The Amazing Adventures of Shell Scott

The opening to Take a Murder, Darling is one of the most memorable ones I’ve encountered this year. Shell Scott has already been on the case for a while, but he opens on a glimpse of the action yet to come. First he describes an alluring woman… which turns out to be merely the statue of an alluring woman. And then comes the description of the corpse:

He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled. Either somebody had really had it in for him or four people had killed him. Or else it was the cleverest suicide I’d ever heard of.

Sounds like just the kind of crazy case Shell Scott would get himself involved in! And so we find out how Shell Scott got to be standing by a deader-than-dead corpse: the whole thing started when Shell was hired to take care of a few jobs for Mamzel’s. Mamzel’s is starting to turn into quite the large chain—it’s something like a women’s physical fitness centre, but the object of the program is basically to make women’s bodies perfect through exercises and other such things. So poor old Shell must suffer the sight of hundreds of women bouncing around in minimal clothing, getting their bodies into shape.

In memory of Reginald Hill (1936-2012)

Crime author Reginald Hill has passed away. Many obituaries and tributes have been written, and one of the most touching tributes to Hill that I’ve read can be found on Martin Edwards’ Do You Write Under Your Own Name? I unfortunately never got the chance to meet him or correspond with him, so I cannot mark his passing away with anecdotes about him as many have done. But there is one thing I can do to honour his memory, and so I picked up a book of his to read and review. After all, if I was an author I think the most I could ask for would be to have my books read and discussed (and maybe even enjoyed) after I died.

And so I settled on Reginald Hill’s Killing the Lawyers as the book to read. Why? Well, look at the title: it’s just brilliant! (And ever so cultured, as it is inspired by Shakespeare’s infamous line “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.” Ol' Bill really had a thing against lawyers, didn’t he?) And as it turns out, the contents of the book were just as good as its title. Published in 1997, it is the third book in the Joe Sixsmith series, starring a black machine-operator-turned-private-eye.

Kicking the Habit

Earlier this year, I made my first acquaintance with Catherine Aird by reading His Burial Too. Although I expressed genuine enthusiasm for the locked-room situation and its resolution (which contains a very good trick at its core), I thought the book suffered from a poor sense of pacing, with a second act that dragged interminably on as the detectives investigated trails that were all-too-obviously dead ends. I had hopes that The Religious Body would be an improvement— the plot sounded like a riot and Aird showed an excellent sense of humour that could make such a story enjoyable. The result was not quite what I expected, though…

The Religious Body opens in the Convent of St. Anselm. One of the nuns, Sister Anne, is nowhere to be found, until somebody stumbles over her body at the foot of the cellar stairs. C. D. Sloan arrives with Constable Crosby in tow to investigate, and he decides that all this just doesn’t add up. Eventually, he decides Sister Anne was murdered, and begins to try finding the killer.

Sister Act

My acquaintance with Anthony Boucher (rhymes with voucher) has been limited to date. I mainly know him as one of the scriptwriters on the radio series The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which was always a delight to listen to, even when Basil Rathbone left the show. Boucher and his partner in crime, Denis Green, came up with interesting problems for Holmes to investigate; although the mysteries themselves were often easily solved (after all, the episodes were less than a half hour long) they showed creativity in their scenarios. Overall, they were interesting expansions of references to un-chronicled cases throughout the Holmes canon. (Occasionally, they dramatized the original stories as well, such as The Speckled Band or A Scandal in Bohemia.)

I’m also aware of Boucher’s influential role as a mystery critic, but he was also involved in the world of science fiction. (You can read all that and more in the back of the IPL edition, which I own, where one "Burke N. Hare" gives a brief biographical outline of Boucher's life. Incidentally, the cover to Nine Times Nine is proof that Nicky Zann is a genius. After all, thanks to his genius, I bought that monstrosity, The Affair at Royalties. Awful, awful stuff. I'm still attending group therapy to get over it. But his cover is once again magnificent, and really intrigued me and intellectually blackmailed me to read this book.) But until now, I never read a novel by Boucher. This mistake has been rectified, as I’ve finished his excellent novel, Nine Times Nine.