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!

A Christmas Number: Do Not Murder Before Christmas (1949), by Jack Iams

Jack Iams (1910-1990) was a journalist and novelist who published a small body of crime fiction in the late 1940s and the 1950s.  A graduate of St. Paul's School and Princeton, he was involved with theatricals at both schools and after WW2 was a television critic for the New York Herald Tribune.

His crime writing in my experience is charming and amusing, kind of an Americanized version of British manners school of Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh.  However, Do Not Murder Before Christmas definitely has American elements to it, such as the crusading young journalist sleuth and the corrupt city administration.

What happened to all these fictional idealistic journalists in crime fiction, incidentally?  They were quite common in the United States in the 1930s and for decades thereafter, but they seem rarer now.  Are we as cynical about journalism as everything else these days?

Anyway, there's also a beautiful blonde, Jane Hewes, and a love triangle to go along with the obligatory murder.  Our hero must overcome a sneering, privileged Ivy Leaguer to win Jane and solve the mystery.

What is the mystery?  Why, who killed Uncle Poot, the kindly and beloved old Dutch toymaker, on the eve of his Christmas party for all the poor tots of Shady Hollow, the slum of the anonymous small city where the novel takes place.

It seems old Uncle Poot kept records going back for decades on the children who patronized his store as to which were naughty and which nice, and someone may have decided that the old Dutchman knew a little too much about these matters.

Though the murder ends up implicating two important families, the aristocratic but decaying Derwents, and the nouveaux riche and corrupt Malloys, our crusading journalist, Stanley ("Rocky") Rockwell, lets nothing get in the way of his pursuit of the truth.  He even finds time to throw the city's African-American children a little Christmas party after Uncle Poot is killed (these children were excluded from the Malloy's charity event).

As the above indicates, the social sentiments in this novel are more advanced than those in James M. Fox's The Gentle Hangman, recently reviewed here, although at one point, after Rocky fights and, through luck, knocks out Jane's snotty boyfriend, Jane gives Rocky a "half-rueful, half proud" smile and observes, "Isn't it awful how bloodthirsty women are?"

I found it funny how this same observation--that women love violence more than the men actually committing the violence--occurred in American mysteries published within a year of each other at the mid-twentieth-century that I read back-to-back.

Mysteries written by MEN, I might add!

Iams' narratives go down like the smoothest of eggnogs, and you can easily read Do Not Murder Before Christmas in an evening (I especially liked the chapter titles, which are adapted from the poem "The Night Before Christmas/A Visit from St. Nicholas").  It's a good example of American detective fiction at that time, with its zippy narrative and streamlined mystery.  Personally I prefer the dense clue puzzles of the 1920s and 1930s, but I can't deny that Iams' novel makes an entertaining read--and one that certainly won't get too much in the way of last-minute holiday shopping.

An earlier Christmas Number: Jefferson Farjeon's Mystery in White.

All Knotted Up: The Gentle Hangman (1950), by James M. Fox

"I'm assuming that a competent private investigator can take care of the matter, for a reasonable fee, and without involving us in any Sam Spade nonsense."

                                                         --The Gentle Hangman, James M. Fox

In the New York Times Book Review in 1950 Anthony Boucher praised James M. Fox's The Gentle Hangman for its convincing setting in Hollywood, "which Mr. Fox knows down to its last hand-painted cravat," and its "plot of tremendous intricacy" (involving "radio giveaways, labor racketeering, and a touch or two of sexual aberration").

Boucher also noted that in The Gentle Hangman there was "not a single turn of phrase or thought to indicate that [Fox] began writing in English only a dozen years ago" and that the author "has taken two of the prime American patterns, the Private Eye and the Bright Young Couple, and fused them delightfully so as to avoid either the excess toughness of the first or the cloying cuteness of the second."

Myself I found there were some good points to The Gentle Hangman, but I'm afraid I can't be nearly so positive about the book as Anthony Boucher.

What is the book about?  Well, as the jacket says, "a diamond brings death to a careless blonde" (I guess diamonds aren't a girl's best friend, eh?).  It seems that a woman tasked on a sort of radio game show with selling a diamond ring on the street for $10 instead absconded with it.  PI Johnny Marshall in turn is tasked with finding this blonde, and he does--dead, "gently" hanged from a bedpost.  By the by, the events take place at Christmas time, so technically this novel is a Christmas mystery, if only tepidly so.

Anyway, thus is launched a plot of, as Boucher wrote, "tremendous intricacy."  The problem is it doesn't uncoil nearly as well as it should.  At the end I wasn't totally clear on just who was who and which parts of which stories were true and which false.  Fox may have been a fan of R. Austin Freeman and Dorothy L. Sayers (see my previous post), but those two authors were much better plot untanglers.

Johnny Marshall is a smart guy.  He's Cornell '39, apparently, quotes Robert Burns and uses big words (a man displays "a couple of prominent, heavily auriferous eyeteeth"--I had to look up that word "auriferous").  He has a good descriptive sense (there are some vivid pictures of LA) and slings narrative one-liners in the classic tough guy tradition:

"She offered us a smile you could have bottled and sold for weed killer."

"It was small enough for a Carmelite nun to develop claustrophobia."

"The Mexican waitress looked like a high-school girl recently recruited into a life of sin; she didn't use quite a full ounce of mascara, and she sported a set of falsies big enough to bounce a truck off."

I found the police predictably unlikable, even though they didn't actually beat up our hero, as so often happens in Raymond Chandler's books.  Instead they beat up a cheap crook, in a lengthy and quite repulsive police interrogation scene.  Johnny seemed to disapprove in a general way, although he primarily expressed contempt for the hood (noting his "halitosis" for example).*

*(In the front matter of the novel we find this disclaimer: "This story is fiction....Apologies are tendered to Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz of Los Angeles County, and to his staff, under whose capable administration such goings-on as these could not possibly have occurred."  Well, that's certainly reassuring.)

In his page on the Johnny and Suzy Marshall series over at thrilling detective.com, Kevin Burton Smith refers to Suzy's "Kiss me, I'm stupid" ditziness, which he finds grating.  I don't know that I would call Suzy a ditz in this book, but she does ask a lot of "but why?" questions, which does get old by the end.  She is clearly the Watson figure in this relationship (Johnny even mentions Holmes and Watson several times).

Little, Brown's select company
Queen, Marsh, Hare and Fox

Especially tiresome is Johnny's seemingly endless series of "cute" pet names for Suzy.  I made a list:

cherry pie
honey bun
sugar lamb
honey doll
pussy cat
sugar bun
angel face

I was wondering whether Fox used a random generator for these. Let's try some others: cherry bun, honey pie, sugar doll, angel lamb--hmm, I'd better stop here. Johnny also refers to Suzy as "the little woman."  You definitely get the sense that the war is over and women are expected to get back inside the home, cooking, cleaning and cooing over their he-men.

Personally, I wish this series had continued until the 1960s, when Suzy might have read Betty Friedan and come up with her own pet name for Johnny: smug bastard.

The only other significant woman character in the novel is a female professional described as such by Johnny:

It wore a Kelly-green silk blouse with matching Paisley scarf and pure white gabardine slacks under the mink, on a body like a man's: tall, broad-shouldered and slender-hipped, the chest as flat as a billboard, the ankles thick and heavy over size-ten feet in low-heeled English saddle brogues. Paradoxically, the over-all effect achieved was somehow feminine and seductive.  

Miss Luanna Bouquette is soon out to seduce Johnny, assuring him that she's not one "one of those queers--you know, the ones who like little girls and things."  Johnny later sums her up as a "nymphomaniac."

Johnny's observations on women often are lamentable:

"Nylons they wear, yet, and they haven't changed a particle in ten thousand years--they still like to see blood so much they even paint their fingernails to preserve the illusion" (this after Suzy can't "suppress the pleasurable inflection" from her voice after Johnny beats two hoods to pulps).

"I was satisfied that there could be only one answer, but it was an answer based on cold, sordid logic of a kind no woman could be expected to appreciate....It simply wasn't the sort of deal that lent itself to argument from an emotional angle, such as a woman by nature always must take" (this on why he's not explaining things to Suzy).

As far as minorities go, a bucktoothed Japanese character is referred to by Suzy and Johnny as "the Jap" (perhaps not so surprising five years after WW2) and Johnny refers to a bulging-eyed "old Negro" diner worker as "the colored boy."  Blah.

Reading The Gentle Hangman, I couldn't help thinking of Ross Macdonald's classic detective novel The Ivory Grin (1952), which is light years ahead in terms of the author's handling of social relations and sympathy and his ability to unravel an extremely complex plot coherently.  Still, an Ivory Grin doesn't flash at one every day.  I might yet give another Fox novel a try next year.  At the very least it should make an interesting lesson in literary sociology.

James M. Fox (1908-1989)

James M. Fox (1908-1989)
aka Johannes Knipscheer

Dutch by birth (his original name was Johannes Willem Mathijs Knipscheer), James M. Fox, a lawyer by profession, settled in Los Angeles after World War Two, where he began writing the hard-boiled Johnny and Suzy Marshall series for which he was, I believe, best known (though he wrote some well-regarded non-series titles like The Wheel Is Fixed, 1951, as well as four espionage thrillers before 1945).

There were nine of these Marshall mysteries, which combine the hard-boiled PI first person narrative with smart mystery couple banter, published between 1947 and 1953.  I am currently reading The Gentle Hangman (1950) and should have the full piece up tomorrow.

While not without some irritations characteristic of the period, it so far seems a literate and intelligent detective novel--though I do find myself missing the genius of Raymond Chandler, with whom Fox was a correspondent in the 1950s, as well as the originality of Ross Macdonald.  But then that is why Chandler and Macdonald, along with Dashiell Hammett, are the ones who constitute the great hard-boiled triumvirate.

Fox also corresponded with Percival M. Stone, a Massachusetts mystery collector and tremendous R. Austin Freeman enthusiast (Freeman, a contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle and creator of the medical sleuth Dr. Thorndyke, was one of the great English detective fiction authors).

Happily, I happen to have one of the letters.  Stone had written Fox on January 4, 1954 canvassing Fox's opinions of crime writers.  From his Studio City abode (I think the place where he lived has been replaced by a Petco) Fox responded two weeks later, on January 17:

I can find no fault with your credo on the subject of R. A. Freeman, who will probably always rank at the top of the English school, with Dorothy Sayers a close second.  I'm somewhat undecided about the stature of Mr. [Freeman Wills] Crofts, whom I have at times suspected of certain deficiencies in plotting and characterization.  But my views are not really worth taking into account, since I've always belonged to the American school myself, and more particularly to that branch of it which is forever kicking over the traces or committing outright iconoclasm in some form or other....

Interestingly, as we see, Fox admired R. Austin Freeman, who also had a great fan in Chandler (though Chandler did not enjoy Sayers' work).  I share Fox's admiration for both Freeman and Sayers and have to admit that Crofts, of whom I have written at length in Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery, did have certain deficiencies in characterization (though I greatly enjoy some of his books).

What do I think of Fox's own work?  Come see tomorrow.

Joan Fontaine (1917-2013)

I think to the crime fiction world Joan Fontaine, who died yesterday at the age of 96, is best known for the films Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941), both directed by Alfred Hitchcock and based, respectively, novels by Daphne du Maurier and Anthony Berkeley Cox.

Great films both (though the alteration of the novel's ending in Suspicion is controversial), but I want to take this opportunity to take note of the 1947 Joan Fontaine film Ivy, a period murder melodrama adapted from The Story of Ivy (1927), by Marie Belloc Lowndes, an under-appreciated crime writer (she's almost solely known today for one work, the much-filmed Jack-the-Ripper tale The Lodger).

Sadly, Ivy is not available on DVD, but let this be my plea to see it released as such.  It's a splendid old Victorian crime story, with a wicked woman (Fontaine), adultery, arsenic and annihilation.

Also in the cast are Herbert Marshall, Richard Ney and Patric Knowles, but except for a brief scene-stealing cameo as a fortune teller from Una O'Connor it is Joan Fontaine's show all the way.  Watch it if you get the chance.

Incidentally, here's the Suspense radio version of The Story of Ivy, starring Ann Richards.