Forgotten Book - Burn This

Helen McCloy (1904-1994) was one of the most talented of American crime writers. I've enjoyed a number of her clever and often off-beat mysteries, both those featuring her regular amateur sleuth Dr Basil Willing, and those in which he doesn't appear. Burn This (1980) marked Willing's final appearance, as well as being his first for twelve years. It also proved to be McCloy's last novel

The story is set in Boston and although the critical consensus is that it's not one of her masterpieces (a view which I share) it is still full of pleasing elements, especially given that McCloy seizes the chance to crack a few jokes about the writing business, and offer a few insights into it. A widow, Harriet Sutton, consults her lawyer about making a fresh start in life. Encouraged by him, she buys a house for herself in a historic neighbourhood, and funds the cost by taking tenants. Because she's a writer, she decides that her tenants should be writers too.

However, the tranquillity of her new existence is disturbed when she comes across an anonymous note marked "Burn this". It appears to be a message from one person living in the house to another saying that a fellow tenant is "Nemesis", a critic of legendary virulence, and that "Nemesis" should be given his - or her - final come-uppance. But who wrote the note, who was to receive it, and who is "Nemesis".

Harriet mistakenly reveals the existence of the note to her tenants, and chaos ensues, but when murder duly occurs, the victim is unexpected - Harriet's lawyer. Is the death connected with the note? In the second half of the book, the victim's heir introduces Harriet to Basil Willing, who lends the  police a hand. I wasn't altogether blown away by the solution to the mystery, which seemed to me to be less interesting that such a tantalising set-up deserved. So it's not vintage McCloy. But it is still decent entertainment, a quick and easy read, though not the best introduction to a fine writer.

Forgotten Book - Who's Calling?

I'm an admirer of the American writer Helen McCloy. She wrote engaging prose and was a skilled plotsmith. She also took care to vary her approach, so that even her series novels, featuring the psychiatrist Basil Willing, are pleasingly different. A case in point is my Forgotten Book for today, Who's Calling? It was first published in 1942, and I was pleased to pick up a Dell mapback edition in the bookroom at Bouchercon in New Orleans last September.

Frieda, a pretty but selfish young woman, is due to meet her boyfriend's family and friends when she receives a mysterious anonymous phone call, warning her off. Undaunted, Frieda goes to Willow Spring to meet the clan. Before long, someone is murdered. But it isn't Fieda. What's more, the murder method was that splendidly time-honoured method- yes, one of my favourites, poisoned chocolates!

Basil Willing is called in to assist the investigation, and his professional expertise is crucial in unravelling the mystery. In some ways, it seems to me that this book anticipates one that is rather better known, Beast in View by Margaret Millar, which appeared more than a decade later. I'd be interested to know if anyone else sees the parallels that seem to me to be quite striking (though I should add that Millar makes very good and original use of the central idea).

This is a highly readable and cleverly constructed mystery. Even though I figured out the identity of the culprit, I didn't pick up all the clues. There was one aspect of the story, concerning Frieda's reaction to the phone call, which I thought wasn't quite "fair play", but overall this is a crime novel that I can definitely recommend. McCloy was an excellent writer whose work deserves to be celebrated.

The Writing Life - and Taking a Break From It

When I was working full-time as a partner in a law firm, holidays were limited, and even when I was away, it was very difficult to escape the burdens of business. Life is different now I'm a part-time writer, and I'm very glad about that, but the question of when and how to take a break from writing is (in a different way) at least as important. Many years ago I read an essay by Len Deighton, which I've never forgotten, in which he said he wrote every day - even on  Christmas Day. (The essay was to be found in an entertaining and informative book put together by Harry Keating called Who-dun-it?) I certainly don't manage to emulate Len, but I do feel that taking a break from writing can really help - somehow - to get one's story ideas into shape.

Considerations like these were in my mind last week, when I celebrated my birthday. You could say that I've reached the age when one should not dwell too much on birthdays, but I believe the opposite: it's time to make the most of them! So in recent years, even when I was office-based, I have taken the day off and gone an interesting trip. The result has been plenty of memorable birthday adventures.

So it was this year, when - having warmed up for the celebrations with a trip to London to see a fabulous concert at the Royal Festival Hall with the ageless Burt Bacharach and Joss Stone - I headed off to North Wales. One of Cheshire's many advantages is that it's an excellent base for exploring lots of fantastic destinations within an hour or so's drive, and one of them is Llangollen, a gorgeous town.

Llangollen boasts a very large second hand bookshop there, and I started my trip by making a few acquisitions, books by Helen McCloy, Edgar Lustgarten, and Julian Symons. Then, as the sun made an appearance, it was on to the steam railway for a trip along the Dee Valley. This journey reminded me of my last steam railway trip, in the Ardeche region of France (below) during a stop off on a short cruise on the river Rhone that I undertook recently.

Next stop was a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Pontcysllte Aqueduct, which is the highest navigable aqueduct in the world, It's a pleasantly dizzying experience to walk along the narrow path beside the canal, far above the valley.

Again it put me in mind of the trip to France, and a visit to another amazing aqueduct, Pont du Gard, (below) which was built by the Romans rather than by Thomas Telford. Two wonderful places, both strongly recommended.

My birthday afternoon finished up with tea at Chirk Castle, followed by dinner overlooking another canal, this time in Lymm, and then a chance to get stuck in to Symons' The Colour of Murder, a highly enjoyable book that I hope to discuss on this blog on Friday. And whilst I didn't get any writing done, the pleasure of doing something different certainly seems to me to be helpful in terms of writing. A chance to relax gives your subconscious a chance to untangle one or two of those knotty plot problems that you've been struggling with. And so it proved last week.  .

Patrick Quentin and The Follower - guest blog by Christopher Greaves

One of the joys of blogging is that it brings you into contact with many people you wouldn't otherwise get to know. I was contacted a while ago by Christopher Greaves, who shares my enthusiasm for Patrick Quentin, and the outcome of our email correspondence is that he's written a guest blog post which I'm happy to include today. Christopher is also the author of The Past is Never Closed

"It’s good to see the Patrick Quentin/Q. Patrick/Jonathan Stagge team receiving more attention.  On the whole, it seems to be the earlier, more Golden Age books that are being read and reviewed, but for my money it’s the later Patrick Quentins - the ones written solely by Hugh Wheeler - that are really something special.  The earlier books tend to be more fanciful, less plausible; the later ones marry the most wonderfully skilful plotting with a greater realism. 

The shift from the earlier to the later style is clearly shown in one of the last of the Hugh Wheeler - Richard Webb collaborations, Jonathan Stagge’s The Three Fears (1949).  The feud which runs throughout the book between the two leading actresses, Daphne Winters and Lucy Milliken, is described with a good deal of sophisticated wit and almost amounts to a comedy of manners (the theme of the diva would be taken up again in Wheeler’s Suspicious Circumstances), but the idea that someone as tough as the ‘Divine Daphne’ would be haunted by ‘three fears’ - of death by poison, claustrophobia and fire - just doesn’t make sense, it belongs to an altogether more quirky, melodramatic way of writing, as does the casual, rather cynical handling of the murder of one of Daphne’s acolytes.  In other words, the book suffers by falling between two stools.

Patrick Quentin’s The Follower from the following year (1950) is a much better book and paves the way for Hugh Wheeler’s solo efforts, written after Richard Webb had dropped out of the partnership.  Actually, it wouldn’t surprise me if The Follower wasn’t a Wheeler-only book: we see here the same ability to reveal character through dialogue and the same interest in the protagonist’s emotional life that we find in the later volumes, almost all of which have in common the fact that there is an emotional problem as well as a murder mystery to be solved.  Where it differs from Fatal Woman, The Man with Two Wives, and the rest of them, is that it is a thriller rather than a whodunit.

The set-up is especially good.  Mark Liddon, a young, just-married engineer, returns to New York from a spell of work in Venezuela in order to be back with his wife Ellie in time for Christmas.  But ditzy, poor-little-rich-girl Ellie isn’t there.  Instead, Mark finds the dead body of one of her former admirers, shot through the heart.  He doesn’t know how it happened but his one inclination is to find and protect his wife, so he hides the body and manages, by a clever piece of detective work, to get a lead as to where she might have gone.  The action now shifts to Mexico - as with two slightly earlier Quentins, Puzzle for Pilgrims and Run to Death.  Mark learns that his wife has bought a ticket for a bullfight - yet when he gets to the stadium, the woman who shows up using his wife’s name isn’t Ellie at all but a complete stranger.  Having just read Helen McCloy’s The Impostor, I can report that the imposture theme is handled in a much more interesting, suspenseful way by Quentin here.  Mark does find Ellie, only to lose her again…until the denouement, when everything is finally explained.  It’s quite a long explanation, but Quentin sustains our interest by leaving a key element of the emotional part of the problem unresolved until the penultimate page.  Perhaps the showdown scene lacks real menace and it’s arguable that too much information is held back until the end, but the gripping narrative, touches of humour, occasional splashes of local colour, and elements of romance and mystery combine to make The Follower a fine thriller with a satisfying conclusion."

Thanks. Christopher!

 

Alarum and Excursion by Virginia Perdue - review

Every now and then, a publisher brings out a series of classic crime novels of the past. I can think of a few series of this kind that, much to my regret, did not last very long. But one of the longest and best series was the "Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction 1900-1950", edited by two Americans with a great knowledge of and love for the genre, Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor.

I have read only about twenty of the fifty books they chose. Naturally, I've loved some of the books, and wondered about one or two why Barzun and Taylor rated them so highly. These things are to some extent a matter of personal taste. But their choices, if sometimes idiosyncratic, were always interesting. An example is Alarum and Excursion, by Virginia Perdue, her last book, first published in 1944.

I was prompted to read this one by an enthusiastic review by John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books. John, like Puzzle Doctor and Curt Evans among other enthusiasts for the classic mystery, is a blogger whose judgments about a book always command respect. This is a case of a book which I didn't love as much as John did, but I can see why he, along with Barzun and Taylor, admired it.

It's an amnesia story. The hero is a wealthy businessman in his sixties who has come across a formula for a fuel that could affect the course of the war, and much else besides. When he comes round, he slowly pieces together what has been going on in his life. As ever, the question is: who can he trust? Now, I am not a great fan of stories about secret formulae, and amnesia cases are also a bit of a cliche of the genre. But Perdue does a good job of creating an unusual story-line and I agree with John and others that the finale is excellent.

This book is good but not, in my view, an absolute classic - it reads a bit like a novel by Helen McCloy, but does not have quite the same power. All the same, it's an entertaining read, and I'm glad I gave it a go. As for Perdue herself, I know little. Even Barzun and Taylor don't rate her other books. Perhaps she died just as she was getting into her stride as a novelist, which is a sad thought.

Forgotten Book - He Never Came Back

Regular readers of this blog will have gathered that in the past year, I've developed a real enthusiasm for the work of the American writer Helen McCloy. My Forgotten Book for today is another of hers, dating back to 1954, and called He Never Came Back (it is also known as Unfinished Crime.) As ever, it is very readable.

In many ways, the book is a thriller, rather than a conventional whodunit. It features a number of the devices that one associates with the thriller form, including a hunt for an immensely valuable jewel, which comes from a small country in the Far East. There is even a mysterious, tattooed Oriental character who is in pursuit of the jewel. Shades of The Moonstone!

More importantly, the book has relentless pace. It's quite short, but the action is non-stop, and I wonder if McCloy was influenced by her husband, Brett Halliday, in shifting from the classic style of her earlier books to this kind of story. Whatever the reason, she did it well.

The story begins with a man called Moxon becoming aware that he is being followed. He has stolen the jewel, and hides it in a cheap store. But then he is murdered. The next chapter begins with a short-sighted young woman meeting a male acquaintance in the shop where she takes a fancy to the jewel and buys it. They go off together for a cup of coffee - but then, inexplicably, the man disappears. Later, when he turns up again - he is a different person. But of course, nobody believes the girl when she says the chap is an impostor. The girl is terrified of elevators. So you can guess where the villain traps her...

This brief summary does not do justice to a book with countless changes of direction. In the hands of another writer, the story might be quite trashy, but McCloy was a gifted story-teller, and she contrives a clever and gripping tale, despite a few almost unavoidable improbabilities. An entertaining mystery.

Forgotten Book - Through a Glass, Darkly

I've mentioned Helen McCloy a number of times in recent months, and I was delighted to read another of her excellent mysteries, Through a Glass, Darkly, now reprinted as an Arcturus Crime Classic, which is my Forgotten Book for today. Again it features her amateur sleuth Basil Willing, a likeable psychologist, whose girlfriend introduces him to a strange puzzle.

Faustina (great name!) Coyle is a young teacher in her first term at an exclusive girls' school, Brereton. As the book opens, the head teacher, Mrs Lightfoot, is giving her the sack - but  not giving her a reason. Something very strange is clearly going on - but what? Faustina briefly contemplates taking legal advice (the employment lawyer in me was naturally enthralled!) but decides against it. Instead, she confides in her friend and colleague Gisela, who in turn consults Basil.

There is a creepy atmosphere about this story which adds to its power. What on earth is going on? Can it be that Faustina really has a mysterious double, and is she - or rather, the double - in some way responsible when another colleague dies? The power of McCloy's stories derives from the fact that not only was she very clever in the way she plotted, she also wrote lucid and compelling prose. Every now and then, she digresses into delivering a chunk of information that may not always help the pace of the scene, but it's usually interesting information. Clearly, she was a highly intelligent person and I imagine her as an interesting woman to talk to.

An intriguing feature of this novel is that it is, in fact, an expanded version of a short story that appeared twelve years before the book's publication in 1950. I read the story a long time ago, but had forgotten the solution. And although there is only a restricted pool of suspects,and you may think that the culprit is over-reliant on chance, McCloy writes so engagingly that reservations are quite easy to put aside. A genuine crime classic..

Forgotten Book - The Impostor

My Forgotten Book for today is another from that talented, and genuinely interesting, writer Helen McCloy. The Impostor was one of her last books, first published in 1976 when she was in her 70s, yet it is a lively, fast-moving story, a thriller rather than a detective story, though there is a neat twist and revelation near the end.

Marina Skinner has married into a rich but rather sinister family. She is involved in a car crash, and when she wakes in a psychiatric clinic, she finds herself effectively a prisoner. Dr Sander, the psychiatrist treating her, is a menacing character and a kindly nurse who tries to help her to escape herself vanishes from the clinic. The chance of escape comes at last when Victor Skinner, her husband, arrives to take her home. There is only one snag - the man claiming to be Victor is an impostor.

This is a great set-up, and the story moves along in a brisk, trust-nobody fashion. Victor, it tuns out, has gone missing, and it seems that the Skinner family business is involved in research into a new and lethal form of laser. We move from a domestic type of mystery, in effect, to international intrigue, with a good deal of cryptoanalysis of a mysterious cipher thrown in.

I felt the second half of the story faltered a bit, partly because I didn't find all the stuff about ciphers as fascinating as McCloy clearly did. In an afterword, she explains - with admirable honesty - that in fact she got one or two things wrong about the cipher in her story, but by the time she found out it was too late to change the narrative. This is a good example of the dangers of excessive complexity. A cipher that a typical reader hasn't a hope of decoding is, to my mind, not worth several pages of discussion, especially when otherwise the pace is excellent. However, there are enough good things in the book as a whole for me to have enjoyed it. Not McCloy's masterpiece, but an enjoyable read, cipher or no.

Forgotten Book - The Death Wish

Elizabeth Sanxay Holding is quite a memorable name, and she was quite a memorable writer, yet she is one of many talented practitoners of the past who nowadays suffer a considerable degree of neglect.  However, I know that Ed Gorman, one of the most knowledgeable of today's commentators on American crime fiction (as well as one of its most entertaining exponents) is a big fan of Holding, and I was prompted to read The Death Wish, my Forgotten Book for today, by a review on John Norris's superb blog, which constantly draws attention to neglected work of genuine quality.

John made the point in his insightful comments that, although published in 1935, this book was in some ways rather ahead of its time, given the focus on the psychological motivations of the characters.The key players are two men, an artist called Robert Whitestone and his friend Shawe Delancey, both of whom are  unhappily married. A very attractive young woman called Elsie falls for Robert, and the consequences prove to be tragic.

Holding had written a number of novels in the romance genre before she turned to crime, and I felt this was evident in her approach to the story. There isn't a great deal of action, and there were times when the behaviour and conversations of Elsie and others was rather over-wrought, to the point where I almost became irritated, in particular with Elsie. The plot didn't seem to me to be strong enough to compensate fully for this.

And yet despite my reservations, there was something about the novel that held my attention, and I certainly agree that, for its time, it was quite a notable piece of work. I didn't care for it as much as, say, Helen McCloy's debut, published three years later, but I suspect that at this point in her career, Holding was to some extent feeling her way, pushing out the boundaries in the way that talented and innovative writers do. I suspect her later books show further development, and I look forward to reading more of her work.

Crimefest 2012

I’m just back from a few days away, spent in a very sunny Bristol. The main focus of the trip was Crimefest 2012, and the organisers did an excellent job, as ever, with the result that this year’s convention was perhaps the best so far – and I’ve enjoyed them all.

On Thursday I moderated , once again, the panel on Forgotten Authors. Peter Guttridge, Caroline Todd, John Curran and Dolores Gordon-Smith did a great job in enthusing the audience for a range of writers, including Helen McCloy (who is definitely on my must-read list), Ira Levin and R.Austin Freeman. I’m really pleased this panel is so popular  - in fact, I’ve been asked to moderate it yet again next year...

My second panel was on Sunday. This time Peter was the moderator and our theme was “past and present”. Tom Harper, Penny Hancock (whom I hadn’t met before, a very pleasant lady who has made a big splash with her debut novel) and Kate Ellis were my fellow panellists.  Great fun.

Peter featured yet again in the Mastermind quiz – and this year, he was the winner, pipping Peter Rozovsky by the narrowest of margins. Rhian Davies, a blogger of note, and Jake Kerridge, one of our most knowledgeable reviewers, were the other contestants, and all of them deserve congratulation: sitting in that black chair can be a real ordeal, believe me.

On a personal level, I was thrilled that no fewer than four stories which have appeared in books I have edited were short-listed for the CWA Short Story Dagger. My warmest congratulations to Cath Staincliffe, Margaret Murphy, Claire Seeber and Bernie Crosthwaite. Of course, the greatest joy was to meet old friends and make new ones, and my abiding memories will include a host of fascinating conversations with people who –whatever their differences of background – share a love of crime fiction.