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.
No comments:
Post a Comment