Sunday, February 9, 2025

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Bernard Capes, The Skeleton Key (1919)

             A maid at Wildshott, Sir Calvin Kennett’s estate, is murdered with the shotgun Kennett’s own son Hugo had carelessly left leaning against a tree when he stopped to chat with her earlier—is it an assignation? Neither of the men who imagine themselves her beaux—the valet of the Baron Le Sage, who has come to play chess with Sir Calvin, nor the butler Cleghorn—seems to have had a tryst with her. But they were both out and about and both are arrested on suspicion.

            No one seems to know anything about the maid, Annie Evans, who had a written recommendation when she was hired two months previously, though the writer of the recommendation cannot be traced, and no one knows of any family of the murdered girl. Nor does anyone know anything about the background of Baron Le Sage, whom Sir Calvin met by chance abroad, as did Vivian Bickerdike, Hugo’s friend, who is surprised to run into the Baron again in London, and then to find they are both on their way to Wildshott by invitation.

            Sergeant Ridgway, a Scotland Yard man closing up a recent case in the vicinity, accepts Sir Calvin’s invitation to take up this case. Ridgway and Bickerdike suspect that the girl may have been pregnant—the autopsy report at the inquest was very coy on this point—and that Hugo may have been responsible.

            The Baron departs, leaving his valet to his fate, but Ridgway comes up with an alibi for the servant, witnesses who put the gunshot earlier, at a time only Hugo could have fired it, and Cleghorn is also released, while Hugo is arrested.

            In Paris, the Baron learns information that enables him to work out the mystery. He takes no particular credit for this, claiming to have been by coincidence at the center of a web of clues. “The Key I found in a skeleton Key,” he says, “of the usual burglarious pattern,” underneath the murdered woman’s body.

            Ridgway has a socialist bent, and thinks “if…things were properly distributed…there’d be no need perhaps for police-officers at all.” Imagination is another sort of key in the narrative. One chance remark is that “charity is as much a matter of imagination as of feeling.” A turn of phrase or even a whole sentence or paragraph occasionally reminds me of Meredith: “Grievance, mutely felt, had thrown her into another camp than that of her order,” the author says of Audrey, Sir Calvin’s daughter. The vocabulary is Victorian educated, with plenty of French and Latin words and phrases. I did a lot of dictionary work with this one. Hipped= depressed; Bashaw=Pasha or bigwig; Macuba snuff and Rapee (fr. “grated”) a coarse, pungent, dark snuff; jimp=slender; lenitive=laxative; à la sourdine=muted; distinctions are made among a bunch of words for a group of trees or shrubs: coppice=one that’s frequently cut to the ground for firewood; copse=a small group of trees; grove=such a group without underbrush such as an orchard; thicket=one with underbrush; spinney=copse planted as cover for game birds; dingle=a deep wooded valley or dell; list slipper=one made of cloth and usually worn for quiet; objurgation=scolding; wyvern=a winged two-legged dragon with a barbed tail; fanfaron=swagger; facula=a lighted or bright spot on  surface; espalier=a fruit tree or ornamental shrub trained to grow along a wall or lattice; spraint=the dung of the otter; frit=frightened; boggle=bogey=specter or phantom.

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

UNCOMMON MURDERS: Guillermo Martínez, The Oxford Murders, translated by Sonia Soto (2005)

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.

            The Oxford Murders was published in 2005 but looks back to events that happened in Oxford in the early nineties, when the unnamed narrator arrived from Buenos Aires to work on a graduate degree in mathematics. His graduate supervisor has recommended he lodge with the widow of her former professor. His landlady turns out to have been one of the cryptologists who helped Alan Turing crack the Germans’ Enigma Code. On the first night after his arrival, she greets him warmly, feeds him dinner, and trounces him at Scrabble. A few days later she is murdered, the main clue being a message that her friend, the famous mathematician Arthur Seldom, says he received, summoning him to her house, including a mathematical symbol, and stating that this would be the first of a series.

            The landlady’s granddaughter Beth, who plays in an Oxford orchestra, has admitted that she feels trapped in her role of caretaker for her grandmother. The narrator’s tennis partner and lover, Lorna, who has a great interest in crime literature, is reading Arthur Seldom’s book on mathematical series, which contains a chapter on serial killers, and her copy is filled with “furious underlinings and illegible comments in the margins.”  Thus Martínez begins to build the list of suspects, which includes a Russian graduate student in math who is convinced his genius has been ignored by Arthur Seldom.

            Seldom tells the police inspector that the murderer must have found his book insulting and is trying to prove something to the mathematician. Seldom had argued that serial killers are crazy rather than logical. He suggests to the police that finding and announcing the next term in the series publicly might stop the murders. A second death has already occurred at this point.

            A third death occurs at a concert by Beth’s orchestra at Blenheim Palace; the dead man is the triangle player. Seldom is about to announce the fourth term of the series, which is merely the simple numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and their Pythagorean symbols, when the climactic event of the book happens, a killing in which the perpetrator dies. The police inspector is convinced he’s solved the Oxford Murders, but the truth is more complicated and more surprising.   

            The narrator’s foreignness gives a nice perspective to the English scene: the light that seems to be dimmed as soon as his plane dips into the sky over England, the incomprehensible cricket games where it is impossible for the uninitiated to even tell whether the game has begun or the players are merely desultorily warming up, the beauty of Oxford and the surrounding countryside, the ubiquitous Indians and Pakistanis. All this is delivered in Martínez’s very clear style in what appears to be an excellent translation by Sonia Soto. The movie made from the book was not a success, probably because the story turned into a purely English mystery, with the Argentinean narrator made into an English math student.

Monday, January 27, 2025

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Octavus Roy Cohen's Jim Hanvey, Detective (1923)

             This is the first collection of Hanvey stories, followed by Detours (1927) and Scrambled Yeggs (1934) collecting all of the stories about the very fat detective (“Down these mean streets a man must waddle,” quipped Kevin Burton Smith in his blog, “The Thrilling Detective”) with the disconcerting, sleepy eyes and the slow-motion blink. The seven stories here appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, and The Chicago Tribune.

            Hanvey solves the first crime by accident, while working on another case; his “Fish Eyes” so disconcert the bank embezzler that he confesses. These stories are inverted mysteries in which we are told whodunnit at the beginning and even watch the crime being committed. In the second story, “Homespun Silk,” Hanvey and the jewel thief, Arthur Sherwood, are on the most genial of terms. “Outside of the underworld,” Cohen tells us of Hanvey, “he had no intimates.”

            Cohen’s diction in these stories is often Latinate and occasionally circumlocutious. Sometimes the effect is exaggeratedly comic, as when he says Hanvey’s was “a face of incarnadined complexion.” Sometimes the effect is just purple, as in a view of Central Park at dusk: “The shadowy walks under the trees were dislimning in softly gathering gloom.” But he is capable of succinct and direct narration.

            Hanvey is even more palsy with the malefactor, Billy Scanlan, in “Common Stock.” Scanlan is out to get a stock proxy from a courier who’s carrying it from a big stockholder in L. A. to the stockholder’s meeting in New York. But Hanvey, traveling with the courier, is one too many for Scanlan.

            Hanvey not only has remarkably small “fish eyes,” but he blinks in slow motion, keeping them lidded for a full second before opening again. He smokes foul-smelling cigars and turns down the offer of good Havanas in favor of them. His favorite piece of personal jewelry is a gold toothpick that is apparently encased in some sort of spring mechanism; the device is always on his watchchain. Perhaps Hanvey’s greatest asset is his knowledge of the criminal world. He boasts that there is no crook with any reputation in the United States that he doesn’t know. Many of these crooks are his friends, even ones he has sent to prison.

“Helen of Troy, N. Y.” asks Hanvey to help keep her husband straight. Hanvey tries, but also keeps his eyes open in case things are not what they seem. In “Caveat Emptor,” he really does help another crook’s wife keep her husband from an unjust conviction for stealing jewels. Hanvey’s friendship with a thief who stole a valuable set of pearls enables him to set up the nasty jeweler who set up the husband.

Hanvey’s psychological skills are tested as he is hired to separate a smitten daughter from the conman she has fallen in love with; the story is “Knight’s Gambit.” And in the concluding story, “Pink Bait,” Hanvey outwits a smooth and cultured grifter who wants to fence some very special pearls. Ellery Queen included the Hanvey stories in his list of the most important short story collections in the first hundred years or so of the mystery and detective genre. Some of the stories are more like capers, and Mike Grost has gone so far as to say that these are not detective stories at all (“Michael Grost’s Class Mystery and Detective Fiction Blog”). But most of them involve some detective work, and a few are quite of the orthodox detective mystery type. And they all entertain.