UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop (1919)

           Christopher Morley was a newspaper reporter and an essayist in the grand days of the personal and literary essay, when every newspaper and magazine featured them. Morley will be familiar to Sherlock Holmes fans as the man who wrote the introduction to the standard Doubleday edition of The Complete Sherlock Holmes. He worked for a while as an editor at Doubleday. Altogether Morley wrote more than a hundred books of essays, poems, and fiction. The Haunted Bookshop was published in 1919 and combines Morley’s passion for books with his love of mystery.

            Roger and Helen Mifflin own “Parnassus at Home,” a Brooklyn used-book store on Gissing Avenue (all the proper names in the book, by the way, have literary origins and come from the names of authors, or characters, or publishers).  Roger and Helen are visited by an enthusiastic young advertising writer named Aubrey Gilbert. Then the prune magnate George Chapman gets them to hire his pretty daughter Titania as a live-in clerk.  Meanwhile a mystery develops concerning disappearing and reappearing copies of a collection of Oliver Cromwell's letters and speeches.

            Aubrey comes back to see the Mifflins and of course falls in love with Titania.  He is waylaid on his way home, after finding the cover of the Cromwell book in a drugstore.  He begins to keep a watch on the bookstore, taking a room across the street, and he hears the ruffians who attacked him trying to get in the back yard of the bookstore. 

            When we find out that the Cromwell book is one of Woodrow Wilson's favorites, we begin to put together the fact that Wilson is about to leave for a peace conference, that three cooks from a nearby Brooklyn hotel have been hired to accompany him, and that one of the cooks advertised the loss of the Cromwell book and was seen with it. The intrigue surrounding the bookshop has to do with various international concerns at the end of the First World War: among them opposition to Wilson’s proposed League of Nations, German nationalism and resentment at the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and the threat of anarchists and revolutionary Bolsheviks.

            Aubrey first suspects that Roger Mifflin is involved with some of these elements when he sees a man use a key to go into the bookshop in the middle of the night and recognizes him as the druggist from the shop where the Cromwell book keeps disappearing and reappearing. Eventually Gilbert rescues Titania and Roger from a bomb-throwing villain.

            The bookshop is haunted, not by any frightening ghosts, but by the spirits of writers and their works. The story is dated, and in its treatment of Titania and her romance with Gilbert, more than a little twee, but those are precisely its charms. And it is old enough to be in the public domain, so you can download The Haunted Bookshop for free from various sites on the web.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Philip MacDonald, Something to Hide (1952)

             MacDonald’s collection of six short stories won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for achievement in the category of the short story in 1953, and Ellery Queen included it in his Queen’s Quorum of short story collections important to the development of the crime-mystery genre. Only one of the stories features Anthony Gethryn, the detective who appears in many of MacDonald’s novels and short stories, beginning with The Rasp in 1924.

            The first two stories present the duo of Doctor Alcazar, a carnival fortune-teller, and Avvie, the carny’s weight-guesser who becomes Alcazar’s sidekick. In “The Green and Gold String,” Alcazar’s cockney client is murdered shortly after she consults him, and her employer offers a hefty reward that he and Avvie go after. Alcazar preserves the idea that he is a clairvoyant, and he is able to solve the mystery, which becomes very personal for the woman who offered the reward, Gloria Druse. But Alcazar and Avvie operate very much in the real world, with Avvie doing the information-gathering and Alcazar the deduction.  Gloria Druse also features in the second story, “Something to Hide.” When Alcazar and Avvie show up in Los Angeles again, broke and looking for a way to make some easy money, Gloria tells them of her friend Olga’s fears for a brother-in-law who didn’t show up when he was supposed to at her house. But before Alcazar can offer to use his powers to solve the disappearance, Olga the skeptic has to be convinced he’s got them. He and Avvie stage-manage a robbery and near-fatal accident for Olga, having predicted the whole thing in advance, and she is convinced. The fake clairvoyant who does real detective work is reminiscent of Gelett Burgess’s character Astro in The Master of Mysteries (1912).

            “The Wood-for-the-Trees” is the only Anthony Gethryn story here—and the only one not set in America--and the title is a clue to what he realizes about a string of serial murders that enables him to solve them. The fourth story, “Malice Domestic,” is bound to remind aficionados of Malice Aforethought by Anthony Berkeley Cox, writing as Francis Iles (1931). But that book is an inverted mystery, where we know who did it from the beginning, while “Malice Domestic” preserves its surprises until the end.

            “Love Lies Bleeding” is more horror story than mystery, although it too, has its surprises. A gay couple, it turns out, have more in common than either thought. The last story, “The Fingers of Fear,” introduces a new detective, a southern California police lieutenant, who may not be as brilliant as Anthony Gethryn, but is smart enough to realize he may have found the wrong suspect in a child killing, and brave enough to risk his job to keep an innocent man from being convicted.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: John D. MacDonald, The Deep Blue Goodbye (1964)

              The Deep Blue Goodbye began a very successful series about Travis McGee, not exactly a detective, but a man who retrieves valuable things from those who have wrongly taken them away from their rightful owners. McGee lives as if retired until he needs money; then he takes on a retrieving job. McGee lives aboard a houseboat called The Busted Flush, named from the hand that began a winning streak in a poker game that eventually won him the boat.

            He doesn’t like a lot of things about modern American life. “I am wary,” he says, of “plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny… I am also wary of earnestness.”

            Some of this is just silly, of course, but McGee has a theory very prescient for 1964 about technology crowding out ordinary people from jobs that are meaningful and that have incomes one can live on. Less timely are his views about women—about “ladies” who seem to represent a kind of ideal for him but who aren’t quite up to surviving the hard knocks of life, versus the much hardier stock who thrive in the poorer classes. But whatever his views about them, his instinct is to protect them, nurse them when they’re hurt, and sleep with them if they offer.

            Junior Allen, the villain in this book, has a lot of the features of the villain in MacDonald’s The Executioners (1957—filmed twice with the title Cape Fear): a very cunning and seemingly unstoppable monster—an incarnation of evil. This book moves inexorably toward a confrontation between McGee and Allen, which happens out at sea.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: S. S. Van Dine [Willard Huntington Wright], The Benson Murder Case (1926)

             In the first of Willard Huntington Wright’s Philo Vance mysteries, a prominent stockbroker, Alvin Benson, is murdered in his Manhattan apartment. The district attorney, John Markham, happens to be with his friend, the art collector and dilletante Philo Vance, when he gets the call, and they go to the murder scene together. So does Vance’s sidekick and narrator of his adventures, never called anything but Van Dine or just Van.

Philo Vance has theories about solving murders that go directly against those of his friend and the police: he thinks physical evidence and circumstantial evidence merely distract investigators, that motive and confessions are of no value, and that the only useful approach to solving crime is the psychological. At this point in Vance’s exposition, I realized why I had been irritated at Van Dine’s descriptions of characters as he introduced them. He describes them in great detail and frequently uses comparisons with art works (Wright was an art critic before he realized how much money there was in popular fiction). Then he proceeds to extrapolate aspects of attitude and behavior from the physical features. Thus, he is conditioning us to accept the bushwa of Vance’s theories.

Vance believes that everything one does is a result of one’s psychological personality. In chapters six and eight, he asserts these theories in his affected manner, which is partly an aping of Britishisms, including dropping final g’s and syllables (inev’tability,” “prob’bly,” “mod’rated,”), calling people “old dear” and saying “’pon my word” and “don’t y’know” often, referring often to the world of visual art, and generally being polysyllabic, pedantic, and irritating. He also piles on quotations, in French, German, and Latin, that, along with his allusions, are often wrenched into the context without any real congruence.

It turns out that Vance is quite acute at observation of plain old facts, however, and one of the striking early moments of the book is Vance’s demonstration, using ballistics lines and angles, that the murderer has to be have been about six feet tall—therefore eliminating the woman, Muriel St. Cyr, who had dinner with Benson the night of the murder. Markham had become fixated on her as the main murder suspect and seemed about to arrest her. This pattern is repeated later, as Markham fixates on St. Cyr’s fiancée, and Vance has to restrain him from that arrest. Ultimately, Vance protracts his explication of the murder by casting doubt on each suspect’s alibi and building a circumstantial case against each of them in turn. It’s annoyin’, don’t y’know?

In Wright’s defense, he manages to keep a number of suspects in play as possibilities for the murderer until late in the book. The Benson Murder Case is on the list of “Detective Story Cornerstones” compiled by Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen.