Death to the Vampire!

Just last week, fellow blogger TomCat took a look at Mike Resnick’s Stalking the Dragon, a parody of hardboiled detective stories with a simple premise at heart: the story, while told in a hardboiled style, took place in a parallel universe with goblins, leprechauns, dragons, and the like walking down the same streets as the private eye, John Justice Mallory. And I instantly resolved to read one of these books in the near future (especially seeing what time of year this is). Well, that day is today, and the book in question is Resnick’s Stalking the Vampire.

It’s Halloween, and detective John Justice Mallory notices that his partner, Winifred Carruthers, seems unusually pale. That’s when he notices the bite-marks on her neck, and he quickly deduces that they were inflicted by her nephew Rupert, who has come over for a visit to his aunt. Well, it’s true: on the boat over to New York, Rupert was bitten by a vampire named Aristotle Draconis, and now Mallory has to figure out how to protect Winifred from her nephew. But then Rupert disappears, and is later found murdered outside Winifred’s apartment. Is Draconis responsible? And if not him, who?

An Unsuitable Job for a Poorly-Defined-Character-Who-is-Nonetheless-an-Interesting-Concept

In Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, the legendary private eye Philip Marlowe is introduced (at least, in novel form), and like it not, Marlowe is one of the most important figures in the genre’s history. For that reason alone, every serious mystery fan should read The Big Sleep at least once. Whether they will enjoy the book is another matter altogether.

The plot: uhm… Marlowe goes from place to place to witness people getting gunned down, and comes across every racist homophobic sexist in the city of Los Angeles. It seems that everyone’s primary purpose in life is to make Marlowe’s existence a living hell. There’s some stuff about pornography, blackmail, and other cheerful subject matter, and an attempt is made to create a plot out of it. The attempt fails. In fact, at times the book makes you wonder whether Raymond Chandler somehow managed to defy space and time and read John Dickson Carr's The Grandest Game in the World back in the 1930s, never realizing that its summary of a hardboiled mystery was a satire, not a guide on how to write them!

The Acquisitive Chuckle III: It's Really the Fourth Entry in the "Showing off Acquisitions" Series, but Only the Third to Use "The Acquisitive Chuckle" in the Title

Well, folks, it’s been a while since my last update on acquisitions. And believe me, there have been plenty of acquisitions in the interim. My biggest haul was pulled off lately when a local used bookstore, which just closed down, held a huge final sale in which prices were ridiculously low. How could I not take advantage of these deals? There are plenty of books to cover and I know I’ll manage to forget some, so let’s get right to it!

Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? : The Smackdown

A Quick Word of Introduction: I originally wrote this piece back in March, submitting it to an online publication. Unfortunately, there seems to have been a major delay in the publishing of the next issue. Being infamously impatient, I have at last decided to publish this essay on my blog to share with my readers. I have made a few more-or-less minor revisions and have added images. In this piece, I tackle Edmund Wilson's infamous essay Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? using all the tools Wilson used, particularly sarcasm. Throughout my analysis I will challenge the claim that this essay "destroyed" the typical Agatha Christie mystery by claiming the precise opposite: it is an entirely useless essay from a critical standpoint. And so, without further ado, I give you:

Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? : The Smackdown

Edmund Wilson, Professional Troll

As a university student, I was seriously tempted to sign up for a course in Detective Fiction last term. What made me decide otherwise was seeing the book list: there was no Agatha Christie nor Raymond Chandler, and in fact, all the books were contemporary. Not only was the selection highly limited, it gave no sense of the genre’s rich and varied history from what I could tell… my fears were confirmed when I found out that one of the readings for the course was Edmund Wilson’s infamous essay Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?

But why is it famous? As I recently discovered on a re-read, Wilson’s essay contains literally nothing of substance. He only proved one thing: Edmund Wilson did not like detective stories. Which is a perfectly valid point of view. But Wilson did not substantiate it even remotely. He simply looked down at the genre through the eyes of a “true intellectual” and sniffed at it. In other words, Edmund Wilson was a troll.

Birds of Prey

When a young girl comes to ace detective Sam Spade for help, he has no idea what he’s about to get himself into. The girl, giving the name of Miss Wonderly, asks Sam and his partner, Miles Archer, to trail a man named Floyd Thursby, who has run off with Miss Wonderly’s younger sister. The money is good and so Spade and Archer take the case. Later that night, a phone call wakes Sam up. Miles Archer is dead—he’s been shot. The police, meanwhile, seem to consider Sam their number one suspect, and Sam refuses to give to give the police more information than is absolutely necessary. He admits Miles was on a case, for instance, but he refuses to name the client. But since there’s no evidence against Sam, the police reluctantly let him walk free.

Before long, Sam is embroiled in a complex mystery. Finding out that his client is really named Brigid O’Shaughnessy, that she never had a sister, and that several people are in town, hunting for a mysterious black bird. And they are willing to kill each other over it. It’s the plot of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, one of the all-time greatest classics in detective fiction and one of the books that gave rise to the hardboiled detective story.

Deadpool

When Maude Slocum walks into Lew Archer’s office, it looks like another typical case. She’s intercepted a nasty letter that was intended for her husband’s eyes—one that would cast more than a shadow of doubt on her fidelity as a wife. As it happens, her husband James will be a very rich man one day (when his mother dies) and she isn’t particularly keen on going through divorce proceedings. Plus, there’s a child to consider: Maude’s daughter Cathy. Maude went through a divorce as a child and doesn’t want Cathy to experience the same things.

And so Lew Archer gets ready to investigate. He rides to the scene but Death hitches a ride on the way, and very soon a body is discovered. The multimillionaire matriarch of the Slocum family, who kept rule over her son and his family with an iron fist, is found dead. She’s been drowned in the swimming pool. But was it an accident? Did she simply slip? Or was it murder?

The Simple Art of Murder

I’d like to welcome readers to another special edition of At the Scene of the Crime! Back in June, I collaborated with Sergio of Tipping My Fedora on a review of George Baxt’s The Alfred Hitchcock Murder Case. Our views on the book were rather similar, but we approached it from two different vantage points: one that of a Baxt enthusiast (Sergio), the other of someone whose introduction to Baxt was far from pleasant (that would be me). So it seemed like a perfect plot to reunite with Sergio and collaborate on another review, as part of the 100^th post extravaganza celebrations.

(What follows may seem like a non-sequitur, but bear with me.)

A few years ago, I picked up a copy of Julian Symons’ Bloody Murder. I’m not sure which edition I picked up, but I was never able to finish it (and my library got rid of it since). Symons then struck me as a condescending person who didn’t understand the fun of the genre, and his appraisal of several authors, including Dorothy L. Sayers, annoyed me. But all this time later, I’ve matured somewhat, and I was interested to see what impression would remain. Would I once again be annoyed by Symons? Or would I actually enjoy Bloody Murder?

Well, there was only one way to find out, and that was by reading the book. It then struck me that Bloody Murder would make excellent material for a crossover review with Sergio, who has expressed positive sentiments for Julian Symons and this book. And here we are today!

So let the repartee begin! Welcome back to the crime scene, Sergio!

***

So Long, My Sweet

Earlier this year, I attempted to struggle through Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye and failed. The book started off well, but at the point at which I gave up, the plot was going nowhere, you could see the ending coming for miles ahead, and it was so overly padded that I simply couldn’t face the prospect of finishing the book. I put it down, wrote a harshly negative and sarcastic series of comments, and concluded that, after all, Raymond Chandler couldn’t write, and his stories were no more realistic than those he blasted in his famous essay The Simple Art of Murder.

So perhaps it’s only fair to give Raymond Chandler another go. My motives were not entirely altruistic; I’ve been preparing to paint my room, putting all my books into boxes and the like (which, by the way, resulted in my desk falling apart yesterday, which will make a lovely start to the school year). So I’ve been listening to an audiobook, and Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely was the only one of his I could find which I hadn’t read yet. I had no intention of returning to the frankly incompetent The Big Sleep, and my thoughts on The Long Goodbye are already well-known.

Are you a detective?

Macdonald constructed his plots rather than improvise them, thereby merging his novelist’s concern for his themes with the reader’s desire for a good (and fairly clued) mystery. The plot was everything with Macdonald. Beginning with The Galton Case (1959) (…) all Macdonald’s novels have the same plot. A murder in the past traumatizes a child and poisons the present, threatening a relationship and causing more murders. The themes of child’s loss of parent and parent’s loss of child (Macdonald experienced both) are rendered poignantly again and again.

—William DeAndrea, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa

Kenneth Millar, aka Ross Macdonald

When I moved, I started to attend Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate and Vocational School. This is the same high school that Margaret Millar and her husband Kenneth Millar (better known under his pseudonym Ross Macdonald) attended. For what it’s worth, I despised the school, which is full to the brim of bad memories for me. I don’t recall a single enjoyable day I had between those walls, and returning for a single evening to obtain a diploma was one the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I left five minutes after the general reunion got underway.

Perhaps it’s one of the reasons I’ve been interested with the work of Ross Macdonald, a prolific writer of hardboiled mysteries starring private eye Lew Archer. I have no idea how he and his wife enjoyed the high school experience, but I walked through the same corridors as they did for a few years. What really surprises me is how long it’s taken me to read something by Macdonald: I decided to acquaint myself with his work through The Galton Case, which he apparently considered the book in which he broke off from the influence of Raymond Chandler and started writing his own way.

Enter Dr. Thorndyke

The inanimate things around us have each of them a song to sing to us if we are but ready with attentive ears.

— Dr. John Thorndyke, “The Echo of a Mutiny” (collected in The Signing Bone)

And thus we have returned to R. Austin Freeman. I launched this series of reviews last week with Freeman’s own The Eye of Osiris, devoted to various Crime Kings: male authors who wrote in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction and towards whom time has been extremely unkind. Freeman is an excellent case in point. At one point in time, he was a highly respected author, even earning praise from Raymond Chandler (no mean feat, that). Flash forward to the publication of Bloody Murder in 1972, and what does Julian Symons write about Freeman? “Reading a Freeman story is very much like chewing on dry straw.” And he hasn’t fared much better today, which just puzzles me. My confusion increased after reading The Singing Bone, a collection of short stories originally published in 1911, in which Freeman invented what is known as the “inverted detective story”—a technique that the television show Columbo excelled at. I was expecting an interesting experiment but not much more. But once again, Freeman surprised me and smashed the ball out of the park.

Slaughterers Slip Up

Murderers make mistakes! … I should just think so! So many devise ingenious schemes to mislead the police and to avert suspicion from themselves: real brainy schemes which ought to succeed. And then they go and spoil them by some tiny oversight which gives the whole thing away, so that their guilt stands out a mile. It’s like a man who fits up an elaborate electrical system in his house: lights, fires, heaters; every conceivable gadget and convenience, and then spoils it all by forgetting to switch on the current.

—     Inspector French, The Case of the Lower Flat (collected in Murderers Make Mistakes

Freeman Wills Crofts is another one of “The Humdrums”, men whose books are too often scorned by critics, although they had quite a following in their day and have been rather influential in the genre.  Crofts seems to have had quite an obsession with seemingly perfect alibis and the way they are broken. Raymond Chandler called him “the soundest builder of them all when he doesn’t get too fancy”. Now, I disagree with Chandler on many points about the genre but he actually has a very good point there, which I will go further into as I take a look at Murderers Make Mistakes.

Murderers Make Mistakes is an interesting short story collection by Freeman Wills Crofts. These stories were originally radio plays, and the book makes no attempt to disguise it. It glories in the fact, giving you the original episodes and their broadcast dates. Eighteen radio plays from Chief Inspector French’s Cases (broadcast between 1943 and 1945) were converted into story form with varied degrees of success. In addition, five cases from Here’s Wishing You Well Again were converted into Inspector French short stories (the original detective being the coroner, Dr. Cataret). There are 23 stories in this collection, and I’m lazy, so once again, I won’t go through each story individually, but give you an idea of the collection as a whole.

Eye spy with my little eye...

Richard Austin Freeman, creator of Dr. Thorndyke

R. Austin Freeman is one of a group of writers that have collectively been labelled “The Humdrums”. They include prolific authors like John Rhode, Freeman Wills Crofts, and JJ Connington. Time has not been kind to them, as their books have become scarcer and scarcer to find. Often the price tags attached are ridiculous. These authors are often scorned by critics, and have an unfair reputation as writers so dull they couldn’t entertain a drunken fish. (I used this description in my review of John Rhode’s Death on Sunday, but it could easily apply to the “Humdrums” in general.) They actually had quite a following in their day. Raymond Chandler, for instance, surprisingly confessed that he enjoyed R. Austin Freeman’s work:

'This man Austin Freeman is a wonderful performer. He has no equal in his genre, and he is also a much better writer than you might think, if you were superficially inclined, because in spite of the immense leisure of his writing, he accomplishes an even suspense which is quite unexpected ... There is even a gaslight charm about his Victorian love affairs, and those wonderful walks across London ...'

This comes as something of a surprise from the same person who damned authors like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. And yet, it is somewhat understandable when you consider the painstaking scientific realism Freeman achieves through Dr. John Thorndyke’s investigations. (And boy, we sure know that Raymond really had a thing for realism...)

But is this all this “scientific realism” a positive point or a negative point about Freeman’s work? I think it’s a bit of both, as evidenced by his 1911 novel The Eye of Osiris. But to discuss why, I suppose I’d better start by describing the plot.

Goodbyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Raymond Chandler

There is a moment in the 1994 movie Speed which suddenly transforms the movie from a good action movie into an exhilarating thrill ride: it is the moment when the bus goes over 50 mph. From that moment on, the movie, which was already good, becomes great, as an intelligent thriller results, with complication after complication thrown in our characters’ faces. Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye contains the exact opposite of this moment: it begins as an intelligent and rather enjoyable story, but suddenly transforms into a mind-numbingly painful experience when it reaches Chapter 13.

Before I go any further, let me say two things. First off, a confession: I did not finish reading this book. Second off: I absolutely despise Raymond Chandler. [Also, be warned: I avoid rude language in my reviews because I believe in using intelligent language, but I found it unavoidable today, and the nicest term I could think of to describe just about all the characters appears quite often: “jackass”. I considered replacing it with “Pineapple”, but it came across as too silly. So "jackass" it is.]