Mon 9 Nov 2020
Archived Mystery Review: JOSEPH MATHEWSON – Alicia’s Trump.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[2] Comments
JOSEPH MATHEWSON – Alicia’s Trump. Avon, paperback original, 1980.
My good friend Ellen Nehr recently mentioned that she was looking for this book on the off chance it had something to do with bridge. Sorry, Ellen. It doesn’t, as you’ve probably already found out. Not at all.
I personally happen to feel (as long as you’re asking) that bridge is a hopeless waste of time. It isn’t however, nearly the waste of good intellect as what this book is actually about. Tarot cards.
Ugh. The occult, spiritualism, astrology, Satanism, or any combination thereof – I’ve said it before, and I’m saying it again: It’s all crap. It’s pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo, the pablum of weak minds incapable of getting through a day and using an ounce of independent thought at the same time. It’s organized brain rot, on a million dollar scale.
Can you think of a greater contradiction in thought processes than to have the members of a “sort of occult underground” as the leading characters in a detective novel? You can’t begin to imagine how hard it was to force myself to finish this book.
I did, though, and that’s only because Mathewson’s new sleuth, the elegant Alicia Von Helsing, does not specifically endorse such simple-minded activities herself. The victim, her godson Ronnie, does, or did, and so do most of the suspects in his death.
So, all right. The background is one a detective might face. I agree there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be an appropriate one for a mystery story. But the fact remains, the world of the occult is one that’s totally alien to me. I don’t understand it, and I just couldn’t wait to get out of it.
First in a series, or so it seems. Why a male author (apparently – I won’t trap myself completely and say “obviously”) would chose to tell a story from the first-person viewpoint of a hip middle-aged married lady from Manhattan is beyond me. The style is fragile and rather brittle, and in Mathewson’s hands, it tends toward the arch and pretentious.
Maybe you’ll like it anyway. It isn’t bad. I just didn’t find it very good.
Rating: C
Bibliographic Update: The author’s real name was Joseph Mathewson, and there was one additional book in his Alicia Von Helsing series, that being Death Turns Right (Avon, 1982). These were the only two mysteries he wrote.
November 9th, 2020 at 9:01 pm
It all depends on how the subject is handled and in what form. It’s not really all that comfortable a fit with the detective story since most psychic sleuths are more psychic than sleuth.
My favorite sort of story in this vein is what Frank McSherry called the Janus Solution where there is both a supernatural and a natural solution (Carr’s THE BURNING COURT and McCloy’s THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY not to mention early Simon Ark stories and some of the better Sax Rohmer).
I’m open to ghost stories and books like Dennis Wheatley’s supernatural thrillers, the Jack Mann Gees books that manage some splendid thrills, Buchan’s WITCH WOOD and such, but this sounds like it in a more cerebral vein giving too much credit to the nonsense rather than exploiting it for thrills and chills and atmosphere.
Just accepting this stuff as real in anything short of something along the line of James Gunn’s THE MAGICIANS or Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy is too much of a stretch.
Though I admit I enjoyed the Dorothy Cannell book about a gypsy fortune teller who was a canny cold reader using those skills to fake supernatural powers or the old series PSYCH about a genius pretending to read minds.
November 9th, 2020 at 10:20 pm
I can take psychic sleuths or leave them — mostly leave them — but sometimes I do find them fun to read, especially the ones you mention. You just have to realize that the rules are different, that’s all, even if you think it’s all a bunch of hooey.
This one’s a different kettle of fish, though, to coin a phrase. Alicia Von Helsing herself was not into the occult, if I’m understanding my younger self, but all of the suspects in the case were.
It was the setting and the characters that produced this mini-rant of sorts, not the method of solving the crime, through some sort of supernatural means, or that anything supernatural was happening. That wasn’t the case, this time.