Road Show: Having Wonderful Crime (1943), by Craig Rice

Having Wonderful Crime (1943), the seventh installment of Craig Rice's John J. Malone and Jake and Helene Justus mystery series, ended an impressive streak for Rice.  While seven Malone/Justus novels appeared between 1939 and 1943, none appeared in 1944, then one in 1945 and one in 1948.

After that there was a long drought before the publication of two additional Malone/Justus novels, My Kingdom for a Hearse (1956) and Knocked for a Loop (1957), the latter published the year of Rice's untimely death at the age of 49.

I reviewed Rice's The Fourth Postman (1948) here last year.  I enjoyed that mystery, though I detected some signs the Rice's liquor-n-laughs formula was getting thin (as was the author's hold on anything approaching sobriety). What did I think of Crime, published five years earlier (and which, oddly, alludes to the later postman murders as an earlier case)?

Check in this weekend and see. At least I hope!  I am winding up indexing for Mysteries Unlocked and am running a bit behind on the blog.  I also am planning to get a review posted, finally, of one of my very favorite Rex Stouts, And Be a Villain (now running a week behind on that one!).  At least I feel the essays in Mysteries Unlocked are looking pretty darn good!  More on that next week.

Stout Reads: See What Rex Read and How He Rated It

For only $300 apiece (heh) you can get a mystery novel owned--and presumably read--by Rex Stout. There are 22 such books listed on Abebooks by Between the Cover--Rare Books, Inc., all once stored in the carriage house of Stout's home.

Better yet, some of them were rated by him:

Christopher Hale, Rumor Hath It (1945) (B+)
Helen Reilly, Murder on Angler's Island (1945) (B2) (they don't know exactly what the 2 signified)
Christopher Hale, Hangman's Tie (1943) (S) (?)
Ethel Lina White, Her Heart in Her Throat (1942) ("surrender on p59") (Oh, Ethel! TPT)
George Harmon Coxe, Murder for Two (1943) (A-)
William L. Stuart, The Dead Lie Still (1945) (C+)

There are other books, but I didn't see others with ratings.  I have to say Stout's Ethel Lina White comment is hilarious, even though I quite like this author.  I don't believe her later books, from the 1940s, are that good, however.  Have you read any of these books?  Was Rex Stout right that George Harmon Coxe was the best bet?  I'll be talking more about Mr. Coxe soon.

Detection Medley (1939), by the Detection Club (edited by John Rhode)

Detection Medley (1939), edited by John Rhode (Cecil John Charles Street), was the last Detection Club book published before war disrupted the Club's activities. This work came up for discussion in the Facebook Golden Age detection group, so I thought I would post the table of contents for people to see. It's a collection mostly of short stories, with some essays.  Sorry about the "bleed"--there are over 500 pages and they are rather thin.

Maybe this will be reprinted someday. In Masters of the Humdrum Mystery (2012), I write about Major Street's struggle to put it all together.

My copy was owned by A. Petrie of 113 Woodhall Lane, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, the second garden city in England.  Sounds a nice place!

Morsels of Murder: Rex Stout's Death Times Three (1985) Part Two: Frame-Up for Murder (1958)

Rex Stout's "Frame-Up for Murder," the second Nero Wolfe novella from Death Times Three (1985), exhibits some of the routine qualities of which Julian Symons complained concerning Stout's post-1950 work.

In this one a pretty young woman, Flora Gallant, wants to hire Nero Wolfe to find dirt on another woman, Bianca Voss, who has established an insidious influence over the business of her "illustrious dressmaker" brother, Alec Gallant.

From his office Wolfe talks to this woman, Voss, on the telephone, only to hear her scream out guttersnipe insults at him (mostly concerning his weight) before she seemingly is attacked and murdered. Investigating, Archie finds that Voss is indeed dead, having been bludgeoned and strangled.

There is a complicating element involving another woman, a very recently deceased actress named Sara Yare, which is reminiscent of Agatha Christie's Lord Edgware Dies (1933). In fact Stout, through Archie Goodwin, does not even attempt to pretend that we, the readers, are being fooled anymore by the mystery of the telephone call:

I will not explain at this point why Wolfe wanted to know if any of the subjects had known Sarah Yare and if so, how well, for two reasons: first, you have spotted it yourself; and, second, since I am not as smart as you are, I had not yet come up with the answer.

Including Flora Gallant, there are five suspects.  Wolfe identifies a killer, but, in truth, Stout could just as easily have made the culprit any one of four people (only one of the group is exonerated in an interesting way); there's not really a pleasing inevitability to the solution. While "Bitter End" (1940) is one of the best Wolfe novellas, not the same thing can be said of "Frame-Up for Murder," in my view; it has a rather perfunctory feel to it. I suppose I could call it "Lower End."

Good news though, the Wolfe novel And Be a Villain is one of the best, I think.  I'll have the review up soon, before I move to another author for Friday.

Rex Stout on Writing

Rex Stout

In December 1971, a day before Rex Stout's 85th birthday, the New York Times published an interview with the author by Israel Shenker.  In the interview Stout made some interesting observation on writing.

I couldn't help thinking how this interview with the elderly author--who, after the recent death of Erle Stanley Gardner for most people at this time probably most symbolized, along with Agatha Christie, the "traditional" mystery story (apologies to the brilliant Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr and Ngaio Marsh)--came out not long before the publication of, yes, the first edition of Julian Symons' Bloody Murder.  Symons and Stout agree on some subjects, but disagree on others.

Stout gets in some very clear political digs, reminding readers of his political liberalism. Noting that his mailbox is in New York State but that his house is just across the border line in Connecticut, Stout wryly declared that he had built his house in 1930 "and I didn't want Hamilton Fish as my representative.  So what did I get?  Clare Boothe Luce."  He also adds that he hopes to outlive the presidency of Richard Nixon: "If he's reelected I'll have to live another four years" (Nixon of course was reelected but, plagued by scandal, resigned the presidency in August 1974; Stout died in October 1975).

Hamilton Fish III (1888-1991)
he and Rex Stout were not members
of a mutual admiration society

Stout had launched firmly on his novel-writing career in 1929 at the of 43, with the well-received psychological novel How Like a God (earlier he had some novel-length works published in All-Story Magazine). He went on to publish some additional "serious" novels before he turned to mystery writing with the Nero Wolfe debut tale Fer-de-Lance in 1934. By that time, he declares in his 1971 interview, he had realized "I was a storyteller and I was not a great writer" (I believe Stout means--ahem!--A Great Writer).

Those who have what they see as higher artistic aspirations for the mystery/crime tale (that it be Great Literature), will probably find Stout disappointingly lacking in nobler aspiration here.  I think this is how Julian Symons felt when, in the 1950s, he suggested that Stout should consider killing off Nero Wolfe.  In Symons' view Stout, a talented writer, had been coasting too long on his corpulent sleuth's tremendous popularity.

In the 1971 interview Stout continues: "It seemed apparent to me [in the 1930s] that writers of the first rank get themselves involved in the difficulties of the people they write about.  It was obvious in a paragraph the way Dostoyevsky felt about Raskolnikov, or the way Tolstoy felt about Natasha, and their feeling was of a degree that I wouldn't get."*

*(of course some crime genre theorists have urged consideration of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment as a crime novel; Julian Symons once took this position himself, but later came to believe, as he states in Bloody Murder, that Dostoyevsky's works "far transcend anything the crime novelist achieves or even aims at").

Stout however urges that creating memorable characters "has nothing to do with the level of literature." Tarzan and Scarlett O'Hara are great characters, he says.  He doesn't like the fiction of Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and John Updike, because these authors are interested in problems, not people.

"the best American
detective story writer
not counting Poe"

As for mystery/crime writers, Stout gives mixed praise to Georges Simenon ("Simenon has written some damn good ones, but he's also some written some damn lousy ones") and Ross Macdonald ("a hell of a good storyteller, but I wish he'd quit telling the same story over and over again").

However, he's unequivocally higher on Josephine Tey and Dashiell Hammett (a coupling I think Julian Symons would have found rather odd):

I'd put Josephine Tey...just after Dashiell Hammett, who was the best American detective story writer not counting Poe, who started the whole thing.  In The Glass Key Dash Hammett did the thing Hemingway tried to do in every book he ever wrote, and a better job of it--establishing the essential manliness of the hero by telling a story about him, what he did and what he said and how he handled a situation.

Symons enthusiastically agreed about "Dash."

Vera Season 2 (2012)

In Season Two of Vera DCI Vera Stanhope (Brenda Blethyn) is still nosing out nasty murders in Northumberland with subordinate DS Joe Ashworth (David Leon) and I'm still enjoying following along the track.  I've been blogging about the Great Detective tradition of late and Vera certainly does have Great Detective qualities, such as social isolation and eccentricity, but, on the other hand, in Season 2 she starts, in the modern fashion, to get more of personal back story (character development) and there are hints that she may "grow."  We gets more glimpses of Joe's home life too, with his wife and kids.  Also DC Kenny Lockhart (Jon Morrison) happily becomes less a cipher this season (DC Holly Lawson, on the other hand, leaves Vera's force after the first episode).

Once again, the season has four episodes:

The Ghost Position

Vera with an old friend moments before a tragedy

A former colleague of Vera's in the police force commits suicide in a horrific and spectacular way after his daughter has been put into a coma by a firebomb attack on his house.  Who was the bomber and why did this person bomb the house?

This was a good opening for the series, moving in rather an unexpected direction.  I did not find the characters quite so interesting as usual, however, the most compelling one having committed suicide in the first ten minutes of the episode.

Silent Voices

Joe lends a thoughtful presence

The only one of the four episodes based on an Ann Cleeves novel, this episode, dealing with the deliberate drowning of a seemingly beloved middle-aged female social worker, has a typically intricate, clued Cleeves plot, but, once again (see my Season One review), I had some trouble buying into the motivations and behavior of the murderer.

Sandancers

Vera conducts a campaign

This episode, about the murder-staged-as-suicide of an Afghanistan veteran, has an interesting milieu among soldiers and a believable plot, but here we face just the opposite problem from that in Sandancers: the plot is too straightforward, leaving little of a surprise element.

A Certain Samaritan

On the beach: Vera and the beekeeper (Sean Campion)

As in Season One, I think, the best episode in Season Two of Vera is the finale.  I found this quite a moving and intricate tale about the stabbing death of a young man.  The emotions of his survivors--and Vera's suspects--are powerfully portrayed (especially memorable are Phyllis Logan as the young man's mother and Sean Campion as his older male beekeeping friend). As in the best modern mystery, the solution of the puzzle arises organically out of a believable, if horrible, human situation and gives us something to think about after the light from the television has faded

the mother of the dead man (Phyllis Logan)

We are also left with a tantalizing fragment of back story concerning Vera's life, brought to us by the splendid Judy Parfitt in an interesting cameo appearance.  I'll certainly be getting Season Three.

The Top Ten Mystery Writers of 1941?

the winner--with her mystery muse?

In 1941 Columbia University Press surveyed the mystery reading habits of the "literary world," via the Press' weekly newsletter.  I'm somewhat dubious that the entire "literary world" actually read this newsletter, but, however broad this sample was, herewith are its ten most popular mystery writers:

1. Dorothy L. Sayers ("by a wide margin")
2. Agatha Christie
3. Arthur Conan Doyle
4. Ngaio Marsh
5. Erle Stanley Gardner
6. Rex Stout
7. Ellery Queen
8. Margery Allingham
9. Dashiell Hammett
10. Georges Simenon

It's fascinating how this group of writers was to maintain its popularity for decades (within the last forty years, however, Queen and Gardner have faded).

In the British contingent we see an early sign of the coalescing of the four Crime Queens (the late Arthur Conan Doyle was the only British male writer included), while the Americans are a pretty traditional lot, with only Dashiell Hammett representing what would be the rapidly rising hard-boiled movement.

Of course it's important to remember this would have been a more highbrow sample than the norm (hence the appearance of Simenon).  Perhaps most striking to me is not the absence of Raymond Chandler, who was new on the novel scene, but that of bestselling mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart.  Had the "literary world" begun to see her and the so-called HIBK ("Had I But Known") gang as old hat?  Or was she, perhaps, a few rungs behind, somewhere in the top twenty?

For more on the "upholstered" mystery reading habits of early-forties readers see this post from earlier this month.