Forgotten Book - Why Kill Johnny?

Back in the late 60s, or maybe the early 70s, I watched a TV murder game show, possibly called Who-dun-it?, which I enjoyed and which had a puzzle based on a story by Harry Carmichael. I've never been able to trace any information about this particular show and it doesn't feature in any bibliographies etc relating to Carmichael. So if anyone knows anything about it, I'd be glad to hear from them - at present there are times when I think I must have dreamt it! However, that show did kindle my interest in Carmichael, though I haven't read many of his books until recently, when Catherine Aird generously passed to me some of the Carmichaels in her collection.

One thing I also discovered quite recently was that Carmichael, whose real name was Leo Ognall, was the father of Harry Ognall. Now when I was a trainee solicitor in Leeds, Harry Ognall was a prominent criminal barrister. He subsequently became famous for his brilliant cross-examination of a defence expert witness in the Yorkshire Ripper case and when he became a judge he made an especially notable judgement in the Rachel Nickell/Colin Stagg case, which was controversial at the time - but subsequently vindicated. Incidentally, a little while before his recent death, Harry published a memoir called - guess what? - A Life of Crime!

Anyway, back to his father. Harry Carmichael is one of many authors whom I'd like to have mentioned in The Life of Crime, but there simply wasn't enough space. Under this name, and as Hartley Howard, he was a mainstay of Collins Crime Club from the early 50s to the late 70s and extremely prolific. In some ways he was a post-war descendent of the Golden Age writers, because he was adept at tricky plotting (and I'd also argue that Martin Russell, to a degree, took up the baton from Carmichael in the 70s). He also paid attention to characterisation, although perhaps not with consistent enough success to make a major impression on the critics. Barzun and Taylor were fans, though, and so is the Collins Crime Club expert John Curran, and they are all exacting judges.

Why Kill Johnny? (1954) is a good example of his craft. There is one element of the story - its starting point - that is so strongly reminiscent of Christie's After the Funeral, published the previous year - that I would guess Carmichael borrowed and adapted it for his own purposes. So I figured out one aspect of what was going on, although that didn't spoil my enjoyment, because the two mysteries are - overall -  quite different. The writing style owes something to the influence of the American hardboiled writers (as the cover of the US paperback edition above suggests) but it's not badly done. This is a pacy book, with a steadily rising body count and some pleasing plot developments. 

 

Forgotten Book - Poison in the Garden Suburb

The detective novels of the husband and wife team GDH and Margaret Cole are rather a mixed bag. I have to say that I've been disappointed with quite a number of those I've read. It's always possible, however, that one may drop unlucky with a particular book, or even a number of them, so I thought I'd give the Coles another try. Their early (1929) detective novel Poison in the Garden Suburb received praise from Barzun and Taylor, so it seemed like a good option.

The story gets off to a lively, and occasionally witty, start. People gather at the Literary Institute of Medstead Garden Suburb to listen to a talk by a noted lecturer, but proceedings are interrupted by the collapse and sudden death of a nondescript bourgeois banker called Cayley, whose only claim to fame is that his young wife is extraordinarily beautiful (and not very bright: the authors clearly don't approve of her). The dead man has been poisoned with strychnine and the prime suspect is a young doctor called Shorthouse, whose behaviour is idiotic to put it mildly.

As a result of this drama, we're not told much about the talk itself, but its subject was eugenics. The Coles were leading lights in the Fabian Society (its fictional equivalent features in the novel as the Bureau for Left-Wing Information), which had a considerable enthusiasm for eugenics at one time. I wondered if Rachel Redford, one of the main characters and employed by the Bureau, was to some extent a fictional portrait of Margaret Cole herself. There are some nice bits of social comment in the early part of the book before we get rather bogged down in the murder investigation.

One of the official detectives, a gloomy superintendent, is pleasingly presented, but the key investigator is the Coles' series sleuth Henry Wilson, who at this stage of his career was operating as a private detective prior to returning to duty at Scotland Yard. I felt the story sagged in the middle, and the climactic excitement felt rather underwhelming, especially since I thought the identity of the murderer was fairly obvious from early on in the story (even though the culprit's true character was barely hinted at: I don't think this is a stellar example of fair play, at least in psychological terms). Overall, this is a novel with some very good ingredients made into a passably entertaining story. Nick Fuller reviewed the book a while ago and makes a number of good point as well as including fascinating contemporary reviews.   

Forgotten Book - Death of a Bookseller

Bibliomysteries, in which books play a part in the story, are an interesting branch of crime writing. Otto Penzler has produced a slim volume which catalogues some of them. I've dabbled myself, given that Marc Amos and his books play a part (in some stories a significant part) in the Lake District Mysteries. And now I've read a much sought-after novel, first published in 1956, called Death of a Bookseller by Bernard J. Farmer.

I know it's sought-after because some good judges have been hunting down a copy for years. I came across a nice first edition in a dust jacket at York Book Fair at the start of this year. The only snag was that it was priced at £400 - yikes! I was not tempted to invest, but I have now read the story and it's rather enjoyable.

The author, Bernard J. Farmer was born in 1902 but I don't know when he died. He was at one time a policeman, but again I'm not sure for how long. However, it is clear that he was a keen book collector, and in 1950 he published a book about the subject. This novel, which was his third, and features his series character Sergeant Wigan, himself very keen on books, appeared six years later. Barzun and Taylor say that the prose style is flat, and there is at least a morsel of truth in this. But there is also some gentle humour and wry observation of human nature. They also say that Farmer wrote as Owen Fox, but I'm not sure this is correct. If anyone out there knows, I'd be interested to hear from them.

What I like about this story is that it's a compassionately told tale (with lots of bookselling lore) about a compassionate man, Wigan, trying to solve the murder of a friend. It's also a clock race story, as Wigan battles to find the truth before a man he believes to be innocent is hanged. The man in the condemned cell is rather well characterised - he's not at all likeable but the cop realises that doesn't mean the man is guilty. Wigan is concerned with justice as well as with books. This is a well-made traditional mystery of that kind in which George Bellairs specialised, and I was glad to read it. I'd also be glad to learn more about its author.

Forgotten Book - The Chief Inspector's Statement

Maurice Procter put his experience as a policeman in Yorkshire to excellent use in a series of crime novels. His best-known book is Hell is a City, which introduced the tough but decent cop Harry Martineau, portrayed by Stanley Baker when the novel was filmed. The Chief Inspector's Statement, which predated that book, came out in 1951, and introduced another strong character, DCI Hunter of Scotland Yard. It's not a well-remembered title these days, but it's a good example of Procter's craftsmanship.

The setting is the fictitious Yorkshire village of Pennycross, and the alternative title of the story is  The Pennycross Murders. Hunter is summoned back there when a child is murdered, the second such crime in the space of a few months. His investigation of the first killing drew a blank, although he found himself attracted to the victim's older sister, Barbary. On his return, he manages to combine his investigative work with a developing friendship with Barbary.

This is a village mystery, but we are a long, long way from St Mary Mead or "Mayhem Parva" here. The mood is realistic, and rather dark, as one would expect in a story about child murders. Procter's descriptions of place are as sound as his accounts of police procedure, and although there are really only two credible suspects, he still manages to maintain interest in whodunit.

I was impressed by this book, and I can see why Procter earned a considerable reputation in the 1950s. Even those great traditionalists, the American critics Barzun and Taylor, were great fans of his work. What is rather less easy for me to understand is why Procter seems to have fallen off the critical radar since his heyday. Julian Symons never mentioned him in Bloody Murder, and his work is rarely discussed. A shame, because he was a very capable writer.

Forgotten Book - Measure for Murder

My Forgotten Book for today is Clifford Witting's Measure for Murder. Witting's name isn't well-known these days, but he retains a number of admirers, and those picky (and knowledgeable) critics Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor rated this particular novel a classic, including it in a series of fifty crime classics from the first half of the twentieth century.

Witting's series detective, Inspector Charlton, makes an appearance in this book, but not until half way through. The structure is unusual. We are told about the discovery of a murder at the start of the book, but then we go back in time and follow a story told by Vaughan Tudor, which sets the scene for the crime.

Tudor is quite a likeable character, and he describes how, after an unsatisfactory spell as a bank clerk, he became an estate agent in a small town, and involved himself in the activities of a newly formed amateur dramatic society. The society gets off to a good start, but tensions mount as Tudor, and one or two of his colleagues, become enamoured of a very attractive actress. Preparations for the staging of Measure for Measure are disrupted by several untoward incidents - and then murder is committed.

The book is set just before, and just after, the start of the Second World War,and I was interested by Tudor's account of small town life at that troubled period of our history. The murder mystery, however, I found less satisfactory. There are too many characters, and the story felt very cluttered. I also found the motive and identity of the culprit less than totally convincing. But Witting's prose is light and agreeable, and he eventually earned membership of the Detection Club.

Forgotten Writer - Simon Nash

Something a little different today - the story of a forgotten writer, rather than a forgotten book. It's a story that came to me through the unlikeliest of routes. When I took part in the recent Liverpool University conference on James Ellroy, and spoke about The Golden Age of Murder, I had the pleasure of meeting Chris Routledge. 

Chris told me about a writer I was unfamiliar with - even though I have a copy of the Barzun and Taylor book (see below) which features one of his novels. I was so intrigued by the story that I asked Chris to tell me more, and I'm delighted that he's happy to share the tale with readers of this blog. Over to Chris.... 

"In the mid-twentieth century writing detective fiction had too much of a whiff of the lowbrow for many academics to admit to doing it, and yet many of them did, under assumed names. Michael Innes, pseudonym of J.I.M. Stewart is probably the best known. In what turned out to be the final few years of his life, I worked with my father in law to digitise some of the detective novels he wrote as a young academic in the early 1960s. Aiming to keep his academic publishing separate from his fiction, he used a pseudonym made from the surnames of his grandmothers: Simon Nash.

The Reverend Professor Raymond Chapman went on to have a successful academic career teaching English literature at the University of London, and continued in his parallel role as a non-stipendiary Anglican priest into a long and fruitful retirement. But in his 30s and early 40s, as Simon Nash, he wrote five detective novels based around his favourite subjects: the life of the university lecturer, English drama, and the day to day workings of parish churches.

Adam Ludlow, Nash’s series detective, is in many ways an idealised self-portrait of Raymond himself: he is a well-read lecturer in English literature, with a passion for Shakespeare, and a habit of coming up with an appropriate quotation for any given situation. Ludlow’s skill as a literary critic turns out to be unexpectedly ‘useful’ in reading clues and understanding character traits and motives. His gentle, but at times rather wicked, sense of humour is played off against the police inspector, Montero.

As is often the case in detective stories, the police in these novels are bound by protocol and thus doomed to appear dull operatives alongside the amateur detective’s imagination and flair. The pairing of Ludlow and Montero owes much to the precedent set by Holmes and Lestrade: despite their differences, Montero’s willingness to accept Ludlow’s superior intellect makes it possible for them to get along. But unlike Holmes, Adam Ludlow is no exceptional polymath. While his own ‘special knowledge’ enables him to solve these particular mysteries, he respects Montero’s expertise as a professional detective and accepts that he too is an educated man.

  

The first Adam Ludlow novel, Dead of a Counterplot (1962), was written for a competition run by the publisher Collins. It did’t win, but it was taken on by Geoffrey Bles and published in 1962. Four more Ludlow stories (Killed By Scandal (1962), Death over Deep Water (1964), Dead Woman’s Ditch (1964) and Unhallowed Murder (1966)) followed, before the combined forces of a young family and a developing academic career put a stop to Raymond’s novel writing. In truth Ludlow had probably run his course by then; by the mid-1960s the fashion for academic-as-detective stories was also on the wane.

Of the five novels Raymond wrote in his short career as Simon Nash, Killed by Scandal, a tale of murder in a suburban amateur dramatics society, was the most celebrated. It was among the ninety crime and detective novels named by Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor in their influential 1971 Catalogue of Crime, and was republished by Garland in 1983 as part of their series ‘Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction 1960-75’. All five novels were republished in the United States by Harper Row in 1985.

Raymond was delighted to be able to revive the Simon Nash novels and helped out in reading the digitised proofs to spot errors made by the OCR software and compounded by me. Sadly he died, aged 89, in November 2013, before we could go any further than the first two novels. I hope in time to complete the project and make all five Simon Nash novels available again."

This is the sort of project I love to hear about, and I'm very much looking forward to reading my first Simon Nash. Thanks, Chris.

Forgotten Book - The Secret of High Eldersham

The Secret of High Eldersham, first published in 1931,was the second book that John Rhode (or, to be precise, Cecil John Street) wrote under the name Miles Burton. The first,was a thriller, and this book too is more of a thriller than a detective story. However,it is significant because it introduces Desmond Merrion, the clean-cut hero who went on to feature in dozens of Burton's books, including a post-war story, Heir to Lucifer, which I featured in this column recently..

The author was a great pub-goer, and it's typical of him that the first scene is devoted to a discussion about a publican's wish to move from one pub to another. How this bears on the plot becomes evident much later. After this preamble, the action moves forward five years, and the man who takes over from him as landlord of a pub in the remote East Anglian village of High Eldersham is found to have been murdered.

At first, it appears that the identity of the culprit is obvious, but the individual in question appears to have a cast-iron alibi. Well, we know about alibis in Golden Age stories, don't we? However, this isn't one of those railway timetable stories of the kind associated with Freeman Wills Crofts, and soon the plot thickens. The police are out of their depth, and Merrion lends a hand. He also takes an interest in Mavis, daughter of the local squire...

This book is very highly rated by Barzun and Taylor, those great American experts in Golden Age fiction, and I'm glad finally to have got round to reading it. For me, the particular appeal of the book lies in the rather spooky setting - East Anglia is a fascinating part of the country that has often featured in fine crime novels. It's also somewhere I'd like to revisit before long.

Forgotten Book - Scarweather

Scarweather, first published in 1934, is the third book by Anthony Rolls (real name C.E. Vulliamy) that I've covered in this blog, and it's a distinctive and interesting novel, with pleasing touches of satiric wit, especially at the expense of archaeologists. One of the unusual features of the novel is that the events described take place over an extended period - a decade and a half. The action kicks off just before the start of the First World War, but the final drama is enacted much later.

The story is told by a young barrister called John Farringdale, who has to be one of the most naive fictional lawyers I've encountered in a long time. The detective work - unhurried, to say the least - is done by Farringdale's mentor, a gifted all-rounder called Ellingham, who is presented in such a way that I did wonder if Vulliamy had thought of using him in more than one story.

Much of the action takes place at a lonely spot on the northern coast called Scarweather. Apparently there is somewhere called Scarweather Sands in the author's native Wales, but his fictional version is located in England - presumably on the east coast, rather than the west, though I couldn't identify it with any resort that I know; certainly not with Scarborough. Farringdale, his friend Eric, and Ellingham, get to know Professor Reisby and his gorgeous wife Hilda, who live at Scarweather, and a sinister sequence of events begins to unfold.

I found the style of writing enjoyable; Scarweather's a good read. The plot has a pleasing central idea, but the main flaw of the book, in my opinion, is that the final revelation is obvious long, long before the end. I was hoping for an unexpected twist, but no luck. This seems to me to be Vulliamy's weakness as a crime writer; he had a gift for coming up with terrific ideas, but struggled to sustain plot development and narrative tension to the end of his books. This may explain why his work has faded from view, but his merits are such that he deserves rediscovery.

Golden Age commentators have had mixed views about him over the years. There is a good essay about him in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers by the very knowledgeable Charles Shibuk, and Barry Pike is another admirer, but Barzun and Taylor were not keen, and Julian Symons expressed some reservations in Bloody Murder. As ever,  Curt Evan's blog is informative and includes a review of this novel; he also published an article about Vulliamy in CADS  a couple of issues back.

Incidentally, when I wrote about Vulliamy on this blog five and a half years ago (blimey, can it be that long?) I mentioned that I have a signed copy of his late book Floral Tribute, but had never read it. Alas and alack, I still haven't got round to it. But I really, really, intend to make the effort now....

Forgotten Book - Information Received

I've mentioned E.R. Punshon several times in this blog. There's not much doubt he's a forgotten writer, and the first time I read a book by him,I wasn't especially sympathetic to his rediscovery. However, I knew that Dorothy L. Sayers, among others, rated him highly, and I felt I should give him another try. I've now read a number of his books, which were better than the first, and a kind friend recently lent me Information Reeeived, which really is very good indeed.

Information Received was the book that introduced Bobby Owen, who developed over the years into Punshon's most renowned series character. In his debut, he is a young constable, an Oxford graduate with a poor degree who, because of the economic slump, is not able to find a job other than at the lowest entry level in the police. But he's a keen and likeable guy, although interestingly he doesn't really "solve" the mystery here in the manner of a great detective.

The starting point is that a wealthy and unpleasant man decides to make substantial changes to his will. As with any character in a Golden Age detective novel, this is akin to signing his own death warrant.Within hours, he is found dead at home. Who has killed him? He has a daughter and step-daughter, and both women have keen suitors, while the cast of characters also includes a rascally solicitor (tut, tut) and a mysterious chap spotted near the scene of the crime.

There are some nice clues, especially involving theatre tickets, plus a number of very interesting plot complications. I was also struck by the nature of the social comment. Punshon was on the political left, and this comes across clearly. Anyone who tells you that Golden Age books were only written by a bunch of conservatives doesn't know what they are talking about. Sayers, whose politics were on the right, loved this book, although the American commentators Barzun and Taylor disliked it - I don't really know why. What I can say is that this is by far the best Punshon I've read to date, and I can recommend it.