Review: The Fire Within

The Fire Within by Patricia Wentworth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked this up under the impression that it was a classic mystery. And at first, it seemed like it would be.

Old Edward is rather a nasty old man who is dying of (probably - it's never said outright) cancer. He has little other than contempt for his brother's son, also named Edward; he much prefers Edward's childhood companion David, now Old Edward's doctor. His wards are sisters Mary and Elizabeth. Mary is recently married to Edward, but David has never got over being in love with her. Elizabeth is in love with David, but it's unrequited; her friend Agneta's brother Louis nurses a similarly unrequited love for Elizabeth. There's also another woman, the widow of the doctor whose practice David took over, who has her eye on David as well.

David, out of principle, refuses to let Old Edward leave him any legacy, so it's mostly willed to the younger Edward, with some provision for Elizabeth.

And then David is called because Old Edward has taken a turn, and is close to death. The old man tells him, "I was fine until I drank from that cup. Edward brought it to me." David tests the dregs in Old Edward's home chemistry lab; there's a huge dose of arsenic.

And then Mary asks him, for her sake, because he once said he'd do anything for her, to just sign the death certificate so there won't be an inquest. Against everything he believes in, and believing that he's becoming an accessory to murder in so doing, he does so, unable to resist his appeal - and it breaks him.

Spoiler tags from here on. (view spoiler)[Shortly after this, both David and Edward receive letters from Old Edward, which he'd arranged to have sent to them with some delay, revealing that it was one of his nasty jokes - he put the arsenic in the cup himself, as a way of ending his suffering that would also cause problems for Edward, but he doesn't want Edward actually convicted of his murder.

This doesn't help David at all. He did what he did, believing what he believed, and he despises himself, and, increasingly, Mary. He's unable to sleep, and starts drinking heavily.

Eventually, Elizabeth is able to grant him sleep, using a mystical connection that she has to the Divine. Desperate, he marries her so that they can be together and she can help him sleep. He sees her only as his old childhood friend, but hopes that eventually they can come to be truly married.

He's had a recurring dream for many years of a mysterious woman in the moonlight by the sea. He used to sleepwalk during this dream. Not long after his marriage, he starts doing so again, and comes to Elizabeth at night, unconscious of what he's doing.

She becomes pregnant, shortly after Mary has also conceived. (Elizabeth and Mary - the choice of names is surely intentional.) But how can she tell David? (hide spoiler)]

The passages dealing with Elizabeth's mystical consciousness reminded me very much of Charles Williams. And after setting everything up for potential tragedy, even an actual murder, the author pulls off what I call the Glorious Ending, where someone acts so much out of love that it completely transforms the outcome.

The author's prose, without being showy or complicated, is expressive and intelligent. There are a lot of (unattributed) poetry quotations at the heads of chapters; I think many of them may be Tennyson, who was the favourite poet of the author's later detective character Miss Silver, but I don't know Tennyson well enough to be certain.

The human relationships are a good deal deeper than you get in a standard classic mystery, because they're the focus of the story. It's definitely a novel, properly so called, and in its way it's a romance, though it's an unusual one. It's not my usual reading, but I enjoyed it considerably, and was gripped by it to the extent that, reading it on the train, I had some difficulty staying aware of which stations we were passing through so I could get off at the right time.

I'll definitely be looking for more from this author. Happily, she's remained popular enough that I can get a lot of her books, mainly the Miss Silver series, from the library.

View all my reviews

Review: The Case with Nine Solutions

The Case with Nine Solutions by J.J. Connington
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A twisty piece of writing, in which once again Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield keeps proving that he's smarter than his slightly Watsonesque inspector, and, eventually, that he's smarter than the criminal.

There are no fewer than four deaths, three of them on the same night. The "nine solutions" refers to Driffield's table of possibilities for two of the deaths: all possible combinations of accident, suicide, and murder, which gets the inspector thinking.

The setup involves a complex set of relationships among workers at a scientific research institute, centering around a married couple whose marriage is not in good shape. There are three men and three women involved in a complicated relationship diagram; to say more would be a spoiler.

I didn't spot the criminal until very late, when even the inspector had worked it out. The reconstruction of the crime is typically clever. And yet, the ending - though involving a literally explosive climax - ended up being a letdown for me, as we're led to think something and then it turns out differently.

It's an odd mixture, in that the plot is obviously driven by powerful emotions, but the investigation is very matter-of-fact, and so is the attitude of the criminal when eventually confronted. Perhaps this is why I felt something was a bit off about it, and I enjoyed it less than I might have.

View all my reviews

Review: The Dark Eyes of London

The Dark Eyes of London by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another classic mystery from Edgar Wallace, and like all of the others I've read, not written to an obvious formula, even though he wrote so quickly.

This one involves a gang of blind men (the "Dark Eyes" of the title). There is a lot of imposture, identity concealment, suspense, and even romance, which is more fully developed than a lot of Wallace's romances, in that the couple at least spend a significant amount of time together.

However, it was the romance that gave me the element that I disliked about the book. It's between the Scotland Yard inspector and his secretary, who he admires not only because she's good-looking (though she is) but because she's intelligent and capable and, he thinks, a better detective than he is. But when he finally proposes, he doesn't like the idea of her working; he wants her to stay home and look after his flat, which is already perfectly well looked after by his manservant and cook. (Yes, a Scotland Yard inspector in the 1920s apparently made enough to have two servants.) I know, attitudes were different then, but usually Wallace doesn't just buy into the zeitgeist in this way. And it's not as if men of that generation never thought women should work or develop their natural gifts. World War I had accelerated a trend of opening up new options for women that had been around since before Victoria, and World War II was soon to accelerate it again.

Apart from that, it's a clever and thrilling mystery with hairsbreadth escapes (sometimes through intelligent preparation), kidnapping, conspiracy and fraud as well as murder, and plenty of period setting to enjoy. Sure, the same few cast members keep on coincidentally meeting, but I should probably give up complaining about that, because it seems everyone managed their plots that way a hundred years ago.

Even with the woman's-place-is-in-the-home foolishness, it's still a solid piece of work.

View all my reviews

Review: The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith

The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith by Patricia Wentworth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A terrific thriller from a century ago.

Jane Smith is exactly the kind of determined, brave, sensible, intelligent young woman I particularly like to see as a protagonist. Several of her more foolish fellow characters dislike her, because she isn't attempting to conceal that she's not suffering them gladly, but I thought she was wonderful.

She's not a stoic, though, and in fact she's a very believable young woman not long out of school. She gets frightened, a lot, and cries on multiple occasions. But she has good reason for both reactions, and, crucially, she doesn't let how she feels stop her from doing what she thinks is right.

The biggest flaw of the book is that Jane keeps being coincidentally in the exact right place at the exact right time for the plot to progress. She overhears conversations, sees people enter secret passages, finds a letter that, if she hadn't found it, would have caused a lot of trouble, not least for her, and of course stumbles and accidentally finds the hidden switch that opens one of those secret passages, with which this novel's setting abounds.

But she is at least looking for the switch when that happens, and, despite all of this helpful-to-the-plot coincidence, she does protagonize, and nothing falls into her lap; she has to be very brave and clever to thwart the evil conspiracy.

That conspiracy is a vaguely defined anarchist/socialist/communist/bolshevist thing, something to do with organized labour, but super radical, in that everyone who's not part of it is to be eliminated all around the world, using some mysterious (presumably chemical-warfare-related) formula which has been stolen from a government lab. My grandfather and great-grandfather were Red Federationalists at around this same time, but I'm reasonably confident that they didn't plot the overthrow of civilization and the deaths of millions. This seems to have been a middle-class bogeyman at the time, along with the "Yellow Peril," and about as real.

Still, I can set that aside for the sake of the story, which is gripping, and delivered in excellent but prose that, however, doesn't draw attention to itself. Unusually, the point of view is omniscient - sometimes switching between different characters' perceptions in the same scene - and the narrator even says "I suppose that..." at one point. It isn't obtrusive, as omniscient narration can easily be, and is mostly indistinguishable from the more usual third-person limited.

There are scenes in which the characters struggle, and look as if they'll succeed, but are thwarted, and then have to try something else, and this goes back and forth a few times, which is great for sustained tension. Jane rescues the Scotland Yard man who's in love with her at one point. We get a long thread in which someone seems one way and we eventually discover otherwise. The main villain is creepy and obsessive and believable. All the main characters have depth and dimension; they're not just their archetype and their plot role and one or two minor tags to distinguish them, they have a complex inner life, things they're striving for and that they fear, a push and pull of wanting something and also not wanting it, abilities that aren't just there for the plot.

It's a fine piece of work, apart from the coincidences and the bogeyman, and sits comfortably in the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list. I'll be looking for more from this author.

View all my reviews

Review: The Mystery of the Blue Train

The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Apart from the fact that multiple characters cross paths multiple times by complete coincidence, which is a device used by better writers than Christie to keep their casts tight, there's not much to carp at in the execution of this one. (Though she does use that device constantly, until they're acquainted and she doesn't need to.)

This is a clever Poirot mystery. I thought, about halfway through, that I had figured out who the murderer was (I thought it was (view spoiler)[the exotic dancer (hide spoiler)]), but I was completely wrong and didn't suspect the actual culprits even for a moment. And yet, I think it would qualify as a "fair-play" mystery; the clues were all there, nothing was known only to the detective.

The journey was enjoyable, Poirot was his classic self, Hastings was mercifully absent, and all in all Christie is hitting her stride with this one.

View all my reviews

Review: The Brand Of Silence: A Detective Story

The Brand Of Silence: A Detective Story by Johnston Mcculley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another rip-roaring pulp adventure from McCulley.

He's re-using his material a bit. The wealthy man gains his valet the same way the wealthy man in The Black Star gets his valet: he finds him about to commit suicide by jumping into a river, talks him out of it, and gains his gratitude and loyalty for life. This seems a slightly unconventional way of getting a valet (I believe it was more common to go to an agency), and it's weird that it happened twice. Anyway, "Murk," as he names the valet (who, implausibly, has used so many false names he's forgotten his real one), is "solid" for his boss from then on. So is his boss's old friend, a detective, who values friendship and loyalty more than money. Both of them refuse to be intimidated or bribed into working against, or ceasing to work for, the hero.

And he needs loyal friends, because he's come back to New York from ten years in Honduras, where he turned $10,000 into a million, to find that he's mysteriously shunned by society; a bank manager doesn't want his business, he's asked to leave the first hotel he books into, young women he hardly knows cut him dead, and, when forced to talk to him, say "You know what you did!" But he doesn't.

And then he gets arrested for murder, and the people who can prove his alibi swear they never saw him at the time.

It's a fine mystery, and it took me until 70% of the way through to figure out what was going on and who was behind it. (view spoiler)[I did suspect the villain of also murdering his wife, but apparently not. And there's no real explanation for how he came to know who could prove the hero's alibi and got to them before they were called into the police station, but that's the only loose end I noticed. Apart from why the hero had never written to anyone in New York for 10 years, including his mentor/virtual foster-father; maybe he wasn't a letter-writer. (hide spoiler)] Meanwhile, there's lots of detective work and plenty of being ambushed and hit on the head and abducted. It's hard-boiled on the outside and noblebright on the inside; both Murk and the detective maintain their loyalty, and the hero is a good man wrongly accused.

If you're going to write pulp fiction, this is how to do it.

View all my reviews

Review: In the Fog

In the Fog by Richard Harding Davis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is clever, and unfortunately the reason that it's clever is a total spoiler.

In a club so exclusive that members don't even mention they belong to it because that would sound boastful, several members are sitting late at night. One is an opponent of a bill in parliament which one of the others, if he speaks to it, will probably get passed. This particular MP has a vice: he loves detective stories, and can't bear to put them down.

One of the other members then starts telling a detective story. Lost in a recent London fog, he stumbled into a house - he's not sure where - and found two people murdered.

It turns out that others of the members also have stories to contribute relating to this murder or the people involved, and the story-telling goes on long into the night...

It's well written, the journey is enjoyable, and the conclusion includes multiple twists, one after another.

View all my reviews