Do as I do, Mr. Splitfoot!

Lucinda had a wonderful idea for a prank. To pull it off, she needed the help of an accomplice, so she enlisted the help of Vanya. The two teenagers decided to pull off a much-deserved scare on the grown-ups, faking supernatural activity. Vanya has a secret hiding place (which he refuses to disclose to Lucinda), and he’ll be hiding there. Upon a verbal cue from Lucinda, Vanya will make series of ghostly raps in reply. That’ll be sure to scare ‘em.

Sure enough, that evening, Lucinda finds an opportune moment and calls out “Do as I do, Mr. Splitfoot!” and claps her hands three times. She gets the reply: three taps sound in reply. It’s unsettling to the adults, and she is ready to call the prank a success… which is when she gets the phone call from Vanya. He’s been kept at home and is unable to play the part of Mr. Splitfoot this evening! But if Vanya was not making the ghostly taps… who was?

Oh, the Humanity!

Sometimes, you come across a book that is so good, you stop and wonder why you hadn’t read it before. When it comes to Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, the simple answer is that I had never heard of the book before. I’m not very knowledgeable about science fiction, and the only reason I picked this book up was on the strength of a recommendation from someone whose opinions I trust. Happily, the book was every bit as good as I expected.

More Than Human tells the story of a group of extraordinary people who come to find each other. They all have strange powers of one sort or another, and they come to “blesh” together, each person becoming one part of a new type of organism. In effect, they become the next stage of human evolution, homo gestalt. That’s all you’re getting from me about the plot, which is really tricky to describe without spoilers. But as with the neatest detective stories, all the plot threads you follow throughout the book end up woven into a tapestry of incredibly beauty.

Blackbeard's Revenge

…And unmoor’d souls may drift on stranger tides

Than those men know of, and be overthrown

By winds that would not even stir a hair…

—William Ashbless

John Chandagnac is off to the New World aboard the Vociferous Carmichael. He has only one thing in mind: he wants to find his uncle, Sebastian Chandagnac. But this will not be a happy family reunion. It turns out that Sebastian Chandagnac is a ruthless criminal. He claimed that his poor brother, the rightful heir to a fortune, was dead, and made off with the cash. That brother, John’s father, was a puppeteer, and ended up dying a pauper, from starvation and the cold. John is furious and wants to get to his uncle, reclaim the fortune that rightfully belonged to his father, and get even.

But you know what they say about the best-laid plans. John’s plans for revenge are suddenly halted when his ship is attacked by a gang of pirates, led by the infamous Philip Davies. And they weren’t working on their own: a few of the Carmichael’s passengers were in league with the pirates, helping them to take over the ship. One of these is Benjamin Hurwood, an eccentric one-armed professor with a beautiful daughter named Beth. When Davies murders the Carmichael’s former captain, Chandagnac, in a fit of fury, attacks the pirate and wounds him. As a result, Davies allows the other passengers to go free, but John Chandagnac is given a different choice:

“Join us, wholly adopt our goals as your own, or be killed right now where you stand.”

If I Had a Million Dollars...

Max Allan Collins’ third Nate Heller novel, The Million-Dollar Wound, is very different from its predecessors. For one thing, it skips forward in time considerably. The previous book in the series, True Crime, took place in 1934. The Million-Dollar Wound opens in 1943. Nate Heller has returned to the States after fighting in WWII alongside his friend Barney Ross, but he returns a changed man.

Heller is brought back home from combat early because his testimony is wanted at an upcoming trial, one which could finally see Frank Nitti, Louis “Little New York” Campagna, and other gangsters on charges of extortion. But if there’s one thing Heller knows, it’s that double-crossing Frank Nitti is a very dangerous way of living, especially in Chicago, Nitti’s town…

Of Gangsters and Outlaws

Private eye Nate Heller is now in his second year of operations. His first year was described in detail in the novel True Detective, and all things considered it was a good first year. Unfortunately, Year Two has been much more quiet, with clients few and far between. After all, it is the Great Depression, and Heller has been watching the proceeds from his first year slowly dwindle…

And then he gets a case. It all starts when a shifty guy named John Howard comes to see Heller at his office. Howard is a travelling salesman who is worried that his wife, a pretty girl named Polly, is having an affair while he’s on the road. He pays Heller an exorbitant $100 in advance to follow Polly around and to determine whether or not she is being faithful. But right from the start it’s an odd job… and after a while, Heller finds that Polly is seeing a man all right… and that man looks remarkably like John Dillinger.

Let Dover Come Over

Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover is a difficult man to get along with. He’s fat, he’s lazy, he’s rude, he’s inconsiderate – in fact, in just about every measurable way, Dover is a repulsive human being. So woe to the criminal forced to deal with Dover, because it will be an extremely unpleasant experience. That’s what someone in Creedshire is about to learn.

It all started with the disappearance of Juliet Rugg, a young girl who weighs sixteen stone. The grotesquely large girl was even more repulsive than Dover by all accounts, and so nobody really seems to care about her disappearance. But it’s Dover’s job to care, even though he thinks it’s a gigantic waste of his time. But as the investigation proceeds, the question becomes more puzzling: just what did happen to Juliet? The unique circumstances, described in detail in Joyce Porter’s Dover One, make an accidental death, a suicide, an elopement, and a kidnapping seem utterly impossible. The only option remaining is murder… but where could you stuff such a large girl?

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.

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…

Dance of Death

Elementary, my dear Watson!

—apocryphal; attributed to Sherlock Holmes

The idea came to Robert Louis Stevenson in the form of a nightmare, according to his wife Fanny, and the first draft took only days to complete. Afterwards, she read the manuscript. As usual, she gave Robert her comments. After a while, he called her back to the bedroom and pointed to a pile of ashes: he had destroyed the manuscript and would start all over again from scratch. The story would eventually become The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one of the most celebrated stories of all of English literature.

But what if that manuscript survived? What if Stevenson never burnt it at all? What if the manuscript came into someone else’s possession? That is the situation created by René Reouven in his book Élémentaire mon cher Holmes (Elementary, My Dear Holmes). And in this novel, we learn that the first draft of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a manuscript of such concentrated evil that anyone who reads it becomes a murderer…

A Most Mysterious Murder...

Le Détective Volé (The Stolen Detective) by René Reouven begins with a disclaimer that goes something like this: “Edgar Allan Poe died in 1849, and Sherlock Holmes was born in 1854, but such a minute detail wouldn’t have prevented two such remarkable people from meeting.” This is a bit misleading, since there is never at any point in the novel a moment where Sherlock Holmes meets Edgar Allan Poe. And yet…

I will admit, the concept of this novel initially had me baffled. This is a Sherlockian pastiche in which Holmes’ fictional nature is admitted from the outset, and as a result the entire novel is a literary game being played out between Reouven and his readers. Here is the premise: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is sick and tired of hearing all these comparisons between Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin stories and his Holmes stories. So he uses H. G. Wells’ time machine to send Holmes and Watson back in time to Paris in the 1830s. Their mission is to get in touch with Vidocq, and investigate whether or not Poe ripped the idea for The Purloined Letter from the headlines. And if so, who was the real-life C. Auguste Dupin?

Psycho

The iconic cover with "cracked" lettering

Life isn’t easy when you’re running a motel in the middle of nowhere. And Norman Bates is doing just that with his life, stuck running the Bates Motel and taking care of his elderly mother, a monster in frilly clothing whose hobbies include psychological torture and preventing her son from having a life away from her. She will go to extreme measures to do this… even commit murder…

… which is precisely what Mother does when Mary Crane comes to the motel, fresh from stealing $40,000 from her employer. Mary is en route to see her fiancé, hoping that the money will help pay off his personal debts and get married sooner. But she decides to drop in at the Bates Motel, where Norman develops a boyish crush on her, even though the years of psychological abuse have left him afraid to so much as touch a woman. Mother doesn’t like this, and so when Mary goes to take a shower, Mother storms into the bathroom:

Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher’s knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream. And her head.

A Closed Book

“I am going to kill a man. I don’t know his name, I don’t know where he lives, I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him …”

Thus begins the diary of Frank Cairnes, an author of detective stories under the pseudonym Felix Lane. But this isn’t a notebook in which he will set down the details of a fictional murder plot: he truly intends to find a man and murder him. But what could prompt a sane man to turn to murder?

It turns out Frank had a son named Martie, and a few months ago he had gone into the village to buy some sweets. That was when he got run over by a careless motorist; poor Martie never stood a chance. The police have been unable to trace the motorist responsible for the death, and he never stopped nor reported the accident. That man is the titular beast in Nicholas Blake’s novel The Beast Must Die, and when he is murdered, Cairnes’ journal is found and he immediately becomes the prime suspect. But Nigel Strangeways isn’t convinced…

Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man

Daisy Harker ought to be grateful for the kind of life she is leading. Her husband is attentive and loving and he even has a good relationship with his mother-in-law, who lives nearby. By all accounts, Daisy should be basking in glory, having attained the American Dream. Her life couldn’t possibly get any better. But Daisy happens to be in a Margaret Millar novel, and she’s about to discover that her life has many secrets completely unknown to her. This is Millar’s A Stranger in My Grave.

It all starts with a nightmare. In this nightmare, Daisy discovers that she is dead. While walking her dog, she came across her own headstone in the cemetery, giving her date of death in 1955. But why should that be? Daisy is very much alive, and cannot recall anything special about the day in question. Her husband tells her to forget about it, and her mother does the same. But then Daisy’s estranged father gives her a call. He asks her to pay a man named Steve Pinata, who has just bailed him out of prison.

Birds of Prey

The passengers on the train to Mexico City had plenty of reason to be nervous. Times are rough and there is a railway strike in Mexico at the moment. Trains everywhere are being tied up and delayed, and as if that weren’t enough, part of the journey takes the train through a region that has a rather bad reputation. And then there are the vultures flying overhead, like an omen of doom. With all that to deal with, the corpse was most certainly not needed.

But a corpse does pop up in Todd Downing’s Vultures in the Sky, and it is the corpse of a Mexican man. He has died under strange circumstances, which don’t necessarily rule out a natural death but which certainly makes the theory far less tenable than it might otherwise have been. If this is a case of murder, the killer acted swiftly and murdered the man under circumstances where the fellow passengers’ vision was impaired. But the killer didn’t count on one man on board: U.S. Customs Service agent Hugh Rennert.

Sleuth

On a night in August of 1938, police constable Edward Watkins is walking his beat when he comes across some strange sights. It seems that somebody is walking around the streets of London in the garb of a seventeenth-century plague doctor. Soon afterwards, Watkins has a conversation with an odd character calling himself Doctor Marcus, a doctor of crime. Suspicious, the officer is convinced that the doctor has hidden a body inside a nearby trash can—a suspicion that Doctor Marcus confirms! Watkins looks into them and finds they are all empty, much to Marcus’ apparent surprise. So the mad doctor skips off, but as a parting shot he tells the officer to look into the trash cans once again just in case. When Watkins does this, he discovers to his horror that there’s a dead body inside after all.

But how did it get there? And where did Doctor Marcus disappear to? All this seems like it is nonsense, but a few months later, Dr. Alan Twist and Inspector Archibald Hurst are visited by a man named Peter Moore, secretary to Sir Gordon Miller, a prolific author of mystery plays. According to Moore, Sir Gordon received a visitor in his study and the two men had a verbal duel of sorts, which ended in a murder challenge. The two men toss a coin, and the result will determine which man will commit a murder. That man must try and pin the blame on the other, and under no circumstances are the two players allowed to refer to the “game”. Unfortunately, Moore could not see what the coin landed on...

It Feels So Good to Be Bad!

Anyone who reads my blog regularly has, by now, noticed two things about me. First off, I’m positively insane. Second, whenever I get introduced to a new author and am very impressed with the book in question, I tend to go on a reading binge. I did this earlier in 2012 with Donald E. Westlake, devouring Dortmunder and Parker novels as though they were potato chips until I realized that I would soon run out of my supplies if I kept at it. But I just can’t learn my lesson, and I’m at serious risk of doing it again with the work of Charlotte Armstrong. The symptoms are all there, and I just got finished reading Armstrong’s novel Mischief.

In Mischief, Mr. and Mrs. Peter O. Jones are on their way to an important social function, where Mr. Jones is due to deliver a speech. They have to leave their daughter Bunny behind, and they planned to leave her at the hotel with Mr. Jones’ sister. But at the last moment, she cancels on them, and they’re forced to scramble around to find a replacement. Fortunately, an elevator operator named Eddie Munro hears of their plight and volunteers the services of his niece, Nell Munro. The Joneses are only too happy to accept Eddie’s offer, but something feels odd the instant Nell steps into room 807…

What Dreams May Come

The Dream Walker is about a young woman named Olivia Hudson, a teacher at a fashionable girls’ school, aged 34. She is narrating her story into a tape recorder as a break from looking at a Portugal-shaped crack in her ceiling. And the tale she tells is a fantastic one: it is the story of a plot to bring down a well-regarded man. But how do you do that? According to Armstrong, you need a crazy plan, one so insane that even when it is exposed it is hard to believe that someone would go to all that trouble to fool people. Such a plot apparently took place.

The target of this plot was John Paul Marcus, a highly respected man whose advice led to Raymond Pankerman’s illegal activities being discovered. Now, Pankerman desires revenge, and right on cue he met Kent Shaw, who devised a brilliant and completely mad plan to bring about Marcus’ downfall. Four people were in on the plot, and Ollie tells us all about it. For although the truth is now known, the damage to Marcus’ reputation has been done, and this is Ollie’s attempt to undo it. But it’s hard work: “Respect is a kind of Humpty Dumpty. All the King’s horses can’t put it all the way up, again.”

God Bless Donald E. Westlake

Fred Fitch has got a problem. Actually, he’s got several – you see, Fred Fitch is a conman’s dream: a born mark. Fred simply is so naïve that any convincing person can come up to him and walk away with Fred’s money, and only after the fact does Fred tumble to the whole trick. Here, let him explain for himself:

“I suppose it all began twenty-five years ago, when I returned home from my first day of kindergarten without my trousers. I did have the rather vague notion they’d been traded to some classmate, but I couldn’t remember what had been given to me in exchange, nor did I seem to have anything in my possession that hadn’t already belonged to me when I’d left for school, a younger and happier child, at nine that morning. Nor was I sure of the identity of the con infant who had done me in, so that neither he nor my trousers were ever found.”

Gangsters and Gunsels and Gals (Oh My!)

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

—Maxwell Scott, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

Max Allan Collins is something of a recurring figure on this blog. I’ve quoted an interesting article he wrote on “The Hard-Boiled Detective” in Encyclopedia Mysteriosa. I’ve read two of his Batman short stories. But I hadn’t yet read any of his novels. I finally took the first step in that direction a while ago, where ten of Collins’ Nate Heller books formed the Kindle Daily Deal – each priced at $1.99. I bought all ten of them. But then I figured to myself, why start in the middle of a series I know nothing about? Why not start where the series started? And so I bought True Detective, the first novel in the Nate Heller series.

The Kindle edition begins with a terrific introduction from the author. He talks about how he came up with the concept for this series and how this book came to be. He tells readers how he named his son, how his literary idol Mickey Spillane complimented him on this book, and how (due to its length and content) it was a challenging book to sell. He also expresses a genuine hope that readers will enjoy the book. I know for a fact that there’s at least one insane reader in Canada who loved every page of it.

The Doc it Was That Died

"[W]hy in the name of literature must I be fobbed off with long discussions of the detective's personal problems? Am I a couch?"

—Jacques Barzun

Dr. Mawsley, the Harley Street gland specialist, was not universally liked, but everyone agreed that he knew his stuff. He was, in effect, the top man in the country for all things gland-related, which makes his sudden death all the more mysterious. You see, Mawsley was alone in a room while his butler stood outside the door. Suddenly, there comes the sound of a crash, and when the butler enters the room, he sees his master lying on the floor, dead, having given himself a fatal dose of strychnine. It happens in John Rhode’s Death in Harley Street.

Was it suicide? Of course not—Mawsley simply wasn’t that kind of man. Utterly self-centered, his practice was thriving and he had much to look forward to. (In fact, he had just spent that evening discussing an unexpected £5,000 legacy that he had inherited.) Besides, suicide was far out of character. So was it murder? Equally unlikely, for several reasons that John Rhode details thoroughly (but which I can’t afford to go into). So it must have been an accident. But how could such an eminent doctor make such a stupid mistake and willingly give himself a lethal injection?