Month: April 2020

#52 – They Do It With Mirrors

Ruth Van Rydock is worried about her sister, Carrie Louise, but she can’t identify why. She arranges for their old school friend, Jane Marple, to stay with Carrie Louise and her family at Stonygates, an institute for treating young criminals, run by her third husband, Lewis Serrocold.

One evening, the troubled Edgar Lawson locks Lewis into the study and threatens to shoot him. A shot is heard, but outside, followed by shots inside. When the door is broken down, Lewis is unharmed and it appears that no harm has been done, but then the body of Christian Gulbrandsen is found in another part of the house. A letter he was typing shows that Ruth was right to be concerned about her sister. Can Miss Marple keep her friend safe and find a killer?

Miss Marple is in good form again, coming out with this gem:

“Human nature, dear,  is very much the same everywhere. It is more difficult to observe it closely in a city, that is all.”

But she isn’t at her best and it takes two additional, rather perfunctory, deaths before the murderer is identified.

Ah well, never mind, because next month we have what someone believes is the best Christie ever, so I’ll see you again “After the Funeral”.

Recurring character development

Miss Marple

Was an English girl from a Cathedral Close who spent time in a pensionnat in Florence where she met Ruth and Carrie Louise. Had an idea that she would go to nurse lepers. This was nearly half a century ago.

Her nephew, Raymond, is in Mexico for six months. Without his financial kindness, she would not be able to live as she does, small fixed incomes having been devalued since World War II.

Has good long-distance sight.

Tells Inspector Curry she is a little deaf.

Inspector Curry refers to a Superintendent Blacker who seems to know Miss Marple but I don’t recall having come across him before.

Signs of the Times

Ruth says “Well there’s a fashion in philanthropy too. It used to be education in Gulbrandsen’s day. But that’s out of date now. The State has stepped in. Everyone expects education as a matter of right – and doesn’t think much of it when they get it!” In England state primary education had been free since 1891 but state secondary education only became free in 1944.

Edgar claims that various men are his father, including Lord Montgomery. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery is best remembered for his victory at El Alamein in 1942 which lead to him becoming Britain’s most senior field officer for the remainder of World War II. Winston Churchill, another of Edgar’s potential said of him “In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable”.

Above the gates of the Institute it says “Recover hope all ye who enter here” a reversal of “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” written above the entrance to Hell in Dante’s “Inferno”. Although this is how the phrase is commonly known (that’s how I’ve always seen it), the original translation was “All hope abandon ye who enter here”.

Alex Restarick shudders when mentioning Christian Gulbrandsen’s collection of “Thorwaldsen’s statuary”. Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844) was a Danish sculptor.

What Else I’ve Been Reading Recently

Till Death Do Us Part (1944) by John Dickson Carr

The shooting, possibly accidental, of a fortune teller at the village fête is the boarding point onto this train of madness. I gave my wife a précis about a third of the way through but not long after I’d have been telling a different story, and would have had to carry on in that vein until the very end of the book. On the back of my Penguin copy JDC says “My ambition is still to write a really outstanding detective novel, which I do not honestly believe I have yet achieved” to which all I can say is “He must have been a perfectionist”.

The Fourth Side of the Triangle (1965) by Ellery Queen

If this book had been ten pages shorter I would have forgiven its obvious flaws – as it is I understand that for the book to be structured as it is, the police investigation had to be that poor, but come on, this is ridiculous. There is a nice Sign of the Times that leads to an alibi though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

#52 – They Do It With Mirrors – WITH SPOILERS

Ruth Van Rydock is worried about her sister, Carrie Louise, but she can’t identify why. She arranges for their old school friend, Jane Marple, to stay with Carrie Louise and her family at Stonygates, an institute for treating young criminals, run by her third husband, Lewis Serrocold.

One evening, the troubled Edgar Lawson locks Lewis into the study and threatens to shoot him. A shot is heard, but outside, followed by shots inside. When the door is broken down, Lewis is unharmed and it appears that no harm has been done, but then the body of Christian Gulbrandsen is found in another part of the house. A letter he was typing shows that Ruth was right to be concerned about her sister. Can Miss Marple keep her friend safe and find a killer?

Miss Marple is in good form again, coming out with this gem:

“Human nature, dear,  is very much the same everywhere. It is more difficult to observe it closely in a city, that is all.”

But she isn’t at her best and it takes two additional, rather perfunctory, deaths before the murderer is identified.

Ah well, never mind, because next month we have what someone believes is the best Christie ever, so I’ll see you again “After the Funeral”.

Recurring character development

Miss Marple

Was an English girl from a Cathedral Close who spent time in a pensionnat in Florence where she met Ruth and Carrie Louise. Had an idea that she would go to nurse lepers. This was nearly half a century ago.

Her nephew, Raymond, is in Mexico for six months. Without his financial kindness, she would not be able to live as she does, small fixed incomes having been devalued since World War II.

Has good long-distance sight.

Tells Inspector Curry she is a little deaf.

Inspector Curry refers to a Superintendent Blacker who seems to know Miss Marple but I don’t recall having come across him before.

Signs of the Times

Ruth says “Well there’s a fashion in philanthropy too. It used to be education in Gulbrandsen’s day. But that’s out of date now. The State has stepped in. Everyone expects education as a matter of right – and doesn’t think much of it when they get it!” In England state primary education had been free since 1891 but state secondary education only became free in 1944.

Edgar claims that various men are his father, including Lord Montgomery. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery is best remembered for his victory at El Alamein in 1942 which lead to him becoming Britain’s most senior field officer for the remainder of World War II. Winston Churchill, another of Edgar’s potential said of him “In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable”.

Above the gates of the Institute it says “Recover hope all ye who enter here” a reversal of “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” written above the entrance to Hell in Dante’s “Inferno”. Although this is how the phrase is commonly known (that’s how I’ve always seen it), the original translation was “All hope abandon ye who enter here”.

Alex Restarick shudders when mentioning Christian Gulbrandsen’s collection of “Thorwaldsen’s statuary”. Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844) was a Danish sculptor.

SPOILERS

Well the moral of this story that a well-run business needs a rigourous system of internal controls to prevent and detect fraudulent accounting! If I’d been doing a reading challenge this year then this would have fitted perfectly into “You share an occupation with the murderer”. Almost all chartered accountants are law abiding citizens – we have to sign a declaration to this effect so it must be true – but then our monthly magazine always has details of why members have been fined or struck off.

We are told early on that Miss Marple believes that Lewis would always put causes before people and this is what motivates him to kill.

We have a classic “as if” misleading statement “He was breathing hard as though he had been running, but otherwise he was unmoved”.

Whilst in hindsight the identity of the killer is obvious – one of the two people who has a cast iron alibi – the way Lewis sets up the fake motive beforehand by taking the tonic away from Carrie Louise and then presenting the police with the letter that the dead man was supposed to have been typing is a stroke of genius.

It is nice that actually it is Carrie Louise who can see more clearly: she can’t believe that anyone wants to kill her and is perfectly correct in this.

What Else I’ve Been Reading Recently

Till Death Do Us Part (1944) by John Dickson Carr

The shooting, possibly accidental, of a fortune teller at the village fête is the boarding point onto this train of madness. I gave my wife a précis about a third of the way through but not long after I’d have been telling a different story, and would have had to carry on in that vein until the very end of the book. On the back of my Penguin copy JDC says “My ambition is still to write a really outstanding detective novel, which I do not honestly believe I have yet achieved” to which all I can say is “He must have been a perfectionist”.

The Fourth Side of the Triangle (1965) by Ellery Queen

If this book had been ten pages shorter I would have forgiven its obvious flaws – as it is I understand that for the book to be structured as it is, the police investigation had to be that poor, but come on, this is ridiculous. There is a nice Sign of the Times that leads to an alibi though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Lucky Policeman (1938) by Rupert Penny

Browsing on Amazon recently, having awarded Sealed Room Murder the prestigious Novel of the Year Award 2019, I searched for Rupert Penny and found this title at a price reduced sufficiently to tempt this Yorkshireman into making an immediate purchase. The second question was: is it actually any good? So I headed for the world’s only known ranking of Penny’s eight book output to find that it was rated Number One!

Simon Selby escapes from Hilary Peake’s private mental hospital into the surrounding New Forest. This is followed a week later by the disappearance of three people: a second housemaid, a journalist, and a hiker. During the course of a search it is in fact a police sergeant who is found dead – minus his left shoe. But as time passes, other corpses are found in copses, also missing sinister footwear.

As with “Sealed Room Murder”, there is humour amongst the killing, including Dr Wrench’s reaction to Peake’s desire to read Milton’s “Paradise Lost”:

“I’d as soon eat a cubic mile of batter pudding myself – aren’t you sleeping well?”

And this description of D.S. “Horsey” Matthews:

“In appearance he resembled a jockey who had grown to resemble a favourite mount, and he was quite untroubled by this fact.”

However the reality of violent death is also addressed as Beale reflects after finding a badly decomposed body:

“Could a sane person do a thing like that? Make a living girl into a twisted dead scarecrow, a damp decaying monstrosity? But of course he wouldn’t know she’d look like that. Why in the world is it so damnably easy to die? It takes months and months to get born, and start the machinery going, and a fraction of a second to spike it.”

A good entry into the GAD serial killer sub-genre, and whilst I was expecting a subversion of the form with the first disappearance which didn’t appear (I guess it was still 1938 after all), I placed an incorrect interpretation on a key piece of evidence, having earlier written down various possibilities of how this type of tale could be resolved.

I didn’t enjoy it as much as “Sealed Room Murder” but I will continue to turn pounds into Pennys, perversely enough with the lowest ranked book because based on the grisly synopsis and title I just have to have “She Had to Have Gas”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Title Anagrams – The Answers

Here are the answers to last week’s anagrams.

  1. Dated Passion                      No Past Is Dead by J. J. Connington
  2. Castle St Astern                   Trent’s Last Case by E. C. Bentley
  3. Gyrated Catheter                Three Act Tragedy by Agatha Christie
  4. Head is Deadly                     She Died a Lady by Carter Dickson
  5. Heavy Crest Arrested        The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie
  6. Hooking the Creed             The Crooked Hinge by John Dickson Carr
  7. Meerkat for Malan             Lament for a Maker by Michael Innes
  8. Monkey Who Stole Cube  One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie
  9. One Not Motivated             Antidote to Venom by Freeman Wills Crofts
  10. Our Damned Germ              Murder Gone Mad by Philip MacDonald
  11. Our Defector                          Tour de Force by Christianna Brand
  12. Our Main Complainer        Policeman in Armour by Rupert Penny
  13. Profit Hit Me                          Rim of the Pit by Hake Talbot
  14. Sailing Wall Alibis               Alias Basil Willing by Helen McCloy
  15. Spoon Storing                       Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers
  16. Swing Eternal Sea               Last Seen Wearing by H. Waugh or C. Dexter
  17. The Haunted Linnet           Death in the Tunnel by Miles Burton
  18. Tripe at the Anvil                 Pietr the Latvian by Georges Simenon
  19. Varlets Migrate                     Maigret Travels by Georges Simenon
  20. Wanted Dry Nose                 Ten Days’ Wonder by Ellery Queen

Previous puzzles can be found here.

Title Anagrams

In line with my online handle, below are twenty titles that authors of mystery fiction strangely chose not to use for their novels. Can you rearrange them to find the real book?

Hint 1 is the number of letters in each word, Hint 2 is the author. Highlight the space  next to the hints to show the hidden text.

Answers – if required – will be provided sometime next week.

  1. Dated Passion                      Hint 1 (2,4,2,4)      Hint 2 J. J. Connington
  2. Castle St Astern                   Hint 1 (6,4,4)         Hint 2 E. C. Bentley
  3. Gyrated Catheter                Hint 1 (5,3,7)          Hint 2 Agatha Christie
  4. Head is Deadly                     Hint 1 (3,4,1,4)      Hint 2 Carter Dickson
  5. Heavy Crest Arrested        Hint 1 (3,6,9)         Hint 2 Agatha Christie
  6. Hooking the Creed             Hint 1 (3,7,5)          Hint 2 John Dickson Carr
  7. Meerkat for Malan             Hint 1 (6,3,1,5)      Hint 2 Michael Innes
  8. Monkey Who Stole Cube  Hint 1 (3,3,6,2,4) Hint 2 Agatha Christie
  9. One Not Motivated             Hint 1 (8,2,5)         Hint 2 Freeman Wills Crofts
  10. Our Damned Germ              Hint 1 (6,4,3)        Hint 2 Philip MacDonald
  11. Our Defector                          Hint 1 (4,2,5)         Hint 2 Christianna Brand
  12. Our Main Complainer        Hint 1 (9,2,6)         Hint 2 Rupert Penny
  13. Profit Hit Me                          Hint 1 (3,2,3,3)      Hint 2 Hake Talbot
  14. Sailing Wall Alibis               Hint 1 (5,5,7)          Hint 2 Helen McCloy
  15. Spoon Storing                       Hint 1 (6,6)             Hint 2 Dorothy L. Sayers
  16. Swing Eternal Sea               Hint 1 (4,4,7)          Hint 2 H. Waugh or C. Dexter
  17. The Haunted Linnet           Hint 1 (5,2,3,6)      Hint 2 Miles Burton
  18. Tripe at the Anvil                 Hint 1 (5,3,7)          Hint 2 Georges Simenon
  19. Varlets Migrate                     Hint 1 (7,7)              Hint 2 Georges Simenon
  20. Wanted Dry Nose                 Hint 1 (3,4,6)          Hint 2 Ellery Queen

Previous puzzles can be found here.

Character Anagrams – The Answers

Here are the solutions to last week’s anagrams:

  1. Archer Sparkle – Charles Parker
  2. Bart McKine – Martin Beck
  3. Cameron B. Plait – Albert Campion
  4. Daniel Averrio – Ariadne Oliver
  5. Evan Hartier – Harriet Vane
  6. Gareth Widdleshire – Hildegarde Withers
  7. George Tunifer – Reggie Fortune
  8. Henry P. Sherif – Phryne Fisher
  9. Howard Coinige – Archie Goodwin
  10. John Chepfers – Joseph French
  11. James Guilter – Jules Maigret
  12. Magdala Shield – Adam Dalgliesh
  13. Nobby Bowe -Bobby Owen
  14. Norma Sprye – Perry Mason
  15. Pancho Evil – Philo Vance
  16. Pauline Sern – Arsene Lupin
  17. Perry Pekan – Parker Pyne
  18. Peter Chouloir – Hercule Poirot
  19. Scarlet Lavee – Steve Carella
  20. Shane Hogget – Ganesh Ghote

Previous puzzles can be found here.

Death and the Professor (1961) by E. and M. A. Radford

Normally, if I don’t like a book I won’t blog about it, but this one really got my goat!

The Dilettantes’ Club meet on the first and last Thursdays of each month, which is then incorrectly rephrased as being every fortnight. Made up of leading men in their respective fields, including an assistant commissioner of Scotland Yard, they are joined by a new member, the logician, Marcus Stubbs. With his help they start to solve cases that have baffled the police, some of them “impossible”.

This sounded like a good premise to someone who enjoys the discursive mysteries found in Christie’s “The Thirteen Problems” and Asimov’s “Tales of the Black Widowers”. Unfortunately most aren’t very good and, which is worse (safe in the knowledge from the Ustinov film of “Death on the Nile” that you can’t libel the dead), one takes the central idea from a short story that I have read recently and another plagiarises an entire novel. There was nothing revolutionary in the other solutions, which mostly felt familiar, but I can’t put my finger on specific works from which they might have been lifted.

I am willing to give the Radfords another go and, based on its subject matter, I can’t not read “Murder Isn’t Cricket” but I urge you not to buy this book! However much the picture of the cat on the cover, which bears no relation to the contents, might tempt you to do so!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Easter

When I was initially thinking about writing this post, the world seemed a very different place, but although some of the practicalities of how we live our lives may have changed,the fundamental nature of who we are as people as not.

At the end of one of Freeman Wills Crofts’ detective stories, a criminal suffering with the guilt of what he has done has the following experience:

“Then one night, when he was at his very lowest, his thoughts went back to his childhood and his childhood’s teaching. Some old words that he had then learnt recurred to him, about going to Someone and being given rest*. And as these echoed in his mind he knew beyond doubt or question that he had been deceiving himself: that there was a God, that good and evil in his life did matter, and that if there was hope for him at all, it was through the Divine Man who had spoken these words.

Without any conscious intention, he suddenly found himself doing something he had not done for perhaps thirty years. He was praying.”

This leads him to a point where:

“His prayer and confession had been the first steps to a vital contact with the Divine. Though his sorrow for what he had done remained, he now knew himself to be forgiven, cleaned from his load of guilt, and with a power and confidence to face the future to which he was moving, such as he had never before experienced.”

The message of Easter is that forgiveness is available to all, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. There are many objections to this proposition, one of which is that we are dealing with an impossible situation, a “locked-tomb mystery” if you will pardon the pun: how could a dead man leave a sealed chamber. I can’t give a nice Carrian solution to this problem because whilst I subscribe to Knox’s Decalogue when it comes to detective fiction, I don’t in real-life.

Frank Morison investigated the evidence for and against the resurrection of Jesus in his book “Who Moved the Stone?” and I recommend it to you.

At this time of global uncertainty where you might be asking some of life’s biggest questions, please consider reviewing the evidence for the claims of Jesus Christ for yourself.

Thank you for reading, once more Happy Easter, and God bless you.

*In Matthew Chapter 11 Verse 28 Jesus says “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest”.

Character Anagrams

In line with my online handle, below are twenty names that recurring characters in mystery fiction could have used when they wanted to check into a hotel anonymously. Can you arrange them to find their true identity? Answers – if required – will be provided sometime next week.

  1. Archer Sparkle
  2. Bart McKine
  3. Cameron B. Plait
  4. Daniel Averrio
  5. Evan Hartier
  6. Gareth Widdleshire
  7. George Tunifer
  8. Henry P. Sherif
  9. Howard Coinige
  10. John Chepfers
  11. James Guilter
  12. Magdala Shield
  13. Nobby Bowe
  14. Norma Sprye
  15. Pancho Evil
  16. Pauline Sern
  17. Perry Pekan
  18. Peter Chouloir
  19. Scarlet Lavee
  20. Shane Hogget

Previous puzzles can be found here.