By the Light of the Television: Poirot, Season 1 (1989)

My theory of television series (and I think I'm hardly alone in this) is that first seasons usually are somewhat tentative, then a plateau in quality is reached for several season, before decline sets in the last season or so.  Poirot doesn't exactly follow this trend, because even though it has the all-important common denominator of David Suchet in the title role throughout the series, it abruptly transformed itself in Season 9, jettisoning the Hastings-Japp-Miss Lemon ensemble and going for a much more sombre tone.  In a way, it's as if we have had two different series.  However I think what I shall dub Poirot I (Seasons 1-8) does rather follow the pattern I have described above.

Essentially Seasons 1-5 (1989-1993) are of a piece, with short story adaptations predominating. One novel adaptation was done in Seasons 2 and 3 and Season 4 consisted solely of three novel adaptations.  Season 5 went back short stories, but was the last such season (for some reason The Labors of Hercules, the best Poirot short story collection, was not adapted at this time--sure, these stories do not have Hastings, but one presumes the adapters would have found a way to shoehorn him into them).

Season 6 in 1995 consisted of four novel adaptations, only one of which was fully successful, in my opinion (Murder on the Links).  Seasons 7 and 8, which did not follow until 2000 and 2001 (why the lag?), had lost much of the earlier magic, ranging from outright dreadful adaptations of novels (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder in Mesopotamia) to merely mediocre ones (Lord Edgware Dies and Evil Under the Sun). 

Since then we have had Seasons 9-12 (2003-2009).  This is the "Dark Poirot," eventually to wrap with one more season, culminating in Poirot's swan song, Curtain.  These have been controversial affairs, some rather brilliant, I think (Five Little Pigs, Sad Cypress), some travesties (Cards on the Table, Murder on the Orient Express).

But, all this said, let's go back to Season 1, when it all began.  On the whole I rank Season 1 a bit lower than Seasons 2, 3, and 5 (the story adaptation seasons).  It seems to me that the budget was smaller and that sometimes episodes were filmed with somewhat less flair.  The series characters also don't seem to have quite gelled.  Japp is a bit of a dull dog in Season 1 (he hasn't yet figured out that Poirot is Always Right and is rather adversarial), while Miss Lemon usually doesn't have much to do.  Hastings is IT from the get-go, yet Poirot, on the other hand, is noticeably politer and less egocentric.  He seems a bit less outsize in personality.  Is this more or less faithful to the character, I wonder?

The Adventure of the Clapham Cook *****
The series gets of to a great start with this tale of the distraught suburban matron who has lost her domestic (good cooks are so hard to find!).  The matron, Ernestine Todd (Brigit Forsyth), is a wonderful satirical character, and Katy Murphy is splendid as the maid Annie (one of the best maids in this series, surely).  Then there's Danny Webb as the uppish railway clerk (from the way he back talks Hastings you just know this man's a Red!).  It was nice espying him as a young man, after seeing him in so many roles over the years, usually as someone unlikeable and really quite snarky (his latest such character appears as one of the young Morse's foils in the film Endeavor, reviewed here).

The mystery itself in pleasingly complex, amusing and dramatic in all the right places, and another excellent corrective to those under the impression that all Golden age English mystery tales place either in country houses or quaint villages.

Poirot and Hastings: The beginning

Murder in the Mews***
Did Mrs. Allen commit suicide or was she murdered?  A clever plot, but rather dramatically inert, I thought.  Not as good as the actual longish short story.

The Adventure of Johnnie Waverley***
Poirot is hired to prevent the kidnapping of an obnoxious country squire's son.  This one has a decent plot and the manor house is suitably splendid (not art deco for once!). However, I think the motive of the culprit was altered somewhat in the adaptation.  It's not completely convincingly done either in the story or the adaptation, in my opinion.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds**
Not as bad as The Cornish Mystery or The Missing Will, but a definite meh episode.  No memorable characters and nothing especially clever about the crime.  Rather a pointless affair.

Murder comes to Whitehaven Mansions

The Third Floor Flat****
Although the solution is revealed rather early, I like this one quite a bit.  It's a clever situation and instead of Poirot coming to murder, murder comes to him--the killing takes place in his own block of flats! There's also the amusing bit of Poirot going to see the murder mystery play and not enjoying it at all.  And the matter of Hastings' car!  I say!

Triangle at Rhodes*****
Great on location shooting here (much of the year's budget must have gone into this episode) and one of Christie's classic plot devices, variants of which she used many times.  Superb story, well-adapted. 

Problem at Sea*****
Another great "tour" tale, with Poirot solving a yacht cabin murder, committed off Egypt.  The murder victim, Mrs. Clapperton, is superbly portrayed by Shelia Allen; she's one of the most memorable gorgons in the history of the series (checking imdb, I see she died just last year, at the age of 78; her last film role was as "Ministry Witch" in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 2005--she will be missed!).

Seasoned mystery fans should get the trick, but the dramatic content and the casting are so good that they should enjoy the episode greatly.  The unmasking of the culprit is a tour de force and the final scene, with Poirot's great line "I do not approve of murder!", is memorably done.

No problem is too great for Poirot

The Incredible Theft***
Country house espionage tale involving theft of super secret airplane plans or something like that.  Not bad, but not memorable.  The best part is Hastings complaining how he has to share a bed at the local inn with Japp.

The King of Clubs***
This one concerns the film actress on the scene at the murder of her film producer.  The film stuff is fun, but the murder is at the producer's house and involves a lot of time spent by Poirot at a rather drab next-door suburban villa. Some notable improbabilities, but not bad.  Best part: A passing tramp is suspected of the dark deed!  Perish the thought!

The Dream*****
A great finish for the season.  Murder of a classic evil factory owner (pork pies), in a locked room situation, rare for Christie.  Excellent use is made of the factory setting (it's glorious deco, though the factory owner himself seems a holdover from Victorian days), the supporting cast is uniformly good (note lovely Joely Richardson, daughter of Vanessa Redgrave), there's a good Miss Lemon subplot and Hastings actually gets to do something useful.  Only slightly marred by no explanation being given of how Poirot arrived at a certain point.

So, although there are some mediocre episodes, Season 1 has some notable successes. Coming next month: Season 5, which has the last set of short story adaptations (until they finally get around to filming The Labors of Hercules).

By the Light of the Television: Endeavour (2012)

Old franchises never die--they just get rebooted!  The last Inspector Morse film, starring the late John Thaw as the uniquely-named Endeavour Morse, appeared nearly a dozen years ago.  The first episode of the ongoing Lewis series, about Morse's number two, Robert Lewis (Kevin Whately), premiered in 2006.  Now we have the pilot film for the new series Endeavour, which envisions a young Endeavor Morse back in the ancient mists of time when The Passing Tramp was born: the mid-sixties!

Shaun Evans endeavors to recapture the Morse magic

One can be cynical about this sort of thing.  In today's youth-obsessed age, what's the best way of rebooting a series?  Like in the case of the recent Star Trek reboot, it seems to be reimagining your old middle-aged characters as hot young 'uns!

So I was initially skeptical about Endeavour, I must admit.  Judging from the stills of Shaun Evans (aside: no doubt an incredibly distant relative! Evans is the eighth most common name in England and the most common name in Swansea; apparently in Wales a minute won't go buy without you're stumbling over an Evans), I thought he was all wrong for the part.  Tall and rangy, rather like Laurence Fox's Sergeant Hathaway in Lewis, he seemed an odd choice for john Thaw's short and stocky--oh, let's be honest, a wee bit lumpy and dumpy--Morse.

two peas in a pod?

But I'm pleased to report I was all wet on this one!  I really enjoyed Endeavour.  While the Lewis series is workmanlike and likeable, Endeavour does something Lewis only rarely manages: capturing the moving, melancholy quality that made Morse memorable for so many viewers back in the 1990s.

In addition, there's the added interest of the swinging sixties setting (when the series opens we're thankfully in 1965, when good taste was still fashionable--I don't want to see Shaun Evans' Morse in fat ties, gold chains, unbuttoned shirts and polyester flair pants, listening to Mahler by the illumination of a lava lamp and letting the word groovy escape from his lips).

By the end of Endeavour I was totally convinced Shuan Evans was the young Morse.  Evans captures Morse's intelligence and melancholy (particularly where women and classical music are concerned), as well as his determination and brashness on a case (like Thaw's Morse he can jump to conclusions and land himself in trouble).  Physically Evans and Thaw aren't much alike, but Evans does capture Morse's mannerisms and between the two men there's also similarity about the eyes (no doubt Thaw's many women fans from the 1990s would call them rather soulful!).

Morse establishes an important new relationship

Amusingly, we get to see Morse developing two of his most important relationships: those with beer and classic cars.  It doesn't go so well with Morse and women, but when did it ever in the original series (answer: very rarely).  Of course it doesn't help that Morse is always falling for women who in the cases he is investigating are either suspects or intimately involved with suspects!

In the case at hand, Morse's love interest is Rosalind Stromming (Flora Montgomery), wife of Dr. Rowan Stromming, an Oxford professor and one of his lead suspects in the murder of a teenage girl (another way Endeavour is true to the original series is that it adds to Colin Dexter's legion of Lolitaesque, nymphettes who are always getting involved with much older men).  Roaslind is not only beautiful and a bit older (in a sexy, sophisticated woman kind of way) than the somewhat awkward and gangling Morse, but she's a retired opera diva!  Is it any wonder our Morse is besotted?

Yup, it's love!  How will it end?

Endeavour strikes many other classic notes as well.  The plot is nicely complex, involving some familiar gambits, creatively applied. Crosswords and poetry are invoked.  There's a car salesman suspect, leading Morse to eye a Jaguar.  There's beer!  Opera arias!  Oxford dons, high level corruption and lots and lots of illicit, inter-generational sex!

I noticed a few actors who were veterans of the original Morse series.  I have no doubt that this was intentional and that I probably missed a few (of course there's the obligatory Colin Dexter cameo--he shows up in Lewis too).  It was pleasing to see Patrick Malahide, now pushing seventy, playing one of his patented satyriac sleazebags (he goes all the way back to the excellent 1990 Morse episode Driven to Distraction).

But the most notable actor in Endeavour, aside from Shaun Evans, is Roger Allam, who plays the young Morse's mentor, Inspector Fred Thursday.  With his pipe and his trilby, Allam really does seem to have stepped right out of the time period.  He brings terrific gravitas to his role, as the no-nonsense, unflappable World War Two vet who gets the job done.  I will pay him the highest compliment of saying I can't envision anyone else in the role now.
 
Allam had what I think was rather a thankless role in what seems to me the poorest of the later Morses, Death Is Now My Neighbour (1997), so it's nice to see him with a really good part in the newer series.  As Detective Thursday he rather reminds me of Albert Finney, which surely is a good thing.

Watch out murderers! Morse and Thursday are on the beat.

I'm not surprised Endeavour was a great success and that a full series is under way. I very much look forward to how it develops, as should any old fan of Morse or any fan of good detective series television in general.

Follies, Part Two: The Bloody Tower (1938), by John Rhode

I write about John Rhode's The Bloody Tower (The Tower of Evil in the United States) in my book Masters of the Humdrum Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the English Detective Novel (2012).  It's one of my favorite detective novels by the author, whose real name was John Street (John Rhode is a pun, you see!).

Wainhouse Tower

Since my book was published in June, I have come to conclude that the folly which likely inspired the titular tower of The Bloody Tower is Wainhouse Tower, built over 1871 to 1875 at the behest of John Edward Wainhouse, an Yorkshire industrialist. Wainhouse intended the structure to serve as a chimney for his Halifax, Yorkshire dye works.  By constructing it high on a hill, Wainhouse hoped to disperse smoke from the town (I can sympathize; there used to be a paper mill in my hometown of Tuscaloosa, Alabama and every time we drove past it the rotten egg smell was overwhelming).

Unfortunately, Wainhouse sold the dye works before the great chimney was completed and the new owner refused to take over the half-completed structure.  So Wainhouse turned it into a folly, an Italianate observation tower, 253 feet high with 403 steps.  It is sometimes referred to as the Tower of Spite, due to a legend that Wainhouse built it in order to spy on his neighbor Sir Henry Edwards, an opponent of industrialization.  The Calderdale website says this story is apocryphal, but it would make a good plot for  a detective novel!

Street was quite familiar with this part of Yorkshire, as his maternal grandfather's ancestral home was Storthes Hall Mansion in Kirkburton, only about a dozen miles away from Halifax. The tower in John Rhode's The Bloody Tower is described as being "not unlike a truncated factory chimney with a ball balanced on top of it."  The American dust jacket design captures this image rather well, I think.  Certainly Rhode's fictional tower variant is much less attractive than Wainhouse' actual one, but it does indeed look like a factory chimney!

Nevertheless, the tower in Rhode's novel was not built by an industrialist, spiteful or otherwise.  The Bloody Tower is a tale of agrarian squalor, being John Rhode's contribution to the "rural gloom" genre of English novels associated at this time with the works of Mary Webb and so memorably satirized in Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm (1932).  "Pretty dreary stuff," sniffed Jacques Barzun in his and Wendell Hertig Taylor's Catalogue of Crime, but this is rather the point!

The American hardcover edition of
The Bloody Tower

In The Bloody Tower, Simon and Caleb Glapthorne, father and son, live in squalor at their decaying Georgian country home, Farningcote Priory, attended by two slatternly servants.  Looming over them all is the folly built by their eccentric eighteenth-century ancestor, Thaddeus Glapthorne, founder of the now almost entirely diminished family fortune.

Caleb, who is found at the beginning of the novel with half his face blown away by a rifle shot, spent his evenings at home guzzling gin with the dipsomaniac cook, when not pursuing the neighboring farmer's daughter.  At first it seems that the shot that killed Caleb was self-inflicted, but then it comes to appear that some other person may have contrived the "accident."

Did the neighboring farmer do the deed, or was it someone else, like Caleb's younger brother Benjamin, disgraced in his father Simon's eyes because he abandoned the collapsing Glapthorne estate to become a marine engineer (Simon considered it "beneath the dignity of a Glapthorne to wipe his hands on a piece of cotton waste")?

Street neatly ties in the death of Caleb with the Glapthorne family prophecy inscribed on the tower, that so long as the tower stands, "So long shall Glapthorne dwell in Farningcote."  Rhode's police detective Jimmy Waghorn eventually solves the mystery (with considerable help from his detection mentor Dr. Priestley), but not before more deaths occur, one of which is surely something rather unique within the history of the genre.

While The Bloody Tower is nowhere near as bleak and depressing as P. D. James' The Black Tower (see here), it is not exactly a cozy story.  Street is uncompromising in portraying the decay and filth of Farningcote Priory and its denizens, which is of a piece with the generally skeptical view that Street takes of the English gentry in his John Rhode books in the 1930s.

Like James, Street also refuses to prettify death by violence. The Bloody Tower is aptly named, for the book is sometimes bloody.

Here's a description of the dead Caleb:

"The right side of his face was completely blown away, leaving nothing but naked and shattered bone.  His dark hair was matted with blood and his left eye, apparently uninjured, stared glassily toward the cobweb-hung rafters."

"Coo, wasn't there a muck of blood too," exclaims with relish the lad who found Caleb's body.  "I never seen the like since Charlie...took me into the yard to see a pig stuck!"

assertions with overconfidence?

In his book Snobbery with Violence, Colin Watson writes that violence in Golden Age detective fiction is "conformist, limited, unreal....A bullet hole almost invariably is neat (as a putt in golf, perhaps)....Blood is generally a 'spreading stain' or a 'pool,' both fastidious expressions that convey nothing of the terrible glistening mess that is made of human butchery."

Well, in the case of the death of Caleb Glapthorne, anyway, the massive head wound made by the skull shattering, brain spattering impact of the bullet can hardly be called "neat"!  Colin Watson gets the violence and the snobbery part wrong too, in relation to The Bloody Tower.

Needless to say, since this is a John Rhode novel, the plot is scrupulously fair.  You may well spot the culprit, although the exact nature of the plot and the splendid murder methods should be harder to divine.

But then you could say the same thing in this respect about P. D. James' book too!

Follies, Part One: The Black Tower (1975), by P. D. James

Follies are odd, ornamental structures, often towers, though they can even be houses (there's a house named Pitts' Folly in Uniontown, Alabama, not far from where I grew up, so named because of its massive columned portico, which overpowers the house).

Wainhouse Tower (1871-1875)
likely inspiration for the folly
The Bloody Tower (1938)
by John Rhode

Follies are an architectural art form in England and have inspired several mystery authors, including John Rhode (Dead Men at the Folly, 1932, and The Bloody Tower, 1938), Agatha Christie (Dead Man's Folly, 1956) and P. D. James (The Black Tower, 1975).  In this piece I want to compare P. D. James' The Black Tower with John Rhode's The Bloody Tower (The Tower of Evil) in the United States.  These novels have some surprising similarities.  Both portray grim worlds of rural decay and dementia, symbolized by a dark tower looming over all.

Follies by their very name seem appropriate for the classical detective novel, for is not murder the ultimate act of folly (or so the thought should run)? In mysteries these crazily eccentric towers seem to suggest not only folly and futility, but doom.

Certainly in P. D. James' The Black Tower, the tower is a potent symbol of death.  The tower in the novel was built by a great grandfather of Wilfred Anstey, current owner of the family estate, Toynton Grange, Dorset.  Great grandad, never too stable to begin with, eventually went completely off his rocker, barricading himself inside the tower, where he starved to death (a typically cheery P. D. James event).

James' cerebral police detective, Adam Dalgliesh, is in hospital recovering from sickness (he thought he was dying, but in a rare piece of good fortune in James-land, it seems the diagnosis was in error), when he receives a letter from his vicar father's old curate, Father William Baddeley, asking him to come down to Toynton Grange, a private nursing home for the incurably disabled, for a discussion about a certain matter that concerns Father Baddeley.

Of course, readers of murder mysteries that we are, we aren't surprised to learn that Father Baddeley expired shortly before Dalgliesh arrives at Toynton Grange.  A natural death--or so they say.

Clavell Tower (1830)
inspiration for The Black Tower (1975)

Dalgliesh naturally is suspicious and finds himself being drawn into snooping around, even though he has decided to retire from the force (he also has that celebrated poet gig going, remember).  The first half of the novel is rather slow (though atmospheric), but in the second half the bodies really begin to pile up, somewhat improbably though entertainingly.  There is a smash climax, though the ending itself is rather abrupt.

At the time it was published, nearly thirty years ago (the same year that Agatha Christie's rather depressing final Poirot novel, Curtain, appeared), The Black Tower was much lauded by critics for its setting in a home for incurably disabled patients. The late crime writer H. R. F. Keating chose The Black Tower as one of the 100 greatest detective novels of all time and it won the Silver Dagger from the Crime Writers Association (it lost the Gold Dagger to Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Per Cent Solution).  The novel was considered the ultimate example of James' refraining from falsely prettifying death in the manner of the classic English cozy mystery.

And, indeed, James doesn't hold back on unpleasant physical details.  Even with the people who aren't patients, we read about discolored teeth, dandruff, mole hairs, sweat, enlarged pores, etc.  James parts company with her model, Dorothy L. Sayers, here, though I do recall one Gothic short story by Sayers, "Scrawns," which gets into similar squirmy material.

Through Dalgliesh--who has always had an aversion to physical contact with other humans that borders on the phobic in my view ("Dalgliesh held out his hand and felt it imprisoned between Anstey's two palms.  It took an effort of will not to flinch from this clammy encounter of moist flesh")--James seems to be confronting her own fears of decay, disease and death.  It makes for some sometimes uncomfortable reading.

the first edition (Faber and Faber)
It's hard to see how this jacket
 could be any more symbolic!

At the same time, however, James' usual emphasis on domestic architecture and food does have a sort of comforting, cozy effect in The Black Tower (by the by, has anyone ever thought of doing a P. D. James cookbook?).  It's the people, all seemingly imprisoned in their own personal black towers of sickness, misery and depression, that make the book challenging.

Certainly James' writing is as compellingly evocative as ever, benefiting here from compression absent from her novels of the last thirty years or so, which typically sprawl closer to 500 pages.  The Black Tower is just under 350 pages, which allows James the space she needs for scenic description and character development without indulging in the tedium-inducing descriptive digressions and life stories of later novels.

James' characters in The Black Tower do tend to be her usual crew of surpassingly unhappy, extremely well-spoken middle- and upper-middle-class professionals (with the odd--and very odd he is!--servant thrown in).

Here's one gent in off-the-cuff conversation:

Basically he's kind and well-meaning, and at least he's spent his own personal fortune at Toynton Grange. In this age of noisy and self-indulgent commitment when the first principle of private or public protest is that it mustn't relate to anything for which the protestor can be held in the least responsible or involve him in the slightest personal sacrifice that, at least, in his favor.

Nice rhetoric for a formal speech or essay, yes, but are people really that eloquent off the top of their heads?  I wouldn't mention such a point normally, but P. D. James does make a great show of how putatively realistic her novels are compared with the Golden Agers!  I don't know.

Here's a one-off from another character: "I don't need a phallic symbol erected by a Victorian eccentric to remind me of the skull beneath the skin."  James so much liked that last phrase--which comes from T. S. Eliot--that she used it as the title for a 1982 Cordelia Gray detective novel.  Of course both the quoted characters are gay men and in P. D. James novels gay men customarily sound like they are auditioning for parts in Noel Coward plays.  These lads are always "on" if you know what I mean.

Despite such carping on my part, I think The Black Tower is a masterful mystery tale.  Not only is it elegantly written, emotionally moving and powerfully atmospheric, it is an authentically fair play detective novel--no small thing, even in 1975!

Coming for Friday, my forgotten novel choice, The Bloody Tower (1938) by John Rhode.

Pitts' Folly (1853), Uniontown, Alabama (photograph 1936)
you must admit this would make a great setting for a murder mystery

Death Before Jack: The Maul and the Pear Tree (1971), by P.D. James and T.A. Critchley

P. D. James' one book-length excursion into true crime--The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders, 1811--has been reissued in Britain by James' English publisher, Faber and Faber, probably, one imagines, due to the resurgent popularity of English historical true crime after the surprise runaway success of Kate Summerscale's reconstruction of the Constance Kent murder case, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (2008).

English historical true crime is hot right now, and authors are eagerly ransacking the historical record for juicy morsels of murder for the public to savor.  Thus it is not surprising that James' four-decades-old true crime opus is getting another go (the fact that last year was the 200th anniversary of the Ratcliffe Highway murders surely didn't hurt either).

Despite the common insistence that during the Golden Age of detective fiction only chess-like, emotionally arid puzzle problems interested British crime writers, in fact mystery authors of that era were fascinated by true crime.  Dorothy L. Sayers wrote about he Julia Wallace murder case, John Street about the Constance Kent case.  Numerous other instances can be given.

the most recent edition

So James' study, co-authored with a Home Office colleague, Thomas Alan Critchley (1919-1991), was hardly the first instance of a famous mystery writer taking a whack at true crime, and it certainly was not the last.  But, P. D. James being involved, The Maul and the Pear Tree is a notable study in the literature of true crime.

Although eclipsed by the Jack the Ripper murders that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century (1888), the Ratcliffe Highway killings that took place in the beginning of the nineteenth century shocked and appalled the British nation, just as the Whitechapel horrors did nearly eight decades later.

Three hundred miles from London, a much agitated rural correspondent wrote:

We in the country here are thinking and talking of nothing but the dreadful murders, which seem to bring a stigma, not merely on the police, but on the land we live in, and even our human nature.  No circumstances which did not concern myself ever disturbed me so much.

Even before the rise of 24-hour cable television, mass murder, with the helpful hand of the penny press, had the power to transfix a nation.

But what exactly happened in the month of December, 1811?  Over a short space of time in Ratcliffe Highway two households were obliterated in savage bursts of violence (though James and Critichley don't mention it, I was rather reminded of the Manson Gang killings, which took place in California in 1969, two years before Maul was published). 

Here is an interesting look, by the way, at what has happened in modern times to the locations associated with the crimes:

Mapping the Ratcliffe Highway Murders

First draper William Marr, his wife, infant son and a teenage shop boy were killed.  Then, a dozen days later, publican John Williamson, his wife and a woman servant were slain.

The murders were extremely brutal: the victims were bloodily battered by blunt instruments (a maul, or mallet, in the first household, an iron bar in the second) and their throats slit (the killing in its crib of a three month old baby, who of course could have identified no one, further demonstrates the savagery of the crime).

James and Critchley go to great length to show how the English law enforcement system of the time was too fragmented and disorganized to cope with such crimes.

As just one example, that the maul had tell-tale initials on it was not discovered for twelve days.  Had an elementary examination been made of the murder weapon at the time of its discovery, the Williamson couple and their servant likely would not have died.

There was a great public outcry over the murders and the inefficiency and delay of authority in finding answers.  Avowed the letter writer quoted above:

I have very long felt the necessity of an improved police....The police laws cannot be too rigorous; and the usual objection that a rigorous police is inconsistent with English liberty might easily be shown to be absurd.

the investigation relied heavily on handbills

Yet there was still a great deal of resistance as well to establishing a modern police force, which many people associated with the Napoleonic tyranny of England's direst enemy, France.  A metropolitan police force would not be organized in London until 1829.

James and Critchley also note the bigotry that infected the investigation, as, in classic fashion, suspicion of the mob ("the mob" often is referred to in this book) caused foreigners to be rounded up unjustly.

In parliament, Richard Brinsley Sheridan spoke witheringly on this subject:

"'Oh, who would do it but Portuguese?' was the general cry.  Prejudice, however, did not long stand still upon the Portuguese.  The next tribe of foreigners arraigned and convicted were the Irish...and it was nothing but an Irish murder and could have been done only by Irishmen!"

After the maul finally was identified, however, the investigation, such as it was, focused on the Pear Tree public house.  The maul came from a chest of tools left there by an absent sailor (those were his initials on it).  We are now presented with a classic detective novel situation, where a limited circle of suspects might have committed the crime.  Who had access to the chest?

Far more effective as a deterrent is the spectacle
of punishment on earth....

Authority alighted on one denizen of the Pear Tree as principal suspect.  He was arrested and soon conveniently found dead, hanged, in his prison cell. Everyone was pleased to accept the man's evident suicide as evidence of his guilt and the case was closed, aside from a desultory search for possible accomplices (surely the first group of killings, at least, could not have been accomplished entirely by one person).

Having cheated the gallows, as the saying goes, the suicide nevertheless was subjected to a public ceremony of punishment, as he was carted out along Ratcliffe Highway, thousands gathered to watch, to be buried at a crossroads, a stake driven through his heart.  I kid you not.

Authority's reasoning for staging this bizarre public spectacle is analyzed in Maul, in a classic Jamesian passage:

One might suppose that the advocates of capital punishment would appreciate a man who, recognizing the justice of his sentence, and accepting that only a life can compensate for a life, saves society the trouble and expense of an official ceremony and embraces his sentence so wholeheartedly that he executes judgment on himself.  But society has seldom seen it in that light....Few people had any doubt that Williams was now receiving his just deserts in the next world.  But the punishment of God, if sure, is invisible, and the contemplation of hell fire does little to assuage a lust for revenge. Far more effective as a deterrent is the spectacle of punishment on earth.

The formal and elegant cadence of this writing is unmistakable James, and an example of why her prose (classic English prose at its finest) has so many admirers.

But wait!  As in the best classic detective novels, in Maul James and Critchley spring a surprise, and inform us that authority almost certainly Got It All Wrong.  In the final fascinating chapters, they demolish the case against the supposedly guilty party and point their accusing fingers elsewhere.

Do they get it right?  It seemed a convincing construction to me (though one matter may be pushed a bit too far--interestingly, this part reminded me of the plot of James's novel An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, which came out the next year, in 1972).  Also, I still have trouble understanding the savagery of the crimes (why kill the baby).

For those who want more on this subject, check out Lloyd Shepherd's The English Monster (2012), a fictionalization of the case.  But don't neglect The Maul and the Pear Tree!

August's Salute to P. D. James

Linked below are two interesting pieces on Britain's longtime co-reigning Queens of Crime, P. D. James and Ruth Rendell.

Ruth Rendell: the peer who never stops plotting (Telegraph, 30 July 2012)

P. D. James: inside the head of a criminal mastermind (Guardian, 14 July 2012)

Interesting that the piece on the conservative mystery peer is in the Guardian and the one on the liberal peer is in the Telegraph!  I guess this just goes to show you how this deadly duo really has conquered the world with their crime fiction.

Anthony Boucher came not to praise
Cover Her Face but to bury it

P. D. James will turn 92 on Friday.  And it is fifty years since her first novel (a crime novel of course!) was published in Britain.  It was called Cover Her Face (coincidentally, this was almost the title of Agatha Christie's posthumously published final Miss Marple mystery, Sleeping Murder).  In Britain it's out in a sparkly new paperback edition from James' English publisher, Faber & Faber.

It's rather amusing (once you get over the initial shock) to see what that Great Man of American mystery criticism, Anthony Boucher (1911-1968), had to say about Cover her Face, which was not even published in the United States until 1966!

To be fair to Boucher, even James herself seems somewhat ambivalent about this novel today, admitting that it is very traditional, but at the time she must have found his review, which appeared in the pages of the  New York Times Book Review on 24 July 1966, intensely disappointing:

It's much easier to see why nobody rushed to import P. D. James' Cover Her Face.  This is a literate and not unpromising first novel, but modeled firmly upon the detective story of 30 years ago at its dullest.  No forward plot, nothing but 80,000 words of relentless (and non-procedural) investigation leading to the final assembly of all the characters and the unbelievable confession....When I keep urging a return to the formal detective story, this is not what I mean.

Ouch!  Basically, Boucher is labeling James one of those British "Humdrums," the tag that has been attached by a number of people, including Julian Symons and James herself, to writers like John Rhode (John Street) and Freeman Wills Crofts (Boucher himself often actually gave much stronger reviews back in the 1940s to Rhode's and Crofts' books than he did in 1966 to James' Cover Her Face).  Such irony! 

Yet here it is a half-century later and Cover Her Face is still in print--in fact has never been out of print--and has sold oodles and oodles of paperback copies, not to mention now e-editions.  Boucher's dismissive review strikes me as something of a miscall, but even Great Men can have off moments!

Maybe she's searching
for Adam Dalgleish!

 In the review column in which he panned Cover Her Face Anthony Boucher expressed a marked preference for Afternoon for Lizards/Bridge of Fear by the New Zealand Gothic novelist Dorothy Eden (1912-1982), who, it seems, published over forty books between 1940 and 1982.

I must admit that I had never even heard of Dorothy Eden, let alone read anything by her.

Though here you go, here's a blog piece on Eden (isn't the internet grand?):

Dorothy Eden: forgotten kiwi suspense writer?

In honor of P. D. James's 92nd and the 50th anniversary (1962-2012) of Cover Her Face, I plan to blog a bit about the Baroness in August.

With the Friday Forgotten book coming up on James' birthday, that day I will be blogging The Maul and the Pear Tree, a true crime study that James authored with T. A. Critchley in 1971.  Nothing by James is truly forgotten (in fact Maul has recently been reprinted by Faber & Faber), but it's as obscure as James gets!

After this, expect to see something some time this month on the first two James detective novels, as well as a comparison piece between one of the Baroness' mysteries and one by "Humdrum" John Rhode.  They have more in common than you might think--and not in a bad way by any means!  Happy reading!

RIP Edgar Box: Gore Vidal (1925-2012)

News comes tonight of the death of American author and essayist Gore Vidal, at the age of 86.  An important figure in the the history of American intellectual culture, Vidal of course will be eulogized (or pilloried, in some cases) for works other than the three detective novels he wrote in the 1950s under the pseudonym Edgar Box.  However, this is a mystery blog, so I will commemorate Gore Vidal by writing about Edgar Box.

I happened to blog the first two Edgar Box mysteries back on May 10 (Gore-y Death) and May 17 (Country House Murders of Edgar Box) of this year.  But I never got around to blogging the last Edgar Box novel, Death Likes It Hot (1954), dubbed at the time "a first-rate comedy of manners" by American mystery critic Anthony Boucher.  So here I take the opportunity of doing so.

Box, Mr. Box

As I indicated in Gore-y Death, I think Vidal rapidly strengthened as a detective novelist over the course of writing his three Edgar Box mysteries.  His first, Death in the Fifth Position (1952), paints an amusing (and for the 1950s surely sexually titillating) portrait of the New York ballet world, but as a true detective novel it is rather a bust. His second, Death Before Bedtime (1953), which is effectively a closed location, classic country house detective novel (though set in Washington, D. C.), tones down the sex a bit (especially the "alternative" aspect of it) but improves the detection.  His third, Death Likes It Hot, carries on in the manner of Bedtime, but is better yet as a pure mystery.

Death Likes It Hot starts off quite quirkily with Vidal discussing the latest New York newspaper death sensation:

The death of Peaches Sandoe the midget at the hands, or rather feet, of a maddened elephant in the sideshow of the circus at Madison Square Garden was at first thought to be an accident, the sort of tragedy you're bound to run into from time to time if you run a circus with both elephants and midgets in it.  A few days later, though, there was talk of foul play....

Well, darn it all, in this novel our hero, debonair public relations he-man Peter Sargeant, never does get involved with this particular case!

It seems Mrs. Veering, wealthy Long Island matron, is determined to be the next big thing in Hamptons hostessing, so she hires Sargeant to help her map out a strategy campaign.  Soon Sargeant is on the Long Island Cannon Ball Express, on the way to his client's current country house party, where murder quickly strikes (a suspicious ocean drowning of one of the guests).

"Dinner was a forced affair...."

Hot is filled with acidulous humor, as any Edgar Box reader by this time had no doubt come to expect.  The novel actually reads rather like the love child, so to speak, of Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler!

As another murder follows the original murder, an interesting plot develops, the best of the three Box books I would say.  Vidal even condescends to describe to layout of the house, which actually matters (though there really should have been a floor plan).  For good reason, as any fan of classical detective fiction will readily see, Vidal specifically references Christie in Hot.  In a New York Times interview from 2011 that concerned the Box novels, lately reprinted by Vintage Books' Black Lizard imprint, Vidal highly praised Christie, even lauding her ability to create interesting characters.  And in his 2010 preface to the Black Lizard edition of Hot Vidal freely admits: "This book is very much in the Agatha Christie vein."

But much of the fun too is in the satirical, sardonic narration of Peter Sargeant, who reminds me of a much less idealistic version of Chandler's great 'tec, Philip Marlowe.  It soon emerges that Sargeant's rich client is a pronounced dipsomaniac, rather reminiscent of a character in Chandler's mystery The High Window.

Vidal has a lot of fun describing Mrs. Veering--"a combination of Hetty Green and lush"--and her avid pursuit of liquid refreshment:

Mrs. Veering stirred her orange juice with her forefinger: I wondered what pale firewater it contained.  Probably gin, the breakfast drink.

Vidal through Peter Sargeant also mercilessly mocks Mary Western Lung, noted children's author--her most beloved book is Little Biddy Bit--and hostess of Book-Chat.  Miss Lung is quite the coyly amorous type, putting the move on all the available men in the house, including the police sergeant sent to check on the first suspicious death. "[W]e talked mostly about books," she later admits of her tryst, er, interview with him.  "He likes Mickey Spillane."

In Death Like It Hot Vidal seems to have it quite in for "lady novelists" in general (Agatha Christie excepted).  Another target of his ire is "Francine Karpin Lock" (obviously Frances Parkinson Keyes).

Perhaps Vidal can be accused of a certain sexism in the Hot, but, on the other hand, the author-target in his previous book was Truman Capote!  And in Hot the male characters are mocked too (as well as bad grammar):

"What can I do you for?" were, I'm afraid, the first words the bereaved husband said to me when I joined him...."A martini," I said.

As is Hamptons society in general!  Here Vidal/Sargeant talks about what makes one part of the "nice" set at the Ladyrock Yacht Club:

Part of being nice means you belong to the Club and deplore the presence in the community of such un-nice elements as Jews, artist, fairies and celebrities, four groups which, given half a chance, will, they feel, sweep all that's nice right out to sea.

And, this being an Edgar Box novel, there naturally is an ample amount of sex that tales place between Sargeant and his current lady friend, rich girl Liz Bessemer.  There's a recurrent joke about how the amorous and uninhibited couple keep having sex in the most uncomfortable of locations. "You know, darling, there are such things as beds, old-fashioned as they may sound," Liz chides Peter at one point.

Eventually Sargeant collars a killer and order--of a sort--is restored on the Hamptons.  The rich can rest easy again.  The novel ends with the indication that Peter Sargeant may end up getting involved in that Peaches Sandoe circus midget case after all.

Sadly, however, we never saw from the hand of Gore Vidal a fourth Edgar Box detective novel, entitled, say, Death Clowns Around.

And now we never will.  But we at least have the three Edgar Box tales, with their moderately naughty depictions of fifties fun and crimes.  RIP Edgar Box.