A Predicament

... You've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

– Harry Callahan, Dirty Harry (1971)

After the success of The Floating Admiral, The Detection Club soon decided to do another round-robin novel entitled Ask a Policeman. The cast list was once again comprised of all-stars, but this time they were not quite as numerous. Six novelists combined their efforts into Ask a Policeman, namely Helen Simpson, Milward Kennedy, John Rhode, Anthony Berkeley, Gladys Mitchell, and Dorothy L. Sayers.

The plot is only a semi-serious one, although the parody elements never outweigh the detection elements. A rich, despised-by-all newspaper tycoon is shot dead at his house, with a plethora of suspects playing a complex game of ring-around-the-rosy around the scene of the crime. But, as luck would have it, these suspects happen to include an Archbishop, the Chief Whip of a political party, and an Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard. But for good measure, you can throw in the dead man’s secretary and a Mysterious Lady, as well as a suspicious butler and other members of the domestic staff.

The Acquisitive Chuckle III: It's Really the Fourth Entry in the "Showing off Acquisitions" Series, but Only the Third to Use "The Acquisitive Chuckle" in the Title

Well, folks, it’s been a while since my last update on acquisitions. And believe me, there have been plenty of acquisitions in the interim. My biggest haul was pulled off lately when a local used bookstore, which just closed down, held a huge final sale in which prices were ridiculously low. How could I not take advantage of these deals? There are plenty of books to cover and I know I’ll manage to forget some, so let’s get right to it!

Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? : The Smackdown

A Quick Word of Introduction: I originally wrote this piece back in March, submitting it to an online publication. Unfortunately, there seems to have been a major delay in the publishing of the next issue. Being infamously impatient, I have at last decided to publish this essay on my blog to share with my readers. I have made a few more-or-less minor revisions and have added images. In this piece, I tackle Edmund Wilson's infamous essay Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? using all the tools Wilson used, particularly sarcasm. Throughout my analysis I will challenge the claim that this essay "destroyed" the typical Agatha Christie mystery by claiming the precise opposite: it is an entirely useless essay from a critical standpoint. And so, without further ado, I give you:

Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? : The Smackdown

Edmund Wilson, Professional Troll

As a university student, I was seriously tempted to sign up for a course in Detective Fiction last term. What made me decide otherwise was seeing the book list: there was no Agatha Christie nor Raymond Chandler, and in fact, all the books were contemporary. Not only was the selection highly limited, it gave no sense of the genre’s rich and varied history from what I could tell… my fears were confirmed when I found out that one of the readings for the course was Edmund Wilson’s infamous essay Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?

But why is it famous? As I recently discovered on a re-read, Wilson’s essay contains literally nothing of substance. He only proved one thing: Edmund Wilson did not like detective stories. Which is a perfectly valid point of view. But Wilson did not substantiate it even remotely. He simply looked down at the genre through the eyes of a “true intellectual” and sniffed at it. In other words, Edmund Wilson was a troll.

Talking about Talking About Detective Fiction

I’d like to welcome readers to this special edition of At the Scene of the Crime, in which I’m joined by a very special guest: Curt Evans, mystery scholar extraordinaire and author of a soon to be published book on “Humdrums”, authors from the Golden Age like John Rhode who are often dismissed despite their importance in the genre’s history.

It seems ironic, now that I think about it, that Curt’s agreed to join me and examine P. D. James’ Talking About Detective Fiction, which is a book that examines the mystery genre. I’ve taken good-natured cracks at P. D. James on the blog before. I haven’t read any of her books, but their size frankly scares me—in the wrong hands, one of her books would make an admirable bludgeoning weapon. But just how well would the Baroness analyse that noblest form of literature, the mystery? The only way to find out would be by reading the book…

Curt, thanks for joining me!

Perhaps I should start by saying that I found this book could be charitably called a train-wreck. I disagreed often with Julian Symons throughout Bloody Murder, but with P. D. James, I rarely got the chance to agree! Her history of the genre is highly selective, going from Jane Austen to the Crime Queens to a cursory glance at modern day, with barely a glance at anything else in between! The entire non-hardboiled American school of writing is treated as a non-entity, as though it never existed! John Dickson Carr is lucky to escape with a mere half-sentence acknowledging him as master of the locked-room mystery, while Helen McCloy, Anthony Boucher, Ellery Queen, and S. S. Van Dine are never mentioned!

James also has a curious fixation on Ronald Knox’s “Commandments” of Detective Fiction, treating them as though they were the only set of rules ever written. Van Dine’s Commandments are never mentioned, for instance, and James gets things horribly wrong when she writes: “Rules and restrictions do not produce original, or good, literature, and the rules were not strictly adhered to.” Did you hear that, Bill Shakespeare? You and your silly sonnets are neither original nor good, because you restrict them to 14 lines! The only rule you can really apply to detective fiction is for it to play fair with the clues, which I don’t see as a problem: it’s simply something that defines the genre.

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!

***

You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles...

My library has got an interesting feature on their website. After you log in to your account, using library card number and a pin, you can look up your reading history. This way, I can see every book I’ve ever borrowed out on my library card, from the time I moved to this city to the present day. One entry in particular interests me. On April 21^st, 2008, I checked out three books that would change my reading life for good: The Three Coffins, Hag’s Nook, and Nine— and Death Makes Ten. All three were penned by John Dickson Carr, and I read them in that order. I was immediately captivated and started placing Interlibrary Loans left and right, placing myself at the mercy of the system to read more Carr. Then, when I found out that He Wouldn’t Kill Patience and The Eight of Swords were unavailable via ILL, I started haunting the local used bookstores, to the point where I’m on a first name basis with a few of the owners. I found The Eight of Swords quickly enough—it was the first in my collection, along with The Crooked Hinge, The Mad Hatter Mystery, and A Graveyard to Let. Other titles were more elusive…

Then, on July 4^th, 2009, I checked out a book by Douglas G. Greene: John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles. I delayed borrowing it out for quite a while. I thought it would be a stuffy academic criticising Carr and his writing left and right, throwing in never-before suspected connotations about his sexuality every other page.

As it turns out, I was completely wrong.

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.)

Top 10 Plot Ideas

Hello, and welcome back to the scene of the crime!

You may be wondering, as an experienced mystery reader, just what kind of mysteries do I like? Do I have any particular favourites or recommendations to fellow mystery fans? Well, to answer your questions, here are my top 10 mystery plot ideas. These are not strictly in “worst-to-best” order, because they’re all fine ideas—I just get more and more enthusiastic as I approach my #1 selection. So, without further ado, let’s get started…