UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Georges Simenon, The 13 Culprits (Détective, 13 March to 19 June, 1930, Les 13 Coupables, 1932), translated by Peter Schulman (2002)

 

            The stories in this collection were written the year before Simenon invented his famous detective Jules Maigret, whose first appearance was in Pietr the Latvian (1931), and their relation to Maigret’s invention is not immediately apparent. The Investigating Magistrate Froget, already old in the stories, is a cerebral protagonist who deduces the guilt of the thirteen title characters almost solely from the answers each person gives to his questions, and he lays out at the end a few lines resembling a geometrical proof, demonstrating their guilt. He takes advantage of his considerable authority as a juge d’instruction, who can recommend prosecution, to rattle his subjects and get them to blurt out an inconvenient truth or desperately to offer a telling lie. Maigret, who is generally in his stories around the age of forty-five or so, is more likely to talk to his suspects like a fellow traveler and to try to get inside them, to inhabit their thinking. But in fact, Froget and Maigret both tap into the same store of experience and wide knowledge of criminal behavior.

          More recognizably like the Maigret stories is the parade of colorful, largely low-life Parisian and provincial types, vain, arrogant, cunning, or just ground down by life. Simenon draws these in a very few strokes. The stories are short, averaging just over ten pages, and Détective magazine, where they first appeared, printed the last page or two containing the solution an issue or two later than the one with the main body of the story. The stories are somewhat like the inverted detective tales that R. Austin Freeman invented; the method was most notably used by the Columbo television series of the 1970s. We already know the culprit, and the question is how Froget will solve the mystery.

Eric Ambler's Epitaph for a Spy (1938) and The Mask of Dimitrios (1939)

             Josef Vadassy comes under suspicion of being a spy when photographs of Toulon defense fortifications are found on his photographic film. He is forced to be the unwilling and resistant tool of Surèté detective Beghin, who is looking for the real spy who exchanged cameras with Vadassy. Because he is a stateless person with an expired passport, Vadassy, an instructor at a Paris language school who vacations on the French Mediterranean coast, must comply with the authorities or risk being deported.

          Vadassy, who is a good deal less smart than he imagines himself, blunders through several days at the Rèserve Hotel in St. Gatien, his usual vacation spot, vainly trying to discover who the spy is. Then the novel turns from short-suspect-list mystery to adventure tale as Vadassy accompanies the police in their pursuit of the spy.

          Ambler wrote Epitaph for a Spy in 1937, and it captures the shadow Germany is casting over Europe as wars grows more inevitable. The grip of Germany on its own people trying to escape to other countries is shown in the story of the German whom Vadassy first suspects of being the spy and later befriends. And Ambler succeeds in depicting the ever-present terror of the stateless person in such a world at such a time. But the novel lacks the page-turning appeal of Ambler’s next book, and his best, The Mask of Dimitrios (1939). The American title was A Coffin for Dimitrios.

          In Istanbul, Charles Latimer sees the body of a man the police tell him is that of the notorious criminal Dimitrios Makropoulos. His quick view of the body makes Latimer of value to one of Dimitrios’s former gang members, and it also puts him in danger. He follows the history of Dimitrios through various cities on the Aegean and in the Balkans. Finally, it takes him to Paris. His interest, he tells himself, is professional: knowing about a criminal such as Dimitrios will help him in writing his mystery novels—or perhaps he will write a biography of Dimitrios.

          Latimer is naïve, and much dimmer than the people he encounters. Among them is Frederik Petersen, and Ambler’s portrait of him is that of a complete moral imbecile. For Petersen, the main problems with white slavery are its expense and trouble, while the bad actor in drug trafficking is the addict. Dimitrios, on the other hand, who from his youth has known that he wanted only money and power—for Demetrios no moral categories apply, any more than they would for a shark, a creature designed to do one thing, to feed.

          Only the fact that Ambler has dropped hints (“When Latimer looked back at this time later….”) can reassure us that his main character will not come to a sticky end. Latimer survives in a dramatic ending. Ambler is an elegant stylist who reminds me at times of Graham Greene, but though his element is similar here to some of Greene’s books, Ambler strikes a more optimistic note. The Mask of Dimitrios makes most of the lists of 100 best mysteries, thrillers, and crime novels.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Reginald Hill, A Pinch of Snuff (1978)

             In mystery fiction, the dynamics between a detective and the Watson or sidekick figure are very important. Edgar Allan Poe, who anticipated almost every other feature of successful detective stories, didn’t get this one right: his narrator is nameless and featureless. Doyle got it exactly right with Watson and ever since, authors have been experimenting with the right combination.

            An interesting example is Reginald hill’s pairing of Peter Pascoe and Andrew Dalziel (pronounced DEE-uhl). Pascoe, the character whose thoughts we follow in Reginald hill’s books, is junior to the older, cruder, but not necessarily dumber Dalziel in the Mid-Yorkshire Criminal Investigation Division—Hill isn’t any more specific about his north English setting. Pascoe is young, educated, and idealistic. Dalziel is middle-aged and cynical, with working-class origins and tastes.

            You can see the dynamics in one of Hill’s books from the late seventies, A Pinch of Snuff. Pascoe’s dentist, Jack Shorter, is accused of molesting a fourteen-year-old patient, Sandra Burkill. Pascoe hardly knows Shorter yet he defends him for complicated reasons. One of these is Dalziel, who is a drinking mate of Sandra’s father at the Westgate Social Club, a working-men’s club. Dalziel simply assumes Shorter is guilty. Pascoe’s idealism tells him everyone is entitled to the presumption of innocence, but his advocacy of Shorter has more personal and doubtful motivation than this principle, which he frequently suspends in his police work anyway.

            Shorter has a militant feminist in practice with him—the book was written in the middle of the seventies’ feminist movement—and partly Pascoe is reacting against her blanket indictment of Shorter and all men as guilty. But Pascoe also knows this woman is too much like one aspect of his wife and probably too much like one aspect of himself—a side of Pascoe that his boss Dalziel scoffs and laughs at.

            Events prove Pascoe more or less right. The real investigation is not into Shorter’s case, but concerns a pornographic film company (for whom Shorter’s accuser has worked, by the way) and whether they are involved in making snuff films—that is, movies in which a person on screen is actually killed during the filming. Hence the punning title A Pinch of Snuff.

            Reginald Hill has written a couple of dozen books about Dalziel and Pascoe, beginning with A Clubbable Woman in 1970. The latest one came out in 2009. Some of the books have been filmed for a BBC television series in which Warren Clarke played Dalziel and Colin Buchanan Pascoe.

The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries: A Mystery Guide and Finding List

The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and
His Contemporaries (Genius Book
Publishing, 2024).

IN 1891, A NEW London magazine, The Strand, decided to publish short mysteries in connected series. Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories about Sherlock Holmes nearly doubled the magazine’s circulation, and Doyle became rich. Other magazines searched for tales with the same kind of appeal. Dozens of men and women began to write detective stories in the series format of the Holmes Adventures.

An enormous flowering of this kind of tale followed, with stories that featured women and men detectives, professionals and amateurs, young and old, aristocrats, gentlefolk, and plain folk. Detectives went rogue and became burglars and con men. Others developed occult powers. It was a Golden Era of detective fiction, and it lasted for two and a half decades until the First World War. Nothing of its variety had been seen before.

Michael Cohen’s The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries is a guide to this trove of stories that fascinated readers a century and a quarter ago. In clear and crisp prose, Cohen takes you through the variety of stories with brief descriptions, and he shows you where to find the stories online in their original, illustrated magazine versions. Here you’ll find names you knew, such as Chesterton’s Father Brown, and less well-known ones such as Ernest Bramah’s blind detective Max Carrados, Anna Katherine Green’s debutante detective Violet Strange, and Gelett Burgess’s “Seer of Secrets,” Astro.

H. Paul Jeffers, The Forgotten Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, based on the original radio plays by Anthony Boucher and Denis Green (2005).

             These stories are based on radio plays broadcast from 1945 to 1947.  The Holmes was Basil Rathbone until 1946 and Tom Conway thereafter; Nigel Bruce read the Watson parts on all the radio shows.

            Sherlock Holmes radio broadcasts had been a staple by then, on the air pretty much continually in the United States and later in England since 1930.  These had various sponsors and were broadcast on different networks over the years.  The plots of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original four novels and fifty-six short stories were soon exhausted, so the radio play writers began to write their own plots using the familiar Conan Doyle characters of Holmes, Dr. Watson, Inspector Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson the landlady, the evil genius Professor Moriarty, and so on. 

            Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater on the Air produced a Holmes broadcast, and many episodes were written by Leslie Charteris, the creator of his own very popular mystery adventure character, Simon Templar, called “The Saint.”  Eventually Charteris hired Anthony Boucher, an author of mysteries and science fiction stories as well as literary and music criticism.  Boucher’s collaborator was Denis Green, who had been a writer for the Thin Man radio series based on Dashiell Hammett’s novel.

            Jeffers’s adaptations of the radio plays into stories often start with a character or situation mentioned in the original Sherlock Holmes stories.  Conan Doyle would have Watson, his narrator, drop references to cases he had not written up, and some of these show up here, such as “The Adventure of the Paradol Chamber.”  The plots are ingenious, though Jeffers has not mastered Conan Doyle’s construction techniques to preserve the readers’ interest.  A typical Conan Doyle Holmes story begins with mystifying events and then moves to physical adventure before Holmes explains all.  The Jeffers stories tend to be anticlimactic.

            Jeffers also lacks Conan Doyle’s sensitivity to language, and he occasionally slips up on historical and cultural issues.  An Edwardian gentleman would not have referred to his own times with that term, for instance, as Jeffers has Watson do, and baronets are not in the English nobility, though Jeffers gives one the title of “Lord.”

            But Sherlock Holmes lovers will suffer a lot just to be once again in the company of their favorite detective, however attenuated and inarticulate this ghostly manifestation might be.  If you’re a reader like that, you’ll like The Forgotten Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, by Carlo Emilio Gadda (1957)

Francesco Ingravallo is the thirty-five-year-old homicide detective who investigates the murder of Liliana Balducci, who, along with her husband Remo, is a friend of Ingravallo, who had dinner with them several weeks before the murder. Ingravallo was attracted to Liliana and is emotionally affected by the murder and by his investigation, which first implicates her cousin Giuliano and then her husband, though their account of things is eventually supported by all whom Ingravallo interviews. Ingravallo is dark haired, and his curly mop of hair is often mentioned in the book. He despises Mussolini and calls him all sorts of names, some playing on il Duce, such as “the Douche” or “the Deuce,” and others merely scurrilous, such as “the syphilitic” or just “the Shit.” Yet it irks him that he hasn’t even achieved the first of Mussolini’s two ranks of honorary titles for citizens, cavaliere, let alone the second, commendatore.

He is introspective and philosophical, with a view about causes—not just murder motives but all human causation—that sees them as a complicated mix of individual willed motives, circumstances, character as destiny, and ultimately untraceable influences, “a whole multitude of converging causes” making a “knot, or tangle, or muddle., or gnommero, which in Roman dialect means skein.” For Italo Calvino, who wrote in 1984 an introduction to this 1965 translation by William Weaver, this view of the limitations of our knowledge of human causes “is reflected in Gadda’s style, in his language, which is a thick amalgam of folk expressions and learned speech, of interior monologue and artistic prose, of various dialects and literary quotations.”

The usual level of the style is elevated and philosophical, reflecting Ingravallo’s thought, but he sometimes thinks and talks in a mixture that reflects his native Molise and his adopted Rome, and street language or diction that reflects social class is frequent. He plays language games with names even as the Romans around him just get them wrong half the time. Sometimes Gadda will record Ingravallo’s thought with an ellipsis that indicates he might have used a stronger word, that the one he chooses after a pause is a euphemism, or he merely thus corrects himself. A half-page-long sentence is not unusual. I rarely got through one of the novel’s 388 pages without having to look a word up, and frequently I did not find it because Gadda had made it up: for example, whatever the Italian word was that William Weaver translated as velocipederasts.

The book is widely satiric, encompassing various levels of Roman and Italian society generally, savage in its aim at Mussolini, at the charisma worship of too many Italians, and at fascism in all its manifestations, and it is petty sometimes in going after Gadda’s pet peeves, such as the pictograph road signs newly devised by a Milanese engineer. As Weaver points out in his translator’s preface, sometimes “his attacks are so thoroughly veiled as to be incomprehensible to all but the author himself.”

Commenting on its stature, Weaver asserts that the book “occupies in contemporary Italian literature the position that Ulysses, Remembrance of Things Past, and The Man Without Qualities occupy in the literatures of their respective countries” in regard to its experimentalism and obsession with language. As Calvino writes in his introduction to the New York Review of Books edition, it is simultaneously a novel about Rome, a book about a philosophical attitude toward causation and our ability to know it, a detective novel, and an attack on the fascism that gripped Italy from the twenties until Mussolini’s death at the hands of partisans in 1945.

As detective novel it’s going to disappoint many of its readers. The murder is memorable, and the detective is an interesting character, but Ingravallo is absent from a lot of the action of the book, as the investigation moves outside of Rome into the Alban hills and is taken up by minor members of the national police, the carabinieri. Gadda is often more interested in finding the picturesque or elaborating on some of his minor characters than he is pursuing the investigation, and once we seem to have the leads to take us straight to the perpetrators of the crimes—there is jewelry theft as well as murder—he simply winds the book up in a few pages without the actual apprehension of the bad actors. As Johnson said about Clarissa, you’re going to be awfully frustrated if you read it for the story. But there are a lot of other things going on in That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana.

 

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)

             A game-changer within the mystery genre: before this book, those who told us candidly of their lust, those whose malice we watched, those who concealed, more or less, their sicknesses—all of these came to a sticky end. After Ripley all things are possible.

            At the beginning, Ripley is a small-time grafter in New York expecting to be arrested every minute. He is hired by Richard Greenleaf’s father to go to Italy to try to persuade his son to return. He ends up killing Richard, impersonating him for a time, killing one of Richard’s friends, and ultimately getting away with both murders. These heinous acts are not excused by the narrative, but are made fascinating by Ripley’s characterization. Ripley is an orphan raised by a cruel and stingy aunt who has left him a moral imbecile. Ripley has an abbreviated list of emotions: he can feel fear and hatred, but he’s incapable of remorse or anything like compassion. Ripley is a sexual innocent—probably a homosexual—with a talent for mimicry and acting that has helped him fill in his emotional gaps. When Richard tells him at one point that Ripley needs to be nicer to Richard’s friend Marge Sherwood, Ripley thinks that he must be more convincing when he pretends to be nice to her.

            Ripley kills Richard in a boat at San Remo, an untidy murder reminiscent of the one in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. During the scene he is afraid of falling into the water and drowning, he is afraid of failing, but he never feels compunction or horror at the act itself.

            Our horror at this murder and the nearly motiveless one of Richard’s friend Freddie Miles does not alienate Ripley from our interest, however. His character is compelling precisely because of what it lacks and the kinds of substitutions that Highsmith makes plausible. For Ripley the enjoyment of possessions, however they are obtained, takes part of the place of sex; gradually we come to realize that brushes with danger also have a sexual frisson for him.

            After the second murder Ripley has to negotiate one crisis after another: his forged signatures on Richard’s monthly maintenance checks are called into question, the Italian police accuse him of having killed Richard when he is being himself and accuse him of having killed Ripley when he is impersonating Richard, and eventually Ripley has to confront Marge Sherwood, Richard’s father, and an American detective the father has hired.

            All of these crises look as if they were building to Ripley’s entrapment, but suddenly he escapes the last threat and is free. We reach the last page and there is no retribution. Ripley looks out at the clear skies of Greece with his conscience—what there is of it—unclouded as well. Highsmith cannot make us love Ripley, but she has involved us in his fortunes and made him interesting, she has let him get away with murder, and she has changed crime fiction.