Tag: Detective Fiction

His Last Bow by Arthur Conan Doyle

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His Last Bow, published in 1917, is the final case of Sherlock Holmes, chronologically, if not actually the last time he appeared in print. The stories collected in the 1927 volume, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, were set earlier. Conan Doyle was quite careless about continuity, but this has never affected the enduring popularity of the Holmes stories.

It is somewhat shorter than most of the other Holmes stories and is subtitled An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes. It is also unusual in that it is not narrated by Dr Watson, but written in conventional third-person style.

The action takes place very specifically on the evening of 2nd August 1914, just before the first world war was to begin, an evening with “an awesome hush and a feeling of vague expectancy in the sultry and stagnant air”. The seaside setting on the eve of war gives the story something of the same feel as the final chapter of John Buchan’s Thirty Nine Steps, published in 1915.

Holmes has long since retired, given up Baker Street for the South Downs, and devoted himself to beekeeping. He has written a book entitled Practical Handbook of Bee Culture. We learn in retrospect that in 1912, Holmes was asked to come out of retirement by the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister, to investigate the German spy ring believed to be operating in Britain.

The story depicts the climax of this operation, as Von Bork, the German spy chief, prepares to return to Berlin. He is discussing how things have gone with Baron von Herling from the German Embassy. There is some doubt as to whether Britain will declare war, but in any event, the two Germans consider that a reckoning between the countries can only be postponed, rather than called off altogether.

Von Bork has been an effective secret agent because he is a keen sportsman, which means that no-one has taken him seriously or suspected his real motives. He is awaiting the arrival of Altamont, an Irish-American who has been gathering information for him. Let’s just say that the evening does not go quite as he expected, and that both Holmes and Watson appear in disguise.

The final exchange between Holmes and Watson, as Watson prepares to return to the army, is quite moving. It’s clear that Conan Doyle was bringing down the curtain not only on the career of the great detective, but also on the pre-war Victorian world with which he was so identified.

If you are reading the Holmes stories, it’s a good idea to leave this short farewell tale to the very end.

I’ve been enjoying all over again the excellent TV series with Jeremy Brett. I don’t think I’m alone in regarding him as the definitive screen Holmes, the actor who was the most faithful to the original stories. It’s a great shame that his early death meant that they did not get around to filming this story. It would have been a great way to go out, but unfortunately, it was not to be.  

Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne

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Lawrence Osborne was the third writer commissioned by the estate of Raymond Chandler to write a Philip Marlowe continuation novel and Only to Sleep was published in 2018.

The brilliant idea here is that it is 1988, the tail-end of the Reagan era, and Marlowe is seventy-two, retired and living in the part of Mexico that is just south of California. When an insurance company in San Diego approaches him to investigate a claim, he can’t resist accepting the case; one last job to stave off the boredom and inertia of retirement.

It’s the sort of mystery familiar from Marlowe’s earlier career. Wealthy property developer Donald Zinn has died in Mexico and his Mexican widow is making a claim on the life insurance. The company suspect it may be a fraud and that Zinn is still alive. Marlowe is despatched to Mexico to find out the truth.

Marlowe is not quite what he was, though. That’s hardly a surprise given the hard living that was depicted in Chandler’s books. He has got his drinking just about under control, but tends to have strange dreams. He has a limp because of arthritis and walks with the aid of a cane. It’s suggested that he is impotent now. Something of what he was remains though, because the cane is actually a swordstick. His determination and quick wits in a sticky situation are still intact, too. So is that moral sense, the feeling that in the end he will do the right thing because he can’t help it. 

Marlowe laments the way the world has changed, and what he sees as debased modern tastes in clothes and music. He remains a suit-and-tie man, fond of the old jazz songs. As much as a detective story, this is a meditation on the passage of time, ageing and retirement, and facing up to mortality.

Pretty soon the plot turns into a pursuit of a man who may or may not be Zinn. There’s a hint that Zinn is a sort of sinister double of Marlowe, being another retiree yet married to a Mexican woman half his age. It has the same dream-like feel of never quite coming into focus that you find in Raymond Chandler’s books. This is reflected in the title, taken from an Aztec song: “We come here only to dream/We come only to sleep”.

The real main character of this book is Mexico, described with such vividness that you have to read quite slowly to take in the precise, descriptive prose. Osborne is also a travel writer, after all, and catches the bright light and colour of Mexico. He has reproduced the distinctive tone of Marlowe’s first-person narration, but also subtly adapted it. Marlowe is as observant as ever, but the setting is Mexico, not Los Angeles. He is older and a bit gloomier.

Once again Marlowe is on a quest, a road trip from hotel room to hotel room as he goes further south into Mexico and further from America in every sense. Much as the book recalls Chandler, it also reminded me quite strongly of Patricia Highsmith. I am thinking of those tales of American expatriates adrift in Greece or North Africa where dollars will buy a lot of things not available at home. There’s also a hint of F Scott Fitzgerald in a rather sinister Gatsbyesque masked party.

This is that rare thing, a continuation novel that is based on the work of another writer yet stands up on its own as work of fiction. I don’t think you have to have read Raymond Chandler to get a lot out of Only to Sleep.   

Have his Carcase by Dorothy L Sayers

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This is one of the later novels by Sayers featuring her aristocratic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, and was published in 1932. Detective novelist Harriet Vane is on a walking holiday in the west country when she discovers a dead body lying on a large rock on the beach. The corpse’s throat has been cut. She takes photographs and recovers some of the man’s possessions, but this remote spot is some distance from the nearest village. By the time the police have been summoned, the body has been washed out to sea.

Lord Peter arrives from London, where he has read about the case in the papers, and he and Harriet investigate the mystery together. They are able to find out the dead man’s identity and piece together the details of his life as a professional hotel dancer in the coastal resort of Wilvercombe. It appears that he had no reason to commit suicide; there is someone who had a reason for wanting him dead and so the case becomes a murder mystery. The two men encountered by Harriet on the shore, a hiker and a camper, become suspects and when the fatal razor is found it becomes a key piece of the puzzle.

There is something very appealing about stories of a man and woman investigating a crime together and this one brings to mind other detective duos such as Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence, Francis Durbridge’s Paul Temple and Steve, or Dashiell Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles.

I listened to a very good 1981 dramatization of this on BBC Radio 4 extra. Wimsey is played by Ian Carmichael and Harriet by Maria Aitken. In some ways, this has dated less than a TV adaptation from the same era might have done. On radio, there is none of that contrast between filmed exteriors and interior scenes shot on videotape that used to be the sign of a BBC TV drama series, for example.

Nonetheless, I don’t think a radio version made nowadays would come out quite like this. Ian Carmichael gives Wimsey a no-holds-barred, upper-class, huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ accent and Maria Aitken gives Harriet a clipped, rather Noel Coward way of speaking. This is all to the good as it suits the characters and the story perfectly.

Ian Carmichael had played Wimsey on television in the 1970s and perfectly captures the feeling that his mannerisms are all an act. In the earlier stories one felt this was a defence against his memories of the great war. Here, as he confesses at one point, it is to hide his true feelings about Harriet. He is in love with her, but she wants to retain her independence and repeatedly turns down his proposals of marriage. This is all complicated by the fact that they only met when Harriet was on trial for the murder of her lover. Wimsey solved the case, found the real killer and secured her acquittal. She hates feeling obliged to be grateful to him.

The relationship between Harriet and Lord Peter extends over four novels in the series, but it isn’t really necessary to know that to enjoy Have his Carcase as a standalone mystery. Yes, there is the slight irritation of the constant deference shown by everyone to Wimsey, the constant “my lording” by all and sundry. You just have to accept that as a sign that the book was published in a different era.

The part that really matters, the well-constructed mystery, retains its freshness. It isn’t easy to guess the outcome, even today, and the solution is highly ingenious. It’s basically an “impossible crime” mystery with a small circle of suspects, but something about the seaside setting gives it a very different feel to a mystery set in a country house. This is clearly the North Devon coast, with Wilvercombe standing in for Ilfracombe. Both the setting and the various characters are rendered with greater realism than was usual for this sort of story in 1932.

Then there is Wimsey himself. Under the “silly ass” act, he is a very shrewd individual indeed with a great knowledge of people. He is a little like a serious version of Bertie Wooster. Ian Carmichael really did make the role his own, both on radio and television. After all, he had already played Wooster by the time he came to play Wimsey.       

The Sad Variety by Nicholas Blake

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The Sad Variety is Nicholas Blake’s penultimate novel featuring the detective Nigel Strangeways. It was published in 1964, so at this point the series had been going for almost thirty years, yet there is no sign of any decline in Blake’s powers or interest in his characters. This story is a compelling mixture of Golden Age detection and the harsh realities of the Cold War.

Here, Strangeways is asked by the security service to keep an eye on an important scientist, Professor Wragsby, who is spending the Christmas holiday at a guesthouse with his wife Elena and eight-year-old daughter Lucy. The girl is kidnapped by two British communists working for a Russian agent. She is ransomed, not for money, but for secrets. So far, so obvious you might think, the story will concern the attempts to get her back.

Things become far more complicated very quickly. The kidnappers arrive in the district with a small boy in tow. They cut and dye Lucy’s hair and substitute her for the boy, so as not to arouse suspicion. What will they do with the rather mysterious boy? It becomes obvious to Strangeways that the kidnappers must have a contact at the guesthouse and he has to try and work out who it is.

The guests are a mixed bunch. There’s a retired admiral and his wife, a young CND supporter and her beatnik boyfriend and a rather bland single man. They all have their secrets, as Strangeways discovers. The revelation when it comes is a real surprise to the reader, linked, as it is, to another jaw-dropping plot twist.

Lucy is a very intelligent and resourceful girl and much of the story is seen from her point of view. She comes up with a clever way of communicating her situation. Blake had written about resourceful young people before, in his 1948 children’s book The Otterbury Incident, published under his real name, C Day Lewis.

This novel is a masterclass in increasing tension and sense of threat and it becomes a real page-turner as the plot reaches its climax.

It takes place at a very specific time, the hard winter of 1962/63. The snowbound countryside, described with Blake’s customary poetic skill, almost becomes another character in the story. The really clever thing is the way the wintry conditions that make it so difficult to get anywhere are integrated into the plot. For example, a body lies undiscovered in a snowdrift, and the Russian agent thinks he is about to be arrested, not realising that the soldiers are only there to clear the roads.

Day Lewis was one of the political poets of the 1930s and the novel represents his final break with left-wing politics. It’s no surprise that the Hungarian uprising of 1956 features so prominently here, because this was the event that caused many former left-wing sympathisers such as Day Lewis to take a long, hard look at Russia and the inhumanity of the communist regime.

The Russian agent Petrov is a nasty piece of work, who enjoys violence for its own sake. Paul, the British communist, has been blackmailed by the Russians into taking part in the plot because of his homosexuality. He is thoroughly disillusioned with the Party: “I don’t set myself up as a model of the virtues, but at least I don’t pretend that whatever suits my book is the truth, like you and your bloody Party do.”          

N or M? Agatha Christie’s wartime spy story

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Agatha Christie did not only write whodunnits; from time to time she dabbled in the spy story. I think N or M? is by far the most effective of those. It sees the return of her married couple sleuths, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. In the summer of 1940, with invasion looming, they are enlisted to winkle out German spies in a quiet south coast seaside town. Or rather, Tommy is enlisted and Tuppence very cleverly gets herself into the game.

It was published during the war in 1941 and it’s intriguing to read a story of this sort written in the heat of the moment when invasion was still a real possibility. This is not a completely realistic novel, but it does reveal some of the atmosphere and attitudes of the time.   

I suppose this is what would today be called a comedy thriller, because as well as the air of suspicion and menace, where anybody might be someone other than who they seem to be, there is a good deal of humour running through the story.

The couples’ children are rather sorry for their middle-aged parents and their desire to find active roles in the war effort. They remain convinced, almost to the end, by the cover story that Tommy is a sort of filing clerk and Tuppence is visiting an elderly sick aunt.

In fact, both the elder Beresfords have put themselves back in harm’s way, by going undercover at Sans Souci, the guest house in Leahampton which the secret service is convinced is the centre of an enemy spy network, with its male and female leaders, codenamed N and M.

Playing roles themselves, both  are only too aware of how the other guests conform almost too perfectly to stock “types”. There is the young mother with her toddler, the young German refugee, the large, elderly Irish woman, the retired gent fussy over his health with his wife whose only purpose in life sems to be to minister to his needs, the retired army man; and so on. Which of them are spies?

Both Beresfords use spy tradecraft. Tuppence puts an eyelash in the fold of a letter she leaves out on view, and checks the paper with fingerprint powder later. The couple’s contact is a man who appears to be fishing at the end from the pier.  

It’s interesting that in a novel that mentions codebreaking work and features a personal code used between Tommy and Tuppence, there should be a character called Major Bletchley. Questioned by MI5 about this, Christie claimed that she had once been on a train for a long time as it waited at Bletchley station.

The novel has quite a resemblance to the final chapters of The Thirty-Nine Steps, with the seaside house making a convenient location for boat landings and signalling out to sea. The vision of the upper echelons of the armed forces and government being riddled with spies and nazi sympathisers also owes something to Buchan. Indeed, it is the uncertainty about who to trust that leads to the Beresfords becoming involved. Having been out of the intelligence game for so long, they are not known to the enemy spies.

The pace picks up towards the end with chases over the downs and a bewildering series of revelations as to who is and isn’t a traitor.

There’s a good deal of sympathy here for German refugees, and a grudging respect for enemy spies who risk their lives, as opposed to traitors who sell their own country out. Tommy and Tuppence were involved in this sort of thing in the last war and remember Edith Cavell, the British nurse shot by the Germans for spying, and her statement “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone”.

Tuppence recognises that although people are encouraged to hate the German people as a whole, that doesn’t mean that she does not sympathise with the feelings of individual Germans caught up, like the British, in this awful situation. This applies particularly to the mothers of those involved in the war, and indeed maternal feeling is one of the main clues leading to the eventual solution.     

Christie offers an interesting explanation of how the Nazis plan to take over Britain, not by an armed invasion, but by an internal coup of British nazi sympathisers. The appeal of nazism is to “pride and a desire for personal glory”. It is “the cult of Lucifer”. As always with Christie, there is a firm basis in Christian morality. After all, the title is taken from the Book of Common Prayer.

Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley

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Sometimes, a work is so influential that it vanishes. I mean that the influence becomes so widespread it is almost invisible; no-one can imagine that anything was ever any different. I think that is what has happened with that fine Edwardian detective story Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley, published in 1913.

As far as I know, it was the first such story to feature the false solution, which became a convention that has proved remarkably enduring in the crime genre. Indeed, the other night, I was watching a recent Belgian detective drama on the TV and there it was, near the end, the confession that seemed to wrap things up neatly – or did it?

In Trent’s Last Case, the investigator makes an assumption about what has happened early on in his work on the case. He allows his heart to rule his head. He finds out eventually that he has been completely mistaken, and goes back to find the true solution to the murder mystery. He thinks he has succeeded only for there to be a further surprising twist right at the end, when the real perpetrator is revealed. Philip Trent, amateur sleuth, declares that he will not investigate again, hence the title.

This is an elegantly written and highly readable novel. It’s a serious story but with a neat touch of humour. The characters are drawn in some depth; indeed I used to think that if Ford Madox Ford had written a crime story it would have come out something like this. The murder victim, a ruthless American business tycoon, is a thoroughly dislikeable individual. Present-day readers might think that some things never change.

It seems to be sending up the conventions of the genre before they have become firmly established, pre-dating as it does the earliest works of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, and the “Golden Age” of the detective story. Both those writers admired Bentley’s book. Margery Allingham borrowed directly from it.

Bentley wrote Trent partly as a riposte to the Holmes stories, which he did not like. He was a friend of G K Chesterton’s and presumably preferred the more humanist and intuitive approach of the Father Brown stories, the first of which had appeared in 1910, to the cold and logical Holmes.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley is best remembered today for the comic verse form that bears his middle name. I think Trent’s Last Case is due for a revival. There’s always a pleasure in going right to the source and it’s a much better read than many of the detective stories that it inspired.

 

Site-specific reading

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I wasn’t at all well that summer. My doctor had diagnosed a balance problem and there was going to be a long wait to see the specialist.  A gentler than usual holiday was called for, so we booked a room in Broadstairs. We had asked for a sea view and there were two comfortable chairs that we moved to face the big window. One of the books I had taken with me was Agatha Christie’s N or M. I found that I was sitting in a seaside guest house, reading a second world war spy thriller about the search for a German spy in a seaside guest house. I can’t remember, though, whether I had chosen that book because of its setting or whether the match of reading and location was a happy accident.

Certainly, I was aware of other literary associations in Broadstairs. On one of the walks I was able to manage, we had a look at the North Foreland and wondered which set of steps cut into the chalk were the ones that had given John Buchan the title The 39 Steps.

On a later visit, the literary allusions came to us, without our looking for them. It was autumn this time. We went for a walk along the beach as the light was fading. As we turned to come back, we noticed a figure in the distance. The figure seemed to be following us. We stopped and the figure stopped too, moving off again as we did and keeping the same distance. We were experiencing in reality the situation from M R James. Eventually, the figure turned towards the cliffs. When we looked again, it had disappeared. Perhaps it had gone up the steps.

We stood under the cliff, discussing this strange occurrence. It was almost dark now, but on the edge of the cliff,  we could make out a sinister figure looking down at us. It appeared to have its arms folded. After a few minutes peering into the near darkness, the penny dropped as we realised that the strange figure was actually a chimney stack.

That was not the only time that I felt I had walked into the pages of M R James. We stayed at a hotel in North Norfolk, not far from the beach and with a golf course nearby. The hotel was quite old and in the past guests had come for seaside golf, like James’ characters. An old framed menu on the wall told us that dinner at 7.30 would be followed by bridge. A reassuring lack of choice in those days. There was a small sitting room, with some books on a shelf. Among them was a battered paperback copy of James’ stories. So I had the experience of reading Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad and A Warning to the Curious in a place very like the fictional locations.

It started to rain, and we went to the bar for a drink. We sat looking out at the hotel grounds and beyond them the now deserted beach. It seemed a far less friendly place in the wind and rain. The cloth canopy of one of the tables on the terrace flapped against its pole. As the wind and rain whipped it back and forth, it looked to me, with my imagination no doubt primed by reading James, like the ghost under the sheet in Whistle.

The hotel might well have had its own ghosts. Another old framed menu was from the second world war.  It was for a very special occasion, the farewell dinner for the officers who had been billeted there, while training for D-day.  A poignant artefact that made me wonder how many of them had returned from Normandy. I would not have been at all surprised to encounter the shade of a young subaltern on the lonely beach at twilight.

One final thing. During our stay at the Norfolk hotel, there was a fellow guest, a lady, who could be seen each evening sitting quietly and writing in a notebook. Perhaps we weren’t the only ones to find our imaginations refreshed by this stretch of coast.

The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake

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Surbiton Festival (4) XA

The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake was published in 1938. It is an example of the type of detective story where the identity of the criminal is known, or appears to be, right from the start. It has some of the expected features of novels of the “golden age”, but is also strikingly different. It feels like an attempt to do something more realistic with the genre conventions, closer to Graham Greene than Agatha Christie.

This is hardly surprising, given that Nicholas Blake was the pen name of Cecil Day Lewis, poet and critic, who was poet laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. The Beast Must Die was the fourth book to feature his series detective, Nigel Strangeways.

Depending on your view of these things, you might see him as a serious poet writing commercial fiction on the side, or as an innovative and brilliant crime writer who also wrote a great deal of poetry. What is undeniable is his talent for language.

Day Lewis wrote sixteen Strangeways novels, and four “stand alone” mysteries, from the early 1930s to the late 1960s. All of them anticipate the more psychological approach adopted by later writers in this genre.

The plot of The Beast Must Die concerns the attempts of Felix Lane to take revenge on the man who killed his young son in a hit-and-run accident. The opening section of the novel is presented as Felix Lane’s diary, describing in great detail how he goes about identifying and tracking down the driver.

Like his creator, Lane is a man with an alter ego. He is in fact, Frank Cairns and Felix Lane is the pen name under which he writes detective stories. It is his knowledge of detection that enables him to find the speeding driver, garage owner George Ratteray, and the use of his pen name that enables him to cover his tracks.

Lane/Cairns has told us right from the start that once he has found the driver he intends to kill him, yet when Ratteray is found dead, Lane insists he has been framed and calls in Nigel Strangeways to clear his name.

The latter part of the novel is on the face of it, more conventional, as all the occupants of Ratteray’s household come under suspicion, and Strangeways works in conjunction with the police inspector to crack the case.

Strangeways begins to suspect that all may not be as it seems when the evidence he gathers conflicts with what Lane wrote in his diary. Has Lane deliberately falsified his account, or has he accurately recorded that Ratteray lied to him?

Strangeways gets to the truth in the end, and the solution is highly ingenious, involving the interpretation of a literary reference in Lane’s diary. It’s an early example of textual analysis as detection, the sort of thing done later on by Colin Dexter in The Wench is Dead.

The greater depth than usual comes from the characterisation and the moral questions that the reader is asked to ponder. Ratteray is a domestic monster who beats his wife and tyrannizes his sensitive son. He has callously covered up his responsibility for the death of a young boy. He would be no great loss to the world.

But the central question of the book, on which the mystery depends, is just what sort of man is Felix Lane.

The criticism that is often made of “golden age” stories is that tragic events seem to make no real impact on anyone. That is not the case here; Lane has been devastated by his boy’s death and there is a suggestion that his nurturing relationship with Ratteray’s son Phil is a substitute for that with his own lost son.

Like all the Blake novels, it is fluently written and highly readable. The peaceful English rural locations, seen at their best in the summertime, are an effective counterpoint to the sad events of the story.

The 1969 Claude Chabrol film adaptation of this book is very good, but omits Strangeways altogether and alters the ending somewhat. The use of the diary in the book would be difficult to reproduce on screen in any case, as it depends for its impact on the sense that Lane/Cairns is confessing directly to the reader.

I am pleased but also somewhat wary to find that the BBC are going to do another adaptation. Pleased because I am a huge admirer of the Blake novels and I think they deserve to be better known today. Wary, though, because I wonder how the finished version will actually turn out. This story is quite dark enough as it is, and does not need any alterations. In the end, there is more than one victim.

(An interesting footnote is that the story was said to have been inspired by a similar incident in Day Lewis’ own life, when his young son had a “near miss”. Perhaps Blake/Day Lewis and Lane/Cairns had more in common than we might think.)