she comes from Georgia.

Everyone in the precinct knows, you see, that all whites from Georgia are racists who believe all the crudest invidious stereotypes about African-Americans, even if they decided voluntarily to move to New York and have been living in the state for the last five years or so.  So, Carella reasons, why don't we have Detective Brown go to this Georgia woman's apartment late at night and threaten her with rape (in plantation dialect) if she doesn't tell the truth about that inconvenient alibi.  Of course, no actual rape is intended, it's just pretend, to shake her up, don't you know.

So while in Jigsaw McBain commendably attempts to address the problem of racism, he falls down flat, in my view, in his handling of sexism (he doesn't even seem to be aware this might be an issue).  I suppose how we're supposed to see this is, she's from Georgia, see, so she's ipso facto racist, and it's okay to pull this stunt with an ipso facto racist from Georgia.  But this highlights another problem for me: everyone just assumes she's a racist because she's from Georgia (even though, as I said, she moved to New York and has lived there for about five years).

Maybe I'm sensitive about this because I grew up in the South (though I was born in South Dakota, let me hasten to add!).

Of course I know this was over forty years ago, and one has to consider the times in which the book was written.  Back in 1968, two years before Jigsaw was published, my parents moved to Alabama (when I was two), my father having accepted a teaching position at the University of Alabama.  My mother, who was from Pennsylvania, didn't want to make the move, because when people thought of Alabama, they (quite understandably) saw awful visions of water cannons and cross burnings and vicious German shepherds and nightstick-wielding cops and crude drawling sheriffs and church bombings and car shootings and--well, you get the point, surely.

But, still, there had to be a better way for McBain to take on the problem of racism than a comic vignette about a policeman, one of McBain's good guys, threatening a woman with (pretend) rape.  Not to mention that I don't believe the woman's admission, when obtained in this manner, ever would have stood up in court.  Nor should it have, frankly, I don't care whether she was a racist or not.

So, forgive the sermonette here, but I in discussing this book I felt I had to explain why McBain completely lost me in the last twelve pages.  If you have a different take on these final pages, you will probably give the book a higher grade, because up until this last chapter it's quite enjoyable.

And, let me reiterate, I still find Ed McBain one of the most purely entertaining series crime writers in the history of the genre, even if, sometimes, one of his jokes misfires. 

For those who are interested in the "big issues" see this academic take on the race question in McBain's 87th Precinct. And here's another blog review of Jigsaw.

Murder Spree: Thirteen Men (1930), by Tiffany Thayer

"A Tale of Murder which is neither a Mystery nor a Detective Story"

As promised, here is the posting on Tiffany Thayer's 1930 bestseller, published by Claude Kendall, Inc., Thirteen Men (John Norris of the Pretty Sinister Books blog is posting on Thayer's Thirteen Women).  By the way, Thayer was a man, baby (yes, I'm doing Austin Powers).  His full name was Tiffany Ellsworth Thayer (1902-1959).

This is an unusual book, and I haven't completed it yet, to be honest, so the full review piece will be coming later!  I've nearly finished a 6000+word piece on Willoughby Sharp, which will serve as the introduction to the the forthcoming new editions of his two detective novels, Murder in Bermuda (1933) and Murder of the Honest Broker (1934).

But back to Mr. Thayer's first novel!  Surprisingly, given Thayer's popularity in the 1930s (which provoked the ire of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker), not a great deal seems to be available about him on the net.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
termed Tiffany Thayer's
books "slime"

The frontispiece to Thirteen Men suggests one source of Thayer's popularity: there is some salacious (by 1930s standards, anyway) sexual detail. There are other sources too, however.

Some of his work has criminous elements that put it at least on the borderland of crime fiction.  Thirteen Men somewhat resembles the classic jury mystery subgenre: you know, the type of mystery that takes place during a murder trial and focuses on the deliberations of the jury.

Raymond Postgate's Verdict of Twelve (1940) is probably the best known of this type of book from the Golden Age today, though in fact that were two other novels, both titled The Jury, by Eden Phillpotts and Gerald Bullett, that preceded it (published in 1927 and 1935, respectively; both are recommended).

The thirteen men of Thayer's book are a confessed serial murderer (he has admitted to shooting 39 people in several different cities) and the twelve people serving on the jury at his trial.  A chapter is devoted to each man, plus there's an opening chapter detailing the horrible events in the killer's crime wave.  The murders, which include the slayings of some children, are really rather grisly.

The chapters devoted to the jurors are character studies, each ending with the particular man getting the summons to jury duty.  These so far are well done, but I'm wondering where it all leads.  Are there any surprises in the final chapter?  What was the killer's motive?  Is he really the killer?  Is he found guilty?  I'm looking forward to finding out!

80 Years Ago Sunday: The Week in Todd Downing Mystery Reviews

On March 26, 1933 the Oklahoma detective novelist Todd Downing reviewed four mysteries for the Daily Oklahoman newspaper:

The Tuesday Club Murders (The Thirteen Problems), by Agatha Christie
The Hanging Captain, by Henry Wade
Red Warning, by Virgil Markham
Dr. Priestley Lays a Trap (The Motor Rally Mystery), by John Rhode

Short excepts:

The Tuesday Club Murders: Downing applauds the reappearance of "Aunt Jane"--that "no end quick-witted spinster of The Murder at the Vicarage"--in this short story collection.

The Hanging Captain: Downing praises Henry Wade's "eminently sane yarn written in the King's English."

Red Warning: There's "creeping horror" in this tale, Downing notes.  "For shudder addicts."

Dr. Priestley Lays a Trap: "Add and subtract with Dr. Priestley," writes a something less than enthralled Downing.  "For mechanically-minded folk."

Note the stylistic similarities to The Tuesday Club Murders--
Both books were published by Dodd, Mead,
one of the premier American publishers of mystery fiction.

There's much more on Todd Downing--his life, his detective fiction and his mystery review--in my 2013 book Clues and Corpses: The Detective Fiction and Mystery Criticism of Todd Downing.

Personally, I've read all four of these books and I liked them all!