Tag: Detective Fiction

Murder in the Basement by Anthony Berkeley

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893–1971) is regarded by critics as the most innovative of the golden age detective story writers. Murder in the Basement (1932) is unusual in that for the first part of the story, the mystery is the identity of the victim, rather than “whodunnit”. The structure is also quite unorthodox and the contrast between the police’s methodical evidence-gathering and the amateur detective’s more psychological approach is well done., There is also a good deal of sly humour here, rather similar to Malice Aforethought, published in 1931 under Cox’s other pen name, Francis Isles.

The novel opens with the discovery of a body buried in the cellar of a house recently occupied by a newly-wed couple. The dead young woman has been shot in the back of the head, so the police are immediately aware that they are dealing with a murder, but there is nothing to suggest her identity.

The first part of the novel describes the painstaking procedures of the police as they try to identify the body. An X-ray reveals that the woman had a plate in her leg as the result of a broken leg. By a great stroke of luck, this plate was one of a limited batch, which narrows down the field considerably, so eventually the police are able to trace where and when the operation was done and hence the name of the victim, who worked at a school near London.

At this point, Inspector Moresby consults his friend, amateur sleuth and writer Roger Sheringham. Here, there is an enormous co-incidence that the reader must simply accept as a narrative device making the whole thing fit together, part of the enjoyable contrivance of the golden age. Sheringham was working at the school on a temporary basis, covering for a friend, but also using his time there as a source of material for his writing. He has written several manuscript chapters using the staff of the school as his characters. Moresby asks to read this, but withholds the identity of the victim from Sheringham. The manuscript forms the second part of the novel, a flashback describing events leading up to the murder with the reader placed in the same position as Sheringham, knowing that one of the women must be the victim, but not which one.

The book goes on to describe the subsequent investigation, in which Sheringham is involved alongside the police. Moresby fixes his attention on one particular suspect, who he is convinced is guilty. This person is a steely individual who greets each question with a flat denial. It now seems to be simply a matter of building the case against them or forcing a confession. The reader may begin to have doubts about this suspect’s guilt, as does Sheringham. Finally, Sheringham reveals the real murderer, but only to the false suspect, not to the police or the world at large, and the novel ends with the killer having got away with murder.

There is some very clever psychology here. Sheringham realises that a fictional incident he created in his manuscript reveals the real nature of one of the staff. Sheringham had picked up the truth about them subconsciously.

Berkeley is adept at creating convincing female characters, individuals with their own desires who are not necessarily pleasant or good people. He also uses a neat gender reversal, with men planting ideas in women’s minds so the women think it is their own idea, a ploy usually attributed to women. There is a slight feeling that he was not altogether keen on women. I read that there were problems in both his marriages.

I spotted who the killer was about half way through, but then thought it must be another character, the result of a clever bit of misdirection. The false suspect is covering for someone else by encouraging the idea that he himself is guilty. The reader will have to be very sharp to work out who he is protecting and why. The real murderer is revealed to be a weak personality and sexually frustrated, rather like Dr Bickleigh in Malice Aforethought. The irony is, that if they had made a better job of burying the body, the displaced bricks in the cellar would never have been noticed and there would have been no investigation at all. As it is, for various reasons, they will never face justice. There is even a suggestion at one point that the victim might have deserved to be murdered.

There are a couple of things I was not so keen on. Berkeley has a fondness for double negative sentences of the “I shouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t. . .” kind, where it is almost impossible to tell what is meant. There is also a gap at the end of the narrative and I wasn’t sure if this was the realistic loose end of any police case, or whether Berkeley couldn’t be bothered to work it out himself.

It was only after I put the book down that I realised the resonance the name “Wargrave” must have had for the original readership in 1932, particularly when applied to a character who, like Berkeley, was a veteran of the Great War.    

221B by Vincent Starrett

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game’s afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears—
Only those things the heart believes are true.

A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.

I am a lifelong reader of the Sherlock Holmes stories and yet I had never heard of this poem, which takes its title from that famous Baker Street address, until I discovered it in a recent magazine article.

Vincent Starrett (1886–1974) was an American journalist and writer, author of one of the first books of Sherlock Holmes scholarship, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1933).

I don’t think anyone has ever summed up the timeless appeal of the Sherlock Holmes world quite as effectively as Starrett does in the last stanza. The poem reminds us of the power of all fiction to transcend the everyday and create a world that is more vivid in our minds than mundane reality.    

221B was written in 1942 and fears about the survival of London during wartime are clear in the first stanza. We can imagine the powerful longing for an earlier, more orderly world at that moment. From today’s perspective, it’s as if the poem deals with three times – 1942, 1895 and the world of imagination that is outside time.

An English Murder by Cyril Hare

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

At first glance, Cyril Hare’s 1951 novel An English Murder, seems to be a fairly typical example of a certain type of golden age detective story. A group of guests are snowed in at an isolated country house over Christmas when a mysterious death occurs and they find themselves involved in a murder mystery. The murderer can only be one of the occupants of the house. So far, so familiar, with a hint of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.

What sets this apart is the more realistic tone, the deeper characterisation and the political theme of the story, which is set during the years of the 1940s Labour government. Hare was a lawyer who became a judge and his precise, dry and ironic prose style means that although the novel is only some 200 pages, an awful lot is packed in and it does not feel short. 

Lord Warbeck is ill, so this small gathering of family and friends over Christmas may be his last. The guests include his son, Robert, who is the leader of a Mosley-style fascist party, and Lady Camilla, Robert’s on–off girlfriend, who would like their relationship to be resolved one way or the other. Then there is his cousin Sir Julius, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is responsible for the punitive tax regime making post-war country-house life so difficult. Also present is Mrs Carstairs, daughter of the local vicar and wife to the man who would like to succeed Julius as Chancellor. The stage is set for tension and disagreement.

The party is completed by Dr Botwink, a Czech academic historian and survivor of the concentration camps. He is present in the house because he has been carrying out research on historical documents held there. Botwink is a fascinating character, with a keen interest in the nuances of the English language and the distinctive English way of doing things. In both these fields he proves rather more knowledgeable than his hosts.

After the death that at first appears to be suicide and is then confirmed as murder, the investigation is carried out by Sergeant Rogers, the Special Branch detective assigned to Sir Julius, because the local police are unable to get through the snow to reach the house. However, it is Botwink who is the real investigator here, and who is led to the solution of the case by something he finds in a book from the library.

Another crucial clue is provided by his outsider’s ear for the oddness of English expressions, and the precise meaning of the phrase “to have words with someone”.

The explanation of what has taken place is a comment on the England of that time, which is described as a curious mixture of modernisation and anachronistic survivals. An ancient legal oddity means that the crime could not have happened the way it did in another European country, hence the appropriateness of the title. This is almost a “state of the nation” novel, rather than simply a detective story.

The character of the butler, Briggs, is developed in more detail than is usual in this sort of story. He is a man who has devoted his life to the old way of doing things and must now try to adapt to changing times, struggling to keep up standards with a much-reduced complement of staff. He is rather reminiscent of the butler in Kazuo Ishoguro’s novel, The Remains of the Day.

One thing puzzled me, though. Was it normal in upper-class households at that time to have the Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve?    

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

I first read Raymond Chandler when I was barely out of my teens and now I’ve come to the end of my re-read of his novels with The Long Goodbye. This was the sixth novel featuring his Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe. It was published in 1953 and won the Edgar award in 1955. I know a lot of people think it is Chandler’s masterpiece. It is certainly a bit different to the others. It’s longer, moves more slowly and is sadder, somehow. There is more social comment and it’s as much a portrait of a corrupt society as anything Dickens ever wrote.

It’s something of a self-portrait as well with two characters who have elements of Chandler himself about them. If Terry Lennox is damaged by his war experiences, Roger Wade is a writer with a drink problem, who feels that his books are underrated because he writes genre fiction. The overall mood of the book feels as if F Scott Fitzgerald had decided to write a detective story. There are quite a lot of literary references as well, with quotes from T S Eliot, Shakespeare, and Christopher Marlowe.

I think the central theme in the book and what gives it that air of melancholy is Philip Marlowe’s friendship with Terry Lennox, who is introduced in that striking opening sentence: “The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of the Dancers.”

Later on, Marlowe helps Lennox escape to Mexico without asking too many questions and then comes under suspicion himself when it turns out that Lennox was a suspect in a murder case.

That seems to be that and then Marlowe is asked by a concerned publisher to help the alcoholic writer Roger Wade, who is struggling to finish a novel. Rather against his will, Marlowe finds himself drawn further into the lives of the wealthy inhabitants of the appropriately named Idle Valley.

This appears to be a second story, totally unconnected to the first but slowly and surely the connection between the two becomes apparent.

A good example of the atmosphere of the book is the scene where Marlowe stands by the lake at the back of Wade’s house and watches the speedboat and the surfer on the water. This has a kind of poetic resonance but also functions as part of the plot because we later find out that the noise of the engine masked a gunshot.

One thing that strikes me is how modern the book still feels, given that it was published in 1953. It seems to have influenced every depiction of Los Angeles since that time. There are drug-dealing doctors, mysterious out-of-town medical establishments and it all feels rather familiar from later books and films. Press magnate Harlan Potter seems to be the original for the John Huston character in Chinatown. The notorious Los Angeles smog is mentioned quite a lot, twenty years before the photo on the cover of Tim Buckley’s record Greetings from L A.

But then Chandler was a very influential writer in other ways. He didn’t invent the first-person, sardonic, private eye narrator (that was Dashiell Hammett) but he did refine and perfect the idea, giving a model to follow to many later writers such as Len Deighton and, more recently, Philip Kerr.

The phrase the “long goodbye” was mentioned in the news the other day, because of the death of Gene Hackman. It is now used to refer to cases of Alzheimer’s, apparently. That theme is in the book, though almost hidden in what appears to be a sub-plot. When Marlowe is trying to find Roger Wade, his only clue is that the doctor’s name begins with the letter “v”. He finds three such doctors and one of them runs a rather sinister old people’s home, where the frail elderly are kept sedated and presumably fleeced of their money. Later on, a character writes something in their suicide note about not wanting to live to be old so “the long goodbye” does not just refer to Terry Lennox. Did I notice that theme when I was younger? I don’t remember that I did. A really good book reveals more and deeper meanings with the passage of time and re-reading.       

There is also a fascinating connection with the recent TV drama about Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in Britain, in 1955. One of the detectives explains to Marlowe why the police have not looked further into a murder. “You don’t fool around with an open-shut case, even if there’s no heat to get it finalized and forgotten [. . .] No police department in the world has the men or the time to question the obvious.” This is exactly what happened in the Ruth Ellis case, I think.

Two years later, Chandler wrote a letter to the London Evening Standard criticising the decision to execute Ruth Ellis. He wrote that it was barbaric and that no other country would have done it.

I’ve never seen the 1970s film of The Long Goodbye and I don’t think I want to. It isn’t supposed to have much to do with the book, as it has been updated to the 1970s and the plot has been altered. It’s a pity, because a decent film, done in the correct period, could have been quite something.

Is The Long Goodbye Chandler’s masterpiece? I don’t know, but it does have a haunting quality, with the characters lingering long in the mind. I liked it when I first read it all those years ago and I like it even more now. One of those “books of a lifetime”, I guess.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins was published in 1860 and has often been regarded as the first mystery novel. It is a combination of gothic romance and detective story and still highly readable today, although it does perhaps rely a little too heavily on coincidence. It stays just this side of melodrama, though, and Collins manipulates suspense in ways that would not be out of place in a modern novel. Even at 600 pages, it’s pretty well unputdownable, what we would today call an “immersive” read. It is very intense and very atmospheric.

Collins makes use of an original narrative technique. There are several different narrators, who, as the story progresses, tell the reader about the events that they were actually present at, thorough their journals and legal statements. It’s rather as if they are witnesses in court, as the first narrator, the art tutor Walter Hartright, tells us and it may reflect Collins’ legal background.

The striking scene near the beginning, Walter’s late-night encounter with the woman of the title while he is walking across a lonely Hampstead Heath is deservedly famous. He has just learned that he is to be employed as a tutor at Limmeridge House in Cumberland. The strange and distracted woman who appears suddenly on the road seems to have some connection with the place. This meeting sets the whole complex and intricate plot in motion. Just who she is and what her connection to Cumberland is are key parts of a mystery that is very much concerned with identity and family secrets. There is also a great deal in the book about the position of women in relation to men in the Victorian era.

In Cumberland, Walter finds himself tutor to two young women, Laura Fairlie and her half-sister, Marian Halcombe. He falls in love with Laura and the feeling is mutual but Laura is engaged to Sir Percival Glyde and feels obliged to marry him as it was her late father’s wish. A heartbroken Walter goes abroad and the story is continued by Marian.

Things take a darker turn after the marriage when the scene shifts to Glyde’s country estate in Hampshire. Marian is part of the household as are Glyde’s friend Count Fosco and his wife, who is Laura’s aunt. Glyde turns out not to be quite as charming as he appeared during his courtship of Laura. He insisted on a pre-nuptial arrangement under which Laura’s money would pass to him on her death and he is soon trying to get access to her fortune while she is still alive. To say much more about how things develop would be to spoil the book for those who have not read it. There are plenty of twists and turns that are not easy to predict, even today.

Apart from the unusual narrative structure, Collins shows other great strengths as a writer in this novel. His superb visual sense places the scene right before our eyes. This is used to great effect with the transition from Cumberland to Hampshire, to the gloomy house and grounds named, rather appropriately, Blackwater.

It is perhaps the depth of the characterisation that keeps the reader turning the pages as much as the mystery element. The women are particularly interesting, especially Marian, who is a fascinating character. When Walter first sees her, he admires her figure, but thinks her face “ugly” when she turns round. That does not seem to deter Count Fosco’s admiration of her at all. What is going on here? Is it because she is described as “dark” and he is Italian? It is the blonde, more passive, Laura that Walter falls for. Is Collins just going along with the standard Victorian idea of what is desirable, or is this intended as a subtle criticism of Walter, an indication that he is a bit superficial? I suspect modern readers are likely to think he has chosen the wrong woman and that it is rather unfair for Marian to end up as a sort of perpetual aunt.

Several of the women refer to their limitations as women. Is this to do with their physical strength or their legal position in relation to men? Or is Collins being a bit ironic here, particularly in relation to Marian, given her forcefulness and determination?

The malevolent Mrs Catherick, with her insistence on hard-won respectability, is another interesting character, but perhaps the most fascinating of the female characters is Madame Fosco. The change in her personality after her marriage and Fosco’s utter dominance of her is never really explained although there are hints of something sinister on his part. It feels like an example of what we would now call “coercive control”.

It is in the third part of the novel that the detective element becomes strongest, when Walter has returned from abroad and sets to work to unravel the mystery. Collins is careful to plant details that justify later events in a way that is still used in crime novels now. Perhaps that is the secret of the book’s enduring appeal, the curious combination of things that are very Victorian and things that are timeless or modern. And given some of the stories that make the news these days, has that much really changed since the nineteenth century?

The Twelve Best Sherlock Holmes Short Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

In 1927, for a competition in the Strand magazine, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle chose his own favourite twelve Sherlock Holmes stories. The reader who most closely matched his selection would win the prize. He omitted the later stories that would appear in The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, as these had not yet been published in book form. When the result of the competition was announced, he published an article that gave his list and the reason for each choice.

Since I spent part of last summer working my way through The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories, I thought it would be interesting to follow in Sir Arthur’s footsteps, by selecting my own favourites and justifying their inclusion on my list.

It seems to me that there are four stories that simply demand to be included.

A Scandal in Bohemia was the first to be published. It’s memorable for the strong female character of Irene Adler and the choreography of the scene where everyone in the street has been employed by Holmes to create a decoy.

The Final Problem is dramatic, fast-moving and ultimately tragic. It raises Holmes’ moral authority because of his willingness to sacrifice himself to rid the world of the evil of Moriarty. The story made the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland famous.

The Empty House is one of the strongest of all the stories, I think, almost three stories in one. There is the dramatic return of Holmes and the story of his survival, Colonel Moran’s attempt to assassinate him, and the locked room murder mystery, all neatly wrapped up together.

His Last Bow was not the last to be published but is the last chronologically. It’s told in the third person, rather than by Watson. Holmes comes out of retirement to crack a German spy ring on the eve of the great war. His moving speech at the end brings the curtain down on their partnership.

So now I have the general shape of my list, what other stories should be included? Doyle himself, in his introduction to The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories, refuted the idea that the quality declined after Holmes returned. I agree, so I will be including some of the later ones.

The Speckled Band is so famous that it has to be on the list. It’s a locked-room mystery to rival Edgar Allan Poe and has the connection to India that features in several other stories.

The Musgrave Ritual is an early case of Holmes’, from the days before he knew Watson, the client being one of Holmes’ former fellow students. It has a rather gothic atmosphere with the country house and missing ancient relics and is also notable for being told largely by Holmes himself.

The Reigate Squires has Holmes at his most ingenious in working out the solution to the mystery. We also get an insight into his health. 

The Norwood Builder differs from the usual formula, because the client who comes to Baker Street is then arrested for murder and Holmes must prove his innocence. There is also Holmes’ friendly rivalry with Inspector Lestrade of the Yard. Holmes spots a crucial clue that the police miss, to do with the manipulation of evidence.

Charles Augustus Milverton features the fascinating character of Milverton, a heartless professional blackmailer who is oblivious to the damage he does. Holmes finds him repulsive, and lets natural justice, rather than the law, deal with him.

The Bruce-Partington Plans is a spy story, perhaps a bit similar to the earlier The Naval Treaty, but more complex and better, I think. It starts with that familiar London smog outside the window of Baker Street, but also makes clever use of the London Underground, rather than Hackney Carriages.      

The Illustrious Client is one of the later stories that Doyle did not include on his list. It takes the theme of violence against women that is often there under the surface to a new level. Baron Gruner is truly loathsome, another example of Doyles’ ability to conjure evil on the page. This one is a suitable riposte to anyone who thinks the Holmes stories are a bit “cosy”.

So now I have eleven, I must select another to bring my list up to twelve. The Red Headed League is notable for its sheer absurdity, that makes Holmes and Watson laugh out loud. The Greek Interpreter has the first appearance of Holmes’ brother Mycroft and the Diogenes Club, for the “most unsociable and unclubbable men in London”. Thor Bridge is Holmes at his most ingenious again, but I think The Reigate Squires has the edge, somehow. Doyle excluded Silver Blaze because he said that the racing detail was wrong. That has not affected its fame or popularity with readers, though, so it has to be this one, for the Devon setting and the curious incident of the dog in the night time, which has entered the language.

So here is my full list, in order of publication date, except for His Last Bow, as already explained.

A Scandal in Bohemia   (1891)
The Speckled Band   (1892)
Silver Blaze   (1892)
The Musgrave Ritual   (1893)
The Reigate Squires   (1893)
The Final Problem   (1893)
The Empty House   (1903)
The Norwood Builder   (1903)
Charles Augustus Milverton   (1904)
The Bruce-Partington Plans   (1908)
The Illustrious Client   (1924)
His Last Bow   (1917)

I suspect that every reader of these stories will have their own likes and dislikes. I see that I have only included six that are on Sir Arthur’s list.

Anyone new to Holmes who wants to find out more would find the stories I have chosen a good starting point.  

The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L Sayers and Robert Eustace

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

I was very excited when I found out about The Documents in the Case, published in 1930. I have read and enjoyed several of Dorothy L Sayers’ other books, but I did not realise she had written this, the only one not to feature Lord Peter Wimsey. It is a crime novel written in epistolary form, based to a certain extent on the real-life Edith Thompson case. I was hoping it would be another Trent’s Last Case or Malice Aforethought but despite being a compelling read, I was left with a slight feeling of disappointment at the end.

The beginning is the most interesting part, where we gradually learn about the slightly odd Harrison household. It’s rather reminiscent of Patrick Hamilton’s boarding house tales. Margaret Harrison is the much younger second wife of George Harrison, who has a grown-up son, Paul, working abroad. John Munting, a writer, and Harwood Lathom, a painter, rent the flat upstairs and since the hallways adjoin, come into contact with the Harrisons. Agatha Milsom is a sort of paid companion to Mrs Harrison. Mr Harrison is keen on his hobbies of painting and the study of wild mushrooms. It is his sudden death, supposedly from eating the wrong kind of mushroom, that is the case of the title.         

One picture of the Harrisons’ marriage emerges through Agatha Milsom’s letters to her sister. Another view comes from Munting’s letters to his fiancé. Mr Harrison seems quite a different character in his own letters to his son Paul. Miss Milsom thinks that Harrison is an unfeeling brute and his wife is a victim, but she inadvertently reveals that Margaret Harrison is a rather self-dramatising character, perhaps as much the cause of the rows as Mr Harrison. Munting has quite a low opinion of Mrs Harrison and is sure that the marital discord is her fault. Is Harrison the bullying husband that Agatha Milsom takes him to be, or simply older and rather set in his ways with fixed ideas of how a wife should behave? If Margaret Harrison is based to a certain extent on Edith Thompson, I got the feeling that Sayers did not altogether approve of her.

Agatha Milsom, the spinster companion who is mentally troubled and obsessed with sex is the most interesting character, but she disappears from the narrative too early on, after having played a crucial role in how events unfold. The later part of the book features the statements of John Munting and Paul Harrison. These are much longer than the letters and it begins to feel more like a conventional novel.

Munting’s letters to his fiancé, Elizabeth Drake, who is also a writer, convey something of the intellectual climate of the late 1920s, when old certainties had been shattered by the first world war and the ideas of Freud and Einstein were becoming known. His obsession with how life came into being is rather irritating, though. How are we supposed to take all this? It does rather neatly set up the discussion among the scientists at the end that leads to the solution. This chapter is very irritating, but more of that later.

Paul Harrison does not believe his father’s death was an accident and becomes the main investigator into what really happened. It’s very well worked out how he has gathered all the documents together. He also says that Munting’s letters to his wife were the work of a writer with one eye on future publication, giving us a clue as to how to read them. Some of Munting’s comments about publishers probably come from Sayers’ own experience, rather like the advertising agency background she used in Murder Must Advertise.

I was slightly irritated by Sir Gilbert Pugh only being named as the Director of Public Prosecutions right at the end of the book. Since it begins with Paul Harrison sending the bundle of documents to him, it would make the whole story much clearer if Pugh’s role was identified at the beginning.

It’s also slightly frustrating that once the poison is proved to be artificial, that is the rather abrupt end of the novel. Yet Paul Harrison spent a great deal of time trying and failing to work out exactly how the poison was administered and we never learn that.

The book was written as a collaboration between Dorothy L Sayers and Robert Eustace. He was a doctor who had worked with other crime writers before, so I assume the science came from him. I suspect that the science versus religion debate might have appealed to the religious Sayers and her desire to write something that would be seen as more than a detective story. The penultimate chapter, in which the scientists discuss the method of proving whether a substance occurred naturally or was artificially synthesised is far too long and tedious in the extreme.

The novel as a whole reads like a cross between a golden-age detective story and a “highbrow” novel of the 1920s, by an author such as Aldous Huxley, whose Point Counter Point gets a mention. It is full of references to writers of the time. John Munting is rather dismissive about A High Wind in Jamaica, and Agatha Milsom is a bit puzzled by the work of D H Lawrence.

Sayers even refers to one of her own novels, because the pathologist Sir James Lubbock says he is working on an arsenic case, presumably that of Harriet Vane in Strong Poison, published around the same time as The Documents in the Case.

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

Agatha Christie’s novels are rather unfairly seen as “cosy” these days. Anyone who wants to find out just how dark her work can be should take a look at And Then There Were None, published in 1939.

An author’s note reveals what a technical challenge it was for her to write. It’s also a challenge for me to convey something of the flavour of the book without giving too much away.

The set-up is very simple. A group of ten strangers are lured to a house on the mysterious Soldier Island, off the Devon coast. During dinner on the first night, a voice rings out and accuses each of the guests of a crime. These are mostly the sort of crimes that are beyond the reach of the law, because no-one realises that any crime has actually been committed.

The voice turns out to be a recording that one of the servants has been tricked into playing.  

In each guest’s room there is a framed inscription of the old nursery rhyme which begins “Ten little soldier boys went out to dine” and ends with “and then there were none”. On the dining room table are ten china figurines. The guests begin to die, one by one, in ways that resemble the rhyme. Then they realise that each death is a murder. Every time someone dies the others find that one of the figures has disappeared from the table.

Someone is exacting retribution for the crimes that went undetected and unpunished.

A thorough search of the island reveals that there is no-one else there. The killer must be one of the guests.

The tension ramps up as the number of people left alive dwindles and the survivors become extremely suspicious of each other. Each of them is now trapped in a nightmare of doubt, believing one of the others to be the killer.

It would be unfair to anyone who has not read the book to say any more. It’s all very well worked out by Christie so that even the arrival of the police at the end does not clear up the mystery. That is revealed right at the end in a note by the perpetrator explaining how they set the whole thing up.

A quick resume of the plot may make the book sound like a rather soulless and mechanical exercise in suspense, but it’s much more than that. There is a crucial point at the very end that seems to go missing in the numerous film and TV adaptations. The guests die in the order of seriousness of their crimes. This makes the reader think back over what they have just read. There are different degrees of moral responsibility and guilt. There are also different ways of betraying trust. And Christie makes clear just what is the most serious crime of all, for which the punishment must be suicide not murder.

The characters are introduced skilfully so that the reader has little difficultly telling them apart. The introductory part of the novel is reasonably realistic. As the tension rises, this gives way to something different. The island is bleak and treeless and the only building on it is the house, a nineteen-thirties modernist structure. There are no gothic trappings here and much of the action takes place in broad daylight.

Everything is stripped back to focus the reader’s attention on the characters and their situation. There is a sort of double suspense, as to just what each did in the past, as well as who might be the killer now. As the survivors begin to contemplate the possibility of death, and their different attitudes to it are revealed, the novel takes on something of an existential atmosphere.

I wonder if this was because it was written at the beginning of the second world war. I detected a similar contemplation of mortality in Eric Ambler’s Journey Into Fear, written around the same time.

In the latter stages, the bleak setting gives the feeling that the characters are in a sort of hell. More than once, there is a hint of the supernatural, as if they are being punished by God. There is a touch of “the voice of God” about the recording. Indeed, the whole story has a rather parable-like feel to it.

The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

Having read a Philip Marlowe continuation novel, Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne, I felt it was time to return to the original novels by Raymond Chandler. A long time ago, he used to be a real favourite of mine. How would his writing seem to me now, a lifetime later?

I assumed that I had read all the Philip Marlowe books, so when I took The Little Sister out of the library, I thought I would be re-reading it. As I started reading, it did not seem very familiar and I realised that I had missed this one.

What a treat it was to have a Marlowe story come up fresh! I think it might just be the best of them, having a slight edge over The Long Goodbye. What I had forgotten is the intensity of Chandler’s writing, the visual quality that makes reading him feel like watching a film noir in one’s mind’s eye. He is such a marvellous prose stylist. Let’s face it, he’s a considerably better writer than many other American writers of the second half of the twentieth century who have more “literary” reputations.  

He didn’t invent that distinctive first-person style, but he did refine and perfect it. Every now and then we get a hint that Marlowe is an educated man. “Browning, the poet not the gun.”, for example. This justifies the language in which his thoughts are framed.

So many of the writers I have liked over the years use a style that derives from Chandler. Len Deighton borrowed quite heavily from Chandler in his early novels, perhaps most of all in Billion Dollar Brain where the assassin uses the same killing method as in The Little Sister. Derek Raymond went so far as to adopt “Raymond” as his pen name. Philip Kerr used a world-weary, Marlowe style detective to examine the Third Reich.

This time, I’m not going to bother with a detailed description of the plot. Chandler himself was famously unconcerned about that side of things. During the filming of The Big Sleep, when asked to confirm a detail in the plot, he said he had no idea. What plot there is here is driven by the search for some photographs that could compromise the career of a rising Hollywood star. But why are people prepared to kill to get them? 

It’s the atmosphere, the sense of place, the feeling that Marlowe is involved in murky goings-on that he can’t quite understand, that are so compelling. Marlowe’s not really a logical detective in the Holmes manner, more of an intuitive one like Maigret.

This story seems even more cynical than the others. It’s full of quotable passages, including the famous line about Los Angeles: “A city with all the personality of a paper cup”. There is a description of a well-off lawyer: “He looked as if it would cost a thousand dollars to shake hands with him.”

Perhaps it is the Hollywood setting that makes this one so good. Chandler had seen it all from the inside by the time this was published and he uses his knowledge to great effect. He had worked very successfully in the film industry, writing the original screenplay of The Blue Dahlia and adapting Double Indemnity. As the movie mogul says “Save fifty cents in this business and all you have is five dollars’ worth of book-keeping”.

The reference to the studio owning “1500 theatres” is a reminder that this was published in 1949 and set in the late 1940s, just before the legal challenge that forced the studios to sell off the cinemas, thus ending their monopoly of the business that was more or less a licence to print money.

It’s a detective story but also a look at the dark side of Hollywood glamour. Money values have become the only values in Los Angeles, making the city a target for all kinds of criminal interests and vulnerable to corruption. This is something more than a murder mystery and Chandler is a serious writer who cannot be confined to a category marked “detective story”.

He is contemplating serious matters here as in this description of Marlowe coming across a dead man: “Something had happened to his face and behind his face, the indefinable thing that happens in that always baffling and inscrutable moment, the smoothing out, the going back over the years to the age of innocence.”

Silence Observed by Michael Innes

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

His real name was John Innes Michael Stewart and he was a Scottish literary academic. Under the name J I M Stewart he published works of criticism and fiction. He’s best remembered today as Michael Innes, author of the long-running series of detective novels featuring inspector John Appleby.

With the first of these, Death at the President’s Lodging, published in 1936, he more or less invented the donnish mystery story, later developed by Colin Dexter, among others. The last one appeared in 1986.

The books have a highly distinctive tone, featuring elegant prose, peppered with literary references, and a pre-occupation with upper-middle class manners. There is a lot of genteel conversation and they often feature country house settings. There is a vein of absurdity or eccentricity to the point of fantasy running through them. These are not realistic police procedurals.

This may sound off-putting, and the books probably are something of an acquired taste, perhaps not for everybody, but what saves them in my view is that Innes was both a shrewd psychologist and a master of plot. Most of the Appleby novels are compelling and enjoyable. Silence Observed, from 1961, is one of the best, I think.

The plot features artistic fraud, another favourite Innes theme. The title refers to the rule at Appleby’s club, as well as the discretion that he finds applies to sales of rather dubious works of art and the veil of silence that descends when eminent people discover they have been tricked.

Like all Appleby’s cases, it covers a very short period of time. The opening conversation in Appleby’s London club takes place in the morning and after a murder that night and another the following day, the case is resolved on the night of the second day. It’s a peculiarity of the Innes novels that the prose is dilatory but the stories fast paced.

This is a short novel, just under two hundred pages, but it illustrates all Innes’ strengths as well as some of his weaknesses. He has a real flair for dialogue, as well as description. The settings, such as Appleby’s club and a decaying old house in Essex, come vividly to life. There’s an exploration of a seedy shop in Bloomsbury that takes Appleby on to the roof tops of London in a scene worthy of G K Chesterton or Margery Allingham. The brief burst of action at the end is perhaps less convincing. Innes had a taste for frantic chases resembling John Buchan and they don’t always quite come off.

By this stage, although it seems somewhat unlikely, Appleby has become Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. He moves in the upper echelons of society. What saves the depiction of this from mere snobbery is the other case that is occupying Appleby’s thoughts. It concerns an eighteen-year-old boy in Stepney who has kicked an elderly shop keeper to death for a small sum of money and will inevitably be hanged. He reflects on this while investigating art fraud among the well-heeled.

With Innes, there is always a sense of an erudite and highly intelligent author having a bit of fun, and he passes this on to his readers. 

Only Innes could present a fake manuscript by the now obscure poet George Meredith as having been forged by a character from a Rudyard Kipling story. And only Innes would have Appleby notice that one of his police constables is called Henry James.