Crime compendium
There is a good deal to celebrate this week, even if some of it —
my first reading of volumes from the Gollancz vintage detection ' reprints — causes even a seasoned addict to wilt some what under the likely future pressure of well over a hundred volumes a year from the three major publishing houses — Collins, G'ollancz and Macmillan —
alone. The two reprints are Ellery Queens, vintage 1939 (Calamity Town) and 1942 (The Dragon's Teeth), each at £1.75. Only recently did I begin to like the Queen detective novels. I always admitted, of course, the extraordinary plotting ability of the authors, and the amazing capacity to plant a million clues while being perfectly fair with the reader. But, I confess it, Ellery himself put me off: there was always something of the Philo Vance about him which I didn't like.
The Dragon's Teeth sees Queen in private detective partnership with the enthusiastic son of an old friend of his father's in the New York Police Department. A millionaire recluse (recluded at sea, i ncide ntally) hires them for a-job, the nature of which he won't divulge, and dies. They chase down his heiresses and set them up under the terms of an eccentric will, at which point the attempted murders begin. Calamity Town is the first Queen novel set in Wrightsville (also the scene 'of the brilliant The Murderer Is a Fox, currently in Penguin, 35p). Queen comes to the town to write a novel and becomes involved in the case of a disappearing fiance, who reappears, marries his girl and then — so overwhelming evidence, including letters of undoubted authenticity suggest — sets out to kill her. A murder takes place and Ellery takes on the impossible task of saving the accused.
Both these stories are excellent, and well deserve repr, lilting, in what is to be a collected edition. But 1 found in them virtues I did not expect. The detection in both cases is not too difficult, and when you have solved the crime you can sit back and enjoy what is a delectable brace of psychological dramas. The personality of the hero is less intrusive than before or since, and the manoeuvrins; among the characters excellently done and highly contributive to tension, It is not often that a writer (or writers in this case, since the Queens until the death of Manfred B. Lee in 1971 were written by himself and his cousin Frederic Dannay) whose forte is pure detection can contrive an atmosphere so well. John Dickson Carr, another great master, usually can, even if the atmospherics surrounding heroes like the grotesque Dr Fell, the irascible Sir Henry Merrivale and the obscure Bencolin are somewhat lurid. But I found To Wake the Dead (1938 vintage. Stacey reprints £1.95) rather disappointing. To say that is, of course, to judge Carr by Carr standards: he is never dull, and never wholly unrewarding. But this story of two mysterious murders, in which a husband and wife are strangled by (apparently) a fully uniformed hotel porter, the one in a country house, the other in a part of a hotel which no-one can reach, really is too easy to solve; and the characters are more insipid than 1 have ever found in Carr. His great ability has always been to mix melodrama and detection in equal doses, and to swing the concoction round so fast that the reader is dizzy with joy. But the pace here is slack, the interrogations interminable, and the eliminations achieved so early that the novel runs to seed before the end.
Far, far from so with Gwendoline Butler's At Coffin for Pandora (Macmillan £1.95). This is a splendidly cunning and terrifying " Victorian mystery set in Oxford," in which the charming and intelligent " new woman," Mary Lamont, friend of Mrs Mark Paulson and Mrs Humphrey Ward, finds herself involved in the protection of a rich and frightened young pupil, Alice Demarest. The Demarest family are both wealthy and mysterious; the contrast between their comfortable lives and the poverty and misery of the late nineteenth century, which may or may not have turned various lower class characters into desperate criminals, is beautifully drawn. The plot is itself satisfying Victorian, and the style gently sub-Austen. I found the villain, when revealed, a little too hard to take, but the characters in the local whorehouse, and the flitting, ambiguous, strikingly named Christian Ableman, as well as the heroine herself, are first class. It is dways good to see an author attempting something new and succeeding: Miss
Butler's Inspector Coffin series (it's a nice in-joke to put his name in this title) of contemporary stories never actually set me on fire, but this breaking of new ground is to be applauded.
Another first for me was The Abominable Man, by the Swedish couple Sjowall and Wahloo (Gollancz £2,00), in which their humane Stockholm detective Martin Beck investigates the brutal slaying of a brutal copper in Sweden's brutal police force. S and W's (1 can't spell them out again) roman policiers have something of the worlds of Maigret and van der Valk about them, but the narrative is less tight and less dense than with Simenon. There is no particular puzzle, and a good deal of introspection is followed by a fairly exciting shoot-out. I don't know: not proven, as they say in Scotland. I know little about the Scandinavians and crime fiction outside a lavishly illustrated and woefully inaccurate (though delightful) study The Murder Book by the Danish scholars Tage la Courand and Harold Mogensen (Allen and Unwin £3.25 and well worth it for the pictures) plus what Hugh Greene has discovered. I'll have to case the joint better before a final verdict.
Finally, and especially when drifting into a discussion of crime criticism, there is The Plot Against Roger Rider by Julian Symons (Collins £1.70), who is probably the foremost scholar of crime and thriller fiction now writing. Actually, there are two overlapping plots, one against Geoffrey Parradine, Rider's old friend, currently sleeping with Rider's wife; and one against Rider himself. There is a large cast of characters, and the action sweeps quickly from England to Spain and finally to Italy. Disappearances and/or murders abound; there is a fetching Spanish detective who dreams of consuming bitter with his confreres of Scotland
Yard and a pair of tiresome young lovers who, by pushing here and pulling there precipi tate a solution to the eventual disappearance and death of Rider. It's an excellent, crack ling read, but the structure is a little too academic; the cunning brain of the author of Bloody
Murder is too busy with timetables rather than people; and
the sociological orientations of that remarkable critique are too much in evidence, particularly
in the case of the young hero who can't make up his mind it he is queer or not. Good: but for Symons a bit disappointing.
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