Hoorah for the Humdrums!

Curt Evans, mystery scholar extraordinaire, has been on the blogosphere for a while now, managing an interesting little blog entitled The Passing Tramp. As the name may indicate, the blog is devoted to wandering around the mystery genre, encountering all sorts of interesting specimens, and then reporting back to readers. It’s an excellent blog, and I tend to agree with Curt on many points, especially his continued and unrepentant defense of a group of authors collectively known as “The Humdrums”. You could say he’s written the book on the subject. Literally—I am of course talking about Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-61.

To put it quite simply, Curt’s book is a bravura performance. He takes a look at three major mystery authors from the Golden Age: John Rhode/Miles Burton, Freeman Wills Crofts, and J. J. Connginton. All three men have been condemned to out-of-print hell, and when brought up by academics at all, their opinions tend to be largely dismissive of these “mere puzzles”. But Curt remains unconvinced, and through his analyses he tries to prove that these books have far more merit to them than such a label might imply.

Case for Sir Clinton

One of the all-time great mystery writers was Alfred Walter Stewart, a chemist who hid under the moniker of J. J. Connington. His series detective, Sir Clinton Driffield, was a sarcastic Chief Constable often accompanied by Squire Wendover. They shared plenty of banter along the way, often dripped in irony, as Sir Clinton investigated complicated cases that relied on plenty of ingenuity. Red herrings, twists and double twists are just some of the old friends you will meet in Connington’s ingenious detective stories: and without a doubt, The Castleford Conundrum is one of the very best.

In some ways, it’s an archetypal case: an odious woman is shot dead at her estate in the country. There was talk of her will being changed, in which she would have cut off her husband and step-daughter. The new will would have significantly benefited the two brothers of her first husband, and there was also a substantial increase in profit for her half-sister/companion. She had already rescinded the first will, but had not yet managed to pen and sign the second when she was killed.

The ghastly priest doth reign

One of the greatest masters of the Golden Age mystery was Alfred Walter Stewart, alias J. J. Connington. I fell in love with his work last year when I read the brilliant The Case with Nine Solutions. And I am delighted that Connington is back in print! This is due to the folks at Coachwhip Publications, a print-on-demand publishing house that has recently reprinted Murder in the Maze, The Tau Cross Mystery, and The Castleford Conundrum. I’m very grateful to Chad Arment for sending me review copies of the last two books—and I decided to start with The Tau Cross Mystery, which coincidentally fits in with one of my themes for the 2012 Vintage Mystery Challenge!

The Tau Cross Mystery is the tenth novel featuring Sir Clinton Driffield, Chief Constable. And this book takes place not in the country house, but in modern-day suburbia, a setting that is quite effectively portrayed. There’s been a murder: an unknown man has been shot in a supposedly-empty flat. Sir Clinton is given too much evidence, and yet none of it seems to lead anywhere: there’s an overturned paint pot, a bloody handkerchief, an altogether mysterious business involving an unnecessary pair of shoes… and the titular “tau cross”, a gold ornament shaped like a cross modelled on the Greek letter Tau.

Of a Maze and Men

"Mr. Connington is one of the clearest and cleverest masters of detective fiction now writing."

—Times Literary Supplement 1930

J. J. Connington’s The Case With Nine Solutions is, in my estimation, a masterpiece— unfortunately, Murder in the Maze is something of a step down. There’s much to admire about it in terms of plot construction and writing, but ultimately it doesn’t all quite work out because of the extremely “solve-able” nature of its puzzle.

Brothers Neville and Roger Shandon are not particularly pleasant sorts. Neville is an unscrupulous lawyer who has a fearsome reputation in the courtroom. Roger, on the other hand, is a businessman with many dealings that are not strictly above-board. As we open our story, they are together at Roger’s estate, Whistlefield, with a few more characters to round things off nicely. Neville wants to focus on a high-profile trial and decides he’ll spend the afternoon in the hedge maze. After all, nobody will be likely to wander in, and if he simply stays in the centre of the maze, he’ll be less likely to be disturbed. Roger decides to accompany him but go to the maze’s other centre. Thus, both the brothers get what they wanted: peace and quiet.

The Nine Possible Answers

Most men, they'll tell you a story straight through. It won't be complicated, but it won't be interesting either.

—Ed Bloom, Big Fish (2003)

Alfred Walter Stewart had a long career as a professor in chemistry and a university lecturer in Glasgow and Belfast, but more importantly for the purpose of this review, he also wrote detective novels under the name “J. J. Connington”. He was a well-regarded figure in his day, and John Dickson Carr gave him some praise in his famous essay The Grandest Game in the World. One of Dorothy L. Sayers’ better novels, The Five Red Herrings, is an homage to his book The Two Ticket Puzzle.

Unfortunately, academic disinterest and snobbery levelled against the Golden Age of Detective Fiction have seriously harmed Connington’s reputation. If you hear about him at all nowadays, it will be classed alongside the similarly-maligned John Rhode, Freeman Wills Crofts, Henry Wade, or R. Austin Freeman. (None of these writers were mentioned even in passing by P. D. James in Talking About Detective Fiction, and Julian Symons mentions some of these authors only in passing.) He will be called an ingenious technical writer but someone who couldn’t entertain a drunken fish— a Humdrum, in fact. After reading his book The Case With Nine Solutions, two explanations propose themselves to explain this discrepancy: either Connington and the Humdrums have been unfairly attacked, or the academic worth of drunken fish has been sorely underestimated.