UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Cold Slice: A Working Man’s Mystery, by L. T. Fawkes (copyright Margo Pierce Dorksen, 2003).

            Terry Saltz is a carpenter who is out of work and fresh out of jail as this book begins.  He got drunk and into a bar fight, ended up in jail, and as a result lost his job, his wife, and his brand-new truck.  It was the truck that hurt most.

            Terry straightens himself out, stops drinking, gets a job delivering pizza, and finds a community of real friends.  When one of the other drivers at the pizza place is murdered, Terry and his friends take it on themselves to find the murderer.

            Mystery booksellers created a new classification for this book: the trailer park mystery.  But don’t expect satire: the book is, if anything, too reverential in its treatment of characters who work hard for a living and don’t always get along too well with the cops.  Its subtitle is “A Working Man’s Mystery.”

            Everyone around Terry Saltz has a nickname.  Terry wants to be called Muzzy, a local word for a bad boy, druggie type.  Someone calls him that as a joke, and Terry likes it.  But the nickname won’t stick; no one will use it.  Terry, finally, isn’t the bad boy type.  The book was originally titled Muzzy and its publishing history shows some things about the way mysteries get into the bookstores these days.  Margo Pierce Dorksen, the author—L. T. Fawkes is her pen name—apparently could not find a traditional publisher for her first mystery.  So it appeared through iPublish.com, a brief experiment Time Warner tried in 2001.  iPublish.com offered electronic book downloads and on-demand print copies of its titles, and it disappeared before the end of 2001, but by that time Muzzy had already received the most votes in an on-line contest for the most popular iPublish.com title.  Meanwhile, Dorksen had another Terry Saltz book either finished or almost ready, and Signet republished her first book as a paperback, retitled it Cold Slice, and promised that there were more Terry Saltz mysteries on the way.  No one except an established author can now sell single mysteries to publishers; prospective authors must approach publishers with two finished and more planned.

            Cold Slice has a lot of detail about the running of a pizza parlor, the way orders are taken and distributed among drivers, the peak in business on nights when it rains, and so on.  There is also a fair amount of detail about carpentry, because Terry gets back into his real work as the book progresses.  It’s not a fast-moving or an especially unguessable plot, but it takes its time creating characters and showing their growing bonds.  I think you might like it, and if you do, there are now more Terry Saltz mysteries.

 

Clare Clarke, British Detective Fiction 1891-1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

           Clarke sets out to look at the detective fiction published during Sherlock Holmes’s absence, that is, from the time Conan Doyle killed him off at the Reichenbach Falls, along with Professor Moriarty, in “The Final Problem,” which came out in the December, 1893 issue of The Strand Magazine, and Holmes’s return in The Hound of the Baskervilles, whose first instalment appeared in the Strand in 1901.

            Most of the successors to Sherlock Holmes during this period which Holmes fans call “the hiatus,” began their lives in the pages of periodicals like the monthly Strand and its imitators/rivals, Pearson’s, Windsor, Ludgate, and Harmsworth magazines, as well as weekly magazines and city newspapers. Clarke examines a sampling of the many authors who published detective fiction during this time, choosing six writers. She begins with a writer second only to Conan Doyle himself in the number of stories published in the Strand, L. T. Meade. She selects from the six series of detective stories published by Meade in the Strand two: Stories from the Diary of a Doctor, which appeared there from 1893 to 1895 and were collected in two volumes in 1894 and 1896; and The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, serialized and then published in book form in 1898.

            Next, she looks at C. L. Pirkis’s The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, serialized in the Ludgate Magazine, which Clarke calls “a female-oriented version of the Strand,” in 1893-1894 and appearing in book form the 1894. Then she turns to Arthur Morrison’s two detectives. The law-abiding one, Martin Hewitt, showed up in the Strand in 1894, while the criminal one, Horace Dorrington, was apparently a little too strong for the conservative Strand and was featured in Windsor Magazine in 1897. She turns then to Fergus Hume’s remarkable stories about the Romany girl Hagar Stanley which were published in provincial newspapers in Liverpool and Woolwich in 1897 and in book form the following year as Hagar of the Pawn-Shop.

            Her penultimate detective is an aristocrat, Augustus Champnell, who appeared first in short stories in newspapers in Manchester, Leeds, and Newcastle between July, 1895 and October, 1899 and came out in book form as An Aristocratic Detective in 1900. Finally, Clarke discusses the Flaxman Low stories written by Kate Prichard and her son, Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard, serialized in Pearson’s Magazine in 1898 and 1899 and published in 1899 as Ghosts: Being the Experiences of Flaxman Low. Clarke makes the argument that detectives like Low who investigate “diabolical agency” instead of confining themselves, like Sherlock Holmes, to material signs and material agency are a product of a certain genre fluidity inevitable as authors were in the process of inventing what detective fiction was going to be.

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Ruth Dudley Edwards, Murdering Americans (2007)

Ruth Dudley Edwards  is a historian, journalist, and biographer, born in Ireland and now living in London, who  began writing mystery fiction in 1981. Murdering Americans is her eleventh crime novel. Her detective here is the rightwing Lady Troutbeck , a member of the House of Lords by virtue of her title and also the head of St. Martha’s College in Cambridge    (a wholly fictional college, by the way). Ida, Lady Troutbeck, who insists on being called Jack, is a Margaret Thatcher Conservative, and the trouble starts when she accepts an invitation to teach at an American college. Jack descends on Freeman University in Indiana as a distinguished faculty visitor, and discovers a corrupt president and a violently repressive provost who, under the aegis of diversity, imposes a tyrannical political correctness. Political correctness is Jack’s meat; she likes nothing better than to do battle with it, always from her own particular political perspective. We might almost expect we were dealing with a political tract here, except Jack’s politics and methods are so over-the-top. Also the book is funny in taking its shots at liberalism. We know how seriously to take things from the beginning, when Jack is detained by security at the airport because of something that her parrot said.

Also, of course, there is something for Jack to investigate. The former provost died under mysterious circumstances. Students are beaten up or expelled if they try to demand that teachers teach.  Jack mounts a revolution of dissatisfied students on Founder’s Day and all turns out well.  She doesn’t really solve the crime, but she happens to have her pistol with her (illegal, of course) and she shoots the boy who presumably murdered the provost and the provost’s goon, when the boy tries to kill someone else at the Founder’s Day activities.

Before this dénouement, though, Jack has to try to make the culinary desert of New Paddington, Indiana livable.  She enlists the aid of a willing student to help with this task, but when she tries to hire other students to help her investigation of the college administration, the students meet with a mysterious accident. Jack is up to the challenge, though, and brings in her own help in the form of her young friend Robert Amiss, who is the detective in some of Edwards’s earlier books.

If your politics match those of Edwards’s Jack Troutbeck, you’ll enjoy this book. And if you’re of a more liberal persuasion but can laugh at liberalism’s excesses, you may like it, too. The trick here is to disregard the book’s not so subtle, Anne Coulterish implication that liberalism itself is the problem, leading to repressive and violent behavior.