UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Dorothy Sayers, Whose Body (1923) and The Documents in the Case (1930)

             Dorothy Sayers, in addition to being one of the most popular writers of the Golden Age of Mystery between the wars, was also a scholar of classical and modern languages, a teacher, a playwright, and a translator of Dante. She invented her detective hero, Lord Peter Wimsey (a courtesy title; his older brother is a duke), in a 1923 novel, Whose Body, which had mixed reviews but began a very successful writing career in which Wimsey was featured in eleven novels and dozens of short stories. In Whose Body, a macabre crime involves switching the body of a murder victim with that of a pauper brought from the workhouse where he died to a teaching hospital, with the idea that the murder victim’s body will be dissected in the anatomy classes. The murderer transports the pauper’s body to the bathtub of an architect whose apartment shares a rooftop with his own. The murdered man is then dissected in the lab and an attempt made to remove all traces of his identity. But some distinctive scars remain.

            Lord Peter Wimsey alternately charms witnesses or stuns them with elaborate stories and persiflage. His friendship with Parker, a Scotland Yard chief inspector, gives him access there. Lord Peter’s valet/butler Bunter was his sergeant during the war and treats his occasional episodes of shell-shock. Bunter is also Wimsey’s crime photographer and research assistant. The Dowager Duchess of Denver is one of the characters, almost as bloviating as Lord Peter, but equally sharp of observation. The older brother, the current Duke, is little more than a caricature of the aristocracy.

            Sayers also wrote a non-Wimsey mystery, The Documents in the Case with Robert Eustace, whose real name was Eustace Robert Barton, the doctor who collaborated with L. T. Meade [Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith] on several mystery story collections around the turn of the century. He may merely have made the initial suggestion about how a poisoning might be discovered, as well as giving other technical advice. The discovery turns on the fact that for certain compounds, including the poison in one variety of mushroom, the natural compound is composed of one enantiomorph, while the synthetic, laboratory-produced compound is racemic, mixed equally of the two enantiomorphs and thus not rotating light left or right in a polarimeter.

            Sayers elected to tell the story in letters or transcripts of statements by different characters, adopting an approach that was popular in 18^th and 19^th century fiction (Clarissa, the original draft of Pride and Prejudice and The Moonstone) but somewhat passé in 1930. Her only epistolary mystery novel is also her only collaboration and her only mystery without Lord Peter Wimsey.

            Novelist John Munting, sharing rooms with the artist Harwood Lathom, becomes entangled with Lathom first by being mistaken for him one night when Lathom is visiting his mistress and landlady Margaret Harrison, and later when he accompanies Lathom to a remote cabin belonging to Harrison’s husband George, whom the two men find dead, apparently having mistakenly cooked and eaten poisonous mushrooms. Harrison’s son Paul investigates knowing his father would not have made such a mistake. A crazy servant in the Harrison’s household and later a venal one in Lathom’s help complicate and then elucidate the mystery, respectively.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: The Best American Mystery Stories 2005, edited by Joyce Carol Oates (2005)

             The first mystery in The Best American Mystery Stories 2005 is really a crime story, and an indication why Joyce Carol Oates was chosen to edit this collection, since she’s not a mystery writer. The books she writes under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly, sometimes billed as mysteries, are crime stories where family secrets come slowly out in the narration, hardly mysteries in the usual genre sense. Such quibbling takes nothing away from her literary judgment though, and this collection contains topnotch stories that have appeared not only in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine but also in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic, and various small magazines.

            Many will consider the jewel of the collection to be the longish story called “Jack Duggan’s Law,” written by George V. Higgins. Higgins, who wrote the mystery classic The Friends of Eddie Coyle, died in 1999, and this story’s delayed publication in 2005 may make it the last of his works to see print.

            But there are other treats as well. Stuart Kaminsky has a story called “The Shooting of John Roy Worth,” where we learn in the first few paragraphs that the town’s sign painter, probably mentally retarded and certainly mentally disturbed, intends to kill the only celebrity from the little town of Pardo, Texas. From there the story moves toward its conclusion quickly and inevitably. But Kaminsky’s rapidly drawn, convincing characters provide a surprise ending.

            Scott Wolven’s story, “Barracuda,” describes in the best hard-boiled tradition an upstate New York subculture in which the usual human virtues of honesty, loyalty, and pity have no place.

            Here’s the opening from a story by Dennis Lehane that he calls “Until Gwen”:

  Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat. Two minutes into the ride, the prison still hanging tilted in the rearview, Mandy tells you that she only hooks part-time. The rest of the time she does light secretarial for an independent video chain and tends bar, two Sundays a month, at the local VFW. But she feels her calling—her true calling in life—is to write.

            That opening, which I would characterize as Elmore Leonard meets Garrison Keillor, might fool you into thinking that “Until Gwen” will be a comic story. But it keeps on getting darker and darker until, as Lehane himself admits in the biographical notes at the end of the book, “it ended up being arguably the darkest thing I’ve ever written.” And that, coming from the man who wrote Mystic River, is dark indeed.

            On the other hand, Daniel Orozco’s story, “Officers Weep,” really is funny throughout. Orozco manages to present a mystery, a love story, and some urban social comedy while never deviating from the form of police reports, a sequence of them from two lines to two dozen lines long  It’s an ingenious narrative device, and Orozco captures the authentic sound of police lingo.

            Among these and the fifteen other stories in this collection, I think you’ll find something you like.