UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Hake Talbot, Rim of the Pit (1944)

             Henning Nelms used the Hake Talbot pseudonym only for his mysteries, The Hangman’s Handyman (1942) and Rim of the Pit (1944), both “impossible” or locked room mysteries, the second book being much better than the first. Nelms was what Homer called his hero Odysseus—πολυτροπον, or versatile. He was a stage magician who was trained as a lawyer, a playwright and a theatrical director who taught drama at Middlebury College in Vermont, and an author. He wrote mysteries, a stage play, four books about stage production and amateur theatre, and, a favorite of mine, Thinking with a Pencil (1964), which contains a lifetime of experience in using makeshift drawings to work out and later to explain problems in magic tricks and apparatus, situations of building sets and staging plays, and generally to solve problems in size, amount, shape, construction, or anything else that can be made more understandable with a graph, a diagram, or a simple sketch.

            Edward D. Hoch, in the preface to a 1981 anthology of locked room mysteries, gave the results of a poll of mystery writers and critics who ranked a hundred locked room novels: Rim of the Pit came in second, next only to John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man (1935). Also ranked high was Death in a Top Hat (1938), a story about a magician murdered in a locked room, solved by another magician. Clayton Rawson, like Henning Nelms/Hake Talbot, was an amateur magician, and there is an affinity between magic and “impossible” mysteries, which often involve illusions, mirrors, clever distraction of the first people who arrive after the murder, and even sleight of hand.

            Talbot’s amateur detective, Rogan Kincaid, is a gambler by profession, and just happens to be visiting his old friend Luke Latham at his hunting lodge near the Canadian border when two mysterious deaths occur. One victim is the wife of Latham’s business associate, a woman who held a séance the night before she is found, apparently bludgeoned to death, in her locked bedroom, with undisturbed, newly fallen snow outside her windows.

            The party of relatives and guests who had assembled for the séance is the suspect pool for this death and another that follows the next day. The medium’s husband, Frank Ogden, and his adoptive daughter Sherry—who provides the love interest for Kincaid—are there. So is Latham’s nephew and his girlfriend. Frank has brought in a man he met in Canada, a stage magician who has the reputation for exposing the tricks of mediums. An anthropology professor who was one of Sherry’s teachers at college is also there. The strangest suspect is Sherry’s real father, a French-born woodsman named Grimaud Désenat, who died of exposure during a winter hunting trip fourteen years before, but who seems to make a frightening appearance during the séance.

            Rim of the Pit is supposedly a fair-play mystery in which all the clues used by the detective to solve it are also available to the reader, but Kincaid’s explanation of the deaths here is so complex as to test readers’ credulity as well as their memory of the hints. The complicated exposition is a weakness of all locked room mysteries, and even the winner of the critics’ poll of this sub-genre, John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man, gets very tedious in places. For my money, one of the first locked room mysteries, Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery (1892), is the only one to avoid such tedium. Locked room mysteries work better as short stories, such as some of Melville Davisson Post’s Uncle Abner stories. But Rim of the Pit has scary séance apparition moments as well as excitement out on the snowy trails, plus some interesting revelations about how the spiritualist medium uses the showmanship of the performing magician.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: The Roman Hat Mystery, by Ellery Queen (1929)

             Ellery Queen was the pen name of Frederic Dannay (born Daniel Nathan) and Manfred Bennington Lee (born Emanuel Benjamin Lepofsky, and also the name of their detective. Their first joint venture under the name was The Roman Hat Mystery, published in 1929. The first of the Ellery Queen mysteries has features that don’t last: an introduction by someone only identified with initials, supposedly a family friend, who visits Richard Queen, his son Ellery, Ellery’s wife and child in retirement in Italy, and gets the details of the mystery he’s about to tell us. Richard Queen is a detective inspector in the New York Police Department who solves cases with the help of his tireless Sergeant Velie but mainly using the brains of his son Ellery, a detective story writer himself, who here is a pince-nez wearing esthete who tediously lards his conversations with literary tags and quotes. He gets humanized in further novels.

            The plot starts with a dead lawyer in one of the back seats of the Roman Theatre, killed during a performance of a popular gangster play. The dead man turns out to be a blackmailer, and his missing hat is the key element in the plot. The Queens have a full audience as suspects. Progress is made when the Queens figure out that the hat and the blackmail are connected.

            The plot moves slowly, and slows even further when Papa Queen is explaining the solution to the mystery. There is a plodding quality that makes one yearn for Christie or Sayers. A notable feature is a challenge to the reader, who is supposedly in command of all the facts necessary to solve the crime, late in the book, before the climactic apprehension of the murderer and the subsequent explanation.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Patricia Moyes, Season of Snows and Sins (1971)

             The title Season of Snows and Sins comes from a poem by Algernon Swinburne, who didn’t like winter. Moyes’s is an ingeniously-told story that uses multiple narrators, a technique that goes back to the very first English detective novel, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. The first narrator is Jane Weston, a recently widowed sculptor living in a rustic chalet in the Swiss Alps. Jane befriends a local orphan girl, Anne-Marie Durey, and as much as arranges the girl’s marriage to a young ski instructor named Robert Drivaz by wangling live-in jobs for the couple at the apartment house next door.

            All seems well until the neighborhood celebrity, a Parisian film actress named Giselle Arnay, starts keeping company with Robert. Convinced that she loves him, he goes to Paris to try to connect with her, fails, returns, drinks, loses his job, and possibly abuses Anne-Marie. One April day he is murdered in his own kitchen. Anne-Marie is wrongly convicted of the crime, largely because of the evidence of Jane, who says she saw Anne-Marie returning from work to her apartment at the time of the murder.

            Jane tells this much of the story, and then the narrative shifts to her friend Emmy, wife of a Scotland Yard inspector. Jane has invited the inspector and his wife to spend Christmas vacation with her. The narrative shift allows us to get another view and to see Jane herself as a suspect. Yet another shift in narrator puts us in the house of the film actress in a scene where she confronts all of her guests in turn with the possibility that each might have been the killer. This classic summary of the suspects is a tried-and-true mystery device that wouldn’t have been possible without the shift of narrators.

            The Scotland Yard detective is Henry Tibbett, who eventually solves the case and clears Anne-Marie’s name. Season of Snows and Sins was published in 1971, and is the eleventh book about Henry Tibbett in a series of twenty that Patricia Moyes wrote before she died in 2000. She was an interesting woman who also did some film work with Peter Ustinov and, in 1960, wrote a screenplay based on Stephen Potter’s One Upmanship books; the movie was called School for Scoundrels.  If you like Season of Snows and Sins, there’re lots more Moyes books to choose from, including a collection of her short stories that has several Christmas season tales and is called Who Killed Father Christmas?  Merry Christmas in August, mystery lovers.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins (1868)

            Collins’s epistolary novel was serialized in All the Year Round before being published in book form. It effectively blends the conventions of the new and popular sensational novel of the 1860s in England, the varied points of view of the epistolary novel, and the features of the detective story. The moonstone is an Indian diamond stolen from the forehead of a statue, probably by Rachel Verinder’s evil uncle Herncastle ; this we discover from an extract from Herncastle family papers. She inherits it and wears it on her eighteenth birthday at a house party attended by all the main characters. Suspicious Indian jugglers are on the grounds. Franklin Blake, whom Rachel was assumed to love, is one of the guests, but when the stone is stolen during the night, Rachel wants nothing more to do with him.

            The famous Sergeant Cuff is called in but can discover nothing. The maid Rosanna Spearman drowns herself. The Verinder family steward, Gabriel Betteredge, much enamored of using Robinson Crusoe for sortilege, narrates thus far.

            During the next year, Rachel first accepts and then rejects the proposal of her cousin Godfrey Ablewhite, who was also present at the house party. She learns that he is after her money, as the evangelist and family relative Drusilla Clack tells us in the second narrative. These accounts, by the way, are requested by Franklin Blake, who after a year of traveling comes back and decides to solve the mystery. His first move is to ask Rachel, who shocks him by telling him she saw him take the diamond. Franklin enlists the aid of Ezra Jennings, the family physician’s assistant, who suggests that they reconstruct the evening of the theft, with Franklin taking the laudanum dose that the doctor, miffed at something Blake said, had secretly given him. The reconstruction merely deepens the mystery.

            Mr. Bruff, the Verinder family solicitor, has the next narrative, and Ezra Jennings the last. Collins shows how the telling of a story from several points of view, explored in eighteenth and nineteenth century epistolary novels to deepen psychological insights, can be used in the detective novel to gradually reveal a mystery. And he uses to enrich the narrative the conventions that the detective story had already developed, such as the thorough but not inspired police operative versus the eccentric and socially liminal private investigator, and the solution brought together in a scene where all the principals are gathered.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: The Brutal Telling, by Louise Penny (2009)

             Armand Gamache is Chief Inspector of the Sûreté du Québec, the province’s criminal investigation division. He is a patient man for the most part, solidly grounded in his circle of family and friends, secure in many years of police experience and knowledgeable about the English and French-speaking people of his province.

            In the little town of Three Pines, a body is found in the bistro of Olivier Brulé. Gamache discovers that the murdered man was a hermit who lived in a log cabin in the woods. The murder was clearly committed in the cabin, but the body, it turns out, was first carried to a newly-renovated house outside the village and dumped there before it showed up in Olivier’s bistro. This bizarre game of shifting the body around points to a festering rivalry among the village hoteliers.

            Examining the cabin, Gamache is astonished to find that the hermit used priceless glass and china for his meals, and his bookshelves are packed with first editions of famous authors. Moreover, the hermit was a woodcarver, and his elaborate and unsettling carvings, Gamache knows, hold much of the secret of his death.

            But before he can discover the truth, Gamache has to employ an art expert and a code expert, and he has to journey to the Queen Charlotte Islands, where Canada’s premier artist Emily Carr painted the Haida Indians and their totem poles.

            Louise Penny tells the story slowly and allusively, invoking the poetry of Margaret Atwood and Mike Freeman. She can be quite funny, and I believe she invented a character whose first name is Havoc just so Gamache can ask his mother to call him and we can have this line: “’Havoc!,’ his mother cried, letting the dogs slip out as she called into the woods.”

            The meals are described with loving care, and you don’t want to be hungry when you’re reading this book: eggs Benedict, escargot in garlic butter, pear with prosciutto, minted sweetpea soup, cauliflower and Stilton soup, a fruit-stuffed Rock Cornish game hen cooked on a spit, a lamb and prune tagine, shrimp and fennel salad, boeuf bourguignon. You get the idea.

            Louise Penny, a Toronto native who worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before becoming a successful, prize-winning crime novelist, now lives in a small village south of Montreal, which is the way Three Pines is described in the book. Still Life was the first of the Armand Gamache series, published in 2007. Penny uses art and artists frequently in the books of the Gamache series, in which The Brutal Telling is the fifth. If you like beautiful settings, art, food, and murder, you’ll like this one.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Pale As the Dead, by Fiona Mountain (2002)

             Fiona Mountain’s 2002 book, Pale as the Dead, is about Natasha Blake, an uncommon sort of detective whose trade is genealogy. She researches family trees for a living. The author is tapping into a huge interest group here: In England, genealogy is now the most popular hobby, and more websites treat genealogy than any other subject except pornography.

Natasha is approached by a young woman named Bethany, who claims to have ancestors connected with the nineteenth-century painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Bethany gives Natasha a diary given her by her grandmother. Then she disappears.

            Bethany’s boyfriend, a photographer who works in Oxford, hires Natasha to find Bethany. Natasha doesn’t trust the boyfriend, especially when he makes a pass at her, but she’s fascinated by the missing girl, who resembles Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife and model, Lizzie Siddal. Bethany seems to cultivate the resemblance, and Natasha worries that she may carry the imitation all the way to suicide, which was Lizzie’s end.

            Complicating her identification with the missing girl is the fact that Natasha doesn’t know her own background; she was adopted after being abandoned by her mother in a Sheffield hospital a few hours after Natasha’s birth on the day before Christmas Eve. So, Natasha is a genealogist ignorant of her own past--that ignorance, Natasha believes, a good part of the reason why she became a genealogist. Bethany is also ignorant of her past, though she thinks she knows her parents very well. What she doesn’t know about her own background may very well kill her.

            The book is set in Oxford and in the picturesque village of Snowshill in the Cotswolds, but some of it takes place in the London haunts of the Pre-Raphaelites and at Kelmscott, where William Morris lived. Mountain does a good job of tying together the past and the present throughout the book, as Natasha’s day takes her past carolers singing “In the Bleak Midwinter,” a carol written by Christina Rossetti, and into public records offices and genealogical archives next to museums exhibiting Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Meanwhile she is reading the diary Bethany gave her, written by the daughter of the Rossettis’ doctor. The diary takes her right into the past.         

            In Bethany’s past Natasha discovers a stunner—to use a word the Pre-Raphaelites liked. This book takes a unique approach to the mystery genre.

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Sara Paretsky, Bitter Medicine (1987)

            Women have been writing mystery fiction almost from its very beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, but until the 1970s, hard-boiled American detective fiction was the province of men. But authors such as Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton and Janet Evanovich changed all that. These writers invented tough private investigators who were different from their male counterparts in more than just gender. The stereotypical male private eye is a loner and lonely, a wise-cracking street-talker with a questionable background. The female detectives of Paretsky, Grafton, and others tend to be more connected with friends and family, better educated—for example Paretsky’s detective has a law degree—but also able to take care of themselves.

            Sara Paretsky’s detective, V. I. Warshawski, takes on corrupt institutions and corporations in her books, which often involve a murder committed to cover up a white-collar crime.  It’s a variation of the stance of the traditional hard-boiled American detective, who set himself—when it was a male-only club—against a corrupt society. In Bitter Medicine, Warshawski goes after a crooked medical establishment.

            Warshawski takes sixteen-year-old Consuelo Alvarado Hernandez and her no-good husband Fabiano to a job interview as a favor to Warshawski’s old friend Mrs. Alvarado. Consuelo goes into labor, and at the private Friendship 5 hospital in the Chicago suburb of Schaumberg where Warshawski takes her, first the baby and then Consuelo die, despite the efforts of the Friendship doctor and the perinatal specialist Malcolm Tregiere, an associate of Warshawski’s friend Dr. Charlotte (Lotty) Herschel. Then Tregiere is murdered, and Lotty asks Warshawski to look into the case.

            Seemingly unrelated incidents in the book signal a widespread misogyny: Warshawski’s face is slashed by a gangster who is a former client; Lotty’s abortion clinic is attacked and vandalized; Consuelo’s death, a result of negligence, is covered up by doctors and entrepreneurs in the private medical establishment.

            Sara Paretsky has lived in Chicago for many years. She began writing the Warshawski books with Indemnity Only, published in 1982. Bitter Medicine is the fourth in the series. She is especially good in recreating Chicago neighborhoods, with their interesting ethnic mixes.  The only movie that has been made from Paretsky’s stories is V. I. Warshawski, a 1991 film starring Kathleen Turner as Warshawski. The movie was based on the second book in the series, Deadlock, and was not a commercial success, probably because the filmmakers made a decision to play the story for laughs.