Nautical naughtiness – Classic crime in the blogosphere, January 2014

Ahoy there!

In honour of The False Inspector Dew, my book of the year so far, and a crime novel I whole-heartedly recommend in my soon-to-be-written-up review, I have decided to give this month’s pick of the blogs a nautical theme. Avast, my hearties.

Off the starboard bow (I’ll stop now), Bev at My Reader’s Block looked at Bruce Hamilton’s Too Much of Water (1958) set on a small cabin ship sailing from Liverpool to the West Indies.

Holidaying conductor Edgar Cantrell investigates the deaths of several fellow passengers – who seem to be connected only by the fact that they were very annoying.

Hamilton gives us a near-four-star story. The characters are interesting and somewhat comic at times. Cantrell makes for a nice, male version of the middle-aged busybody getting himself drawn into a bit of amateur detective work.

Vintage Pop Fictions looked at another kind of boat – an underwater one. In Horse Under Water (1963) Len Deighton’s nameless spy is sent to investigate a sunken German U-Boat off the Portuguese coast. He soon finds his job is not as straight-forward as it seemed.

This is spy fiction of a very different kind from James Bond. There’s relatively little action and when acts of violence do occur they come unexpectedly. That’s not to say that it’s dull. There’s plenty of tension and plenty of suspense as the plot twists and turns. There’s danger, but it’s a brooding menacing kind of danger, it’s danger that can take the characters (and the book’s readers) off their guard.

Staying under the sea, Sergio at Tipping My Fedora looked at Tom Keene and Brian Haynes’ Spyship (1980), a book which has a real ring of truth about it.

The premise is based on the true case of the Gaul trawler, which sank in February 1974 off the north coast of Norway, which the authors investigated for a TV news magazine show. Attempts to find the wreckage failed, leading to several conspiracy theories that would not be truly resolved for another thirty years.

One last shipwreck. The blogger at My Bookish Friends is reading 100 books recommended by friends (not a bad idea, actually). Inexplicably, one of her friends recommended the famously poor The Floating Admiral, a 1923 collaboration by the Detection Club (Sayers, Chesterton, Christie etc.). A book so bad I gave it back to the charity shop. A short but pithy review concludes:

By the eighth or ninth, painstakingly pedantic, solution I found myself envying the corpse.

And finally, Curt over at the Passing Tramp almost tied in to the nautical mystery theme, but unfortunately, The Body Missed the Boat.

Jack Iams’ 1947 mystery stays ashore in French Equatorial Africa.

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.

Anchors aweigh for next month’s reading…

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See also some non-nautical reading.

Annabel’s House of Books

• Gerald Seymour’s Harry’s Game (1975)

Alex in Leeds

• Dorothy L. Sayers’ Whose Body? (1923)

AQ’s Reviews

• Dorothy L. Sayers’ Whose Body? (1923)

At Beneath the Stains if Time: ‘How Good a Detective Are You? (1934) is a compilation of one-page detective stories, challenging the reader to figure out how Professor Fordney logically reached his conclusions… The solution to each story is printed, upside down, on the backside of the page.’

Beneath the Stains of Time

• Norbert Davis’ The Mouse in the Mountain (1943)
• H. Edward Hunsberger’s Death Signs (1987)

Bitter Tea and Mystery

• Anthony Gilbert’s A Case for Mr Crook (1953)

My Bookish Friends

• The Detection Club’s The Floating Admiral (1931)

The Broken Bullhorn

• Margery Allingham’s Death of a Ghost (1934)

Christie in a Year

• Agatha Christie’s Sparkling Cyanide (1945)
• Agatha Christie’s Partners in Crime (1929)
• Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap (1952)

Classic Mysteries

• E. X. Ferrars’ The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas (1958)
• E. R. Punshon’s Diabolic Candelabra (1942)
• Frances and Richard Lockridge The Dishonest Murderer (1949)

Clothes in Books

• J. C. Masterman’s The Case of the Four Friends (1956)
• Len Deighton’s The IPCRESS File (1962)
• Earl Derr Bigger’s The Agony Column (1916)

Col’s Criminal Library

• Gregory McDonald’s Fletch (1975)

Confessions of a Mystery Novelist

• Catherine Aird’s The Religious Body (1966)

The Consulting Detective

• The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (movie, 1976)

Crimesquad.com

• Dorothy Simpson’s The Night She Died (1981)

Crimezine

• Raymond Chandler’s Payback (1958)

The Dusty Bookcase

• Michael Bryan’s Intent to Kill (1956)

Ela’s Book Blog

• Margery Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke (1952)

Existential Ennui

• Michael Gilbert’s Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens (1982)
• Eric Ambler’s Intrigue (anthology, 1965)

FictionFan’s Book Reviews

• William McIlvanney’s The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983)

Finding Time to Write

• William McIlvaney

A Guy’s Moleskine Notebook

• Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent (1987)

Heavenali

• Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860)

I Love a Mystery

• Michael Crichton’s Zero Cool (1969)

Ms Wordopolis Reads

• Patricia Highsmith’s Those Who Walk Away (1967)

My Reader’s Block

• Carter Dickson’s The Skeleton in the Clock (1948)
• S. S. Van Dine’s The Winter Murder Case (1939)
• James Francis Thierry’s The Adventure of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons (1918)
• Bruce Hamilton’s Too Much of Water (1958)
• T. H. White’s Darkness at Pemberley (1932)

The Retro Review

My Top Five Female Detectives in Fiction

Mysteries in Paradise

• Arthur Upfield’s Death of a Swagman (1945)

Only Detect

• Wade Miller’s Uneasy Street (1948)

Open Holmes

• Julian Symons’ A Three-Pipe Problem (1975)

The Passing Tramp

• Mary Roberts Rinehart’s Episode of the Wandering Knife (1950),
• Matthew Head’s The Accomplice (1947)
• Jack Iams’ The Body Missed the Boat (1947)
• Mignon Eberhart’s Unidentified Woman (1943)
• Royce Howes’ Murder at Maneuvers (1938)
• A. Fielding’s The Case of the Two Pearl Necklaces (1936)
• A. Fielding’s The Eames-Erskine Case (1924)

A Penguin a Week

• Georges Simenon’s Maigret’s First Case (1948)
• Georges Simenon’s Maigret’s Mistake (1953)
• Georges Simenon’s Maigret and the Old Lady (1953)

The Poisoned Martini

• Ngaio Marsh’s Enter a Murderer (1935)

Pretty Sinister Books

• Clifford Witting’s Catt Out of the Bag (1939)
• Helen McCloy’s The Man in the Moonlight (1940)
• Anne Austin’s One Drop of Blood (1932)
• Wilkie Collins’ Armadale (1866)
• Helen McCloy
• Richard Shattuck’s The Wedding Guest Sat on a Stone (1940)
• Nigel Morland’s The Careless Hangman (1940)
• Victor L. Whitechurch’s Thrilling Stories of the Railway (1912)

Pulpetti

• Joe Gores’ Interface (1974)

Reading Ellery Queen

• Barnaby Ross’ Drury Lane’s Last Case (1933)

At the Scene of the Crime

• Helen McCloy’s Mr Splitfoot (1968)

In Search of the Classic Mystery

• Peter Lovesey’s A Case of Spirits (1975)
• Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890)
• Ellery Queen’s Calamity Town (1942)

The Telegraph

• Georges Simenon

Tipping my Fedora

• Agatha Christie’s Endless Night (1967)
• Tom Keene with Brian Haynes’ Spyship (1980)
• Ed McBain’s Sadie When She Died (1972)
• Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel (1954)

Vanished into Thin Air

• J.J. Connington’s In Whose Dim Shadow (1935)
• Pierre Boileau’s Six crimes sans assassin (1939)
• S. A. Steeman’s L’Ennemi sans Visage (1934)
• Alexis Gensoul’s Gribouille est Mort (1945)
• Michael Innes’ Appleby’s Other Story (1974)

Vintage Pop Fictions

• James Gunn’s Deadlier Than the Male (1943)
• Eric Ambler’s Judgment on Deltchev (1951)
• C. S. Forester’s Payment Deferred (1926)
• S. S. Van Dine’s The Canary Murder Case (1927)
• Robert Eustace’s A Master of Mysteries (1898)
• Len Deighton’s Horse Under Water (1963)

Yet Another Crime Fiction Blog

• Chester Himes’ The Crazy Kill (1959)

You Book Me All Night Long

• Rex Stout’s Fer de Lance (1934)

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