Mon 3 May 2021
Reviewed by Mike Tooney: OLD-TIME DETECTION, Autumn 2020/Winter 2021.
Posted by Steve under Magazines , Reviews[6] Comments
(Give Me That) OLD-TIME DETECTION. Autumn 2020/Winter 2021. Issue #55. Editor: Arthur Vidro. Old-Time Detection Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd. 36 pages (including covers). Cover image: The Radfords’ Who Killed Dick Whittington?
As is his usual wont, in this latest edition of Old-Time Detection Arthur Vidro has once again delivered a valuable compendium of information about classic detective fiction, resurrecting long-forgotten pieces as well as showcasing up-to-date commentary about the genre.
When, in 1951, Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen (the editor) got together to compile a list of what they considered to be a “Definitive Library of Detective-Crime-Mystery Fiction,” they probably had no idea that their compilation (commonly called the “Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones”) would still be worth consulting seventy years later. One of their choices for the list is Clayton Rawson’s locked room classic Death from a Top Hat (1938), which receives Les Blatt’s scrutiny. Another “cornerstone” is Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden (1928), which Michael Dirda, in contrast to the usual consensus opinion, does not regard as “the first modern espionage novel.”
Two now largely forgotten detective fiction novelists worth spotlighting are the married writing team of E. and M. A. Radford; they receive their due attention in Nigel Moss’s essay, which sadly notes that despite a long writing career “the U.S. market eluded them.” Moss also highlights the play, that rare theatrical bird, an honest-to-goodness whodunnit, derived from the Radfords’ sixth novel, Who Killed Dick Whittington? (1947).
While he was still living, impossible crime expert Edward D. Hoch turned his attention to Agatha Christie’s short fiction and found most of it praiseworthy: “If the short stories often are not the equal of the best of her novels, they still sparkle on occasion with her vitality and ingenuity, reminding us anew of the pleasure of a well-crafted tale.”
Dr. John Curran, the world’s foremost expert on all things Christie, has nice things to say about Mark Aldridge’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World, in his opinion a “must-have book for the shelves of all fans of the little Belgian and his gifted creator.” Curran also includes little-known facts about Agatha, only a few of which yours truly was aware.
Continuing with the Christie theme is a talk by Leslie Budewitz aptly entitled “The Continued Influence of Agatha Christie”; “she was,” says Budewitz, “first and foremost a tremendous storyteller.”
Then come a couple of apposite reviews, both by Jay Strafford: Sophie Hannah’s The Killings at Kingfisher Hill (2020), starring Hercule Poirot; and Andrew Wilson’s I Saw Him Die (2020), the fourth in a series of novels making the most of that Queenian fictional trope of featuring a detective fiction writer as, well, an amateur detective.
The center piece of this issue of OTD, both figuratively and literally, is Stuart Palmer’s entertaining story “Fingerprints Don’t Lie” (1947), in which Hildegarde Withers, sans Inspector Piper, solves a knotty murder in Las Vegas.
Continuing with Charles Shibuk’s series of paperback reprints from the ’70s (at the time a noteworthy and welcome trend for classic mystery buffs), he highlights works by Nicholas Blake (Mystery*File here), Charity Blackstock (Mystery*File here), John Dickson Carr (of course!; Mystery*File here ), Agatha Christie (also of course!; Mystery*File here), Raymond Chandler (ditto; Mystery*File here), Henry Kane (Mystery*File here), Patricia Moyes (Mystery*File here), Ellery Queen (Mystery*File here), Dorothy L. Sayers (Mystery*File here), Julian Symons (Mystery*File here), Josephine Tey (Mystery*File here), and editor Francis M. Nevins’s (Mystery*File here) nonfictional The Mystery Writer’s Art, “obviously the logical successor to Howard Haycraft’s The Art of the Mystery Story (1946) . . .”
Several pages of contemporary reviews of (mostly) classic mysteries follow: Jon L. Breen about Robert Barnard’s School for Murder (1983/4) and Evan Hunter’s “factional” Lizzie (1984); Harv Tudorri about Ed Hoch’s Challenge the Impossible (2018); Ruth Ordivar about Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Angry Mourner (1951); and two reviews from Arthur Vidro about Barbara D’Amato’s The Hands of Healing Murder (1980) and John Ball’s In the Heat of the Night (1965): “with maturer re-reading, I am dazzled . . .”
The issue wraps up with letters from the readers and a befitting puzzle about Agatha Christie.
All in all, Issue 55 is definitely worth adding to your collection.
If you’d like to subscribe to Old-Time Detection:
Published three times a year: spring, summer, and autumn. – Sample copy: $6.00 in U.S.; $10.00 anywhere else. – One-year U.S.: $18.00 ($15.00 for Mensans). – One-year overseas: $40.00 (or 25 pounds sterling or 30 euros). – Payment: Checks payable to Arthur Vidro, or cash from any nation, or U.S. postage stamps or PayPal. – Mailing address: Arthur Vidro, editor, Old-Time Detection, 2 Ellery Street, Claremont, New Hampshire 03743.
Web address: vidro@myfairpoint.net
May 3rd, 2021 at 8:16 pm
Most genre historians, including Eric Ambler and Graham Greene consider John Buchan’s THE POWER HOUSE as the first modern spy novel because it is the first to describe urban terror and predicts both nationalism and a Hitlerian “Rational Fanatic.”
A few hold out for RIDDLE OF THE SANDS, but it actually fits as neatly into the Future War genre popular in its time and elements of its adventure story aspects appear in Stevenson’s “Pavillion on the Links.”
In any case ASHENDEN is pretty much a fix up of interconnected short stories rather than a novel and is predated by THE THIRTY NINE STEPS.
May 3rd, 2021 at 8:24 pm
Chronologically:
Erskine Childers -The Riddle of the Sands (1903)
John Buchan’s THE POWER HOUSE (1913)
John Buchan’s The 39 Steps (1915)
Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden (1928)
May 3rd, 2021 at 11:41 pm
H’mmm! I myself would vote for some examples of Britain’s weird ‘invasion fiction’ genre as the proto-form of the intrigue thriller advanced so tremendously by Buchan.
This is just a private opinion/impression of mine own, I’m not trying-to-gore-anyone’s-ox or tilt-at-anyones-windmill.
Link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_literature
Chesney’s ‘The Battle of Dorking’ (1871), and then such authors as William Le Queux, or E. Phillips Oppenheim –their works littering the waning decades of the Victorian era when Buchan (1875-1940) matured.
Not to mention the difficult-to-describe influence of ‘story papers’ so prevalent at the time.
I appreciate the argument also, that Bran Stoker was an early author of intrigue. The ‘vampire’ motif, exaggerating (as did Richard Marsh, ‘The Beetle’) the theme of “dangerous foreigners who need watching”.
I’d even give a nod to Anne Radcliffe’s ‘The Italian’ (1797) as laying the groundwork for it all.
None of this denies the thrust of ‘The Power House’ (1913). Just brainstorming aloud, on my part.
Anyway, much to fascinate. I appreciate the OP post.
May 4th, 2021 at 2:08 am
ASHENDEN is the first book to depict espionage seriously and realistically, though. Buchan and Childers both wrote in the “shocker” tradition, whereas ASHENDEN depicts espionage as a squalid – and often trivial – matter.
May 4th, 2021 at 8:16 pm
Certainly I agree with Roger re ASHENDEN and the serious tradition, but I think BRETHERTON by Morris also predates it, though it is a bit more romantic than ASHENDEN however realistic it’s portrayal of a spy in country.
Le Queux, Oppenheim, and others certainly wrote spy fiction before most of those titles, but they tended to be melodrama in Le Queux’s case and Cosmopolitan Diplomatic intrigue in Oppenheimer’s case (THE GREAT IMPERSONATION predates all but RIDDLE). He and Le Queux both wrote Future War, and Le Queux may well have invented that genre, as he is often credited with doing.
RIDDLE is set in the outdoors like KIM, and while it does predict the German’s actions in WW I, and II, right down to some of their naval operations, it is also pretty clearly in the Future War tradition Le Queux and others pioneered. It is a splendid novel but it is firmly in the same country as Mason’s THE FOUR FEATHERS or Kipling’s KIM and doesn’t really break new narrative ground.
Greene, Ambler, and others credit POWER HOUSE both because Buchan predicts the rise of nationalism and his Hitlerian Rational Fanatic ( he also introduces a very modern villain at the head of a politically Conservative movement operating like an early SPECTRE — in fact Buchan’s Conservative MP hero teams with a Labor Union MP to foil them), but because of a scene where hero Ned Leithen finds himself stalked in broad daylight in Piccadilly Circus. The moment Leithen muses on how thin the veneer of civilization is and how easy he could be taken, kidnapped, or killed in a crowd and no one notice is generally recognized as the birth of the modern spy novel with it’s urban settings and paranoia.
I’m not sure you get to ASHENDEN without Buchan, I know you don’t get to Ambler and Greene without him.
May 5th, 2021 at 8:08 am
BRETHERTON was 1929, ASHENDEN 1927 in book form -presumably the stories appeared separately earlier.
BRETHERTON is realistically convincing, if you accept the preposterous basic assumption.
The important thing about Buchan was that he was a serious writer – a different kind of seriousness, to Maugham, Greene or Ambler, but still serious. He took evil seriously, as a Calvinist. Like his historical novels, his “shockers” assumed that there was only a thin crust between civilisation and savagery and that it could vanish at any moment.