The Murder Weapon Wouldn't Stay Put: Episode of the Wandering Knife (1950), Mary Roberts Rinehart

Mary Roberts Rinehart's Episode of the Wandering Knife collects two novellas,  the title tale and "The Secret," as well as a long short story, "The Man Who Hid His Breakfast."

"Episode of the Wandering Knife" and "The Man Who Hid His Breakfast" are, I think really first-rate Rinehart tales.  "The Secret" is much weaker, in that "the secret" in the tale is a trite plot device.

Yet even it was a pleasant surprise, in that it was a Nurse Hilda Adams story.  Nurse Hilda Adams was a character introduced by Rinehart all the way back in 1914, in the novella "The Buckled Bag."  I had thought until now that Nurse Adams only ever appeared in two 1914 novellas and two novels, published a decade apart in 1932 and 1942, but I found she also appeared in this additional, final novella, evidently written in the mid-/late-1940s.

The title story offers a gripping and at times grimly amusing situation of multiple murders and a killing knife that wouldn't stay put.  All the Rinehart staples are present: the wealthy family, the old mansion, the secret buried in the past.

Rinehart is associated with wealthy "nosy spinster" narrators because of her most famous novel, The Circular Staircase (1908) (I know she also used this type in The Case of Jennie Brice, 1913, and, as I recollect, The Door, 1930), yet in the novel The Wall, as in "Knife," the narrator, Judy Shephard, is a comparatively young, unmarried woman who finds romance in between murders.

Even though only five years separate The Wall (1938) and "Knife" (serialized in 1943) you get a definite feeling that times have quite changed in the good old U. S. of A.  In "Knife" the heroine's mysterious love interest, Tony King, makes repeated disparaging comments about the wealth of her family, and she herself is embarrassed and defensive about it (especially that barracks of a family mansion).

The feeling we get is that with the war on more sacrifice is expected of the wealthy (and that it will be willingly given).  Judy Shephard also gets to demonstrate some athletic prowess and more outspoken language, including the epithets "hell" and "damn," and she is looking for serious war work (i. e., a job), all of which makes her more of a discernible modern type.

Additionally we learn that the Shephards are comparatively new money.  They come off rather better than the old money family in the tale.

The plot itself is a good one, intricate but clear, and the writing is lively, with the relationship between the narrator and her willful mother especially well-conveyed (and frequently humorous) and the romance between Judy and Tony subtly and charmingly done. At about 40,000 words, "Knife" could have been expanded into a full scale novel, but I like it as is.

the most recent paperback edition is
more garish and more lurid
but less accurate

At about 10,000 words, "The Man Who Hid His Breakfast" is considerably shorter than "Knife," but it's just right for its length as well.

It's an unusual tale, in my experience, in Rinehart's output, in that not only does it have no first person narration, but it has a male protagonist, a police inspector on his last case, (his retirement being imminent), and that there's an emphasis, quite uncommon in the Rinehart canon, on material clues.

The central character, Tom Brent, is a wonderfully-portrayed character, decent and fatherly, despite his tired feet and conflicts with his obnoxious political hack superior and with his wife over plans for retired life (he wants to start a dog kennels, she a chicken farm). Rinehart effectively captures the different focus of this tale in her narration:

He went slowly down the stairs, aware that Joe's eyes were following him with something like pity. For this was his last case before he retired, and it looked like a stinker. A man ought to be able to get out quietly, to end his long service with dignity. But this murder was front-page stuff. The big substantial house, the social standing of the family insured that it would be plastered all over the front pages of the newspapers. Already reporters were crowding the pavement outside.  Soon he would have to call them in and tell them something.  He didn't know what.

For the Rinehart traditionalists, however, rest certain there's young love present too.  Yet it's Inspector Brent's show.  Had the very wealthy Rinehart needed to write a novel of year like many "lesser," improvident and impecunious crime authors, she most definitely could have built a series around this guy.

Mary Roberts Rinehart, police proceduralist: Had we but known!

Death Wears a Mask: The Accomplice (1947), by Matthew Head

Art teacher and critic John Canaday (1907-1985) as "Matthew Head" wrote seven crime novels between 1943 and 1955.  The best known of these books are the four "Mary Finney" mysteries, particularity the three that are set in Africa.  Two of these were reprinted within the last decade in typically attractive editions by Felony & Mayhem. To my mind, however, the most striking crime novel by "Matthew Head" is a non-series take, The Accomplice (1947).

Set in Paris and Kansas City (the "Paris of the Plains") in the 1930s, The Accomplice reminds me a great deal of one of those between-the-wars American expatriate novels, like F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night (1934) and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), although the subject matter in Head's tale is a great deal more lurid.  From more recent times I was rather reminded of Ruth Rendell's The Bridesmaid, 1989.

The novel starts with a love triangle of sorts, which we eventually find is actually a rectangle, and a very strange one at that. Hank Bewley, studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, becomes enamored with pretty Corrie Walters of Kansas City, but Corrie is besotted with Lex Abbott, also of Kansas City and a quite rich and quite visually arresting young man.  Here's a descriptive passage to give you some idea of the striking writing in the novel, which is told in Hank's voice:

a beautiful design

Whenever Lex and I walked down the street together there was always a ripple of faces turning in our direction, and that never happens when I walk down the street alone.  I've seen people stop dead in their tracks when Lex came along toward them, and then turn around and follow him as if they had lost all control over their direction of movement.  Strangers were always edging up to him at bars or sending him notes in restaurants, yet as long as I knew him I never knew anybody to react to that face with an immediate smile or that happy feeling of expectancy you get sometimes from a new face that you want to know.  It was a sullen and stony face, but as a piece of pure design it was a joy to look at, in shape and in color.  "Joy" isn't the right word, because the face didn't promise anything good.  The word popped up there because I was trying to avoid the word "beautiful," but I might as well go on and say that as a piece of pure design, Lex's face was beautiful.

Initially Hank reminded me of a Nick Carraway outside observer type (see Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby,1925), but he becomes very personally involved indeed in an emotional imbroglio that grows increasingly bizarre when Mimi de Couer, a sort of female roue, appears on the scene.  She is quite an old friend of Lex's, it seems.

a not entirely accurate
but remarkably arresting
and sexually suggestive cover

Later the scene shifts to Kansas city and Mimi's odd interior decorating establishment there. Events finally culminate in murder, of an especially horrific and unforgettable nature. Although The Accomplice is primarily a character novel, there is a neat little murder problem to be unknotted. After that there is a haunting coda in Paris.

This is a first class crime novel, notably sexually suggestive for its period, that unaccountably has been out-of-print for nearly fifty years, a situation that I hope can be rectified.*

*(Be warned the Dell paperback editions from the 1940s have poor, brittle paper.  Also watch out for a blog review of this novel that reveals too much, imo).

Have You Seen This Gorilla? The Body Missed the Boat (1947), by Jack Iams

I earlier reviewed Jack Iams' Christmas mystery, Do Not Murder Before Christmas (1949) and I enjoyed it enough to go back and look at another Iams book, his first criminous tale in fact, The Body Missed the Boat (1947).

the va-va-voom!
Dell paperback edition

Set in Brazzaville in French Equatorial Africa, Boat draws on Jack Iams' experiences during WW2 working for the Office of War Information.  Iams reported enjoying his time in Africa, concluding wryly that he likely was "the type that goes to pieces gracefully in the tropics."

One imagines as well that the success of fellow American Matthew Head's (art critic John Canaday) first African mystery, The Devil in the Bush (1945), may have had some influence of Iams' choice of setting.

While Iams' Christmas is an enjoyable tale, I preferred Boat, in part for the comparative originality of the colonial African setting.

To be sure, both are smoothly written novels--Iams was a skilled popular writer--with some appealing humor; yet Boat also boasts a plot that kept me on my toes. I did not foresee the solution.

Boat could have been alternately titled The Gorilla Box Murder, for it details the fallout when the American consul in Brazzaville is found dead from poison in a box that was supposed to contain a gorilla, Mama Bu-Bu, consigned for shipment to the United States.

The narrator is the good-hearted young vice-consul, Freddy Benson. Besides Freddy, there is a winning cast of characters, including the sinuous French consulate secretary, Yvette Armenois; the cool and clever Hilary Judd, a British woman working for Radio Brazzaville with whom Freddy is quite smitten; Philippa Darrow, "professional animal huntress"; Larry Brune, Radio Brazzaville correspondent; and the commissaire de police, Anatole Mauclerc (the Inspector Maigret of Africa). Iams writes male and female characters equally well, I think.

Boat has fine humor (the murdered man incidentally was an objectionable individual whom everyone justifiably loathed), often directed at the diplomatic service (there's also an amusing portrait of a fish-out-of-water FBI man), and an ingratiating narrative.  Like Iams' previous novel, I found it a book that could be finished in an evening with much enjoyment.  The plot is clever and the local color first rate.  Recommended.

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)