Anthony Berkeley's Gold Age Mystery MURDER IN THE BASEMENT Reprinted

 [Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“With a set of clever twists, Berkeley finally lays out the issue of how best to see justice served, and the answers are both rueful and entertaining.”

 

For the reissue of this “crime classic” by of the Golden Age mystery authors, Anthony Berkeley, an insightful introduction from series editor (and author) Martin Edwards. Framing the 1932 novel as “the first detective novel to contain a ‘whowasdunin’ mystery,” Edwards point readers toward more than just a gallop through a British investigation—and instead into regarding how Berkely in 1932 broke new ground in how to tell a good story.

 

The tale opens with Reginald and Molly Dane, charmingly inexperienced newlyweds, exploring their very first house. When Reginald finds evidence of something bricked up under the cellar floor, the two expect a treasure chest of gold—but alas, as Chief Inspector Moresby and his me soon confirm, the buried item is a body. And from here on (barely into Chapter I), Murder in the Basement marches with the difficulties of identification before forensic science’s modern miracles, and then to the competitive darknesses behind the scene in a school called Roland House.

 

With this entry, experienced Berkeley readers will perk up and sniff the wind, since the Chief Inspector heads to the author Roger Sheringham—a clever inhabitant of other Berkeley mysteries—to ask about the school. Sheringham spent two weeks there, doing research for a novel while also observing the stresses among staff members. Could he have actually instigated the crime with what he told the staff? Sheringham admits:

 

“They’d been egging me on to talk about murder … I gave them, in fact, a sort of lecture on murder, not as a fine art but as a practical means of getting rid of an unwanted person. I talked a lot of damned rot, of course, but then I always do. I never dreamed that any one of them could be taking me seriously: but it looks very much as if one of them did.”

 

Then, in a nimble twist that we’d now call “a bit of meta,” the crime novel shifts to offering Sheringham’s own manuscript, challenging both its author and the reader to pick out who the unnamed victim must have been. For if Sheringham’s theories of crime are effective, that should be possible from an outline of the situation—right?

 

With a set of clever twists, Berkeley finally lays out the issue of how best to see justice served, and the answers are both rueful and entertaining—demonstrating again why the early 20th century, in developing crime novels and their authors, has been proclaimed a Golden Age. Whether you’d pick your crime authors of choice during the 1920s and 1930s from Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, G. K. Chesterton, and John Creasey, or their American counterparts Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Mary Roberts Rinehart, here is a good reason to consider adding Anthony Berkeley to your list.

 

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

 

Complete Collected Mysteries of Grand Master Margaret Millar

About two weeks ago, Syndicate Books -- distributed by crime fiction marvel Soho Press -- released the first of a massive seven-volume set that will offer the complete works of Margaret Millar.

And for many a mystery fan, the most pressing mystery is: Who was Margaret Millar, and why don't we know her books already?

Think back to when you began reading the classic mystery authors. I know who I read: Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, and my mother's copies of Earle Stanley Gardiner and John Dickson Carr. Then Mignon Eberhart, John D. MacDonald, Graham Greene, even Ngaio Marsh. These have all been named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. The award began in 1955 with Agatha Christie; many others named since then have written for so long that I think of them as my own contemporaries instead of my mother's -- John Le Carré, Tony Hillerman, Donald E. Westlake, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.

But I missed a few, and I think it's no accident that Margaret Millar's work was among them. Deeply disturbing, psychologically intense, probing, and really truly creepy in their pace and suspense, her books -- like Vanish in an Instant and Beast in View -- are books I could not have absorbed well during the anxious and hectic college years and then childrearing. Now, however, their power and finely honed craft make an immediate impression.

It's not easy to find Millar's books in bookstores; even in the online sources of used books, they're not plentiful. So it's a huge gift to find the first collected volume of COLLECTED MILLAR, subtitled The Master at Her Zenith, as a freshly issued oversized paperback (9 by 6 inches, and 1.5 inches thick, 533 pages). Unlike the "old" softcovers familiar to collectors, this one is sturdy and well bound, to rest comfortably (if heavily) in the hands. And what a source!

Not only has this central volume of five of Millar's novels been released -- the remaining six are scheduled to follow briskly, this month for Legendary Novels of Suspense and the others in 2017: in January, March, May, June, and July (the last volume is her memoir and nature writing).

I found the insistent tightening of suspense in Vanish in an Instant reminiscent of watching a Hitchcock film playing out -- here's a sample of the writing:

Cordwick picked up the wrinkled bloodstained trench coat, quite naturally and casually, as if it was an ordinary piece of clothing. There was no indication, in his movements or expression, of his extreme distaste for the sight of blood, the feelings it gave him, of loss, futility, vulnerability. The blood on this worn and dirty coat had been the end of a man and might be the end of another.

He said calmly, "Do you, for instance, recognize this coat, Mrs. Hearst?"

"I -- don't know.. It's so wrinkled. I can't ... what are those marks?"

"Blood."

She drew in her breath suddenly, gaspingly, like an exhausted swimmer.

Beyond Hitchcock, the rich literary writing also reminds me of Henning Mankell's work, and the pained examination of emotions might well be a response to those who accuse crime fiction of wanton violence. In Millar's writing, every wound, every death, is shockingly real.

Feminist, Grand Master, sustained powerful author, Millar merits more reading today. I'm glad to see this series in print, and recommend it for many a collection of strong crime fiction.

New from Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins: A LONG TIME DEAD

Actually, Max Allan Collins is very much alive -- and even Golden Age crime fiction author Mickey Spillane has only been dead for a decade (he lived from 1918 to 2006). Instead, the title for this delightful eight-story collection comes from one of the tales included. And they all have that great Spillane flavor: like "The Big Switch," "Fallout," and "So Long, Chief." A LONG TIME DEAD comes out on September 6 from Mysterious Press, and it's well worth pre-ordering.

Spillane was the creator of Mike Hammer, a detective whose style is closer to gangland than to cop, even though his buddy Captain Pat Chambers will most likely help him cover up the seamy side of his crimesolving. Hammer has a little issue that today would disqualify him totally for that PI license (or "tag" as he calls it): He tends to shoot the bad guys dead, once he's established that they're at fault. He hardly ever means to do it, but most often he confronts someone who pulls a gun on him, and the only way to stop his opponent's trigger finger from aggression is if Hammer's own immediate shot blows out the brain network of the criminal. See?

If you don't see that, don't worry -- you have plenty of time to catch on, as story after story goes in that direction. Even so, the diversity among these is wide and enjoyable. It's also fun to realize that Collins, a master of crime fiction himself and a superb collaborator, has taken the left-behind beginnings of Spillane's abandoned shorter works and built them into full-fledged tales. I found it fascinating in each one to guess at what part had been Spillane's and what part Collins erected on the foundations. What's never in doubt, though, is Mike Hammer's adoration of his smart and sassy secretary/partner Velda, and his blunt assessment of a situation:

You don't need doctors or coroners or medical examiners to tell you when somebody is dead. Not this kind of dead. You say, "Shit," because you knew this dead somebody and he was a great old guy who was your friend. And because he was your friend, you are the reason he is stuffed inside a wooden crate with bullet holes in him.

In a long introduction, Collins explains how all this came to pass, and the long close friendship he'd had with Spillane. One tale, "Grave Matter," he says he wrote mostly himself; another, "Skin," brings us the aging detective and his attempt to straighten out his crimefighting style, along with some updates in technology (not really the 'Net, but at least cell phones).

Fond of the Golden Age classics? Treat yourself to this collection. It's almost like being there, all over again.

The Shadow World of 1952: INNOCENCE, Heda Margolius Kovály

Thirty-somethings today hold 9-11-2001 as their mark in time: the date the world changed. And it did for an older generation too, but it wasn't the first time. There was President Kennedy's murder - a date when the romance of Camelot fled from the image of American politics. Later would come the violent deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Marks on the timeline in terms of saving the world came, too -- like the date the Berlin Wall finally stopped dividing the two halves of Germany, and the Iron Curtain that hung across all of Europe finally seemed destined to fall.

June 2 marks the American release of INNOCENCE, OR MURDER ON STEEP STREET, a 1985 crime novel written by Czech memoirist and translator Heda Margolius Kovály. At the time it was first published (in Czech), the book was considered so subversive -- set in 1952 Czechoslovakia and baring the gray horrors of Soviet-style life in that nation trapped behind the "Iron Curtain" -- that its publication took place in Germany instead. The author didn't want it to create extra trouble for her friends still living in Prague at the time, and she kept the book's profile so low that it was considered obscure.

Flash forward to today, as Soho Crime publisher Juliet Grames and Kovály's son Ivan Margolius -- with translator Alex Zucker -- finally release, with great satisfaction, INNOCENCE to American readers. What if Raymond Chandler's earliest work had hidden all this time? Would mystery writing be the same? How would the noir genre have risen without it? Step through the looking-glass as a woman, with a finger on the pulse of Europe, and you have the effect of Kovály's novel: Here is where we begin to face the world as it is, the the fierce appetite of crime and murder, which devour goodness and crack open the polite, the gentle, the kind. The innocent.

Helena Nováková is working as an usher at a movie palace, the Horizon. Her life's stripped of all graces: Through her own offhand suggestion of a kindness to a friend, she tumbled her husband into a political black hole, and he's serving probable life in jail. She's numb, impoverished. Barely scraping by in a Czech culture of comrades and corruption. And almost without a will of her own.

Slowly, around her, the facade of civilization crumbles, one person at a time. As INNOCENCE opens, Helena is doing an errand for the absent "manager" of the Horizon: telling the projectionist that his error of the day before won't be tolerated if it ever happens again. Soon afterward, the projectionist is arrested, and the investigation that uncovers his victim also begins to push Helena toward taking action that she hopes will restore her husband's freedom, or at least his culture.

But instead, like the supposed dominoes of Communist occupation that once pushed America into the Vietnam war, Helena's fellow employees and even the Horizon patrons turn out to be involved in crime and corruption themselves. And -- what added trouble is Helena bringing upon herself?

The translation by Alex Zucker catches exactly the trembling grim aura that I recall from the 1960s in junior high school, learning about the fervent passion of the Communist promise while also sampling Russian literature and its despair. At some moments I almost felt the red paper covers of the first Communist propaganda booklet I ever read; at others, I could have been rediscovering the madness and menace of Bulgakov's crime novel The Master and Margarita, without any redeeming magic. Here are the roots of Eastern Europe's turmoil - the same ones that Alan Furst entwines in his Eastern European crime fiction that takes place in the 1930s. There was a world war between the 1930s and the 1952 scenes of INNOCENCE -- but in some ways it only justified the bitter changes that continued to twist once-civil, once-cultured nations into a mockery of Marx's own promises.

Helena's unthinking efforts to improve her situation lead into a compelling sequence of memorable scenes and taut suspense. No car chases, no gunfights, but the grit and betrayal of espionage are here, along with its pained consequences.

I didn't always appreciate Zucker's choice of slang for the Czech characters -- Helena and her husband had been "hitched" for two years when their lives imploded, and Helena reflects on her own actions, "If only I'd kept my trap shut." It's jarring at first. But the match to both Chandler and the American radio shows of the 1950s eventually won over, and I felt like an investigator myself, seeking the truth behind the performances at the unfortunate Horizon. Does Helena deserve the consequences she reaps?

Pick up a copy of this unusual and engrossing mystery, the only one that Kovály wrote. Let me know if you feel the same way about it, after reading it and stepping away far enough to look again: I'm shelving my copy next to Chandler.