UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake (1943)

            Philip Marlowe is hired by a cosmetics executive, Derace Kingsley, to find his kleptomaniac and nymphomaniac wife, Crystal, who disappeared a month before. She wired from El Paso to say she was getting a Mexican divorce and marrying one of her many boytoys, Chris Lavery. Marlowe interviews Lavery and discovers his neighbor, a doctor named Albert Almore, once treated Crystal Kingsley. Almore is very nervous about someone snooping around and sends a local cop to shoo Marlowe away. Marlowe learns from Kingsley that Almore’s wife committed suicide.

            Marlowe talks to the caretaker of the lake cabin where Crystal was last living. His name is Bill Chess, and very soon he and Marlowe find his wife, Muriel, at the bottom of Fawn Lake. She left him a month ago after his dalliance with Crystal Kingsley, on the same day Crystal left the cabin. Muriel left a note saying she’d rather be dead that live with Bill any longer. The local newspaperwoman tells Marlowe that two weeks before Muriel disappeared, an LA cop named DeSoto was looking for a woman named Mildred Haviland, whose picture could have been that of Muriel Chess, with different hair and eyebrows.

            The local constable, Jim Patton, and Marlowe find a locket hidden in a sugar box in Chess’s cabin that is engraved “From Al to Mildred,” clinching the fact that Muriel was Mildred Haviland. Patton has arrested Bill Chess, and has found Muriel’s car, with full suitcases in it, hidden in a nearby abandoned garage. Marlowe thinks the locket and the searcher for Mildred Haviland indicate that Bill was not Muriel’s murderer.

            Marlowe learns that Lavery met Crystal Kingsley in San Bernardino before she left for El Paso, and that he went in a cab to the station with her.  But when he goes to talk to Lavery again, he finds a woman there who says she’s the landlady and who’s found a gun on the stairs. She disappears and Marlowe finds Lavery dead of two gunshots in his shower. When Marlowe tries to talk to the investigator hired by Ardmore’s dead wife, the Bay City police rough him up and arrest him; it looks like there are three murders so far, and one more before the book is very much farther along.

            Chandler’s plots tend to be complicated, like this one, and his style has a lot of Los Angeles wise-guy talk, but mostly straightforward prose. One feature of it is that when Marlowe meets someone new or enters a building, we get a very detailed description. Sometimes the details help to point to aspects of character or class or taste, but often they seem to be there for no other reason than to show us Marlowe’s powers of observation. Once in a while, an allusion will come out that indicates Marlowe is not merely street-smart; a woman is described by Marlowe as pleading “like the erring wife in East Lynne,” for example. Here is an exchange that shows something of the style:

            There was a desk and a night clerk with one of those mustaches that get stuck under your fingernail….Degarmo lunged past the clerk….The clerk snapped at Degarmo’s back like a terrier.

            “One moment, please. Whom did you wish to see?”

            Degarmo spun on his heel and looked at me wonderingly. “Did he say ‘whom’?”

            “Yeah, but don’t hit him,” I said. “There is such a word.”

            Degarmo licked his lips. “I knew there was,” he said. “I often wondered where they kept it.”

            The Lady in the Lake has a nice twist to its ending, concerning the lady of the title. I’m not sure it makes everything clear, but that’s another aspect of Chandler’s plots that people often comment on. The story goes that the people making the movie of The Big Sleep got so confused by the plot that they called Chandler to ask for clarification. Chandler told them their guess was as good as his. Another surprising feature of the ending is the quick draw that takes place as the bad guy faces off with a rural county constable in California hill country. Critics like John Cawelti and Paul Skenazy have talked about the closeness of the Western and the detective story genres, but Chandler’s high noon episode is still funny and surprising.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Margery Allingham, Mr Campion and Others (1939)

            Because he’s a connoisseur of hundred-year-old cognac, Albert Campion ends up as the representative of his spirits merchant at a gathering where the pitch is a machine that ages cognac; in this case, Campion manages to hand over to his friend, Superintendent Stanislaus Oates, a notorious wanted criminal, “The Widow,” in the first of a baker’s dozen of short stories featuring Allingham’s society man about town. The stories were published separately in the thirties, ending with 1939, the year the war began, which also saw the publication of the collection. Campion also has an arcane knowledge of rings where semi-precious stones’ first letters spell out the name of the person to whom they’re given. This knowledge helps net him another catch for Oates, a country-house burglar, in “The Name on the Wrapper.” Campion is able to help out an old friend and his new love and to prevent the new love’s father from falling victim to a con man, in “The Hat Trick.” A silver merchant gives Campion a hint that helps him crack burglaries that targeted old silver, in a story, “The Question Mark,” with more than even the usually high Allingham quotient of coincidence.

            Allingham was notoriously coy about Campion’s background, but he is clearly an aristocrat who hobnobs with nobles and possibly even royals. From the more than two dozen novels and short story collections featuring the character, readers have gleaned that Albert Campion is a pseudonym, that he is a younger brother but probably succeeded to the title—possibly viscount—at some point. The Wikipedia article on “Albert Campion” teases all this out.

            How could a reputable doctor think a man was dead and then find him hale and hearty two hours later? So Campion asks himself in “The Man in the Window.” Juliet Fyssher-Sprigge, a young friend of Campion’s, involves him and Oates, through her fiancé and his mother, in another burglary case and a frantic trip to France, in “The White Elephant.” When a French jewel dealer comes to London and promptly disappears, in “The Frenchman’s Gloves,” Campion has to figure out what is going on, with some help from Oates. Slumming and reminiscing with an old friend, Campion finds evidence of a kidnaping. He and the friend investigate; the story is “The Longer View.”

            These little mysteries that have been hovering close to Campion, starting with girls he knows or old friends, finally come closer in “Safe as Houses,” featuring the formidable Great Aunt Charlotte and her moral imbecile of a son. Neither Oates nor Campion’s friend Lance Feering likes Campion’s pickpocket pal Cassy Wild, even though Cassy delivers to Oates the perpetrator of the evening’s crime, as “The Meaning of the Act” takes us into espionage and the war years. Campion’s advice to the snobbery of his friends is “Take a drink with anyone and pick your pals where you find’ em.” A safecracker devises a scheme to get government and private offices to give him information about the kinds of safes they have—he specializes in only Bream safes—by filling out what look like official government forms, in “A Matter of Form.” And in the last story, “The Danger Point,” a stolen pearl necklace becomes a means to try to extort a young woman into an unwanted marriage.

            The Campion of these stories is not the Lord-Peter-Wimsey wannabee of the early novels. He is at ease in the high society world where many of his friends and family are to be found, and equally at ease with the Cassy Wilds of the underworld and the ordinary police people of Superintendent Oates’s world. He is knowledgeable without being prepossessing or pedantic, observant well beyond the average, and quick to make connections. “The Meaning of the Act” provides an example: after an evening in which Campion watches an “Egyptian” dancer’s act and another of her spectators is struck on the head, Oates visits Campion and tells him he’s in over his head in espionage matters about which he knows nothing, and he needs to forget everything he saw that evening and think no more about it. Campion offers Oates a drink, and with no further information than his recalling that the injured man was in the code-breaking section of intelligence during the last war, he figures out the whole case while Oates consumes his drink.

            Mr Campion and Others is on Ellery Queen’s Queen’s Quorum (1951) list of the most important detective-crime collections of short stories published during the first hundred years of the genre.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Ross Macdonald [Kenneth Millar], The Underground Man (1971)

            The hot Santa Ana winds are blowing down from the southern California mountains, and the highlands are on fire around Santa Teresa, Macdonald’s fictionalized version of Santa Barbara. The fire started when a lighted cigarillo was dropped by Stanley Broadhurst as he was being stabbed to death. When detective Lew Archer investigates, he soon finds one murder on top of another, literally and figuratively, a plot development that is partly telegraphed by the book’s title. Stanley Broadhurst was obsessed with finding out about the father who deserted him and Stanley’s mother when the boy was three—just about the age that Kenneth Millar (Ross Macdonald’s real name) was when his father abandoned him and his mother. Though the author is too smart to imbue his detective with such a past or passion, intergenerational dynamics are a spring for Millar’s plots, which often require Archer to delve into the past and discover what a character may have witnessed as a child, how she or he was treated by parents, and just how present the past is in everyone’s lives. Because parents have often remarried, the family lines can get complicated. Reviewing this book for the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, Ted Gioia confesses “I even had to construct a chart to help me navigate” (https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-underground-man-at-age-50).

            Julian Symons says in his history of the detective novel (Bloody Murder) that Millar “fulfilled his ambition to use the crime story as a vehicle for conveying psychological truths.” A result is that the books are less bloody than those of his contemporary crime writers and that Archer moves through them as a sympathetic interviewer of the characters rather than a main figure who stands out as one who attracts violence. Critics are divided about which is Millar’s best book, with The Galton Case (1959) and The Chill (1963) vying with The Underground Man as candidates. All of them have, in addition to the psychological intensity, a poetic sense of southern California as an Eden after the Fall.