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.

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Jason Fforde, The Eyre Affair (2001)

            A few mysteries these days have alternate-universe settings; these are books that could as easily be shelved in the Fantasy/Sci-Fi section as in the mystery aisle. I’ve resisted them up to now, thinking that, as Sherlock Holmes says in “The Sussex Vampire,” “This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us.” But I decided I ought to sample one such book, and I chose Jason Fforde’s The Eyre Affair—Eyre as in Jane Eyre, because the book’s detective, whose name is Thursday Next, spends some time within the novel Jane Eyre and saves its heroine from kidnapping. The detective’s intervention also changes the ending of Charlotte Bronte’s novel from a less satisfactory one to the one we have now.

            The idea of fictional characters traveling outside of their books, or real people entering books, was first conceived, so far as I know, by Woody Allen in a hilarious 1977 New Yorker short story called ‘‘The Kugelmass Episode.’’ Jason Fforde makes the idea part of an alternate-universe England in 1985, when time travel is common, though space travel is still by train and dirigible airship.  It’s a place where Jurassic Park-type cloning is commonplace—the story’s detective has a pet dodo, for example. 

            Thursday Next is a detective in the Literary Division of the Special Operations Network, policing manuscript forgeries and other violations to the country’s literary heritage, in an England where Shakespeare has become a popular culture figure with coin operated machines called Will-Speaks that deliver soliloquies from the plays for ten pence. When she becomes involved in the theft of the Jane Eyre manuscript, she finds herself facing a larger-than-life villain who is motivated by pure evil and an officer of a global mega-corporation whose motive is pure greed. The villain has the Prose Portal, the machine that enables travel into and out of books; the corporation wants the machine because it represents power to change and distort the truth.

            The larger context of the story is the Crimean War between England and Russia, which, in this book, did not end in 1856 but continues to the present day, 130 years after it began. Thursday is a veteran of that war and bitterly opposes it. The outcome of her present adventure also affects the outcome of the war.

            The book has a lot of wordplay with names and many literary allusions, and its plot turns can be quick and surprising. If your tolerance for the fantastic is high enough, you might like it. Stay away if you can’t stand anything by Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett or Kurt Vonnegut or J. K. Rowling. If you do like The Eyre Affair, there are now more Thursday Next books to keep you entertained.

 

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: J. Storer Clouston's Carrington's Cases (1920)

            F. T. Carrington, who calls himself not a detective but an “inquiry agent,” was introduced the year before this collection in Clouston’s novel Simon. The short stories, but not the novel, make it on to Queen’s Quorum of the 125 most important detective and crime fiction books.

            Carrington is young, with an “ingenuous” (the word gets repeated in several stories) and “agreeable face,” has a moustache, and wears a monocle—this description comes from Simon. The eleven stories include a long three-parter called “Coincidence,” an unlikely tale of two neighbors, each of whom is convinced that the other has been murdered until they encounter each other sometime later in a hotel lobby. The murdered man was real enough, but it was the lover of the wife of one of the neighbors.

            In another story, “The Millionth Chance,” Carrington, trying to flush a German spy from his hiding place in his wife’s house, ends up luring out her English lover instead. In another he goes undercover to catch the revengeful crook who calls himself “Mr. Snakes.”

            “A Medical Crime,” the first story and like many of these, less than ten pages long, has Carrington catching the provost of a town in Scotland who has called Carrington in to help solve robberies that the provost himself is committing. The provost says he suspects the culprit is one of the two town doctors. Carrington tells the provost he has interviewed the men (he hasn’t) and told one about how there is an infallible method of identifying footprints that can only be foiled with rubber-soled shoes. The other one, he says, he told about a foolproof smell test for identifying burglars that can only be foiled by burning feathers at the scene. So all the provost has to do is look for one or another at the next crime scene. The provost falls for it, reports to Carrington he found burnt feathers at the next robbery scene, and is himself arrested for the crimes.

            Carrington works briefly with a lady detective who investigates “The Haunted House” and then marries the ghost—the “long-lost” eldest son who has returned. An amnesiac hires Carrington, who has only “A Photograph” to work with, but who finds the amnesiac’s wife. He also discovers, but does not disclose, that the amnesiac is wanted for murder. In “Duplicates,” Carrington’s media fame in averting an attempted jewel robbery leads to his battle with a duplicate Carrington. And when Dr. Watson consults Carrington, the doctor proves even stupider than he depicts himself in the Holmes stories. Watson allows “The Truthful Lady” to convince him to consume, in the form of digestive bonbons, the will that would have enriched his client. “The Missing Husband” turns out to be holed up in the disused wing of the house with his wife’s pretty maid.

            Carrington intercedes on behalf of an old friend whose husband has become dangerously insane in “The Price,” and in the final story, Carrington is not named, but there is a detective who manages to identify three spies on a Highland line train headed ultimately toward the naval bases at Cromarty and Scapa. “The Envelope,” with a German address and left on the floor of the carriage, is what alerts everyone that there might be a spy, and the detective is the one who manufactures it.

            The coincidences and unlikely story lines make Carrington’s stories entertaining and unusual, and since the beginning setup is often an after-hours gathering with Carrington’s telling his friends a story about something odd happening to him in the course of his work, we are prepared for something not only worth telling, but perhaps too unusual to be strictly true. We will never know, of course, and it does not matter.