Saturday, July 15, 2023

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…

Saturday, July 1, 2023

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.