The Poetics of Murder: How Strange a Thing (1935), by Dorothy Bennett

On the back cover of Jack, the Lady Killer (Poisoned Pen Press, 1999), the detective tale told in poetic form by the late H. R. F. Keating, Jack is described as "one of the rarest forms known to literature, the detective novel in verse."

How strange indeed: a 1930s mystery
in the form of a narrative poem

Well, just guess what your Passing Tramp has come across: How Strange a Thing, a narrative murder mystery poem of 96 pages by one Dorothy Bennett, published in 1935 by Caxton Printers of Caldwell, Idaho.  It was published simultaneously with Murder Unleashed (Doubleday, Doran), a regular old prose detective novel, also by Bennett.

Who was Dorothy Bennett?*  I hardly know, beyond that she was unmarried in 1935, a university graduate, a Berkeley, California native and the daughter of Mrs. Mary Richardson Bennett, to whom How Strange a Thing is dedicated.  I would like to know more about Bennett, for in producing How Strange a Thing, she at least claimed the merit of doing Something That Is Not Done Every Day.

Aline Kilmer, wife of poet
Joyce Kilmer (above)
 praised How Strange a Thing
as "an excellent work of art"

On the back cover of its dust jacket How Strange a Thing carries praise from (1) Aline Kilmer (1888-1941), widow of Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918), famed author of "Trees," and a poet, author and essayist in her own right and (2) T[homas] K[ing] Whipple, a prominent literary critic (in 1928 he authored Spokesman: Modern Writers and American Life), Princeton classmate of Edmund Wilson and American literature professor at the University of California at Berkeley (I'm guessing Dorothy Bennett may have been a student of his).

Edmund Wilson famously despised detective stories, but his former Princeton classmate Professor Whipple must have felt differently, for the latter man praised How Strange a Thing for having, among other fine qualities, "the excitement and suspense of a good detective story" (Whipple also felt it had "the verve and speed of good narrative, and the insight into people's minds of good fiction").

I am not quite as enthusiastic about Dorothy Bennett's verse mystery as the distinguished T. K. Whipple. However, I found How Strange a Thing an interesting reading experience, and it certainly has kindled my interest in the idea of mystery made in verse.

How Strange a Thing is set in San Francisco, a locale about which Bennett writes evocatively:

Before their feet steep Sacramento street
Plunged like a rocket swiftly down to meet
The dark and glittering bay.

The city lay before them; Danny and Phil
Stood watching it a second from Kearny's hill;
Before their feet steep Sacramento street
Plunged like a rocket swiftly down to meet
The dark and glittering bay; and sweetly sang
The night and the cool wind, the distant clang
Of little cable cars, glow-worms that crawled
From Market street up to a fog-bound world,
The foothills of the stars, and from there hurled
Themselves in haste down to earth-light again.

Earlier Danny found himself landed in a great deal of trouble.

"Danny Tiernan went up the steps of his little brown house," we are told in the first line of the poem. "Into horror."  

The police are waiting for Danny to question him about a murder:

You knew a girl, we understand--a player
Of small parts in the theatre--Mary Thayer?

Mary has been stabbed to death.  Danny knows he is in trouble when he gets the police warning:

On either side of him stood plain-clothes men,
One said, "We warn you--anything you say
We can use against you, from this day."

The police take Danny away to a police station for interrogation.  Danny is subjected to three hours of American third degree.  Fortunately, Danny's housemate Phil turns up--and Phil is a newspaper journalist:

Phil's press badge flashed to sight upon his vest.
"The stars fight for you, Danny.  This is a charm.
That shall stand stout between you and all harm.
And if you think their second thought is best,
I will match star with star, and, saint, or sinner,
I will assuage you, Danny.  Let's go to dinner."

Oyster stew in cream
the perfect accompaniment for alibi discussions

Over dinner ("oyster stews in cream") the matter of alibis are discussed.  It emerges that Mary ran round with a flash set, including a couple Italians named D'Avila and "Dry" Martini, described with characteristic 1930s ethnic chauvinism:

Danny grinned faintly.  "Martini wasn't pleasant.
Just scratch him and you get original peasant."

Oh, and we learn, that Danny didn't really love Mary, but another young woman, Clare.  Cue love interest!

So, who killed Mary Thayer?  We do find out, and the solution has a certain interest, in terms of character study.  If you are looking for a fair play mystery in the form of verse, however, forget it!  I wish Bennett had shown more interest in clue placement and perhaps trimmed some of the Big Philosophizing about Death.  But then I am a detection fiend!

On the whole, despite my disappointment with How Strange a Thing as a fair play mystery, I did enjoy the poem.  At the very least, it is an interesting novelty, and it made me want to seek out H. R. F. Keating's effort in this field, Jack the Lady Killer.

I bet Keating gives us real clues along with the verse!

*Note There appears to be another Dorothy Bennett, a playwright and screenwriter, who was active in the 1930s and 1940s, but she does not seem to be the same Dorothy Bennett who in 1935 published How Strange a Thing and Murder Unleashed. The Passing Tramp.

Elimination at Sea: Cartwright is Dead, Sir! (1934), by Hugh Baker (Forgotten Books by Forgotten Authors 3)

"[A]board this ship is a murderer who has the power to kill almost instantaneously without leaving  a mark, without inflicting a wound, without leaving a trace of his presence except the body of his victim."

Quite a handy set of abilities in the hands of a mass murderer!  Will he (or she?) be stopped?...

Houghton, Mifflin, publisher of Cartwright is Dead, Sir!, assured prospective readers of the novel that so tension-filled were its pages they would never regain "peace of mind" until they had reached the very end.

I wouldn't go quite that far, but Cartwright is Dead, Sir! is a fast-paced, fairly clued (well, for the most part) tale that should keep a mystery fan entertained for several hours.

The novel deals with a fateful voyage of the fruit steamer Napoc from New Orleans to the Latin American Republic of Costa Blanca. Wireless messages have been received, from one M. O. D.,  demanding that the ship change course, or dire consequences will result.  These messages are ignored...and the deaths commence.  No traces are apparent of how the victims have come by their deaths. Could they have been slain by a "death ray," as M. O. D. claims?

And what is the motive behind this madness?  Could it have something to do with the machinations of rival American fruit companies in Costa Blancan politics?  And what does the vanished good luck piece have to do with it all?  And the man who can't abide the smell of oranges?

1934's other shipboard mystery,
rather better known than Cartwright!

Aspects of this novel certainly remind me of John Dickson Carr (there's an obvious general resemblance to Carr's shipboard mystery, The Blind Barber, coincidentally also published in 1934; and the death ray business was like "teleforce" from The Reader Is Warned).  To be sure, Cartwright is not as good as John Dickson Carr's 1930s mysteries, but that is setting quite a high bar!  I enjoyed this one for the fast pace, the suspense, the solid plot and the look at American-Latin American commercial and political relations in the 1930s.

"Hugh Baker" is the pseudonym of Hermann B. Deutsch (1889-1970) and Donald Hugh Higgins.  About the latter man I know nothing, but Deutsch was a prominent Louisiana journalist in his day and authored additional works, both fiction and non-fiction.

Hugh Baker also published a mystery short story or novelette with a title redolent of Edgar Wallace thrillers: "The Whispering Terror" (Mystery Magazine, 1935).  Judging by Cartwright is Dead, Sir! this work would be worth a read.

Thirsty Evil: "A Bottle of Perrier" (1926), by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton's significant contribution to supernatural fiction is well-known (see her short story collection Ghosts, 1937), but it seems that her story "A Bottle of Perrier"--originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1926 under the title "A Bottle of Evian" and reprinted in Wharton's short collection Certain People (1930)--is less heralded as the great crime/mystery genre tale that it is.  It is always a pleasure for me to go back and read this story, for in artistic merit as a genre tale it is comparable, I think, to such inspired short stories as Lord Dunsany's "The Two Bottles of Relish" (1932) (what is it about bottles?), John Collier's "The Touch of Nutmeg Makes It" (1941) and Stanley Ellin's "The Specialty of the House" (1948).  It also harks back to such sinister Edgar Allan Poe tales as "The Black Cat," "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amontillado" (bottles again!).

Perrier in the desert....

Edith Wharton evidently did not think much of detective fiction (in her 1913 novel The Custom of the Country she uses the fact that a family has The Hound of the Baskervilles displayed to suggest the family's comparative illiteracy), yet she gave mystery and murder fans a corker of a story in "A Bottle of Perrier."

Edith Wharton

When the story opens "young Medford, of the American School of Archeaology at Athens" has gone to visit "his queer English friend, Henry Almodham," who, himself a lay archaeologist with sufficient private means to indulge his eccentric whims, lives in a crumbling crusader's castle in the desert.  As Medford leans against "the roof parapet of the old building, half Christian fortress, half Arab palace," he looks out around him at the vast "mystery of the sands, all golden with promise, all livid with menace, as the sun alternately touched or abandoned them."

Medford is informed by Almodham's servant, Gosling, speaker of "a sort of palimpsest Cockney lined with Mediterranean tongues and desert dialects," that Almodham was suddenly called away by a friendly Arab chief to explore some ruins to the south, but will be back shortly; meanwhile, Medford is to make himself at home.

At Medford's first meal at the castle Gosford offers him wine, which Medford, still recovering from a bout with fever, has been forbidden.

"Just a mineral water, then, sir?"
"Oh yes--anything."
"Shall we say a bottle of Perrier?"
"Perrier in the desert!  Medford smiled assentingly....

I've just taken you through the first three pages of the story; there are eighteen pages of beautifully-written, steadily-mounting tension to go.

After several days have passed, Wharton writes:

Medford found sleep unrecoverable. He leaned in his window and watched the stars fade and the dawn break in all its holiness.  As the stir of life rose among the ancient walls he marveled at the contrast between that fountain of purity welling up into the heavens and the evil secrets clinging bat-like to the nest of masonry below.

What happens over those days at the crumbling crusaders castle that looms up, in majestic isolation, out of the desert? If you're like I am, you will have to keep reading, because you will simply have to know.

Happily, "A Bottle of Perrier" is available on the net and also was reprinted by Scribner's in 1991 in The Selected Short Stories of Edith Wharton, which also includes some of the author's best ghost stories: "The Lady's Maid's Bell"; "The Eyes"; "Kerfol"; "Mr. Jones"; "Pomegranate Seed" and "All Souls'."  It also appears in the 2002 collection The Ghost Feeler: Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (though it is not a supernatural story), along with an introduction by Peter Haining.  See this review at darkecho.

Next up: a shipboard mystery--a very obscure one!--The Passing Tramp.

Rhineland Romance: Castle Skull (1931), by John Dickson Carr

John Dickson Carr's first detective series, which chronicled the exploits of French magistrate Henry Bencolin, is a short one, comprised of four novels Carr published from 1930 to 1932, plus a final volume, The Four False Weapons, that appeared in 1937.

Castle Skull (1931) is the third of the Henri Bencolin mysteries.  Like the other early novels in the series (It Walks by Night, The Lost Gallows and The Corpse in the Waxworks), it has  a splendidly lurid title, redolent of exoticism, the outre and horror.  Although Carr continued to employ these elements in many of his books over his long and successful mystery writing career, he toned them down somewhat from the early novels, where the horrific really predominates (as has been observed, I believe, by S. T. Joshi, It Walks by Night might be a pulp horror novel title).

Certainly Castle Skull is steeped in the outre.  To begin with there's the highly Gothic setting, in the German Rhineland.

Many mysteries of the Golden Age take place in country houses, but how many take place in castles?  And what a castle is Castle Skull!  Yes, its highly eccentric owner, the larger than life magician Maleger, deliberately designed it to resemble a skull.  This 1940s Pocket edition captures the castle rather well, I think (except for the lovely sunny sky).  Not only does the castle look like a skull, but it is equipped with all the creepy paraphernalia you could ever ask for in such an abode; and Carr, as was his wont, makes the most of this.

The novel opens with quite a bit of back story.  Maleger, we learn, was murdered some twenty years earlier, his body thrown out of a train carriage into the Rhine.  Somehow this was accomplished even though Maleger's carriage was under observation the whole time and no one else was seen entering it (one of Carr's patented miracle problems, very nicely worked out too).

Maleger's estate was left to two friends, a Belgian banker named D'Aunay and a prominent English stage actor named Myron Alison.  A few weeks before the novel opens, something very bad happened to Myron Alison.  He was shot several times and then for good measure set on fire.  His blazing body was espied on the crazily grinning battlements of Castle Skull.

Bencolin investigates
the dark depths of
Castle Skull

Just imagine what an opening this would make for a film! It strikes me once again what opportunities modern filmmakers are missing in treating John Dickson Carr as mystery's Mr. Cellophane, even as they film the umpteenth version of a Miss Marple mystery (now with rewritten ending!).  Unfortunately Carr himself does not make the most of it, because the the story of the murder is told secondhand to Bencolin and his young Watson, Jeff Marle, rather than being shown directly to the reader.  Obviously, it seems to me, the novel should have opened with the immolation scene.  We know from such later bravura Carr set-pieces as the exploding hot-air balloon sequence in Carr's wonderful historical mystery novel Captain Cut-Throat (1955) that Carr was absolute aces at directly depicting evocative action scenes.  But enough about that--back to further developments at Castle Skull!

Henri Bencolin is brought into the case informally and is soon investigating with good old, forgettable Jeff (first in a long, long line of many writer stand-ins for the author).  Across the river from Castle Skull is the country house of Myron Alison, where a house party was taking place during Myron's murder, conveniently providing us with our suspects.  There's Myron's sister, Agatha, known as "The Duchess"--even though she's not one; a famous violinist; D'Aunay and his wife; a young English gentleman; and a nice young woman, though modern.  There's also a middle-aged journalist hanging about the place, who happily is chock full of nuggets of Maleger-Myron Alison back story.

The mental duel between Lionel Atwill's Inspector Krogh
and Basil Rathbone's Baron Wolf von Frankenstein
in Son of Frankenstein (1939) is similar to the
 of Bencolin-Von Arnheim in Castle Skull

Soon Bencolin and Jeff are joined by Baron Sigmund von Arnheim, one of those stock monocled, know-it-all Prussian types common to Anglo-American books and films of that era. Von Arnheim and Bencolin are longtime rivals, so the two engage in a competition to solve the case, bandying much surfacely polite, improbably theatrical language with each other, in the highly archaic fashion that Carr, who seems to have wanted to live as an English cavalier in the seventeenth century, so much admired.

Just 25 when this novel was published, Carr handles the solution section of the novel (40 pages!) with laudable dexterity.  Von Arnheim solves the case!  Or does he....

Besides being grippingly narrated, the solution is eminently fair play, I think.  One has to admire not only Carr's ingenuity with murder designs--a skill John Street, for example, had too--but also Carr's admirable clue placement, which at times rivals the great Agatha Christie.  My only complaint (besides the absence of a castle floor plan--but see this extraordinary webpage on this matter) with Castle Skull is that the characters really don't do justice the superb setting.

The two really interesting characters in Castle Skull are Maleger and Myron Alison, both of whom, as murder victims, are off the stage when the novel opens.  As Douglas G. Greene has noted in his superb biography of Carr, John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles (1995), Carr somewhat softened Bencolin in Castle Skull, making him "slightly more human," but this softening "doesn't fit the personality that Carr has developed for Bencolin"--it merely makes him duller.  As for the country house crowd, they are sticks, with the exception of Agatha Alison, who is interesting because she is such an outlandish and improbable character.  I would have sworn Carr meant her to be a broad parody of Dorothy L. Sayers, but Carr would not have known Sayers in 1931.

Dorothy L. Sayers
"Duchess" of Deception

Here is Carr's description of the stout, mannish, Duchess (who also smokes cigars, drinks stout and plays poker), which really does seem to foreshadow Sayers at Detection Club meetings in the 1940s and 1950s (judging by the uninhibited recollections of Christianna Brand): "She floundered in, her bulk compressed into a tight black gown which caused startling bulges in extraordinary places."

But it's the way the Duchess talks that's really extraordinary:

"Come right in, young fella-me-lad!  Have a bottle of stout.  Always drink three, myself, before I turn in."

"Well, well, you just tell the old Duchess about it!  Plague take me!  When all your fancy detectives are stumped, I'm going to take a hand!"

"H'm.  Is that so?  Damme!...H'm.  Writer, b'Gad!  Play rugger, don't you?"
"Baseball," I said, "I'm an American."
"You do?  Well, hang me!--And look here, laddie, don't you think that because I'm a bloody Britisher I don't know the outfield from home plate.  Listen.  I saw the whole world series in '09, the year Wild Bill pitched against the Pirates...."

Put Sir Henry Merrivale in a dress
and you get Agatha Alison

And so on.  All this conversation is uttered while Agatha is sitting "behind her table in a flaring negligee, drinking Guinness' stout."  From the words--especially recalling how Carr's later series detective Sir Henry Merrivale loves baseball too--I felt certain the Duchess was really Sir Henry Merrivale in drag, perhaps on a secret undercover mission in this very queer castle.

Heck, even now I still think "she" may have been, although this was one question even the great Henri Bencolin did not resolve!

Well, this finishes for now my Continental tour.  I'm headed back to the States (There's no place like home!), but will be stopping off briefly in a desert clime.  Who will I visit there?  Stop by tomorrow and see!--The Passing Tramp.

Who Killed Cécile? Cécile est Morte/Maigret and the Spinster (1942/1977), Georges Simenon

I am due to tramp up to the scenic Rhineland and Castle Skull with our old pal John Dickson Carr, but I paid one last call, for now, on Georges Simenon, who is always a solid bet to show a reader a good time.  This time the book in question is Simenon Cécile est Morte (1942), reprinted in the United States and Great Britain in 1977 as Maigret and the Spinster.

poster for the film version of the novel

Why did it take thirty-five years for a translation into English?  This is perhaps the best Maigret novel that I have read.  It was filmed in France in 1943, apparently the fastest novel-to-film translation in the Simenon canon.  The book should made quite a good film.

When in 1940 Simenon commenced Cécile est Morte/Maigret and the Spinster (I will refer to this novel as Spinster), his last Maigret novel had appeared in 1934.  Simenon's sales had dropped since he stopped writing Maigrets to concentrate on his roman durs (hard novels, or noir) and he evidently turned back to the Maigrets as a way of adding more coins to his coffers.

Despite this mercenary motivation, when Simenon returned to writing Maigret mysteries his style of writing to some extent had changed. While not sacrificing an interesting mystery plot, Spinster is even stronger than earlier Maigrets in its depiction of character and atmosphere.  And while this particular Maigret exploit still offers the reassurance of a problem solved and justice done, it has its discomforting, bleaker elements as well.

Cécile in the film
looking decidedly unspinsterly to me

The spinster of the title is Cécile Pardon, only twenty-eight years old, but worn out before her time as a general slavey to her wealthy, miserly aunt, Juliette Boynet.  Cecile is one of Simenon's pathetic women, tragically unblessed with good looks (she even has a squint).

The poor girl has been in the habit of constantly visiting Maigret at his office, assuring him that someone has been entering her aunt's flat on certain nights.

Nothing has been stolen, but objects have been moved around. Maigret's colleagues make a joke of the visits, pretending to believe that squinty Cécile is Maigret's mistress; and Maigret has become hardily sick of Cécile.

So when Cécile visits yet again and Maigret puts her off it is no surprise.  When he finally decides to see Cécile, she has gone, but the message left by her for Maigret strikes a new--and very urgent--note: "It is essential that I should see you.  Something absolutely frightful occurred in the night."

Maigret decides to go to the flat of Cécile and her aunt.  There he finds Cécile's aunt dead, strangled, lying on her bed--but no Cécile. When Cécile later is found at police headquarters she is quite dead--strangled and stuffed in a broom closet.

Suspects aplenty in this now double murder case soon emerge:

Cécile's brother and sister, who hated their tightfisted aunt.  The brother, Gerard Pardon, particularly needed money, as he is out of work, with a wife shortly to give birth to their first child.

The relatives of the aunt's deceased husband, from whom she inherited a substantial amount of money, which she invested in numerous lucrative properties, including the apartment building in which she lived.

Her lawyer and business adviser, Charles Dandurand, who has served time for corruption of minors and encouraged her to invest money in houses of prostitution.

The perverse Dandurand is just one of the questionable tenants in the building, all of whom are memorably limned by another vivid character: the concierge nicknamed "Madame Saving-Your-Presence" by Maigret, on account of her reiterative use of that phrase.  This gossipy old lady is a wonderful character, straight out of Agatha Christie, though Simenon takes us out of the cozy territory by noting that Madame's room smells of "stale cat's urine" and by lingering over the dinner table's "glutinous remains of a pig's trotter"--Madame's dinner.

Simenon photo on the back of
Maigret and the Spinster

Though Maigret explains rather mystically to a visiting American criminologist that he solves cases intuitively ("I feel things"), I, a materialist mystery fan, found the plot of this particular novel immensely satisfying.  In it there are interesting twists that would not shame an Agatha Christie tale.  People may say they don't read Maigrets for the mystery plots, but anyone who, like me, does read Maigret and the Spinster at least partly for its mystery plot should not be at all disappointed.  Nor should they forget the characters and the setting any time soon--a splendid bonus!

Next we head from the realism of Simenon and Maigret to the romanticism of John Dickson Carr and his French detective, Henri Bencolin, in the last of our French-flavored mysteries.

I hope to see you at Castle Skull.  Be sure to bring flame retardant!--The Passing Tramp.

20,000 Views and Six Dead Men, by Stanislas-André Steeman

First, let me mention that as I type this I've just passed 20,000 views, having entered into my fifth month of blogging.  It's nice to know some people are finding this a place worth stopping by for a time.  I will try to keep it interesting!

Like Georges Simenon, Stanislas-André Steeman (1908-1972) is another Franco-Belgian writer of mysteries; yet Simenon is much better known, certainly in the English-speaking world.  The most detailed information I could find on the subject of Steeman comes from this fascinating entry in Xavier Lechard's blog, At the Villa Rose, Lost in Translation: Stanislas Andre-Steeeman.

Lechard calls Steeman "arguably one of the greatest mystery writers of all time."  He notes that, in contrast with Simenon, Steeman was fascinated with the detective fiction genre and its conventions, or rules, treating them respectfully in many orthodox works.

Despite the fact that one can find more orthodox Simenon mysteries in some of the Inspector Maigret series, there is no getting away from the fact that on the whole Simenon was one of the major influences in shifting the mystery genre away from formal puzzle plotting toward an emphasis on such things as milieu, character, psychology, etc., that one associates, traditionally at least, with the mainstream novel.  And for many readers Simenon's name is synonymous with French crime genre writing in the twentieth century.

So when presented with the prospect of French language mystery author who emphasized classical detection I had to go a-digging for this gold! Unfortunately merely two of his books were ever translated into English and only one of those two seems at all locatable: Six Dead Men/Six Hommes Morts (1930/31--I have seen both years given for its original publication date).  So I had to make do with this one title, a pleasure and a frustration, because while it's a very good book, it makes one wish for more, which simply isn't there, at least not currently.

So, what is the nitty and the gritty, as an instructor of mine used to say, of Six Dead Men?

First of all, the novel bears a striking resemblance in conception to The Sweepstake Murders, by J. J. Connnington, which was published in 1931.  In Connington's mystery--one of his best--nine individuals form a sweepstakes syndicate, so that if any one of their tickets wins they all will share the winnings equally among themselves.  One of their tickets does win, but there is a legal delay in the awarding of the money.  When one of the syndicate members accidentally dies, the survivors formally agree that only living members of the syndicate will share in the winnings, when they eventually are awarded.  Bad idea! Suddenly other members of the syndicate start to expire--this time from someone's deliberate design.

quite similar in conception to Six Dead Men

Well, now, what mystery fancier wouldn't fancy such a plot as this?  Steeman's plot in Six Dead Men is quite similar  to that in The Sweepstake Murders (before writing his own did Connington, who was fluent in French and regularly read French novels, read Steeman's book, assuming it originally appeared in 1930?).

This time the tale concerns not nine, but, yes, six men, who agree to set out in the world for five years, make their fortunes, return and share those fortunes among themselves.  Well, when the novel opens they have started returning, five with fortunes (an impressive bunch!). And, perhaps not coincidentally, they also have started dying.  One man falls overboard from an ocean liner (or was he pushed?), another is shot, another stabbed.  The police seem helpless is stopping this campaign of slaughter.  Can anyone stop it?

rather like an Edgar Wallace....

One is immediately struck by Steeman's adherence to the classical form in Six Dead Men.  Many Simenon tales from the period, such as, say, The Strange Case of Peter the Lett (Pieter-le-Letton) and The Crossroad Murders (La Nuit du carrefour), feel more like Edgar Wallace thrillers then true detective novels.

In the early 1930s both Simenon and Steeman were dubbed "the French Edgar Wallace," an appellation that seems more suited, both in terms of output and subject matter, to the Simenon novels of this period (the early 1930s) than to the Steemans, judging from what Xavier Lechard has written about Steeman.  Six Dead Men indisputably is a true detective novel.

The ploys of deception in Six Dead Men are truly classical. While they may not fool the experienced reader of Golden Age detective fiction, who likely will have seen variations of the ploys in Sayers or Christie or Crofts, for example, they are delightfully and ingeniously handled by Steeman.  I particularly liked the deductions made about one of the murders, which takes place in an apartment lift (Ngaio Marsh later used this locus with great effect in one of her novels, Surfeit of Lampreys).  And, yes, there's even a floor plan!

there's something eerie
about those old lifts....

There is also a bit of love interest, in the form of the novel's only significant female character, the lovely Spanish woman Carmen, fiancee to one of the six men. Two of the other men fall in love with her over the course of the tale, adding complication.  But is Carmen really what she seems?...

As befits a classical detective novel, the writing and characterization is sparely, but effectively, done. Carmen, the rivals for her love, an investigating magistrate and Steeman's series detective, Wenceslas Vorobeitchik (understandably he goes by "Wens"), all are efficiently and economically characterized.  Suspense is artfully maintained (I was quite on edge during the novel's penultimate climax).  This would be a great novel to read alone in a 1930s apartment building at midnight on a stormy night.  Creaky lift an extra!

Six Dead Men was reprinted in the United States in 1932 as part of the French crime wave that hit Anglo-American shores at that time.  Simenon was at the crest of this wave and today is by far its best-known component.  But on the strength of my reading Six Dead Men, I would conclude that Stansislas-André Steeman deserves to be much better known today than he is.

Note: The American edition of Six Dead Men was published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1932, in an attractive edition with what seems to be a good translation by Rosemary Carr Benet (1898-1962). She was the wife of Stephen Vincent Benet, renowned author of the Pulitzer prize winning narrative poem John Brown's Body (1928) and the much-anthologized short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1937).  On the couple, see Patricia McAndrew, "Stephen and Rosemary: A Love Story," in David Garrett Izzo and Lincoln Konkle, eds., Stephen Vincent Benet: Essays  on His Life and Work (McFarland, 2002). Stephen's brother, William Rose Benet, wrote an early Agatha Christie review raving The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.  The Benets, it seems, had good taste in detective fiction!

Next stop: the Rhineland, with your pleasant guide, John Dickson Carr.  He wants to show us a castle where certain unpleasant events have occurred of late.  Come along now, don't hesitate....

"As Flat and Artificial as a Picture Postcard?" Maigret in Holland (1931), by Georges Simenon

Maigret had only a faint idea of what it was all about when he arrived one May afternoon in Delfzijl, a small town squatting on the low coast in the extreme northeast of the Netherlands....

So begins one of my favorite Maigret mysteries by that publishing phenomenon Georges Simenon (1903-1989).

Un Crime en Holland is the eighth of ten (ten!) Maigret crime novels Simenon published in 1931, although it was not published in English until 1940, under the title of, naturally enough, A Crime in Holland, translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury.  Since 1980 it has been published in Britain and the United States under the title Maigret in Holland, evidently in an attempt to distinguish  the novel as one of the Maigret series, rather than one of Simenon's roman durs, or hard ("noir") novels*

*(note: the publishing history detail above is drawn from the fantastic Maigret website).

So, why do I like this novel so much?

Three reasons, I think: first, Simenon's portrayal of the Dutch setting; second, the novel's resemblance to a classical British mystery, which is much more pronounced than what one usually encounters in the Maigret series; and third, though the novel is written in Simenon's rather spare early style (and a new English translation is badly needed), there is in it some interesting character psychology and wit.

Maigret is in Holland semi-officially, to look into the shooting death of a native that has involved a French citizen, Professor Jean Duclos, a distinguished criminologist traveling on a lecture tour through northern Europe.  On page two, we are given a list provided by Duclos to Maigret of the victim, Conrad Popinga, a teacher of cadets on the training ship at Delfzijl, and potential suspects in the killing: Liesbeth Popinga, his wife, daughter of the headmaster of a lycee in Amsterdam; Any van Elst, Liesbeth's younger sister, a would-be professional woman recently awarded a law degree; and Beetje Liewens, a nearby farmer's daughter.

Maigret soon discovers additional suspects, including the father of the fetching Beetje and Cornelius ("Cor"), a cadet on the training ship possibly infatuated with her.  Then there are the actual material clues, the butt of a Manila cigar and a sailor's cap left at the scene of the crime....Could the killer have been someone from Popinga's past life as a captain in the merchant service?

This is one Maigret that actually could have used a house floor plan (plans are referred to in the text, but we never see them).  Popinga was shot outside his house by someone, the police believe, in the house. The logistics of who was where when come under serious scrutiny; and they do matter, though Maigret seems to discount those clues of the cap and the cigar and psychology plays an important role in his deductions.  In the closing chapters Maigret even stage manages a reenactment of the night of the murder.

When writing Maigret in Holland Simenon seems to have been thinking of the more classical style, clue-oriented English detective novel, for in the book he includes satire about the methodical, materialistic, scientific detective, as represented by the criminologist, Professor Duclos. The Great Man condescends to Maigret at every turn. Simenon portrays Duclos as a pompous ass of an intellectual, arrogantly certain that he can reduce crime investigation to an exact scientific formula.  We enjoy seeing him naturally getting his ultimate comeuppance at the hands of Maigret.

Maigret in Holland also is of interest for Simenon's portrayal of the straitlaced, conservative, bourgeois Dutch community in which Maigret uncomfortably finds himself. Fans of classical English detection often maintain that the incongruity of murder in genteel surroundings heightens reader interest in the story, and I think Maigret in Holland supports this contention. Certainly Simenon himself through his character Maigret seems to express such a point of view:

Georges Simenon

Such quiet, such serenity--it was almost too perfect, so perfect that it was difficult for a Frenchman to believe that life here was life at all.  Was it?  Or was it all as flat and artificial as a picture postcard?

Turning his back on that scene to study the town, [Maigret] was faced by well-built, well-painted houses, windows beautifully clean, curtains spotless, cactuses on every windowsill.  But what was behind those windows?

Raymond Chandler thought murder needed to be taken out of the Venetian vase and dropped into the alley, but what happens when murder shatters one of those fine Venetian vases (or perhaps in this case we should say a Delft vase)?  Maigret of course eventually answers the question of what messy things went on behind those pristine Dutch windows--to his own satisfaction, if not that of the local inhabitants:

Early next morning Maigret took the 5:05 from the small station at Delfzijl.  He was alone. Nobody had thanked him. Nobody had come to see him off.