The Countdown Concludes....Happy 2014!

To recap:

#20 I'll Tell You Everything (1933), J. B. Priestley and Gerald Bullett

#19 Murder in Maryland (1932), Leslie Ford

#18 The Curved Blades (1916), Carolyn Wells

#17 Southern Electric Murder (1938), F. J. Whaley

#16 Written in Blood (1994), Caroline Graham

#15 Murder in Bermuda (1933), Willoughby Sharp

#14 Murder Ends the Song (1941), Alfred Meyers

#13 The Portcullis Room (1934), Valentine Williams

#12 Ten Plus One (1963), Ed McBain

#11 Death of an Old Goat (1974), Robert Barnard

#10 Murder of the Honest Broker (1934), Willoughby Sharp

#9 The Wall (1938), Mary Roberts Rinehart

#8 The Slayer and the Slain (1957), by Helen McCloy

#7 The Running of Beasts (1976), by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg

#6 Last Post (2008), Robert Barnard

Now to the Top Five!

#5 Murder in Hospital (1937), Josephine Bell

Josephine Bell's first of many crime novels over a long writing career that extended into the 1980s was much-praised its day for is intricate plot and authentic workplace atmosphere.  It details what turns out to be a series of murders at a London teaching hospital that caters to working class patients in the era before National Health (Americans may be more familiar now with the period following National Health introduction due to the popular British television series Call the Midwife).

For her novel Bell, a doctor herself, clearly drew on her experiences at London's University College Hospital.  She produced a great book, a gripping murder mystery and a fascinating social document. Unfortunately, the novel has been out of print for over seventy years. Many of her novels are now available from Bello as eBooks, but not her fine first one (a first edition of which is currently available for around $450 USD).

#4 Give a Corpse a Bad Name (1940), Elizabeth Ferrars

This is another great first novel by a prolific late Golden Age woman crime writer, Elizabeth Ferrars, who wrote write up until her death in 1995. In contrast with Josephine Bell's first, Name has a highly-traditional setting in an English village, but it's a virtuoso performance of a familiar (and much-beloved) theme.  

When forty-something widow Anna Milne (recently returned from South Africa) reports to Constable Leat and Sergeant Eggbear (love that name) of that she has run over and killed an unidentified man, the village of Chovey is plunged into a complex murder mystery. Amateur detective Toby Dyke and his mysterious friend George pop up, happily, to straighten out the mess (watch that George).

Brightly written, with good characters, setting and a fine plot with a twist, this one is a real winner from the era of the classic British country house and village mystery.

#3 Death of a Curate (1932), Kenneth Ashley

This extremely obscure mystery by Kenneth Herbert Ashley, an accomplished English poet, was my find of the year, I think. Ashley had a great feel for rural ways in England and tremendous empathy for the down-and-out of his day (one of the poems in his collection Up Hill and Down Dale (1924) is called "Out of Work").  

What makes his Death of a Curate remarkable for its time is its extremely naturalistic setting.  One feels this is the rural England of real life, not of conventionalized crime fiction.  

In comments to my original blog review a reader suggested that this Kenneth Herbert Ashley may be Kenneth Herbert Ashley (1885-1969) of Nottinghamshire, a stonemason in 1911.  

One hopes we may find out more about Ashley in 2014 and see this novel reprinted, after over eight years.

#2 Hide My Eyes (1958), Margery Allingham

This Margery Allingham crime novel is a psychological suspense tale of vicious murderer, Gerry Hawker, and the doting older woman, Polly Tassie, who hides her eyes to the truth about him.  

Eyes a beautifully-written and masterful character study, ultimately quite darker, I think, than Allinghams's more celebrated suspense novel, The Tiger in the Smoke (1952).  While not Allingham's finest novel of detection (though there is an interesting alibi construction), it's arguably her finest novel (stop) and certainly a high point of English crime fiction, which was a-changing in the 1950s.

#1 The Far Cry (1951), by Fredric Brown

Although Fredric Brown was reprinted by the wonderful imprint Black Lizard in the 1990s he has since been dropped by them.  I can't see why, but then if I ran the world Brown's books would be part of the Library of America crime fiction series as well.  

A master plotter, Brown was a great writer of American noir, hard-boiled and semi-hard-boiled crime fiction (and science fiction for that matter).  His devoted mystery fans debate which title is his best novel, but for me it's The Far Cry, a novel of murder in the past and obsession, with an ending you won't forget.  As I said in my original review: "With its strongly-conveyed setting, high degree of narrative suspense and deft plotting, The Far Cry is a classic among crime novels."

Well, that's all for 2013.  I wish all of you a happy 2014, full of much (fictional) crime.

I Can't Stop the Countdown....

To recap:

#20 I'll Tell You Everything (1933), J. B. Priestley and Gerald Bullett

#19 Murder in Maryland (1932), Leslie Ford

#18 The Curved Blades (1916), Carolyn Wells

#17 Southern Electric Murder (1938), F. J. Whaley

#16 Written in Blood (1994), Caroline Graham

#15 Murder in Bermuda (1933), Willoughby Sharp

#14 Murder Ends the Song (1941), Alfred Meyers

#13 The Portcullis Room (1934), Valentine Williams

#12 Ten Plus One (1963), Ed McBain

#11 Death of an Old Goat (1974), Robert Barnard

And now to the start of the Top Ten:

#10 Murder of the Honest Broker (1934), Willoughby Sharp (reviewed 18 May)

Willoughby Sharp's second and last detective novel sets murder at the New York Exchange--a place the author knew down to the ground.  Sharp doesn't hold back in his depictions of Wall Street "wolves," making this book as timely in 2014 as it was in 1934.

With an appealingly sardonic police detective and a clever puzzle with plenty of nifty material clues, this is a superb classical detective story.  Happily, it has been reprinted (with, I will add, a long introduction by me on the author and his publisher and business partner, the remarkable Claude Kendall).

#9 The Wall (1938), Mary Roberts Rinehart (reviewed 13 December)

This long mystery novel tells of a series of murders that befall a wealthy island resort community obviously based on Bar Harbor, Maine, where Rinehart herself--probably the wealthiest and most popular Anglo-American mystery writer in the 1930s after the death of Edgar Wallace--owned a home. An atmospheric and suspenseful tale, with a pleasing filigree of love interest.  When it came to fictional murder among America's genteel moneyed class, Rinehart knew how to do it like no one else.

the superbly designed
American first edition

#8 The Slayer and the Slain (1957), Helen McCloy (reviewed 30 June)

A notable example of 1950s psychological suspense, The Slayer and the Slain may not pack quite the same punch today as it did in 1957, but it is still makes exceedingly eerie, engrossing and intelligent reading.

It also marked a notable development phase in McCloy's writing career, as at this point she mostly abandoned her fine Basil Willing detective novel series in favor of more works of psychological suspense--none of them, I think, as good as this one.*

*(look for some more Helen McCloy to be reviewed here in January)


#7 The Running of Beasts (1976), Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg (reviewed 13 April)

This serial killer novel from the 1970s is a brilliant collaboration of two accomplished authors (the second collaboration on this top twenty list).  Very scary, very tricky, sometimes unpleasantly explicit, and with some dark humor too (the much-edited writings of the young journalist is virtuoso stuff). Detailing more about the cleverness of this book's plot risks giving away too much, so I will leave it at that.

#6 Last Post (2008), by Robert Barnard (reviewed 27 February)

An apt title this, for this novel was Robert Barnard's last great mystery before his sad death this year. An homage of sorts to the great Agatha Christie (particularly her 1968 novel By the Pricking of My Thumbs), it involves secrets from the past, sexual indiscretions, murder, true detection, clever clueing and a twist.

It's a great pleasure to know such a book can still appear in the 21st century, even though it's sad to think there will be no more such books from Robert Barnard, one of the greats of post-Golden Age detective fiction.

Be sure to come back for the final five on New Year's Eve!

The Countdown Continues....

To recap:

#20 I'll Tell You Everything (1933), J. B. Priestley and Gerald Bullett

#19 Murder in Maryland (1932), Leslie Ford

#18 The Curved Blades (1916), Carolyn Wells

#17 Southern Electric Murder (1938), F. J. Whaley

#16 Written in Blood (1994), Caroline Graham

Now on to #15--#11:

#15 Murder in Bermuda (1933), by Willoughby Sharp (reviewed 17 May)

This pioneering police procedural was written by a Wall Street broker who after the Great Crash retired with his family to live in Bermuda for several years. Murder in Bermuda, his first detective novel, resulted.

There's no Great Detective, but rather some dedicated cops.  There's also a good puzzle with good local color.

Murder in Bermuda has been reprinted, along with Sharp's second and last detective novel, Murder of the Honest Broker (see next installment).

#14 Murder Ends the Song (1941), by Alfred Meyers (reviewed 29, 31 March)

This is another impressive effort by a forgotten American mystery writer.  Reminiscent in basic plot design to Ngaio Marsh's Photo-Finish (1980) and P. D. James' The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982), Song, the only mystery novel by Meyers, tells the tale of the murder of a tempestuous opera diva in an isolated mansion cut off from the outside world by a storm.

The San Franciscan Meyers was a friend of Anthony Boucher and, like Boucher, a great opera aficionado.  In Song, he provides his readers with a colorful, authentic background and a richly plotted puzzle.

#13 The Portcullis Room (1934), by Valentine Williams (reviewed 11 January)

In contrast with Sharp and Meyers, Valentine Williams was a prolific old pro at the crime fiction game. Most of the mysteries he wrote were thrillers rather than true detective novels, but he did write some of the latter, including the atmospheric The Portcullis Room, set on an island-bound Scottish castle.

This novel, in which the author puts together an interesting cosmopolitan cast including some uncommonly convincing Americans (for a British author of the era), was praised by Dorothy L. Sayers, and deservedly so.

#12 Ten Plus One (1963), by Ed McBain (reviewed 9 May)

Ed McBain's name is synonymous with the American police procedural.  In this tale he combines with the procedural form the multiple murder plot.  What connects the series of appalling sniper killings? The reader will rush to find the answer in this suspenseful and consummately entertaining crime novel.

#11 Death of an Old Goat (1974), Robert Barnard (reviewed 22 February)

In this scathing but hilarious crime novel the late Robert Barnard with a poisoned pen (or a toxic typewriter?) takes merciless literary revenge upon an entire continent.

Barnard quite evidently did not think much of the time he spent teaching at an Australian university!  Possibly Barnard's funniest crime novel, though Australians may beg to differ. Read to the very last line, which is a classic in kicker last lines.

Next up: the Top Ten!

Peter Lorre Double Feature (The Verdict, 1946, and The Stranger on the Third Floor, 1940)

The actors Peter Lorre (1904-1964) and Sydney Greenstreet (1879-1954) were very popular film actors after their iconic appearances in the classic crime film The Maltese Falcon (1941).  They ultimately co-starred in nine films between 1941 and 1946, the last of which was The Verdict, based on the detective novel The Big Bow Mystery (1892), by Israel Zangwill (1864-1926).

Israel Zangwill

Zangwill's landmark locked room mystery had been filmed two times before, but I don't believe either of the earlier versions is well regarded.  This third version was scripted by Peter Milne, who had previously written the screenplays for The Kennel Murder Case (1932), adapted from the S. S. Van Dine novel, and a few other mystery/horror films.  It also was the first feature film directed by Don Siegel, who went on to helm, among other films, The Big Steal (1947), with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955) and Dirty Harry (1971).

Like the novel upon which it is based, The Verdict is the in Victorian England.  Greenstreet, who unquestionably is the lead in the film, plays Superintendent George Edward Groman, who is cashiered after a man he charged with murder in a prominent case is discovered to be unquestionably alibied--shortly after his execution.

Soon Groman, in retirement, is confronting another murder--that of a man in the locked room of a lodging house, right across the street.  Now Groman has a chance to solve this murder and make a fool out of his scheming, though far less intelligent, rival and replacement, Superintendent John R. Buckley (George Coulouris).

Lorre and Greenstreet

Anyone who has read The Big Bow Mystery will recall the clever locked room plot, which is nicely adapted in the film.  Peter Lorre plays an artist friend of Greenstreet's, but the film is Greenstreet's all the way.  On hand as well are Joan Loring, as the chorus girlfriend of the murder victim, and Rosalind Ivan, one of the great forties film harridans (see The Suspect, 1944, and Scarlet Street , 1945), as the landlady.  She's comic relief in this film.

I found The Verdict quite an enjoyable film, with a tricky plot and some thoughtful reflections on the quality of justice.

The earlier of the two films, The Stranger on the Third Floor, was, it appears, an important step in Peter Lorre's career trajectory.  Despite starring in the famous Fritz Lang film M (1931), the original version of Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and Karl Freund's Mad Love (1935), I think in 1940 Lorre would have been primarily known to American audiences as the star of the Mr. Moto films (1937-1939).

Peter Lorre as the Stranger

Directed by Boris Ingster, who worked in the Soviet Union with Sergei Eisenstein, Stranger has smashing visuals and a great urban landscape of neon-lit diners and lonely, shadowy boarding houses (the print is nicely restored too). Though he gets top billing, Peter Lorre is hardly in the film; however the snatches we see of him are memorably filmed and he has a great few minutes at the climax.

The thinly-plotted film is about a newspaper reporter, Mike Ward (John McGuire), who is the key witness in the trial of a hard-luck loser, Joe Briggs (Elisha Cook, Jr., great as usual in what was to be his signature role), for the slashing murder of a diner owner.  Mike's good girl fiancee (Margaret Tallichet) has her doubts, however; and soon another slashing murder occurs--right next door to Mike's boarding house room!  Soon Mike himself is a suspect.

having a bad dream (John McGuire)

This is a very short film (just over an hour) that might have benefited from a longer running time.  The finale, with Lorre and Tallichet, could have been more drawn out for greater suspense.  A good chunk of the film is taken up by a nightmarish and surreal dream sequence.  It's terrific to watch though.

There are uniformly good performances throughout the film, from law enforcement officials to pressmen to landladies to street vendors.  I especially liked Charles Halton, one of filmdom's great twits, as Mike's nosy and unlikable neighbor, and Ethel Griffies as Mike's nosy and unlikable landlady (nearly a quarter-century later, when she was well into her eighties, she most memorably played that annoying know-all ornithologist in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds).

Stranger has been called the first film noir.  From it we're missing a fatal woman and the ending seems far too sunny--literally and figuratively--for pure noir, but there certainly are a good number of film noir elements, not the least of which is its questioning of the "justice" meted out by a legal system--a point the film shares with The Verdict, which has also been called film noir.*

*(certainly the relentlessly fog-bound Verdict would qualify as film voile)

The Countdown Begins: The Passing Tramp's 2013 Best Books Blogged

Well, it's time again to pick the best crime novels reviewed this year on the blog.  I think I reviewed 72 works of mystery fiction this year, mostly novels published before 1960, as well as some books about mystery fiction.

Were there some disappointing novels reviewed here this year?  Sure, like Theodora DuBois' Death Is Late to Lunch, Doriel Hay's Murder Underground, Ed McBain's Jigsaw and the late Robert Barnard's The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori, but I won't dwell on the disappointments.

So, without further ado, here are numbers 20-16:

20. I'll Tell You Everything (1933), by J. B. Priestley and Gerald Bullett (reviewed 8 March)

An affectionate and humorous pastiche of English Golden Age thrillers, this novel is about a Cambridge lecturer and the strange adventures that befall him after he meets an odd Italian professor urging him to accept an iron casket holding the bones and ashes of the Iron Prophet, Yann.

Both Priestley and Bullett were well-regarded English mainstream writers who made additional contributions to the crime fiction genre that are well worth looking up.

19. Murder in Maryland (1932), by Leslie Ford (reviewed 4 June)

With a strong sense of place, bright writing and an excellent narrator, a middle-aged woman doctor, Murder in Maryland is a well-crafted exercise in genteel American mystery, despite some condescending portrayals of African-Americans, unfortunately an issue with this author.  Her Maryland will be a bit too much "old South" for some readers in the age of Paula Deen and Duck Dynasty.

18. The Curved Blades (1916), by Carolyn Wells (reviewed 31 October)

Classic American murder at a country house party, with the victim a nasty rich woman who spends the first chapter giving everyone around her reasons to kill her.

For once Wells eschews improbable locked rooms, leaving the reader with a tricky and bizarre murder problem (the victim is found dead with a smile on her face and a Japanese paper snake wrapped around her neck).  Wells' Great Detective Fleming Stone falls in love, rather tiresomely, but you can ignore that and concentrate on clues.

17.  Southern Electric Murder (1938), by F. J. Whaley (reviewed 21 June)

As this title indicates this is a dense English murder mystery of railway movements and times.  It makes use of a real railway line that runs from Victoria Station, London to Brighton, Sussex, and many of the stations in it are still in existence today.  A great book for those who like to concentrate on a meaty murder problem (and for those who love railroads).

16. Written in Blood (1994), by Caroline Graham (reviewed 19 February)

A great wickedly satirical English village mystery--one might call it a curdled cozy--at which Caroline Graham most definitely excelled (her books inspired the seemingly never-ending British television mystery series Midsomer Murders). Some splendidly unlikable characters (Sergeant Troy, whom I described in the original review as "a boorish, sexist homophobe" and Brian Clapton, surely one of the most repulsive creatures in crime fiction) and a fairly-clued solution that is withal a genuine surprise.

I don't rate it higher because of its excessive length and over-the-top finale (written with TV in mind?), but it's a fine modern English mystery.

Fifteen more to go!  Are you as excited as I am?

Even if you're not (perish the thought!), be sure to check in tomorrow for Nos. 15-11.

Anthony Boucher's Choice: The Twenty Best Crime Novels of 1943

What was the good mystery stuff seventy years ago, in the midst of World War Two? Here's a list of critic and mystery writer Anthony Boucher's favorite 1943 crime novels:

Death of a Busybody, George Bellairs
The Lady in the Lake, Raymond Chandler

Painted for the Kill, Lucy Cores
The Mouse in the Mountain, Norbert Davis

She Died a Lady, Carter Dickson
Unidentified Woman, Mignon Eberhart
Ministry of Fear, Graham Greene

A Stranger and Afraid, Michael Hardt
The Smell of Money, Matthew Head
Death in the Doll's House, Hannah Lees and Lawrence Bachmann
Colour Scheme, Ngaio Marsh

The Green Circle, Chris Massie
Do Not Disturb, Helen McCloy

Wall of Eyes, Margaret Millar
The Thursday Turkey Murders, Craig Rice

The Year of August, Mark Saxton
Murder Down Under (Mr. Jelly's Business), Arthur Upfield

Stalk the Hunter, Mitchell Wilson
The Black Angel, Cornell Woolrich

Only a few of the names that are familiar to me come from the hard-boiled/noir school (Raymond Chandler, Norbert Davis, Cornell Woolrich).  Some of the books I didn't recognize, but I think these are, like Graham Greene's Ministry of Fear, espionage tales, which naturally would have been of particular interest during WW2.  The Green Circle I'm not sure should really be considered a crime novel, but then I tend to be something of a purist about these things.

How many of these have you read?  If over half, I would say you are a classic crime fiction superstar!

My own top twenty--the top twenty novels I blogged this year--will be starting soon.  Here are the links to last year's thrilling countdown:

http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-countdown-begins.html
http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-countdown-continues.html
http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-countdown-continues-part-2.html
http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-countdown-concludes.html

And, incidentally, in my recent Christmas Number

Do Not Murder Before Christmas (1949)

I forgot to post last year's Christmas Number:

Murder for Christmas (1941)

Though I did post the one from the previous year (and do so again, just to have everything neat and tidy):

Mystery in White (1937)

Ray and Jimmy: The Raymond Chandler--James M. Fox Correspondence (1950-56), Part I

Back in 1979 a small but fascinating collection of Raymond Chandler correspondence with James M. Fox (on Fox, see my recent blog posts) was published by a small Santa Barbara, California press. The little book was edited by James Pepper--the same James Pepper, I presume, who is proprietor of James Pepper Rare Books in Santa Barbara.  The copy I had was inscribed by Pepper to Richard Harwell, who I presume was Richard Barksdale Harwell (1915-1988), the Georgia librarian, bibliographer, author, according Emory University, who has some of his papers (I find this especially interesting because I have Barksdale relations in my family background).

Raymond Chandler

The correspondence between Chandler and Fox commenced on December 20, 1950, when Fox wrote Chandler, having met him the previous month at a dinner party.  Fox was following up on a promise to send Chandler a copy of his new, non-series novel, The Wheel Is Fixed (his previously novel was the John and Suzy Marshall mystery The Gentle Hangman, reviewed rather tepidly by me here).

Though he signed his epistle "with kindest regards," Chandler's response was not very encouraging:

One thing puzzles me a little: here you are, Dutchman by birth and a good deal of an internationalist by education; yet you seem to have committed yourself to one of the most parochial and overworked fields of writing there is--a style so desperately overdone that in some of its recent manifestations (for instance, The Drowning Pool, by John Ross Macdonald) it has become a burlesque.  There are pages in this book which are pure parody.  The man has ability.  He could be a good writer.  Yet everything in his book is borrowed, and everything in it is spoiled by exaggeration.

Chandler urged Fox to try writing a spy story.

It was interesting to see Chandler again attacking the work of Ross Macdonald.  I was familiar with his corrosive comments about Macdonald's first Lew Archer novel, The Moving Target (1949) (as was, sadly, Macdonald, after some of Chandler's correspondence was first published in the 1960s), but I don't recall having before seen these dismissive comments about The Drowning Pool (1950).

I myself am not too crazy about his first two books, but think much more highly of his next pair, The Way Some People Die (1951) and The Ivory Grin (1952).  Did Chandler ever come to accept that Macdonald was a great creative artist within detective fiction?  If so, we don't seem to have a record of it, sadly.

James M. Fox

Fox's response is interesting too.  "I was practically bulldozed by publishers and agents into producing book-length detective stories.  Since then I've turned out six of them, and I'm working on the seventh. They actually make a living for me....I know this is an overworked and parochial domain, and I can see your point about Macdonald's book and others....For myself, I try to keep from overdoing it.  But the attempt has never served to please my publishers."

It sounds like Fox was perhaps not as personally inspired to write hard-boiled detective fiction as he ideally should have been, even though he was a great admirer of Chandler's crime fiction.

Certainly parts of The Gentle Hangman did feel synthetic to me, and this seems to have been the same case with Fox's novel Free Ride, according to John Norris.

Ross Macdonald

The subject of the pressure brought to bear by publishers on genre authors' writing is an interesting one, I think.  From Tom Nolan's biography of Ross Macdonald I know that Macdonald frequently was pushed in the 1950s to add more violent action to his books.  It wasn't for about a decade after the commencement of the Lew Archer series that he really began fully writing the type of crime fiction he wanted to write.

In that sense, Chandler was right to point out that the younger man's earlier work was imitative, though his negative judgment was far too sweeping.  Some of Macdonald's 1950s fiction is tremendously good.

Could Chandler in fact have felt threatened by this quality as he struggled to complete another novel after The Little Sister (1949)?

Anyway, apparently Fox did not hear back from Chandler after this initial exchange, but he wrote him again, two years later, in March 3, 1953.  "It has taken me almost two years to bully my publishers into allowing me to act upon" Chandler's suggestion that he write a spy novel, he wrote.  Yet finally he had done so; and he wanted to dedicate the book to Chandler," "for the many lessons your books have taught me, even though I may have proved myself a student with a mere C-average, so far" (the novel was Dark Crusade).

A gratified Chandler soon wrote Fox back, mentioning that he had just read Dorothy B. Hughes' spy story The Davidian Report and didn't really like it, though he was a great admirer of her work; and he looked forward to seeing Fox's effort.

Thus was launched a correspondence of three years between the two men.  Over time they went from "Mr. Chandler and Mr. Fox" to "Chandler and Fox" to, finally, "Ray and Jimmy." Expect to see more about this after Christmas.  Happy holidays!