UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Laura Lippman, The Girl in the Green Raincoat (serialized in The New York Times, 2008; book form 2011)

            Many mysteries have made use of the “armchair detective,” the investigator who solves a crime without leaving his house, merely by deducing the answer from facts brought to him by newspapers or informants. Edgar Allan Poe invented the armchair detective. His Auguste Dupin solves “The Mystery of Marie Roget” by reading newspaper accounts of a young woman’s murder. Other sleuths solve crimes while they are involuntarily immobilized by injury or illness. A broken leg keeps the protagonist of Hitchcock’s Rear Window –based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich—from investigating the murder he sees taking place through a nearby apartment window. In Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, a bedridden detective inspector solves England’s greatest historical crime, the murder of the princes in the Tower.

            Laura Lippman refers to Rear Window and to The Daughter of Time in the opening pages of The Girl in the Green Raincoat, her eleventh book about her reporter turned private investigator, Tess Monaghan. Tess is about to give birth to her first child and because of preeclampsia has been ordered to stay in bed. She chafes at this restriction, but from her new sun porch she can at least watch people walking their dogs in the park. One woman interests her because she and her dog wear outfits of the same celery green. Tess watches the girl in the green raincoat and her dog every afternoon for a week; then one day the dog shows up, running, trailing its green leash, but the woman does not reappear.

            Tess sets her staff to the task of finding the dog’s owner. They find the dog first and then the man who claims that it is his wife’s dog, that he doesn’t want the dog, and that his wife is out of town on business. A little digging shows that this man’s two previous wives and a girl friend all died under mysterious circumstances. When she makes a couple of blunders that let those she is checking on know she is curious about them, things get dangerous for Tess, who is already in a vulnerable position.

            Despite the novella-like brevity of The Girl in the Green Raincoat, we learn more about those around Tess in this than in some of the longer books. The reason is that the book was first serialized in The New York Times in 2008 before book publication in 2011, and Lippman has tried to give some self-sufficiency to each installment by having someone tell a story about themselves to Tess in the course of the plot.

            Tess’s associates include the inimitable Mrs. Blossom, who gives an extraordinary, tautological reason for the serenity of her marriage to Mr. Blossom: “I figured out that being happy made me happier than being unhappy ever did.” Another person who assists Tess’s investigations is her friend since college, Whitney Talbot, who is also a kind of rival of Tess’s. From her parents Tess learns that they were not the political activists she has always assumed they were.

            The Girl in the Green Raincoat is a quick and entertaining read. I think you’ll like it.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Stephen Leather, The Eight Curious Cases of Inspector Zhang (2014)

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 eight stories here are the only ones Leather has written about his Singapore Police Inspector Zhang, who is not eager for publicity about his detective skills, but like Sherlock Holmes, does his work for the sake of the problems he can solve, as long as his faithful attendant, Sergeant Lee, knows his worth, and his other fellow workers. In the first of the stories, “Inspector Zhang Gets His Wish” for a locked-room murder, which allows him to give John Dickson Carr’s Gideon Fell lecture on the subject with similar prolixity. And he allows us to guess the solution by showing us the evidence twice.

Cecilia Wang appears to have shouted “I’m going to jump!” from the ninth story of an apartment building, also shouting her name in response to a question of Inspector Zhang, standing below with his wife. She falls a few seconds later, but the autopsy finds her lungs full of water. “An impossible crime,” says the inspector, gleefully, in “The Falling Woman.”

“The Dead Thai Gangster” was shot, but it couldn’t have happened on the plane Zhang and Sgt. Lee were taking to Bangkok. But he was dead, and had been alive a few minutes before; Zhang solves another impossible crime.

The burglar whose fingerprints are found on the murder weapon as well as his toothmarks on the arm of the murdered woman really does have “The Perfect Alibi”: he was in jail at the time of the murder.           Zhang is a very methodical investigator, and the step-by-step approach he follows allows the reader to see the evidence that Zhang himself sees. The result is that, for the most part, these are fair play mysteries in which the reader has a chance of anticipating the detective’s solution. The pace, as a result, tends to be slow. Often Zhang arrives at his solutions before his Forensics Department has had a chance to process the crime scene. He would rather, as he says often, use “zee little grey cells,” because Zhang is a fan of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot as well as Sherlock Holmes. He is, in fact, a devotee of mystery fiction in general, contemporary as well as going back to the nineteenth century

            “The Hotel Guest” claims to have lost his memory when he was mugged, but Zhang makes a series of deductions from observations of him, supplemented by what he sees in CCTV footage from the hotel elevator, and he solves the “case.” The story is reminiscent of Rodrigues Ottolengui’s “The Nameless Man,” where the detective’s friend Mitchel attempts to fool the detective, Barnes, with a fake amnesiac.

 “The Disappearing Drugs” were supposedly dollied into an empty apartment but then managed to disappear without anyone entering or leaving. The CCTV footage gives Zhang a clue.

“Inspector Zhang goes to Harrogate” is another locked room mystery that Zhang solves by realizing the murder could be committed from outside the room. The occasion for Zhang’s being in England was a surprise birthday trip to a mystery writers’ convention, arranged by his wife, and Zhang revels in every minute of it. The victim, a mystery writer who made himself the best-selling author of eBooks by pricing the electronic versions of his mysteries low, is killed by a jealous rival author. Leather, in fact, was the second-best-selling Kindle author in 2011, and was involved in public disputes with other authors about his methods.

Zhang investigates, in “The Island of the Dead,” the murder of a rich cosmetic surgeon whose specialty is restoring virginity to the deflowered. Like his patients, the case is not what it appears to be. These stories, though a little repetitive and not fast-paced like the thrillers Leather usually writes, are each entertaining; they appeared first as Kindle editions and were collected in 2014.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Mignon G. Eberhart, The Cases of Susan Dare (1934)

 

            These six cases are the only ones Eberhart wrote about Susan Dare, a mystery writer, who is first challenged to do detective work and then eases into it as a second calling. In the first, “Introducing Susan Dare,” the old black servant insists he saw a red ring on the hand that fired the shot that killed the house guest. But the newspaperman, Jim Byrne, the one who urges Susan Dare to solve the mystery before the police can arrest her friend and hostess Christabel Frame, has discovered that the old servant calls flowering wisteria “red.” And Christabel wears an amethyst ring, while the ring always worn by the man Susan suspects is green. Meanwhile some memory, not quite distinctly recalled but perceived none the less as important, will not come clear in her mind.

            Jim Byrne persuades Susan to spend an evening in the home of the Wrays because Caroline Wray is terrified something bad is going to happen there, and the creepy atmosphere soon has Susan thinking so, too. Marie Wray, who was adopted into the family but shares the fortune her adoptive father left her, along with Caroline, old Wray’s real daughter, cousin Jessica, and a male heir. Susan figures out that Marie was killed earlier than everyone thought—everyone but the murderer of course—and the monkey. The story is titled “Spider.”

            The “Easter Devil” is a statuette from Easter Island that is the center of the dread Felicia Denistry feels. Dread, an atmosphere of some impending catastrophe, Susan placed in danger and occasionally requiring rescue by Jim Byrne and his friend Lieutenant Mohrn—these all recur in the stories. Susan is sent by the two men to the Denisty house and figures out the importance of the bridge Felicia must across to get to her French lessons, and that leads her to the identity of the murderer, though she is nearly murdered herself before the story is over.

            Murder at a community theater dress rehearsal of Private Lives is the subject of Susan Dare’s next investigation; she shows up with Jim Byrne just after it has happened, and is detained along with everyone in the company by a constable until the sheriff can arrive to take charge. By that time Susan has determined how vital makeup is to the mystery, and specifically “The Claret Stick.”

            “There is something wrong about the house. Something terribly wrong.” These sentences appear in “The Man Who Was Missing,” but they might equally well be found in any of the other five stories. In this penultimate story, the unnerving location is a boarding house where a French ballet dancer tells Susan her lover has disappeared from. Susan soon locates signs of murder, but the plot gets more and more complicated.

The final story is “The Calico Dog,” an imaginative idea where two men claim to be the heir snatched from the house by a nursemaid when he was four, and they are both living in the mother’s house because she is convinced one is her son, but she doesn’t know which. The ending is extremely complex, and it’s set in a hotel where a ball is going on and a fortune teller’s tent, complete with hangings and a labyrinthine entrance, is set up next door.

Eberhart’s style is clear and evocative, but the emotional temperature is often turned up too high, and Susan Dare seems too reliant on Jim Byrne; though he does really save her at one point, mostly she calls him in when she just gets nervous or wants a sounding board for her suspicions, which are always spot on. Eberhart began writing at the end of the twenties, while Christie had already been writing from the beginning of the decade, but she seems closer to Mary Roberts Rinehart than to Christie or Sayers. Dare will not voice her suspicions until there is some concrete proof that she might be right. This reticence and her timorousness characterize her, though the latter often seems to be a feeling of surrounding danger that is justified by some signs she has already picked up on. The book is in Ellery Queen’s list of the most important mystery short story collections up until the mid-twentieth century.