UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Bartholomew Gill, The Death of a Joyce Scholar (1989)

            Bartholomew Gill is a pen name for Mark McGarrity, whose 1989 mystery The Death of a Joyce Scholar is the eighth and probably the best of McGarrity’s Dublin mysteries. The series, which features Chief Superintendent Peter McGarr of the Dublin Murder Squad, began with McGarr and the Politician’s Wife in 1977 and ended with the author’s death in 2002.  MacGarrity was not, like his main character, a native Dubliner; he grew up in Massachusetts and went to Brown University.  He fell in love with Dublin while in graduate school at Trinity College.  For years he had divided his time between Dublin and New Jersey, where he wrote a regular outdoors feature column for the Newark paper.  It was in New Jersey where he died in 2002.  He had locked himself out of his second-story apartment and, when he tried to get in through a window, he fell.

            The title, The Death of a Joyce Scholar, makes McGarrity’s book sound like a literary mystery, but it isn’t really, although its murder victim was not only a Joyce scholar at Trinity College but a performer and guide in the Bloomsday tours that reproduce the route taken around Dublin by Joyce’s main characters in Ulysses.  In fact, the scholar’s wife seeks out McGarr because he is not a literary type like her husband’s colleagues, but rather, as she says, “one of us,” meaning a Dubliner from a working-class background like her husband and herself. 

            This “us versus them” attitude becomes a theme in the book.  The scholar’s wife and her women friends have an exclusionist feminist view of the world.  The Trinity College literature crowd has an “us or them” attitude that can destroy promising graduate students, an ironic elitism--since Fergus Flood, seemingly the most Irish of the Trinity professors, is a transplant from the American Midwest.  The new cop in McGarr’s squad, Ruthie Bresnahan, is concerned about fitting in with the others because of her gender and her Kerry origin.  McGarr is supremely at home in the murder squad but uncomfortable in his young wife’s artist crowd as well as in the literary world his investigation throws him into.

            Eventually McGarr reads Ulysses, which he’s never done before.  He doesn’t find it a key to solving his murder, but he thinks its snapshot of 1904 Dublin still depicts the city he grew up in.  The city is almost like another character in McGarrity’s book, as it is in Joyce’s.

            The Death of a Joyce Scholar contains perhaps the most imaginative use of the mystery convention of recounting in the middle of the book what we know about the case so far: one cop, Ruthie Bresnahan, details the case so far to another cop as he’s undressing her.  Joyce, Dublin, murder, sex . . . what more could you ask for?  I think you’ll like it.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: J. S. Fletcher's The Middle Temple Murder (1919)

           Frank Spargo, sub-editor at the London daily Watchman, happens upon a recently discovered body in Middle Temple Lane one night. Later the name and address of Spargo’s young barrister friend Ronald Breton shows up as the only thing in the pockets of the dead man. Together Spargo, Breton, and a remarkably cooperative Scotland Yard detective named Rathbury investigate, but it is Spargo who takes the lead. Spargo uses his daily features in the Watchman to crowd-source additional information about the murder.

            The investigation takes Spargo to Market Milcaster and a famous case of embezzlement tried there, and eventually to the wild moorlands of Yorkshire, where three of the principals in the case are gathered. The solution to the puzzle comes suddenly, and equally suddenly the book ends, without a rehashing or rationalizing of what happened and how—we can guess why. The plot first thickens when the father of Breton’s fiancée (the fiancee's sister is a girl in whom Spargo’s interest is growing) seems to be implicated and not exactly who he pretends to be. Gradually we learn who the murdered man was and who his associates were. Nothing the investigators learn is concealed from the reader—this much is in agreement with Golden Age mystery practice—but this 1919 story moves more like a police procedural, even though Spargo is not officially a policeman.

            Fletcher, like his rival writers Edgar Wallace and E. Phillips Oppenheim, was remarkably prolific. All three wrote more than a hundred mysteries each. The Middle Temple Murder was nearly contemporary with Oppenheim’s The Great Impersonation (1920) and Wallace’s The Mind of Mr J. G. Reeder (1925), and these three books are often considered as the best of their respective authors.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: The Case of the Self-Taught Lawyer

 

            Is there any one of Erle Stanley Gardner’s 80-plus Perry Mason mysteries that could be called uncommon? They all seem pressed from a common mold. The same adversaries, Perry Mason and District Attorney Hamilton Burger, face each other in the courtroom. The same team of Della Street and private detective Paul Drake backs Mason up. And always there are courtroom fireworks, Mason’s client is acquitted just when conviction seemed most certain, and the real culprit is unmasked. Or almost always: Mason loses The Case of the Terrified Typist; in the TV series, Raymond Burr’s Perry Mason loses a second one, The Case of the Deadly Verdict.

            Perhaps the book we should single out is The Case of the Velvet Claws, the very first Perry Mason novel in 1933, not because it differs from the others, but because it establishes just what is new and uncommon about the Perry Mason stories.

            Certainly their creator was uncommon enough. Gardner spent only one month in a law school, but by working in a law firm as a clerk and cramming in his spare time, he managed to pass the California bar exam. His first clients were Chinese and Mexican immigrants—ethnic groups who were never treated stereotypically in Gardner’s fiction. Eventually he wrote not only eighty-two Perry Mason books but dozens of others under various pen names, and he was at one time the best-selling author in the world.

            The real novelty here is that by uniting his detective with a criminal defense lawyer, Gardner gave Americans what they wanted to believe about American criminal justice. As formulaic and stylized as the Perry Mason stories are, they are far closer to perceived truth than the myths underlying traditional detective stories. Few people imagine they can find a real person much like Sherlock Holmes to do their investigating for them, but many people believe that they could find a Perry Mason if they were accused of a crime and had the money to hire the best lawyer available. Brilliant and unbeatable criminal defense lawyers have been an American institution since Abraham Lincoln successfully defended a man accused of murder by using an almanac to discredit the eyewitness’s report of seeing the killing by the full moon.

            The police bring to bear all their institutional machinery upon a case against  those they accuse, but the odds can be made approximately equal if those people can find the right combination of lawyer, private detective, and support crew. Perry Mason makes this defense machinery look homey as well as efficient, almost like a family operation, and that is not the least of his claims to still high popularity forty years after Gardner’s death.