The Cabinda Affair (1949) by Matthew Head

John Canaday was a World War II veteran, educator and had a two-decade long career as the leading art critic for The New York Times, but more importantly, he wrote seven crime-and detective novels – published between 1943 and 1955 under the penname "Matthew Head." Four of those novels feature his series-detective, Dr. Mary Finney, who's the American Miss Marple of the missionary brigade in the Belgian Congo. 

The Cabinda Affair (1949) marks the second appearance of Dr. Mary Finney and Hooper Taliaferro (pronounced Tolliver), but she spends 2/3 of the story listening to Hooper's recounting his recent Cabinda adventure.

Hooper has remained in the Belgian Congo following the events recorded in The Devil in the Bush (1945) and now works for a US government agency called the War Contracts Settlement Commission (WCSC). His latest assignment brings him to a small, hard-to-reach town of a Portuguese enclave, Cabinda, that's "old as towns go" in those parts, but its appearance "screamed aloud for a watercolorist." Cabinda is dotted with boxcar-like, candy-colored houses with false-front type, like an old American western town, "except that they had all been painted in these soft Easter-egg shades of blue and vermilions and creams and gray-lavenders and whites" – trimmed in contrasting colors. Hooper is deployed to this enclave to help settle "one of those good will contracts" worth four million dollars! That's an awful lot of goodwill.

During the war, the US was very anxious for Portugal to stay neutral ("so was Portugal") and the generous contract was a friendly gesture from Uncle Sam to the Portuguese, but the war is over. And they don't need the overpriced mahogany anymore. Since there had already been two long extensions on the date of delivery of the first load, the contract only has a week left before it becomes cancelable.

Hooper is accompanied to Cabinda by a lawyer and troubleshooter, Cotter, who arrived sick as a dog, but what concerned Hooper more is his boyish, movie-star good looks. Not without reason when their business dealings begin to blend with the domestic affairs of their shady host, Falcão. Falcão is a stockholder and local manager of the Companhia Khaya who lives in Cabinda with his young and beautiful wife, Ana Falcão. She has a mesmerizing effect on Hooper and Cotter. Falcãos also have two children. A 17-year-old daughter, Maria, who's an innocent, frail-looking beauty with a humped back. Henriques is her old brother and he would be rather back in Lisbon than running the logging camp. Lastly, there's a disreputable lawyer, Maximiano da Cunha, and a nosy wood importer, Pete Caulsworth-Bigg.

So the business end of their meeting gets quickly mixed up with the personal and Hooper, while sick  with fever, witnesses several things he was not supposed to see. This culminates with him finding a body in the adjacent room with a knife wound before passing out again.

Miss Finney listened to the whole story and called his mental processes and powers of observation "an exercise in the distortion of obvious fact by the application of sentimental prejudice," because things happened right under his nose without catching on "anything's happened at all" – which is the crux of the plot. There aren't any physical clues to examine with the truth being hidden in the psychological makeup of the suspects. What they see or how they behave holds the key to the solution. Something that would not have been half as difficult had Hooper not wrongly interpreted everything he saw and heard, but it's a clever play on the unreliable narrator by using "a sentimental fool" with tropical fever.

Despite the African setting, the character-driven plotting and storytelling places The Cabinda Affair, weirdly enough, among the novels of the uncrowned British Crime Queens like a Moray Dalton or Maureen Sarsfield. A final flick of the knife gave the solution a twist justifying its inclusion among the Crime Crimes (crowned or uncrowned). There is, however, one noticeable difference. While the character-driven plotting and storytelling is very reminiscent of the Crime Queens, the tone is not as polished or sophisticated. I suppose most you go, "oh, no, the book takes place in Africa," but don't worry, it's not rampant, colonial-era racism. It's actually the opposite. The Cabinda Affair has some passages that you expect to find in a modern crime novel instead of a vintage detective story from the late 1940s. And in this regard, the frank, open-minded Miss Finney stands closer to Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley than Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. 

The Cabinda Affair began with Hooper doing all the talking, recounting everything that happened in detail, but Miss Finney began asking questions as the story progressed and under her scrutiny everything Hooper assumed was "pretty obvious and logical" began "to stop making sense" – exposing that case was not closed. So she accompanies Hooper on a return journey to Cabinda where she effectively destroys a criminal scheme and reveals a murderer who's both surprising and obvious, which revealed another clever aspect of the story. The Cabinda Affair is mostly a decent, character-driven crime novel leaning a little too heavily on the colorful setting, but there's another layer to the plot Head used to give a satisfying twist to Miss Finney's explanation that elevated it to a genuine detective novel.

So, yeah, The Cabinda Affair is a little out of the ordinary for a 1940s whodunit with clashing contrasts between tone and style, but Head made it work and it's an accomplishment to come up with a gracefully simple twist that upgrades a plot from decent to quite good. Recommended! And I'll be moving Head's The Smell of Money (1943) and The Congo Venus (1950) to the top of my wishlist now.

Diggin' Deep

"You picked a nice sort of playmate."

- Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon (1941, Film) 

Hooper "Hoop" Talioferro (pronounced Tolliver) is running an art gallery in Paris after having spent time in the Belgium Congo, where he provided assistance to a medical missionary in the clearing of several crimes (c.f. The Devil in the Bush, 1945), but the delivery of a two letters will be giving him a taste of the Gallic criminal.

Matthew Head's Murder at the Flea Club (1955) begins with Hoop honoring a request from the first letter to drop in on a friend of an old friend, Audrey Bellen, who does not leave a favorably impression him, however, promises to take her daughter Marie Louise out for the evening. The second letter came from Dr. Mary Finney, medical missionary and amateur snoop, informing him that she's briefly in Paris as a guest of the Sûreté.

They make an appointment for the following day at The Flea Club, a semi-public nightclub of which Hoop is a member with access to the cellar room where an archeologist, Professor Johnson, digs for the foundation of Ste. Geneviève de Fli – remnants of a chapel dating back to the 9th century. The entire floor is being dug up, section by section, which gives a nice touch to a night-club cellar filled with an odd mixture of guests ranging from gigolos to expatriates, but one of the excavation pits contains something that it shouldn't: the night-club singer, "Nicole," half buried under sand with her head caved in.

Murder at the Flea Club is not a linear narrative. Instead of telling the events from start to finish, Hoop feds the reader and Mary Finney bits and pieces until the final portion of the story. There's an Had-I-But-Known'ish tone in the opening as Hoop tells that both letters will involve him in a murder at the club and its solution with everything else largely consisting of filling up the gap of events leading up the murder, connecting the Bellen's with the denizens of the Fleas and fleshing out the characters – whom all seem to have one-on-one alibis. So yes. This is a very character-driven mystery novel and as you can probably deduce from this over written, but already dwindling, review, is that they usually leave me with less to say than the ones that are a bit heavier on the plot. And if the first mention of the victim's dying message is made after the 100-page mark, characterization might have gotten in the way of the plot just a little bit.

Having said that, I loved how Head wrapped-up the story. Mary Finney has planned a dinner with all of the suspects for a classic dénouement, but Monsieur Duplin is sure they already know the identity of Nicole's killer and prevented anyone from attending – in order to compare notes with Finney and test her acumen. This is why I think Rival Detectives are grossly underrated! They're great vehicles to deliver false solutions, twists and surprises – even in a minor way like here.

All in all, not a bad read that tried to retain a good plot in the face of heavy characterization, and there's a nice little twist given in the explanation, but it were mainly the opening and closing chapters that did it for me.

Finally, to pad out this post even further, allow me to direct your attention to Ho-Ling's (English) review of a Japanese edition of Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1928) with gorgeous, retro-style cover art.

The Prevaricatory Hangman

Apparently, the year Twenty-Eleven insists on being a year of discoveries. Not since the primordial days of my fandom, when the habit hadn't yet developed to the stage of a chronic addiction, have I sampled so many new and different authors – which is partly to blame for the fluctuation in quality of the books I discuss here. And that bums me out a bit, when only a few months before opening this blog I was reading such classic locked room stories as Alan Green's What a Body! (1949), Anthony Boucher's Nine Times Nine (1940) and Herbert Brean's The Traces of Brillhart (1961).

I guess I can always re-read them, right? *a loud, grumbling protest rises up from my to-be-read pile* Shuddup! you cannot dictate my life any longer! You cannot force me to... what... a-are those t-teeth?!

OK, here's a short review for you to read, while I deal with this situation (if I'm not back before the end of this week, avenge me!):

The Death of a Sham Hangman

Matthew Head's The Devil in the Bush (1945) starts off with Hooper "Hoop" Taliaferro (pronounced Tolliver), a young professor of botany at an American university, touring the Belgium Congo as part of an economic mission to determine the status of the agricultural stations, and decide which of them are valuable enough to the war effort to receive financial backing from his government. During his wanderings through the infernal region, from Colonial settlements to the more uninhabited spots that lead to the stations, he meets a rugged, scared man with a crooked nose who becomes really chummy and boosts how he once strung up a native who killed a sub-administrator during a brief uprising. But when Hoop tells him he's on his way to inspect the facility of one André de L'andréneau, his friendly demeanor pales and takes off in a hurry, which isn't surprising, as it turns out, he was André and lying through his yellowed stained teeth. The next time Hoop sets eyes on the prevaricatory hangman, after arriving at the station, he's stuffed in a primitive coffin – ready for burial!

The disease he succumbed to, by all appearances, seems normal enough, especially for that region, but the broody atmosphere and relationships of the station people hint at a darker reason for his death. And then there are the blatant lies he told Hoop when he had no idea who he really was.

Among his potential murderers, if it was murder, which dwell the Congo-Ruzi station, are his brother, Gérôme, and his wife Jacqueline, another Belgium couple and their beautiful daughter, who longs to escape from the bush, and the resident botanist Henri Debuc. There's also a medical missionary, Dr. Mary Finney, who possesses a sulphurous tongue and crude manners, who acts as the story's detective. But before she's able to point out the responsible party there will be a second, far more gruesome, death, in which one of them gets his throat cut and the flesh ripped off his back.

Head paints an intriguing, but despairing, picture of life in the Congo, and intertwines it with a clever little detective plot, with a few interesting clues thrown into the mix, however, I felt that some of the story's impact was lost by its length. The plot would've been a lot more tighter, and effective, had it been a novella.

The Devil in the Bush was brought back into circulation by Felony and Mayhem back in 2005, and is still fairly easily obtainable online.