Wed 5 Jan 2011
Detective Fiction Read in 2010: An Annotated List by J. F. NORRIS.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists[9] Comments
An Annotated List by J. F. NORRIS.
Here’s my contribution to the lists that are popping up now that 2010 is over. I read nearly 100 books last year but not even half of them were vintage detective novels. I’ll have to rectify that this year.
The list is in chronological order and not ranked because I can’t ever put my likes in numerical order or even apply letter grades. I did, however, add some highly opinionated comments after most of the titles to give you an idea of how much I liked or disliked a book.
Titles in BOLD were excellent and entertaining on all levels. All of those titles are well worth seeking out. Good luck with finding them though, as nearly all are out of print and scarce in the used book trade. The stinker books (and there were quite a few) are at the bottom of the list after the row of asterisks.
â— The Red Lady – Anthony Wynne. (Impossible crime with a clever gimmick that fooled me. How could I not see that one coming?)
â— The Chinese Orange Mystery – Ellery Queen. (A re-read for me.)
â— The Curse of the Bronze Lamp – Carter Dickson.
â— The House Without a Key – Earl Derr Biggers. (First ever time I read a Charlie Chan book. Rather surprisingly good.)
â— The Emperor’s Snuff Box – John Dickson Carr. (Brilliant! Why has it never been filmed? Would work beautifully on screen. Very Rear Window like, plus many cinematic sequences.) [FOOTNOTE.]
â— The Horseman of Death – Anthony Wynne. (One of his dull ones. Went on and on and on. Ugh.)
â— About the Murder of a Man Afraid of Women – Anthony Abbot. (One of the better Thatcher Colt books, heavy on action in the last third. You learn a lot about ballistics in his one. Truly a surprising ending. I gasped, believe it or not.)
â— The Ghost Hunters – Gordon Meyrick. (Short stories about an occult detective, all supernatural elements with the exception of one story are rationalized. Mediocre. One story was like a “Scooby Doo” cartoon in print.).
â— The Greek Coffin Mystery – Ellery Queen. (Another re-read. Ellery’s lectures and overall pedanticism are annoying to me now. I think I loved them when I read them as a teenager.)
â— The Witness at the Window – Charles Barry. (Silly, but entertaining in a Gun in Cheek kind of way. Has a secondary, French-speaking detective who appears in the last half of the book who is obviously a Poirot parody.)
â— Poison Unknown – Charles Dutton. (More of an action thriller. From Dutton’s later period when he abandoned his scientific detective John Bartley in favor of the youthful Harley Manners who tended to resort to traps and gimmicks when unmasking the killer.)
â— The Cleverness of Mr. Budd – Gerald Verner.
â— All Fall Down – L.A. G. Strong. (Trenchant wit, good plot, forgotten writer whether as a mainstream novelist, short story writer or detective story writer. Well worth tracking down all of his detective novels. Also his supernatural short stories.)
â— Murder of a Chemist – Miles Burton. (Extremely rare book. I read it then sold it online for an outrageous sum. Email me for details if you’re curious about the sale. The book is not really worth reading though.)
â— Tragedy on the Line – John Rhode. (The early Rhode’s are surprisingly good, IMO. Rhode gets a bad rap as one of the dreary writers, but he often is entertaining. Sometimes ingenious.)
â— The Claverton Mystery – John Rhode. (Surely one of his best, near brilliant.).
â— Into the Void – Florence Converse. (Odd little book about bootlegging in a New England village, has a quasi impossible crime plot, more interesting as a study in the American village as microcosm than as a detective story.)
â— Death on Tiptoe – R.C. Ashby. (I loved this! But I have a penchant for Gothic elements in the detective novel. My review for this book can be found here.)
â— Out of the Darkness – Charles Dutton. (Author’s first book, underrated writer. He wrote a handful of books that deal with the psychopathology of multiple murderers long before anyone was writing about demented serial killers. This one deals remarkably well with the after effects of shell shock.)
â— The Crooked Cross – Charles Dutton. (Once again emphasis on the psychopathology of murder. Fundamentalist Christian beliefs lead to mania.)
â— The Lava Flow Murders – Max Long. (See my review here for more on this book.)
â— Cue for Murder – Helen McCloy. (Near brilliant. Title serves as a huge clue. Basil Willing and McCloy never really get their due when discussing the cream of the crop of the Golden Age. She is definitely overlooked, IMO. Also book is spot on with the theater background — one of the best theater mysteries of any era. Really understands the actor mentality.)
â— Streaked with Crimson – Charles Dutton. (Yet another crazed serial killer with an interesting motive.)
â— Murder, M.D. – Miles Burton. (Overrated; most of book is dull, surprise ending is not really much a surprise for a savvy contemporary reader.)
â— He Arrived at Dusk – R.C. Ashby. (Her best detective novel. Gripping with a Du Maurier like mastery of misdirection in the narration. Read my full review here.)
â— The Joss – Richard Marsh. (More a supernatural thriller but with a smidgen of a detective plot that recurs throughout.)
â— The Shade of Time – David Duncan. (Impossible crime novel, not one of my favorites due to an insulting misunderstanding of what a transvestite is in the latter portion of the book.)
â— Murder Takes the Veil – Margaret Ann Hubbard. (Great setting: a convent school in the Louisiana bayou; story was like a bad Phyllis Whitney plot though.)
â— The Notting Hill Mystery – Anonymous or Charles Felix. (Innovative, clever and thoroughly original – especially since it was published in 1863! My critical essay appears here earlier on this blog.)
â— Death at Swaythling Court – J. J. Connington. (His first detective novel. Much of it seems like a parody of the genre in the first half. Entertaining, lively with an intricate and satisfying plot.)
â— Such Friends Are Dangerous – Walter Tyrer . (Whopper of an ending. Took me completely by surprise. A little masterpiece. Succeeds as both a scathing satire of British village life circa 1955 and as a devilish detective novel. By a writer who mainly wrote adventure thrillers for the Amalgamated Press syndicate.)
â— Candidate for Lilies – Roger East. (Underrated writer, excellent plotter, literate style. This one has a truly poignant ending for a detective novel. Borders on true tragedy in the classic Greek sense.)
â— The Case of the Constant Suicides – John Dickson Carr. (This makes many “Best of Carr” lists. I found it to be more farce than detective novel, even with its gimmicky plot. The character of the staunch Catholic Scottish woman had me laughing out loud on the subway train several evenings.)
â— Rough Cider – Peter Lovesey. (Brilliant! Surely one of Lovesey’s best if not his best of all time.)
â— Murder Rehearsal – Roger East. (Mystery novelist’s plot idea seems to be the model for a real killer’s handiwork. Gets a bit convoluted in the middle, but worth seeking out. He can write!)
â— The Lord of Misrule – Paul Halter. (Disappointing. I figured out how the killer left no footprints because the main clue was obviously planted and is also a blatant anachronism for the Victorian era in which the book is supposedly set. Also bothered by servants who were treated as members of the family — talk about lack of verisimilitude! They were allowed to take part in the seance? Never! I wanted to be surprised and delighted, but was not. I guess he’s hit and miss. For me this was a big miss.)
Books You Would Be Wise to Avoid:
â— The Watcher – Gerald Verner. (Pedestrian plot, lackluster writing, stock characters.)
â— The River House Mystery – Gerald Verner. (I have no problem revealing to you that the butler did it in this one. Seriously! Utterly dreadful.)
â— The Screaming Portrait – Ferrin Fraser. (Absurd and contrived from beginning to end. On the first page we are told that the narrator had been tiger hunting — in South Africa! I should’ve thrown the book in the trash then and there.)
â— The Case of the Scared Rabbits – George Bellairs. (Very scarce book, but one of his worst plots. Not worth seeking out)
â— Red Rhapsody – Cortland Fitzsimmons. (My first and probably last Fitzsimmons book. Ludicrous plot, high body count and laughable solution. Also, another insulting treatment of a gay man from the 1930s. Blecch.)
FOOTNOTE / Editorial Comment: After John’s list appeared first on Yahoo’s Golden Age of Detection list, Bob Houk pointed out that:
“The Emperor’s Snuff Box was made into a movie in 1957, called The Woman Opposite or City after Midnight. Here’s the IMDB entry:
“http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051071/.”
Apparently a British production, the film’s two stars were Phyllis Kirk and Dan O’Herlihy, and it was released in the US by RKO Radio Pictures. It has come out commercially on VHS but (so far) not on DVD. It should be findable, but (after a quick search), I haven’t yet.
January 6th, 2011 at 3:53 am
Well, I’ve read all the John Street books bat two under the Waye pseudonym and one under the Burton and I have to agree with the view that he gets a bad rap as a “Humdrum.” I don’t find the often really cleverly conducted murders in his books dull. He reminds me a good bit (especially in the John Rhodes) of Austin Freeman (a few of his books seem to borrow elements directly from Freeman stories).
Despite the fact he’s always yoked with Crofts, few of Street’s books emphasize unbreakable alibis at length like Crofts often did. That’s something so associated with Crofts I term it Croftsian. Murder of a Chemist, which were talking about at GAD, is a Croftsian book.
Street has been dismissed as stuffy (HRF Keating thought it very quite amusing that he ended a book with the words “they were duly hanged”), but Street had, unlike Crofts, a dry sense of humor. I often find Dr. Priestley and his manifest contempt for the police and imperiousness rather funny. Dr. Priestley actually is one of my favorite Golden Age tecs, though Rhode allows him to recede hugely in the 1950s, when most of his books become quite formulaic.
But when you write about 140 genuine tec novels, you’re bound to lose inspiration eventually!
I think Murder, MD is quite good. I know what you mean about solution, but the concealment of certain elements I thought was very well done–unusually so for Street, who is usually more interested in how? than who? I also enjoyed the village satire. As Barzun commented, the Burtons tend to me more village-centered and satirical, the Rhodes more scientific and gadgety (though some Burtons are have scientific elements too). I think Street must have come to see the Burtons as a more feminine-oriented series, complete with an amateur gentleman detective (though he toyed with a genteel love element in the Rhode series too when he added Jimmy Waghorn and his girlfiend/wife Diana).
But I’m just glad to see someone else reading Street and saying some good things!
You’ve persuaded me to order some Duttons. I had about four around the place already, but had not read, although I use something from him in my Humdums manuscript (hopefully to be published someday!).
January 6th, 2011 at 8:13 am
Nice list! I’ve read very few of them I must admit, even in the days I was reading the Golden Age authors, but I do agree on the Lovesey.
I read 147 books this year, of which 79 were mysteries (including 17 short story collections).
January 6th, 2011 at 12:51 pm
This list of detective fiction excludes all the contemporary books I read. Well, I guess I cheat when I add the Lovesey book, who is definitely outside of the Golden AGe. But he is so much of a GA style writer to me I have to include him. So although I read only 41 Golden Age books my grand total for mystery and crime fiction last year is 68. (That’s 68 completely read. I never count the ones I toss aside that were so dull or so stupid I never finished them.) Of those newer books – some of them published in 2010 – I thoroughly enjoyed these:
Bryant and May on the Loose – Christopher Fowler (who cannot absolutely adore these old policemen and their odd Peculiar Crimes Unit?)
The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag – Alan Bradley (precocious little Flavia de la helps solve an impossible murder among a troupe of traveling puppeteers)
A Field of Darkness – Cornelia Read (Edgar nominated. Sardonic female amateur sleuth. Fairly clever plot although I did figure it all out.)
Paganini’s Ghost – Paul Adam (murder in the antique violin collecting world. Set in Italy. Fascinating look into a world I knew nothing about. Plus nifty historical insights into the life of the composer/ violinist)
The Brutal Telling – Louise Penny (the only contemporary writer of recent years IMO who understands what a detective novel is and definitely shows her love for the old traditional whodunit in every haunting book she writes)
Love Songs from a Shallow Grave – Colin Cotterill (I think this is an incredibly original series. Coroner in 1970s era Laos who is possessed by the spirit of a shaman that allows him to see ghosts. CURSE OF THE POGO STICK is perhaps the most bizarre and the funniest of the series.)
Hypothermia – Arnaldur Indridason (the absolute best of the so-called “neo-Nordic” school. Set in Iceland with a sullen but compassionate detective who is haunted by the death of his brother. This was my second favorite in the series. VOICES is my personal favorite.)
Bryant & May Off the Rails – Christopher Fowler (Excellent! Right up there with WHITE CORRIDOR as one of the best. I eagerly look forward to Fowler’s witty and innovative books each year)
The Sherlockian – Graham Moore (His first book at the youthful age of 29. Very well done. Tells two stories simultaneously – one with Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker solving a crime in Victorian era England and another in modern times about the apparent murder of a member of the Baker Street Irregulars that was inspired by the mysterious death of Richard Lancelyn Green.)
Listingly yours,
John
January 6th, 2011 at 3:06 pm
The Colin Cotterill is one of my favorite current series. I love Dr. Siri and enjoy his entourage. The Bradley was a good one too. I enjoyed it at least as much as his highly-touted first book.
January 6th, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Peter Lovesey was one of the “new” writers I started reading in the 1980s (I was too young in the 1970s). I admire his effort to stay within the classical mold.
January 6th, 2011 at 5:55 pm
Lovesey’s awfully good, works in the classical tradition, as everyone’s said, and he’s still active. I have more of his yet to be read, unfortunately, than I’ve managed to polish off. I need to do something about that.
But as for Charles Dutton, well, my only encounter was not, as you might say, very positive.
Check out my review of THE CLUTCHING HAND which was posted on this blog some three and a half years ago:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=258
John, given your positive comments, I might give him another try, but with so many books and authors I’ve not even sampled yet, perhaps not.
January 6th, 2011 at 6:08 pm
Yes, Steve, that Clutching Hand review was not too favorable! I wonder if it’s really possible for a book entitled The Clutching Hand to be very good? That sort of title always makes me think of Old Dark House films like The Cat and the Canary.
January 7th, 2011 at 4:40 am
Curt –
How funny to say you were too young in the 1970s to read Peter Lovesey. Not only did I read Lovesey in the 1970s (when I was in high school) I read every single book by Agatha Christie, most of Ellery Queen, S.S. Van Dine, Gardner, Carr (in both his guises), Ngaio Marsh, Sayers, only three Rex Stout mysteries (not a big fan of Nero Wolfe – dare I admit that?), Charlotte Armstrong, Margaret Millar, Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee stories, all of Dashiell Hammett’s books, and -of course- the entire Sherlock Holmes canon. There are probably others but I’m too tired to search my memory for more. Those were definitely the authors I was obsessed with at the time. TV and movie adaptations had a lot to do with guiding my tastes then. Perry Mason was in reruns on WOR-TV, Wimsey was on PBS, Christie was in the movies and TV, Queen and Stout also on TV, Judge Dee was adapted into a creepy and effective TV movie, Hammett’s Dain Curse was a mini-series with James Coburn, etc. etc. My Dad clued me into Philo Vance. And a high school friend told me about Carr and Marsh.
I only returned to reading Golden Age writers in the late 1990s and now I am addicted to all the “obscure” and overlooked writers having pretty much read all the writers that are the familiar names. As I have recently learned from taking part in a Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge the writers’ names that keep cropping up are all the ones I have read when I a kid. And then to read comments by people who say they have never heard of a GA Giant! How can someone who loves mystery novels have never heard of Ellery Queen? Reading things like that stuns me. But thank God for the internet and its hundreds of blogs and fan sites where we can lead eager readers to the oldies and still very much the goodies.
John
January 7th, 2011 at 4:58 am
I did start reading Christie in the 1970s and became a Christie addict, somehow never found out there were other mystery writers besides Arthur Conan Doyle, who I also loved (and Erle Stanley Gardner, who I was never drawn too despite liking the Perry Meson TV show in reruns).
I got attracted to detective fiction again by happenstance in 1989 when I was in a good bookstore in Chicago. John Dickson Carr, in the IPL paperbacks! Then I read Sayers, then Ngaio Marsh, Leo Bruce, Nicholas Blake, Cyril Hare, etc. Also the “moderns” Lovesey, Barnard, James, Rendell. Only really started reading Americans in the last decade. For me tec fiction used to have to be British. I’ve changed a lot though, I even enjoy Raymond Chandler!
But naturally a voracious reader wants to read more! And I agree, there is a lot of good to excellent forgotten (or nearly so) stuff out there. The extreme tendency today is to reduce everything classical in the USA to hardboiled (Chandler, Hammett, Macdonald) and in the UK to “cozy” (Christie, Sayers, Marsh, Allingham and sometimes Tey, plus a man or two). This is the approach PD James emphasizes in her Talking about Detective Fiction, which has already been blurbed on the new edition of Ross Macdonald’s The Ferguson Affair. PD James is an amazing person and a graceful writer, but I think her book just too much cements conventional wisdom, which is not that wise.