UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: J. Storer Clouston's Carrington's Cases (1920)

            F. T. Carrington, who calls himself not a detective but an “inquiry agent,” was introduced the year before this collection in Clouston’s novel Simon. The short stories, but not the novel, make it on to Queen’s Quorum of the 125 most important detective and crime fiction books.

            Carrington is young, with an “ingenuous” (the word gets repeated in several stories) and “agreeable face,” has a moustache, and wears a monocle—this description comes from Simon. The eleven stories include a long three-parter called “Coincidence,” an unlikely tale of two neighbors, each of whom is convinced that the other has been murdered until they encounter each other sometime later in a hotel lobby. The murdered man was real enough, but it was the lover of the wife of one of the neighbors.

            In another story, “The Millionth Chance,” Carrington, trying to flush a German spy from his hiding place in his wife’s house, ends up luring out her English lover instead. In another he goes undercover to catch the revengeful crook who calls himself “Mr. Snakes.”

            “A Medical Crime,” the first story and like many of these, less than ten pages long, has Carrington catching the provost of a town in Scotland who has called Carrington in to help solve robberies that the provost himself is committing. The provost says he suspects the culprit is one of the two town doctors. Carrington tells the provost he has interviewed the men (he hasn’t) and told one about how there is an infallible method of identifying footprints that can only be foiled with rubber-soled shoes. The other one, he says, he told about a foolproof smell test for identifying burglars that can only be foiled by burning feathers at the scene. So all the provost has to do is look for one or another at the next crime scene. The provost falls for it, reports to Carrington he found burnt feathers at the next robbery scene, and is himself arrested for the crimes.

            Carrington works briefly with a lady detective who investigates “The Haunted House” and then marries the ghost—the “long-lost” eldest son who has returned. An amnesiac hires Carrington, who has only “A Photograph” to work with, but who finds the amnesiac’s wife. He also discovers, but does not disclose, that the amnesiac is wanted for murder. In “Duplicates,” Carrington’s media fame in averting an attempted jewel robbery leads to his battle with a duplicate Carrington. And when Dr. Watson consults Carrington, the doctor proves even stupider than he depicts himself in the Holmes stories. Watson allows “The Truthful Lady” to convince him to consume, in the form of digestive bonbons, the will that would have enriched his client. “The Missing Husband” turns out to be holed up in the disused wing of the house with his wife’s pretty maid.

            Carrington intercedes on behalf of an old friend whose husband has become dangerously insane in “The Price,” and in the final story, Carrington is not named, but there is a detective who manages to identify three spies on a Highland line train headed ultimately toward the naval bases at Cromarty and Scapa. “The Envelope,” with a German address and left on the floor of the carriage, is what alerts everyone that there might be a spy, and the detective is the one who manufactures it.

            The coincidences and unlikely story lines make Carrington’s stories entertaining and unusual, and since the beginning setup is often an after-hours gathering with Carrington’s telling his friends a story about something odd happening to him in the course of his work, we are prepared for something not only worth telling, but perhaps too unusual to be strictly true. We will never know, of course, and it does not matter.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Cold Slice: A Working Man’s Mystery, by L. T. Fawkes (copyright Margo Pierce Dorksen, 2003).

            Terry Saltz is a carpenter who is out of work and fresh out of jail as this book begins.  He got drunk and into a bar fight, ended up in jail, and as a result lost his job, his wife, and his brand-new truck.  It was the truck that hurt most.

            Terry straightens himself out, stops drinking, gets a job delivering pizza, and finds a community of real friends.  When one of the other drivers at the pizza place is murdered, Terry and his friends take it on themselves to find the murderer.

            Mystery booksellers created a new classification for this book: the trailer park mystery.  But don’t expect satire: the book is, if anything, too reverential in its treatment of characters who work hard for a living and don’t always get along too well with the cops.  Its subtitle is “A Working Man’s Mystery.”

            Everyone around Terry Saltz has a nickname.  Terry wants to be called Muzzy, a local word for a bad boy, druggie type.  Someone calls him that as a joke, and Terry likes it.  But the nickname won’t stick; no one will use it.  Terry, finally, isn’t the bad boy type.  The book was originally titled Muzzy and its publishing history shows some things about the way mysteries get into the bookstores these days.  Margo Pierce Dorksen, the author—L. T. Fawkes is her pen name—apparently could not find a traditional publisher for her first mystery.  So it appeared through iPublish.com, a brief experiment Time Warner tried in 2001.  iPublish.com offered electronic book downloads and on-demand print copies of its titles, and it disappeared before the end of 2001, but by that time Muzzy had already received the most votes in an on-line contest for the most popular iPublish.com title.  Meanwhile, Dorksen had another Terry Saltz book either finished or almost ready, and Signet republished her first book as a paperback, retitled it Cold Slice, and promised that there were more Terry Saltz mysteries on the way.  No one except an established author can now sell single mysteries to publishers; prospective authors must approach publishers with two finished and more planned.

            Cold Slice has a lot of detail about the running of a pizza parlor, the way orders are taken and distributed among drivers, the peak in business on nights when it rains, and so on.  There is also a fair amount of detail about carpentry, because Terry gets back into his real work as the book progresses.  It’s not a fast-moving or an especially unguessable plot, but it takes its time creating characters and showing their growing bonds.  I think you might like it, and if you do, there are now more Terry Saltz mysteries.

 

Clare Clarke, British Detective Fiction 1891-1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

           Clarke sets out to look at the detective fiction published during Sherlock Holmes’s absence, that is, from the time Conan Doyle killed him off at the Reichenbach Falls, along with Professor Moriarty, in “The Final Problem,” which came out in the December, 1893 issue of The Strand Magazine, and Holmes’s return in The Hound of the Baskervilles, whose first instalment appeared in the Strand in 1901.

            Most of the successors to Sherlock Holmes during this period which Holmes fans call “the hiatus,” began their lives in the pages of periodicals like the monthly Strand and its imitators/rivals, Pearson’s, Windsor, Ludgate, and Harmsworth magazines, as well as weekly magazines and city newspapers. Clarke examines a sampling of the many authors who published detective fiction during this time, choosing six writers. She begins with a writer second only to Conan Doyle himself in the number of stories published in the Strand, L. T. Meade. She selects from the six series of detective stories published by Meade in the Strand two: Stories from the Diary of a Doctor, which appeared there from 1893 to 1895 and were collected in two volumes in 1894 and 1896; and The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, serialized and then published in book form in 1898.

            Next, she looks at C. L. Pirkis’s The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, serialized in the Ludgate Magazine, which Clarke calls “a female-oriented version of the Strand,” in 1893-1894 and appearing in book form the 1894. Then she turns to Arthur Morrison’s two detectives. The law-abiding one, Martin Hewitt, showed up in the Strand in 1894, while the criminal one, Horace Dorrington, was apparently a little too strong for the conservative Strand and was featured in Windsor Magazine in 1897. She turns then to Fergus Hume’s remarkable stories about the Romany girl Hagar Stanley which were published in provincial newspapers in Liverpool and Woolwich in 1897 and in book form the following year as Hagar of the Pawn-Shop.

            Her penultimate detective is an aristocrat, Augustus Champnell, who appeared first in short stories in newspapers in Manchester, Leeds, and Newcastle between July, 1895 and October, 1899 and came out in book form as An Aristocratic Detective in 1900. Finally, Clarke discusses the Flaxman Low stories written by Kate Prichard and her son, Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard, serialized in Pearson’s Magazine in 1898 and 1899 and published in 1899 as Ghosts: Being the Experiences of Flaxman Low. Clarke makes the argument that detectives like Low who investigate “diabolical agency” instead of confining themselves, like Sherlock Holmes, to material signs and material agency are a product of a certain genre fluidity inevitable as authors were in the process of inventing what detective fiction was going to be.