I spoke with (well, emailed) Curt about his work and his long-time fascination with the less-publicised writers of the British ‘Golden Age’…

What inspired you to write Masters of the ‘Humdrum’ Mystery?

Too often books that purport to be about the entire crime and mystery genre end up devoting most of their space to books published since 1990, about the time of your cutoff date! The 1920s barely exist, aside from a few books about Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey that may get included (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, certainly). I wonder whether people think British crime writing in the first decade of this century could be adequately represented by, say, two authors? Who would they be, Ian Rankin and Val McDermid? Should we forget about everyone else?

In Masters I wanted to begin a personal project of recovering the lost world of Golden Age British mystery fiction. If people really want to fully appreciate the history of their favorite fiction genre, they need to start looking at more authors. This applies as well, by the way, to the United States, though Masters deals with Britain.

So what brought you to the Golden Age?

Over twenty years ago when I was visiting a friend in Chicago I went to a basement bookstore there and wandering around the aisles I came across a great mystery section. I ended up buying three IPL paperback editions of John Dickson Carr mysteries: Hag’s Nook, the Judas Window and The Burning Court. They all I believe had introductions by Doug Greene, Carr’s biographer-to-be.

My friend was living in an old Chicago brownstone–great place, though he was sharing the apartment with four people–and I can recall sitting on this stone balcony on at dusk reading The Burning Court, one of Carr’s creepiest books. It’s the one involving murder and possible witchcraft in Pennsylvania.

Up till then I had only ever heard of the Crime Queens among English mystery writers: Christie, Sayers, Allingham, Marsh. I had started reading Christie back even before she died, when I was all of eight years old if you can believe it – I don’t say I solved any of the murders! – and I had read probably two-thirds of the Christies by the time I finished high school. I quit reading mysteries in college, however, until I came across Carr, then I got sucked in again. After I read all the Carrs I could track down, I started looking for other writers. By this time I was in graduate school and I started using reference books like A Catalogue of Crime, by Wendell Hertig Taylor and the late, great Jacques Barzun. It was there I found out about the detective novelists Julian Symons called “Humdrum”–writers of considerably less flair than writers like Carr, to be sure, but nevertheless of great interest to me for their clever puzzles and period English flavor.

When I started looking into the subject more I found a lot of condescending stuff being written about the Humdrums specifically and puzzle-oriented mysteries in particular. I think even back then, twenty years ago, the seed was painted in my brain to address this subject in a book someday. But by then I was working on a dissertation in the history of the southern United States, so any such mystery project had to be set aside. I did write Doug Greene a fan letter though!

In your book you focus on three writers: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, and Alfred Walter Stewart. Are they ‘the best of the rest’, or do you think they were as good as the more famous names?

I wanted to focus on these three writers I think they are enjoyable genre writers but also because they epitomize the puzzle tradition of the classical British detective novel in its purest form.

Of course for a great many today, Golden Age British mystery fiction – that produced between the two world wars – is almost exclusively represented by four or five ‘Crime Queens’. They’re like the vowels: a, e, i, o, u–and sometimes y. With the Crime Queens we have Christie, Sayers, Allingham, Marsh–and sometimes Tey.

The late Jacques Barzun argued Georgette Heyer should be included as well, but that has never quite taken, though Heyer’s detective novels remain in print.

Then there’s Gladys Mitchell too, though she seems to be too eccentric for mass popularity.

Then sometimes we get the group I think of as the Detection Dons: Michael Innes, Nicholas Blake and Edmund Crispin (though Crispin was really post-Golden Age if we interpret the term strictly). Lots of literary allusions, quotations and wit.

Cyril Hare and Anthony Berkeley Cox (Francis Iles) sometimes get mentioned too among the ‘literary’ men.

And of course the American John Dickson Carr, who lived in England for many years and set most of his detective novels there, still has his followers among the fans of the locked-room mystery.

All these writers are better known today than John Street, Freeman Wills Crofts and Alfred Walter Stewart, who, along with some other writers, were over forty years ago dubbed ‘Humdrums’ by crime writer and critic Julian Symons in his mystery genre study Bloody Murder. This was not meant as a compliment!

To Symons, these writers emphasized puzzle and plot mechanics at the expense of literary style, making their books unpalatable reads. Since Symons critics have tended to follow his lead on this matter.

The great exception is Jacques Barzun’s and Wendell Hertig Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime, which lavished with praise these three authors, especially Street. Barzun and Taylor were great advocates of the detective novel actually having detection, or ratiocination. They admired Street, Crofts and Stewart as clever plotters and functional stylists.

Nowadays, of course, seemingly about everyone in the mystery field wants to be considered ‘literary’. The highest compliment many critics think they can pay a mystery – oh, excuse me, crime – novel is to say that it ‘transcends the genre’.

P. D. James says mystery writers have outgrown ingenuity and aim merely at having ‘credible’ plots, while they focus on producing books that are just like mainstream novels. This emphasis would have struck many Golden Age readers as passing strange. These readers didn’t want a mystery to be just like a mainstream novel. They wanted to escape from mainstream novels.

In the modern atmosphere the Humdrums have become the designated scapegoats for the Golden Age’s perceived sin of having overemphasized the puzzle element in mysteries. Even Christie, despite her still great sales and popularity, has been mocked as merely a maker of puzzles. I get into all this in the Masters of the ‘Humdrum’ Mystery introduction, which is called ‘Mere Puzzles’.

Essentially I argue that we have written these writers – who actually were quite highly regarded in the Golden Age – out of the period, putting almost all the emphasis on the Crime Queens. It’s ahistorical, but also, I think, an injustice to these writers, Street, Crofts and Connington. T. S. Eliot, for example, read both Crofts and Connington in the 1920s and highly praised books by both men. Yet we only ever hear how he, like Dorothy L. Sayers, liked Wilkie Collins.

In Masters I set to redress the balance.

Did you visit the UK or was everything researched remotely?

No, to this day I have never been to England, which is kind of odd, considering how much I have read and written about it. Though actually my history Ph.D. is American history. Still, I have always loved English history. Once upon a time I was able to name all the English kings going back to William the Conqueror and I knew all the players in the Wars of the Roses.

This book is a product of the internet, which allowed me to make connections and marshal information in a way that would have been impossible in the 1990s. I did make trips to American universities to see some pertain university papers collections that aren’t accessible via the internet.

How exactly does one go about making contact with an author’s estate/relatives? Is there a lot of real-life detective work involved?

With Crofts I never found anyone who actually knew him, which was a disappointment. I did plunk down some cash to get some Crofts’ personal correspondence that came up for sale.

Crofts never had any children, and Street’s daughter died in her twenties 81 years ago (as far as I know I was the first person to discover that Street even had a child). Stewart’s daughter, now in her nineties, was very helpful.

To be honest, these days it’s getting hard to find surviving children of Golden Age mystery writers (who tend not to be the most prolific people when it comes to actual propagation anyway)! I envy Doug Greene starting when he did with his John Dickson Carr biography. He was able to interview actual Golden Age mystery writers! Also Clarice Carr, widow of John Dickson Carr. As you know, both Carrs were close friends of John Street and his companion (later wife), Eileen Street.

You managed to write more about Street and Stewart than you did about Crofts. Was there more source material for them?

I discovered Stewart’s correspondence with Rupert Thomas Gould very late in the project, but fortunately not too late. It is Jonathan Betts, the author of the fine biography on Gould published by Oxford University Press, who preserved it and kindly allowed me access to it. It offered a fascinating picture of an intense intellectual friendship. It’s the kind of thing historians live for finding. And what was especially pleasing was that the correspondence tended to buttress the surmises I had already made about Stewart, after reading his work. I didn’t have to go back and rework much at all, just add the new detail from the correspondence.

One thing that bothers about the “Humdrum” tag is you get the idea that these were just a bunch of “old, boring white guys,” as the saying goes. But writers write their personalities into their work, I don’t care whether they are Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, Raymond Chandler or Freeman Crofts!

The fact is, these “Humdrums” were interesting personalities in their own right and quite distinct from each other. You would never have caught the devout Christian Freeman Crofts writing the racy stuff that Stewart put into those letters with Gould, for example. And Street had a surprisingly liberal attitude about women and marriage, compared to most Golden Age writers. Of course, in his own life it turned out he separated from his wife when he went off to World War One and apparently never returned to her. He lived with another woman for probably over two decades before he was able to marry her, on the death of his first wife. Everyone, including the Carrs, thought Street and his companion, Eileen Waller, were married. Wrong. Not so humdrum!

Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery
Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961
Curtis Evans
9780786470242
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

The so-called Humdrum writers are a deserving group in their own right. For one thing, they have been the most persistently and undeservedly defamed of English mystery writers. Elementary fairness calls for a more in-depth look at their written record.

And in that spirit Curtis Evans, (proprietor of the Passing Tramp blog), begins an entertaining journey through the lives and works of three typical Humdrum writers.

What is a Humdrum writer? Julian Symons, the crime writer, critic and historian of the genre, coined the term to describe those mystery writers of the ’20s and ’30s who valued plot above all else. Symons accused them of publishing ‘books which had almost invariably been plotted with a slide rule, but were written without style or savour’. His landmark history Bloody Murder cemented and popularised this view and argued that an evolution from Humdrum mystery to the more sophisticated crime novel was inevitable.

In a convincing opening chapter, Curt argues that critics who followed Symons pushed the Humdrums deeper into obscurity by an unthinking application of the familiar labels of ‘cosy’ and ‘hard-boiled’. British authors - their ranks often thinned to the four ‘queens of crime’ – were cosy and feminine. US writers were hard-boiled and masculine.

Curt points out that the overwhelming tendency of commentators to subscribe to the Symons view has concealed a more nuanced picture. For starters, the move from Humdrum to crime novel was not as smooth as has been made out. Chapter one of Masters deals with the alleged lack of readability of the ‘pure’ puzzle, putting the record straight with quotations from contemporary reviews (many from acknowledged literary greats) and publishers’ blurbs. Take this Collins’ blurb:

‘[Rhode appeals] mostly to those who like a really intricate problem… Often one will need a map, ruler and compass.

Curt argues that the idea that mere ingenuity was something to be outgrown would have surprised the reader of the 20s and 30s, and quotes one fan’s comment on Dorothy L. Sayers’ Busman’s Honeymoon (Sayers in many ways led the herd away from ‘mere puzzles’ by introducing literary ambition to her mysteries).

The last depravity! Why should my corpse be garnished with parsley from the Young Maiden’s Garden of Verses?

Of course, other critics felt differently, evidenced by a number of less-than-positive reviews.

…the puzzle is scrupulously fair, and unrolls with the customary deliberation till the time comes for Dr. Priestly to shy the Encyclopedia Britannica at the reader’s head.

The bulk of the book consists of biographical sketches and critical overviews of three neglected writers, demonstrating their interest in business and industry and ‘emphasis on material detail and technical and scientific soundness‘ – a marked contrast to the supposed British ‘cosy’ approach.

The three writers – as popular in their time as Christie and Sayers – are: ‘railway engineer and devout low church Anglican Freeman Wills Croft; army artillerist, military intelligence officer and electrical engineer Major Cecil John Charles Street; and Scots-Irish chemistry professor Alfred Walter Stewart.’

As John Rhode, Street introduced his great detective Dr Lancelot Priestley in The Paddington Mystery (1925). Priestley is a retired mathematician with an interest mainly in the logical aspects of investigation, ideal for tackling the ingenious murders devised by his creator (Curt calls him a ‘master of deviously devised destructive designs‘).

In 1930, Street launched another brand, Miles Burton, and used that name to write 59 stories featuring the more stereotypically Golden Age dilettante/detective Desmond Merrion.

Curt argues that Rhode possessed a ‘genial, worldly and intelligent personality‘ which came through in his stories, and that he offered ‘an engaging grounding in solidly English settings’ - especially the pub. Despite his plain style, he had a sense of the odd (best demonstrated by his use of a green hedgehog as an instrument of death).

Curt doesn’t attempt to defend the more pedestrian writing of his next subject, Freeman Wills Crofts. He cites several deplorable habits, including diversions into unconvincing working-class dialects, travelogue, and ‘a lack of perception of the emotional bases of darker human behaviour‘. However, he values Crofts’ commitment to plotting (the former railway engineer became a master of the timetable mystery) and argues he has additional interest as a religious writer. Crofts was a disciple of moral rearmament in the 1930s, and his stories reflect this.

The final author, Stewart, was a university teacher of chemistry who began his literary life as J. J. Connington with the strange dystopian and quasi-fascist novel Nordenholt’s Million. This described a new society arising after the demise of civilisation:

no Parliament, no gabble about Democracy, no laws that a man can’t understand…

When he turned his hand to the detective novel, his detective Clinton Driffield is equally cold-blooded and high handed – perfectly happy to act as judge and jury as well as chief of police. A high point for me was the correspondence between Stewart/Connington and his friend Gould – two bluff chaps putting the world to rights, and swapping examples of – ahem – abductiana.

I ended up quite liking all three writers for their intelligence and their self-confidence. Each of them had a definite world-view which came through in their mysteries. Of the three, it’s the John Rhode books I want to check out (and in fact I have just ordered his A. S. F. – mainly because it features a baddie called Richard Westwood).

This is a book well worth reading if you have an interest in the history of crime writing. The tone of Masters will come as no surprise to readers of Curt’s blog: eminently readable, affectionate for his subject, and full of original research. He has a keen eye for the apposite (and often hilarious) quotation, and is even-handed in his treatment of his three subjects. This would be an ideal book for any collection of literary criticism or cultural history as well as for fans of Golden Age crime.

Later in the week I’ll be talking to Curt about Masters, so keep an eye out for that.

See also: Bloody Murder

Final destination: A keeper

Past Offences by Rich Westwood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

A Dark-Adapted Eye

In these circumstances alone one knows when someone is going to die. Vera would die at eight o’clock and that was that.

This is the third Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine novel in the CWA’s top 100 (the others being A Fatal Inversion and A Judgement in Stone). In all three, she uses a similar approach to story-telling. The bare bones of the central crime are revealed almost immediately; the suspense comes from the slow uncovering of the details of the case. We know it’s Professor Plum, but we have to find out whether he did it in the study or the library, and whether the Inspector needs to evidence-bag the candlestick or the pistol.

In this case, Professor Plum is a famous murderess, the subject of true crime books and a waxwork figure in Madame Tussaud’s. Her story is being told 30 years after the fact by Faith Severn, niece to the Hillyard sisters Vera and Eden. Faith begins to visit the Hillyards as a young girl in 1939. Their rural home, Laurel Cottage in the village of Great Sindon, is a safe distance from war-torn London.

As with Rendell’s A Fatal Inversion, part of the book’s flavour comes from nostalgia. Rather than the golden summers of the hippy era, A Dark-Adapted Eye looks back to the economically and socially straitened years on either side of WWII.

Vera Hillyard, summed up as an ‘unreasonable carping scold’ is very much a creature of these times. Make-do-and-mend, admire those further up the ladder and despise those lower down, and mind your own business. Plus, illogical and as shirty as hell:

You didn’t know the biscuits were home-made? My goodness, but Grandma would turn in her grave! I can see we were wasting our time making biscuits for you. Might as well have gone down to the grocer’s and bought any old packet of Maries. I wonder what Eden would say to that. I don’t suppose she’s tasted a shop-bought biscuit in all her life. Well I hope our humble, home-made stuff will suit you, I’m sure I do. We’re not up to these sophisticated London ways and I can’t see us changing now.

Vera’s younger sister Edith – Eden – represents the other side of the coin. French make-up, Veronica Lake hair-do, Americans and boyfriends. They’re as weird as each other, though, especially when they begin to grow apart. If you like Megan Abbott, there’s a similar vibe. Women in conflict, with passions bubbling under the surface. Vera shows this more than Eden:

I had seen her busy, bustling, hysterical, panic-stricken, jubilant, triumphant, frustrated, petulant, angry, but I had never seen her happy.

Throw in an unexpected baby, and things get really intense. The finale is an interesting twist on a fair-play mystery: you definitely have all the clues you need to work out what has been going on…

A Dark-Adapted Eye is skilfully assembled, but I noticed the artifice, probably only because I’ve recently read other Rendell novels which employed a similar approach, and because of the narrative voice. ‘Faith Severn’ writes in a naturalistic, chatty (if slightly formal) style. Chapter 2 drops you into a flurry of characters – Francis, Jamie, Patricia, Chad, Helen, Gerald, Tony, Pearmain. It does take a while to piece them all together. There’s a little self-deprecating joke about this later on:

One of the difficult things about my Great Sindon relatives was their way of assuming you knew exactly whom they meant when they referred to someone or other.

However, it seems to me that writing in a character’s voice means that you should tell the story as the character would. At several points I thought: Hang on. No narrator would actually leave that bit of the story out until now, unless they were deliberately holding things back, and why would they do that unless to build suspense?

But still, Rendell can really write. I’d definitely recommend this if you want an immersive read. And chapter one is a belter.

See also: A Judgement in Stone, A Fatal Inversion

Final destination: A keeper

Past Offences by Rich Westwood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The Last Sherlock Holmes Story by Michael ‘Zen’ Dibdin – reviewed this month at Only Detect.

Another busy month for classic crime on the web – this time I’ve opted for a mix of ‘repeat offenders’ and ‘unusual suspects’.

First up, Mark Frauenfelder at boingboing looked at Donald E. Westlake’s The Hunter (1962) and concluded:

Parker fits in with the current crop of charismatic sociopaths that headline shows like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, and Dexter. I guess their appeal is that even though they are awful people, they have just enough humanity to make you care what happens to them without actually rooting for them. It takes a skilled writer to create bad people that you care about, and Westlake is one of the greats.

For what it’s worth, when I looked at The Hunter last September, I disagreed. But an army of fans can’t be wrong. Especially if they’re as scary as Parker.

Onto gentler heroes. I mentioned Faber’s fancy John Buchan ebook/game The 39 Steps a few weeks ago. It’s had a very mixed reception, none more mixed than at this month’s review at NPR.

This is a thriller. Putting speed bumps in a page-turner is madness. And in a Buchan novel, you need to keep a breakneck pace so you don’t stop to think logically about the plot holes. But this adaptation’s sluggish pace is enough to make the amusements of a spy novel seem as flat as soda-water that’s been standing in the sun, as Richard Hannay might grumble.

Richard Hannay’s adventures of course continued in Greenmantle and then in Mr Standfast, reviewed at I Prefer Reading. It sounds like his third caper finally sees him facing down his – ahem – unfamiliarity with the fairer sex…

His old Intelligence boss, Bullivant, sends him off to stay at Fosse Manor near Isham to get a lead on a very dangerous man, Moxon Ivery – or at least, that’s what he calls himself. Hannay has assumed his old alias, Cornelius Brand, & while at Fosse Manor, he meets Mary Lamington & falls instantly in love. Mary, however, isn’t just the token love interest. She’s part of Bullivant’s intelligence network & is a bright, resourceful young woman who has a crucial part to play in the narrative.

Staying with gentlemen, we move on to Josephine Tey’s unlikely hero, the imposter Brat Farrar (1949). Radish Reviews makes some interesting comments about when it is set…

The novel is not really anchored in any specific time that Tey points out, but it presumably takes place after WWII because there are references to people being “bombed out”.  So given its publication date (1949), one just assumes it’s set somewhere in that vicinity in time.  But it somehow feels like it’s set more interwar, and there are a few iffy timeline items as a result.  Given that the lynchpin events of the book—the disappearance and presumed suicide of Patrick Ashby following the death of his parents in a plane crash off the coast—take place some eight plus years earlier, that puts those events right smack in the middle of The Blitz.  I’ll leave it to you to work out the problem with that and just say that there’s no sign here that the war ever happened—no mention of rationing, of the post-war issues Britain faced.  It’s a little timey-wimey, to quote The Doctor.

Michael Dibdin is famous for coming from Wolverhampton, and also as a crime writer. Before he wrote the Aurelio Zen novels, he penned The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978), reviewed at Only Detect.

The cozy structures of Victorian life, which had long kept evil within boundaries that the great detective could negotiate with masterly flair, are now crumbling underfoot. Inciting this affront to order are the exploits of Jack the Ripper.

You’re going to like this last segue. Sticking with Zen, we move to Japan, and Ms Wordopolis‘ review of Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seichō Matsumoto (1961).

I liked getting a slice of post-war Japan, getting a sense of what was a bestseller in the 1960s in Japan, and digging into how investigations differed technology-wise fifty years ago.

Past Offences by Rich Westwood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The Odd Flamingo

It was only through reading Nina Bawden’s obituaries last year that I realised a) she had also written for adults (this is because I am startlingly ignorant), and b) she had written two crime novels at the beginning of her career.

Her first, Who Calls the Tune, she described as ‘a kind of homage to Graham Greene’. The Odd Flamingo was her second book, published when she was 29, and is also a bit Greene around the gills.

Will Hunt, the narrator, is a small-town solicitor. He is called by Celia Stone, the wife of his old friend Humphrey, to meet a young girl called Rose. Rose has dropped a bit of a bombshell into Celia’s comfortable married life. She claims that she had an affair with Humphrey – and to prove it she has the love letters in her handbag. Worse, she says she is pregnant and that Humphrey gave her £50 to get an illegal abortion.

Will considers Rose’s story all too likely – he was once a great admirer of Humphrey but now has no illusions about him. He promises Celia to sort things out as quietly as he can and goes to track down his friend at a conference in London.

Meanwhile, Rose goes missing. When the police identify her as the young girl found floating in a canal in Little Venice a few days later, Humphrey is squarely in the frame.

Humphrey has a half-brother called Piers living in decadence in Maida Vale, and a really nasty piece of work. Almost his first action is to supply Humphrey with a paper-thin and eminently disprovable alibi. And it is soon disproved. Is Piers an ally or not? If he is, he is even less welcome than his opinions:

Do you think my brother murdered this little whore?

Will’s efforts to find out about Rose’s life (he is more motivated by this than by any desire to help Humphrey) lead him to a dingy club called the Odd Flamingo, a place he remembers from his younger days.

It had been frequented by small criminals and down-at-heel prostitutes [...] a mixture of lesbians and pimps with a sprinkling of students who had come to see the fun [...] grey-haired women in mannish coats and pretty boys with lipstick on their mouths.

It is still much the same, and the older Will is now repulsed by his old haunt – as he is, in fact, by almost everything about the case. He is basically a complete prude and a unsuited to the murky waters he is wading through. So why does he get involved?

Will has a bit of a complex about women and needs to keep them on pedestals. Piers again:

All right, Lancelot. Go on thinking your sweetly pretty thoughts.

To Will, Rose’s story is that of a young girl sinking deeper and deeper into bad company, but somehow preserving her innocence.

…she seemed the only worth-while person in the whole sordid business, [...] if it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t be dirtying my hands.

He only met Rose the once before she disappeared, and he doesn’t think he fell in love with her, but he desperately wants to help.

Bawden wears her influences very much upon her sleeve. The Odd Flamingo nightclub with its marginalised lowlifes is pure Gerald Kersh. Will, a prim provincial solicitor living with his mother, taken out of his comfort zone by a confrontation with a potentially deceitful girl – The Franchise Affair. There’s a baby-faced Catholic-boy killer straight out of Brighton Rock. There are even a couple of paragraphs of Rogue Male.

But she could write. The first thing that strikes you is the force of her descriptions. When Will meets Rose’s mother Irma:

But it wasn’t Rose. It was someone much older, a little, skinny woman in a coat of so dead and dull a brown that it was impossible to imagine anyone choosing it for any purpose other than camouflage. She wore a joyless hat…

The characters aren’t just described well, they behave like real people at a time of great stress – erratically, confusingly, and downright awkward. The ending, when it comes, is impossible to predict from the beginning of the story, and is quite shockingly sudden. 

The Odd Flamingo is in many ways a little gem of a book – well-written without being too literary, character-driven, and with a great sense of time and place. Definitely one to check out.

See also: The Franchise Affair, Gerald Kersh’s Prelude to a Certain Midnight

I am entering The Odd Flamingo in the Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge, in the Dangerous Beasts category. Fellow Vintage Mystery Challengers should note the kind offer of review copies from publisher Bello.

Final destination: A keeper

Past Offences by Rich Westwood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The Female Detective

After thoroughly enjoying the high-Victorian larks of Mrs Paschal the Lady Detective last month, I turned with some enthusiasm to the British Library’s other resurrected lady-sleuth The Female Detective. This came out a few months earlier in 1864 than Hayward’s book, and obviously has a very similar premise. However, it is quite different in tone – much more of a serious-minded consideration of the life of a crime fighter with polemics and thinly veiled sidesteps into true crime alongside the straight-forwardly fictional stories. Miss Gladden, our heroine (Gladden’s not her real name, and her friends think she is a dressmaker) shares a collection of tales from different stages of her career as a detective:

• ‘Tenant for Life’ is a relation of the step-by-step uncovering of an old mystery – why would somebody need to buy a baby in a hurry? (Note that it’s the hurry that’s the initially suspicious thing about the transaction, not the whole buying a child thing: ‘Children are not bought in the dark in the midst of fear and trembling, if all is clear and honest sailing.’).
• ‘Georgy’ is the story of a plausible young man’s bare-faced swindling of his careless employer (and his escape).
• ‘The Unravelled Mystery’ is another exercise in deduction, this time of the ‘armchair’ type, but is actually more focused on shortcomings in the structure and organisation of the English police. ‘I venture to assert that the detective forces as a body are weak; that they fail in the majority of the cases brought under their supervision;’
• ‘The Judgement of Conscience’ finds her unwillingly pursuing an admirable man she believes a murderer. ‘A man is your friend, but if he transgresses that law which it is your duty to see observed you have no right to spare him because he is so; for in doing this you admit, by implication, that you did not spare other men because they were no friends.’
• ‘Murder or No Murder’ is closely based on the real-life Road Hill Murder case, which also inspired The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (this story features another detective, Hardal, ‘the most eccentric barrister at the Bar’, who I would have liked to meet again).
• ‘The Unknown Weapon’ sees Miss Gladden solving the murder of the feckless son of miserly Squire Petleigh – killed with a strange piece of metal.
• ‘The Mystery’ is not of a piece with the others, being a semi-farcical tale of the elopement of a young couple.

One joy in this book is watching a detective at work painstakingly assembling clues and following leads. This process wouldn’t hold much water if judged by the standards of later puzzle mysteries, but they have a distinctly Victorian flavour that gives them charm. ‘The Unravelled Mystery’ applies Miss Gladden’s deductive prowess to a newspaper report and proceeds step-by-step to her conclusion (submitted to the authorities, but ignored):

DEDUCTION.–That a foreign man, of age, but not aging, was murdered by stabbing by the members of a secret foreign society of educated men which he had betrayed. That this murder was committed by lodgers and most probably on some other floor than the basement, and of a house situated in the Soho district.

I was particularly interested in the use of evidence. In ‘The Unknown Weapon’, she has recourse to a ‘Microscopic Chemist’ who identifies some fluff for her. In ‘The Judgement of Conscience’, a vital clue is a scrap of paper:

I refer to the wadding, or rather stopping, used to fix the charge in the barrel of the firearm. If this stopping is not a disc of pasteboard, or a material sold for charging purposes, it frequently happens that it is a piece of paper torn from a supply in the possession of the person using the firearm [...] indeed there are cases on record where the rough line on the edge of the bit of half-burnt paper has agreed so certainly with another morsel found in the pocket if a suspected man…

Miss Gladden is a remarkable woman. There is humour in the book and a lot of it stems from her redoubtable character. She definitely speaks as she finds:

Arrived at Tram at once I found the constable, and I am constrained to say-a greater fool I never indeed did meet.

She was not pleasant to look upon, her jaw being so underhung as to give her at first sight that malevolent expression which is too suggestive of the bull-dog.

There are some lovely sidelights into her off-duty character. My favourite:

Even when I am engaged hot in a case, I am afraid I relax on a Sunday.

In summary, Miss Gladden is an implacable foe to the criminal, a proper deductrix (I may have made that word up), and a worthy ancestor of modern-day female detectives. The book isn’t as rambunctious as Revelations of a Lady Detective, but it is probably a more significant work in the history of the genre.

See also: Revelations of a Lady Detective

Also reviewed at: Pretty Sinister Books

I am entering The Female Detective in the Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge, in the Genuine Fakes category. The Introduction to this edition tells us that ‘Andrew Forrester’ was a nom de plume of James Redding Ware, who also wrote books on subjects as diverse as card games, dreams, famous centenarians, English slang and the Isle of Wight.

Final destination: A keeper

Past Offences by Rich Westwood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Cop Hater

The buildings were a stage-set.
They faced the river, and they glowed with man-made brilliance, and you stared up at them in awe, and you caught your breath.
Behind the buildings, behind the lights, were the streets.
There was garbage in the streets.

Cop Hater was the first of more than 50 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain. The 87th Precinct covers a large area of the American city of Isola and is the setting for one of the earliest, most influential, and certainly the longest running, police-procedural series in crime fiction.

(In an engaging introduction to this edition, McBain explains that he intended to set Cop Hater in New York, but was finding the overhead of checking every single piece of procedure onerous, so switched to his own city. Doing so clearly opened his creative floodgates – two more 87th Precinct novels followed in 1956.)

If you’ve read any of the novels, you’ll know that the hard-working cops of Isola are very rarely lucky with the weather. It’s so cold you can barely move your frozen limbs to arrest your perp, or so wet you can’t see him through the rain. In Cop Hater, it’s hot, 95.6°F of hot:

At the precinct house, two fans circulated the soggy air that crawled past the open windows and the grilles behind them. Everything in the Detective Squad Room seemed to wilt under the steady, malignant pressure of the heat. Only the file cabinets and the desks stood at strict attention.

And in this horrible damp heat, somebody starts killing detectives. The Squad Room starts chasing suspects – sweatily, and with plenty of stops for beer.

Bush, an experienced but cynical cop, sums up McBain’s philosophy of detection early on:

All you need to be a detective is a strong pair of legs, and a stubborn streak. The legs take you around to all the various dumps you have to go to, and the stubborn streak keeps you from quitting. You follow each separate trail mechanically, and if you’re lucky, one of the trails pays off. If you’re not lucky, it doesn’t. Period.

And this is how it goes. The cops follow up leads – most of them dead ends – meanwhile dealing with reporters, crazies, assorted criminals, and all the inefficiencies of an imperfect and cumbersome system.  This is the cop as working stiff, bitching about the job and the weather (especially the weather) but getting the job done.

There is no shortage of leads. Bush again:

This whole goddamn city is full of cop haters. You think anybody respects a cop? Symbol of law and order, crap! Anybody who ever got a parking tag is automatically a cop hater. That’s the way it is.

As with more recent authors, McBain also offers us a glimpse into the private lives of his policemen as a counterpoint to their lives at the coalface. Detective Steve Carella (a mainstay of the series) gets together with his wife Teddy, while his partner Bush deals with his complicated marriage to the négligée-clad Alice.

The atmosphere of Cop Hater seems strikingly contemporary, aside from all the men wearing suits, the ladies’ underwear (there’s almost as much underwear as there is weather), and a couple of chapters featuring hep-cat gang members. It’s almost surprising it was published in 1956. Of course the book feels contemporary – timeless may be a better word – because it uses exactly that mix of bureaucracy and banter that characterises police novels today. In fact, McBain established that formula and proved it worked again and again.

Why should you read this book? It established the template for the modern police procedural, and more importantly, if you like it, there are dozens more in the series to keep you going.

I’ll leave you with today’s weather:

The heat did not help the classic ceremonies of death. The mourners followed the caskets and sweated. An evil, leering sun grinned its blistering grin, and freshly turned soil – which should have been cool and moist – accepted the caskets with dry, dusty indifference.

See also: Sadie When She Died, Gideon’s Day (for a UK equivalent). Sergio at Tipping my Fedora is reading the 87th Precinct novels in order.

I am entering Cop Hater into the Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge, in the Leave it to the Professionals category.

Final destination: A keeper

Past Offences by Rich Westwood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

‘While I’m on the subject of “artistic license,” I should mention an aspect of these comics I find particularly entertaining: the covers.’ – The Baker Street Blog

April was a bumper month for classic crime on the blogosphere, so this post really just skims the surface.

Starting with a picture: Katie Magnusson at The Baker Street Blog looked at Dan Day’s The Cases of Sherlock Holmes,  a comic book series from the 80s:

These are a fun, quirky addition to my collection, and could be enjoyed by any Sherlockian who is a fan of comics or illustrated editions of the stories.

They do look good – the lurid covers (the one on the left was created for Silver Blaze) conceal nice line art and apparently a faithful rendition of the original stories.

Staying with the Victorians, Vintage Pop Fictions looked at The Leavenworth Case (1878) by Anna Katharine Green, an author satirised as leading the ‘Had I But Known’ school. VPF enjoyed it, and unexpectedly reveals that Green…

…went to great lengths to make the novel as realistic as possible in terms of the criminal law, and with such success that it was used at the law school at Yale as a teaching aid on the subject of circumstantial evidence.

There’s been a lot of John le Carré about this month, coinciding with his new book. Mrs Peabody (in I think her first appearance here) gives a personal appreciation of le Carré, noting his services to language teaching as well as spy fiction:

What’s had the greatest impact on me as a reader, though, is the critique of how the intelligence services (on either side of the ideological divide) are willing to sacrifice the individual for the ‘greater good’, and the recognition of the immorality of this act.

Steve Powell at the Venetian Vase asked whether crime novels should be more political, citing le Carré’s famous drift to the left.

le Carré was in his late forties when he completed the Smiley vs Karla trilogy, and it is often presumed that people who start on the political left become gradually more conservative with age. Yet right at the age when you would expect le Carré’s values to start corresponding more closely with Smiley’s. the author suddenly turned against him.

The Rap Sheet ran two ‘Books You Have to Read’ I liked this month. Linda Barnes recommended a book called Life’s Work (1986) by Jonathan Valin

A middle-aged knight in damaged armor, Stoner’s a guy who’s been around the block. He’s played some college ball and done a stint as an investigator with the local D.A.’s office. He begins his quest here by locating Bill’s best friend on the team, 11-year veteran Otto Bluerock, angry, overweight, and cut by the Cougars that very morning.
“I didn’t find Bluerock inside–just a desk and a chair and a little piece of sunlight that had fallen through an open window and flattened itself on the concrete floor.” I fell for that sentence, first-person narration at its Chandleresque best.

Never heard of author or book, which is why I liked the piece.

Then Ayo Onatade looked at Chester Himes’ A Rage in Harlem (1957):

an urban police procedural like no other. It offers a high degree of violence. It delves into female sexuality in rather blatant fashion, which some readers might find unnerving. And gender roles are thrown into the plotting mix along with alcohol and drug abuse and the varying ethnicities of some of the characters. Why this novel is so frequently overlooked by today’s readers is a mystery.

Keishon at Yet Another Crime Fiction Blog is reading through the Factory novels of Brit noir author Derek Raymond, and thoroughly enjoying the series. She has written four reviews so far, the latest being I was Dora Suarez (1990):

I WAS DORA SUAREZ gained the author some notoriety because of the heinous nature of the crimes perpetrated by the villain who is a masochistic serial killer. The entire series is dark but this book goes beyond dark to something akin to horror [...] The crime scene of Suarez/Carstairs is “one of the most appalling sights I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen all of it” says our narrator, the junior detective who only goes by “sergeant.”

Finally, Diane Plumley at the Bookshop Blog aired some controversial views about Margery Allingham in a review of The Fashion in Shrouds (1938),

Allingham may have created a fantasy upper class. I hope so, because the characters peopling her books are vacuous, one dimensional  and dull.

Tsk. Still, there’s room for all sorts

Past Offences by Rich Westwood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

In The Grail Tree, tracing a fake antique sword leads Lovejoy to a most unlikely forger and puts him on the trail of that most sought-after antique, the Holy Grail. Whether or not it’s real, somebody is prepared to kill for it. See? Sounds cosy. It even ends in a museum.

Spend Game opens with the killing of Lovejoy’s old army pal Leckie. I’m not going to say what the antique is in this one, because it sounds even cosier than the Holy Grail.

Julian Symons’ Bloody Murder – From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History is a non-fiction book which does just what it says on the tin. A recommended read for anybody interested in this genre, not least for the dozens of books it puts onto your classic crime radar.

John Buchan’s Greenmantle is the sequel to The Thirty-Nine Steps and finds the heroic Richard Hannay leading a team of agents on a mission through Germany and Turkey to uncover a WWI plot to destabilise Britain’s influence in the Middle East. It is a longer, more detailed, and marginally more realistic book than its predecessor, and all the better for it.

Coming bang up to date, Henry Sutton’s My Criminal World is a crime novel within a crime novel in which a writer grapples with launching a new series character, hampered by his belief that his wife is grappling with one of her students. Entertaining.

Staying with recent books, Paul Collicut’s The Murder Mile is a graphic novel published by SelfMadeHero. An athlete-turned-GI-turned-PI investigates the death of a potential four-minute-miler in a beautifully watercoloured 1950s America. Sport leads to gambling leads to the mob leads to corrupt police. The book looks great and the setting was new to me.

Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male is a high-concept novel which takes the man-on-the-run idea to one of its possible conclusions: man-gone-to-ground. In its favour it’s a straight-forward read, but to be honest I couldn’t take to the central character.

William Stephens Hayward was up next with Revelations of a Lady Detective, an 1864 title beautifully reissued by the British Library to complement the rest of their early crime publishing. Mrs Paschal is a brilliant creation and her adventures are a proper Victorian mix of melodrama and penny-dreadful action.

Finally, Claire McGowan’s The Fall is another recent book. I won a copy last year and regret leaving it so long before picking it up. Charlotte and Keisha are two very different women brought together in the aftermath of a savage murder. They’re realistic and nuanced characters written with a healthy mix of drama and humour. I can also recommend following Claire on Twitter (@inkstainclaire) as she’s one of my funnier tweeters.

My pick of the month? Torn between McGowan and Hayward, I’m plumping for the alive one.

Pick of the month for April 2013: The Fall. Although, why put a toilet on the front cover? (I do know why, but come on…)

For other people’s picks, please visit Mysteries in Paradise.

Oleander Press in Cambridge has just released the second in their London Bound series: William Le Queux’ The Doctor of Pimlico.

Writer of detective stories, Walter Featherston is himself a mystery to all his friends. To some he’s a seasoned traveller known in society circles all over the continent. To the police he is known as “Mr Maltwood” with ready access to the upper echelons of Scotland Yard and the Sûreté Générale in Paris, his knowledge of criminology and his success in the pursuit of criminals recognised internationally.

London Bound is a series of classic London-based crime novels re-set and reprinted by Oleander.

It all sounds like a labour of love. The Series Editor, Richard Reynolds, is the crime specialist at Heffers Bookshop in Cambridge, and the covers have been designed from scratch by Ayshea Carter, designer at the Fitzwilliam Museum.

First out was The Charing Cross Mystery on the 25th February. Christopher St John’s Sprigg’s Fatality in Fleet Street is out on June 10th, with more to follow.