UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: C[harles]. Daly King, The Curious Mr. Tarrant (1935)

            Eight stories narrated by the athletic Jerry Phelan, who meets Trevis Tarrant in the first story, “The Codex Curse,” when they are both locked into a room in the Metropolitan Museum trying to keep an Aztec Codex from being stolen. They fail, but not to worry, because Tarrant knows who took it and how to recover it.

            Tarrant prefers to call these “episodes,” the word “case” being “too formal an expression for his activities. He is not a detective, but looks for “apparently inexplicable problems” which he solves by a rigorous adherence to the doctrine of causation. Jerry remembers his experience with Tarrant and reaches out to him in the second episode. “The Tangible Illusion” is one oppressing Valerie Mopish, soon to be Mrs. Phelan. Tarrant and Katoh move in to Valerie’s “modernistic” house, built for her by her brother. Katoh is Tarrant’s Japanese butler/valet, who is a doctor at home in Japan and a spy in the States. It turns out the brother may have been less than all right that Valerie got all the money when the parents died.

            “The Nail and the Requiem” is a locked room murder mystery, and Tarrant solves it by the process of elimination: if the murderer couldn’t have gotten out…. “Torment IV” is a boat, and it may or may not have other characteristics in common with the infamous Mary Celeste.

            The only stories that can be recommended are in this first half of the book; skip the first one and read the next three.

            “The Headless Horrors” is a silly story about voodoo ritual beheading. “The Vanishing Harp” is a slow-moving story, another locked-room puzzle, but not a murder, though an attempted one, and at the end Tarrant gives the miscreant the “honorable” way out. “The Man with Three Eyes” does a classic sleight-of-hand move in diverting attention from the obvious answer to a murder committed in plain sight—almost—with several witnesses. This story is also probably worth reading. But the final episode, “The Final Bargain,” goes off into la-la land with twisted auras causing paralysis and Tarrant pledging to go away for seven years as some kind of bargain to save Jerry’s sister Mary, who loves Tarrant and vice-versa.

            This collection made it into Ellery Queen’s list of the most important detective and crime fiction short stories.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Henry Kisor, Season’s Revenge: A Christmas Mystery (2003)

 

            I picked up Henry Kisor’s mystery called Season’s Revenge because I had read a book by this author before. Henry Kisor, who was for many years the book review editor of the Chicago Sun Times, learned to fly a small plane in his middle age.  Kisor had been reluctant to take flying lessons earlier because he is deaf; when he was in his fifties, though, he went flying with a friend who is a deaf pilot, and realized it was possible. His book, The Flight of the Gin Fizz: Midlife at 4,500 Feet, recounts Kisor’s recreation of the first transcontinental flight early in the last century. His book struck a chord with me, since I didn’t learn to fly until I was sixty.

            I called this series “Uncommon Mysteries,” and this one qualifies: the detective is a Lakota Sioux Indian with a Mexican name whose beat is in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and who investigates a murder where the weapon was a black bear.  There are some other surprises I won’t give away.  This is the first of six mysteries Kisor has written about Steve Martinez, in the sheriff’s department of Porcupine County. Martinez was adopted as a youngster and raised in a white household. He looks like an Indian but thinks like a white. He knows the Upper Peninsula is ancestral Sioux land and feels its appeal, but he’s also too modern and rational to believe in this ancestral bond. Kisor has admitted in interviews that this biracial or bicultural tug on his main character comes from his own sense of living in two different cultures:  the hearing and the deaf.

            Kisor peoples his fictional Porcupine County with believable folks, including the head of the local historical society, who provides romantic interest for Steve Martinez.

            One aspect of the mystery is the curious historical fact that in the 1930s, Soviet Russia recruited hundreds of Finnish-American Upper Peninsula residents to emigrate to Karelia, a Finnish-speaking part of the Soviet Union. These people expected to get good jobs in Karelia and send money home, but a lot of them simply disappeared, and in Michigan their relatives who were left behind were unable to pay mortgages and lost their homes to land grabbers during the Depression.

            The subtitle A Christmas Mystery, is a little misleading, since the crime, though solved at Christmastime, takes place months earlier, and the action of the book covers almost half a year. But it ends with snow and Christmas lights. Merry Christmas, mystery lovers.

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.