Poison, running through my veins...

The case of Freeman Wills Crofts on this blog is a strange one. A few years ago, I read the short story collection Murderers Make Mistakes. The stories in that collection began as a series of radio plays, and Crofts turned them into short stories. I enjoyed the book, especially the first half, which effectively showcased Inspector French’s strengths as a detective. And yet, for whatever reason, I never returned to Crofts since reviewing that book. His name popped up prominently when I reviewed Curt Evans’ Masters of the Humdrum Mystery, but apart from that, it was all quiet on the Crofts front.

So in August of last year, I decided to remedy the situation by picking up Crofts’ Antidote to Venom, a book which landed on my radar when John over at Pretty Sinister Books reviewed it (and directed me to a website where I found a cheap copy of the book – thanks once again, John!). But tragedy struck, and as I packed my bags to move to the seminary, I managed to lose my copy of Antidote to Venom, having read about halfway through. Then, a few weeks ago, when I was visiting home, a stroke of luck occurred – I found the book, with the bookmark still in place! And so I eagerly picked up the book and after briefly refreshing my memory on what had occurred, I read on.

[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.

You Reap What You Sow...

WARNING: This review contains a potential spoiler in that I give away something that does not happen when I hoped it would. However, it was impossible to describe my disappointment without this revelation. The reader is warned, but it's something that should have been obvious.

The Reverend Otis Joy is a very, very wicked man. Indeed, his bishop, one Marcus Glastonbury, discovers that Joy has been embezzling funds from the Church of England systematically, and there is a deficit of about £15,000. But Marcus Glastonbury wants to ensure there is no public scandal involving the church, and so he makes a fatal mistake. The bishop neglects to tell anyone of his plan visit to Otis Joy, coming more-or-less-inconspicuously on his day off. And so, Otis Joy seizes his opportunity and murders the bishop, making the whole thing look like a suicide. To add credibility to this theory, he makes the bishop look like a sex pervert who jumped into a quarry because of shame.

It’s a jolly start to the story in Peter Lovesey’s The Reaper, and as we soon find out, Otis Joy is not only an embezzler but also a serial killer. People who inconvenience him have a nasty habit of dropping dead and things are no different at his current parish in Foxford. But the police scoff at these stories, shared in the pub: after all, how could a man go and tell his congregation to live their life one way, and then turn around and do something completely different himself? Otis Joy is a man of the cloth: how could he be a serial killer?

Trial by Stupidity

I love the stuff written by Anthony Berkeley, and was looking forward to reacquainting myself with his work. I decided to go with something written under his Francis Iles pseudonym: Before the Fact, which was adapted into the Hitchcock film Suspicion. However, I hesitate to call Before the Fact a mystery at all, since the only mystery is just how stupid the heroine is.

Lina McLaidlaw marries Johnnie Aysgarth, despite the warnings from her family, particularly her father, who says the Aysgarth clan is rotten stock. But Lina believes she can rehabilitate little Johnnie— he’s her little child and she so desperately wants what’s best for him. Of course, unknown to her, Johnnie is a murderer, something we find out in the very first paragraph of the book. And at first, Before the Fact is an excellent portrayal of an insecure woman desperately clinging to a love affair, no matter how unhealthy and unwise it is for her. That lasts about eight chapters.

Murder most foul

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee;

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw.

—Macbeth, Act II, scene i

I find myself once again puzzled over why Henry Wade should be considered one of The Humdrums. I can understand why someone like John Rhode or Freeman Wills Crofts would be considered as part of the group, but for the life of me I don’t see that in Henry Wade (pseudonym of Major Sir Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher). I’ve just finished reading his book Heir Presumptive, and it is undoubtedly the best inverted murder mystery I’ve ever read. In fact, I’d go so far as to call it (ahem) Literary Art.

Heir Presumptive was published in 1935, though the edition I found in the university’s library was a reprint from 1937. It comes complete with a family tree and a map of Captain David Hendel’s deer forest, folded in an interesting way at the front of the book and the back. These come in very useful, particularly the family tree: the family history is a complex one, and at first, I found myself looking at the family tree quite often to see who was related to whom.

Enter Dr. Thorndyke

The inanimate things around us have each of them a song to sing to us if we are but ready with attentive ears.

— Dr. John Thorndyke, “The Echo of a Mutiny” (collected in The Signing Bone)

And thus we have returned to R. Austin Freeman. I launched this series of reviews last week with Freeman’s own The Eye of Osiris, devoted to various Crime Kings: male authors who wrote in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction and towards whom time has been extremely unkind. Freeman is an excellent case in point. At one point in time, he was a highly respected author, even earning praise from Raymond Chandler (no mean feat, that). Flash forward to the publication of Bloody Murder in 1972, and what does Julian Symons write about Freeman? “Reading a Freeman story is very much like chewing on dry straw.” And he hasn’t fared much better today, which just puzzles me. My confusion increased after reading The Singing Bone, a collection of short stories originally published in 1911, in which Freeman invented what is known as the “inverted detective story”—a technique that the television show Columbo excelled at. I was expecting an interesting experiment but not much more. But once again, Freeman surprised me and smashed the ball out of the park.

Slaughterers Slip Up

Murderers make mistakes! … I should just think so! So many devise ingenious schemes to mislead the police and to avert suspicion from themselves: real brainy schemes which ought to succeed. And then they go and spoil them by some tiny oversight which gives the whole thing away, so that their guilt stands out a mile. It’s like a man who fits up an elaborate electrical system in his house: lights, fires, heaters; every conceivable gadget and convenience, and then spoils it all by forgetting to switch on the current.

—     Inspector French, The Case of the Lower Flat (collected in Murderers Make Mistakes

Freeman Wills Crofts is another one of “The Humdrums”, men whose books are too often scorned by critics, although they had quite a following in their day and have been rather influential in the genre.  Crofts seems to have had quite an obsession with seemingly perfect alibis and the way they are broken. Raymond Chandler called him “the soundest builder of them all when he doesn’t get too fancy”. Now, I disagree with Chandler on many points about the genre but he actually has a very good point there, which I will go further into as I take a look at Murderers Make Mistakes.

Murderers Make Mistakes is an interesting short story collection by Freeman Wills Crofts. These stories were originally radio plays, and the book makes no attempt to disguise it. It glories in the fact, giving you the original episodes and their broadcast dates. Eighteen radio plays from Chief Inspector French’s Cases (broadcast between 1943 and 1945) were converted into story form with varied degrees of success. In addition, five cases from Here’s Wishing You Well Again were converted into Inspector French short stories (the original detective being the coroner, Dr. Cataret). There are 23 stories in this collection, and I’m lazy, so once again, I won’t go through each story individually, but give you an idea of the collection as a whole.

Oh, there's just one more thing...

In the past, I frequently complained about the state of the modern mystery, but in recent months, I’ve discovered wonderful authors like William L. DeAndrea and Bill Pronzini. Still, mysteries in the classic, GAD-style mould often seem unfairly ignored— how else to explain the lack of interest in publishing translations of Paul Halter's work in English? (You can say what you like, but Le Tigre borgne (The One- Eyed Tiger) is an absolute masterpiece.)

And yet, the opposite seems to be true in Japan, where authors like Soji Shimada (author of the brilliant The Tokyo Zodiac Murders) sell well! I’m not Japanese, nor do I understand the language, so I really cannot comment in depth here. However, on the blog Detection by Moonlight, there recently was a guest blog written by Ho-Ling, who pointed out some Japanese detective novels (translated into English) worth checking out. After searching my library catalogue, I managed to find one of the books Ho-Ling mentions in his final list (which includes a disclaimer, “not a complete list”): Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X.

The Murder Game

First and foremost, I must take the time to applaud the efforts of James Pritchard, Agatha Christie’s great-grandson, who has created his own company, The Langtail Press, and has busily been resurrecting lost classics from the void of obscurity back into print—particularly those written by Anthony Berkeley.

I had previously read only one Berkeley novel, The Poisoned Chocolates Case, which was a brilliant tour-de-force in which at least half a dozen false solutions are proposed. I enjoyed the novel tremendously, as it was written with intelligence and wit, and I could hardly wait for the chance to read another Berkeley novel. At last, I selected Jumping Jenny and ordered it from The Langtail Press’ impressive catalogue.