Sherlockian Shorts #11 – The Hound of the Baskervilles

A series of posts, containing full spoilers, as I make my way once more through the complete canon, picking out points of interest and reflecting on my personal experience of the stories.

• After a comic strip version of “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” this was my first proper encounter with the written Holmes as a friend brought a classic adventures edition into school which I borrowed. I also read “The Thirty-Nine Steps” in the same edition.
• This was the first new Holmes story for eight years. Doyle’s antipathy towards his character is well-known and the first words between Watson and Holmes are practically parodic: 

“Well Watson, what do you make of it?”

Holmes was sitting with his back to me, and I had given him no sign of my occupation.

“How did you know what I was doing? I believe you have eyes in the back of your head.”

“I have, at least, a well-polished , silver-plated coffee-pot in front of me,” said he.

• “Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong” by Pierre Bayard, whilst containing a lot of pseudo-literary nonsense, does propose an alternative, and more logical, solution to the case. It also contains spoilers for Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” and “Towards Zero”.

Previous posts in this series can be found here.

As Holmes himself is still on his Great Hiatus in my re-read of the canon, it is a fitting point to announce that tis blog will be on a temporary hiatus of its own as I work on a different project, which will involve several months of concentrated effort. If it is successful, you will be the first to know. Happy New Year!

Reprint of the Year 2023: The Black Lizard (1934) by Edogawa Rampo (translated by Ian Hughes)

Kate at Cross-Examining Crime is once again running her Reprint of theYear competition and both of my choices are from the revived Green Penguin range.

The second is a novel by the man with the best pen name in the business, featuring his regular sleuth Kogoro Akechi, a master of disguise, who is confronted by his evil female counterpart, the Black Lizard.

He gets the better of their first encounter, but is bested a second time round, leaving his enemy in possession of both the Star of Egypt diamond and his employer’s daughter. Can he get close enough to her to win them both back?

This is definitely a thriller rather than a detective story, and reminded me the short story collection Again the Ringer by Edgar Wallace (so much so that I re-bought it), as it is episodic and each time you are wondering who is really who and which of them has the upper hand. One occurence has parallels with my favourite scene from Mission: Impossible 2.

The Dark Angel comes across ultimately as a prototype Bond villain, complete with secret base, and some very bizarre personal tastes.

Overall this is a fun, but highly improbable romp, with Rampo sending himself up when he refers to himself anonymously:

“There is a certain novelist whose works include a story called ‘The H____ C____’ The story is about a villain who _____ and gets up to mischief. The Black Lizard has artfully enacted this novelist’s nonsensical imaginings.”

 

Reprint of the Year 2023: Game Without Rules (1962) by Michael Gilbert

Kate at Cross-Examining Crime is once again running her Reprint of the Year competition and both of my choices are from the revived Green Penguin range.

The first is a collection of short stories featuring Mr Calder and Mr Behrens, two ostensibly retired civil servants, who are still very much active participants in the Cold War.

The Road to Damascus

Mr Calder’s neighbour turns to him when he discovers a skeleton in an old WWII hideout – could this be the body of an old adversary? Or did he manage to change identities during the blitz? 

A brilliant ending when Mr Behrens responds to the question of why he is sitting so still.

On Slay Down

Mr Behrens is concerned that the youth of today is mentally and morally softer than his generation and fears for the future of the Service. However Mr Calder discovers a young man who is happy to play outside the rules.

The Spoilers

A number of prominent men have been persuaded to give up their roles in public life but when the conspirators cross a line they get much more than they bargained for. Policeman Patrick Petrella makes a cameo appearance.

The Cat Cracker

“It is not a case in which direct of forceful methods are likely to achieve anything but disaster. It is not a problem which would appeal to Mr Calder. That is why we have turned to you.”

Mr Behrens must persuade a former pupil not to defect.

Trembling’s Tours

The founder, Mr Walcott Trembling, had organised and accompanied tours at a time when a visit to the continent was an adventure, when a tourist expected to be swindled from the moment he arrived at Calais, and a careful family carried its drinking water with it.

New employee Mr Caversham finds that things have changed a lot since the founder’s time.

The Headmaster

A high-ranking intelligence officer accidentally gets too close to the enemy’s top agent, who kills him, thus putting into effect a chain of events that will bring about his downfall. 

Heilige Nacht

Mr Calder walked out onto the runway – a thick nondescript figure in a belted mackintosh, carrying a worn airplane flight satchel strapped to one shoulder and the lives of a number of people in his hands.

Mr Calder and Mr Behrens spend Christmas in Berlin.

“Upon the King…”

Mr Behrens finds that a young VIP is more than capable of taking care of himself.

Cross-Over

Mr Behrens and Mr Calder (literally) road test a new piece of technology. A counterpoint to The Cat Cracker.

Prometheus Unbound

Professional agents usually did come to an untimely end. The curious, involute, secretive, occasionally dangerous and always responsible way of life took its sure toll of them. A few were killed by the enemy; others took their own lives; half a dozen, as Mr Fortescue knew, were living in quiet country houses where the furniture was fixed to the floors and the inmates ate with plastic knives and forks and were shaved by a resident barber.

Mr Calder cracks up and not even Mr Behrens or his faithful hound, Rasselas, can help.

A Prince of Abyssinia

“If he was dying, he’d like to take me along with him.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I tortured him. And I broke him. He’d never forget.”

There is always a price to be paid in the game without rules.

Michael Gilbert had fought in WWII before being held in an Italian prisoner of war camp (the inspiration for the novel “Death in Captivity”) and he and his unlikely heroes are clear about what he fought (and they are fighting) for as evidenced here:

“We’re getting so Security-minded,” said Miss Nicholson, “that we might as well be living in a totalitarian state, under the control of the Gestapo.”

Miss Nicholson, who was an intellectual liberal, often said things like this in letters to the Press and at public meetings, possibly because she had never lived in a totalitarian state and had no experience of the Gestapo…

and then:

“What do you mean by a police state?”

“In Belgrade last year a meeting was called. Not a political meeting. The government did not ban the meeting, they simply gave out that they did not approve…as soon as the meeting started the police blocked all the exits. No one was allowed to leaver until his name and address had been taken and confirmed. For some days nothing happened. Then the police visited every house – there were hundreds, so it took time – and broke every window in every house. It was mid-winter so it wasn’t amusing. That’s what I mean by a police state.”

This is an excellent short story collection and on the strength of it I have bought three more Gilbert anthologies.

Death and the Conjuror (2022) by Tom Mead

I don’t normally read modern mysteries set during the Golden Age because there is still a lot of the Golden Age that I haven’t read, so why read an imitation when I can go to the genuine article, but Tom Mead is such a nice chap that I felt obliged (in a good way) to give his book a go. And I’m very glad I did…

Anselm Rees, a psychiatrist fresh in London from Vienna, meets a mysterious visitor in his home and soon after is found brutally murdered inside his locked study. Is the guest responsible? Or could it be one of his three patients? Or even his daughter and her fiancé?

Used to straightforward back-street affairs, Inspector George Flint recognises that he doesn’t possess the special sort of brain required to solve murder as a puzzle  and so turns to stage magician Joseph Spector for help. 

Spector could be any age between fifty and eighty and his real name is unknown but this man of mystery manages to unravel a tangled tale which involves the impossible disappearance of a painting and a second impossible murder.

Mead has a clear love for classic mysteries which shines through and what impressed me most was the part of the solution to the first murder which had nothing to do with its impossible nature. It felt like I must have read something similar before, showing that it was an appropriate element in an homage like this, but I can’t cite a specific example, so perhaps it is original.

Overall this is a fun, very readable, mélange of classic tropes, and as well as being valid in its own right, will hopefully encourage readers to try some of the authors that Mead references in the acknowledgements. 

Murder in Memoriam (1984) by Didier Daeninckx (translated by Liz Heron)

17 October 1961: French police open fire upon a demonstration of Algerians in Paris. Roger Thiraud, a history teacher, is deliberately shot dead at close quarters. Neither his death, nor that of an unknown number of protestors is ever properly investigated.

Summer 1982: Roger’s son, Bernard, is investigating something dangerous, when he too is shot at close range in Toulouse.

Enter Inspector Cadin, who has been dealing with a grave-diggers’ strike and the forging of official summonses which are making the local bureaucracy look foolish. This murder gives him something to really get his teeth into. He doesn’t believe it was a  coincidence that Thiraud père et fils were killed in such a similar way and soon makes his way to Paris to investigate the first murder before returning to Toulouse to understand why both men were killed.

Almost forty years after its publication, some of what happens is quite obvious to anyone with the right knowledge of modern French history (one name I knew I recognised but couldn’t quite place) but the first readers would have been shocked by the light shed on two dark chapters in France’s national story. As with any good historical novel, it made me want to find out more about the events that the cases are based upon.

I had thought Cadin was a one-off character but the 100 Greatest Literary Detectives explains that he appears in three other novels and a book of short stories – sadly none of these have been translated into English.

 

 

Monkey See, Monkey Murder (2023) by James Scott Byrnside

Steven Rinehardt “the magnate who got mauled by a maniacal macaque in Malaya” has returned to Chicago and demands that the police take action against Ivan “The Flesher” Florkowski, a notorious gangster with a signature method of murder, who he believes was behind the attack and will not stop until he is dead.

Sergeant Grady is stuck between a rock and a hard place: Rinehardt is rich and powerful and has the mayor’s ear, but he is a corrupt cop and FLorkowski has him in his pocket. He doesn’t want to be sacked but he definitely doesn’t want to be dismembered and dumped in the river in barrels.

His solution is to get Rowan Manory, the “only incorruptible person in Chicago”, to investigate the case for him, as if he can clear Florkowski then Rinehardt will have to believe him.

Manory is uninterested in the case but needs to pay the bills, so he accepts and is therefore on the scene when a second monkey attack occurs. This is shortly followed by the type of “devious murder, the well-plotted murder, the type of murder to which he had staked his reputation time and time again”.

The explanation of all this monkeying around is clear and beat by beat I was nodding along and remembering where each clue had been deftly slipped in, even though it had totally passed me by at the time. This is another triumph from the pen of JSB and I look forward to the next outing of Manory and Williams.

Notes

A locked room lecture includes a spoiler for The Big Bow Mystery which is well worth reading.

One character is reading “Through the Wall” by Cleveland Moffett which is well-reviewed here.

A very minor quibble but the use of the term “hazmat suit” really jarred me. The internet shows that they were in use by 1921, having been invented in Malaya during the Manchurian plague ten years earlier, but that the contraction does not appear in print until the 1970s.

 

Black Holes (2011) by He Jiahong (translated by Emily Jones)

Hong Jun is a lawyer who trained in the USA before returning home to practice in China. Xia Dahu asks him to represent his son, Zhe, who has been arrested for fraudulent stock market trading. He’d also like his help in a contract dispute with an American company.

With the assistance of his boss’ daughter and ex-wife, Zhe is released from prison on medical grounds, but manages to get himself into an even bigger mess. It will take all of Hong’s experience to save his client and his family from their actions.

The opening chapter in which Hong sets his secretary, Song Jia, a problem about which eyewitness testimony regarding a number plate is correct, had me hoping that here we had a Chinese Perry Mason and Della Street and that what would follow would be a clever courtroom mystery. Unfortunately this was the mystery highpoint of the book.

What actually followed was the story of three families and how their experiences of the Cultural Revolution were being played out in the present. Hong Jun does spring a surprise on the court but only because the police are completely inept and basic information has not been given to the reader.

That Hong Jun is one of the 100 Greatest Literary Detectives and Perry Mason is not tells you that this guide, as will have been obvious from my previous reviews, is more concerned with Literature than Detection.

Fever (1937) by Friedrich Glauser (translated by Mike Mitchell)

Sergeant Studer is one of the 100 Greatest Literary Detectives and when I read that one of his cases involved the French Foreign Legion, I decided this was the one I would try.

Studer has been staying in Paris whilst his wife has been staying with their daughter, awaiting the birth of their first grandchild. On a final night out with his French colleagues he is introduced to Father Matthias who has spent many years in Morocco as a priest to the Foreign Legionnaires:

“Strange things go on in the souls of those men; there are moving conversions of which people who think of the Foreign Legion as the dregs of humanity have no conception.”

He tells them about a corporal who had psychic turns. Recently in a trance he took on the spirit of the priest’s dead brother and threatened to kill his former wives. Father Matthias is on his way back to Switzerland to prevent the dead man from taking his revenge.

This brings backs memories for Studer who remembers that he once planned to enlist in the foreign legion after an argument with his father but hadn’t wanted to upset his mother so had remained in Switzerland and become a policeman, rising to chief inspector of the Bern City police until he was forced out after exposing a banking scandal. This caused him to begin again with the cantonal police but he did get to work with Hans Gross, author of the “Criminal Investigations” textbook, and Edouard Locard, famous in the field of forensic science for the principle that “every contact leaves a trace”.

On his return home, he finds that both women are dead, and he sets out on an investigation that will take him a long way from home and from which he may not return.

Studer has been likened to Maigret, and I can see why, but I would say he is more quixotic. His wife, in this book at least, with her interpretation of a piece of evidence, plays a much more active role in events than Madame Maigret.

It is an interesting book, not least because Studer takes more drugs than any sleuth since Sherlock Holmes, but it must say something about the lack of puzzle plots in German crime fiction that their awards are named after Friedrich Glauser. I’d read another one if I found it secondhand but I doubt I’d buy any more new. 

Turning Japanese #21: The Devil’s Flute Murders (1953) by Seishi Yokomizo (translated by Jim Rion)

A man posing as an official from the Department of Health poisons ten people in a jeweller’s shop before making off with some of the stock. One of the suspects was composer, Hidesuke Tsubaki, and although he was able to satisfy the police with an alibi, shortly after he committed suicide.

Or did he? Now his daughter Mineko comes to Kosuke Kindaichi with news that he has been seen by his wife and two other women at the theatre and she invites him to an evening of divination which aims to find out the truth but which instead conjures up the mark of the devil and the sound of his flute.

This is followed by a locked room murder – before a long diversion as Kindaichi travels west to see if Hidesuke’s alibi really does hold up – before three more deaths occur.

Kindaichi’s chronicler explains that he has had to revisit his friend’s older casebooks because of the darkness of this tale, but the reality is that he initially overlooked it because it isn’t that good. The initial hook of the mass poisoning is excellent, but not enough is done with it, and there is a final revelation that could have made an excellent clue, but overall it is too long – and ROT13 SPOILERS jul qvqa’g xbznxb whfg gryy ure qnhtugre gur gehgu nobhg zvfuvzn’f cneragntr orsber nalguvat unccrarq engure guna erirnyvat gur gehgu bapr vg jnf gbb yngr?

I know that there is another Yokomizo scheduled for 2024 but I feel the translator’s time would be better served bringing us a new author, rather than more in what is now becoming a slightly lacklustre series.

In an author’s note, Yokomizo says that some readers will be reminded of certain similar incidents, details of which can be found here.

Click here for more reviews of Japanese mystery fiction.

The City & the City (2009) by China Miéville

Narrator Tyador Borlu is a police inspector in the city of Beszel called out one morning to a crime scene where a young woman’s body has been dumped. The investigation proceeds routinely until Borlu gets the idea that the girl was killed in Ul Qoma, a foreign city. This difference in jurisdictions would not be too much of a problem except for the fact that Beszel and Ul Qoma are physically both part of the same city but psychologically are distinct.

Citizens of each city may be physical neighbours but having been brought up from infancy to “unsee” (and unhear and unsmell) each other, they maintain the barriers between them. Some areas are “crosshatched”, for example main thoroughfares, where both groups are allowed to mingle, still “unseeing” but seeing enough to avoid bumping into each other.

An all-powerful entity called Breach comes down like a ton of bricks on any breach of the rules, deliberate or accidental, and Borlu expects that the case will be handed over to it, but a legal technicality means that he has to go to Ul Qoma to continue his investigations.

I would not have come across this book were it not for my 100 Greatest Literary Detectives challenge but this is a definite hit, not as a mystery, but as a sci-fi/fantasy/speculative thriller. Borlu is not a great detective, but he is an archetypal one, particularly as he finds that (ROT13 spoilers) gb rafher gung whfgvpr cerinvyf ur zhfg oernx gur ynj.