Death of a Reviewer

John Riddell, book reviewer for Vanity Fair, is dead. The medical examiner has viewed the body and has confirmed everyone’s worst fears: the poor man died of boredom right in his own library, surrounded by the previous year’s bestsellers! How lucky that Philo Vance is on hand, having had some previous experience with this sort of thing. *

* “The Benson Murder Case” (Scribners); “The ‘Canary’ Murder Case” (Ibid.); “The Greene Murder Case: (Ibid.); “The Bishop Murder Case” (Ibid.); and “The Scarab Murder Case” (Ibid.)

As you can perhaps guess, today’s book is a parody: The John Riddell Murder Case, written by “John Riddell”. Actually, the author is American humourist Corey Ford. The John Riddell Murder Case is one of the most hilarious books I’ve ever read in any genre, period. This is just one of those books that is full of laugh-out-loud moments, especially if you know what is being parodied. And the targets are varied: not only is S. S. Van Dine a target, so are such various people as Robert Frost, Dashiell Hammett, and ex-President Calvin Coolidge! What could possibly bring such different people together?

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?

All aboard the S. S. Van Dine!

I’m afraid that readers of this blog will begin to think that I’m simply stealing my reading list off of other blogs. Once again, today’s book was inspired by a previous review—and yet again, it was Bill from Traditional Mysteries who inspired it. The book is Murder in Pastiche by Marion Mainwaring, and after the enticing review Bill wrote in January, the book flew near the top of my to-be-read pile… and now that it’s April, I figured it was about time to give it a read. (Yeah, I’m not sure how to explain the physics behind that… Apparently, the last few months on this blog have been a massive game of Jenga with my to-be-read pile, and nobody was aware of it.)

But I digress. We find ourselves on board the R. M. S. Florabunda as it sails from Liverpool to New York. And, by an astonishing coincidence, nine prominent detectives have all come on board the same ship! These sleuths are parodies of some of the most famous detectives of all-time: M. Atlas Poireau (Hercule Poirot), Sir Jon. Nappleby (Sir John Appleby), Jerry Pason (Perry Mason), Broderick Tourneur (Roderick Alleyn), Trajan Beare (Nero Wolfe), Miss Fan Sliver (Miss Silver), Spike Bludgeon (Mike Hammer), Mallory King (Ellery Queen), and Lord Simon Quinsey (Lord Peter Wimsey). With any one of these detectives on board, a mystery is bound to explode— but with nine? That’s just tempting fate.

Riding the Rails

If I were not before the bar

Something else I’d like to be

If I were not a barr-is-ter

An engine driver me!

— John Cleese, Monty Python’s Flying Circus

The last time we saw Gustav “Old Red” Amlingmeyer and his brother, Otto “Big Red” Amlingmeyer, they had just solved a major mystery on a ranch, which got started with the apparently-accidental death of a supervisor. All this was chronicled in the wonderful book Holmes on the Range, a book where elements of a classic Western went toe-to-toe with elements of a classic mystery. The result was not one genre beating out the other, but a solid blend of the two. Now we’re back with On the Wrong Track.

The time is 1893 and Old Red has got it in mind to become a Pinkerton agent. Unfortunately, he and his brother go from town to town only to meet with the same scepticism and mockery. But at long last they seem to have gotten their lucky break—sort of. See, it’s complicated, but as cowboys, Big Red and Old Red are none too fond of the railway companies. So their feelings are somewhat mixed when they at long last get hired as detectives for the Southern Pacific Railway company. It’s particularly surprising how insistent Old Red is on the job—he even sells their horses!—since he’d rather ride the trail than the railway even if trains could get him to his destination in a fraction of the time.

Data, data, data!

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

— Sherlock Holmes, A Scandal in Bohemia

If you read this blog regularly, you may have inferred one thing about me: I absolutely adore Westerns. One of my favourite movies of all-time is John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, starring Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Vera Miles, Lee Marvin, and Andy Devine (amongst others). It is, in my mind at least, as close as you can get to the perfect movie: plenty of action and suspense, just the right touch of comic relief from Devine, a truly frightening villain, and complex characters that you get to care for. There’s also a powerful sense of nostalgic regret, which may be one of the reasons the movie was filmed in black-and-white…

Unfortunately, it’s hardly likely that I’ll be able to find some way of sneaking in a proper review of a “pure” Western like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. But what’s the next best thing? Why, mystery/Western crossovers, of course! Because if you combine a murder mystery with cowboys, I’d like two subscriptions, please. I’ve reviewed such books in the past: William DeAndrea was en route to starting an excellent series in this vein starring Lobo Blacke and Quinn Booker, but his untimely death deprived us of more of their adventures. This is where Steve Hockensmith comes into play.

The Sound of the Basketballs

My casebook also records the name of the American barque John D. Carr, whose disappearance was a fortnight’s sensation, until Homes was able to accurately predict its exact location—in drydock—from a simple mathematical calculation and the word of the steersman that he had lashed the wheel before going over the side—a case I have already chronicled in The Adventure of the Locked Rhumb.

—Dr. Watney, The Adventure of the Missing Cheyne-Stroke

“I fear some grave misfortune may have befallen Sir Lionel Train.”

Homes nodded in instant understanding. “Who?” he inquired.

“Sir Lionel Train, head of Q6-JB45-VX-2DD-T3, the most secret of our secret services. Other than the Yard and Special Services, no one has ever heard of the man.”

“Ah! That Sir Lionel Train!” Homes said, and nodded.

—     Criscroft and Schlock Homes, The Adventure of the Great Train Robbery

I discovered my love of mysteries through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales. So it’s hardly a surprise that, when I tired of reading juvenile mysteries, I turned to various pastiches to try recapturing the magic of Holmes. During that period, I encountered many parodies among the Holmes pastiches. I’ve seen Holmes portrayed as a complete buffoon, Watson the genius of the duo, Holmes as a figment of Watson’s imagination, and so forth. But over the last two days, I’ve had the intense pleasure of reading Schlock Homes: The Complete Bagel Street Saga, which is single-handedly the wittiest, funniest, most wildly entertaining, and (to put it simply) the best collection of Sherlock Holmes parodies I’ve ever read, collecting all the stories of Schlock Holmes, written between 1960 and 1981.

Schlock Holmes was a creation of Robert L. Fish, and I was inspired to find this book after reading Norma Schier’s brilliant The Anagram Detectives. Her final tale, The Boing! Ritual, is a riff on Schlock Holmes, who himself is a parody of Sherlock Holmes. Homes and his assistant, Dr. Watney, are pulled through some of the most astounding adventures, brought to them at their headquarters in 221B Bagel Street. On occasion, Homes’ brother Criscroft comes by to bring an interesting problem to his attention. (Invariably, however, there is something at Criscroft’s club preventing him from investigating himself.) Throughout the collection, Homes and Watney come across their archenemy, Professor Marty (whom they call—with good reason—The Butcher), several times.

Quite the Corpse...

When it comes to fitness, I will cheerfully admit that I am far from the picture perfect image of it. In fact, I’m downright overweight. But as it happens, I’m perfectly content with it. I do realize the importance of staying healthy and I do several things to keep from being morbidly obese, like walking to and from the library. However, I cannot understand the obsession so many have with getting slimmer— the French singer Bénabar satirizes this in a song called À notre santé (To our health), where he declares having the perfect body is the new priesthood, mentioning such innovations as dealcoholized beer, decaffeinated coffee, and de-sugared sugar. (Oh, the horror…)

So, when in Alan Green’s What a Body!, fitness nut Merlin Broadstone was murdered in a locked room, I cheered along with the rest of 1948 America, which frankly got tired of the endless stretching, of being told to chew every mouthful of food exactly 30 times, of new exercises involving everything from medicine balls to swimming…

Nobody invited the fourth detective...

“It has become a game, a mere game like chess, this writing of murder mysteries. While in real life, it is no game, but something quite simple and savage, with about as much mystery wrapped round it as that piano leg. And that’s why I’ve no use for detective fiction. It’s false. It depicts the impossible.”

…

“That may be so. But I enjoy the game. It has, as you say, become far more subtle lately, and no one can guess the murderer till the last few pages. But after all, we expect fiction to transcend life, and a murder in a book to be more mysterious than a real one.”

—Alec Noris and Sam Williams in discussion, Case for Three Detectives

When I wrote my review of Paul Halter’s novel Le Tigre Borgne, I was convinced that it would be my last review before I left for a three week vacation on Monday morning. But, as it turns out, my next read, Case for Three Detectives by Leo Bruce, was such a delightfully quick one, it simply flew by!

It seems so horrible, doesn’t it, to discover one’s hostess dead? Yet that is precisely what happens to Mr. Townsend, the narrator of the story, who along with a group of his fellow guests, have a discussion on the merits of detective stories. It seems like an innocent discussion, but things take a dark turn when Mary Thurston, Dr. Thurston’s wife, is found in her room, with the door bolted shut and the windows closed, murdered… From then on, Townsend is thrust into an investigation involving ingenious false alibis, ropes, rats, apples, box rooms, and the like, as three detectives found their way onto the scene of the crime to do some proper investigatin'.

Reactivated Agent's Hem

When I read Doug Greene’s brilliant biography of John Dickson Carr, The Man Who Explained Miracles (my library seriously runs the risk of not getting its copy back one of these days), I also looked in the appendices, which included a comprehensive list of works authored by Carr. In this list, Greene also devoted a section to parodies of Carr, and one title caught my eye: Hocus Pocus at Drumis Tree by Norma Schier. I was intrigued by the idea of parodying Carr while making the names anagrams—“Drumis Tree”, for instance, is a clever anagram of “Murder Site”.

However, for quite some time, I was unable to find a copy of the story to read. I finally decided to buy a copy of The Anagram Detectives, an excellent collection of stories written by Schier. In this collection, she takes cracks at everyone from Agatha Christie to Ellery Queen to Michael Innes, and she manages to create clever mysteries as well! (Sometimes, after all, the joke in a parody is how ridiculous the solution is, or how the solution is never told, but endlessly delayed. Well, not to worry- that isn’t the case here.)