Revenge of the Mad Hatter

Brighton, 1882. It is the height of the vacationing season, and Albert Moscorp is the protagonist of the story. While on vacation, he becomes involved with the family of Mrs. Zena Prothero, a beautiful woman married to a doctor who seems ignorant of her attractive qualities. But of course, this is a mystery, and after a bit, murder intervenes to cut someone’s holiday short… It is a grisly murder case, in which only a select few of the limbs are recovered by the police: the victim’s severed hand, as it happens, is found in the aquarium’s alligator cavern…

First off, let’s get my major problem with this book out of the way at once: I hate the character of Albert Moscorp. He is a disturbing and frankly psychotic creation: he spies on the entire beach through his various binoculars and telescopes. When he sees Zena Prothero through the lens, he takes plenty of pains to acquaint himself with the family, justifying it all in the name of science. How does he manage to introduce himself to Mrs. Prothero? Quite simple: he kidnaps their young child when they’re not paying attention only to return it. It is a frankly alarming sequence which had my jaw hanging wide open as I waited to see whether we would enter the domain of pedophilia or not. The voyeuristic delights Moscorp takes are creepy: like Drury Lane, he is an unsuccessful, unlikeable experiment, with eccentricities taken to the maximum. This is the main character, folks… The person I would estimate we waste well over half the book on… Enjoy!

A very palpable hit...

Robert Bruce Montgomery, alias Edmund Crispin, was more than just a mystery writer: he was also an influential mystery critic and (under his own name) a prolific composer. I love the story of how he decided to try his hand at mysteries: he read John Dickson Carr’s The Crooked Hinge and was so impressed, he decided to try doing something of the sort himself. And thus was born Gervase Fen, Professor of English Literature at Oxford. His name is a reference to Dr. Gideon Fell (they share the same initials) and Fen makes a remark in The Case of the Gilded Fly that establishes Fell as a real person sharing the Crispin universe with Fen. (In Swan Song, Crispin makes similar references to Mrs. Bradley, Sir Henry Merrivale, and Albert Campion.)

Swan Song is the fourth entry in the Gervase Fen series, originally written in 1947. It revolves around the mysterious death of Edwin Shortenhouse by hanging. Shortenhouse was a singer rehearsing for a production of Die Meistersinger, and was universally despised by his fellow cast-members, the musical director, etc. He was despicable, arrogant, and his presence poisoned the atmosphere in the theatre. So nobody really minded when he was found hanging… only the case for suicide doesn’t quite add up, and we’re left with an impossible murder! For the victim was alone in his dressing room, and a witness outside testifies that nobody went in or out...

The Mad Hatter Strikes Again!

Somewhere in the early 1930s, Manfred B. Lee and Frederick Dannay (who together wrote under the name Ellery Queen) created a new persona: Barnaby Ross. I recall reading somewhere that they even staged debates in public, with one cousin posing as Ellery Queen and the other being Barnaby Ross. The Ross novels involve retired Shakespearean actor, Drury Lane, who was forced into premature retirement due to deafness.

I had read one Drury Lane novel before: The Tragedy of X. It was an interesting read: the plot was interesting, and Queen actually bothered to explain why someone would bother leaving a dying message, reminiscent of Carr’s locked-room lecture in The Hollow Man. However, I highly disliked the character of Drury Lane. He has an unhealthy obsession for Shakespeare, building a shrine to Shakespeare called The Hamlet. For no apparent reason, he convinces people like his makeup man, Quacey, to move in with him and become his servants. (Quacey’s makeup skills are unparalleled, for instance, but he devotes himself to working for Lane instead of helping in the theatrical world.) Add to that dialogue that he seems to have stolen from Norman Bates, and you have a character that frankly struck me as a psycho in the making.