locked room mystery Archives

FFB: Vanishing Men – G McLeod Winsor

333, Friday's Forgotten Books, impossible crime, locked room mystery, obscure writers, science fiction, scientific detection Comments Off

Mar 222013

Looking at the table of contents and reading the chapter titles I learned that Vanishing Men (1927) promised five disappearances and a laboratory explosion. Good enough for me. I plunked down my money and bought the book. I was hoping for something along the lines of the scientific impossible crime novels of Nigel Morland under his many pseudonyms. Would this one involve esoteric chemistry experiments like the books featuring Johnny Lamb? Would I learn of mechanical or engineering problems as in the novels Morland wrote as Neal Shepard? Perhaps physics or biology would be featured. I was surprised when the story hinted at invisibility, matter disintegration and experiments with radioactive elements. The solution to the crimes seemed to be heading toward science fiction and fantasy rather than real hard science.

Prosaically titled The Mysterious Disappearances in the original UK edition the story takes the form of a detective novel opening with the theft of diamonds and gems from a jeweler's office and several apparent murders. The biggest mystery that plagues the several policemen from Scotland yard tackling the various crimes, accidents and vanishings is the fact that the victims' bodies cannot be found. Among the many baffling and inexplicable events the police face:

A jeweler disappears from his locked office. There is only one door watched by two clerks who saw only a single visitor enter and exit during the work day.
The body of a Maharajah disappears from a plane crash site with no sign of footprints or any other disturbances surrounding the wreckage.
A policeman enters a building in full view of his colleagues but never returns. A search of the house reveals it to be completely empty of inhabitants.

The primary suspect is Arthur Seymour, a reclusive misanthropic amateur scientist who lives next door to narrator Sir Henry Fordyce. Seymour has been conducting strange experiments with uranium and radium but will not go into details about the specifics of his work. Fordyce happens to be privy to Seymour's personal life and relates how a broken engagement and his one time fiancée's marriage to another man drove Seymour to the brink of madness. The man who stole Seymour's bride-to-be is also the jeweler who disappears at the start of the book. The police are determined to find a connection between all the vanished men and Seymour and thus prove a case of elaborate revenge. They, however, need some vital information from Miss Arnold, the adopted daughter of the jeweler's widow. Inspector Gilmour turns to Fordyce who he believes might more skillfully obtain Miss Arnold's cooperation. She has refused to talk with Gilmour who she finds a boor and Inspector Glynn who she found inappropriately friendly. Fordyce, a dignified middle-aged gentleman, is shocked when in the course of his sly interrogation he finds himself falling in love with the woman, fifteen years his junior.

The book has a somber often humorless tone thanks in large part to the extremely uptight Henry Fordyce as narrator. But the adventures and multiple puzzles keep the reader engaged. Only the introduction of the at times sappy love story subplot periodically detract from what otherwise is an intriguing mystery that soon becomes a science fiction adventure. In the final chapters Seymour's experimental work is revealed to be an early form of quantum mechanics and particle physics. Fordyce finds himself rendering those experiments in very basic layman's terms in an attempt to convey the often difficult mathematics involved which he confesses he does not understand at all.

George McLeod Winsor, apart from sounding like a character found in the pages of a Stevenson novel, was a little known scientific romance writer from the early part of the 20th century. His best known work -- thanks to its inclusion in 333, a bibliography of fantasy, science fiction, lost race and supernatural fiction -- is his novel Station X (1919). The book is a bizarre tale of interplanetary warfare between Mars and Earth. I have not read the book but the plot summary in 333 certainly makes it seem like a War of the Worlds knock-off with the added bonus of alien mind control. But then there are dozens of books published between 1890 and 1920 about evil Martians invading Earth taking all sorts of forms from bat winged humanoids to metal encased tentacled machines. Though no aliens are involved in the mysterious events in Vanishing Men the solution depends on something just as fantastical as Martians or Venusians.

FFB: From This Dark Stairway – Mignon G Eberhart

Friday's Forgotten Books, impossible crime, Lance O'Leary, locked room mystery, Mignon Eberhart, Sarah Keate Comments Off

Jan 112013

From This Dark Stairway (1931) is Eberhart's fourth book to feature the sleuthing team of Nurse Sarah Keate and policeman Lance O'Leary. It follows her bravura locked room detective novel The Mystery of Hunting's End and nearly surpasses that book with yet another impossible crime. A physician enters an elevator with his patient on a hospital gurney headed for an operating theater. The elevator seems to malfunction or stall. When the elevator opens the physician is dead and patient and gurney are gone. But no one saw anyone get off or on at any of the other floors. The only explanation seems to be that patient killed doctor and fled. But how did he get away without anyone seeing him leave the elevator?

As is usual with Eberhart she sets the scene with a moody descriptive section that gives us a perfect rendition of the creepy stairway that the hospital employees are forced to use due to the mechanical problems of the only elevator that serves the four floors of Melady Memorial Hospital. Sarah Keate tells us out of expediency she finds the stairway a better option even if it is dimly lit and rickety and spooky. There is a fair amount of HIBK type of narration in the opening chapters but this soon gives way to a tale of a motley group of nurses, doctors and eccentric patients all of whom become suspects in the murder of Dr. Harrigan.

There are cleverly placed clues, a few red herrings (remember them?), and an impressive show of misdirection especially in the final chapter. In addition to the puzzling and nearly impossible murder and disappearance in the elevator there is also the theft of an antique Chinese snuff bottle, the desire to find the formula for a new anesthetic drug called Slaepan, a missing surgical knife, the discovery of chewing gum on the doctor's body, and perhaps most significant of all the death of an unnamed Negro patient. In fact, in the penultimate chapter Lance tells Sarah that if the Negro patient had not died on that very night there would have been no murder.

I have read other reviews and criticism of the Sarah Keate novels which all seem to play up the HIBK elements and dismiss the detective novel portions as being middling to absent. Not so here. Keate does real detection even if much of it comes by accidental discoveries and coincidence. She seems to be present more often than is necessary during police interviews. Eberhart, however, gets away with this by making nearly all of the patients hysterics and oddballs who require a nurse present (at least according to head physician Dr. Kunce) so that the interrogation does not overly upset them.

I liked Eberhart's use of humor in this book, too. Sarah can often come across as a stuffy, old-fashioned spinster with Edwardian views about everyone's behavior, but here she shows off a modern self-effacement. There is a running gag about the mispronunciation of Dr. Kunce's name that wears thin by the midpoint of the book, but other nice touches include some digs at Sarah's spinsterhood, specifically her lack of sex appeal that she sarcastically acknowledges in her reporting of Sgt. Lamb's veiled insults.

Eberhart was known to me primarily as a suspense novelist and this is my first encounter with one of her true detective novels. She does an admirable job here. The characters are lively and strange. The action is well paced, the atmosphere grows increasingly eerie as the story approaches the denouement. I was never bored. The hospital setting even if set in the 1930s still felt modern to me with its staff adhering to stringent administrative protocol and the references to patient by their room number rather than their name. Three of the minor characters are called 301, 302 and 303, for example. This happens all the time in the real world of hospitals no matter how often nurses and residents are told to call a patient by their name. I know since I've worked in hospitals all my life.

What impressed me most of all was that From This Dark Stairway is one of the uncommon examples of a Golden Age detective novel in which the murderer's name is not revealed until the final sentence. This book is well worth seeking out for that tour de force bit of mystery writing alone.

ALTERNATIVE CRIME: The Doctor’s Murder Case

alternative classics, impossible crime, locked room mystery, Phoenix Press, Robert Portner Koehler, witchcraft Comments Off

Sep 282012

Another installment in my continuing series on alternative genre mystery writers -- those oddballs who try their damnedest to stump their readers with legitimate detective novels or try to spook and scare their readers with terrifying horror but often bungle in their attempts. Yet they persevere! And amazingly continue to be published, more often than not by second or third string publishing houses. Today I honor Robert Portner Koehler, one of the many writers from that diehard house of unintentional detective story hilarity -- Phoenix Press.

A more boring title could not have been slapped on this intriguing effort than The Doctor's Murder Case (1939). And it cheats the reader, too. The doctor is merely the narrator; it's not his case to solve. The subject matter rather than the narrator should've been celebrated in the title. The chapter titles are far more evocative of the true content of this typically convoluted Phoenix Press mystery. Try these on for size: "The Poltergeist", "The Devil Comes to Leams", "Death of a Witch", "Dark Necromancy", "The Passing of the Witch's Devil", and "Wizardry's Last Stroke." Any of those chapter titles would've been deserving for the book's title. You'd think that this book has all the makings of a John Dickson Carr or Gladys Mitchell mystery. Well, not quite.

Narrated by the fairly colorless Dr. Garrison who is treating an invalid spinster in the rural Massachusetts town of Leams the story is about the freakish bludgeoning death of Judy Priest (I know!), a local woman thought to be a witch. There are a few elements to the unusual murder that almost make it a true impossible crime novel. Arnold Grant, the crazed sexton, has been holding secret meetings of his cult group in a nearby barn. He's been whipping up some of the weak-minded ignoramuses of the town into a religious hysteria. Among his several pet topics is Judy Priest who he denounces as a witch because she happens to practice herbal medicine.

One night he gets his group so riled up that they head to Judy's house and start shouting at her and throwing stones at her house. She won't come out. Would you? Then a hysterical maid curses Judy and they hear a horrible scream inside the house. When they break into the house through a window they find that Judy has been struck down and killed. Was it a supernaturally caused death? Or did someone from the group manage to find a way into the locked house? Police questioning reveals that no one seemed to have left the group throughout their taunting.

Lieutenant Carson is the police detective who handles the case. He has a few odd detection methods (a Phoenix Press detective novel staple), one of which is paying close attention to slips in grammar:

"I warn you now, Lieutenant, wild horses won't drag that person's name out of me."
"Oh, it's a woman, is it?"
I showed my surprise.
"Don't avoid a pronoun, if you want to hide a person's sex. If it had been a man, you would have said his name without hesitating. Now, wouldn't you?"

As the investigation proceeds all manner of the supernatural, whether it be witchcraft or curses or poltergeist behavior, evaporates. The story focuses on Judy's long dead child and a possible connection with a kidnapping of years ago. What starts out as a creepy tale with Gothic atmosphere, freaky characters, madness and paranoia, ghoulish graveyard scenes, and talk of the criminal mind that reminded me of similar lectures in the work of Charles Dutton devolves into a pedestrian mystery with a kooky, "deep dark secret" lifted from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. That is, if the Grimms had been writing while under the influence of a hallucinogenic drug. A second murder involving a bottle of beer that was somehow poisoned while remaining capped offers a second near impossible problem until the solution is propounded, one that is even more lame than the puzzle of how Judy was killed in her locked house.

The detection is mostly good, but towards the end it becomes laborious and confusing. It's a shame that the story begins with such promise and ends up where it does. Koehler tries his best but just can't deliver a smashing ending without resorting to implausible motivations and moronic actions that only come from the minds of bad characters in hastily written detective novels.

The Doctor's Murder Case is Koehler's third novel. He would go on to write an even dozen more mystery novels even branching out to create three series characters who appear in a trilogy of books each. I have one more Koehler novel to try out, his sixth with series character Pecos Appleby and set in New Mexico. I'll be reporting back on whether he manages to improve. I'm not too hopeful.

FFB: The Body Vanishes – Jacquemard-Sénécal

Agatha Christie, French writers, Friday's Forgotten Books, impossible crime, John Dickson Carr, locked room mystery, non-English language Comments Off

Aug 102012

While the first book the French writing team calling themselves Jacquemard-Sénécal wrote was in fact the second book they had published (Le onzième petit nègre, 1977), their first published book was apparently considered to be more conventional by the publisher though no less ingenious. It won for them the coveted Prix du Quai des Orfevres, the French mystery writer's prize, in 1977. While The Eleventh Little Indian (as it was published in the US) was considered "too daring" I think Le Crime de la Maison Grün or, as the English publishers redubbed the book, The Body Vanishes (1976) is far more daring. The trickery employed in this debut (yet really their second book) and the gasp inducing solution surpass what the two men did in their Agatha Christie tribute.

A drowned woman's body disappears from a river bank. It reappears in the locked and burglarized workshop of Wotan Grün, an antiquarian bookseller. The only thing noted to be missing is a rare 15th century incunabulum, the envy of several collectors and the bookseller's competitors. The woman is soon identified as the lover of Wotan's son Denis, the morose and cynical black sheep of the Grün household. As the intriguing investigation proceeds the entire household is enveloped in a world of treachery and thievery, murder attempts and suicide, and -- believe it or not -- the search for an alchemy formula for turning lead into gold.

The book introduces their series character Lancelot Dullac (cute name, huh?), a police detective who works alongside another policeman named Holz. The detection in this book is mostly of the Q&A type, though there are several instances of Golden Age type originality and cleverness in the few scenes that involve physical evidence. Most notable among those portions is a second impossible murder disguised as a suicide that involves some rigged machinery that John Dickson Carr might have dreamed up.

Once again on display a plethora of plot devices and motifs found in the work of their idol Agatha Christie. There are allusions to Evil Under the Sun, Peril at End House, Murder at the Vicarage and the many stage related mysteries she wrote. The two writers come from a theater background and once again dig into their trunk of stage tricks and illusions to bamboozle the reader with dazzling misdirection. There is even some dizzying business with rifles and bullets that reminded me of Erle Stanley Gardner's gun crazy plots. All in all plenty of wizardry and plot machinations to appeal to any fan of the puzzle driven detective novel.

Humdrum Summer Surprise

Freeman Wills Crofts, impossible crime, J. J. Connington, John Rhode, Julian Symons, locked room mystery, reference works Comments Off

Jun 072012

Two days ago I received my copy of Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery by fellow blogger and vintage mystery scholar Curt Evans. It's an in-depth study of three unjustly denigrated Golden Age detective novelists - Cecil Street (who wrote under the pseudonyms John Rhode and Miles Burton), Alfred W. Stewart (who wrote as J.J. Connington ) and Freeman Wills Crofts. It's a true labor of love for Curt who spent the last ten years of his life researching, writing and trying to sell the book to a daring publisher. Finally it paid off.

The "humdrums" is a derogatory term created by mystery writer and critic Julian Symons in his 1972 study of crime fiction Mortal Consequences (published in the UK as Bloody Murder). He lumped together several "dull" and "unimaginative" writers of detective novels mostly from the late 1920s - 1930s and derided them for boring characters, flat writing and tepid plots. As Curt (and many of us vintage mystery bloggers) will tell you -- nothing could be further from the truth.

A close reading of these three men's books will reveal exactly the opposite. Rhode was ingenious in coming up with bizarre murder methods and, when he put his mind to it, concocted ingenious plots with fine examples of logical and scientific detective work. Similarly, Connington was good with tricky plots and in his early books at least displayed an offbeat sense of humor. Crofts was the genius of the alibi and the timetable and he loved to write detective stories about trains, boats and ships at sea. In Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery Curt discusses in detail the best books by these writers and proves Symons to be biased and snobbish in his dismissal of them as "dull" writers.

And now you can own a copy! It's published by McFarland & Company, a publisher of mostly academic non-fiction books, and can be purchased directly at their website. They offer an oversized paperback edition or an eBook version. Or you can try amazon. Since it comes from an independent academic press the price is a bit steep at $49.95. Unfortunately, the book is not offered at any discount prices online. But for those who are truly interested in learning more about these three writers and their fertile imaginations I say it's worth every penny.

FFB: Mr. Diabolo – Anthony LeJeune

Anthony Boucher, Friday's Forgotten Books, ghosts, impossible crime, John Dickson Carr, locked room mystery, obscure writers, supernatural Comments Off

May 252012

A ghost-like figure clad in Victorian wardrobe complete with cloak, flamboyant waistcoat and stovepipe hat appears and disappears in a haunted alley known as Devil's Lane. Hours later a man is found strangled in a locked room. Has a long forgotten specter returned and killed again? I can a smell a John Dickson Carr homage at ten paces. In Mr Diabolo (1960) Anthony Lejeune tries his hand at what many other crime writers have also attempted -- to write a convincing impossible crime tale with a multiple puzzling mysteries and a tantalizing locked room murder worthy of the master. He almost succeeds.

In the opening chapter, "The Coming of Mr. Diabolo" we learn of the specter's legend which dates back to the days of young Lord Farrant, one of the founders of the College of Western Studies, who staged "mysterious midnight parties in his rooms." Professor Cornelius describes the origins of the specter:

His rooms smelled of incense or, some said, of brimstone. his servant found the stubs of black candles and once, half burned, a kitten's paw. And sounds were heard. In short, people became quite convinced that young Lord Farrant was indulging in the black arts. [...] his friends were less discreet, particularly in their cups. They were overheard speaking of somebody who was present at their meetings called 'Mr. Diabolo.'

A conference of the Anglo-American Literary and Political Society ("the Alps" to its members) has brought together academics from both the US and the UK to the campus of the college, a former monastery dating back to the 15th century. The story is narrated by Foreign Office agent Alastair Burke who is allowed to participate in the criminal investigation as a liaison for the Americans attending the conference until a lawyer can be found to represent them. He continues to be involved int eh case when he becomes a witness to a second attempted murder. It is the mysterious Arthur Blaise, however, former associate of Burke's in the spy trade, who unravels the mystery of the disappearing Mr. Diabolo and the locked room murder of Bill Frazer.

As is the case with many mysteries of this subgenre the characters are obsessed with the miraculous circumstances that obscure the crime. Burke and the lovely Barbara Tracey act as the amateur sleuthing duo who do their best to gather data from the suspected members of "the Alps" all the while remaining mystified by the unscalable wall that surrounds the alley, the pile of clothes left behind by the vanished specter, and the door locked on the inside of Frazer's sealed room. Arthur Blaise, like Fell and Merrivale, will not succumb to the impossibilities. He absorbs and examines the evidence, weeds through the lies and deceit, holding back most of his thoughts until the final pages when he explains away all the obfuscating mysteries as the magician's tricks they really are.

"Anthony Lejeune" is in reality Edward Anthony Thompson, crime fiction reviewer, thriller writer, and close friend of Dennis Wheatley. His debut spy thriller Crowded and Dangerous (1959) was described as "snugly readable, bustling Buchanish" by esteemed critic Maurice Richardson with a plot summed up by Violet Grant of the Daily Telegraph as "the trail leads from a Chelsea houseboat to a ship in the London docks, sailing under an Iron [C]urtain flag." Lejeune later created series character Adam Gifford, a reporter and spy, who appeared in at least three other mysteries one of which is the tempting The Dark Trade (1966), published in a US paperback reprint as Death of a Pornographer. In the 1980s he returned to writing mysteries with an academic background and created Professor Lowery who solves crimes in two books.

Japanese edition from 2010
One of the 10 Best "honkaku"- orthodox mysteries

Mr. Diabolo is for the most part an engaging read but my attention began to wander with the probing exploration of Frazer who we discover is a womanizing cad with a taste for blackmail. The bulk of the tale is sidetracked by more and more secrets uncovered related to Frazer's past life and the women in the cast. Too much attention is spent in discussing the architecture of the building, the numerous stairwells, the abundance of keys to all the rooms, and other minutiae which tend to confuse and overwhelm the reader. There seems to be a lot of clutter in this mystery.

Thankfully, when the solution comes there is one brilliant surprise -- perhaps a nod to a famous Anthony Boucher novel which also shares a similar trick -- that redeemed the book for me. With such a great opening, the macabre legend, and the baffling vanishing of a ghost-like killer Lejeune's novel aspires to true greatness and promises to dazzle the reader. Sadly, he only manages to raise a faint glow of surprise just falling short of book that might have been a real classic in locked room mysteries.

The Bishop at Sea – Andrew Greeley

Andrew Greeley, Bishop Blackie Ryan, impossible crime, locked room mystery Comments Off

May 162012

A haunted aircraft carrier is the scene for this locked room mystery featuring Bishop John Blackwood Ryan. As in the case of the previously reviewed Happy Are Those Who Mourn there is the presence of a malevolent ghost. This time, however, there is not a murder in a locked room but a naval officer who seemingly vanishes from a locked room. Compounding the mystery are two additional disappearances of naval officers who were cronies of a martinet of a commanding officer who was terrorizing and intimidating the crew of the USS Langley a series of that only succeeded in breaking down all morale. The crew believes that all those who vanished were killed and tossed overboard. Strange manifestations and creepy events especially among the women's quarters lead some of the more superstitious crew members to think that "Digby" Hoy, the vanished officer, is haunting the ship. Like the other book The Bishop at Sea is less a mystery novel than it is a sounding board for Greeley to discuss sociopolitical issues. In this case, the major issue is the role of women in the military.

Frustratingly, the mystery aspects become less and less important to the book as Blackie gets closer to the heart of the evil on board the carrier. The locked room is presented as puzzling but the solution is prosaic. The ghost is not at all a ghost. The disappearances are not disappearances. Greeley alludes to Chesterton's "The Invisible Man" repeatedly with teasing references to the crew to look for the mailman on board the aircraft which automatically telegraphs the solution to one that will involve disguise of some sort.

Rather than being a mystery novel The Bishop at Sea is really about didactics. Not only is the role of women in the military discussed ad nauseam with an ace woman pilot acting as a symbol for how women are maltreated, abused, and taunted, but the role of the military itself in United States politics is intensely discussed. Greeley gets to voice his opinions of how much government money is wasted on the military force especially with regard to aircraft carriers; how the military protects and covers up bad behavior and dangerous hazing that borders on attempted murder; and how there are two schools of thought in the military – the old veterans running everything who never wanted women in any roles whatsoever and the younger members, rising in rank, who see women in less traditional roles than their older superiors. As the parade of characters (and this is a huge cast) continues and Blackie probes further into the mystery the book seems less a novel than a protracted essay with characters' monologues serving as Greeley's bullet points in his lectures.

Based on other reviews elsewhere on the internet this is supposedly the best of the Blackie Ryan books. I will have to strongly disagree. Whereas Happy Are Those Who Mourn was a genuine mystery novel with an investigation that uncovered secrets that were integral to the story, The Bishop of Sea is a political diatribe disguised as a mystery novel. The mystery aspects of the book are always an afterthought, the solutions to those mysteries are not at all satisfying and presented way too matter-of-factly. The interrogation of the crew members becomes more and more an excuse to discuss controversy and "issues" with the mystery continually pushed to the background.

In the final pages when the mystery is sloppily solved the action explodes in violent gunfire, multiple bloody deaths, with the women saving the day. While I agree with many of Greeley's points the manner in which he uses his characters to put his theories and opinions into practice smacks of the contrived in this particular book. For this reason I felt cheated on multiple levels. I felt like a consumer who bought a mislabeled product and demands his money back on his purchase.

If you want to read a political treatise on women in the military and the role of the government in an aging backward military force then this is the book for you. As a mystery novel, however, The Bishop at Sea is a miserable failure.

The Ancestral Precipice – Jan Ekström

John Dickson Carr, locked room mystery, non-English language, Ross MacDonald, Stieg Larsson Comments Off

May 072012

"The John Dickson Carr of Sweden" proclaims the dust jacket of the first UK edition of Ättestupan (1975) translated as The Ancestral Precipice and published nearly ten years later. Takes a while for the English language speaking world to catch on to a great writer, doesn't it? While there is a baffling locked room murder in this cleverly constructed detective novel its central theme of family secrets and adulterous affairs has more in common with Ross Macdonald than Carr.

Charlotte Lethander, calls to her home her surviving nieces and their families to celebrate her ninetieth birthday. The entire multi-generational family arrives bringing with them plans for blackmail, scheming, adultery and murder. On the very first day of this rocky reunion we learn that the black sheep Victor, a womanizing photographer who likes shooting women nude, has a letter with incriminating information he wants to sell to his father, Martin, and demands 15,000 kronor for its delivery into his hands. Additional avaricious behavior is on display from the nieces, their husbands and children as they vie for the attention of the dying aunt Charlotte. In the midst of all this fawning adulation and scheming a murderer plots a revenge years in the making.

Before the weekend has hardly started Victor and Martin are dead. It appears to be a murder/suicide. Martin having shot Victor apparently returned to his bedroom, locked his door, and allowed the extinguishing flames in the bedroom fireplace to suffocate him with carbon monoxide. But Martin's children - especially his sharp-witted and sharper tongued daughter Vera - know that the strong-willed man would never submit to Victor's demands and that the suicide has to be a cleverly disguised murder. But how then did the murderer escape the room? It was locked on the inside. When the police investigate the scene the damper on the flue is open making it seem impossible for Martin to have died from carbon monoxide inhalation. And yet he did. Further complicating matters is the fact that gun found in Martin's room though recently fired is not the gun used to kill Victor. The case takes an even stranger twist when a second gun is found in the attic with fingerprints of another family member who was thought to have an alibi the night of the deaths.

"Can't tell the players without a scorecard!"
The very necessary family tree I referred to frequently while reading

Hovering over these two crimes is the death of Mauritz Corn's wife, Stella, who accidentally fell to her death and was discovered at the foot of ättestupan, the ancestral precipice of the title. The letter Victor had in his possession revealed the truth about her fatal plunge long believed to be an accident. Aunt Charlotte delivers a jarring description of the foreboding feature of the ättestupan and also the Nordic legend that attaches itself:

Do you know what was here before the house was built, just where we're standing now, I mean? An ancestral precipice. It's been here since Viking days, though I don't suppose any Vikings lived here, you know, only cultivators. Nature is harsh. [...] You know what an ancestral precipice is, Inspector? Some of the old ones threw themselves down the precipice. Others were given help when they asked for it. I wonder if anyone would want to give me help without my asking for it. For an ancient old hag it would be eminently suitable.

Inspector Durrell, in charge of the murder investigation, must not only get to the truth of the curious events surrounding the death of Victor and Martin, but also the mysterious death of Stella now looking more and more like a murder. Will the letter from Victor's blackmail scheme ever be found? Who does it name as Stella's killer? Will the killer strike again?

The story is filled with the kind of brooding aura and dark family secrets that fill the pages of the cases of Lew Archer. When I saw the Swedish film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo I also noted the pervading MacDonald-like atmosphere that imbued that film. I wonder if Stieg Larsson was familiar with the mystery novels of Ekström who appears to have been influenced not only by Carr but by Ross Macdonald. Fans of Larrson, Carr or Macdonald will find plenty to admire in The Ancestral Precipice, a real puzzler with plenty of twists and a good example of the least likely suspect revealed as the killer in the final pages.

AVAILABILITY: The book was first published in the US in 1982 under the blase title Deadly Reunion. Copies of both the UK and the US editions are readily available through the various internet bookselling sties. To date this is the only novel of the popular Swedish writer Jan Ekström that has been translated into English.

FFB: Happy Are Those Who Mourn – Andrew Greeley

Andrew Greeley, Bishop Blackie Ryan, Friday's Forgotten Books, ghosts, locked room mystery, supernatural Comments Off

Apr 062012

I bet you never knew that the Catholic Church has a little known law on its books that recognizes people who have made a "contract of love" with each other to be legitimately married in the eyes of the Church regardless of the couple never having their marriage consecrated in the rite of matrimony by a priest. Stunned? It's true and it's only one of many eyebrow raising bits of information about canonical law unknown to most Catholics (or anyone else, for that matter) that are revealed in Happy Are Those Who Mourn (1995), a fascinating mystery novel by priest, sociologist, and one time college professor Andrew Greeley.

I approached this book that deals heavily with the business -- both financial and spiritual -- of the Catholic Church, specifically the Archdiocese of Chicago, all in the context of a murder mystery with a air of smugness. Having been raised Catholic (though no longer attending mass nor participating in the rites and sacraments) I thought that I knew everything about my religion and that I would be bored with a rehash of the theological aspects that would most likely be written in simple to understand terms for a wider non-Catholic audience. I was hoping that the locked room murder plot would be enough to keep me interested. Instead I was slapped in the face by irony.

As I read I was captivated by all the discussions of canonical law and the financial obligations a U.S. parish has to the Archdiocese and to the Vatican. The plot hinges on a murder in a locked room and is mildly puzzling, but is not the real hook of the piece. The mystery is more concerned with the slow reveal of past secrets that eventually involve arcane and truly shocking laws in the Church. In particular I was astonished that there is a law dating back 1300 years that seems to condone a certain mortal sin or, rather, in extremely specific circumstances the sin in question is not a sin at all and does not need to be confessed. I was blown away by this.

"Blackie" Ryan is asked by his immediate superior Cardinal Sean Cronin to visit a suburban Chicago parish where the pastor, Monsignor Charles McInerney, recently died. It appears that the strange tower room in the rectory where the monsignor died is being haunted by the his spirit. Not only is the tower room in the rectory plagued with weird phenomena -- the TV and lights go on and off by themselves, books are thrown off of bookshelves, footsteps are heard in the outer hallway -- the church organ bursts unaccompanied into inappropriate music, and the electronic church bells chime Christmas tunes in the middle of a hot summer. Cardinal Cronin is not pleased and he will not have the weird goings on in Woodbridge become the subject of tabloids or the lead story of local TV news crews. Blackie has made a name for himself as a debunker of spook shows so he is sent to the suburb to put an end to the apparent poltergeist activity.

While in Woodbridge Blackie learns that the dead priest was intentionally murdered and that his death was covered up to appear accidental. He also uncovers some questionable financial dealings with the parish money. He and the current pastor approximate that somewhere there is a missing $10,000,000 that belongs to the Archdiocese. Where did it go? Was that the motive for the murder of the priest? And what has Lynn Reed, a local woman dubbed the town nympho by a staunch nun, have to do with the death? She is Woodbridge's most beautiful woman and is known to flirt with all the men whether married or not. She was also was seen leaving the rectory carrying out boxes of documents a few days after his death. Is there some sort of conspiracy at work in Woodbridge?

The contrast between Cardinal Cronin and Bishop Ryan makes for entertaining springboard to the book's complex web of financial chicanery, sexual dalliance, and madness in the suburbs. While Cronin is a vociferous, temperamental whiskey taking boss who likes to lecture and will hear no arguments, Blackie is laconic, calm and almost stoic. He likes to reply to questions with a variety of adverbs among which "Arguably", "Doubtful", and "Indeed" are the most common. He jokes about his "invisibility" being one of his best attributes in his detective side work. Like Father Brown he is often taken for granted or completely ignored though he is very much present and all-observing.

The most captivating part of Blackie's character is that he is a truly modern priest. He refers to God as She, he does not believe in the concept of hell, he views sexuality as an expression of human spirituality, and above all he sees God as all-loving and forgiving to the extreme. Most of the time this laid back priest is as affable as can be, but can be stern and unyielding when his patience is tested by fools and braggarts. There are quite a few of those types among the parishioners of Woodbridge. Blackie makes for a good detective, too. He is skillful at getting people to drop their masks and show their true selves. It's not just Q&A, however, there are a few nice touches of legitimate old-fashioned detective work and some intuitive reasoning that come into play. Plus there is Blackie's belief in the existence of psychic phenomena, considered heretical by his Cardinal boss, but a genuine and welcome surprise to me. As Greeley slyly writes about the priest's dismissal of the poltergeist activity as "nothing but cheap tricks" I was convinced that the ghostly mischief would prove to be nothing but fakery, and yet... But that should be left for the reader to discover on his own.

Well read devotees of crime fiction may want to draw comparisons to John Dickson Carr and G.K. Chesterton in the story of a haunted tower, supernatural incidents and a locked room murder. There may be slight coincidences in those classic writers' books and stories but the true core of Greeley's story is not in the puzzle. Greeley is most interested in the secrets kept hidden in the hearts of Woodbridge's citizens. The heart of the story is quite literally found in the human heart -- in the desires and longings of the lonely, in the perverted pleasures of the corrupt, in the compassionate forgiveness of past transgressions, in the differences between a legal marriage and a marriage of the heart.

Andrew Greeley is something of a celebrity here in Chicago but I had never read anything he wrote until last week when I chose this mystery novel. He has written extensively in a variety of non-fiction (theology, psychology, self-help, sexuality) and fiction (fantasy, erotica, mystery). A best selling author throughout the 1980s, the subject of numerous TV, magazine and newspaper interviews, attention to his books and work has since dwindled. Most of his books are now out of print. There are a total of seventeen books in the Bishop Blackie Ryan series, most of them featuring plots with locked room murders, impossible crimes, and ghosts. This was a superior introduction to the series and I plan to read more. Blackie Ryan is one of the more fascinating religious sleuths out there. I never dreamed a mystery novel could enlighten me about my own religion.

Locked Room Fans Take Note

book collecting, locked room mystery, reference works Comments Off

Mar 282012

Martin Edwards just alerted me of a new reference book on the locked room subgenre that I and so many other vintage mystery bloggers enjoy. It's called Narratives of Enclosure in Detective Fiction by Michael Cook and it tends to have a historical and academic flavor.

Martin writes:

...the book is not quite what I expected, for a number of reasons. The author’s starting point is interesting. He suggests that Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” set a pattern for detective fiction with an emphasis on “enclosures, death and references to sequestered lives”. So although there is quite a bit of focus on Golden Age fiction, when – most people would accept, I think – the locked room mystery was in its hey-day, the book includes extensive discussion of some stories that one wouldn’t really associate with the locked room sub-genre. A key example is that splendid Charles Dickens story, “The Signalman”.

Unfortunately, like all academic tomes it's a pricey book and will run you well over $50 (plus shipping depending on where you find it). To purchase a copy of the book try the usual bookselling sites. I found it listed at amazon.com and bookdepository.com (free shipping always!). It may be at other sites as well.

For more on the book see Martin's post Narratives of Enclosure at his blog.

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