Full Dark House (2004) - Christopher Fowler

 And to see my decree is obeyed as it should be;
To the shades I shall go in propria Personæ!

"Act 1 Finale," Orphée aux enfers, Jacques Offenbach

Tragedy has struck the London police force. The headquarters of the Peculiar Crimes Unit has been bombed and its leader, Detective Arthur Bryant, killed in the explosion. His best friend and partner, John May, takes it upon himself to find his killer, both for the sake of justice and to get some measure of closure after having his friend taken from him. He suspects that the bombing is connected to the first case they worked together, 60 years ago during the blitz. A dancer was horribly killed during the rehearsals for a new production of Offenbach’s Orphee aux enfers (one of the greatest comic operas of all time). More deaths follow among the actors, seemingly without any rhyme or reason. We follow the course of both of these investigations in Christopher Fowler’s Full Dark House.

I’ve seen authors start their series in many different ways, but this is the first time I’ve seen one begin by killing off one the main characters. Full Dark House is the first entry in the Bryant & May series (also known as the Peculiar Crimes Unit, or PCU, series). I’ve been wanting to read it for quite a while, since Fowler intended it in part as a homage to the Golden Age of detective fiction. Plus, a series centered around strange crimes with historical connections to London is just cool. I had actually intended to start with the second book in the series, The Water Room, which has a reputation as one of the strongest mysteries in the series, but since this one was in system at my library, I figured I might as well try reading a series in order for once. Was that a good idea? We shall see…

The book has a duel-narrative structure, alternating between the present and the 1940s. It’s used to good effect, drawing parallels between the two narratives and frequently using one of them to fill in gaps of information in the other. More time spent on the WWII murder plot, which was a wise choice for a couple of reasons. One is that the integration of the historical setting and the mystery is a central part of the series. The other is that, just as a general point, a mystery concerning baroque executed murders in the depths of an old theater is likely to be more interesting than the semi-procedural investigation of a bombing. (Which is not to say that the modern plot is uninteresting, it just couldn’t support the length accorded to the other plot.)

As for that other plot, it is suitably intriguing. Members of the production are being killed off in ways that reflect their roles (a dance has her feet cut off, the singer playing Jupiter is crushed by a large metal globe, etc.). There seems to be no way for anyone to have committed them as, although the theater is a labyrinthine building filled with odd nooks, crannies, and hiding places, the only door to the backstage is kept locked at all times and all the people known to have been there were accounted for. In addition, there have been sightings of a cloaked figure wearing a mask of comedy, who has potentially been stalking members of the cast. It seems likely that someone wants to see the production shut down, but as the government intends for it to boost wartime morale, it falls to Bryant and May to see that the killer is caught before that can happen.

Now, I really enjoyed this book, but the mystery plot wasn’t the reason why. Quite honestly, it had some serious problems. In the first place, it was not in any way fair. There’s no cluing to speak of and there’s a major Knox violation. It’s not unlikely that you’ll cotton on to the solution, the existence of gur phycevg jub jr'ir arire frra orsber is pretty obvious from the Phantom of the Opera parallels and another character’s ntbencubovn is hinted at in an unrigorous thematic way which is interesting but in no wise a clue. That said, none of these issues were the source of my problem with the plot. I knew going in that Full Dark House was not a fair-play mystery, but, as shall be seen, I liked other aspects of it so much that even that wasn’t going to seriously impact my enjoyment of it. No, my problem came from the way the false solution was handled. (Some may consider revealing even the existence of a false solution as something of a spoiler, but I disagree. When the detective gives their summation with something like a fifth of the book remaining, it’s a fair bet that things aren’t done yet. To discuss the issues with the way it’s handled, however, would involve going into details about the relation between the false and true solutions, details which, although they don’t spoil the culprit’s identity, would most certainly give too much away. Therefore, part of the discussion will be in rot-13. You can come back and read it after reading the book.)

The basic problem here is that the false solution is more interesting and more satisfying than the true one. But while that’s an accurate description as far as it goes, it is also overly reductive. The false solution is prompted by Oelnag'f ernyvmngvba gung gur rnpu bs gur xvyyvatf jnf pnevrq bhg va n jnl gung fhttrfgf bar bs gur Zhfrf bs Terrx zlgubybtl. Ur pbaarpgf guvf jvgu n ehzbe nobhg gur zna jub svanaprq gur cebqhpgvba, bar fnlvat gung uvf zbgure envfrq uvz va gur eryvtvba bs pynffvpny Terrpr, cynpvat uvz haqre gur cebgrpgvba bs gur Zhfrf. Oelnag gurbevmrf gung, ol pbzzvgvat zheqref cngrearq nsgre rnpu bs gur Zhfrf, va n gurngevpny frggvat, ur vf pbzzvgvat fnpevyntr ntnvafg gurz, qvfnibjvat gurz naq fubjvat gung ur pna fgnaq nf n frys-znqr zna jvgubhg gurve cebgrpgvba. Shegurezber, vg furqf yvtug ba jul ur jnf vagrerfgrq va svanapvat gur cebqhpgvba. Becurr nhk rasref gnxrf n fnglevpny naq veerirenag crefcrpgvir ba pynffvpny zlgubybtl, naq jbhyq guhf cebivqr gur cresrpg onpxqebc sbe fhpu n cyna. When this theory is introduced, we, and the other characters, can see that it has major flaws. In fact, it has to be, since it serves a narrative purpose outside of the mystery. However, despite its holes, this proposed solution has a number of excellent points. It has that element of grandeur that is possessed by many of the genre’s greatest works, it is deeply rooted in specific aspects of the characters and setting, and, most importantly, it gives meaning to the preceding events. I don’t mean that it just explains them, although it certainly does (and in a mystery that sort of meaning is absolutely necessary). Perhaps it would be better to say that it gives the events not just meaning, but also significance. There is a satisfying pattern inherent in that solution, which, were it correct, would also shed light on the characters involved.

The real solution, on the other hand, does none of these things. In it, gur pbeerfcbaqrapr orgjrra gur zheqref naq gur Zhfrf vf fgvyy qryvorengr, ohg bayl nf n jnl gb senzr gur svanapvre va beqre gb sbepr gur cebqhpgvba gb pybfr. And that’s not exactly the most interesting solution. Sure, the zlgubybtvpny cnenyyryf are striking, but without a reason to exist they just feel like window dressing. (Not to mention that it was an unreliable and bizarrely convoluted way for the culprit to achieve their goal. If the case had been investigated by someone without Bryant’s interesting methodology, it couldn’t achieve what it was meant to. It’s like in those Ellery Queen novels where the criminal counts on Ellery’s taste for complicated explanations, only without the culprit having any reason to think that there would be a “great detective” to manipulate…) But leaving that rather large flaw aside, the bigger problem is that the solution has been evacuated of everything that gave it significance. All of the thematic resonance and context from the characters that gave it “meaning” is missing. Vg jnf whfg n trarevp jnl gb senzr fbzrbar. Jub jnf senzrq be ubj gurl jrer senzrq orpbzrf na veeryrinag. On its own the true solution would have been tolerable, but following a more interesting and meaningful false solution makes it disappointingly anticlimactic.

Even without the benefit of a satisfyingly resolved mystery, however, Full Dark House has much to recommend it. First off, as I alluded to in my discussion of the plot, the characterization in the novel is superb. The dual narrative allows for a moving portrayal of the friendship between Bryant and May, alternating as it does between their first getting to know each other and May’s grieving for his friend. The rest of the cast is equally well drawn. In particular, the performers in the opera may not be quite as fully realized, but they are well sketched, with several subtle touches. Furthermore, the writing is extremely good throughout. The dialogue and description were both a joy to read. The tone was mostly comic, but at times it switched seamlessly to the menacing or the sincere. That is not an easy thing to do, but Fowler made it look effortless. Finally, excellent use is made of the historical setting, both as regards the plot and in general. Fowler thoroughly researched London during the blitz, and it shows, not in long blocks of exposition, but in all sorts of interesting historical details worked into the narrative. These make reading the novel a very immersive experience. I had a very hard time putting it down when I was reading it.

So, despite some notable flaws, I wholeheartedly recommend Full Dark House. While the mystery is weak, it succeeds admirably as an entertainment and as a novel. Having finished it, I now look forward to reading The Water Room all the more. The promise of this kind of writing and a satisfying mystery is a very exciting one indeed.

The Transvection Machine (1971) – Ed Hoch

There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In the far flung feature of the 21st century, trouble is brewing for the united states. It’s beset by anti-technology terrorists, growing tensions with the Russo-Chinese alliance (as the cold war is apparently still going), there’s unrest on its moon colony, and Vander DeFoe, the cabinet secretary of extra-terrestrial defense, has died during a routine appendectomy. That last is problematic for two reasons. One, all routine surgeries are performed by medical robots, and it’s unheard of for anyone to die during a robotic operation. Second, and more importantly, DeFoe is the inventor of the transvection machine, which allows teleportation over great distances. It was first demonstrated by instantaneously transporting a woman from the US to India. Though still experimental, the hope was that it would allow for rapid transportation between Earth and the moon, giving the US an advantage in colonization. (This possibility is why DeFoe was appointed to the cabinet.) Without him, research on the device will likely stall out. It falls to “computer cop” Carl Crader to investigate his death. It seems impossible that it could have been murder, since the cassette tape (yes, I know…) on which the program for the operation was stored was both untampered with and located in a secure, central national medical facility. The tape's data was transmitted via telephone wire to the robot at the time of the surgery, precluding any interference. But if it somehow was murder, there’s certainly no shortage of suspects: DeFoe’s estranged wife, the ex-partner he cut out from their invention, or the aforementioned terrorists. Was it murder, or wasn’t it? And if it was, how could it have been committed? These are the central questions in Ed Hoch’s The Transvection Machine.

I started this book with high hopes. There are essentially no reviews of this book, so all I knew about it came from the blurb, but the outline made it seem like a hybrid mystery, and, as you can tell from past reviews, I’m a big fan of those. And it was by Ed Hoch, whose short stories were consistently good and who wrote some of the acknowledged masterpieces of the impossible crime sub-genre. So surely, I thought, this would be an excellent, or at least good, book. You no doubt already know how accurate that thought was. Anytime anyone starts out saying they had high hopes for something, it’s practically a sure thing that those hopes were disappointed. And this is a sterling confirmation of that trend. Bluntly, this book was truly awful. And not in the so-bad-it’s-good way either. No, it was awful in the agonizingly painful way.

As I am quite candid about the plot being my favorite aspect of mystery fiction, and as it was the plot which first attracted me to this, it makes sense to start my discussion there. As a preliminary, I should point out that this is most emphatically not a hybrid mystery. I had hopes that it would be an overlooked example, but it was not to be. As for the plot as it is (rather than as it might have been), the thing that strikes you about it as you read is how remarkably unfocused it is. For over half the book the character go back and forth (and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth…) trying to decide if it’s murder or not (while investigating in ways that only make sense if they already know that it is a murder). Now, there’s quite a lot of potential in that ambiguity, but unfortunately none of it is utilized here. It is blatantly obvious to the reader that, yes, it was murder. So why does it take the characters so long to figure it out? Well, midway through they address that very question. It seems that murders are so rare (despite the rampant violent terrorism?) that autopsies just aren’t routinely carried out anymore. This comes up when Crader, who, as the “most powerful law enforcement official since J. Edgar Hoover,” should presumably know this, asks why there hasn’t been an autopsy. And after finding this out he...doesn’t order one. Why not? It’s unaddressed in the story, but I can think of a couple of reasons. If an autopsy were performed, it would lead to the instant complete solution of the mystery. And if it were solved that soon, this would be a short story rather than a novel. It’s almost too obvious to point out, but this is terrible plotting. If your mystery story depends on the characters overlooking the obvious in order to stretch out the plot, something is wrong. And if that plot is so transparent that simply performing an autopsy would clear it up, something is very wrong. And if you, as the writer, absolutely can’t have an autopsy performed, maybe don’t set your book in a future with highly advanced medical science.

And speaking of things too obvious to point out, even after the characters definitively realize that a murder took place (over halfway through the book, mind), it still takes a frustratingly long time for them to solve it. And make no mistake, the who, how, and why are very easy to figure out. You could get close just by guessing, and with even a slight bit of effort will probably arrive at the solution, if it doesn’t just jump out at you altogether. That’s not to say that it’s well clued, as the cluing is rather indifferent. It’s simply that the plot is just that transparent. (And that the misdirection is literally just Crader saying rneyl va gur obbx gung ur qbrfa'g frr ubj gur phycevg pbhyq unir qbar vg, naq yngre ernyvmvat ubj ur pbhyq unir jvgubhg zhpu be nal arj rivqrapr.) In my last review I said that Philo Vance should be ashamed of himself for taking so long to identify the culprit, but compared to Carl Crader he’s truly a criminological genius.

The plot has other structural problems as well. It feels like parts from four or five books were chopped up and shuffled together. There are sections that feel like the sci-fi mystery we would expect, ones that feel like a political thriller, and ones that feel like a quasi-hard boiled story. There’s an extended sequence of someone escaping from prison on the moon (which could possibly have worked on its own, but which doesn’t at all fit in this novel) and another of Crader being kidnapped by the techno-terrorists on a tropical island. That last is especially egregious, going nowhere and serving only as padding. And since this wasn’t exactly a long novel to begin with, it stands out. The Transvection Machine feels like a confused patchwork of story elements that just don’t fit. 

But of course, plot isn’t everything. Good writing and characterization can save a book with a poor plot. Sadly, neither of those are in attendance here. The writing is very, very bland. It’s serviceable and nothing more. As for the characterization, it is, if you can believe it, even worse than the plot. At best the characters are cardboard cutouts, names on the page with no distinguishing features whatsoever (Crader himself is a notable example of this). At worst, they go from indistinguishable to profoundly unsympathetic. The best example of this is Earl Jazine, the creepy Archie Goodwin to Crader’s incompetent Nero Wolfe, who, despite apparently being in a relationship with Crader’s secretary, chases after every female character he comes across. He strings along the nurse who was handling DeFoe’s operation and sleeps with DeFoe’s widow, who he was sent to question and who he actively suspects of being his killer. And this is one of the protagonists!

And then there’s Euler Frost, an anti-machine terr...(you know, I’m just going them neo-ludites from now on. It’s simpler to type.) a neo-ludite who escaped incarceration on the moon, returned to Earth, and is a suspect in the murder. He (and his whole plot line) exist only to voice Hoch’s complaints about the encroachment of technology into modern life. Not, mind you, that any of its supposedly deleterious effects are ever actually shown. But some of the characters complain about it, so it must be bad. This plot element culminates in what may be the biggest misfire in the book, something which blows even Jazine’s skeevyness out of the water. (Spoilers for the finale of the book, which has nothing to do with the mystery.) Gur arb-yhqvgrf, nf gur ortvaavat bs gurve eroryvba ntnvafg grpuabybtl, oybj hc gur cerivbhfyl zragvbarq prageny zrqvpny yvoenel naq pbzchgre flfgrz, juvpu unaqyrf gur bccrengvbaf sbe nyy bs gur Havgrq Fgngrf. N terng qrny vf znqr bs ubj gurl znxr fher abg gb xvyy nal bs gur fgnss, ohg vg'f zragvbarq rneyvre va gur obbx ubj ener fhetrbaf ner orpnhfr bs gur cerinyrapr naq fnsrgl bs pbzchgrevmrq zrqvpvar. Fb gurl pbaqrza hagbyq zvyyvbaf gb ceriragnoyr fhssrevat naq qrngu orpnhfr "gur znpuvarf ner whfg fb rivy." Naq abg bayl ner gurl gerngrq flzcngurgvpnyyl, Penqre rira fnlf ur jbhyq wbva gurz vs ur jrer lbhatre! These characters are all horrible people!

Ultimately, The Transvection Machine is something of an enigma. Hoch was a consistently good writer of short stories, and was by all accounts a very kind man. So what prompted him to write this, a novel with an embarrassingly transparent plot and main characters who are who are significantly worse than the actual murderer, is baffling. I have heard interesting things about the other, equally obscure, book in the series, The Frankenstein Factory, so I’ll probably read it at some point. But as for this, I have no hesitation in calling it the worst mystery I’ve ever read. It is equal parts infuriating and insulting to the reader’s intelligence. If I wind up doing some kind of end of year list, this will most assuredly by named as one of the lowlights of my  year. In one respect, at least, I’m glad I read this. As no other mystery blog has reviewed it, there’s no one warning people away from seeking out this book. Beware! Learn from my experience, so that my suffering may not be for naught. Avoid it as you would the cozy mystery section in a bookstore. For like that benighted place, The Transvection Machine has nothing to offer fans of clever mysteries.

The Bishop Murder Case (1929) – S. S. Van Dine

 

Comes a bishop, maybe, or a solemn D.D.
Oh, beware of his anger provoking!

“Oh! A private buffoon,” The Yeomen of the Guard, Gilbert & Sullivan

The period from around 1910-30 was an important one for mystery fiction. It was then that conventions of the genre took shape, when ideas and structures drawn from the works of numerous writers coalesced into a definite form. What’s striking about many books from this period is just how well they hold up. Works such as Trent’s Last Case, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, & the Father Brown stories, which contributed substantially to the development of mystery fiction, remain satisfying and enduring examples of the genre they helped create. Unfortunately, while this was a surprisingly common occurrence, not every influential work is necessarily a shining example of mystery fiction. For proof, we need only look to works such as The Bishop Murder Case by S. S. Van Dine.

It starts off well, with a very intriguing premise. Joseph Cochrane “Cock” Robin is killed with an arrow. The most likely suspect’s name is German for sparrow. The parallels to a famous nursery rhyme are obvious. (Or at least I think they are. I’m not entirely sure just how well known “Who Killed Cock Robin” is anymore.) It isn’t long before the police receive a letter, clearly sent by the killer (who identifies himself as The Bishop) making the connection quite explicit. The New York district attorney asks Philo Vance, Van Dine’s series detective, to assist, due to the singular nature of the crime. At first the killer’s identity seems clear, but more murders follow even after the suspect’s arrest, and each one is patterned on a different nursery rhyme.

Though it isn’t as well known as the other examples I listed, The Bishop Murder Case had a major influence on the development of mystery fiction, originating tropes that would become staples of the genre. Most obviously, it is the first example of a series of fictional crimes patterned around nursery rhymes, a device which was adopted by many authors, most notably Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen. That’s a significant enough innovation as it is, but the nursery rhyme killing is in fact a specific manifestation of a more general concept, which, as far as I can tell, also originated in Bishop. There doesn’t seem to be a generally-used English term for it, but in Japanese it’s referred to as mitate, which translates to “resembling.” In a nursery rhyme murder, the crime (obviously) is made to resemble a nursery rhyme. But of course, there are many other types of resemblance which could be used, such as resemblance to a literary or musical work, to a piece of art, or even to a scientific or mathematical concept. In addition, the resemblance may lie in the general situation, the relation of the characters, or in some element other than the murder itself. This idea of establishing an analogy involving the crime or situation has proven quite influential in mystery fiction, vastly expanding the field of potential plots.

In addition to its general influence, I’m convinced that Bishop also inspired an aspect of another well-known novel, Queen’s Cat of Many Tails. That novel, which originated many of the tropes of the serial-killer mystery, places an emphasis on the panic caused by the seemingly indiscriminate murders committed by the unknown title character. Having read both, it’s impossible not to notice striking similarities between many passages in Cat which portray the collective reactions of New York City to the serial killings and the beginning of Bishop’s eighth chapter, which details the public’s reaction to the newspaper publication of the Bishop’s letter. I don’t think that this resemblance was an intentional reference (certainly it doesn’t come up in the published letters of Dannay and Lee from when they were writing Cat), but given the degree to which they were influenced by Van Dine, I think it’s safe to say that this passage made an impact on the cousins and was a subconscious influence on their work.

So much for Bishop’s historical importance; how does it fare as a mystery, or as a work of fiction? As you’ve no doubt gathered from my introduction, I don’t think very highly of it, but it’s not without its good points, which are what I’d rather lead with. For one thing, it’s a consistently entertaining novel. As I remarked earlier, the premise is excellent and the novel’s action never flags, with crimes and significant events happening every few chapters. And though Van Dine’s style may not be as distinctive as, say, Carr’s or Innes’, it was well suited to the story. While I was reading the book, I never wanted to put it down.

However, while the prose style is good, there are some problems with the writing. The customary illustration would be to complain about Vance being an annoying character, perhaps making reference to Ogden Nash’s celebrated witticism. But honestly, I didn’t have a problem with him. Sure, his canonically real but linguistically fake English accent bugged me, but that particular character trait only stuck around for a few chapters. Candidly, Vance wasn’t the annoying part of the novel, Van Dine was. To elaborate, the conceit of this series is that Van Dine is a friend of Vance’s and is writing up these cases after the fact. The problem that came from conflating the author with the fictional narrator is that it gave Van Dine an apparently irresistible temptation to show everyone how smart he was. Bishop is pack to the gills with displays of (often spurious) erudition. For example, in chapter 8, Vance reads up on psychology, thinking it might help with the case. Nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with Van Dine’s decision to list, in a single, paragraph length run-on sentence, the titles and authors of all 14 books consulted, with the titles in the original French or German. There is absolutely no reason for this pedantry, its only purpose is to allow Van Dine to show off. This lengthy paragraph disturbs the flow of the narrative, but it doesn’t have any impact on the plot. Unfortunately, there are other instances of showoffishness that are rather more…impactful.

(The upcoming paragraph points out an issue with one of the clues. For reasons which will be clear, it doesn’t actually spoil anything of significance. However, if you want to read Bishop completely blind (and have a more frustrating experience when you do), feel free to skip it.)

One of the few clues in Bishop (we’ll talk about that later) is a scrap of paper with the Reimann-Christoffel curvature tensor written on it which was planted on the body of one of the victims. Vance uses this to deduce some psychological characteristics of the murderer (we’ll talk about this later as well). The problem is that Van Dine has little to no clue what the formula he includes actually says. When Vance explains his reasoning, the meaning he gives for the tensor is wrong. The clue flat out does not say what Vance (or rather, Van Dine) claims it does. The reader has no chance whatsoever to interpret it correctly. In a sense, someone who’s never heard of the Riemann tensor is better off than one who has, as one who’s unfamiliar with it could possibly(?) guess its significance, while someone who knows about it even in the most non-technical terms certainly could not. If Van Dine had bothered to check his understanding against any general reference on the subject (the Encyclopedia Britannica, say) this problem could have been avoided, but, given the overall tone of the book, it seems he was just so cocksure of his knowledge that he didn’t bother confirming it. (Believe it or not, we’ll also talk about this later.)

Of course, even if he had gotten that fact right, the reader still wouldn’t be able to reach the same solution as Vance. That’s because the conclusion drawn from that piece of evidence is a tortured argument based on a dubious and subjective line of psychological reasoning. An alarming number of the “deductions” in Bishop follow the same pattern. Often, they’re based on discredited psychological theories, and all are based on Vance’s impressions of things, rather than any objective fact of the situation. Starting from the same information, you could just as easily reach an entirely different set of conclusions. And they would have at least as much theoretical validity as Vance’s. They could hardly have less.

These flaws I’ve been harping on may seem like separate issues, but they all come together, culminating in something which is even less than the sum of its parts. Specifically, chapter 21, “Mathematics and Murder,” which is, not to mince words, one of the greatest farragos of nonsense that I’ve come across in my years of reading mystery fiction. Little of consequence happens in this chapter, as it solely consists of Vance monologuing about the psychological characteristics of the criminal. (Don’t worry about spoilers, nothing of any consequence is ad-Vanced in this chapter.) Vance says that the murders are the product of a mathematical mind. Why, you ask? Because the study of mathematics causes one to “have an enormous contempt for human life” and “scoff at all human values.” One absorbed in these studies becomes a “sadist” with an “infantile complex.” Vance (or rather, as Vance is clearly acting as an author avatar, Van Dine) “proves” this by myriad examples drawn from mathematics, physics, and astronomy. (Bizarrely, he refers to all three subjects as mathematics. In fact, there are fewer purely mathematical examples than there are scientific). That said, and in keeping with his use of the tensor, nearly all of these examples are completely misunderstood! Even on their own terms they’re meaningless. And they’re meaningless in the context of the story as well, since all of the suspects fit Vance’s definition of a “mathematicia
n,” be they actual mathematician, physicist, or hobbyist chess player. As a student in a physical science and enjoyer of math, I could almost take offence at this, if it weren’t so ludicrously funny. It almost seems as if Van Dine were bitter at scientists, perhaps (and this is the merest speculation, not seriously meant) because books by the eminent physicists of the day became bestsellers, while few were buying his book(s) on Nietzsche…

Now, I’m not highlighting this chapter simply because it’s deeply (and unintentionally) hilarious. It represents an egregious, though subtitle, example of a type of reasoning that is utterly impermissible in mystery fiction. Vance decides that a mathematician (very broadly construed) committed the crime based on a broad psychological generalization about a class of people. You don’t immediately notice it because the group is a professional class, but imagine that he said it had to have been committed by a woman because the crimes could only have been a product of a feminine mind. Or if he had singled out a particular ethnic group on a similar line of reasoning. Then the fallacy would stand out. An author cannot impute psychological traits like that to a group of people. Mathematicians, scientists, and chess players are people with individual temperaments and habits of mind. Some may be meticulous while others may be disorganized. Some may possibly be deranged, infantile sadists, but most are not. It would be one thing to, for example, say that a criminal was likely a surgeon because they tied a surgical knot in committing a crime. It would be quite another, however, to say that they must be a surgeon because the crime could only have been executed by one with a surgeon’s callousness. The former is a legitimate deduction, the latter is nonsense.

At this point I’ve said a lot about the book, but little about the mystery itself. Could it be that, despite the book’s many issues, there’s a satisfying mystery buried within? Sadly, no, it could not. There are two reasons for this. One is that there is an utter dearth of clues. Oh, there are plenty of psychological “clues,” but as we’ve seen, they lack any semblance of rigor. There is only one piece of tangible evidence, which is ignored for much of the book, simply because the book would be over too soon if it weren’t. From a structural perspective, this is a glaring flaw. Ideally, the detective should solve the crime as soon as they have all the evidence needed to do so. When the detective gets that evidence midway through the book, and does nothing with it (and allows more people to be killed!), they don’t exactly come off looking all that competent. The other flaw is that almost all of the suspects get killed off, making it fairly trivial to spot the murderer, even without the decisive piece of evidence. (From what I gather, this is a problem with many of Van Dine’s novels.) These flaws are both major on their own, but together they combine to form an enormous flaw. To wit (and this completely spoils the book): gur cvrpr bs rivqrapr vf gung bayl gjb crbcyr jrer noyr gb unir pbzzvggrq bar bs gur zheqref. Bar bs gurfr crbcyr vf yngre xvyyrq bss. Bar jbhyq guvax gung gur pbapyhqvat fgrc bs guvf flyybtvfz jbhyq or boivbhf, ohg Inapr tbrf n ybbbbbat gvzr jvgubhg pbafvqrevat gur cbffvovyvgl. For all the talk about how this is one of Vance’s most difficult cases, the reader is likely to disagree. Frankly, Vance, Van Dine (fictional version), and D.A. Markham don’t exactly seem like the brightest bulbs in the chandelier of justice for missing that inference.

Also, while Bishop is the first example of the nursery rhyme killing, it is also the first example of the characteristic flaw of that trope. Specifically, there’s no reason for the killer to make the crimes resemble nursery rhymes. In keeping with the pseudo-psychologism of the rest of the novel, the reason just boils down to “the killer was a deranged mathematician.” The whole point of the device is that the analogy between the murders and the nursery rhyme signifies something. Certainly, it adds interest to a story regardless of the motivation, but the solution will be an anticlimax if there is no reason behind it, no meaning to speak of. And even ignoring that, “the culprit was crazy” is never a satisfying justification for any aspect of the solution to a mystery.

Thanks to these many and varied flaws, I cannot recommend The Bishop Murder Case as a mystery. It was entertaining, and it says something about Van Dine’s writing that, even with the stylistic issues and rampant pedantry, it was an entertaining read. But if you read it, you’ll probably wind up disappointed. That said, anyone with an interest in the history and development of mystery fiction absolutely needs to read it, as it had a significant and lasting impact. But for everyone else, if, after all this, it still interests you and you can find a cheap copy, read it. But don’t go seeking it out, because it’s really not worth the effort…

The Mill House Murders (1988) - Ayatsuji Yukito

I see the big wheels turnin’
Never endin’, on and on they go

“Big Wheels” (ELO)

This review marks a milestone for the blog, the first full month of regular posts. Granted, that’s only three reviews, but still, it’s something to celebrate…

Though characters being familiar with the tropes of mystery fiction is a common…er, trope of mystery fiction, it’s painfully obvious that most characters who appear in the genre lack this awareness. For example, nobody who was so much as remotely familiar with even the basic trappings of the genre would, after being seriously injured in a deadly car crash, would commission an eccentric architect to build a house in the middle of nowhere and live there in almost complete seclusion, surrounded by a collection of eerie paintings. Yet this is exactly what Fujinuma Kiichi, son of the famous painter Fujinuma Issei, does in Ayatsuju Yukito’s The Mill House Murders. And his dubious decision making doesn’t stop there. Once a year he invites three people to view the paintings, the only times he allows anyone to view his father’s works. In 1985 the annual visit goes awry, ending with one guest dead, another vanished, and a painting stolen. Next year, he invites the same set of people back again. Even ignoring questions of genre savviness, that is clearly not a wise course of action. In addition, another person shows up unannounced, Shimada Kiyoshi, who knew the man who vanished and wants to find out what really happened. The guests go over the events that occurred a year previously, but without giving anything away, it eventually becomes clear just how bad an idea it was to hold one of these gatherings….

The Mill House Murders was published earlier this year, and its release has been eagerly awaited. Mill House is the second entry in Ayatsuji’s Yakata series, the first entry of which, The Decagon House Murders, was published in 2015. Eight years is a long time to wait to continue a series, so there was much excitement when it was announced that Pushkin Press would be publishing the next volume. I haven’t been waiting quite that long to read it, since I read Decagon in 2019, but that doesn’t mean I was any less excited. And in my opinion, Mill House lived up to that excitement, though not perhaps for the reasons you would expect.

Though just directly comparing books with one another is not necessarily the best tact to take in a review, I think that in this case it’s not only warranted, but also possibly intended. Decagon & Mill House are too similar to one another for the correspondence to be accidental. The main similarity lies in the novels’ structure, in both cases two separate but related narratives alternate from chapter to chapter. In Decagon the separation is geographical: most of the cast is on an island getting killed off while a smaller contingent investigates on the mainland. Mill House uses a different kind of separation, one temporal rather than physical. An interesting consequence of this is the way all other variables are held constant. The time is different, but otherwise it’s (mostly) the same people, in the same place, for the same purpose. This allows for another structural point of interest, as for much of the book the action alternates between past events and present discussion about those events. This allows the characters’ theorizing to mirror the reader’s and gives the characters more facts to reason with.

There are also similarities in the plot. A similar (though certainly not identical) type of trick and misdirection are used in both novels. Mill House has far more clues than Decagon did, possibly even too many. Very few readers will reach the summation without unraveling at least a decent portion of the plot. Of course, the very fact that there is a summation represents a structural departure from Decagon. While that novel was absolutely fairly clued, the detective’s reasoning was not explicitly spelled out. Once the reader knew the truth, they would likely remember unnoticed clues, but the chain of reasoning was never explicitly spelled out. That made for a very interesting reading experience, but I can see why it wouldn’t be repeated further in the series. Unfortunately, while the trick in Mill House was very good, the one used in Decagon was a masterpiece. Though the former presents an interesting and satisfying variation on the core idea, the combination of its relative transparency and its similarity to its more accomplished predecessor renders it slightly underwhelming.

Vagrerfgvatyl, gurer vf nyfb na ryrzrag bs fvzvynevgl ertneqvat gur zbgvirf bs gur xvyyref va gur gjb abiryf. Obgu bfgrafvoyl npg bhg bs n fhccbfrq qrfver sbe eriratr, ohg va obgu pnfrf guvf vf whfg n guva irarre bs frys-whfgvsvpngvba pbirevat zber frysvfu checbfrf. Gur xvyyre va Qrpntba pynvzf gb or niratvat gur qrngu bs gur tvey ur ybirq, ohg ur nqzvgf gung fur jbhyq unir orra nccnyyrq ng uvf npgvbaf. Va nqqvgvba, ur xvyyf fbzrbar jub ur nqzvgf unq ab cneg va ure qrngu, fvzcyl orpnhfr vg svgf uvf "cresrpg" zlfgrel abiry-rfdhr fpurzr. Va Zvyy Ubhfr, gur xvyyre pynvzf gb jnag eriratr sbe n pne nppvqrag (juvpu jnf, nf sne nf gur ernqre vf njner, pbzcyrgryl nppvqragny), ohg vg gheaf bhg gung uvf zbgvir fgrzf sebz terrq naq n qrfver sbe gur ivpgvz'f jvsr. Va obgu pnfrf gur xvyyre pynvzf gb or n jebatrq vaqvivqhny, ohg vf va snpg nalguvat ohg. (Spoilers for both Mill House & Decagon hidden by rot13.)

Despite these similarities, there are major differences in the execution of the two books. One which stands out early on is the character writing. In Decagon the characters were fairly flat, with little characterization. Aside from occasional humanizing moments they were mostly there only for the roles they played in the plot. Some of them were downright interchangeable. Honestly, this didn’t bother me at all when I read it, since they were developed to the extent that the plot required, but it’s a criticism that I’ve seen leveled against the book fairly often. Mill House shows a definite improvement in this regard. All of the characters have distinct personalities. They’re not deep, but it marks a definite improvement in Ayatsuji’s style. (This also seems as good a point as any to add that the quality of the translation, done by Ho-Ling Wong, is very good indeed. For reasons that I can’t mention without spoilers, this can’t have been an easy novel to translate into natural sounding English, but it was carried off admirably.)

An unfortunately disappointing point about the novel is that the titular mill house is very much underutilized. The whole premise of the series is that murders keep happening in houses designed by Nakamura Seiji, an architect who always hid secret passages and architectural tricks in his buildings. This allows for any number of interesting situations, as well as allowing completely fair violations of a fundament rule of mystery fiction. As a rule (or rather, a commandment), a writer can’t just have the murder committed via secret passages, as it makes for a remarkably unsatisfying solution. But when the presence of a secret passage is guaranteed, suddenly this is no longer a problem. Not only can it more naturally be integrated into the broader plot, it can also feature in the reader’s theorizing and deductions. In this way something that is ordinarily seen as a cheat becomes an opportunity for new and creative situations and tricks. In this novel, however, the architecture was disappointingly underutilized. Vaqrrq, gur zheqrere arire hfrq gur frpergcnffntr ng nyy, nf ur jnf hanoyr gb svaq vg. And aside from one quite effective set piece, the titular giant mill wheels that line the house also play no role in the plot. To an extent this is understandable, as Ayatsuji was no doubt still deciding what he wanted to do with the series, but it’s still slightly disappointing.

At this point it probably seems as if I'm not quite sold on The Mill House Murders as, although the writing has improved, and although the mystery was certainly good, it just wasn't as gripping or as well executed as Decagon. But that conclusion would be completely wrong, for the simple reason that The Mill House Murders's ending had a real degree of grandeur to it. Mystery fiction, by its very nature, involves taking a situation that seems uncanny and…well, mysterious and explaining it in rational, sensible terms. Some have argued that this makes the solutions inherently disappointing, but I cannot agree with that. A good solution elevates the situation it sprang from, it possesses a satisfaction and a genuine, aesthetic beauty all its own. But it generally (though not always) takes the situation from the level of the wonder-inducing to that of the readily explicable. (Again, this isn’t to say that the solutions don’t inspire wonder, the best ones always do, but it’s wonder of a different sort.) As mentioned, some solutions overcome this difficulty by dint of the sheer brilliance of the solution (as in a great many of Carr’s novels, for example, or in Decagon itself). But others sidestep the issue altogether. In these, the solutions, and the overall situations, signify something in some way, be it artistic, moral, philosophical, or something else altogether. Obviously, I can’t give details, as I would be spoiling some of the best works the genre has to offer, but examples of what I mean include the last chapter of Ten Days’ Wonder, the motive in Gokumontou, and the moment of realization in The Nine Tailors. The solutions to these novels posses a sublimity which is difficult to describe, but which ensures that they stick in the reader’s mind, the relevant scenes indelibly impressed upon his or her memory. And the ending of The Mill House Murders possesses this quality, its very last scene elevating all that has come before. It produces this effect differently than the aforementioned works, as it isn’t part of the solution to the crimes that does so, but the answer to a more…thematic mystery that has come up throughout the book. It reveals an (unclued but foreshadowed) pattern to the events of the novel that gives them grandeur and, within the world of the story, significance. Some might say that the specifics are out of place in the rational world of a mystery novel, but they don’t in any way alter or invalidate the solution, so to me that objection seems to be something of a pointless quibble. While Mill House isn’t on the same level as the books I mentioned earlier, it is of the same kind. And its last line is so good as to almost rival that of Carr’s “The House in Goblin Wood.” Without this closing scene, I could still recommend The Mill House Murders as an entertaining and well-clued mystery that doesn't quite live up to its potential. But with it, I think it’s a minor classic which I recommend strongly. Furthermore, I very much hope that Pushkin will continue with the series, as the next novel, The Labyrinth House Murders, sounds especially interesting.

The Hot Rock (1970) - Donald E. Westlake

 “It’s a jinx,” Dortmunder said. “Don’t give me any more horoscope stuff, all I’m saying is I’m not superstitious and I don’t believe in jinxes, but there’s one jinx in the world and that emerald is it.”

- The Hot Rock, Donald E. Westlake, 1970

John Dortmunder has a reputation as a smart crook, but one thing he never learned is that if something looks too good to be true, it probably is. So when his buddy Kelp comes to him with a can’t miss proposition, he barely hesitates before signing on. It seems that a recent civil war in Africa has led to the formation of two countries: Talabwo and Akinzi. Akinzi wound up in possession of an emerald claimed by Talabwo, but refuses to return it. Thus, Talabwo’s ambassador to America approached Kelp, and Kelp Dortmunder, with a plan. They are to steal the emerald from an exhibition and bring it to the ambassador, for which they, and anyone whose services they need, will receive $30,000 apiece. Well, what are two poor crooks to do in the face of temptation like that? They round up a crew, case the joint, and steel the emerald. All of which goes according to plan, up until they attempt their escape. I won’t spoil exactly what happens, but the long and the short of it is that they make their escape sans emerald. And so they’re back to square one, planning a different scheme to steal the same emerald.

This is the general pattern of the plot Donald E. Westlake’s The Hot Rock (1970). Dortmunder et al. devise a plan to steal the emerald, only for it to slip through their fingers due to pure bad luck, prompting the development of another, even crazier scheme. And the schemes are crazy. (Though I’ll avoid going into details, the highlight is one involving a borrowed train and an insane asylum.) Westlake originally conceived the novel as a dramatic heist story, but his plot ideas kept getting wackier until he realized that he had the makings of a good comic novel on his hands. (Luckily for him, given how successful the series would turn out to be).

As should be clear by this point, The Hot Rock is not really a mystery, for the simple reason that there’s nothing to solve. It’s a comic heist story, and a very amusing one at that. Unfortunately, though, that leaves me with very little to say about it. There are some clever twists, and the reader is likely to anticipate some of them, but they are not in any sense fairly clued. There’s no grand narrative trick or subversion of the expected structure. It’s just an entertainingly written crime novel with a lot of large-scale set-pieces. And that’s not at all a bad thing, but it doesn’t leave much to talk about without getting in to spoilers.

Consequently, despite The Hot Rock appearing on the syllabus of deductive fiction, there isn’t all that much to say about it from a genre historical angle either. Certainly, one can trace a line of decent from, for example, Hornung’s Raffles stories and Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin. Of these, judging only from this novel, the Dortmunder series seems to have more in common with the Raffles stories, which focus on the commission of a theft from the thieves’ perspective, than with the Lupin series, which often included deductive elements. Westlake’s main innovation here was creating a series in which the premise was predicated on the protagonist’s bad luck, where much of the entertainment comes from seeing the improbable ways that things go wrong and the equally improbable ways he comes up with to try to fix things, as opposed to the usual format of this type of story, which is watching things go largely as planned, with occasional setbacks thrown in to keep things exciting.

Looking back over this review, it seems as if my thoughts on the book are ambivalent, but that’s not the case. The Hot Rock is an amusing novel, and I enjoyed it enough that I plan to return to the series in the future. The next Westlake I read, however, will likely be one of his whodunits, since his comic style would fit wonderfully with a full-fledged mystery.

Death of the Living Dead (1989) – Yamaguchi Masaya

Say what was that name you called me?
What was that grin you grinned?
An expression so uncertain
That breaks a line so thin?

“Commercial Breakup” (Thomas Dolby)

 

(Note: This is a review that I wrote early last year, just after I read Death of the Living Dead. Had I written it now, I would have done it very differently. However, I have decided to leave it mostly as is. I still agree with its content, and it doesn’t bug me to the extent that I want to go through the effort of revising it. Let’s just say that it’s a snapshot of how I was writing reviews a couple years ago, and be glad I didn’t start blogging then…)

The Barleycorns could, by any definition of the word, be called an odd family. There’s the patriarch, Smiley, a skilled mortician who, forced to leave England due to his womanizing ways, emigrated to America and decided to reestablish his practice in a grand way, founding the Smile Cemetery, the largest and most prestigious funerary establishment on the east coast. There are his sons, John, a dour, business-oriented man set to succeed his father as head of the house of the dead, William, a would-be theatrical producer who’s always looking to secure more funding, Jessica, Smiley’s only daughter, who married the son of one of his business associates, and James, who, disconcertingly proud of his skills as an embalmer, has no interest whatsoever in such trifles as the management of the cemetery (and that’s without getting into the segment of the Barleycorn siblings who have already shuffled off their mortal coil.). And there’s our protagonist, Francis “Grin” Barleycorn, son of Steven Barleycorn, one of the aforementioned late lamented, who, instead of joining the family firm, chose the life of a punk rocker. From front to back, the Barleycorns are a family touched by death, every one of them having worked in or trained for a role in the running of the cemetery, but, in more ways than one, they’ll soon find that they don’t understand death as well as the thought. For, all around the world, the dead are returning to life. And, against the tableaux of these unnerving events, the Barleycorns will be confronted with death in an even more immediate way when someone begins killing them off. But who would want to kill in a world where the dead can come back to life?

This is the question posed in Yamaguchi Masaya’s Death of the Living Dead, which was released in December of 2021, in an excellent translation by Ho-Ling Wong. Published in 1989, it was Yamaguchi’s debut novel and is considered one of the major works of the shin honkaku movement. Though I had been aware that Yamaguchi had been trying to get it released in English for a few years, I must say that its sudden publication took me by surprise. Especially as it wasn’t the first Japanese mystery novel involving the dead returning to life to be published last year. An surprising coincidence, but a welcome one. (According to the back of the book, there’s a Hollywood film adaption in the works, which probably explains how a publisher was finally found. One wonders how the film will turn out…)

The first half of the novel is rather slow moving, focusing mostly on the establishment of the setting, characters, and themes, but it’s extremely riveting, as well as necessary to the plot. If you don’t pay close attention here, I can assure you that you have very little chance of solving the mysteries that follow. And once the plot gets moving, it really gets moving. Between the killer stalking the Barleycorns, the corpse that vanishes between its funeral and burial, and the possible return of a serial killer from years back, you start to wonder how all of this could possibly tie together.

But tie together it does. As unrelated as they seem, all of these plot threads contribute to a solution that is astonishingly elegant in its simplicity. Its central point is downright Chestertonian (which is quite fitting, given how often he’s quoted here). It’s so blindingly, elementally obvious that we (or at least I) never consider it.

And this isn’t the only similarity to Chesterton. Like the Father Brown stories, Death of the Living Dead is fundamentally a piece of humanistic detective fiction. Yamaguchi is interested in exploring how people relate and react to death, both individually and as a society. This exploration comes into focus well before the mystery itself, but don’t think that they are unrelated concerns. The philosophic questions at the heart of the novel are essential to the solution, and the mystery throws the philosophical questions into sharp relief. Furthermore, to bolster this theme, Yamaguchi includes well-researched information on subjects as diverse as funerary customs, Medieval art, and the history of embalming. This is the kind of mystery that Robert Burton or Sir Thomas Browne would have written.

(At this point, there’s an aspect of the novel’s that I’d like to discuss, but it’s something that some people might consider a spoiler. To be clear, I don’t think it is, and it’s mentioned in the table of contents anyway. Plus, most, though not all, of the reviews out there mention it (and if you’ve read any of those, you already know exactly what I’m talking about). Still, I certainly don’t want to spoil anyone’s reading experience, so if you want to go in absolutely blind, skip the next paragraph and come back when you’ve finished the book. For everyone else, read on…)

Perhaps the most striking thing about Death of the Living Dead is the fact that Grin, who’s both the protagonist and the detective, himself becomes one of the living dead early on in the book, after he is poisoned with arsenious acid. The undead here aren’t the shambling zombies of horror fiction, they retain their personalities and memories. This puts him in the unusual position of having to catch his own killer, but it also adds some extra complications. Chiefly, he has to hide the fact that he’s dead, from both his family and his girlfriend, Cheshire, who acts as his Watson. The only person he lets into his confidence is Dr. Hearse, a close friend of his grandfather’s (and one of my favorite characters!), a professor of thanatology and occasional consultant with the local police. Grin has the good doctor embalm him, as coming back to life doesn’t stop the process of decomposition. Aside from throwing a new wrinkle into the plot, this turn of events also has another narrative function. Since only Grin and Dr. Hearse know that someone poisoned Grin, everyone else investigating the Barleycorn killings is in possession of imperfect information. The police can’t hope to solve these killings, but Grin, and the reader, can.

Not that the police had much of a chance to begin with. The local police are, shall we say, somewhat dysfunctional. The sergeant gladly blabs everything he knows to the press, the junior detective is only interested in two things, getting promoted and slacking off, and the senior detective, Richard Tracy, is a workaholic who’s unhealthily obsessed with his job. At first, he seems to be the force’s only sane man, but as the crimes begin to pile up, Det. Tracy’s stress levels get closer and closer to the breaking point. He also provides one of the novel’s absolute funniest scenes. Near the end of the book, he proposes a false solution which starts out brilliantly clever. However, as he goes on, flaws start appearing in his explanation. They start out subtle, but by the end his audience is chiming in one after another, pointing them out faster than he can keep up with.

As you may have guessed from Det. Tracy’s name, the view of America in Death of the Living Dead is very pop-culture influenced. This becomes apparent early on, particularly in the scene set in NYC, which, with its boom-box carrying gangsters and corrupt cops, feels like it could have come from an over-the-top 80s action flick. As strange an atmosphere as this may seem for a classically styled puzzle-plot mystery, it actually works quite well. After all, you wouldn’t exactly expect strict realism from a novel where punks run around solving murders as the dead rise from their graves…

As far as I can see, the novel only really has one flaw, and not a major one at that. Near the beginning, it’s stated that worldwide, thirteen people in total have returned to life. Conceivably, some may have escaped risen unnoticed, but it couldn’t be that many. So revivification seems to be a fairly rare phenomena, yet in the small town of Tombsville, the living dead just keep on coming, in numbers that are truly surprising, given how few rose before. Vaqrrq, ol gur raq, whfg nobhg gur jubyr Oneyrlpbea snzvyl unf znqr gur erghea gevc (spoilers concealed using rot13). Now, this isn’t a hard science fiction novel, and I’m not demanding some kind of detailed explanation for this. But since we’re told at the beginning that this is an uncommon thing, I think most experienced readers will factor that into their theorizing. Unless told otherwise, we assume that everything in a mystery could be relevant, so I wish that Yamaguchi had somehow indicated that this wasn’t something we needed to pay attention to, rather than just hoping that we don’t notice the mother of all statistical anomalies.

But, that said, I can’t say that this even remotely impacted my enjoyment of the novel. I didn’t even notice it until a few days after finishing it. And that I was still thinking about it days later says a lot. Death of the Living Dead is a triumph as a novel of detection, but it’s also a moving rumination on man and mortality. It’s a book that I’ll not soon forget, and I highly recommend it.

(As I mentioned, I still agree with everything in this review. But I do have a couple of things I’d like to add. The first is actually something that I meant to mention in the review, but which completely slipped my mind. It’s simply that I admire Yamaguchi’s choice of chapter quotes. It takes skill to be able to use John Dickson Carr, Jorge Luis Borges, and King Crimson in the same novel.

The second point has less to do with the book itself, and more to do with its reception. I’ve been shocked at how little attention it’s gotten since its release. When it has been reviewed (on a handful of blogs and in the Washington Post) it’s garnered high praise, but by and large it seems to have slipped under the collective radar. And that’s a shame, because in my opinion this book is a masterpiece of the genre and deserves a wide readership.)

Prologue

Hello, and welcome to my blog! Pardon the disorder, I’m still moving in and setting up (which is to say that there’ll be some changes made, layout wise). My purpose in starting a blog is simple: to review and discuss fair-play mystery fiction, what John Dickson Carr so rightly called “the grandest game in the world.”

As a bit of background, I’ve been an enthusiastic reader of mystery fiction since I was a child. Strictly speaking, my first exposure to the genre was through the Sherlock Holmes stories, which I loved. I don’t really count this though, since I didn’t know they were mysteries; in fact, I had never even heard of mystery fiction. To me, back then, Sherlock Holmes was sui generis, and so couldn’t lead me on to discover the larger genre. But a couple of years after first reading Sherlock Holmes, I read an Agatha Christie novel (specifically The Secret Adversary). Though this isn’t a novel that’s known for the quality of its mystery (indeed, it’s been argued that it isn’t fair-play at all), it was entertaining, and it made aware of the world of mystery fiction. After reading it, I quickly sought out more Christie, and eventually discovered other authors, such as Sayers, Stout, Innes, Carr (my favorite mystery writer), Caudwell, and Queen, to name but a few.

I’ve long considered starting a blog like this, since (like many mystery fans) I don’t know anyone else who reads this sort of book, and so have no one to discuss them with. However, I have always decided against doing so, because I worried that, sooner or later, I would fall out of the habit of writing for the blog. This isn’t just a groundless fear either; multiple times I’ve set myself the goal of writing reviews of the mysteries I read (not for a blog, just for my own reference), but these attempts never lasted long. The main reasons for this were a chronic lack of time and motivation. (After all, when you’re not doing anything with them except reading them at an indeterminate future time, writing reviews tends to take a fairly low priority…) I thought that perhaps having some project in mind might help, something that might allow me to impose at least a loose structure on what I wrote, but I had no idea what form that might take. Recently though, a promising possibility presented itself.

Earlier this week, on the blog The Detection Collection, a syllabus of detective fiction was published, aiming to provide a comprehensive historical overview of fair-play mystery fiction. The syllabus had been under discussion for a while, and I’m proud to say that I (along with many other, more knowledgeable fans) was somewhat involved in its compilation. While I am hardly an impartial observer, I think it represents an excellent resource, both for those interested in the genre’s history and for new readers. I was, however, somewhat appalled to see how many of the works listed that I hadn’t read, even after fifteen years of mystery reading.

Naturally, my first thought was that I should work through the unread titles on the syllabus, filling the gaps in my reading. It was only a bit later that I realized that not only would this project be immensely enjoyable, it would also supply exactly the sort of framework that I was looking for to keep me on track with writing reviews. For once the old idea of starting a blog seemed plausible. And so, here we are.

The majority of the posts I plan to write here fit into three categories. The first is simply reviews of various mysteries I read, watch, play, or listen to. The second, which is a subset of the first, consists of reviews of works that appear on the syllabus. In addition to discussing the works themselves, in these reviews I plan to look at how they fit into, represent, or have shaped the development of the genre. The final category will be posts not about any specific works, but about the characteristics, tropes, and devices used in mystery fiction. In particular, I have some topics in mind that I would like to write longer form essays on.

As yet, I’m not entirely sure what my posting schedule will be, especially as my schedule will change drastically once the next academic year begins. At the moment, I plan to post twice monthly, with the first review going up on June 1^st. It’s one I wrote a couple of years ago, about a novel that I consider to be among the best mysteries published in the past few years.

That’s pretty much all I have to say at the moment, except that I’m excited to start this project. I hope that you find my ramblings interesting or useful, and, of course, comments are always welcome.

(Come to think of it, I suppose that’s not quite all I have to say, as I should probably offer an explanation of the blog’s title. Its original source is from Act II of Hamlet, where the melancholy Dane refers to a troupe of actors as “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.” In his introduction to The Anthony Boucher Chronicles, a volume of collected reviews by author and critic Anthony Boucher, Francis M. Nevins uses the phrase in reference to Boucher’s view that “you could get a better idea of just what it was like to be alive in that time from reading the fiction of an earlier period than you could from reading a factual history.” Thus, mystery novels serve as the abstracts and chronicles of the time when they were written.)