Yet She Must Die

Like famous critic Anthony Boucher, I’m a Catholic, and I believe God has a sense of humour. Either that or the ghost of Harry Stephen Keeler has been up to his old tricks again. Why do I say this? This morning, after several months of the application process, I went to volunteer at the local hospital for the first time. Later, I realised how ironic it was that I just finished reading Colin Dexter’s The Wench is Dead.

See, The Wench is Dead largely takes place inside a hospital, as Inspector Morse finds himself there, recovering from a nasty bout of illness. While in the hospital, Morse comes into contact with fellow patients, nurses, doctors, etc. and they all turn out to be a very colourful, lively bunch that I liked reading about.

Can you see?

The 2002 movie Minority Report is one of my favourite movies of all-time. Then again, maybe I’m a little bit biased. I’m a huge fan of director Steven Spielberg, I tend to like action movies, and I really liked the movie’s creative visuals and special effects. I’d argue that it’s one of the greatest movies made in recent years, and it’s also a movie that mystery fans would probably enjoy.

The movie is based on a short story by (who else?) Phillip K. Dick. It stars Tom Cruise, who in those days hadn’t yet become the major punch line he is now. Cruise plays John Anderton, Chief of the Pre-Crime Unit in Washington, D.C. The Pre-Crime unit uses “precogs”, mutated human beings who experience visions of future murders. These are interpreted by police officers who go and arrest the culprit before they can commit their crime.

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.

Dead for a ducat

Like so many detectives before me, I found myself searching for a man's lost daughter. My case began last year. The girl I sought was a Californian, 17 years old. She lived in Santa Barbara. One winter night, she was driving home drunk from a party and struck and killed an 11-year-old boy. If I were the Continental Op, Dashiell Hammett's detective, the girl would be the wealthy daughter of a Manchu provincial leader now living in exile up in San Francisco. If I were Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, the girl would be the reckless daughter of an oil tycoon (…) Finally, if I were Lew Archer, Ross Macdonald's gentle but edgy investigator (…), the girl would be the daughter of a Santa Teresa pharmacist who had discovered that her father was not her father, but a man being blackmailed for 17 years by the president of a shipping company because her real father is the president's brother, the captain of an oil tanker who knocked up the girl's mother when he discovered her as a young stowaway aboard his ship hiding from her boyfriend, the pharmacist, who was then a young bank robber on the lam from a foiled job where he shot and killed a teller who was the mother of the captain's wife, who in turn was mother of the little boy the girl ran down (her half-brother).

—David Bowman, The Case of the Brokenhearted Father

Raymond Chandler is known for creating mean streets on which his detective, Phillip Marlowe, would walk. Ross Macdonald, however, took the hardboiled genre in a new direction by creating Lew Archer, a private detective who was sensitive. The Zebra-Striped Hearse was published in 1962, three years after 1959’s The Galton Case, which kicked off this series of hardboiled reviews. Perhaps it’s appropriate to come full circle and end this series by returning to the beginning… if that makes sense. If it doesn’t…. hey, it’s a Ross Macdonald novel.

We like to get the trial over with quickly, because it's the sentence that's really the fun!

It’s rare for me to be thoroughly disgusted by a novel. There have been plenty of unpleasant reading experiences, such as Anthony Wynne’s The Toll House Murder or Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. I have been alarmed a handful of times, such as with a disturbing central character in Peter Lovesey’s Mad Hatter’s Holiday. But until now, only George Baxt’s The Affair at Royalties had thoroughly disgusted me— I can now add Mickey Spillane’s I, The Jury to the list.

Spillane was once the most vilified writer in America. His hero, Mike Hammer, is as politically incorrect as they come. He refuses to forgive the Japanese for the war, he plays games with his secretary, he sleeps with every woman he comes into contact with on the job, and he threatens or beats up half the suspects he interrogates. And that’s just the first few chapters.

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.

Face-Off

Bon Cop Bad Cop is a very Canadian film. It is a mystery, a thriller, a cop/buddy movie and a comedy rolled into one, and it has two very Canadian things at its core. The first is the noble pastime of hockey, a truly Canadian sport. The second is the relations between English and French Canadians, which have not always been the most cordial. In October of 1970, it escalated into violence when members of the Fédération de libération du Québec (FLQ) kidnapped James Cross and murdered Pierre Laporte. It was the only time in Canadian history that the War Measures Act (ie marshal law) was imposed during peacetime.

There are a few reasons for this (all too brief) digression on Canadian history. Like I said, it’s important to understand that French Canadians and English Canadians have not gotten along well in the past, as this plays a key role in Bon Cop Bad Cop. But my other motive is simply a love of history in general, and the October Crisis holds a strange fascination for me.

[insert name-related pun here]

The last time I looked at a Bill Pronzini novel, it was Camouflage, the latest entry in the Nameless Detective series, published in June of this year. It is somewhat fitting then that I return to the series with Blowback, the fourth book in the series, published in 1977. My copy of the book comes complete with a quote that declares the main character is “an immensely likable addition to the roster of private investigators”. It slightly shocked me when I realized that the quote was attributed to my favourite author of all-time, John Dickson Carr. In 1978, the year my edition was printed, Carr could still sell books. My, how times change.

Blowback is a fairly short novel, but it is jam-packed with events. It all starts when the Nameless Detective gets a call from an old friend and fellow WWII veteran, Harry Burroughs. Harry owns and runs a small fishing camp, and invites Nameless to spend some time there, as he would like to ask him a favour. Nameless is waiting for results of a test—he has a lesion on one of his lungs and is waiting to hear whether it is benign or malignant. Waiting it out alone over the weekend doesn’t sound like much fun, so he decides to accept Harry’s invitation.

Murder on Air

It might seem like an odd choice to review a novel by William L. DeAndrea in this series of hardboiled reviews. But in this case, I think the choice is defensible: Killed in the Ratings (DeAndrea’s first novel) is far more hardboiled than later entries in the Matt Cobb series. The book deservedly won an Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and DeAndrea would follow it up impressively, winning another Edgar the following year for The Hog Murders. (Here’s an interesting bit of trivia—looking at the dust jacket of Killed in the Ratings, it seems that DeAndrea originally planned to call his second book The Serial Murders.)

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.