A Mere Child's Play of Deduction

"A part of childhood we'll always remember,

It is the summer of the soul in December."

- It Feels Like Christmas (The Muppet Christmas Carol, 1992)

My last blog-posts discussing the work of Herbert Resnicow stem from 2012 and consisted of reviews of two of his later period detective novels, The Gold Gamble (1989) and Murder at City Hall (1995), but after these posts he fell off my radar – presumably because I had exhausted all of his locked room mysteries. I simply used him to supplement my crippling impossible crime addiction and tossed him aside the moment he had served his purpose. It’s shameful, I know, but here we are again and for a good reason!

Recently, I found one of his short stories, "The Christmas Bear," which was listed by Steve Lewis on his list of "Locked Rooms and Other Improbable Crimes." So why not, I thought, add one more title to this year's naughty list of holiday-themed detective stories. A list that already includes J. Jefferson Farjeon's Mystery in White (1937) and Winifred Peck's Arrest the Bishop? (1949).

Originally, "The Christmas Bear" was published in the January 1990 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and anthologized by Cynthia Manson in Mystery for Christmas and Other Stories (1990), but also found its way into several other short story collections – such as Merry Murder (1994) and Murder Most Merry (2002). So not a bad print run at all, but the story can easily be added to the line-up of any Christmas-themed anthology, because it’s a bit more than just a detective story.

The first thing one has to note about this short story, comprising of fifteen pages, is its rich texture, which consist of clear-cut characterization and a plot as solid as the originality of its premise. Resnicow even included a false solution that doubles as a tell-tale clue for the actual explanation for the theft of the stuffed teddy bear. But let's begin at the beginning.

"The Christmas Bear" takes place in a small, poor town of only twelve hundred families and the scene of all the action is the local firehouse, which has organized a toy auction to raise funds for a four-year-old girl, Petrina Rozovski, who badly needs a liver transplant. There is, however, a hint of gloom here, because the town is very poor and the characters admit that there's enough "money in the whole county" to pay for the operation. So the toy auction will only get them so far.

Miz Sophie Slowinski, "the youngest great-grandmother in the county," takes her great-granddaughter, Deborah, to the firehouse to look around, but the girl immediately falls in love with a funny looking teddy bear on the top row of a rickety shelf. It's a black-furred, stuffed moon bear, "shinning blueish when the light hit it the right way," with a long snout and "a big crescent-shaped white patch on his chest," but the organizer refuses to take money upfront for the bear – on account of wanting to raise as much money as possible during the auction. But when they return to the firehouse, Miz Slowinski is practically accused of having taken the teddy bear regardless. Naturally, she did not snatched the bear and it seems not very likely anyone else did as well.

The shelves are improvised: boxes piled up with boards across them and these contraptions are liable to fall down if "you look at them crooked." There's "no way to get to the top row" until "you've taken off the other rows," but someone managed to snatch the bear from the top shelf without wrecking the whole construction. So Miz Slowinski set out to find answers and finds several of them in the store of Mr. Wong, who donated the bear to the auction, which is also where she the gets the idea for the false solution.

I actually imagined this false solution, before the theft was discovered, because it was very similar to how the high-hung prizes in game booths at the fun fair are taken down, but Resnicow showed here why he was a modern-day locked room artisan. This false solution would have been the most obvious answer to this small problem, but Resnicow found an equally acceptable answer that fitted the whole story like the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle. As the cherry on top, the motivation gives the story an ending that was diabetic-inducing sweet. Just sickening sugary, but therefore perfect if you're in a jolly holiday mood.  

So, I would call "The Christmas Bear" an excellent example of, what they call in Japan, an "Every Day Life Mystery," which additionally is also a splendid Christmas story. It's also an interesting take on the impossible crime story, but this will no doubt result in JJ writing a blog-post questioning the story's legitimacy as a locked room mystery. You're an old humbug, JJ! 

Speaking about locked rooms, the next review might be of one, but some of you would argue that's hardly surprising. 

The Simple Art of Murder

"A museum is a place where one should lose one's head."

- Renzo Piano

Isn’t funny how some of the heirs of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, setting up shop on those mean streets during the 1970s, became the custodians of the traditional, (mostly) fair-play detective stories by incorporating elements from them into the first-person, reflective narrative that defines the Hardboiled Detective?

Notable examples are Joe Gores and the husband-and-wife writing team consisting of Bill Pronzini, known for his ongoing biography of the Nameless Detective, and Marcia Muller, creator of the iconic female private eye Sharon McCone. I have reviewed work from all three writers, having delved more extensively in some than in others, but combined, you can trace a line between their stories that delineates a movement of crime writers who were aware of what came before them – and build upon those traditions rather than disregarding them. The old cunning fox may have been dragged out of his warm, comfy drawing room, but a few of his descendents obviously inherited some of his tricks.

Marcia Muller's The Tree of Death (1983) introduces a new character, Elena Oliverez, curator of the Museum of Mexican Arts in Santa Barbara, who is forced to play detective after a murder threatens to ruin the opening of the museum and even curtail her freedom!

The victim in question is the indolent and repulsive Frank de Palma, director and fundraiser of the museum, who accepts a monstrous, garish ceramic árbol de la vida, tree of life, from a rich patron of the museum, but Elena despises it – thinking that a piece that looks like an oversized souvenir from Tijuana reflects badly on the rest of the collection. Oliverez and De Palma bounce opinions off one another, before the later decides that he really should fire her and the former concludes that someone ought to murder him. And someone does. De Palma decides to work late and Oliverez sets the alarm and locks the door, effectively locking him in until he decides to leave, but when she comes back next morning he's still there – buried under the debris of the tree of life. Naturally, Lt. Dave Kirk fancies her as his number one suspect.

Well, at first, I lumped Oliverez in with Lawrence Block's Bernie Rhodenbarr and William DeAndrea L. DeAndrea's Matt Cobb, professionals in their field who, through their work, come into contact with murder and their narrative voices echo the hardboiled school, but they're more softboiled whodunits, however, as the story progressed, it became more and more reminiscent of Herbert Resnicow's Alexander and Norma Gold novels.

Another museum piece of crime!

The Tree of Death gives the reader a peek behind the walls of rooms and cellars of a museum that are normally closed-off for visitors, much like in The Gold Frame (1987), and is populated with professionals and knowledgeable people who occasionally share little nuggets of information – something that was (admittedly) more pronounced in Resnicow than in Muller. The solution for the problem of the locked museum is also something that can be labeled as typical Resnicow, who must have found even a sealed library to be too claustrophobic for a proper impossible situation. Locked rooms and closed spaces consisted in Resnicow's stories of multi-level chambers for acoustic testing (The Dead Room, 1987), entire theatres filled up with people (The Gold Deadline (1984), The Gold Curse (1986) & The Gold Gamble, 1989) and are stage with a play in progress, but always managed to wrap them tighter than Scrooge's wallet and used every nook of a building to his advantage. That's exactly what Muller did here and made me love the book even more, because I dote on Resnicow and The Tree of Death may have left its mark on his work! 

The most interesting difference was how the victim was characterized, which in Resnicow's novel is usually done after the murder has been committed and we get a thorough account of his life, sort of a short story within a novel, but here we get to know De Palma through the eyes of Oliverez. We get the impression that he's your stereotypical murder victim who was born to play the part of a corpse, but Muller humanizes him in an interesting way. After the body is discovered, someone fetches a drink for Oliverez and gets it in De Palma's cup - with a heart and the word "DAD" printed on it. It won't make you care a lick more or less about De Palma, but it's a good objection to his murder no matter how unlikeable he was. I never had second thoughts like that by any of Resnicow's victims, and more importantly, it's a fact that's not beaten into the ground. It's a reflection, a sudden realization that the mangled body on the floor was a person and not a stageprop. And that made it feel more real and memorable.

Anyhow, this is a blog dedicated (mostly) to neglected mystery writers, but The Tree of Death rubbed in the fact that I have been neglecting Marcia Muller. I'’m sure I will have to answer for that to a couple of ghosts, but at least DeAndrea as the Ghost of Christmas Present should be fun as he shows me the error of my ways.

A Knife for a Knave

“Playing detective isn’t all fun. Somebody’s going to suffer. And it’ll be a nice somebody; all our prime suspects are good people and the victim was a bastard.”

- Lolly (Murder at City Hall, 1995)

Edward I. Koch is a former attorney at law and retired politician, who exchanged the court room for a seat in the United States House of Representatives, where he served as a Congressman from 1969 to 1977, and presided over New York City as its 105th mayor from 1978 to 1989 – and this last political tenure formed the basis for a handful of detective novels "penned" in collaboration with subsequently Herbert Resnicow and Wendy Corsi Staub.

In his foreword, Koch notes that he loves to write and "decided to create a fictional Ed Koch who could be mayor of New York forever in a series of mysteries" and that he "joined forces with Herb Resnicow, whose fertile mind can conjure up the plots of the criminals as mine moves to undercover those plots and catch the crooks." I found it hard to gauge how much ink Koch himself contributed to this novel, but the construction of the plot, as he pointed out himself, definitely bore a number of the architectural features that are telling of Resnicow's style and it wouldn't surprise me if he also did most, if not all, of the writing – as a literary subcontractor, of sorts, for the ex-mayor. But more on that later.

Murder at City Hall (1995) has Ed Koch exercising one of his mayoral authorities that is rarely, if ever, wielded by a governing head of a city: the authority to perform marriages. Koch has granted a friend permission to use City Hall chapel for her daughter's wedding and even consents to perform the ceremony himself, but as he legally ties the enamored couple together someone else is cutting the lifeline of Karl Krieg short – a dishonest and despised property developer. He was found in an alcove in the chapel, after most of the attendees where heading for the gala reception at the Plaza Hotel, stabbed to death with a homemade knife wrapped in a paper napkin that functioned as a makeshift handle.

The fact that the wedding chapel has one entrance, no windows and that nearly everyone who was in attendance had to pass through a metal detector makes it somewhat of a puzzle how the knife was brought into the chapel – unless it was carried inside by someone who didn't had to pass through the metal detector at all. And guess who that person was? The mayor himself! This leaves Koch in a tight situation, one that could cost him City Hall, and decides to take it upon himself to figure out the identity of the person responsible for the murder of one of his city's most hated citizens – which he does with the ardor of an enthusiastic amateur detective and with the helping hands of his friends.

Gumshoes who operate as an equal team, like the tandem of Mayor Koch and his friend Lolly in this novel, can be seen as a staple of Resnicow's detective fiction, although, I think he glutted on this when Koch's parents flew-in to help him solve this murder and save his job. But then again, this was probably done as a request from Koch as a surprise for his folks.

Anyway, there are also other aspects of the plot that are covered with Resnicow's fingerprints, such as the personality of the victim (who are seldom possessors of a sympathetic personality in his stories), the modus operandi (stabbing is his preferred method) and the comedy, but, unfortunately, it lacked one of his clever trademark solutions that would've explained the presence of the knife by exploiting the layout and architectural features of the chapel to by pass the metal detector. The actual solution was pretty mundane and uninspired, although, there was a somewhat clever, but false, solution proposed right before the real killer was unmasked and that makes me wonder if the final explanation was dreamed up by Koch and Resnicow included his own answer to the questions proposed in this book as a false solution – which showed more foresight and ingenuity than the one they eventually went for.

Before wrapping this review up, I have to make one more observation and that is how much Koch struck me as a P-G incarnation of Sir Henry Merrivale (including an associate nicknamed Lolly!) – bouncing snappy comments off his secretary and the press hounds. I have no idea how much this fictionalized Koch resembled the real man, but I love the idea that Koch came to Resnicow with a Carter Dickson novel and asked him if he could make him a bit like H.M. Hey, it would mean that he has taste.

All in all, this was a nice, lighthearted detective story from a mystery writer who revived the classic Golden Age Detective novel during the 1980s, but was, alas, unable to do that same trick in this story – which ranks a lot closer to Murder, She Wrote than any of the past masters he paid such a beautiful tribute to in the Gold and Bear series. It's still a nice read, but I think you have to be fan of Herbert Resnicow to really enjoy it. 

By the way, does anyone want to hazard a guess how many times I wanted to type Edward D. Hoch instead of Edward I. Koch? 

Edward I. Koch

The Koch Mysteries: 

Murder at City Hall (1995; with Herbert Resnicow)
Murder on Broadway (1996; with Wendy Cori Staub)
Murder on 34th Street (1997; with Resnicow and Staub)
The Senator Must Die (1998; with Wendy Cori Staub)

The Alexander and Norma Gold series:

The Gold Solution (1983)

The Gold Deadline (1984)

The Gold Frame (1986)

The Gold Curse (1986)

The Gold Gamble (1989)

The Ed and Warren Bear series:

The Dead Room (1987)

The Hot Place (1990)

And I wrote a short overview of Herbert Resnicow's life and work:

Herbert Resnicow: Building a Career On Crime

Their Last Bow

"A theater can be a dangerous place, like all places where crowds of people gather."

 - Karen Gregg (The Gold Gamble, 1989)

The plot of The Gold Gamble (1989), contrived by that architect of crime, Herbert Resnicow, has a poetic structure – since it's the farewell performance of his golden pair, Alexander and Norma Gold. It's hard to gauge, though, if these final acts were penned with their retirement in mind or whether his commitment to other projects prevented him from returning to them, before his death in 1997, which is not an unlikely scenario, as the 1990s saw him outsourcing his talents to abet the likes of Pelé and Edward I. Koch with their literary aspirations, but on the other hand, the story does read like a best-off compilation of their previous investigations – and they seem to have full-filled nearly everything they set out to do in their first outing.

As I said before, The Gold Gamble bears all the familiar hallmarks of their antecedents with the New York Police Department and the criminal elements that patronized the museums and theatres of Manhattan, from a theatrical backdrop to a locked room conundrum with a solution that relays on the architectural features of the building, but there were also one or two notable changes in the personal situation of the lead roles.

Alexander and Norma amassed considerable wealth as consulting detectives, which is easy enough to do when your primary costumer base consists entirely of billionaires, setting them up for life – but continue to work to keep Alexander's brain cells from accumulating rust. It's, therefore, fitting that their final clients are, more or less, themselves when a murder threatens their $2.5 million investment in a Broadway musical.

Guys and Dolls was a critically acclaimed musical, based on a number of short stories that were penned by Damon Runyon, that premiered on Broadway during the early 1950s and Maxwell Sapphire, a washed up, but not untalented, producer wants to revive the play. It's the last opportunity he has at reestablishing himself as a theatrical producer, but the lack of financial funds keeps Sapphire from brightening his dimming star and ends up knocking on the Gold's door with his hat as a begging bowl in his hands. Well, at first he tries to keep up a front, but this, of course, evolves in a mental sparring match between him and Alexander – in which the intellectual heavyweight knocks him down a peck or two.

I really take delight in these customary, cerebral fencing matches between Alexander and his prospective clients, even though the roles were reversed here, but there was a tell-tale clue stuck between the pages that strongly hinted that you have to be a fan, like me, to appreciate these segments. Whoever owned the copy, I just read, before me left a one-line note that stated, "not bad but hard to get into." Well, I guess I sort of see this persons point, since these conversations do tend to drag on a bit, but I also love how unapologetically these books are in their lighthearted intellectualism and love for the arts. It's as if Resnicow bluntly says: this is a fun, but clever, detective story and you can take it or leave it! Needless to say, I took it!

But back to the story at hand: a financial agreement is reached between them and Sapphire, who, for some reason or other, I envisioned as Vincent Price, pockets the checks needed to set everything in motion, but there's a snag that could bring down the curtain on the show before it even opened – Sapphire's late night snack, Lisa Terrane!

Lisa Terrane is an inexperienced, untalented and spiteful chorine who got herself a small part in the show and is an understudy for the lead role of Adelaide, played by Carol Sands, but that's hardly enough to satisfy that enormous ego or quell her delusions of grandeur! So you would expect that Carol Sands has to be on her toes for dropping chandeliers or poisoned bottles of champagne, but it's her unimportant, easily replaceable understudy who is brutally murdered in her dressing room – killed with a clot of cold cream and a towel (read the book for details). Exeunt Lisa Terrane.

This unexpected exit of Lisa Terrane, should, in theory, have made everything run a lot smoother, but Carol Sands was the only other person on the floor when her understudy was being smothered and this lands her another leading role as the prime suspect in a murder enquiry – and with only three days before the critics' preview everything seems to be crashing down around them.

Alexander and Norma not only have to exonerate their leading star, but also cast someone else in the role of the murderer and figure out how this person was able to sneak pass the doorman, a guy named Pops, without being seen – which is a lot harder than you'd think. As a doorman, Pops appears to be omniscient, all-knowing and all-seeing. He sits in a booth and notes down everyone who comes and goes, even when he seems to be immersed in a complicated crossword puzzle, and sneaking pass him seems as impossible as bolting from a locked room or trotting over a field of virgin snow without leaving footprints. Norma tried and failed miserably. The secret of Pop's apparently super sensitive sensory perception is as clever as it simple and integral to the entirety of the solution to the problem of entering a floor whose entrance was under constant observation. It's not the most ingenious or mind-blowing impossible situation Resnicow dreamed up in this series, but, once again, it's completely original and shows how you can use an entire building to create the illusion of a sealed environment.

Note, however, that tracing the steps from the crime-scene back to the murderer of Lisa Terrane does not, necessarily, mean that they have saved the show and their multi-million dollar investment, because the guilty party can still be another person who can't be missed or replaced on a short-term notice – such as another one of their lead stars or the director. It's the proverbial quagmire and it will take a lot of brainpower to drag them out of it. 

All in all, The Gold Gamble is another amusing detective story that provides its reader with an intricate puzzle, set against a background of a musical production in absolute peril, which also does a fairly good job at scattering the clues around the stage and corridors of the theatre – and the only thing I can raise against this book is that the pace is a lot slower than usual and that a map would've been neat feature during the reconstruction of the crime. Nevertheless, the love Resnicow had for both the detective story and the performance arts dazzles like a lead star on opening night, but if you are new to his work I recommend you make the acquaintance, of Alexander and Norma, over the coarse of one of their previous cases.

I have now read all of the Gold Murder Cases, five novels in total, but instead of giving the bibliography in chronologically, I will post them in order of strongest to weakest:

The Gold Deadline (1984) [*****]

The Gold Frame (1986)  [****]

The Gold Curse (1986) [****]

The Gold Gamble (1989) [***]

The Gold Solution (1983) [***]

I also reviewed the entire Ed and Warren Bear series: 

The Dead Room (1987) [*****]

The Hot Place (1990) [**]

And wrote a short overview of Herbert Resnicow's life and work:

Herbert Resnicow: Building a Career On Crime

An Old Master in New Amsterdam

"Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere."

- G.K. Chesterton.

Over the past two or three months, I have been making futile attempts at pouring an equal amount of book reviews of detective stories from two contrasting eras into this blog, but the scale refuses to cooperate – and tips in favor of the classically styled, neo-orthodox mysteries instead of those that were actually penned during the efflorescence of the genre. So I have decided to even out the ratio between GAD and Post-GAD stories by reading them alternately in order to intersperse the reviews. Of course, this determination to straighten out this uneven distribution of stage time guarantees absolutely nothing and it's not an unimaginable scenario that, within a week or two, I will look back at this post and think, "well, that didn't happen," but hey, at least I tried. Sort of, anyway.

But enough of this palaver, it's time to make this spot once again pulsate with the linguistic rhythms of ritualistic drumming that will gently mesmerize you into a state of relaxation – in which you will be possessed by a dawning realization that your cluttered bookshelves feel very bare if Herbert Resnicow isn't wedged in between Helen Reilly and John Rhode.

The plot of The Gold Frame (1987) centers on a long-vanished, previously unknown, painting from the brush of one of the greatest painters from the Dutch Golden Age, Jan Vermeer, which was confiscated during the German occupation and ended up behind the Iron Curtain – before it resurfaced and was offered for sale to Mr. Daniel Belmont.

Mr. Belmont is the founder of The Fine Arts Museum of New York, which was erected out of love for his now late wife and their shared adoration for the Dutch Masters of the 17th Century, who presently has a seat on the Board of Trustees – and it has always been a dream of the old man to secure an original Vermeer for his museum. The serendipitous acquisition of this long-lost masterpiece, entitled The Girl in a Blue Kimono, seems to have fulfilled this longing as scientific testing of the paint layers and wooden panel check out and experts affirm that it's unmistakably a Vermeer. Well, all except for one of the conservators, a woman named Hanna Becker, who's a self-styled authority on Vermeer and is emphatic in her verdict that the painting is a forgery. But here's the snag: the only person who possesses the talent and skill required to forge a Vermeer that could pass for the genuine thing is Hanna Becker herself!

A pernickety job for the Golden Pair of Detection, Alexander and Norma Gold, but they can procure a six-digit paycheck if they can determine the paintings origin – whether it's an authentic Vermeer or a fraudulent imitation. However, there are two constituent elements frustrating Norma and Alexander in their investigation and one of these foils is the very man who has to sign that big paycheck. 

Mr. Belmont has an incurable affinity for playing cat-and-mouse games and found a playmate in Alexander, but you have to read their intellectual fencing match for yourself – it's cerebral art! The other complication is the murder of the detested and corrupt director of the museum, Orville Pembrooke, who was found in his private dining room with his custom-made oyster knife protruding from the back of his neck – which drove a wedge between the atlas and the occiput.

"Aha," I hear you mutter, "another one of Resnicow's ingeniously and uniquely constructed locked rooms I have read so much about!" Well, yes and no. The murder of Pembrooke is not a traditional locked room mystery, since everyone had an opportunity to walk in on him and soil their hands, but there are some other features that suggest an impossible crime – depending on what your definition of that is. First of all, according to the medical evidence, Pembrooke didn't resist his assailant when the knife was planted in his neck and this person struck with tremendous force, but left Pembrooke's fingerprints on the handle un-smudged! And no, no, no, you have to give Resnicow more credit than that! The knife was neither dropped on/or thrown at Pembrooke. I'm inclinded to declare this as an impossible murder, but it's really up to the individuel reader to decide for themselves which label they will apply to this crime.

While the murder of the unpopular director provided an intriguing how-the-heck-was-it-done situation to the plot, I must admit that I found it less enthralling than the truth behind the re-emergence of an Old Dutch Master in New Amsterdam and how Resnicow avoided one of the familiar pitfalls found in detective stories with a plot focusing on a lost Shakespeare manuscript or a previously unknown piece of art – even though the illustration on the front cover suggests otherwise.

I also appreciated the picture Resnicow painted (pun fully intended) of what goes on behind the art-strewn walls of a museum and watch characters like Freya Larsen, chief conservator, at work as well as reading how she and her colleagues squall with pleasure at the fact that their boss is en route to the city morgue. They really couldn't be happier even if they were given Rembrandt's The Night Watch, and not openly reveling at his untimely, but welcome, passing is perceived as a suspicious act!

The Gold Frame might have one or two plot threads that will fail to completely excite you, but collectively they make for another riveting read that blends engaging storytelling and deft characterization with a touch of charming, unapologetic humor – making for an excellent piece of intelligent escapist fiction. I guess a term in obscurity is his punishment for refusing to explore the dark, frightening catacombs of the human psyche and not let Alexander's recovery put a strain on his marriage with Norma. That's what you get for daring to be entertaining in this day and age. 

The Alexander and Norma Gold series:

The Gold Solution (1983)

The Gold Deadline (1984)

The Gold Frame (1986)

The Gold Curse (1986)

The Gold Gamble (1989)

The Ed and Warren Bear series:

The Dead Room (1987)

The Hot Place (1990)

Herbert Resnicow: Building a Career On Crime

"There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds."

- G.K. Chesterton.

Herbert Resnicow

Herbert Resnicow (1920-1997) was a civil engineer, earning his degree at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, who made a drastic career move at the age of 60 – when his first detective novel, The Gold Solution (1983), landed him a nomination for an Edgar statuette in the category Best First Novel. Resnicow was unable to secure the coveted price, but the tone was set and he wrote a score of classically-styled whodunits in the succeeding decade, featuring the wise-cracking behemoths Alexander and Norma Gold or the entrepreneur Ed Bear and his philosopher son Warren, as well as outsourcing his talent to abet Edward I. Koch and Pelé with their literary aspirations.

In spite of these accolades, Herbert Resnicow has evanesced from popular view and virtually nothing is known about his life – at least not online. Nearly every scrap of personal information I have on him was culled from his obituary, which also mentioned that he served overseas with the Army Corps of Engineers during WWII and left behind a wife, four children and four grandchildren, but a synopsis or review of one his detective stories were even harder to find before I took up his cause. This makes me feel at times as if I'm the only who cares and appreciates this neglected, modern-day practitioner of the locked room mystery who did his part in continuing a fine old tradition that is worth preserving. 

The Style

Herbert Resnicow came into this world during the same year that the 1920s were born, which has a mark in my book indicating the dawning of the Golden Era of Detective Fiction, and when you look at the style, tone and characters that populate the Alexander and Norma Gold stories, it's simple to discern the type of mysteries Resnicow must have enjoyed reading during his lifetime – and perhaps even read when they were first published during the 1930-and 40s.

The novels that have the Golden Pair at their helm are archetypical mysteries of the Van Dine-Queen School of Detection, slightly updated and resettled in the 1980s, but nonetheless feel as the genuine thing.

In my review of The Gold Deadline (1984), I remarked that Alexander and Norma could've been conceived after splicing and stitching together the genetic materials of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin with those of Jeff and Haila Troy, but that's not an entirely fair assessment of their characters. The resemblances are merely superficial and a closer inspection will reveal a set of characters that are defined by their own personalities.

Alexander Gold is a physical and intellectual heavyweight on the rebound after a near fatal brush with death, but he feels that his recovery is stagnating his massive intellect until one of his friends, a high profile criminal lawyer, who sort-of plays the John Markham to his Philo Vance, proposes that he solves complex, seemingly insoluble problems from the comfort of his armchair – with his quick-witted, Amazonian wife doing the necessary leg-work and inducing witnesses and suspects to subject themselves to one of Alexander's cross-examinations. While this may come across as a rip-off of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, spiffed up as one of those facetious husband-and-wife detecting teams with a penchant for risible banter and bouncing affectionate insults off each other, it's a resemblance that is merely familial rather than the result of cloning. But you have get to know them yourselves to see how much they really differ from Wolfe and Goodwin.

The characterization of Ed Bear and his son Warren, who find themselves forced by circumstances, rather than by boredom or the prospect of a large fee, to don a pair of deerstalker in The Dead Room (1987) and The Hot Place (1990), were done on a more serious and sober note – and their cases are less jocular in tone than those taken on by Alexander and Norma. The sobering effect in these stories is the developing relationship between father and son, which needed maintenance after the unexpected passing of their wife and mother, but this never casts a grim shadow over their personalities or the plot. This also gives it a surprising touch of realism, because the situation is handled in the same way a reasonably normal and average family, with all their faults and imperfection, would deal with such situation and in spite having lost the most important person in their life they found themselves trust back into their everyday life – which is what usually happens in real life. The situation they find themselves in is in a way very similar to that of Ellery and Richard Queen, but their relationship was never explored like this and that makes the Bear's a more interesting and rounded set of characters than the Queen's. 

 

However, it's not just the detectives that inhabit these stories that reflect the American detective story of the 1940s, but also the backdrops of their investigation – which either gives you an inside tour of an institution or have cultural backgrounds.

The Gold Solution is an in-depth look at a New York architectural bureau and The Dead Room takes a peek at the inner-workings of a company that produces audio equipment, while The Gold Deadline and The Gold Curse (1986) reflect a genuine love for the theatre and performance arts, which he confessed to in his preface of The Gold Deadline, and the people the Gold's or the Bear's have to deal with are usually professionals, enthusiasts or intellectuals – staples of the Van Dine School. These "behind-the-scene" looks are often as fascinating as the plot itself and in the instance of The Gold Solution, which had a conclusion that left me a bit under whelmed, it even saved the story for me.  

The solutions of these mysteries also often hinge on how the crimes were committed, but I will come back on that when I discuss the locked room mysteries.

The Formula

Formula is perhaps the wrong word, but Resnicow undeniable drew up a blueprint for his detective stories and constructed the bare outlines according to the instructions on this drawing. However, this does not mean that one book is identical to another, but more a repetition of certain writing techniques – most notable in the way he introduces and fleshes out the personalities of the victims (who are seldom the recipients of this readers sympathy). The fatalities are always introduced as if they are faceless props in a murder play, but their exit is quickly followed-up with a meticulously detailed account of their life, either in a written report or during a verbal interview, which often feel as a short story within a novel – and the best of these can be found in The Gold Solution and The Gold Deadline. This psychological analysis and in-depth look at a character's personality is another element that can be found in detective stories whose authors attended classes at the Van Dine School.

The Locked Rooms

When Herbert Resnicow exchanged his drafting pencil for a typewriter (or an early PC), he brought with him over forty years of experience and knowledge of construction and engineering – and this is reflected in his unique approach to the locked room problem.

The closed environments constructed by Herbert Resnicow are not confined to hermitically sealed studies, bolted bathrooms or inaccessible towers, but revolve around entire floors or even an entire building – fully three dimensional spaces where characters move freely from one floor, room or spot to another. Yes, I know what you think, but rest assured hat I'm aware of the difference between an impossible crime and a closed circle of suspect's situation. These stories are full-fledged locked room mysteries, but with a completely different and often very satisfying spin on them. This is also what makes Herbert Resnicow more than just a mere throwback to the glory days of the detective story. He not only picked up the threads of tradition, but also weaved new patterns with it.

The murder in The Dead Room, for example, is committed in a watched, dim and multi-level archaic chamber, designated for acoustic testing and experimentation, and offers a one-of-a-kind solution that is custom made to the interior and situation of that echoless room. The crime-scene in The Gold Solution is an entire top-floor apartment, designed as a tightly sealed fortress, while The Gold Curse stages it murder during a performance of Rigoletto, turning the entire podium in a open sealed room under constant observation, but his most daring and ingenious locked room trick can be found in The Gold Deadline. A locked and guarded theatre box may seem claustrophobic in comparison with the other closed-off spaces, but the way in which Resnicow employs the entire building is simply marvelous and even logically explains why anyone would go to such insane and risky lengths to create the illusion of an impossible murder. Its solution is also unique and tailor made to fit the setting and circumstances in which the murder was committed!

When it comes to drafting and constructing a locked room, Herbert Resnicow was one of the greatest architects in the genre, with a touch madness not entirely uncommon in geniuses, and I think John Dickson Carr would've been delighted that his beloved locked rooms were carried into the 1990s by a such a talented and expert craftsman. 

However, I don't think that Herbert Resnicow's legacy is that of a locked room artisan, but that of a risible mystery writer of logic who conclusively demonstrated that entertainment can be both lighthearted and intellectual stimulating as well as proving that there's always a place on the printed page for Great Detectives – no matter what era is we live in.

Why he's all but forgotten today, even by my fellow mystery aficionados, is beyond me and a mystery that may remain unsolved, however, I will continue to beat his drum and I just hope my little scribbles will do his name and work justice.  

Note: I have not yet to read any of his Crossword Mysteries or collaborative efforts, but expect reviews of The Gold Frame (1986) and The Gold Gamble (1989) to turn up before the end of the year. As a matter of fact, I have already begun in The Gold Frame and it's shaping up to be another excellent read – set at a museum and involving paintings from an old Dutch masters!

The Alexander and Norma Gold series:

The Gold Solution (1983)

The Gold Deadline (1984)

The Gold Frame (1986)

The Gold Curse (1986)

The Gold Gamble (1989)

The Ed and Warren Bear series:

The Dead Room (1987)

The Hot Place (1990)

Too Hot for Comfort

"You're going about this wrong, Ed; trying to fit a normal motive to an abnormal situation in a straightforward way. Have you tried Warren's way of backward thinking?”

- Iris Guralnick (The Hot Place, 1991)

When I read the first chapter of The Hot Place (1991), I fully expected that at the end of the book another opportunity was waiting for me to force a link in the chain of laudatory reviews praising the neglected and undervalued Herbert Resnicow, but his sixteenth detective novel turned out to be a surprisingly routine affair – lacking the effulgence of its predecessor, The Dead Room (1987). 

The Hot Place starts off strong when entrepreneur Ed Bear strides into the main entry lounge of the sumptuous Oakdale Country Club, to which he and his son pay a Prince's ransom in membership fees, only to find it occupied with policemen – and a few of them are scowling down at his son, Warren, while scribbling in a notebook. Only a few hours before, Warren had entered the steam room, around eight in the morning, after an early workout and stumbled over the remains of Barney Brodsky.

Brodsky was a miserable old curmudgeon, who could only derive solace from needling and aggravating everyone unlucky enough to wander into his peripheral vision, but this hardly seems like an adequate motive for a murderer to plead a case of justifiable homicide to his or her conscience – and so everyone assumes the old geezer was merely overcome by the heat and density of the vapors that cloud up the steam room. But Warren believes it was murder and when a medical examiner takes a look at the body the diagnosis is death by asphyxiating. Murder, plain and simple!

The murder of Barney Brodsky appears to be closely entwined with the dealings of his business associates, who also form a closely-knit network within the club, and a big investment deal – which is interlocked with one of the Bear's latest commercial endeavors. As a result, father and son find themselves taking on the roles of Ellery and Richard Queen as they probe through the fog enshrouding this case, however, this time they have less than a week to clear everything up and safe an enterprising young man from ruination.

You'd think that after such a set-up that the plot had build-up more than enough steam required to effortlessly charge through the chapters towards the final dénouement, but after the opening the book becomes sedentary and takes it time to position all the pieces on the playing board before resuming again. As a result, intricate and ingenious plotting was sacrificed in favor of characterization – and it shows when compared to Resnicow's previous efforts. The clues are there, but they border dangerously close on the green tie variety, especially the central hint, and the solution mainly hinges on the movement of the murderer at the time of the deed. It's not an entirely uninspired solution, but it would've been better suited for the pages of a short story.

I was also somewhat disappointed that the crime-scene barely had any significant role in the execution of the murder. The exploitation of the architectural features and functions of a crime-scene was his specialty and I structured a fairly clever, but false solution, around that expectation. 

Brodsky always used the steam room from eight to nine and was usually its only occupant, since nobody could take it when he turned the thermostat all the way, and I reasoned that the murderer used the combination of this habitual visit to the steam room and high temperature to craft a convincing alibi for the police. Everyone expected him to be in that room between eight and nine and when his body was found it would be assumed that he was killed within that hour, but what if he was murdered before that time? Lets say 15-20 minutes before eight. Body dumped in the hot room, making it impossible to determine the actual time of death, while the murderer makes sure he can account for every minute during eight and nine. Yes, I know, I should write detective stories myself. 

On the other hand, the father-and-son team of Ed and Warren Bear do make up for some of the shortcomings found in the plot. They're not only excellent as a pair of enterprising amateur sleuths, but they also come across as a genuinely warm, but imperfect, family – as Ed is still grappling with the lost of his wife and worrying that he still hasn't any grandchildren, while Warren is wrestling with insecurity issues. But this never casts a grim shadow over their personalities and it's handles very realistically, IMHO, because in spite having lost their wife and mother, they find themselves trusted back into their normal, everyday life – which is what usually happens in real life. All of a sudden, you find yourself back in your old life again and that you can still laugh or worry about things that seemed trivial only a few weeks ago.  

So while The Hot Place is not Herbert Resnicow's magnum opus, it's still a very readable yarn with two enduring characters at its helm and I thought it was interesting to see him handle a closed circle of suspects situation for a change – although I hope to encounter another intricately plotted locked room problem in the next novel. I still recommend it if you're looking for a fun little mystery, but don't expect a masterpiece from it.   

On a final note, towards the end of the book there's a reference to Ellery Queen, Nero Wolfe and Alexander Gold, but does this mean that Alexander and Norma Gold are fictional characters in the Ed and Warren Bear universe? Or do they share that space with Ellery Queen, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin? 

The Alexander and Norma Gold series:

The Gold Solution (1983)

The Gold Deadline (1984)

The Gold Frame (1986)

The Gold Curse (1986)

The Gold Gamble (1989)

The Ed and Warren Bear series:

The Dead Room (1987)

The Hot Place (1990)