Search Results for 'Dorothy L. Sayers'


ELSEWHERE ON THE WEB, by Mike Tooney:


DOROTHY L. SAYERS – The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. Ernest Benn, UK, hardcover, 1928. Payson & Clarke, US, hardcover, 1928. Reprinted extensively in both hardcover and paperback.

    “Today is perhaps also a suitable occasion to recall a classic detective story which not only opens on Armistice, or Remembrance Day, but in which the coincidence of events on that particular day is absolutely crucial to the story. The book in question is The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, by Dorothy L. Sayers.”

— Martin Edwards, “Do You Write Under Your Own Name”

http://doyouwriteunderyourownname.blogspot.com/2008/11/remembrance-day.html

DOROTHY SAYERS Bellona Club

    “The story of The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club breaks into two halves, with each half functioning as a more or less independent novella. The first and better half, consisting of Chapters 1-12 and the start of the succeeding chapter, contains a real puzzle plot. The first half is also rich in genuine detection.

    “In fact, nearly 100% of this section consists of following Wimsey on his detective efforts. Wimsey’s detective work shows the influence of Sayers’ ancestors in the realist school. … Sayers uses formal, abstract, non-naturalistic chapter titles in this book, in this case based on Bridge hands. Such a technique will become common in later Golden Age writers, especially Ngaio Marsh.”

— Mike Grost

http://mikegrost.com/sayers.htm

DOROTHY SAYERS Bellona Club

    “The Bellona Club is a men’s club. One of the members is discovered to have passed away, apparently while sitting in his chair reading a newspaper. Since the General is known to have a heart condition, it doesn’t appear to be very much out of the ordinary. But when attendants move him, they discover that, although rigor mortis has set in and he is stiff as a board, his knee joint hinges easily. This decidedly suspicious condition indicates that the body was forced sometime after rigor mortis began.

    “Lord Peter is called upon to investigate and unearths some startling facts. The General’s sister, it seems, died on the same day at precisely 11 a.m. — and she has a will with the following clause: If the General predeceases her, her entire (and considerable) estate goes to one party; if she dies first, then the estate goes to another. It is clearly established when the sister died — but did the General die before her or after her?”

— Drew R. Thomas

http://www.worlds-best-detective-crime-and-murder-mystery-books.com/lord-peter-wimsey.html

DOROTHY SAYERS Bellona Club

From The Saturday Review, 27 October 1928:

    “THE UNPLEASANTNESS AT THE BELLONA CLUB. By Dorothy Sayers. S. Payson & Clarke. 1928. $2.00.

    “This should have been a pretty good detective story. Its crimes, and the motives out of which they spring, are comparatively reasonable. General Fentiman, grandfather — not uncle, as the jacket-blurb-writer wrongly guessed — of Major Robert and Captain George Fentiman, was found dead in a smoking-room chair at the club. He had been dead for some hours. His wealthier sister died the same morning. Because of her will it was important to learn which had died first. Later it developed that dirty work, even murder, had been done; but this development comes too late. That’s what’s the matter with The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. All its developments come just a little too late to knock the reader off his chair: he is given plenty of time to foresee most of the book’s twists and turns, and he needs no great nimbleness to keep anywhere from one to six chapters ahead of the story.”

http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1928oct27-00301

DOROTHY SAYERS Bellona Club

    “[Ian] Carmichael’s Wimsey is ever the aristocrat, here ready to quote W. S. Gilbert and W. Shakespeare (though not nearly as frequently as Rumpole will quote his favorite poets), even though he must apologize now and then for being over the heads of some of his less well-educated acquaintances. In this story the grinding poverty of one of the interested parties is shown in striking contrast to Wimsey’s luxurious accommodations and ability to be very generous with his money (which after all was never earned by any workaday sweat of his brow).”

— Frank Behrens, IMDb, Review of the 1972-3 TV miniseries

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068146/reviews

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068146/

    “Another fine piece of detection by an expert, with usual great dialogue, characterization and humor. It’s a shame Dorothy stopped writing so soon.”

— Xavier Lechard

    “However, despite the brilliant evocation of
the stodgy Bellona Club and the contrasting Bohemian London, and the good characterisation … the book is ultimately a disappointment …”

— Nick Fuller

http://gadetection.pbworks.com/w/page/7932286/The%20Unpleasantness%20at%20the%20Bellona%20Club

DOROTHY SAYERS Bellona Club

    “… The Unpleasantness became my favorite of the series so far. I liked the plot, the elaborate crime and twists, but above all I liked the portrait of post-war England, in particular the experiences of the soldiers who returned. Together with the first decade of the 20th century, my favorite historical period is the Interwar. The Innocence and the end of it.”

— “The Sleepless Reader”

http://thesleeplessreader.com/2011/03/22/the-unpleasantness-at-the-bellona-club-strong-poison-by-dorothy-sayers/

    “This is a book in two parts, perhaps not intentionally so, but that is how it reads. I read the first half with very little interest, almost with hostility. The clues seemed as subtle as neon lights in the Club, they pointed in only one direction, and the storyline plodded steadily towards it. I felt an antipathy to the tone of the book. I disliked the way the younger characters were unpleasantly cynical and condescending, not only to their elders but to anyone different to themselves. And I didn’t take to the flippant, wealthy Lord Wimsey. His investigations seem unhampered by the constraints of time and money. In this story he alone is right, and he is always right. His every conjecture is spot on, like a man getting heads with every throw.

    “And then somewhere towards the middle of the book, you turn a page and find the story suddenly springs to life.”

— Karyn Reeves

http://apenguinaweek.blogspot.com/2011/02/penguin-no-5-unpleasantness-at-bellona.html

IT’S ABOUT CRIME
by Marvin Lachman


– This essay/review first appeared in The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 9, No. 2, March/April 1987.  It is quite remarkable that Harper has kept Sayers’ detective fiction in print ever since, although different cover art is now used, and the prices are generally double those mentioned below (!).   No changes have been made to update these comments since they were first published.


DOROTHY SAYERS Lord Peter Wimsey

   Harper’s Perennial Library keeps reprinting Dorothy L. Sayers, proving that there will always be an audience for class. In her lifetime Sayers published eleven Lord Peter Wimsey novels and three short story collections which included Wimsey stories. Perennial has now republished nine of the novels and all of the short story collections in uniform paperback editions at $3.95 each. (I suspect that the two remaining novels, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club and The Nine Tailors, will also be reprinted shortly.)

   In addition, there is a trade paperback of almost five hundred pages, Lord Peter ($8.95), which contains all of the Wimsey short stories, including three that were never previously published in book collections. That book is enhanced by a James Sandoe introduction, an essay by Carolyn Heilbrun (who writes mysteries as Amanda Cross), and a delicious Wimsey parody, “Greedy Night,” by E.C. Bentley.

DOROTHY SAYERS Lord Peter Wimsey

   Speaking of bonuses, I must again praise the illustration by Marie Michal which appears on all of the covers. They’re some of the best done paperback art I’ve seen in years.

   I’m not sure if there’s anything else about Sayers that hasn’t already been said. I could suggest that her non-series short stories not be overlooked since they are uncommonly good, especially “The Man Who Knew How,” in Hangman’s Holiday, as well as “Suspicion” and “The Leopard Lady,” in In the Teeth of the Evidence.

DOROTHY SAYERS Lord Peter Wimsey

   Those volumes also contain stories about Sayer’s other series detective, wine salesman Montague Egg. Very down to earth with his advice on how salesmen should succeed, his stories are “no-nonsense,” yet imaginative in plotting. I especially enjoyed his information about wine.

   I would also suggest that one not be put off by the foppish quality of Lord Peter. I’m not sure why some detectives between the wars, like Wimsey, Reginald Fortune, and the early Albert Campion, were created as silly asses. The fact is that, if given half a chance, they will prove that they are far from effete.

   Also, their authors, especially Sayers, are people of intelligence, and they write as if they assume the same about their readers. These days, one feels that many writers are appealing mainly to our emotions or our libidos.

Editorial Comment.   I regret that two of the covers shown aren’t nearly as sharp as I’d like them to be. I’ll see if I can’t obtain better images to replace them. To see Marie Michal’s work the way it’s meant to be seen, follow the link in the essay above.

Reviewed by DAVID VINEYARD:         


L. T. MEADE & ROBERT EUSTACE – The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings. Ward Lock & Co., UK, hardcover, 1899. Dodo Press, UK, softcover, 2009.

   Before the Yellow Peril that reached its apex with Sax Rohmer’s diabolical genius Dr. Fu Manchu, there was the Italian Peril which had among its finer moments, Guy Boothby’s Dr. Nikola, and this novel by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace.

   THAT a secret society, based upon the lines of similar institutions so notorious on the Continent during the last century, could ever have existed in the London of our day may seem impossible. Such a society, however, not only did exist, but through the instrumentality of a woman of unparalleled capacity and the Brotherhood of the Seven Kings was a name hardly whispered without horror and fear in Italy, and now, by the fascinations and influence of one woman, it began to accomplish fresh deeds of unparalleled daring and subtlety in London. By the wide extent of its scientific resources, and the impregnable secrecy of its organizations, it threatened to become, a formidable menace to society, as well as a source of serious anxiety to the authorities of the law.

   Shades of cammora, omerta, and the Black Hand, the Brotherhood of the Seven Kings as presented here rivals not only the Mafia and Union Corse, but the Si Fan and Spectre, and its leader is both fascinating, beautiful, and evil.

   A scientist of no mean attainments herself, with beauty beyond that of ordinary mortals, she had appealed not only to my head, but also my heart.

   So speaks our narrator, Norman Head, who met the dazzling Katherine in Italy and was enlisted in the Brotherhood only to discover the darkness at its and her core. Now it is 1894, and he has fled to London, where a consultation with Mrs. Kenyon, a friend, over her son, Cecil, the young Lord Kairn, introduces him to the mysterious Dr. Fieta, and to the stately and seductive Madame Koluchy — none other than his own Katherine: “That is the great Mme. Koluchy, the rage of the season, the great specialist, the great consultant. London is mad about her.”

   The poor boy, Cecil, is already in the hands of Mme. Koluchy and the Brotherhood who have evil plans to get the boy out of the way so one Hugh Doncaster can lay claim to money and title. Our hero, without so much as a thought, decides to follow them to Cairo where Dr. Fieta has suggested the climate will benefit Cecil, but from whence he will never return. Norman is made of sterner stuff and will not allow the child to be sacrificed to the sinister Katherine.

   In Malta, Dr. Fieta slips away from him with the boy and heads for Naples, where Norman first knew Katherine, and dreads to go, but will follow if he must.

   We are still only in chapter one, mind you.

   Norman reveals himself as a member of the Brotherhood to Dr. Fieta, discovering the evil doctor has injected the boy with Mediterranean Fever to make the lad appear sick, but the latter will not be moved from his deadly assignment and in a race to save the boy Norman finally corners him as he is about to throw the boy into the sulfurous caldera of Mt. Vesuvius, and it is Dr. Fieta that dies there instead.

   Vesuvius was a favorite scene for melodrama in British fiction in the 19th century, with many a villain or tragic lover meeting their fate there. Varney the Vampire ends his reign of terror in its fires as well. More recently Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child had their hero, FBI agent Aloysious Pendergast, confront his evil brother Diogenes among the sulfurous fumes of the great volcano (Book of the Dead).

   The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings appeared as a serial in The Strand, and much like the early Fu Manchu novels each chapter is a complete short story around the central theme of Norman outwitting and foiling the evil machinations of the Brotherhood against targets in England. Like Conan Doyle and even Bram Stoker, it attempts to take advantage of the then still new ease of travel and communications by employing such modern inventions as steam yachts, railroads, telegrams, and science in general in much the same way writers today like Clive Cussler, Steve Berry, and James Rollins use technology.

   For all the dated nature of books like this, they are the direct ancestor of the books at the top of today’s bestseller lists full of mysterious conspiracies and the like. Today the villains are Islamic extremists and evil corporate interests or shadow governments rather than Italian or Chinese secret societies, but the basics are the same; movement, mystery, incredible odds against one or a handful of protagonists, and general bad guy 101 activity. Here the conspiracies are personal as are the crimes, but they are only one remove from Carl Peterson or Ernst Stavro Blofield threatening England or the World.

   L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace were popular writers in the Strand, who wrote numerous books like this. Both almost always wrote with someone else, him, perhaps most famously Eustace with Dorothy L. Sayers, his being a physician and much desired as a collaborator for the medical expertise he brought with him.

   Miss Meade, Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith, an Irish woman from County Cork, seems to have been the storyteller of the two, penning over 300 books, eleven appearing posthumously. Her books ran the gamut from stories for young girls to sensational fiction, religious, historical, and adventure novels. One of her better known mystery collaborations with Eustace, with whom she penned eleven books, is The Sorceress of the Strand, which features Madame Sara, another villainess. She also collaborated with Dr. Clifford Hallifax (Memoirs of a Physician) and Sir Robert Kennaway Douglas (Under the Dragon Throne).

   As he battles Mme. Koluchy, Norman acquires a friend and ally, Dufrayer, and the pair fight the female mastermind to a stand still, until like Moriarity with Holmes, her full attention seems focused on ridding herself of them. It’s always one of the puzzles of this kind of book that between adventures everything seems forgiven and everyone goes back to normal until the next adventure, until near the end when it is convenient for the writer, the villain finally has enough.

   With Scotland Yard finally onto Mme. Koluchy, she is cornered, and more dangerous than ever. Having killed Dufrayer, she is pursued to her lair by Norman, where she disarms him by means of an electromagnet, and defies him:

    “It is my turn to dictate terms,” she said, in a steady, even voice. “Advance one step towards me, and we die together. Norman Head, this is your supposed hour of victory, but know that you will never take me either alive or dead.”

   And, true to her word, she springs her last deadly device in the furnace of her hellish laboratory that burns at a hellish 2400 degrees Centigrade taking a brave detective with her.

   The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings is entertaining melodrama from another age, well enough written, modern for its period, and minus many of the excesses of the time period. Mme. Koluchy proves a fascinating mix of femme fatale and fiend, and our stalwart heroes at least aren’t as lunkheaded as Dr. Petrie and Sir Denis Nayland Smith in the Fu Manchu saga. All in all it is great fun from the late Victorian period and more than worth finding (simple enough in ebook form).

   You can hear in this simple tale of adventure and intrigue some of the same concerns abroad today, the same xenophobia and the same need to reassure the reader good old fashioned Anglo Saxon values will win out in the end. Like many of today’s thrillers, and those from other eras, it reflects both real and imagined fears of foreign influence, unspeakable conspiracies, and the darkness just beyond the light that haunt middle class imagination across the years. As the mystery novel has always been primarily about the restoration of order from the demons within us the thriller has always been about the thin line between us and the demons just outside our door, forces we have no control over.

   If nothing else, it is a reminder the more things change in popular fiction, the more they stay the same.

AN ORGY OF DEATH:
Sex in the City in Alice Campbell’s Desire to Kill
by Curt J. Evans


ALICE CAMPBELL – Desire to Kill. Farrar & Rinehart, US, hardcover, 1934. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1934.

   In his interesting and influential but often rather one-sided analysis of English detective novels and thrillers between the wars, Snobbery with Violence: English Crime Stories and Their Audience (1971), Colin Watson portrays the Golden Age English mystery as quite straight-laced, sexually speaking, with blushing crime fiction writers of the day able to bring themselves to refer only “obliquely” to “coital encounters.”

    “The political tone [of the between-the-wars English mystery novel] was conservative save in a handful of instances,” pronounces Watson. “As for morals, it would be difficult to point to any other single branch of popular entertainment that conformed more strictly to current notions of decency. […] An almost Victorian reticence continued to be observed in crime fiction for decades after treatment of unsavory topics had come to be accepted, within limits, as a legitimate feature of the straight novel.”

ALICE CAMPBELL

   Colin Watson likely never read Alice Campbell’s 1934 crime novel Desire to Kill.

   Admittedly, the novel is set in France (specifically Paris), where many English readers no doubt could more easily accept the presence of moral decadence in human life. Still, the plot itself quite strikingly involves elements (drugs, homosexuality, prostitution and sexual voyeurism) that would be right at home in the unbuttoned and unzipped modern mystery.

   Alice Campbell (1887-?) herself was an American, though, like John Dickson Carr, she is associated with the English school of mystery. Originally she came from Atlanta, Georgia, where she was part of the socially prominent Ormond family. (Ormond was her maiden name.)

   Campbell moved to New York City at the age of nineteen and became a socialist and women’s suffragist (this according the blurb on a 1939 Penguin paperback — evidently Penguin did not deem it necessary to shield potential readers from knowledge of this author’s less than conservative background). She moved to Paris before World War One, married the American-born artist and writer James Lawrence Campbell and had a son in 1914. By the 1930s (possibly sooner), the family had left France for England, where Campbell continued writing crime fiction until 1950 (the year The Corpse Had Red Hair appeared).

   Campbell’s first mystery novel was Juggernaut, a highly-praised tale of the murderous machinations of a villainous doctor. (The story was adapted into a film starring Boris Karloff in 1936.) Throughout the rest of the pre-WW2 period, most of her crime tales were set in France.

   Desire to Kill is one of the French novels. Like many of Campbell’s crime stories, it is really more a tale of suspense, though there is some detection in the form of attempts by a couple amateur investigators to pin the crime on the true villain. Dorothy L. Sayers praised the novel “for the soundness of the charactersation and the lively vigor of the writing,” which she thought helped to lift the narrative out of “sheer melodrama.”

   And melodramatic the tale is! The opening sequence, which concerns the events at socialite heiress Dorinda Quarles’ bohemian drug party, is well-conveyed. Sybaritic “Dodo” Quarles imbibes deeply and frequently at the well of moneyed decadence:

ALICE CAMPBELL

    “The girl was by all accounts coarse, flamboyant, untrammeled by scruples or breeding; indiscriminate in love, and with a capacity for drink which led her to the open boast that, like a certain gentleman of Half-Moon Street, she never breakfasted, but was sick at eleven….”

   Dodo’s latest wicked pash is the cult-like new religion of the Bannister Mowbray, obviously a charlatan and a degenerate, at least in the eyes of the respectable:

    “Rumour had it he came of a good Highland family, his mother a Greek; that in a remote past he had been sent down from his university for dubious practices. At all events he was known to have delved deep into mysteries the normal being eschewed, and to have founded a cult which, after being hounded from place to place, was now domiciled in Corsica. Just what went on in the circle of his initiates no outsider could definitely state, but credible report declared the man’s readiness to prey on the infatuated disciples who clung to him with a strange devotion.”

   Bannister Mowbray’s current “henchman and slave” is Ronald Cleeves, the handsome son and heir of Lord Conisbrooke. The author compares him, in a suggestive image, to a “pure Greek temple…invaded by a band of satyrs.”

   Later on Campbell’s amateur detective, the brash, American-born freelance journalist Tommy Rostetter, visits the two men at Ronald’s Parisian abode and finds them “wearing dressing-gowns” and sitting “close together, in earnest discussion over bowls of café au lait.”

   Other characters in the novel — all guests as Dodo’s party — include:

   Peter Hummock, originally of South Bend, Indiana. “Ranked as the most pestiferous social nuisance in Paris,” Hummock nominally deals in antiques and designs tea-gowns “for middle-western compatriots” but spends most of his time “in a tireless dash from one gay function to another, impervious to snubs, detailing scandal.”

   Mrs. Cope-Villiers, “familiarly known as Dick…a reputed addict to cocaine.”

   â€œThe glum and taciturn Australian poetess, Maud Daventry.” A neighbor of Tommy’s (based on Gertrude Stein?), she first is mentioned in Campbell’s earlier Tommy Rostetter mystery, The Click of the Gate (1932). Tommy has “nothing against her, little alluring as was her soggy complexion, mannish dinner-jacket, and untidy mop of hair invariably flecked with cigarette-ash.”

   Announcing that Dodo’s party guests have consumed a powerful hallucinogenic drug, Bannister Mowbray promises them the thrill of intense dreams:

    “They will tend toward wish-fulfillment, of course, but the character will vary with the individual. All I can predict is that if any one of you cherishes a desire ordinarily forbidden, he may…taste an illusory joy of accomplishment.”

   During the period when all the guests at Dodo’s party are ostensibly in drug-induced stupors, Dodo is stabbed to death—a rather Manson-like culmination of events!

   Apparently someone indeed had cherished an ordinarily forbidden desire, a desire to kill; and its accomplishment in those dark hours was not at all illusory.

   When a woman he believes to be innocent is implicated in Dodo’s murder, Tommy investigates to discover what truly happened at this decadent affair. He finds that the dead Dodo is not missed:

   â€œWho cares a hoot if she did stick a knife into the worthless bitch?”

   â€œDavid!”

   â€œWell, what was she, then? You tell me a nice name for her.”

   Despite encountering indifference and resistance, Tommy perseveres in his investigation and eventually discovers an amazing answer to his problem. Proving it, however, proves a perilous endeavor indeed for him.

   Much of the later part of the novel involves goings-on at a house of prostitution where, for a price, the madam allows those voyeurs who like to look but not touch access to strategically placed peepholes, so that they may watch the house’s illicit couples coupling.

   Though Campbell never directly describes sexual acts, reticent she is not in Desire to Kill. In terms of subject matter the novel certainly offers something outside the beaten Golden Age track — and the mystery is not at all a fizzle either. It is herewith recommended as an antidote to conventional genre wisdom and for its sheer entertainment value.

CAMPBELL, ALICE (Ormond). 1887-1976?

* Juggernaut (n.) Hodder 1928 [France]
* Water Weed (n.) Hodder 1929 [England]
* Spiderweb (n.) Hodder 1930 [Geoffrey MacAdam; Catherine West; Paris]
* The Click of the Gate (n.) Collins 1932 [Tommy Rostetter; Paris]
* The Murder of Caroline Bundy (n.) Collins 1933 [England]
* Desire to Kill (n.) Collins 1934 [Tommy Rostetter; Paris]
* Keep Away from Water! (n.) Collins 1935 [France]
* Death Framed in Silver (n.) Collins 1937 [Insp. Headcorn; Colin Ladbroke; England]
* Flying Blind (n.) Collins 1938 [Tommy Rostetter; England]
* A Door Closed Softly (n.) Collins 1939 [Alison Young; Colin Ladbroke; England]
* They Hunted a Fox (n.) Collins 1940 [Insp. Headcorn; Alison Young; Colin Ladbroke; England]
* No Murder of Mine (n.) Collins 1941 [Insp. Headcorn; England]
* No Light Came On (n.) Collins 1942 [Geoffrey MacAdam; Catherine West; Paris]
* Ringed with Fire (n.) Collins 1943 [London]
* Travelling Butcher (n.) Collins 1944 [England]
* The Cockroach Sings (n.) Collins 1946 [Insp. Headcorn; England]
* Child’s Play (n.) Collins 1947 [England]
* The Bloodstained Toy (n.) Collins 1948 [Tommy Rostetter; Insp. Headcorn; England]
* Veiled Murder (n.) Random 1949    [see Comment #6]
* The Corpse Had Red Hair (n.) Collins 1950 [England]

    — The bibliography above was taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.

   As a followup to the various lists posted here recently of favorite mystery writers and characters over the years, here’s yet another. This one was announced in the Fall 1994 issue of The Armchair Detective, the results of a survey the magazine had taken of its readers earlier that year.

ALL TIME FAVORITE MYSTERY WRITERS

1. Rex Stout
2. Agatha Christie
3. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
4. Raymond Chandler
5. Ross Macdonald
6. Dorothy L. Sayers
7. Dashiell Hammett
8. Ngaio Marsh
9. Josephine Tey
10. P. D. James
11. Robert B. Parker
12. John Dickson Carr
13. Erle Stanley Gardner
14. Dick Francis
15. James Lee Burke

FAVORITE CURRENTLY ACTIVE MYSTERY WRITERS

1, P. D. James
2. Lawrence Block
3. Robert B. Parker
4. Sue Grafton
5. Dick Francis
6. Tony Hillerman
7. Ed McBain
8. James Lee Burke
9. Martha Grimes
10. Elizabeth George

FAVORITE MYSTERY NOVELS

1. The Maltese Falcon
2. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
3. The Hound of the Baskervilles
4. Gaudy Night
5. The Daughter of Time

FAVORITE MYSTERY SERIES CHARACTER

1. Sherlock Holmes
2. Nero Wolfe
3. Hercule Poirot
4. Miss Marple
5. Lew Archer

WRITER WHO WILL STILL BE READ FIFTY YEARS FROM NOW

1. P. D. James
2. Tony Hillerman
3. Dick Francis
4. Robert B. Parker
5T. Ruth Rendell
5T. Lawrence Block

   On the reverse page of the poll results were the Mystery Bestseller Lists for May-June 1994, as reported by several specialty mystery bookshops:

HARDCOVERS

1. “K” Is for Killer, Sue Grafton
2. Tunnel Vision, Sara Paretsky
3. Shooting at Loons, Margaret Maron
4. The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams, Lawrence Block
5T. Dead Man’s Heart, Aaron Elkins
5T. Tickled to Death, Joan Hess
7. Till the Butchers Cut Him Down, Marcia Muller
8. The Concrete Blonde, Michael Connelly
9. How to Murder Your Mother-in-Law, Dorothy Cannell
10. Dixie City Jam, James Lee Burke

PAPERBACKS

1. The Track of the Cat, Nevada Barr
2. Missing Joseph, Elizabeth George
3T. To Live and Die in Dixie, Kathy Hogan Trocheck
3T. Blooming Murder, Jean Hager
5. Dead Man’s Island, Carolyn Hart
6. Cruel and Unusual, Patricia Cornwell
7. J Is for Judgment, Sue Grafton
8T. Bootlegger’s Daughter, Margaret Maron
8T. Share in Death, Deborah Crombie
8T. Poisoned Pins, Joan Hess
11. Twice in a Blue Moon, Patricia Moyes

Reviewed by DAVID L. VINEYARD:         


THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. ( Män som hatar kvinnor, literally “Men Who Hate Women.”) Sweden, 2009. Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace. Screenplay Niolaj Arcel, Rasmuss Heisterberg. Based on the novel by Stieg Larrson. Director: Niels Arden Opley.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO Noomi Rapace

   I won’t go much into the complex plot of this international best selling thriller, the posthumous first of a trilogy by Swedish journalist Stieg Larrson. This Swedish film of the book, part of what is known as the Millennium Trilogy (The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest are the other two), introduces the protagonists Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist and publisher of Millennium, an expose magazine, and Lisbeth Salander, a gifted violent and almost feral computer researcher.

   To summarize the plot as simply as possible (and leaving a good deal out) Blomkvist faces ruin after a libel suit following his expose of a prominent industrialist’s criminal activities. While waiting a possible jail sentence and financial ruin he is commissioned by Henrik Vanger, the former CEO of Vanger Industries to find out what happened to his niece Harriet, who disappeared forty years earlier, under the guise of researching a history of the Vanger family. Vanger believes someone in the family murdered Harriet, and taunts him by sending him a framed flower every year on his birthday as Harriet once did.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO Noomi Rapace

   Vanger makes no bones about his family. They are a bad lot, but Harriet was one bright spot among the twisted monsters around her.

   Meanwhile unknown to Blomkvist, Vanger has him investigated, the research done by Lisbeth Salander, the girl of the title, a mysterious young woman with a photographic memory and rare skills in her field. Lisbeth is hostile, violent, paranoid, defensive, and dresses in semi Goth outfits, black jeans and pullovers (her nose is pierced too) and rides a motorcycle. She is being sexually extorted by the man who runs her trust fund, but after a brutal rape turns the tables on him.

   Lisbeth has dark secrets that Rapace echoes largely like a silent star, mostly with her eyes.

   Eventually Blomkvist discovers Lisbeth, and they join forces, uncovering a history of sexual abuse and murder — a possible serial killer — dating back forty years (the sins of the past that haunt the Vanger family could almost come from a Ross Macdonald novel). Their descent into Vanger family history becomes steadily more disturbing until Blomkvist faces torture and murder and is saved only by Lisbeth’s timely arrival.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO Noomi Rapace

   But the death of one killer is only the beginning, and there are dark secrets and the fate of Harriet Vanger still to be uncovered, nor is Lisbeth willing to leave Blomkvist to his fate.

   There is a good deal more than this going on. The book could easily be a cross between Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Andrew Vachss, Mickey Spillane, and a Swedish William Faulkner, with a bit of de Sade and Henry Miller thrown in to boot.

   There are enough literary analogies and references for a few dozen dissertations in it without even touching on the social, political, sexual, and psychological depths, but the film manages to capture the feel and the mood of the book even without the benefit of some of its more literary pleasures.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO Noomi Rapace

   The film version takes a bit to get started, being faithful to the novel with a 152 minute running time. You may find yourself confused how the two narrative tracks are going to join, or wonder when and if they are, but Nyqvist is well cast as the middle aged moral hero and Noomi Rapace is perfect as Lisbeth Salander, who has her own demons.

   It is a difficult role, physically and mentally demanding, a sort of female Mike Hammer with a tortured soul and Rapace’s large dark eyes staring out from the face of a child woman will stay with you long after the film ends. Few actresses expose themselves both physically and psychologically as naked as Rapace does in this film

   When the film does get going, it is uncompromising, violent, dark, and yet neither exploitative nor merely sensational. Director Opley’s hand is certain, even gifted, and the film is both stunningly shot and sharply written and staged.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO Noomi Rapace

   It can’t have been easy shaping Larrson’s unwieldy, in length anyway, very literary work into a taut film, but the effort pays off in a stunning film adaptation that is as good a translation of a big dense book to the screen as I’ve seen in many a year.

   This is not a feel good film, but it is satisfying, and surprisingly the hero and heroine come across as human and vulnerable when they could easily have been preachy and self-satisfied in light of the book and movie’s themes of corporate corruption, sexual violence against women, traces of Nazi fascism lingering in the underbelly of wealthy Swedish society, the darkness at the heart of a supposedly perfect society, and generations of sexual abuse and despair.

   That Blomkvist and Lisbeth emerge as people you actually care about is a tribute to both the script and the actors playing the roles.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO Noomi Rapace

   I’ll be watching the sequel The Girl Who Played With Fire in a few days The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest has yet to be released on DVD, but I look forward to it, If they keep up this level of work it may prove the best such series of films since The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter films.

   The American version of the film is in production, but I don’t have high hopes for it. It could hardly look any better, and I can’t imagine an American actress exposing the same mix of vulnerability and toughness while maintaining a core of humanity as real as Rapace’s. No doubt we will get a kick ass Lisbeth much more conventionally pretty and glamorous, but not half as real as Salander.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO Noomi Rapace

   Even if you were indifferent to the book, or just have no urge to read it, see this film. Don’t wait for the American version — I can virtually assure you it won’t tackle half the subject matter or half as graphically. I do warn you, this is violent, sexually graphic, and certainly adult, but it is never sensational or exploitative, and the two characters at its heart prove to be someone you care for in a way rare to any thriller.

   The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is one of the best thrillers I’ve seen in ages — adult, complex, and uncompromising. I actually kept the NetFlix DVD an extra day and watched it again. It’s that good. The Girl Who Played With Fire is next in the queue and I look forward to it.

   See this one, but be prepared. It is visceral experience unlike any thriller I’ve seen in many years. It comes at you and refuses to be ignored or just watched, but insists on being experienced. You may well have the urge to pull away a few times while watching it, to distance yourself a bit, but when the credits roll I suspect you will have the same reaction I did.

   Damn good movie.

A REVIEW BY CURT J. EVANS:         


WINIFRED PECK – The Warrielaw Jewel. Faber & Faber, UK, hardcover, 1933. E. P. Dutton, US, hardcover, 1933.

   In 1933, Catholic priest and writer Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, one of the talented Knox siblings, children of Edmund Arbuthnott Knox, former Anglican Bishop of Manchester, published Body in the Silo, a detective novel.

WINIFRED PECK The Warrielaw Jewel

   This is not really news. Father Knox, best known in the mystery genre today for having formulated an influential set of “rules” for the writing of detective fiction, had before 1933 already published three well-received detective novels and been admitted as an original member of the Detection Club in 1930.

   There was a five year lag between The Footsteps at the Lock (1928) and The Body in the Silo (1933), but, still, the appearance of the latter could not exactly be called a surprise.

   But another Knox sibling also published a detective novel in 1933: one of Ronald Knox’s sisters, (Lady) Winifred (Knox) Peck. Entitled The Warrielaw Jewel, this mystery tale by Peck, a once successful though today mostly forgotten mainstream novelist, received quite favorable reviews and holds up well today.

   Three years ago, the excellent Persephone Books reprinted Peck’s House-Bound, a mainstream novel with a World War Two period setting, with an introduction by her (and Ronald Knox’s) famous niece, the late novelist Penelope Fitzgerald. The Warrielaw Jewel deserves reprinting as well.

   Jewel is notable as an early example of a Golden Age mystery that, in its shifting of emphasis from pure puzzle to the study of character and setting, helped mark the gradual shift from detective story to crime novel which Julian Symons famously celebrated in his history of the mystery genre, Bloody Murder .

   A tale of Victorian/Edwardian familial dysfunction, Jewel rather resembles Margery Allingham’s Police at the Funeral (1931) and More Work for the Undertaker (1948), as well as S.S. Van Dine’s The Greene Murder Case (1928).

   While the puzzle certainly is not as intricate as Van Dine’s in the latter novel, the writing is excellent, in my view on a level with that of Allingham and her Crime Queen contemporaries Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh. (There also is some similarity to American Mary Roberts Rinehart’s mystery novel The Album, published the same year, though thankfully The Warrielaw Jewel is without all Rinehart’s Had-I-But-Known digressions.)

   As one pleased reviewer noted of Peck’s mystery novel, “the writing, atmosphere, and characterization” made the story “something quite distinct.”

   The Warrielaw Jewel actually is set in the Edwardian era, 1909 specifically ( “that period, so far away from modern youth, when King Edward VII lived, and skirts were long and motors few, and the term Victorian was not yet a reproach”).

   The narrator, Betty Morrison, wife of the lawyer for the eccentric, decaying gentry family of Warrielaws, tells the tale from the vantage point of the early 1930s, looking back over those shocking events in the vicinity of Edinburgh, Scotland, including the death of elderly family head Jessica Warrielaw and the trial of her favored nephew for murder.

   Involved in the affair is a family heirloom, a so-called fairy-jewel, said to have been given to the Warrielaw family centuries ago by a glittering enchanted lady carried off and married by a dark and brooding laird ancestor. A curse is said to have been laid upon the jewel. Certainly dreadful happenings, whatever the cause, overtake the family in the present day.

   There is investigation and detection, performed by an retired policeman friend of Betty Morrison’s husband; yet it is Betty herself who provides the final, crucial piece of evidence. The mystery itself is engrossing, though the best elements of the tale are found in the characters — particularly the various odd Warrielaws and their remaining retainers –and the Edwardian Scottish atmosphere.

   I hope that one day Winifred Peck’s The Warrielaw Jewel is republished and honored as a member of the company of better-written, literate mysteries of the period, for it certainly deserves to be so designated.

   When one reviewer declared The Warrielaw Jewel “in a class by itself” and added that “it looks as if [Mrs. Peck] were going to bear [Father Knox] at his own special game,” he was not, in my view, exaggerating.

Bio-Bibliographic Data:   Winifred Peck, 1882-1962, was born and educated in Oxford and lived in Edinburgh, according to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. His bibliography includes only one other mystery novel that she wrote, the provocatively titled Arrest the Bishop? (Faber, 1949).

   While copies of the latter may be found offered for sale online (although with asking prices of $50 and up), none of The Warrielaw Jewel were seen, even with a US edition.

MY 100 “BEST” MYSTERIES
by DAVID L. VINEYARD


   Steve suggested we might try our hands at a 100 best list, so here with some reservations is mine. Reservation number 1:   I have limited myself to mystery and suspense novels, so no thrillers, adventure, or spy novels.

   Number 2:   I have no short story collections on the list — I couldn’t top the Queen’s Quorum anyway.

   Number 3:   I am skipping the early classics from The Moonstone to The Hound of the Baskervilles. For all practical purposes this list begins with the birth of the Golden Age which most would place with E. C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case. The books before that are deserving of a list of their own.

   Also, I have limited myself to one title per writer though obviously some writers should have multiple entries.

   The final reservation is that this is no “best” list. More a favorites list, and of course at different times there would be some variation. Some favorite writers don’t make the list because another, sometimes lesser, writer wrote one very good book. And though they wrote well after the cut off date I’m leaving R. Austin Freeman to the earlier period along with Conan Doyle and Chesterton.

   And warning, this list is extremely eclectic.

   It struck me too how many of these had been filmed so a * marks a film version.

   With those caveats, herewith:

About the Murder of The Circus Queen by A. Abbott *
The Death of Achilles by Boris Akunin
Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham *
Terror on Broadway by David Alexander
Perish By the Sword by Poul Anderson
Hell Is a City by William Ard
The Unsuspected by Charlotte Armstrong *
Murder in Las Vegas by W. T. Ballard
Death Walks in Eastrepps by Francis Beeding
Charlie Chan Carries On by Earl Derr Biggers *
The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake *
Bombay Mail by Lawrence G. Blochman *
No Good From a Corpse by Leigh Brackett
Green For Danger by Christianna Brand *
The Clock Strikes Thirteen by Herbert Brean
A Case for Three Detectives by Leo Bruce
The Screaming Mimi by Fredric Brown *
Asphalt Jungle by W. R. Burnett *
The Secret of High Eldersham by Miles Burton
Fast One by Paul Cain *
Circus Couronne by R. Wright Campbell
The Man Who Could Not Shudder by John Dickson Carr
Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler *
Elsinore by Jerome Charyn
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie *
First Prize by Edward Cline
Stolen Away by Max Allan Collins
Brass Rainbow by Michael Collins
The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin
The Wrong Case by James Crumley
Snarl of the Beast by Carroll John Daly
Sally in the Alley by Norbert Davis
The Poisoned Oracle by Peter Dickinson
To Catch A Thief by David Dodge *
My Cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier *
End of the Game (aka The Judge and His Hangman) by Friedrich Duerrenmatt *
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco *
The Naked Spur by Charles Einstein *
The Eighth Circle by Stanley Ellin
L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy *
Mirage by Walter Ericson (Howard Fast) *
Double Or Quits by A. A. Fair
The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing *
Death Comes to Perigord by John Ferguson
Isle of Snakes by Robert L. Fish
High Art by Rubem Fonseca *
King of the Rainy Country by Nicholas Freeling
Operation Terror by the Gordons *
Take My Life by Winston Graham *
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene *
It Happened In Boston by Russell Greenhan
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett *
Violent Saturday by W. L. Heath *
Why Shoot a Butler by Georgette Heyer
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith *
Night Has 1000 Eyes by George Hopley (Cornell Woolrich) *
Flush as May by P. M. Hubbard
Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy B. Hughes *
One Man Show by Michael Innes
An Unsuitable Job For a Woman by P. D. James *
The 10:30 From Marseilles by Sebastian Japrisot *
The Last Express by Baynard Kendrick
Night and the City by Gerald Kersh *
Fata Morgana by William Kotzwinkle
Murder of a Wife by Henry Kuttner
Headed for a Hearse by Jonathan Latimer *
Curtain for a Jester by Richard and Francis Lockridge
Let’s Hear it For the Deaf Man by Ed McBain *
Through a Glass Darkly by Helen McCloy
The Green Ripper by John D. MacDonald
The List of Adrian Messenger by Philip MacDonald *
Black Money by Ross Macdonald
Gideon’s Day by J. J. Marric (John Creasey) *
Died in the Wool by Ngaio Marsh
Guilty Bystander by Wade Miller *
A Neat Little Corpse by Max Murray *
Sleeper’s East by Frederic Nebel *
Let’s Kill Uncle by Rohan O’Grady *
Puzzle for Fools by Q. Patrick
Fracas in the Foothills by Eliot Paul
To Live and Die in L.A. by Gerald Petivich *
Shackles by Bill Pronzini
Cat of Many Tails by Ellery Queen *
Footprints on the Ceiling by Clayton Rawson
Trial by Fury by Craig Rice
The Erasers by Alain Robbe-Grillett *
The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers *
So Evil My Love by Joseph Shearing *
Stain on the Snow (aka The Snow is Black) by Georges Simenon *
The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjowall & Per Waloo *
Death Under Sail by C. P. Snow
Blues for the Prince by Bart Spicer
One Lonely Night by Mickey Spillane
Judas Inc. by Kurt Steel
Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout
Rim of the Pit by Hake Talbot
The Bishop Murder Case by S. S. Van Dine *
Above the Dark Circus by Hugh Walpole
Death Takes the Bus by Lionel White
Death in a Bowl by Raoul Whitfield

Editorial Comment:   Previously on this blog have been top 100 lists from Barry Gardner and Jeff Meyerson. Coming tomorrow is another such list from Geoff Bradley, editor and publisher of CADS (Crime and Detective Stories) . Thanks to all!

Reviewed by DAVID L. VINEYARD:         


SUSAN HILL – The Woman in Black. David R Godine, hardcover,1986; trade paperback, November 1987. Originally published by Hamish Hamilton, UK, hardcover, 1983. Many later reprint editions.

SUSAN HILL The Woman in Black

   It is Christmas, and solicitor Arthur Kipps’ family is clamoring for a Christmas ghost story, but he has no intention of sharing one, for the one ghost story Mr. Kipps knows is no tale for a cozy fire and a family setting …

    They had chided me for being a spoilsport, tried to encourage me to tell them the one ghost story I must surely, like any other man, have it in me to tell. And they were right. Yes, I had a story, a true story, a story of haunting and evil, fear and confusion, horror and tragedy. But it was not a story to be told for casual entertainment, around the fireside on Christmas Eve.

   The detective story and the ghost story as we know it both have a common ancestry in the birth of the Romantic Movement and the Gothic tale that developed as part of it, then morphed into the detective story on one hand and science fiction and fantasy on the other.

   In particular, though, the ghost story has always had some appeal to many of the readers and writers of detective fiction, as if in the urge to explain away the world in terms of rational thought, there was also a desire to recapture the innocence of simple faith in the uncanny and the unnatural. That, and the ghost story often has a mystery to be solved at its heart, the mystery of why the ghost haunts in the first place.

   There is a long list of psychic sleuths and no small number of writers of detective fiction who have dabbled in the supernatural including names such as Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Le Fanu, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, John Dickson Carr, and many more — sometimes in standalone tales of the supernatural and in others in combination with the detective story. Even Barzun and Taylor included a section of ghost stories in their Catalogue of Crime.

SUSAN HILL The Woman in Black

   And don’t forget that Sherlock Holmes, that most rational of rational thinkers, encountered a spectral hound, a vampire, and off the page, a mix of giant Sumatran rodents and worms unknown to science — and even when he and others explain away the supernatural, the faintest hint often lingers on the edge of the reader’s perception.

   A handful of stories like Carr’s The Burning Court and Helen McCloy’s Through a Glass Darkly manage the neat twist of having it both ways, what Frank D. Sherry called the “Janus Solution,” both a rational solution and a supernatural one.

   Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black is not only a ghost story, it appeared as a young adult novel originally, but for anyone who reads it the memory will linger. It is an exceptionally dark and powerful book. This is no Janus solution though. This is a full blown ghost story, and unrepentantly so.

   Mrs. Alice Drablow of Eel Marsh House has died, and young solicitor Arthur Kipps is chosen by his employer Mr. Bentley to travel to the north of England, attend Mrs. Drablow’s funeral, and see to her estate. It’s an important assignment for Kipps and a chance for promotion so he can marry his fiancee Stella.

   But rumors abound about Eel Marsh House, and as Kipps is taken in a pony cart across the dangerous marshes to visit the place he is struck by its unique appearance.

SUSAN HILL The Woman in Black

    “I looked up ahead, and saw, as if rising out of the water itself, a tall, gaunt house of grey stone and with a slate roof, that now gleamed steely in the light. It stood like some lighthouse or beacon or martello tower, facing the whole, wide expanse of the marsh and estuary, the most astonishingly situated house I had ever seen or could conceivably have imagined.”

   As in the modern gothic, houses are often virtually characters in many ghost stories. Here Eel Marsh House plays that role.

   There he sees for the second time a mysterious and curiously malign woman in black he first spied at Mrs. Drablow’s funeral. He also experiences a terrifying experience of a woman and child killed on the marsh in a pony trap — or thinks he does, the mist is on the marsh and he can hear the tragedy, but not see it. But no such accident or missing persons are reported.

   Doing a bit of detective work, he begins to piece together the story of Eel Marsh House together from the reluctant locals. No one wants to talk about Eel Marsh House, or the woman in black. Borrowing a dog for a companion from the landlord he is staying with, Kipps returns to Eel Marsh House to complete his inventory.

   Gradually he learns of the tragedy that occurred at Eel Marsh House. A young woman and a child drowned in the marsh in a pony trap and their fate was tied to the death of a spinster woman who lived there, Jennet Humpfrye, who became obsessed with her sister Alice Drablow’s child and blamed her sister for the accident in which the child and a servant were killed in a pony trap on the marsh — in circumstances much like those Kipps experienced his first time alone in the mist.

SUSAN HILL The Woman in Black

   Jennet Humpfrye is the woman in black, who, suffering a wasting disease, went mad in her grief for the child that was not hers — went mad and lingered on to take her revenge beyond the grave.

   Again Kipps hears the crying of he dying child and the screaming woman on the marsh — and the dog hears it too, and he and the dog both almost lose their lives on the treacherous marsh as the woman in black watches them struggle and almost drown. Mr. Dailey, he landlord, arrives in time to take Kipps and the dog away, and reveal the final secrets of Eel Marsh House.

   After his near death, Kipps’ health fails and he is haunted by the woman in black; his fiancee Stella comes to fetch him back to London when his fever breaks and away from Eel Marsh House and the malignant spirit of Jennet Humpfrye.

   But neither she nor Eel Marsh House is finished with Kipps or us. Wherever Jennet Humpfrye has been seen there has been one “sure and certain result,” as Kipps learns from Mr. Dailey; “in some violent circumstance a child has died.” Time passes, Kipps and Stella marry, and they have a son …

SUSAN HILL The Woman in Black

   The Woman in Black was highly acclaimed on publication, and is now considered a modern classic of the form. It has rightly been called a ghost story as Jane Austen might have written one. Like most such tales, it depends on an accumulation of tensions, small disturbances, and sudden shocks, and though a short novel, barely 50,000 words, it has the weight of a much longer tome.

   A fully dramatized version of The Woman in Black was recently aired on BBC7 (it first aired in the 1990’s) adapted by John Strickland in four parts with John Woodvine as the older Kipps. It was adapted for television in 1989 with a teleplay by Nigel Kneale (the Quatermass serials and films) and directed by Herbert Wise.

   Like the best of ghost stories, this one is simple, quiet, and builds to a moment of power and tragedy. Though it certainly has its moments of terror — Kipps lost on the marsh in a mist listening helplessly as a woman and child die in terror; a chair rocking in a closed room; the malevolent appearance of the title character; his near death on the marsh with the dog, Spider, lent him by the landlord of the inn; and his final confrontation with the woman in black — it is not about sudden frights or bloodshed.

SUSAN HILL The Woman in Black

   There is no gore and no monster — only a terrible grief that leads to otherworldly revenge, and one man’s encounter with things that cannot be rationally explained — or dismissed.

    I had always known in my heart that the experience would never leave me, that it was now woven into my very fibres, an inextricable part of my past … and then I prayed, a heartfelt, simple prayer for peace of mind, and for strength and steadfastness to endure while I completed a most agonising task…

   They have asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.

Reviewed by DAVID L. VINEYARD:         


PETER DICKINSON – A Summer in the Twenties. Pantheon, US, hardcover, 1987. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1981.

    “Everything’s changing so fast,” she said. “Isn’t it stunning to wake up every morning and feel the whole world is brand new again, a present waiting for you to unwrap it?”

PETER DICKINSON A Summer in the Twenties

   The year is 1926, and the Twenties are Roaring with flappers and social conscience and colliding with the death of the Victorian era and Red scares about rising Bolshevism. That’s the background for Peter Dickinson’s A Summer in the Twenties.

   This one is more a thriller than a detective story though Dickinson was one of the bright lights of the late flowering of the fair play detective story. He and Robert Barnard almost single-handedly revived the genre injecting humor and style as well as real insights into character and action and in many ways extending the traditions begun by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Michael Innes, even as P.D. James and Ruth Rendell were taking the genre in their own directions.

   Dickinson’s best books were those featuring Superintendent Jimmy Pibble, and his Poison Oracle — in which the detection is done by a chimp who has been taught to communicate in a private zoo in the curious palace of a desert sheikdom — was chosen by H.R.F. Keating for his Crime and Mystery Stories The 100 Best Books (reviewed by Marv Lachman here ).

   Thomas (Tom) Hankey is the hero of this one, the son of Lt. General Lord Milford, and a product of the privilege and wealth of the upper classes at a time when that meant more than money. At the novel’s start he is in the South of France pursuing the beautiful Judy Tarrant, another product of the same class.

   But this idyll is cut short when Tom is summoned home by his father. A crisis is brewing in England, one that borders on revolution — the General Strike of 1926.

   For those unfamiliar with the General Strike, it was an attempt by the British working class to shut down transportation and other industry in England to show both their importance to the country’s economy and protest social injustice, triggered by a lockout of coal miners. Instead it inspired paranoia in the upper and middle classes and the government, with memories of the recent Russian Revolution still fresh and the Tory government anxious to break the back of the Trades Unions.

   While there were certainly some radicals on the left with visions of a revolution, that was far from the aims of the mass of strikers — but in this case appearance trumped reality. It became a defining moment in the class war in England and inspired the plots of many a thriller in the Sydney Horler and Sapper class. Dennis Wheatley’s first Gregory Sallust novel Black August was a Wellsian variation inspired by the General Strike.

   And true to the spirit that would carry England through the Blitz, the upper and upper middle class rallied, manning the vital jobs of the working class and keeping the country going. Whatever your politics, it was a splendid effort mindful of WW II when even the then Princess Elizabeth was in uniform driving a staff car.

   That’s why Tom’s father has called him home, to train as a volunteer engineer on the railway:

    “Last year the Trades Unions got together and passed a resolution that if the miners were locked out the railways wouldn’t move any coal. I think they’ll stick to that — in fact I think they’ll go a good deal further, and there’ll be a General Strike and nothing will move at all … if we let the unions shut the country down and keep it shut down for a month we’re finished.”

   His father has more sympathy for the miners than the owners, but the General Strike is anathema to him.

   Tom is quickly dispatched to the slums of Hull, a mining town unlike anything in his life experience. There his wish to do his duty clashes with his innate sympathy for the workers and his sense of decency and fair play. Confronted by bullies and violence on both sides, gangs of hooded men with guns, he finds merely doing the right thing to be a challenge, and his feelings for Judy Tarrant are soon tested when he meets fiery Kate Barnes and a passionate agitator.

   What makes reading Dickinson a pleasure is that the characters are well drawn and above all human. They make mistakes, have prejudices on both sides of the question, and manage to change, grow, and rise to the occasion as needed. Tom, Judy, and Kate all grow. He is also the brightest of writers, capable of real humor and rare intelligence.

   Though there is little mystery element there is a good deal of action some railway lore and the growth of the main characters, especially Tom …

    He was conscious that on the whole he had done right, but that all this was really through no virtue of his own … however blunderingly he had been doing things which later he would remember without a sour taste in the mouth … and certainly in no mood to believe that he had by more than a hairsbreadth diminished the ignorance and intransigence of either of the two forces he had been caught between.

   This being Dickinson there is a killer and a mystery resolved, though a minor one, but as a portrait of a unique time and a picture of good people trying to resolve the differences that divide them, coming together for a common good, and facing the very real class divisions that separate them A Summer in the Twenties is a solid smart read.

   If you don’t know Dickinson, he is well worth meeting. He took up writing at age forty after seventeen years as an editor at Punch. He was successful both as a children’s author and a mystery writer, winning a Gold Dagger from the Crime Writer’s and the Carnegie Medal for his children’s books, and his books, including King and Joker, The Lively Dead, One Foot in the Grave, Walking Dead, The Lizard in the Cup, and Skin Deep are all good examples of his many virtues.

       Previously reviewed on this blog:

The Lively Dead (by Steve Lewis)