The Justice League

Your Excellency—

The Bill you are about to pass into law is an unjust one (…) Therefore it grieves us to warn you that unless your Government withdraws this Bill, it will be necessary to remove you, and not alone you, but any other person who undertakes to carry into law this unjust measure.

(Signed) FOUR JUST MEN.

“IT IS IMPOSSIBLE NOT TO BE THRILLED BY EDGAR WALLACE” proudly declares the back of my edition of The Four Just Men. Indeed, back in his day, Edgar Wallace was a wildly popular author. Even Hitler was a fan of his work—although you’ll never see that on a dust jacket! An enormously prolific author, Wallace holds the record among 20^th century authors as the one with the most film adaptations based on his work. He’s even more known today for the role he played as the co-creator of King Kong… and then there’s the Four Just Men series, which began with The Four Just Men in 1905.

Julian Symons might scoff at this point—Wallace can’t be a real writer! He was too popular! And he has a point, in that Wallace’s output is so immense that the quality is highly variable. But one thing remains constant, and that is the factor of unadulterated fun that goes into reading an Edgar Wallace adventure. The Four Just Men is just that—incredibly fun. There’s even an impossible crime thrown into the mix—but more on that later.

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!

***

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.

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.