Richard L. Graves is a consultant on weapons and pyrotechnic devices as a result of the US Army training him as a demolitions expert. And his five caper novels feature explosives as a touchstone for the major action.

   Graves’ first novel, and his best, is The Black Gold of Malaverde (Stein & Day, hc, 1973; Bantam, pb, 1974). My thanks go to Bill Crider for calling this book and Graves’ work to my attention.

   The Black Gold of Malaverde begins with a guerrilla takeover of the South American country of Malaverde led by a buffoon named Mercado. But behind Mercado and his peoples’ revolution is the shadowy figure of international financier DePrundis. The wealth of Malaverde is its black gold: oil.

   The Malaverde oil industry has been controlled by Bradford Petroleum, but during the takeover D. J. Bradford, son of the American millionaire, is captured and later killed.

   Bradford Senior, burning with grief and revenge, turns to an obscure organization known as The Bank to avenge his son. The Bank is an economic intelligence agency who sees DePrundis’s influence as a threat to the international monetary stability they protect.

   The Bank allows Bradford to contact Hugo Wolfram, a demolitions expert now running a company specializing in stopping oil fires. Wolfram is the architect of the caper to ruin the entire country of Malaverde. He recruits a Japanese actor, two divers, a master seaman, and a pilot.

   The plan is ingenious, realistic, and suspenseful. The result is a holocaust of devastating scope. The unique feature of the caper is the stipulation it look like a monstrous accident and Wolfram manages to fulfill that condition too, with a minimum loss of life. I strongly recommend The Black Gold of Malaverde.

   Less successful is The Platinum Bullet (Stein & Day, hc, 1974; ppbk, 1985). DePrundis, who managed a narrow escape in The Black Gold of Malaverde, links up with the Russians in an attempt to corner the platinum market. Again, The Bank calls in Wolfram and his crew to neutralize this threat.

   Wolfram and his people work a classic “platinum mine” con on DePrundis and the Russians. The caper is fun but lacks suspense. One problem is Wolfram has a crew of four specialists who aren’t challenged enough to develop suspense and characterization as a result of their actions. The result is an entertaining but superficial novel.

   The scene shifts to the Mid-East in Cobalt 60 (Stein & Day, hc, 1975; ppbk, 1986). The Emir of an oil-rich country plots the assassination of many world leaders including most of the top levels of American political leadership: the President, Senators, and Representatives.

   The Bank initially asks Wolfram and his people to look into the situation. Wolfram discovers the Emir is producing highly radioactive cobalt pens and paperclips. The idea is to plant these common, innocent-looking items near world leaders and let the deadly radiation silently kill them.

   Cobalt 60 ends with a wild chase scene, but again there doesn’t seem to be enough for Wolram’s crew to do.

The last Wolfram book, Quicksilver (Stein & Day, hc, 1976; ppbk, 1981), is the silliest. Harry Descau, a devious international moneymaker, forms a partnership with the Cubans and a defected Russian physicist. Then, in their jungle base in Guatemala, they transmute mercury into gold using a nuclear reactor.

   The Bank discovers Descau’s plan to disrupt the entire international gold market and calls in Wolfram and his team. Wolfram’s solution, naturally, is to destroy the base and its reactor. The method is extreme: amplify that region’s natural earthquakes into a big one that will cause a nearby lake to overflow, wiping out the entire operation. It works. But it all seems too easy, too glib, and too tacky.

   I suppose this is a good place to talk about the formula of caper adventures. Graves’ earlier novels succeeded because they more nearly satisfied the conditions of the caper formula.

   Basically, the caper is planned, executed, and then something goes wrong and the characters have to improvise. Lionel White, one of the masters of the caper novel, told me he develops his characters so their flaws cause the caper to fail.

   Donald Westlake does the same thing in his caper spoofs like The Hot Rock and Bank Shot. In programs like Mission: Impossible, essentially a caper format, the unexpected equipment failure or some random factor forced the IM team to improvise; that failure of the plan provided suspense and a chance for the characters to come up with ingenious solutions to the problem, delighting the audience.

   Whether the caper fails because of the flaws of the characters executing it, or if the caper succeeds after the characters come up with clever actions to overcome the problems, it is essential something go wrong with the caper.

   A perfectly executed caper is boring.

   Donald Westlake asserted that tenet while writing about Parker, his professional thief. The Parker series of capers, written by Westlake under his Richard Stark pseudonym, are variations of the theme: “We had the perfect caper — then something went wrong.”

   Essentially, Graves’ later novels are perfect capers and they lack the excitement and suspense of The Black Gold of Malaverde.

   Perhaps Graves realized this when he wrote his latest book, C.L.A.W. (Stein & Day, hc, 1976; ppbk, 1984). A secret group of terrorists plan to disrupt the Presidential Campaign and assassinate the country’s leadership. They rob an Army munitions base, stealing three missiles and eleven artillery shells.

   Benton Dace, an American intelligence officer, and the obligatory beautiful KGB agent follow the clues that lead to a potential massacre at the Presidential inauguration. The action is fast-paced, the caper is realistic, and the quality is reminiscent of The Black Gold of Malaverde.

Editorial Comment:   One additional novel by Richard L. Graves, published after this review was written, was The Argon Furnace (Scarborough House, hc, 1990). Publishers Weekly described the plot thusly:

   PW also says the book is “relentlessly predictable” and yet the “action scenes are dynamic.”

   Anthony Berkeley Cox tends to be mostly remembered for the first two of his “sophisticated,” psychological “Francis Iles” novels, Malice Aforethought (1931) and Before the Fact (1932).

   As for the more numerous crime novels Cox wrote under the name “Anthony Berkeley,” the great standouts traditionally have been The Poisoned Chocolates Case, a stunt story much praised by Julian Symons and others, and the clever criminal and judicial extravaganza Trial and Error (1937), in my opinion Cox’s magnum opus.

   Little of the rest of Cox’s output gets much notice, though in my view some of it, particularly Top Storey Murder (1931), Jumping Jenny (1933) and Not to be Taken (1938), is excellent. However, there also are some extreme clunkers to be found, too!

   Tellingly, when House of Stratus reprinted the Anthony Berkeley books some ten years ago, it excluded The Wychford Poisoning Case. The reason surely is the rampant sexism to be found in the tale.

   Cox thought of himself as an incisive psychological novelist, but the psychological insights he offers in the Berkeley books through the utterances of his surrogate, the amateur detective Roger Sheringham, can be embarrassingly puerile, when not actually revolting.

   Exhibit A in my case is The Wychford Poisoning Case, which Cox, as was his wont, rather grandiosely subtitled “An Essay in Criminology.”

   The plot of the novel itself is unexceptional for Cox, following as it does a common pattern in the Berkeley tales, namely Roger Getting It All Wrong. This was the puckish Cox’s way of tweaking purist fans of the classical ratiocinative detective novel. However, after you have read a few Berkeleys you come to expect a “surprise twist” — which makes the twist, when it comes, something less than a surprise.

   What is really interesting about Wychford is the utterly loopy sentiments expressed in it. Roger Sheringham’s thoughts on women in Wychford suggest that, when it comes to psychiatry, Roger would have made a better patient than practitioner.

   Wychford mainly seems to be about Roger’s (and the author’s) extreme antipathy toward the modern woman of the 1920s, as embodied in the tale by the flippant flapper Sheila. ( “I’m simply revelling in all this!” she shouts at one point, “It’s fun being a detective.”

   At various points Roger takes time to recommend the great need for modern women like Sheila to be spanked and to fume over these brazen females being so forward as to don male garments, pajamas. But Roger absolutely takes the cake with a jaw-droppingly misogynistic soliloquy on page 124:

   Well! Now you know. Send the bill to Roger Sheringham. One has to wonder what the female writer E. M. Delafield, to whom Cox dedicated Wychford, made of all this.

   This telling bit about Roger, an Oxford graduate and successful novelist (sound familiar?) appears in The Silk Stocking Murders:

   Cox himself was married twice, though neither time successfully. He also was considered the most trying member of the Detection Club (see my forthcoming pamphlet in CADS).

   In The Silk Stocking Murders (Exhibit B), the worst victims of Roger’s lamentable psychology are Jews, notoriously subjects of scorn in between-the-wars English writing (and hardly just in detective novels).

   This tale promises interest as a crime story, with its four strangling murders (of women), but its narrative is plodding compared to that of the somewhat similar The ABC Murders (by Agatha Christie) and its resolution is just plain silly, in my estimation.

   One of the lead characters in the tale is a Jewish financier named Pleydell. Cox actually takes pains to make clear that Pleydell is not one of those objectionable Jewish financiers, don’t you know — though his explanation is itself problematically patronizing:

   The most cringeworthy moment in Silk Stocking comes when Roger and the pointedly named Anne Manners — the sympathetic (non-modern) female character in the tale — further anatomize Pleydell over tea:

   Most modern readers will probably find Anne (and Roger) altogether less than charming here.

   Thriller writers like “Sapper” often get smartly rapped over the knuckles by indignant critics for obnoxious anti-Semitic elements in their writing, but with more “sophisticated” writers like Cox this sort of thing tends to get overlooked.

   The teatime duologue between Anne and Roger that Cox subjects us to in Silk Stocking is a reminder than the anti-Semitism that plagued Europe in the 1920s and 1930s (with fatal results for millions in the 1940s) was hardly confined to the knuckle-dragging elements.

   But just how sophisticated was Cox, really?

   I get the feeling that Cox at some level recognized flaws within himself and thus made his ego projection, Roger Sheringham, frequently fall on his face in the Berkeley tales. Yet I sensed no indication in Wychford and Silk Stocking that Cox was satirizing (or disagreeing with) Roger’s views on women and Jews.

   Moreover, although Roger (and Cox) love to prate about psychology, the “psychological” solution of the four murders in Silk Stocking is labored and unconvincing, an indication that, despite all the talk, Roger and his creator are mere dabblers in the psychological arts, often shamelessly winging it when it comes to expository solutions of crimes, even when Roger actually is meant by the author to be Getting It All Right.

                  SPOILER

   The murderer in Silk Stocking turns out to be the seemingly sympathetic Jew, Pleydell. We are told by Roger that Pleydell was mad and that the first two in his series of four murders were “pure lust-murders” but that the third was a “vengeance-murder, or a megalomania-murder, if you like” and the fourth was a “murder committed with the sole motive of increasing the strength of the case against the man he loathed.”

   With this surfeit of muddled motivations on the part of one mad murderer, the brilliant clarity of Agatha Christie’s solution to a series of killings in The ABC Murders is utterly lacking in The Silk Stocking Murders.

               END SPOILER

   I have the uneasy feeling that in his cases — even the ones he is actually meant to solve — Roger is just talking out of his hat. Call me unsophisticated, if you like.

PETE HAMILL – Dirty Laundry. Bantam, paperback original, 1978.

   Sam Briscoe, 200 pounds of Irish Jew, is not a private eye, but a newspaper reporter — very nearly the next best thing, as I’ve implied before — presently free-lancing, but once a top columnist for a New York paper. (Hamill makes no secret of the fact that he regards this series as an integral part of his imaginary autobiography.)

   A one-time girl friend calls on Sam for help, but on her way to him she’s smashed up while crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. The night is cold, and Sam has no idea that the killer’s trail will soon be leading him into sunny Mexico, and involve him deeply in the affairs of some renegade revolutionaries from Cuba.

   And thereby all the ingredients of the traditional hard-boiled paperback novel are here — crime, passion, greed, lust, and revenge; the fire isn’t. And yet, if your taste runs toward the fulfillment of adolescent male fantasies, I think you’ll like it just fine.

Rating:   C plus.

[UPDATE] 03-15-11.   I had the impression back in 1979, that Sam Briscoe was going to hang around as a character a lot longer than he did, which was only two three books.

   Of course with a line like the one below, excerpted from an online biography, you can understand that the writing of PBO mysteries was not going to be a career-changer for him:

    “He [Pete Hamill] has been a columnist for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and New York Newsday, the Village Voice, New York magazine and Esquire. He has served as editor-in-chief of both the Post and the Daily News.

   And as they say, there is more, much more. The Sam Briscoe books are not mentioned.

   From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

PETE(r) HAMILL. 1935- .
      Dirty Laundry (n.) Bantam 1978 [Sam Briscoe]
      The Deadly Piece (n.) Bantam 1979 [Sam Briscoe]

      The Guns of Heaven (n.) Bantam 1983. [the third Sam Briscoe adventure; see comments]

DOROTHY GARDINER – The Trans-Atlantic Ghost. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1933.

   The detective in what was Mrs. Gardiner’s first mystery novel has a well-chosen name, I think you’ll agree, but the fact is that while Mr. Watson indeed did work for 20 years for the New York Police Department, he was for all that time a minor clerk, a statistician. (Though, of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that!)

   The locked room murder he’s called upon to solve in this book is in California, however, where he finds himself as part of an around-the-world cruise he’s about to embark on, as he heads back home to his native England for good.

   The locked room is in an English castle that’s been transported across the ocean and rebuilt in the hills of California by a wealthy millionaire; there is some talk of ghosts, and some obnoxious louts who call themselves policemen, led by the appropriately named Captain Bulnose; and lots of suspects.

   What makes this book so disappointing is difficult to describe without giving the entire solution away, and you may as well have your own chance at it. Allow me to suggest, however, that it’s the obvious one, and one that at one point Watson is solemnly assured could not be the explanation.

   Of course we shouldn’t assume that everyone knows the truth, or speaks it, but some tiny spark of imagination is to be expected as well, isn’t it?

   There are some nicely humorous scenes to be pleased with, such as when the string on Watson’s pajamas gives way at one crucial point, and to be honest, this was no real chore to read, but as a mystery, it’s (sadly) rather a silly one.

Rating: C minus.

[UPDATE] 03-12-11.   A scarce book, with only a single copy of the US edition listed on ABE, and my copy has no jacket, thus no image above.

   I don’t know much about the author, but according to one website: “Dorothy Gardiner was born in Naples, Italy. She grew up in Boulder, Colorado. In 1917, she graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in History. During the Second World War she was in charge of all the files and records for the North-Atlantic Area office of the American Red Cross.”

   From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, a list of her mystery fiction:

GARDINER, DOROTHY. 1894-1979.
      The Transatlantic Ghost (n.) Doubleday 1933 [Mr. Watson]
      A Drink for Mr. Cherry (n.) Doubleday 1934 [Mr. Watson]
      Beer for Psyche (n.) Doubleday 1946
      What Crime Is It? (n.) Doubleday 1956 [Sheriff Moss Magill]
      The Seventh Mourner (n.) Doubleday 1958 [Sheriff Moss Magill]

       Lion in Wait (n.) Doubleday 1963 [Sheriff Moss Magill]

   She also edited For Love or Money: The 1957 Anthology of the Mystery Writers of America (Doubleday Crime Club, 1957).

         Steve:

   I just found your email inviting my comment on Ralph Dennis.

   Deadman’s Game [reviewed here ] was to be the first in a series, and Dennis did write a second novel which was never published. It was one of several unpublished novels Ralph’s sister kindly let me read.

   To drop back a bit, I met Ralph Dennis one time when he was working at Oxford Books II in the Peachtree Battle Shopping Center in Atlanta. I recognized him from a picture the Atlanta Constitution ran some years before.

   While we chatted about writing, he noticed among the stack of used books I was holding a few of the Parker novels by Westlake. You know, he said, I created a character a lot tougher than Parker. At the time I had not read Deadman’s Game, but I expressed great interest.

   The story he briefly told was a common one in publishing. His editor who championed the character left the publisher and “orphaned” the series. The editor newly assigned to Dennis loathed the character and the violence. He rejected the novel and that was that.

   I wish now I had gone back there and befriended Ralph and shared a beer at the Stein Club or one of his favorite bars George’s on North Highland Street. I read his obit in the Atlanta Constitution in the mid-1980s. Then I wrote about him a couple of times and since I’ve heard from several old friends of his.

   Finally, I tracked down Ralph’s sister and learned much more of his story. I knew he had a BA and a master’s degree from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill but I didn’t know he had another master’s from the Yale School of Drama and was on his way to a PhD when he had a serious falling out with adviser and dropped out.

   His sister said he was not very open to editorial comments from his agent or editors. That hurt him.

   She was very interested in getting him back into print and we had several conversations about it.

   She let me read several of his unpublished novels. Some were ambitious, mainstream novels. Others had criminal/suspense elements but were longer and more ambitious. More like a Stuart Woods.

   And there was the shorter novel labeled simply Kane. It featured a breakneck pace and the violence level was higher than most anything around in the 1970s. I thought republishing Deadman’s Game together with the second novel would make an excellent book, a fine reading experience. The second really completed the first. I could see why no publisher coming along later would be interested in this second novel as a stand-alone.

   Point Blank press agreed and even drew up a contract. But then Ralph’s sister died. Her children still wanted to move forward but her lawyer said there were technical problems having to do with the rights to unpublished manuscripts. We emailed back and forth for several years. I think he retained a Georgia lawyer to reopen Ralph’s estate. Eventually, I knew nothing was going to happen, and so far, that’s correct.

   A shame.

         Richard Moore

1. Ten to sen / Points and Lines

   Seichō Matsumoto’s Ten to sen (Points and Lines) (1957) is a railway timetable mystery straight out of the Freeman Wills Crofts school. It has such Crofts school features as police detective heroes, plenty of skilled detective work, and plot solutions partly based on the “breakdown of identity.” It is very absorbing reading.

   Matsumoto’s story unfolds against the background of a government scandal, involving bribery between businessmen and government officials. This is exactly the sort of situation featured in Akira Kurosawa’s film, The Bad Sleep Well (1960), which makes an interesting cross reference to Matsumoto’s novel. Kurosawa’s treatment is very melodramatic and adventure oriented, whereas Matsumoto focuses on a straightforward realism, never losing focus on the detective work in the book.

   Matsumoto’s tales tend to focus on sinister murder conspiracies against the innocent. The conspiracies tend to be worked out in great detail, often involving faked alibis. There is a pleasing sense of mathematical symmetry in Matsumoto’s plots.

2. Suna no utsuwa / Inspector Imanishi Investigates

   Matsumoto’s later Suna no utsuwa (Vessel of Sand, translated as Inspector Imanishi Investigates) (1961) combines some traditions in his writing.

   The first and better half (Chapter 1 through the middle of Chapter 9) is a mystery story, focusing on solving an obscure murder. It involves such standard Matsumoto devices as an unidentified corpse, railway timetables, and a plot focusing on the two extremes of Japan, the North East and the South West regions of the Islands.

   Like Ten to sen, it builds up some interesting geographic patterns in its puzzle plot, patterns that involve the two extremes of the Islands, and which can be traced on a map with almost pure geometric precision and symmetry.

   The second half of the book is more of a pure thriller or suspense story, with only a little mystery left. It reminds one of some of the suspense short stories in Koe (The Voice). I like the second half of the book much less than the first, and in general do not enjoy Matsumoto’s thrillers anywhere as much as his mystery stories.

   The story also shows Matsumoto’s gift for misdirection. Several times Matsumoto makes it look as if his plot were going one way, only to pull off the opposite direction a few chapters later.

   Some of the reviews quoted on the back of Suna no utsuwa occasion some comment. It has become a truism of criticism that police procedural writers are trying to paint a picture of their society, and more than one reviewer duly states this about Matsumoto.

   I don’t agree. While Matsumoto is indeed realistic, it is hard to see that he is attempting to build up a systematic picture of Japanese society, à la Balzac. Instead, Matsumoto mainly seems concerned with creating mystery plots, together with exploring a few specific subjects that seem to interest him: policemen and their wives, train travel, men with hidden mistresses, bar hostesses, stage and film actors, newspaper reporters, life in South Western Japan, where Matsumoto grew up.

   The unnamed reviewer for The Milwaukee Journal compares Matsumoto to Anton Chekhov. This is very true. Matsumoto, like Chekhov, often creates a character by revealing some small aspect of their behavior or personality.

   This small piece somehow evokes a whole person, in ways that are mysterious, yet somehow very effective. There is also a low keyed intimacy of tone that recalls Chekhov, at once realistic and sensitive, and a gift for lyrical description of both scenery and everyday life.

3. “Kanto-ku no onna” / “The Woman Who Wrote Haiku”.

   The best short story in Koe (The Voice) is “Kanto-ku no onna” (“The Woman Who Wrote Haiku”) (1960). This is a genuine mystery story, not a suspense tale, with a first class plot. It also has the emotionally involving situations one finds in Matsumoto at his best.

   The puzzle plot is in the tradition of such earlier works as Wilkie Collins’ The Haunted Hotel (1878), and F. Tennyson Jesse’s “Lot’s Wife” (1929).

4. “The Cooperative Defendant”

   Matsumoto’s short story “The Cooperative Defendant” shows his interest in ambiguous situations. As is common in Matsumoto, his detective cannot decide whether his suspect is guilty or innocent. He oscillates between these two positions, based on reasoning about the evidence.

   Sometimes he recreates the crime one way in his mind. Then he gets new insight into the data, and reconstructs the crime in a different way. He usually has to really struggle mentally over this, taking a long period of time and much mental effort.

    “The Cooperative Defendant” also shows Matsumoto’s fondness for waste spaces: railroad yards, industrial lots, lonely road sides, country areas that are just being built up into cities, deserted beaches are all favorite Matsumoto locales. These are all areas that have some small aspect of human occupation, but which are typically nearly deserted, and almost in their natural state.

   There often seems to be water nearby, whether the sea, a famous waterfall, or just a small irrigation pond, as in this tale. Such American pulp writers as Norbert Davis and MacKinlay Kantor also were fascinated by such spaces, although one doubts either had any direct influence on Matsumoto.

   Matsumoto’s characters often have complete life histories, something one also finds in Hugh Pentecost. Their various professions can show unexpected links to the murder plot.

Editorial Comments:   This essay first appeared on Mike’s website, A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection. It is reprinted here with his permission.

   If I am reading this biography of Matsumoto correctly, the stories that Mike has brought our attention to are only a small sliver of his crime fiction output. Quoting briefly:

    “A prolific author, the self-educated Matsumoto did not see his first book in print until he was in his forties. He wrote until his death in 1992, producing in four decades more than 450 works. Although Matsumoto also produced popular historical novels and respected works of nonfiction, it is his mystery and detective fiction that solidified his reputation as a writer at home and abroad.”

   Also, if you have it to hand, you might wish to read:

Apostolou, John. “A Yen for Murder: A Look at Japan’s Ichiban Mystery Writer, Seicho Matsumoto.” The Armchair Detective, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Summer, 1987).

   Despite having produced over 130 mystery novels between 1886 and 1932, the year of his death, the English born, New Zealand raised author Fergus Hume (1859-1932) is known — to the extent he is known at all today — for one work, his debut murder tale, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.

   Accounts typically claim that over 500,000 copies of Hansom Cab were quickly placed into eager purchasers’ hands (some sources suggest up to as many as a million copies may have been sold), making the novel a landmark financial success within the mystery genre.

   After relocating from New Zealand to Australia in the 1880s and finding employment as a barrister’s clerk, Fergus Hume soon manifested marked literary tendencies. He published a few stories and began writing plays, but the latter efforts went nowhere. Determining that what the public really desired was a murder tale, Hume pored over the celebrated mystery novels of the French author Emile Gaboriau (1832-1873). Then he produced his own crime story, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.

   Finding resistance among Australian publishers to this work as well, Hume was forced to the expedient of privately printing it. To everyone’s amazement the novel sold briskly. Hume then made the mistake of his life, for a pittance parting with the book’s copyright to an Australian publisher who soon had it flying off shelves not only in Australia but Great Britain and the United States. Apparently Hume never made a penny off the book again.

   Undaunted by his ill turn of economic fortune, Hume determined to make his living as a novelist. By 1888 he had moved to England (where he would live the rest of his life) and had ditched his Australian publisher. The next year saw the publication of Hume’s first mystery novel set in England, The Piccadilly Puzzle.

   A fascinating review of The Piccadilly Puzzle appeared in the inaugural issue of Zealandia, a short-lived New Zealand literary journal (it ran for twelve issues). The reviewer of Puzzle, William Freeman, was also the editor of Zealandia and a prominent New Zealand journalist of his day. His review of the tale is acute but also strikingly harsh in tone. However, if Hume was offended by this review, he soon enough had the last laugh on Freeman.

   Before I get to the Zealandia review and the bizarre fate of the reviewer, however, some words about The Piccadilly Puzzle are necessary.

   Clearly inspired by the recent Jack the Ripper murders (as was another Victorian mystery novel published at this time, Benjamin Farjeon’s Devlin the Barber), The Piccadilly Puzzle revolves around the mysterious murder of a woman on a foggy night in a major London thoroughfare.

   The woman, initially thought to be a “streetwalker” (shades of the Whitechapel murders) soon is identified as a certain Miss Sarschine, the mistress of a prominent lord who, it seems, has just eloped to the Azores on his private yacht with another lord’s wife. The dead woman was not strangled or stabbed but, rather, poisoned — the poison apparently being one of those convenient tropical toxins utterly unknown to Western science, the use of which later would be much frowned upon in the Golden Age of the detective novel (roughly 1920 to 1939).

   Perhaps not coincidentally, poor defunct Miss Sarschine, that lovely lady of easy virtue, had a pair of Malay kris, complete with fatally poisoned blades, hanging on a wall of her love nest (apparently deadly poisoned kris on the wall add just that right final touch to a romantic evening).

   The London police put a private detective named Dowker entirely in charge of the case (something which struck me as rather odd). As a character this Mr. Dowker is not interesting at all, but, worse yet, he has a “colorful” Cockney sidekick, a street urchin named Flip, who speaks like this:

   As much as I admire Hume’s perseverance in typing so many apostrophe marks, I have to confess my eye flew past Flip’s speeches as fast as was possible. I have to wonder whether Hume was inspired to create Flip by Arthur Conan Doyle’s ragamuffin assistants to Sherlock Holmes, the Baker Street Irregulars, who had appeared in the premier Holmes tale, A Study in Scarlet (1887). I cannot recall the Irregulars speaking quite so irregularly as our friend Flip, but perhaps my memory is playing me false.

   The mystery in The Piccadilly Puzzle is certainly as convoluted as Flip’s speech (in addition to untraceable poisons, Hume for good measure also throws twins — another Golden Age no-no — into the mix as an additional plot complication); but, alas, it is not really fair play, an overheard confession being necessary to accomplish the killer’s exposure.

   Hume became known for having a consistent narrative construction in many of his mystery tales, whereby a series of individuals are suspected in turn, only to have Hume pull a “surprise” culprit out of his top hat.

   This keeps the story rolling along, but makes the wary reader immediately look for the culprit among the characters whom no one suspects. It’s the least likely suspect gambit famously associated with Agatha Christie, but Hume lacks the Golden Age Crime Queen’s uncanny finesse.

   Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Piccadilly Puzzle is the sexual immorality (or amorality) of the characters, which is portrayed with striking casualness by the author.

   One would conclude from this tale that the English aristocracy in 1889 was hopelessly debauched. One lord seduces a young woman, sets her up in a London love nest, then commences an affair with a woman married to another lord (in an exceedingly odd twist, this woman turns out to be the identical twin sister of his aforementioned mistress).

   Additionally, we learn that the straying wife had already had a sexual affair with another, younger man, before breaking with this man to marry the lord (she was ambitious for a title). After learning of his wife’s wayward ways the lord she married regrets that he impulsively wed the hussy rather than simply make her his mistress, as the other lord did with the other sister.

    “Sounds like the second act of a French play,” remarks one character. Indeed!

   It is perhaps worth noting that Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray was published a year after The Piccadilly Puzzle. Wilde’s famous short novel incurred some considerable criticism that year as “nauseous,” “unclean,” “effeminate” and “contaminating.”

   While Fergus Hume clearly had not attempted a work of literary ambition in The Piccadilly Puzzle, he nevertheless in the tale gave readers a whiff (whether fragrant or foul depending on the individual) of fin de siecle decadence.

   Which brings us, finally, to William Freeman’s hostile piece on The Piccadilly Puzzle in the pages of Zealandia. Rarely have I encountered such a scathingly detailed review of a mystery novel. In Freeman’s eyes, the work was a failure on all counts, literary, technical and moral.

   At the time Freeman wrote his condemnatory review of Hume’s fifth mystery tale, Hume was a New Zealand national celebrity, author of, as Freeman put it, “the most successful novel of the day.”

   To be sure, Hume soon would be overtaken and surpassed by Arthur Conan Doyle (who had already published A Study in Scarlet in 1887 and would produce, in an explosion of creative genius, The Sign of Four and the dozen short stories comprising The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1890-1892).

   Yet by producing mystery tales at an awesome rate — he was, along with the later Edgar Wallace and John Street, one of the most prolific producers in the history of the mystery genre — Hume managed to maintain a relatively successful writing career over the next quarter century or so.

   Only after the outbreak of World War One, when he lost his American publisher, G. W. Dillingham, and the onset of the Golden Age, when his health declined and his books came to seem increasingly antiquated, did Hume find his financial prospects darkening. His last years were spent in a single rented room in a bungalow and he died in near poverty, only a couple years after his onetime rival Conan Doyle.

   Yet those dark days were a long way off in 1889, when Hume was still big news and interest in his literary fate was high, especially in New Zealand, where he was the colonial who had astonished the writing world (even if he had not always impressed it: “What a swindle The Mystery of a Hansom Cab is,” wrote Arthur Conan Doyle bluntly in a letter at this time. “One of the weakest tales I have read, and simply sold by puffing.”).

   Like Conan Doyle, William Freeman, a noted controversialist in his day, was not one to be intimidated by fame. Freeman himself had authored in 1889 a sensation tale (modeled on Charles Dickens) entitled, with unwitting prescience on his part, He Who Digged a Pit.

   In the very opening lines of of his review of The Piccadilly Puzzle, Freeman made his poor opinion of Hume’s latest crime novel brutally plain. The book, he wrote damningly–

   In addition to finding The Piccadilly Puzzle poorly written — its prose lacked the “beauties which hid the repulsiveness of the plots in [two of Hume’s earlier tales, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and Madame Midas]” — Freeman damned the book as well for essentially failing to adhere to what some thirty years later, in the Golden Age of the detective novel, would be called the fair play standard.

   In Freeman’s eyes Fergus Hume did not play fair with his readers but, rather, with out-of-bounds mendacity led them down the garden path:

   Freeman also takes Hume to task at length for the numerous improbabilities the author scattered throughout his tale, ending by asserting, “to solely construct a whole plot out of nothing else [but improbabilities] is straining the credulity of readers too far.”

   Having disposed of Fergus Hume’s writing and plotting to his own evident satisfaction, Freeman then proceeded to blast The Piccadilly Puzzle for sundry moral transgressions. This line of argument was to prove ironic in the face of Freeman’s own subsequent behavior.

    “The worst feature of the book,” thundered Freeman righteously, “is its moral tone.” In Freeman’s horrified eyes, the characters of The Piccadilly Puzzle wallowed “in a seething mass of moral corruption which the author cynically disdains to hide behind the slightest shadow of the veil of decency.”

   Indeed, Hume seemed “to consider it natural that everybody should be immoral.” He portrayed this immorality “with a coarse fidelity” that Freman found “positively repulsive.”

   Freeman closed his resoundingly minatory review article by expressing his “emphatic condemnation” of other New Zealand writers embarking on such a “dangerous” literary course as Fergus Hume had. Hume now represented New Zealand before the eyes of the world, Freeman noted. Sadly, he had shirked his duty as an author to stand with that “which is clean, wholesome and pure-minded.”

   I personally would love to know what Fergus Hume made of Freeman’s review of The Piccadilly Puzzle.

   Or of the sudden and surprising downward turn in Freeman’s own personal fortunes:

Zealandia soon went defunct and in 1890 Freeman (whose full name was William Freeman Kitchen) had become the editor of the Dunedin Globe. A year later he resigned from the paper, amid great controversy. (The paper under his management made what were later determined by government investigation to be baseless charges against the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, its offices were subjected to arson and Freeman was found to have lied about the amount of money the paper was losing each month.)

   By 1893 Freeman had moved to Australia, where it was announced in a newspaper that he had died, leaving behind his wife and two children in New Zealand. Yet that same year Freeman was discovered in the flesh, very much alive and in the company of a female correspondent. He had, it seems, falsely announced his own death. He was arrested and tried for desertion and bigamy. Ultimately he committed suicide in 1897, at the age of 34.

   Truly, a turn of events almost (if not quite) as odd as those in The Piccadilly Puzzle! As far as I know, however, no twins and no tropical poisons unknown to science were involved in the real life William Freeman Kitchen mystery.

   Fergus Hume would go on for about another three decades to write an unbroken string of nearly one hundred more mystery tales–though his name tenuously survives in genre history only as the author of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. While Hume’s The Picadilly Puzzle may be justly forgotten, William Freeman’s review of the novel deserves to be remembered.

   As posted today on Elizabeth Foxwell’s The Bunburyist blog:

   The Top Ten favorite mystery writers of 1941, as reported by the New York Times on April 18, 1941, based on a survey conducted by Columbia University:

   Follow the link above for more information, including who was considered “Best Detective.”

   Any surprises? Based on recent discussion on this blog, any comments?

   Several days ago I posted a notice of author Lou Cameron’s death last October. As it turns out, this was in error. I received an email from his daughter this morning saying that while his health is not the best, he is definitely still with us.

   The Louis J. Cameron who died had the same date of birth as given in Contemporary Authors for Lou Cameron the author. This suggests that either CA is in error, which is a good possibility, or that what happened was just another of life’s many mysterious coincidences.

   I apologized to his daughter for the mistake and asked her to accept the page and the comments that were left as a tribute to her father, which I’m happy to say that she has. To that end, I will rework the page into a brief biography to go along with the previous cover gallery of many of the books he wrote, but this time without a mention of his non-existent passing.

   When present day critics and historians look back at the Golden Age of Detection as it took shape in its British form, they almost never go beyond the four “Mystery Queens” of the era: Christie, Sayers, Allingham and Marsh.

   Curt Evans, a frequent guest blogger here on Mystery*File, accepts all four as “royalty,” but as you will know from his reviews and his followup comments on the reviews of others, he is a devoted champion of the male authors of the same time period, now deposed and all but relegated to the dustbins of the past.

   In this regard, may I recommend to you a two part part series on The American Culture website, in which Curt takes on the present day one-sided view of the past? Names are named, and claims that have been made are hung up for inspection, analyzed and rejected.

   And who are the Crime Kings of the era? Curt will tell you. His two-part essay is long, but it’s well worth your time and consideration.

http://stkarnick.com/culture/2011/03/01/the-british-golden-age-of-detections-deposed-crime-kings-part-1-of-2/

http://stkarnick.com/culture/2011/03/03/the-british-golden-age-of-detection%E2%80%99s-deposed-crime-kings-part-2-of-2/