The Final Problem

Earlier this year, I reviewed a string of Holmesian pastiches, which is when I got very annoyed at a recurring plot element. It seems that many pastiche writers go for the cliché plot element where they “kill” Holmes for one scene, have Watson mourn his tragic death, and bring him back twenty or thirty pages later. This got so annoying that when I was reviewing Loren D. Estleman’s first-rate Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula, I ended up writing the following:

Basically, I’ve gotten very tired of sitting through Holmes’ death over and over again, and only to see him come back. It’s not like I hate Holmes – I love the character – but it’d be refreshing if someone killed Holmes off and just left him dead.

Those words have come back to haunt me. Because as it turns out, there is a gentleman out there named Michael Dibdin who wrote The Last Sherlock Holmes Story. And ooooooooh boy, it’s definitely the last Sherlock Holmes story. I won’t say why it’s the last one, but I will say this much: Dibdin’s revisions to the Canon are so drastic that they make Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven Per-Cent Solution look like a faithful follow-up.

The Grandest Game in the World

Okay, here’s the situation: some crazed maniac is out there killing people left and right. With victims dropping like dead flies, the murderer leaves taunting messages for the police in the form of a crazed “dialogue”, chock-full of riddles, puns, and clues to the next victim. The press has gone insane over the story and have dubbed this lunatic “the Wordman”, and the chase is on. Sounds just like a mystery from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, doesn’t it?

But surprisingly enough, this is the plot summary for Dialogues of the Dead by Reginald Hill, a book that was published in 2002. In this book, Hill’s regular detectives (Andy Dalziel and Peter Pascoe) find themselves duelling against the Wordman, a killer who writes stories about his murders after the fact and submits them to a short story competition.

[Insert Clever Title Here]

Goodness, it’s been a while since my last Anthony Berkeley review. In fact, I think my last one was Before the Fact, a book that he’d written as Francis Iles. It gets plenty of praise from critics such as Julian Symons, but I honestly could not see any of the subtle characterization or intricately-constructed suspense that they praised, and the ending was just flat-out stupid. And this was back in 2011! What on earth happened? I remember thinking of Berkeley as one of my favourite authors, and I wasn’t consciously avoiding his work… And so, to remedy the situation, I decided to read Berkeley’s other famous Francis Iles thriller, Malice Aforethought.

Malice Aforethought begins with a practically perfect opening paragraph: “It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr. Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter. Murder is a serious business. The slightest slip may be disastrous. Dr. Bickleigh had no intention of risking disaster.” That’s more or less all you need to know about the plot; this inverted detective-story shows you why Dr. Bickleigh decided to murder his wife, how he set about doing so (it’s an ingenious plot), and how he attempted to thwart off the resulting police investigation. The book is more of a thriller, as the reader wonders whether Dr. Bickleigh will get away with his crime.

There are monsters in Mirkwood!

Growing up is hard, but it’s even harder when you are a dwarf, living in a small town in Nebraska, where other kids physically torment you and everyone else shuns you, leaving you as an outcast. If you’re Dr. Robert “Mongo” Frederickson, you might even move to New York City and get a PhD in criminology, becoming a university professor after giving up a highly successful career in the circus. It’d take a lot to bring you back to your home town… such as the death of a favourite nephew.

Tommy was a bright kid. He had an incredibly high IQ and was a veritable wizard with a computer. He was also a very big fan of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and was part of a group of kids who played a game called “Sorscience”, where you score points by matching real-life phenomena to events from The Lord of the Rings. He and a fellow player were discovered dead, apparently a murder-suicide between two young gay lovers. The town is shocked and so nobody minds it when the whole incident is covered up as quickly as possible. But Mongo is then hired by an unusual person: Coop Lugmor, who abused Mongo when they were children, tries to hire the dwarf to investigate the deaths. According to Coop, his younger brother was no “fag” and he wants Mongo to prove it and catch the person who did this.

It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key...

There’s plenty of stuff going on in The Plot Against Roger Rider. So perhaps the best way to summarise the story is to use this blog’s time-honoured method of stealing someone else’s words. In this case, you can get a feel for the story’s direction from the opening paragraph alone:

“You could say that the plot against Geoffrey Paradine started at the same time as the plot against Roger Rider. That would not be wrong, although it might be a little misleading. And you could start the story of both plots at several different points. The moment when Henry Princeton stepped off the plane at Heathrow, for instance. Or the day when John Burlington Summers told his landlady in Sydney that he was going to pursue his researches into the Russian royal family elsewhere, and left for Spain. One of the plots might be said to have started when Sheila Rider saw her father coming out of a teashop with a woman. Or you could say that the whole thing began when Amanda Rider took Geoffrey Paradine to bed. But upon the whole the best starting point is the warm July day when Roger Rider went to consult a private detective.”

Several plots, subplots, counterplots, and bizarre events later, we finally learn who was plotting against whom and what exactly the plot against Roger Rider was. But it’s quite a journey and it takes several twists and turns, and more than once it turns out that what you thought was going on was something else altogether. This is a tough story to sum up, complex and full of interesting twists and turns. And what makes it all the more unusual is that the author of this novel was none other than Julian Symons.

My Ghost in Disguise

“There are, fortunately, very few people who can say that they have actually attended a murder.”

—Margery Allingham, Death of a Ghost [opening sentence]

Everyone agrees that John Lafcadio was a brilliant artist far ahead of his time. In fact, he himself was certain that his reputation would improve after his death, and so he came up with a unique scheme to exploit his popularity from the after-life. He left a dozen paintings with his agent, and instructed his widow Belle to wait for ten years. After that, she was to hold an annual celebration where one portrait would be unveiled. Lafcadio calculated that, if his archrival Tanqueray was still as popular 22 years after his death, then good luck to him. But as it turned out, he needn’t have worried: Tanqueray did not survive Lafcadio long, and his critical reputation has since undergone a steep decline while Lafcadio is celebrated as an artistic genius.

But Belle honours Lafcadio’s wish and this year marks the eighth year of the annual show. A colourful cast of characters is present: for instance, there’s Max Fustian, an art critic and dealer whose entire fame was built on his appreciations of Lafcadio’s work. There’s the great Lafcadio’s former mistress Donna Beatrice, who shared the artist with his wife in a ménage à trois. There’s his granddaughter, and his former top model (now reduced to the position of the household cook). Oh, and also Mr. Albert Campion among the guests, which is fortunate: for he is about to investigate the Death of a Ghost when one of the guests at the gathering, Tommy Dacre, is murdered with a pair of scissors…