UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Harry Kemelman, The Nine-Mile Walk (1967)

             Eight stories originally published from 1947 (the title story) to 1967, narrated by the never-named County Attorney, about the armchair detective exploits of his friend Nicky Welt, “Snowdon Professor of English Language and Literature,” possibly in Amherst, though the narrator’s county is Fairfield, and there is not a Fairfield county in Massachusetts, though there is one in neighboring Connecticut.

            “Give me any sentence of ten or twelve words,” says Welt, “and I’ll build you a logical chain of inferences that you never dreamed of when you framed the sentence.” His point is that a chain of inferences can be logical and still not be true, but the point gets lost when the narrator comes up with the sentence, “A nine mile walk is no joke, especially in the rain.” It’s something the narrator has overheard one of two men say as they came into the restaurant he and Nicky are leaving. Welt builds his chain of inferences until he convinces the narrator to have the two men arrested for the murder of a man on the train from Washington to Boston overnight.

            This pattern of Welt’s solving of crime he merely hears about or is shown some evidence of continues through the stories. In “The Straw Man,” Welt shows that the County Attorney of the neighboring county blew a kidnaping investigation—and probably a murder as well—by failing to see the significance of the ransom note and to whom it was delivered. In “The Ten O’Clock Scholar,” Nicky figures out that the supposed murder weapon was a ruse to conceal the real weapon. Welt solves another murder from the photograph of a chess board taken at a murder scene.

            From a story told by a man who witnessed some of the events, Welt figures out that the murderer has set up the crime by altering the time of one of the victim’s two watches (“Time and Time Again”). “The Whistling Tea Kettle,” in the room of a man who doesn’t drink tea, starts Welt on a chain of inferences and leads him to foil a plan to steal a valuable museum item.

            In “The Bread and Butter Case,” Welt once again humiliates the County Attorney of Suffolk, who has pursued the wrong man in the murder of a man found in a snow bank. While playing chess with a man who had been assisting a person, later murdered, with his new book, Nicky hears a conversation between his opponent and another man that allows him to solve the murder.        

So it goes through the eight stories here, in a collection that Ellery Queen included as the last item of his 1969 Queen’s Quorum, a history of the detective fiction short story through examination of 125 titles published in the genre from 1845 until the 1967 Nicky Welt collection. Kemelman is better known as the creator of the amateur detective Rabbi David Small, who appears in a dozen mystery novels, but Professor Nicky Welt was his first detective.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: H. R. F. Keating, Under a Monsoon Cloud (1986)

Uncommon Mysteries is the heading I’m using for brief notes I’ve made about mysteries I found odd, or especially good, or memorable in some other way. Some of these notes were broadcast as fillers on a public radio station, WKMS, in Murray, Kentucky, a decade ago. Others are new. 

            In Under a Monsoon Cloud, H. R. F. Keating’s Inspector Ganesh Ghote becomes a criminal—an accessory to a crime—when he suggests and then aids in the concealment of an accidental killing by a fellow officer he admires. He does it because the killing is a momentary lapse on the part of the officer, Assistant District Inspector General “Tiger” Kelkar, whose career has been otherwise spotless and exemplary. Kelkar has hurled an inkpot at an incompetent subordinate, Sergeant Desai, intending to frighten him, but the inkpot not only strikes the stupid sergeant, but hits his temple and instantly kills him. Ghote suggests that he and Kelkar take Desai’s body to nearby Lake Helena and make it look as if he drowned while trying to swim across. Later, when Desai’s blood-stained jacket is found, Kelkar commits suicide, leaving a note that says he acted alone. But Ghote is suspended, charged with aiding in the cover-up, and summoned to an inquiry. He hires Vimala Ahmed, a civil liberties lawyer who has previously been the bane of the police, but he does not tell her the truth until very near the end of the proceedings. When he tells her, she refuses to act further for him but remains at his side because it is too late for him to get other representation.

            You will have to read the book to see how this all turns out, but you can tell from this partial summary what makes Under a Monsoon Cloud an uncommon mystery. Ghote is forced to see things from the point of view of the malefactors he so often tries to catch. He gets a new view of the maneuvers of his lawyer, maneuvers which he previously regarded as lying, trick-playing, and relying on legal technicalities to shield guilty persons from just punishment. He gains the perspective of a defendant and sees through the eyes not of an innocent one but a guilty one. Under a Monsoon Cloud is not merely about thinking like a criminal—an ability useful to all detectives—but rather about being a criminal and seeing every effort to bring about justice as an enemy action. In this sense the book has more of its roots in Dostoevsky than in Arthur Conan Doyle.

            This is the fifteenth book in Keating’s series about Ghote, whose fans will be happy to learn that he is neither corrupted nor destroyed by his experiences here. Despite the advice of his wife, the pandit of his temple, and his old school friend, Ghote manages to tell the truth and still remain a policeman.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Ngaio Marsh, A Man Lay Dead (1934) and Surfeit of Lampreys (1941)

            Ngaio Marsh invented her gentleman detective, police inspector Roderick Alleyn, in 1934 with A Man Lay Dead. Alleyn is in the tradition of detectives of gentle—sometimes even noble—birth, but he is not nearly as obnoxiously flippant and foppish as Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey or the American Philo Vance.

            This first Alleyn book is not as good as later ones, supposedly causing Marsh to cringe at its thin plot and amateurish devices: for example an unnecessary re-creation of the crime with everyone assembled at the end, and a murderer who slides down the country house’s bannister in order to commit the crime. The Alleyn series eventually included thirty-two books, and the one critics seem to like best is the tenth, published in 1941 and titled Surfeit of Lampreys.

            From the point of view of Roberta Grey, a New Zealander who first meets the Lampreys in New Zealand when she is fourteen, we are introduced to Lord Charles Lamprey, younger brother of the childless Marquis of Wutherwood and Rune, Charles’s wife Charlotte or Imogen, and their six children, Henry, the oldest, who eventually becomes a romantic interest for Roberta (whom the Lampreys call Robin), Frid or Elfrida the aspiring actress, the identical twins Colin and Stephen, Patricia, called Patch, and the youngest, Michael, who is eleven when Roberta, now twenty, comes to England after the death of her parents to find a job. The Lampreys have moved back to England with the failure of the scheme to live in New Zealand because it was supposedly cheaper. Roberta is in love with the feckless Lampreys, their nonchalance in the face of debt or murder, and their charming irresponsibility.

 The day after Roberta arrives, Charles and his brother the Marquis quarrel when Charles asks for money. The Marquis leaves and is murdered in the lift on his way down, or while the lift is still on the Lampreys’ floor. Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn investigates with his assistant Fox, whom Alleyn often calls Br’er Fox or Foxikins. Because the culprit is most likely someone in the Lamprey household, and Charles is the Marquis’s heir, the family closes ranks in their interviews with Alleyn, lying when they think it necessary to protect any one of them. Aside from Charles, another suspect is the Marquis’s wife Lady Violet, who is nutty and has recently taken up the black arts. There are also a couple of servants in the household as well as the chauffeur and lady’s maid who have come with the Marquis and his wife.

Marsh was a painter, an actor, and a theatre director, and her plots tend to bring in these worlds in charades (such as that involving the murder weapon in Surfeit of Lampreys), amateur plays (such as the murder game at the country house in A Man Lay Dead that turns into real murder) and pantomimes, actual theatre productions, art and artists such as Agatha Troy, who is Alleyn’s wife, and numerous quotations, especially from Macbeth, or, as theatre people like to say because of the play’s notorious reputation for bringing bad luck, The Scottish Play.