Review: Trent's Last Case

Trent's Last Case by E.C. Bentley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An unusual classic mystery from a close friend of G.K. Chesterton's, best known as the inventor as the clerihew (that's what the C in his name stands for). He and Chesterton collaborated on several books, in which Bentley wrote biographical verses about famous people and Chesterton illustrated them.

In this book, Trent, a painter who routinely quotes English poetry like Lord Peter Wimsey (though different poets, I think), starts the book with an established reputation as an amateur detective. This reputation was established in adventures which were not chronicled prior to this one; this is the first book of what eventually became two novels and a collection of short stories, though internally it reads as if it's the end of the series. He's called in by a newspaper he occasionally works for to investigate the death of a prominent American financier currently staying in England, where he maintains a house. By coincidence, Trent knows the uncle of the financier's wife, and they meet at the nearby hotel and discuss the case.

The odd features include that the dead man appears to have dressed in a hurry, but also in a way that a person wouldn't normally dress (which, to me, instantly pointed to someone else having dressed him, but that's not a conclusion that Trent gets to straight away). He also behaved oddly on the night of his death. Also, nobody heard the shot that killed him, and nothing is missing, apart from half a bottle of whiskey.

From this intriguing base we get what is, for much of the time, not a conventional mystery at all. Trent investigates, finds clues, comes to a theory... but he has fallen in love with the widow, and thinks she might be involved at least indirectly, so he chooses not to pursue his main suspect. There's then a long interval in which he tries, unsuccessfully, to forget about his love interest. When things shift in such a way that he talks to the suspect after all, he finds that things were not at all as they appeared, and the book finishes with a startling twist, leading Trent to declare that this is his last case.

It has the poetic observations and the slightly askew quality one might expect from a friend of Chesterton's. It's not a formulaic book, by any means, which makes it interesting to me, and I think its departure from the expected mystery formula works.

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Review: In Brief Authority

In Brief Authority by F. Anstey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While it isn't quite the ever-escalating farce that Anstey did so well in The Tinted Venus or The Brass Bottle , and is neither as packed with incident or as comedic as either of them, this is an amiable comedy set in England and Fairyland in 1914. The advent of the First World War leads to an author's introductory note excusing the use of German names from the Brothers Grimm, and an epilogue which abandons comedy and talks seriously about the war.

The story involves a suburban English family with pretensions to be upper-middle-class; the husband, Sidney, is a partner in a firm which does something, I don't remember what (maybe it was never specified), but is ignored by his senior partner whenever he suggests anything; the wife is a social climber with absolutely zero ability at self-reflection or self-critique, and nobody has as high an opinion of her as she has herself; the older daughter has pretensions to be an intellectual, but has no real grasp of the subjects she goes to hear lectures about (including the philosophy of Nietzsche, which almost leads to disaster later on when she encourages a love interest to adopt it); the son would like to be one of P.G. Wodehouse's idle, useless rich idiots, but isn't rich, and has just been sacked from his job for being idle and useless and a bit of an idiot; only the younger daughter, who's about 10, is anything like a decent human being. Her governess, Daphne Heritage, is, it turns out, the heir to the throne of a fairytale kingdom, though she's unaware of this, and sells her employer a pendant she inherited from her father to cover a debt incurred by her late mother. The pendant is the mark of the heir, and so when a representative of the kingdom turns up, he mistakes the mother of the family for the queen, and they are installed as the royal family of Märchenland (Fairytale Land) in the capital city of Eswareinmal (German for "Once Upon a Time," if I'm not mistaken).

Nobody except the family themselves consider themselves remotely qualified for this job, especially the supposed Queen Selina, and they proceed to make a mess of things. The son, Clarence, is now rich... but still idle, useless, and a bit of an idiot, and bored because nobody will play golf with him and he can't get any cigarettes. Daphne is smart enough not to give in to his rather half-hearted attempts to woo her, particularly since his intention is for her to be his mistress rather than his princess (he doesn't use the word "mistress", but it's clear enough what he means).

Various people get engaged, or are supposed to get engaged but don't, and meanwhile the rather doddery old Court Godmother, who isn't as good at manipulation as she ought to be, discovers the mistaken identity. Since it was partly her mistake, she doesn't necessarily want to announce it, but she uses it as leverage to try to resolve the situation as she feels it should be resolved, with mixed success.

Everyone's plans go awry, in fact, since nobody is particularly bright or competent, and a difficult time is had by all before we get a good fairy-tale ending - somewhat brought down by the ensuing realities of the war in the epilogue, in which Clarence finally does become good for something.

It's not by any means my favourite Anstey book, but it's amusing, and worth a read.

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Review: Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy

Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've said in other reviews of his books that you don't read Freeman Wills Crofts for the characters. That's a little unfair; in this book, there is a decent amount of characterization. It just mostly isn't applied to the detective.

Inspector French is such an Everyman he might well have been designed as a reader self-insert character. I don't know if that was something people consciously created a century ago; whether it was or not, kudos to FWC for creating such an outstanding one.

French does have one personal characteristic that isn't completely generic, though, and it's that he's able to win people round so they want to tell him things, by being genuinely affable and taking an interest in them. He uses this ability to win friends and influence people a number of times in this volume, to progress what seems initially to be an unpromising investigation with few clues available.

A remote house on the Yorkshire moors is owned by a miser, and he, his two servants (who are a couple), and his young niece live there. The niece is invited to visit an acquaintance, and while she's away, the house burns down. Three bodies are found in it, in positions corresponding to the master's bedroom (one) and the servants' bedroom (two), and the safe, rather than containing thirty or forty thousand pounds in banknotes - the miser having been one of those Scrooge McDuck types who likes to have his money in his house so he can play with it - contains only burnt scraps of paper. Bad luck; a tragic accident.

Or is it? When a banknote turns up that was reported destroyed by the local banker, who had a list of serial numbers of the latest batch he'd sent out to the house, it rouses the banker's suspicions, and he calls in the police, who manifest in the form of Inspector French. It's several weeks since the fire, and the trail is now as cold as the ashes. French gets a sense of the village and follows up some leads, which initially get him only to dead ends. But, being French, he perseveres methodically, and there's a shocking twist and a tense action scene at the climax.

The emphasis is, as always, on the procedural investigation, but there's a better romance subplot than in the earlier Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery , and the various characters take on, if anything, more reality and solidity than in most mysteries of the time; the cleverly planned crime is also motivated believably. Solid, like French's investigative method, and recommended.

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Review: A Bayard From Bengal Being some account of the Magnificent and Spanking Career of Chunder Bindabun Bhosh, Esq., B.A., Cambridge

A Bayard From Bengal Being some account of the Magnificent and Spanking Career of Chunder Bindabun Bhosh, Esq., B.A., Cambridge by F. Anstey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a tricky one. It's a British author pretending to be an Indian author, and comically getting English idioms wrong as he tells a story of an Indian man (not the supposed author) in England, having unlikely adventures that sometimes assume that England is like India. The illustrations are also supposedly by an Indian illustrator, though actually by an English one, and are done in a Mughal-influenced style, showing the British scenes as a not-very-knowledgeable Indian person might imagine them.

It wouldn't fly today, in other words; there would be a firestorm on Twitter, and the author would have to disappear and resurface several years later, possibly under a pseudonym. The tricky part is that the main body of the text is actually quite amusing at times, though that's brought down badly by the supposed translations of parables and the pseudo-author's commentary on the illustrations, the first of which is often not funny at all, and the second of which is heavy-handed and obvious.

On the whole, not recommended.

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Review: Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Stories of the Witch Knight and the Puppet Sorcerer

Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Stories of the Witch Knight and the Puppet Sorcerer by Garth Nix
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The contribution of the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories to this volume's DNA is strong and clear, not only in the general feel of the world and the partnership between the two protagonists, but in the tone of the stories. The various encounters they have do not tend to end well for other characters, or even for Sir Hereward; he frequently desires to dally with women they encounter, but even if they're not outright antagonists they're often victims and/or agents of the otherworldly entities that the pair hunt down and exterminate on behalf of the Committee for the Safety of the World.

The language, too, is similar to the prose of Fritz Lieber (author of the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser tales). It's not as over-elaborate as, say, Jack Vance, whose stories I particularly dislike, mainly for the alienated, dark characters, but also for the overwrought prose, which unfortunately gets imitated by other writers who don't have the chops to pull it off. Nor is it the highly charged, dramatic prose of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. It's formal in cadence, but mostly straightforward in syntax, and progresses at a steady pace through these shadowy mini-tragedies, helping to insulate the reader by its very matter-of-factness from the horror of some of the events.

There is the odd dangling modifier, and there are a few too many commas between adjectives sometimes (including one after "one," which is an adjective, technically, but should never have a coordinate comma after it). Otherwise, the copy editing is good, and while the author sometimes uses an old-fashioned piece of technical vocabulary as part of his worldbuilding and tonebuilding, he always seems to use it correctly.

I'd read three of these stories when they were collected before, but was happy to come back round again and read several more. While they're darker than I usually prefer, they're well written, and I enjoyed them.

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Review: Worlds of Eternity

Worlds of Eternity by Aaron Hillsbery
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

The authors never use one short sentence when three long sentences will do, and it quickly became tedious to read. Here's an example:

"A faint vibration came from Michael's pocket. It was his phone, demanding attention. Mindful of the person seated next to him, he kept his elbow close to his body as he struggled to extract the device. After considerable effort, he finally succeeded. Straightening himself, his eyes fell on the screen, revealing a new message."

Or you could just say, "Michael's phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out - with some difficulty because of the crowded tram - and saw a message from his sister." That's 25 words in two sentences, and it conveys slightly more information than the 54 words in five sentences above.

A lot of those long sentences involve an introductory participle (like the last sentence quoted above), and occasionally those participles dangle, referring to something other than the grammatical subject of the sentence. There are also a few issues with tense (missing past perfect, mingling of past and present), the usual excess commas between adjectives, and some odd or incorrect use of vocabulary, like "she glanced the woman" instead of "she glimpsed" or "she glanced at". It's well within the normal range of errors, probably better than average, but that tedious, long-winded prose means there's not much plot per thousand words, and slows the pace to a crawl even in the action scenes. I only got 5% of the way through, so I can't say much about characterization, worldbuilding, or plot; it moved so slowly I hadn't seen much of any of those yet, just wordy narration of the mundane and obvious.

I received a pre-release version from Netgalley for review, and some of the minor issues may be fixed before publication.

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Review: The Adventures of Dr Thorndyke

The Adventures of Dr Thorndyke by R. Austin Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This author pioneered the "reverse mystery" which most famously appeared in the TV series Columbo, where we, the audience, see the crime committed and know who did it, and the interest is in watching the detective work it out. Thorndyke is no Columbo; he's a snob, for a start, and as sophisticated and elite as Columbo is an everyman. He also relies on meticulous forensic science to track down the perpetrators, no matter how careful they have been.

These stories are varied; most, but not all of them are "reverse mysteries". They're entertaining mainly from a problem-solving point of view.

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