UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Sebastian Junger, A Death in Belmont (2006)

              You may remember Sebastian Junger as the author of The Perfect Storm, his book about the 1991 Halloween storm in the Atlantic that killed crews aboard fishing vessels and caused billions of dollars of damage.  In A Death in Belmont, published in 2006, Junger writes a true-crime mystery about a murder that took place in Belmont, a suburb of Boston where his family lived when Sebastian was only a year old.  In the fall and winter of 1962-63, Sebastian Junger’s mother Ellen, who lived with her husband and one–year-old Sebastian in Belmont, employed a builder and his two assistants to add a studio to their house.  One of the two workers was Albert DeSalvo, who eventually confessed to most of the murders the papers were calling those of the Boston Strangler.

            Before they were finished with the building, and on a day when DeSalvo had spent a short time by himself on finishing work in the new studio, a woman was strangled just a few blocks away.  The pattern of the crime was like that of the murders to which DeSalvo eventually confessed, although his confession did not mention this particular killing.  In the meanwhile, a black man named Roy Smith, who had worked as a housecleaner at the murdered woman’s home that day, was arrested, tried, and convicted of the murder.  When DeSalvo was later caught and confessed to a number of stranglings, no attempt was made to implicate him in the Belmont killing or to overturn the Smith conviction.

            DeSalvo was stabbed to death in a prison hospital in November, 1973, ten years after Roy Smith’s conviction.  Roy Smith died of lung cancer in another prison hospital in 1976.  Junger cannot prove that Smith was innocent and DeSalvo guilty of the Belmont strangling (the way it was told to him by his parents when he was a child), and during his investigation of the crimes and the people involved he is not always convinced that that is the way it happened, but he seems to end with that conviction, though he admits it cannot be proved.

            For my money, Junger is more convincing at showing that Roy Smith is very unlikely to have committed the crime than he is of proving that DeSalvo did it, but DeSalvo left very little evidence at some of his crimes. Without his confession, some of them would have been difficult or impossible to successfully prosecute him for. Junger reawakens some of the horror of the time, partly by making it personal, recording how on more than one occasion his mother was alone in the house with the Boston Strangler.

 

 

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Leslie Charteris, Meet the Tiger (1928)

             Leslie Charteris (born Leslie Bowyer-Yin) with this book invented his long-lived character Simon Templar, who gets his nickname of the Saint from his initials, and sometimes leaves a signature drawing of a haloed stick figure at the scene of his capers. He is an adolescent’s fantasy hero who combines romantic power—he is tall, tanned if not exactly dark, and handsome—with physical prowess at gunplay, knife-throwing, and hand-to-hand fighting; strength, superb conditioning and stamina; speed and athletic ability—and humor, presence of mind, as well as insouciant daring in confronting danger.

            He comes to the quiet seaside village of Baycombe because he has heard of plot by a criminal mastermind known only as the Tiger. A large amount of gold stolen from a Chicago bank, impossible to turn into cash in any quiet way, is to be disposed of by using it to salt a South African mine, driving up the price of its stock that the Tiger has bought very cheaply.

            Templar pretends he wants the gold for himself, but in fact he has made a deal with the bank to recover the gold for a percentage of its value. He is in competition with a detective named Carn, also out to find the gold and unmask the Tiger.

            Complicating the Saint’s project is the romance that has developed between him and Patricia Holm, who lives in Baycombe with her aunt. Patricia proves herself an adventurer in her own right and pursues the quest for the gold even when she believes the Saint to be dead.

            Charteris makes the Tiger’s identity too guessable in overdoing the least-likely-suspect device. His prolixity can get tedious in this book, although more under control in later ones: Templar and Patricia spend much too much time thinking about how to proceed and anticipating possibilities, slowing the action. The plot gets so complex we lose track of why things are happening, but all comes right in the end if our suspension of disbelief holds.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Georges Simenon, The 13 Culprits (Détective, 13 March to 19 June, 1930, Les 13 Coupables, 1932), translated by Peter Schulman (2002)

 

            The stories in this collection were written the year before Simenon invented his famous detective Jules Maigret, whose first appearance was in Pietr the Latvian (1931), and their relation to Maigret’s invention is not immediately apparent. The Investigating Magistrate Froget, already old in the stories, is a cerebral protagonist who deduces the guilt of the thirteen title characters almost solely from the answers each person gives to his questions, and he lays out at the end a few lines resembling a geometrical proof, demonstrating their guilt. He takes advantage of his considerable authority as a juge d’instruction, who can recommend prosecution, to rattle his subjects and get them to blurt out an inconvenient truth or desperately to offer a telling lie. Maigret, who is generally in his stories around the age of forty-five or so, is more likely to talk to his suspects like a fellow traveler and to try to get inside them, to inhabit their thinking. But in fact, Froget and Maigret both tap into the same store of experience and wide knowledge of criminal behavior.

          More recognizably like the Maigret stories is the parade of colorful, largely low-life Parisian and provincial types, vain, arrogant, cunning, or just ground down by life. Simenon draws these in a very few strokes. The stories are short, averaging just over ten pages, and Détective magazine, where they first appeared, printed the last page or two containing the solution an issue or two later than the one with the main body of the story. The stories are somewhat like the inverted detective tales that R. Austin Freeman invented; the method was most notably used by the Columbo television series of the 1970s. We already know the culprit, and the question is how Froget will solve the mystery.

Eric Ambler's Epitaph for a Spy (1938) and The Mask of Dimitrios (1939)

             Josef Vadassy comes under suspicion of being a spy when photographs of Toulon defense fortifications are found on his photographic film. He is forced to be the unwilling and resistant tool of Surèté detective Beghin, who is looking for the real spy who exchanged cameras with Vadassy. Because he is a stateless person with an expired passport, Vadassy, an instructor at a Paris language school who vacations on the French Mediterranean coast, must comply with the authorities or risk being deported.

          Vadassy, who is a good deal less smart than he imagines himself, blunders through several days at the Rèserve Hotel in St. Gatien, his usual vacation spot, vainly trying to discover who the spy is. Then the novel turns from short-suspect-list mystery to adventure tale as Vadassy accompanies the police in their pursuit of the spy.

          Ambler wrote Epitaph for a Spy in 1937, and it captures the shadow Germany is casting over Europe as wars grows more inevitable. The grip of Germany on its own people trying to escape to other countries is shown in the story of the German whom Vadassy first suspects of being the spy and later befriends. And Ambler succeeds in depicting the ever-present terror of the stateless person in such a world at such a time. But the novel lacks the page-turning appeal of Ambler’s next book, and his best, The Mask of Dimitrios (1939). The American title was A Coffin for Dimitrios.

          In Istanbul, Charles Latimer sees the body of a man the police tell him is that of the notorious criminal Dimitrios Makropoulos. His quick view of the body makes Latimer of value to one of Dimitrios’s former gang members, and it also puts him in danger. He follows the history of Dimitrios through various cities on the Aegean and in the Balkans. Finally, it takes him to Paris. His interest, he tells himself, is professional: knowing about a criminal such as Dimitrios will help him in writing his mystery novels—or perhaps he will write a biography of Dimitrios.

          Latimer is naïve, and much dimmer than the people he encounters. Among them is Frederik Petersen, and Ambler’s portrait of him is that of a complete moral imbecile. For Petersen, the main problems with white slavery are its expense and trouble, while the bad actor in drug trafficking is the addict. Dimitrios, on the other hand, who from his youth has known that he wanted only money and power—for Demetrios no moral categories apply, any more than they would for a shark, a creature designed to do one thing, to feed.

          Only the fact that Ambler has dropped hints (“When Latimer looked back at this time later….”) can reassure us that his main character will not come to a sticky end. Latimer survives in a dramatic ending. Ambler is an elegant stylist who reminds me at times of Graham Greene, but though his element is similar here to some of Greene’s books, Ambler strikes a more optimistic note. The Mask of Dimitrios makes most of the lists of 100 best mysteries, thrillers, and crime novels.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Reginald Hill, A Pinch of Snuff (1978)

             In mystery fiction, the dynamics between a detective and the Watson or sidekick figure are very important. Edgar Allan Poe, who anticipated almost every other feature of successful detective stories, didn’t get this one right: his narrator is nameless and featureless. Doyle got it exactly right with Watson and ever since, authors have been experimenting with the right combination.

            An interesting example is Reginald hill’s pairing of Peter Pascoe and Andrew Dalziel (pronounced DEE-uhl). Pascoe, the character whose thoughts we follow in Reginald hill’s books, is junior to the older, cruder, but not necessarily dumber Dalziel in the Mid-Yorkshire Criminal Investigation Division—Hill isn’t any more specific about his north English setting. Pascoe is young, educated, and idealistic. Dalziel is middle-aged and cynical, with working-class origins and tastes.

            You can see the dynamics in one of Hill’s books from the late seventies, A Pinch of Snuff. Pascoe’s dentist, Jack Shorter, is accused of molesting a fourteen-year-old patient, Sandra Burkill. Pascoe hardly knows Shorter yet he defends him for complicated reasons. One of these is Dalziel, who is a drinking mate of Sandra’s father at the Westgate Social Club, a working-men’s club. Dalziel simply assumes Shorter is guilty. Pascoe’s idealism tells him everyone is entitled to the presumption of innocence, but his advocacy of Shorter has more personal and doubtful motivation than this principle, which he frequently suspends in his police work anyway.

            Shorter has a militant feminist in practice with him—the book was written in the middle of the seventies’ feminist movement—and partly Pascoe is reacting against her blanket indictment of Shorter and all men as guilty. But Pascoe also knows this woman is too much like one aspect of his wife and probably too much like one aspect of himself—a side of Pascoe that his boss Dalziel scoffs and laughs at.

            Events prove Pascoe more or less right. The real investigation is not into Shorter’s case, but concerns a pornographic film company (for whom Shorter’s accuser has worked, by the way) and whether they are involved in making snuff films—that is, movies in which a person on screen is actually killed during the filming. Hence the punning title A Pinch of Snuff.

            Reginald Hill has written a couple of dozen books about Dalziel and Pascoe, beginning with A Clubbable Woman in 1970. The latest one came out in 2009. Some of the books have been filmed for a BBC television series in which Warren Clarke played Dalziel and Colin Buchanan Pascoe.