Murder... with an Overpowering Dose of Romance Thrown In

The first time we met MI5-man-turned Anglican priest Max Tudor, he soon became involved in a murder investigation in a book entitled Wicked Autumn by G. M. Malliet. Now, Father Max is back in A Fatal Winter, the second instalment of the series. In this book, Max Tudor gets involved in a conversation on a train with an elderly lady. She turns out to be Lady Baynard, a well-to-do woman residing at the nearby Chedrow Castle, and her snobbery seems like something out of Victorian England. So Father Max listens without listening and manages to live through the train ride home…

Unfortunately, his fellow passenger isn’t quite so lucky. Not long after her chat with Father Max, Lady Baynard meets her death. But before she died, her brother Oscar, Lord Footrustle, was savagely murdered with a knife. Lady Baynard seems to have died of natural causes, but the police are not satisfied, and seem to think that she may have died of the shock of finding out that her brother was killed. Either way you look at it, it’s a mess, and the police turn to Father Max to solve the case.

Santa's Slay

I have read only one Ngaio Marsh novel to date, and that was Death of a Fool/Off With His Head. It had a lot of good things in its favour—particularly an intriguing impossible crime—but the book was pretty uneven as a whole. Much of it was good but other parts were laughably obvious or just not very interesting. The detective, Roderick Alleyn, wasn’t repulsive, but he wasn’t particularly memorable, either. In fact, the most memorable point of the book was the work that went into the production of a traditional English dance. The question is, could Marsh improve when I approached her for my second dose of Alleyn, in the late book Tied up in Tinsel?

Tied up in Tinsel is a book about a very rich man, Hilary Bill-Tasman, who has an obsession for the past. He repurchases the old family home, tracks down old furniture and paintings and repurchases them, and plans to restore the house in general. But to do that and to maintain it, he needs servants. But where is one to find servants in the 1970s? Why prison, of course! More specifically, the entire staff is composed of murderers who have left their penitentiaries behind. This is seen as a form of rehabilitation… but things get very awkward when somebody begins to play malicious pranks recalling the murders that the staff had committed years ago! And it’s even worse when an unpleasant butler disappears after having played the role of The Druid (aka Santa) for the local children at Christmastime…

'B' is for Bernie

This next review was inspired by Bill of Traditional Mysteries, who reviewed Lawrence Block’s The Burglar in the Library a while ago. The review interested me—I had never read a Block and he seems to be a very prolific author of hardboiled mysteries/crime novels. I have another of his books, Eight Million Ways to Die, sitting on my shelf awaiting me to read it. But it seemed to me a little more interesting to first take a detour to the world of Bernie Rhodenbarr, bookseller and professional burglar, as he gets involved in a traditional snowed-in-English-country-house mystery!

After a relationship of Bernie’s goes sour (after all, the girl was getting married that Thursday!) the burglar decides to say “to hell with it” and refuses to cancel reservations he’s made for the weekend at an exclusive and quaint little hotel/guest house called Cuttleford House. He decides to instead bring Carolyn Keiser along, his best friend in the world as well as a lesbian. But he isn’t coming to Cuttleford House just to enjoy the fairy-tale-England atmosphere of the place… he’s there to look for a book. More specifically, a copy of the first edition of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep inscribed by the author to Dashiell Hammett! Such a book, if it existed, would be absolutely priceless to fanatical collectors. And Bernie, after reading the memoirs of a forgotten pulp author, is convinced not only that the book probably exists, but also that its location is Cuttleford House.

Murder is Our Business

James Anderson’s The Affair of the Mutilated Mink was a wonderful tribute to the finest Agatha Christie novels. You had the country house setting, the “Bright Young Things”, the ingeniously tricky plot, and plenty of respect for the original material. And in a delightful move, the book was set not in the historically-accurate 1930s, but in the universe of 1930s Golden Age mysteries, where murder among the upper classes is taken for granted and Inspectors Appleby and Alleyn are a telephone call away.

That being said, it was the second volume in a series of books and it did give some hints as to the plot of the first book, The Affair of the Blood-Stained Egg Cosy. All this time later, I’ve had plenty of time (and plenty of books!) to forget these hints. So what better thing to do than to return to Alderly Hall, back to the estate of Lord Burford, back to his family and one of the all-time great butlers, Merryweather.

A Rant Against the Word "Cozy"

The term “cozy” really rubs me the wrong way. It’s not necessarily the word itself, which describes a niche of the mystery market decently: a book where everyone is nice and polite, the detective has a perfect love relationship, and there are plenty of cats to act as animal sidekicks. What really irks me is how this term is abused and stuck onto books and authors that do not fit the label in the least. As a result of this tomfoolery, many authors are branded with this simplistic and unfair “cozy” label.

Agatha Christie gets the most unfair treatment in this regard. Critics gleefully describe her books as “cozy”, citing her idyllic villages and how order is restored to these idyllic villages after some crime, with life going on as before. (Not to forget the usual snide remark about her upper-class worship.) To this I loudly proclaim: “Bah, humbug!”

Case Without an Amateur

The last book I read, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, was a dismal affair. It markets itself as a parody of Agatha Christie and her contemporaries, but it is remarkably mean-spirited, with senseless plotting, insipid characters, and a writing style composed almost entirely of clichés. To top it all off, Gilbert Adair even talks about G. K. Chesterton just so he can throw in the line “Gilbert is a genius.” Someone truly is a bit too fond of himself…

But I digress. The essence of it is that The Act of Roger Murgatroyd is possibly one of the worst mystery novels ever written, but more importantly, it is written with total disdain for the genre and Agatha Christie herself. This is why James Anderson’s The Affair of the Mutilated Mink was such a tremendous breath of fresh air for me; here, at last, is a tribute to Agatha Christie done right!

Prima Aprilis!

“But how extraordinary! I mean, it’s like finding a cauliflower in your bed, or something perfectly ridiculous like that.”

—Ludovic Travers, The Case of the April Fools

The Case of the April Fools has an interesting premise at its core—an April Fool’s joke has gone horribly, horribly wrong. It’s a very good idea—in fact, Anthony Boucher and Denis Green used it in one of the New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes radio plays, where Dr. Watson is enlisted by friends to play a trick on Holmes where the great detective investigates a fake jewel theft with clues planted that will point to none other than Holmes himself… but then the real jewel disappears!

However, something a little more serious than theft is involved in The Case of the April Fools. Ludovic Travers is invited by the rich Courtney Allard for a get-together at Allard’s country house. Everything goes splendidly, until Charles Crewe, one of Courtney’s guests, is found stabbed to death in his room. Courtney breaks down and says that this was not supposed to happen— Allard was supposed to die a fake death as an April Fool’s prank. Travers sees that Courtney is more or less useless, so he goes to call the police himself… but as he does so, a shot rings out! When Travers returns to the scene of the crime, he finds another corpse: Courtney Allard has apparently blown his brains out, but oddly enough, the gun is nowhere to be found.

I am Inspector Tiger...

One of my favourite playwrights is Tom Stoppard, a veritable theatrical genius. His play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is one of my favourites; it’s an intellectual tennis match with the audience, as Stoppard retells the story of Hamlet from the point of view of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet’s two school friends. Throughout the play, the characters ponder on their purpose, the meaning of life, and the role of the theatre in life (although, of course, just about nobody debates that last point out loud).

Some of these elements are transferred into The Real Inspector Hound, Stoppard’s first play and a lively parody of the country-house whodunit, particularly Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. Our two main characters are Birdboot and Moon, theatre critics. Birdboot is a fickle critic who is willing to give actresses positive reviews in exchange for certain favours. Moon is a second-string critic, substituting for Higgs, the first-stringer, who has failed to show up.

Killed on the Ice

Death at Wentwater Court is the first detective novel in the Daisy Dalrymple series, written by Carola Dunn. For a debut mystery, it’s not bad at all, and I rather liked it. It’s a good, old fashioned fair play detective story, complete with a family get-together over the Christmas holidays at a secluded country house… The inevitable snowstorm that cuts the suspects off from the outside world, however, was delayed due to icy road conditions.

In any case, the book is great fun. The mystery involves the death of the highly unpleasant Lord Stephen Astwick, who managed to get himself invited to Wentwater Court even though nobody really liked him. When a skating party forms one morning to have some fun down at the lake, they receive a shock instead: Lord Stephen has apparently fallen through a patch of thin ice, knocking himself unconscious in the process and drowning to death.

What's all this, then?

Margery Allingham is an interesting author, though definitely an acquired taste. My first Allingham was The Case of the Late Pig, and although I liked the quality of the writing and the writer’s sense of humour, I thought it was not the best introduction to her work, as her detective, Albert Campion, does the narrating, thus leaving me confused about who certain people were, if there were backstories or not, and so forth.

Police at the Funeral is far more traditional. It is told in third-person narration, and I followed the characters much better this time around. Of course, it helps that the characters are extremely well-written to begin with, and overall, Allingham does a fine job with her story.

The Canadian Statue Mystery

It seems that, in recent weeks, a bit of an international flavour has been thrown into the mystery blogs. I’ve reviewed Paul Halter, John has gotten a crack at the Boileau-Narcejac writing team, and TomCat has introduced us to Dutch authors like Libbe van der Wal. (An internet meme like the Alphabet of Crime Fiction could totally be inspired by this.) Then, I was asked the intriguing question of whether I knew of Canadian GAD-school authors. I couldn’t think of any, but John came to the rescue and offered a suggestion: Louise Penny.

It is very difficult to capture the Canadian spirit— although we’re similar to Americans, Canadians are very different in many ways. It’s a pleasant surprise when an author succeeds in writing Canadiana. In a mystery, it’s doubly pleasant: Canadians are sorely underrepresented in mysteries of the GAD school. Too often, the Canadian cousin is just a neighbour of the aforementioned cousin (probably deceased), trying to get a piece of the family fortune. Basically, Canada is too often used as an easy excuse for why Bob has been away or where outlaw Mickey Finn has been hiding out. (Canada is not alone in this club— Australia comes to mind as a country that plays a similar role a little too often.)