UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Penelope Fitzgerald, The Golden Child, (Colin Duckworth, 1977; rpt. Mariner, 1999).

            Penelope Fitzgerald is a British novelist who did not begin publishing until she was in her sixties, but who eventually won England’s top literary award, the Booker Prize, as well as the National Book Critics Award in this country.  Her first book, The Golden Child, is a mystery based on the Tutankhamen exhibition which came to London’s British Museum in 1972.  But the museum in the book is not quite the British Museum, though it resembles it; the Golden Child of the title, a gold-encrusted mummy, is not quite Tutankhamen; his country of origin is not Egypt but “Garamantia;” and the museum director is not quite Lord Kenneth Clark, though he looks and acts like him.  And unlike the Tutankhamen exhibit, this one turns out to be a fake; the thousands of people in folded queues in the famous courtyard are unaware that the mummy in the gilded sarcophagus is not the adolescent king but a much more modern corpse covered with gold-leaf.

            The quirky staff of the museum, besides the Kenneth Clark look-alike, includes a precious aristocrat his coworkers call the May Queen, a ubiquitous assistant known only as Jones—whose name turns out to be Jones Jones—the cantankerous old Sir William, discoverer of the real treasure of the Golden Child, and Sir William’s sleepy, insouciant, six-month’s pregnant secretary Dousha Vartarian.

            Fitzgerald shows a Dickensian playfulness about names, such as that of Professor Untermensch, the expert on hieroglyphics.  The book has a parody Frenchman, a sort of combination of Jacques Derrida and Claude Levi-Strauss.  There’s a little touch of P. G. Wodehouse and more than a little reminder of Waugh as the museum employee at the bottom of the food chain is the one singled out for an intrigue-filled trip to Moscow, where he uncovers the real Golden Child artifacts and the international Cold War politics that dictate that a fake one be sent to England.  The British ambassador to Garamantia, where the Golden Child came from, is, according to the museum director, “Pombo Greene, whom I have known, since he was in my election at Eton, to be exceptionally foolish and incompetent.”

            The book has an orthodox mystery plot with a couple of murders, but its strength is social comedy, and its conclusion is a farcical scene which satisfies our desire for poetic justice.  Fitzgerald died in 2002, shortly after this book was reissued in a Mariner paperback.  It’s her only mystery.

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Amanda Cross [Carolyn Heilbrun], In the Last Analysis (1964)

Uncommon Mysteries is the heading I’m using for brief notes I’ve made about mysteries I found odd, or especially good, or memorable in some other way. Some of these notes were broadcast as fillers on a public radio station, WKMS, in Murray, Kentucky, a decade ago. Others are new.

             Kate Fansler teaches literature at an unnamed private university in New York. A student of hers, Janet Harrison, asks her to recommend a psychiatrist. The year is 1962, and psychiatry is all the rage. Fansler is not sure she believes in psychiatrists, but she has slept with one, and she gives her student the name of her former lover, Dr. Emanuel Bauer. Several months later Fansler discovers that Janet Harrison has been found, murdered, on Emanuel Bauer’s couch.

            It appears that the police have no intention of investigating the murder beyond finding more evidence to incriminate their only suspect, Dr. Bauer. Fansler decides to do a little investigating herself. She enlists the aid of an old friend, Reed Amherst, who is an Assistant District Attorney, and she is also helped by Jerry, a young man about to marry her niece.  Fansler figures out that Janet learned a secret about the offices Dr. Bauer shares with other doctors. Specifically, she discovered that the gynecologist in the adjoining office is not in fact Dr. Michael Barrister, whose name is on the door. Harrison, it turns out, had once been the real Barrister's lover. So the book, in the last analysis, is very much a tale of former lovers.

            A literary allusion to D.H.Lawrence's The Rainbow tips Fansler off to the truth.  And that’s fitting because Amanda Cross was the pseudonym of Carolyn Heilbrun, an English literature scholar who taught for many years at Columbia. In 1972 Heilbrun became the first woman tenured and promoted to a full professorship at Columbia, a fact and a date that implies a good deal of resistance to women and an old school, old boy network at that university. Not surprisingly, Heilbrun became a feminist.

            In the Last Analysis was the first of Heilbrun’s Kate Fansler mysteries, and for a time only the publishers knew the identity of these books’ author. By the time Heilbrun was revealed as Amanda Cross, she had tenure, and there couldn’t be any reprisals for some of the highly unflattering depictions of her colleagues that show up in her books. Heilbrun wrote fourteen Kate Fansler novels in all, and this first one is less concerned with academic life than most of the others. The series ended with The Edge of Doom, published a year before her death. She also wrote books of literary criticism and personal books about writing, about being a woman author

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Rudolph Fisher’s The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem (1932)

             The first known mystery novel written by an African-American is Rudolph Fisher’s The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem.  Fisher wrote it in 1932, and it was reprinted a few years ago by the University of Michigan Press. In it Dr. Archer, a Harlem physician, is summoned at about eleven one evening to a house across 130th Street from his own, where a psychic with the comic name Frimbo has apparently been killed.

            A black homicide detective named Perry Dart is called in, and he and Archer together investigate the murder, interrogating the usual small list of suspects, including a numbers runner, the undertaker whose parlor is on the ground floor of the psychic’s office, the undertaker’s beautiful young wife, a Pullman porter for the New York-Chicago Twentieth-Century Limited, and a drug addict who thinks Frimbo has put a spell on his dying brother and who admits to trying to put a murderous spell on Frimbo. All those present mention the psychic’s hired man, who ushered his clients in and out of the psychic’s presence; this man has apparently disappeared, and we clever readers begin to suspect that perhaps he doesn’t exist; perhaps the psychic did his own reception work in disguise.  The truth turns out to be a little more complicated, however.

            Fisher includes a man seemingly resurrected from the dead, plenty of disguise, the use of blood testing and dental records to establish identity, a love triangle, and a Harvard-educated African tribal chief.

            The story wouldn’t pass the rules of fair-play detective mysteries, where all the suspects have to be part of the action from the beginning, but there’s hardly a dull moment.  The language is frank for the most part, and the view from the inside of black Harlem society of theaters, poolrooms and psychic parlors is fascinating, as is the view of Africa as something exotic and unknown.  There are a few—not many—topical references, among them one to Lindbergh’s flight, one only to the Depression, and one to a “television receptor” in Frimbo’s up-to-date laboratory.  But the book is fun because it’s a real period-piece.  It feels like the thirties not because its author is trying to recreate an era, but because he’s really writing in the thirties, so the speech of black Harlem and all the slang rings true. 

            Rudolph Fisher was a doctor who wrote novels and short stories.  He lived in Harlem and on Long Island, and he is generally considered one of the core figures of the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and thirties.  He died a couple of years after The Conjure-Man Dies was published.  This is his only attempt at mystery fiction.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Edmund Crispin [Robert Bruce Montgomery], The Moving Toyshop (1946)

             Richard Cadogan, the poet, is a friend of Gervase Fen, the Oxford professor who solves crimes (just as Philip Larkin, the poet and dedicatee of the book, was a friend of Bruce Montgomery, the Oxford don, who wrote mysteries. So, naturally, when Cadogan gets involved in a murder as he enters Oxford for a holiday, he goes to Fen for help.

            The plot is wearily complex and involves a series of heirs to a fortune, each identified by an Edward Lear limerick by the woman who is giving them her fortune because each of them does her some kindness and she doesn’t particularly like the relative who is the main heir. They all will inherit if the main heir fails to return to England and claim the fortune within a given time. Thus we have a motive. The lawyer handling all this decides to murder the main heir, and so do some of the alternates, more successfully.

            Fen’s eccentricities and the constant play with language and allusions make the book amusing, as do the activities of those Fen enlists to help him in the investigation.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: J. J. Connington, Mystery at Lynden Sands (1928)

Uncommon Mysteries is the heading I’m using for brief notes I’ve made about mysteries I found odd, or especially good, or memorable in some other way. Some of these notes were broadcast as fillers on a public radio station, WKMS, in Murray, Kentucky, a decade ago. Others are new.

J. J. Connington was the pseudonym of Alfred Walter Stewart. Stewart was a chemist and his seventeen novels about Sir Clinton Driffield (this is the fourth) often have scientific aspects; in this one the role of amyl nitrate in a murder is one issue, and there is a later ruse about hydrophobia and its serum.

            Driffield’s Watson is Wendover, whose first name is never given, but Driffield calls him “squire.” On a seaside golfing vacation at Lynden Sands, they encounter the murders of the caretaker of Foxhill, an unoccupied manor house near the resort hotel on the beach, and of a ne’er-do-well grifter who turns out to be the first husband, long thought to be dead, of Cressida Fleetwood, née Fordingbridge. Her family owns Foxhill, though there are questions about who is the current heir. A claimant has returned from the war and may or may not be the missing Derek Fordingbridge. Along with possible bigamy and murder, the plot includes embezzlement, a mysterious young Frenchwoman, and what appears to be a small gang of crooks living nearby.

            Steinbrunner and Penzler (Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection) compare Connington’s “meticulous plotting” with that of Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode. Driffield has a little of Holmes’s cold impersonality as well as a few of his put-downs: he says to Wendover after the latter has summed up the case, “Masterly survey, Squire. Except that you’ve left out most of the points of importance.”

            Mystery at Linden Sands is one of Martin Edwards’s examples of classic crime in The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, and Connington was one of T. S. Eliot’s favorite crime writers.