Dance into the Fire

When the United States entered the Second World War, Detroit converted its automobile factories into an “arsenal of democracy”. Car manufacture was put on hold and instead, workers produced tanks, aircraft, and other machines which helped the Allies win the war. All sorts of people had to come together and collaborate in a spirit of patriotism. But racial tensions were high and eventually resulted in rioting.

And in Loren D. Estleman’s novel Jitterbug, a psychotic killer is taking the whole patriotism thing a bit too far. A maniac is on the loose, murdering people left and right. Specifically, he targets hoarders, convinced that every dead hoarder means a soldier’s life is saved on the war front. All those gas and food rations can go to the fine American troops instead of the greedy hands of citizens back home too old and/or infirm to fight. He even leaves a calling card, the message “Kilroy was here”, and it’s up to police lieutenant Maximilian Zagreb to hunt the killer down. But there’s no shortage of suspects in a metropolis like Detroit, and Zagreb is racing against time as Kilroy’s violence escalates…

What a Tangled Web we Weave!

I haven’t really tackled Polish mystery novels all that often on this blog. I wrote something about them as a guest post for Beneath the Stains of Time— which was still known as Detection by Moonlight at the time. And last year I read a book by “Joe Alex”, a Polish author named Maciej Słomczyński who was the only person to have translated all of Shakespeare’s works. I hope that this year I’ll be able to cross the language barrier a bit more often and give readers a small taste of the stuff that is currently being written in Polish… and hey, we might even get a novel that slips through the cracks and gets translated into English.

What are the odds of that happening, you might ask? Well, the odds are better than you might imagine, because I’ve found one. Zygmunt Miłoszewski is an award-winning Polish author, author of one of the few Polish crime novels to cross the language barrier into English. The novel is Uwikłanie, translated as Entanglement and published by the Bitter Lemon Press in 2010.

The setting is modern-day Poland and our hero is Teodor Szacki, a public prosecutor in the nation’s capital, Warsaw. He’s about 35 or thereabouts, and he’s married and has a daughter. He’s also got a tough job, one that can get depressing as hell. Take this latest case, for instance. A body was found in a Catholic convent, rented as a retreat centre. At the time, it was being used by a psychotherapist for a weekend of group therapy sessions, where each session revolved around a different person. The point of each session was for the participants to role-play as important people in X’s life, and X would have to come to terms with [insert your favourite psychological issue here]. One pseudo-scientific explanation later, we find out that a child’s heart disease can be caused by his father’s failure to attend his parents’ funeral. Sounds like a fun time!

The Noble Duke of York

Oh, The grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.

And when they were up, they were up,
And when they were down, they were down,
And when they were only half-way up,
They were neither up nor down.

— English children’s nursery rhyme

After my disastrous experience reading Louise Penny’s Still Life, I decided to return to the Golden Age of detective fiction: back when good plots were more important than overwriting a story with an obvious conclusion. And what better way to contrast the two experiences than to go to one of the “Humdrums”: authors with such a bad reputation that you’d think they were unable to entertain so much as a drunken fish. But I’ve challenged this point of view many times on my blog, and I will do it again. So I decided to go back to a reliable favourite: Henry Wade.

Henry Wade was the pseudonym of Major Sir Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher. I’ve said it before, but because his real name is so damn awesome I decided to say it again anyways. He’s perhaps best known for his series character of Inspector Poole, but he also wrote the fantastic inverted mystery novel Heir Presumptive, one of the best books I’ve ever read, regardless of genre. But today I decided to return to Inspector Poole, in Wade’s third book, The Duke of York’s Steps.

Let there be blood...

Someone has a grudge against the police department… more specifically, the cops at the 87^th Precinct. Cops are being gunned down left and right, apparently at random by a “cop hater”. It is up to the cops of the 87^th, already overworked and understaffed, to avenge their fallen colleagues and bring their murderer—or is it murderers?—to justice.

This plot device has been used many times in mystery fiction—whether in X Vs. Rex by Phillip Macdonald, or, more recently, Cop to Corpse by Peter Lovesey. (Why yes, this is a pathetic attempt at foreshadowing some soon-to-be-read books!) But this time it is being used by Ed McBain in one of his 87^th Precinct police procedurals: Cop Hater. Sergio over at Tipping My Fedora is on a quest to review the entire series, and his reviews are always extremely intelligent and for the most part enthusiastic. So I decided to give McBain a chance despite my historical dislike of the police procedural… so could McBain rise to the challenge?

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.

All that glisters is not gold

I have somewhat mixed feelings about Henry Wade’s Gold Was Our Grave. It is a 1954 novel, written under the Wade pseudonym by Major Sir Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher. It’s the third book I’ve read by Wade, and although in general it’s a solid read, it is somewhat problematic at the same time. It has elements of a police procedural (for which Wade hardly gets enough credit) but it’s a genuine mystery at the same time.

Perhaps I should start at the beginning (an excellent place to start, I find). Hector Berrenton is a financier, who years ago was involved in a scandal involving the San Podino gold fields, when a Mexican engineer fabricated a fictional reserve of gold, tricking the company involved into asking for investments… only to ruin many people who had invested in good faith. It resulted in the prosecution of Berrenton and two others, who were accused of knowing the gold field was fake and supressing the information, selling out before the bottom dropped out and making some nice profit out of the whole deal. However, due to lack of evidence, the trio was acquitted…

In Tribute to A. C. Baantjer

TomCat and John have already posted reviews of books by the late Dutch author A. C. Baantjer, who died a year ago on August 29^th, 2010. I’m afraid this review is two days late, but better late than never, right? I cannot soliloquize about how Baantjer influenced me, because I only just finished reading my first (translated) book by Baantjer, DeKok and Murder by Melody. I cannot offer new, in-depth insights into the author’s psyche, the viewpoints expressed in his novels, or the influence on a generation of Dutch authors. I can, however, offer a fair review of a book that not only flew by, but also was highly enjoyable. Isn’t that the best tribute you can ask for as an author, to know your stuff is still being read and enjoyed after you’ve shuffled off this mortal coil?

They Love Not Poison

When I picked up No Friendly Drop by Henry Wade, I was at first expecting the “drop” to be a fall from a building— perhaps it would be an elevator murder if we were lucky. But as it turns out, I forgot a line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (despite having acted in the play) where Juliet refers to “no friendly drop” having been left for her by Romeo. That’s right, this is a novel involving a poisoning, and it’s a really good one.

Henry Wade was the pseudonym of Major Sir Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher. That’s right: he had two titles and 3 names (four if you count the hyphenated name as two). But don’t let that mislead you. If you’re expecting Henry Wade’s detective novels to have a sleuth à la Lord Peter Wimsey running around, making pedantic comments and a general nuisance of themselves, you’re entirely wrong.

No, his detective is Inspector John Poole, one of the most likeable police detectives I’ve ever come across. He has a college education, but he doesn’t go off into irrelevant asides about the limits of translating The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám into Swahili. He does have a romantic interest in this novel, but it’s delightfully subdued, producing extremely memorable moments of banter.

The Flying Inn

Christopher Fowler

How can I describe Christopher Fowler’s Peculiar Crimes Unit mysteries? I was expecting something rather like John Dickson Carr’s The Department of Queer Complaints: impossible murders and locked rooms being investigated by a police squad. Well, I was wrong—the series turned out to be just what it claimed. It was all about peculiar crimes. Some books, like White Corridor and Ten Second Staircase involve genuine locked rooms (or other impossible scenarios). Others, like The Water Room, are just bizarre crimes.

Since this is my first time reviewing a Fowler novel on the blog, I’ll give you a quick rundown of the previous entries I read in the series. Full Dark House has a brilliant atmosphere, a retrospective murder case in WWII London with a lunatic murdering people in a theatre. It has a lot of social commentary, but Fowler gets away with it because it’s good stuff. The only thing wrong with it is the solution, where the book falls apart, as some impossible occurrences are never adequately explained and the killer is just random.

The Water Room has a far less interesting set-up but an infinitely better solution. (With Fowler, it often seems that the better the set-up, the less interesting the solution, and vice versa.) Ten Second Staircase involves a lunatic serial killer dressing up as a Highwayman and killing minor celebrities, becoming one in the process.