UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Ngaio Marsh, A Man Lay Dead (1934) and Surfeit of Lampreys (1941)

            Ngaio Marsh invented her gentleman detective, police inspector Roderick Alleyn, in 1934 with A Man Lay Dead. Alleyn is in the tradition of detectives of gentle—sometimes even noble—birth, but he is not nearly as obnoxiously flippant and foppish as Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey or the American Philo Vance.

            This first Alleyn book is not as good as later ones, supposedly causing Marsh to cringe at its thin plot and amateurish devices: for example an unnecessary re-creation of the crime with everyone assembled at the end, and a murderer who slides down the country house’s bannister in order to commit the crime. The Alleyn series eventually included thirty-two books, and the one critics seem to like best is the tenth, published in 1941 and titled Surfeit of Lampreys.

            From the point of view of Roberta Grey, a New Zealander who first meets the Lampreys in New Zealand when she is fourteen, we are introduced to Lord Charles Lamprey, younger brother of the childless Marquis of Wutherwood and Rune, Charles’s wife Charlotte or Imogen, and their six children, Henry, the oldest, who eventually becomes a romantic interest for Roberta (whom the Lampreys call Robin), Frid or Elfrida the aspiring actress, the identical twins Colin and Stephen, Patricia, called Patch, and the youngest, Michael, who is eleven when Roberta, now twenty, comes to England after the death of her parents to find a job. The Lampreys have moved back to England with the failure of the scheme to live in New Zealand because it was supposedly cheaper. Roberta is in love with the feckless Lampreys, their nonchalance in the face of debt or murder, and their charming irresponsibility.

 The day after Roberta arrives, Charles and his brother the Marquis quarrel when Charles asks for money. The Marquis leaves and is murdered in the lift on his way down, or while the lift is still on the Lampreys’ floor. Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn investigates with his assistant Fox, whom Alleyn often calls Br’er Fox or Foxikins. Because the culprit is most likely someone in the Lamprey household, and Charles is the Marquis’s heir, the family closes ranks in their interviews with Alleyn, lying when they think it necessary to protect any one of them. Aside from Charles, another suspect is the Marquis’s wife Lady Violet, who is nutty and has recently taken up the black arts. There are also a couple of servants in the household as well as the chauffeur and lady’s maid who have come with the Marquis and his wife.

Marsh was a painter, an actor, and a theatre director, and her plots tend to bring in these worlds in charades (such as that involving the murder weapon in Surfeit of Lampreys), amateur plays (such as the murder game at the country house in A Man Lay Dead that turns into real murder) and pantomimes, actual theatre productions, art and artists such as Agatha Troy, who is Alleyn’s wife, and numerous quotations, especially from Macbeth, or, as theatre people like to say because of the play’s notorious reputation for bringing bad luck, The Scottish Play.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Francis Iles [Anthony Berkeley Cox], Malice Aforethought (1931)

 

            Dr. Edmund Bickleigh is both self-deprecatingly funny and unabashedly murderous. He kills his very unpleasant wife in a complicated plot. First he secretly gives her a patent medicine that causes headaches. Then he gives her increasing doses of morphine for the headaches. When he pretends concern at her growing addiction and stops the morphine, she begins stealing it from him. He makes sure others are aware of her habit and then kills her with an overdose. Bickleigh is an engaging character, and while we may not be sympathetic, we are curious about him and interested in his dealings with a domineering wife and two mistresses. Because he is clever and imaginative, he seems to have a chance of getting away with murder, and the only suspense in the book surrounds Bickleigh’s arrest and trial.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Sebastian Junger, A Death in Belmont (2006)

              You may remember Sebastian Junger as the author of The Perfect Storm, his book about the 1991 Halloween storm in the Atlantic that killed crews aboard fishing vessels and caused billions of dollars of damage.  In A Death in Belmont, published in 2006, Junger writes a true-crime mystery about a murder that took place in Belmont, a suburb of Boston where his family lived when Sebastian was only a year old.  In the fall and winter of 1962-63, Sebastian Junger’s mother Ellen, who lived with her husband and one–year-old Sebastian in Belmont, employed a builder and his two assistants to add a studio to their house.  One of the two workers was Albert DeSalvo, who eventually confessed to most of the murders the papers were calling those of the Boston Strangler.

            Before they were finished with the building, and on a day when DeSalvo had spent a short time by himself on finishing work in the new studio, a woman was strangled just a few blocks away.  The pattern of the crime was like that of the murders to which DeSalvo eventually confessed, although his confession did not mention this particular killing.  In the meanwhile, a black man named Roy Smith, who had worked as a housecleaner at the murdered woman’s home that day, was arrested, tried, and convicted of the murder.  When DeSalvo was later caught and confessed to a number of stranglings, no attempt was made to implicate him in the Belmont killing or to overturn the Smith conviction.

            DeSalvo was stabbed to death in a prison hospital in November, 1973, ten years after Roy Smith’s conviction.  Roy Smith died of lung cancer in another prison hospital in 1976.  Junger cannot prove that Smith was innocent and DeSalvo guilty of the Belmont strangling (the way it was told to him by his parents when he was a child), and during his investigation of the crimes and the people involved he is not always convinced that that is the way it happened, but he seems to end with that conviction, though he admits it cannot be proved.

            For my money, Junger is more convincing at showing that Roy Smith is very unlikely to have committed the crime than he is of proving that DeSalvo did it, but DeSalvo left very little evidence at some of his crimes. Without his confession, some of them would have been difficult or impossible to successfully prosecute him for. Junger reawakens some of the horror of the time, partly by making it personal, recording how on more than one occasion his mother was alone in the house with the Boston Strangler.

 

 

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Leslie Charteris, Meet the Tiger (1928)

             Leslie Charteris (born Leslie Bowyer-Yin) with this book invented his long-lived character Simon Templar, who gets his nickname of the Saint from his initials, and sometimes leaves a signature drawing of a haloed stick figure at the scene of his capers. He is an adolescent’s fantasy hero who combines romantic power—he is tall, tanned if not exactly dark, and handsome—with physical prowess at gunplay, knife-throwing, and hand-to-hand fighting; strength, superb conditioning and stamina; speed and athletic ability—and humor, presence of mind, as well as insouciant daring in confronting danger.

            He comes to the quiet seaside village of Baycombe because he has heard of plot by a criminal mastermind known only as the Tiger. A large amount of gold stolen from a Chicago bank, impossible to turn into cash in any quiet way, is to be disposed of by using it to salt a South African mine, driving up the price of its stock that the Tiger has bought very cheaply.

            Templar pretends he wants the gold for himself, but in fact he has made a deal with the bank to recover the gold for a percentage of its value. He is in competition with a detective named Carn, also out to find the gold and unmask the Tiger.

            Complicating the Saint’s project is the romance that has developed between him and Patricia Holm, who lives in Baycombe with her aunt. Patricia proves herself an adventurer in her own right and pursues the quest for the gold even when she believes the Saint to be dead.

            Charteris makes the Tiger’s identity too guessable in overdoing the least-likely-suspect device. His prolixity can get tedious in this book, although more under control in later ones: Templar and Patricia spend much too much time thinking about how to proceed and anticipating possibilities, slowing the action. The plot gets so complex we lose track of why things are happening, but all comes right in the end if our suspension of disbelief holds.

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.