Thu 19 Nov 2009
A Review by Maryell Cleary: LEO BRUCE – Jack on the Gallows Tree.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[9] Comments
LEO BRUCE – Jack on the Gallows Tree. Academy Chicago, paperback; first US edition, May 1983. Hardcover edition: June 1983. British edition: Peter Davies, hardcover, 1960.
Carolus Deene, history master in an English public school, is recuperating from jaundice at the Royal Hydro in Buddington-on-the-Hill. He encounters the murders of two elderly ladies, each of whom has been strangled and laid out with a madonna lily on her chest.
It seems that the two deaths must be related, but how? The ladies had not known one another, and had little in common. Deene dips into the mystery, much to the displeasure of his headmaster. At once he is beset by the snobbish elderly cousin of one of the ladies, and by one of his students who is determined to play Watson.
Along the way he comes across characters who are reminiscent of Edmund Crispin’s books: a farmer whose house pet is an ocelot, an elderly couple who practice both vegetarianism and nudism, two local ladies who vie for the attention of the police and of Deene, and a Miss Shapeley who keeps strong language out of her bar.
If this is a parody, it is deft enough to be enjoyable as a serious read. Bruce is a pseudonym of the late Rupert Croft-Cooke, who wrote other mysteries under his own name and the Sergeant Beef books under the Bruce cognomen.
Editorial Comment: Maryell Cleary, who died in 2003, was an ordained minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church as well a voluminous reader and collector of detective fiction. I met her once while she was taking a trip by car through New England. She stopped here to look at my collection and to go through my duplicates, and of course we spent a long, wonderful afternoon talking about each of our favorite characters and authors.
Maryell was especially fond of mysteries in the Golden Age tradition. In fact, she had a letter in the same issue of The Poisoned Pen as the one above in which she protested mildly that fans of private eye novels had taken over the pages of recent issues! More coverage, she requested, of authors like Martha Grimes, Ruth Rendell, Patricia Moyes, Charlotte MacLeod, Robert Barnard, Marian Babson, Dorothy Simpson and P. D. James.
To that end she also wrote many reviews and articles herself for the mystery fanzines of 20 and 30 years ago, including the still late lamented Poisoned Pen, published for many years by Jeff Meyerson. I’ve conferred with Jeff, and we both agree that she would have liked her reviews to go on after her. They will appear here on a regular basis for some time to come — she wrote a lot of them!
November 19th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Bravo, I’m an old fan of Bruce and both Carolus Deane and Sgt. Beef. As stated here, his parody was deft enough to provide both smiles and detectival thrills. Deane is a bit more than just a school master sleuth though, he’s also a former commando, and one of the more attractive late entries in the classical sleuth stakes.
Ironically as Rupert Croft-Crooke he wrote rather tough minded crime novels that weren’t the least humorous. In fact they tended to be rather grim and dark.
If all Maryell Cleary’s reviews are as deft and insightful as this one we all have something to look forward to.
November 19th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
My experiences with Carolus Deene, two of them, left me with only a so-so opinion of him, but Maryell certainly makes this book sound like a winner.
Humor is a tricky thing, and when I was younger I think I was a whole lot more serious about my detective fiction than I ought to have been.
— Steve
November 19th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Robert L. Fish’s Schlock Homes stories were running around the time I really began reading mysteries, as were Gerald Kersh’s Beau Raymond and Great Karmesian so I gravitated to the humorous side fairly early.
I came upon the Deane books after having already been initiated by Edmund Crispin’s Gervace Fen and Pheobe Atwood Taylor’s Asey Mayo and Leoniadas Witherall (as Alice Tilton), so Deane likely seemed pretty tame to me by the slapstick standard of Fen. As for Beef, The Case for Three Detectives where Bruce takes broad and effective pot shots at Lord Peter, Father Brown, and Hercule Poirot remains one of the bright spots of the Golden Age.
For some reason many of my favorites were primarily (or often) humorous writers like Norbert Davis, Craig Rice, Stuart Palmer, Jonathan Latimer, Christianna Brand, and Fred Brown.
Still, it may have been due to all those hours watching old B mystery programmers, where, as Leonard Maltin once observed, the films were sometimes in desperate need of some mystery relief from all the comedy relief.
November 19th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
For people wanting to learn more about the life of the author, see Curt Evans, “The Man Who Was Leo Bruce,” at http://theculturealliance.org (type in the title on Google and you will see a link to the page).
I’m a fan too.
November 19th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
If you click the link in my above post, you will see when you get there “RECLAMATION” in the top right corner. If you click that it will take you to the page.
November 19th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Thanks for the follow-up assist, Curt. On my screen RECLAMATION was on the right, but not in the corner. But without the hint, I’d have been totally lost.
The piece is a 75 page PDF file, so don’t go to read it without having some free time or without planning to print it out.
It’s worth reading, though, and I recommend that you do. Rupert Croft-Crooke’s life and career as a writer are both covered, and in considerable detail. Well done!
November 19th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
David
I seem to have read all the same authors you did, and I found them funny, the same as you. Carolus Deene, though, for whatever reason, didn’t jiggle my funny bone, whenever it was the first time I read him. Maybe it was something I had for lunch that day, and I think it behooves me greatly to try Leo Bruce again.
— Steve
November 19th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Steve, yeah, you’re right, it’s right side, not right corner. Everything you ever wanted to (or didn’t want to) know about Rupert Croft-Cooke.
I think like David that Case for Three Detectives is a significant book, both in its satire of the form, and also in its four excellent solutions to the crime! There are a few other Sergeant Beef titles almost as good.
The Carolus Deene books are more gently humorous. I think the best have both some nice humor with amusing characters and good plots. Some are derivative, but Furious Old Women, for example, is really ingenious. It’s classical English detection at a comparatively late date (1960), a late bloom on the plant.
Croft-Cooke always loved classical detection, but barely talked about it in his memoirs. Like other writers who aimed to be serious novelists, I think he viewed detective novels as somewhat beneath him. It’s a shame, because therein probably lay his greatest talent as a novelist (he also wrote excellent memoirs and histories).
Another interesting thing is, he was an unsatisfied, restless person in real life, I think. He seems to be a classic case of a person using humor to cover up bitterness and pain. Of course in his real life he went through the mortification of an arrest for “homosexual offenses” during the British gay scare of the 1950s. He quit writing the Sergeant Beef books, which had a former copper as the hero, after that!
November 23rd, 2009 at 2:48 pm
A wonderful collection of Bruce’s short stories was published by Academy Chicago Publishers in 1992 titled MURDER IN MINIATURE. It contains 28 or so stories and a few feature Sgt Beef. There is not a bad story in the book.