Review: That Affair Next Door

That Affair Next Door by Anna Katharine Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Before Miss Marple, there was Miss Butterworth.

Miss Butterworth is a very decided middle-aged spinster (middle-aged by today's standards; perhaps elderly by the standards of her time), living in the fancy New York neighbourhood of Gramercy Park. When a murder is committed in the next-door house, she - in the most dignified possible manner and with full consciousness of her social position - pokes her nose in and starts figuring things out, in tandem with the police detective, Grice, who had appeared in seven previous books by the same author, and is at this point quite old even by today's reckoning, at 77.

My big objection to the first Grice book, which is the only other one I've read by this author, was that people kept declaiming set-piece speeches about their emotions. The style seems to have settled down somewhere in the interim, and the whole book is a delight, with the notable exception of a nasty piece of anti-Chinese prejudice dropped right in the middle, apropos of nothing whatsoever. It may only be part of the characterization of Miss Butterworth's type of person and her likely prejudices, rather than the prejudice of the author, but it's a jarring note in any case. She's a slightly unreliable narrator, at least when it comes to herself, so I'm choosing to believe this was at least mostly the character's unexamined prejudice.

Miss Butterworth conveys more personality in a paragraph than, say, Freeman Wills Crofts' Inspector French does in probably his entire series (I have only read a couple of those books, but I'd risk a small bet). Take this example:

I don't like young men in general. They are either over-suave and polite, as if they condescended to remember that you are elderly and that it is their duty to make you forget it, or else they are pert and shallow and disgust you with their egotism. But this young man looked sensible and business-like, and I took to him at once, though what connection he could have with this affair I could not imagine.

Grice retains his quirk of not looking directly at people, but always picking some object in the room and apparently addressing his remarks to it, while remaining fully conscious of everything that's going on. He's smart enough to treat Miss Butterworth and her deductions and discoveries with respect, while not being so unprofessional as to open up all of his own investigation to her. She has knowledge he lacks; he's a man (who, if I remember rightly from his first appearance, is of the working class, though that's not mentioned here), and she's a woman who has spent her life in the level of society that the Van Burnams, the family who own the house where the murder was committed, also inhabit.

The mystery involves obscured identities, deceptive young gentlemen, and an odd murder which appears to have taken place in two stages. There are plenty of twisty twists and startling revelations. I've not given it my "plot-relies-on-coincidence" tag, because although the murder happens as it does because of a reasonably unlikely coincidence, and there's another coincidence later that raises the irony level, neither of them assist the plot to stay on track, which is the sense in which I mean that tag.

The only significant issue I noticed with the copy editing is that quite often something phrased as a question has no question mark.

I am demoting it a tier ranking (from Silver to Bronze) in my annual Best of the Year list, because of those couple of moments of really horrible racism, but other than that I thought it was better than most other classic mysteries I've read lately.

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Review: Dungeons & Dragons: The Fallbacks: Dealing with Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons: The Fallbacks: Dealing with Dragons by Jaleigh Johnson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'll be honest: I didn't expect this to be good.

A lot of people who write "licensed" fiction are, let's face it, hacks - and hacks who, all too often, don't have much of a grasp of the basic mechanics of prose.

This author is better than that, and better than the average writer in general.

Because the characters are a D&D adventuring party, it's an ensemble cast. Those can be difficult to do. Giving multiple characters distinctive viewpoints, voices, motivations and backgrounds, and then meshing them together in such a way that they both clash and support each other and all contribute to the overall plot, is not a trivial task, and here it's handled well. The characters have some dimension to them, and they all have believable arcs which are complementary.

The plot trots along at a good pace without sacrificing characterization, though you are expected to be familiar with the world of the Forgotten Realms; its places and creatures and organizations get minimal description. It even took me a while to realize Tess, the group's leader, was an elf, partly because I was left to assume that the people whose species wasn't specified were human, and (unless I missed something) Tess's elven ancestry wasn't mentioned immediately. There's also a good deal of reference back to the previous book, which I haven't read, but I didn't feel lost because of it; everything said about the events of that book is said in a context where it's relevant to whatever's going on in this book.

Overall, it felt like a good, solid pulpy adventure with well-intentioned, capable but flawed characters who bounced off each other in interesting ways.

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Review: The Lerouge Case

The Lerouge Case by Émile Gaboriau
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This 1863 mystery is so very, very French. There are two mistresses central to the plot, one of them particularly awful, and the other one has an illegitimate son, upon whose identity the plot hinges. Everyone is very excitable. Someone literally dies of shame; someone else, rejected by his love interest, runs out to murder the man she prefers to him, can't do it, and falls into a delirium for six weeks. (Said love interest, incidentally, is about 19 at the time of the main events, since it's roughly two years since events, including the rejected suitor's offer, that took place when she was stated to be 17. However, her successful suitor, who is 33, has been trying to convince his father to let him marry her for the past five years, meaning when he started she was 14 and he was 28. Those aren't good numbers by modern standards, though in 1863 France nobody would have turned a hair; that was the year that the age of consent was raised from 11 to 13.)

The inciting incident is that an elderly woman is murdered in a village near Paris. The amateur detective thinks over the scenario, and concludes that obviously she was a former servant who was blackmailing her former employer over an illegitimate child, which turns out to be correct. The detective, by the way, is not Lecoq, even though this is considered the first Lecoq novel; Lecoq appears only briefly at the beginning, with another brief mention late in the book, and his sole role is to bring the amateur detective, Tabaret, into the story. In later books, apparently, Tabaret is his mentor, and Lecoq takes a more active role.

Tabaret then goes to see his neighbour, who by complete coincidence is closely connected with the crime, thus short-circuiting a great deal of tedious investigation and getting straight to the drama and sensation, which was presumably what the original audience was there for. Plus! The investigating magistrate also has a coincidental connection to the prime suspect, one that will give that punctilious official a good deal of angst, because he's not sure he can be fair and impartial. This development, at least, uses coincidence to create difficulties rather than remove them, but I still don't love it. (Though it will later turn out that, in a way, the first coincidence also caused difficulties...) The author lampshades the convenience of the coincidences, and also the ridiculousness of the hackneyed baby-swap backstory, which, of course, doesn't justify either one.

It soon appears that the prime suspect has been expertly and comprehensively framed, with a lot of physical evidence clearly pointing to him. The physical evidence is subtle enough that a bungling police officer, such as the one who's investigating, would miss it, but Tabaret picks up on it because he's very smart (if eccentric). Tabaret is then convinced of the suspect's innocence by the fact that he has (or at least proffers) no alibi, and someone who was as careful as the criminal they're looking for would definitely have one, but also we, the readers, are privy to the suspect's thoughts, and he is not thinking "I done it, it's a fair cop" (or the aristocratic French equivalent).

And then the supposedly bungling officer tracks down his completely different suspect, and there's a twist that gets us re-evaluating the significance for this case of the old forensic maxim "Who benefits?," and makes it pretty clear who the criminal must be (and we've already seen their motive). Cue manic pursuit and dénouement, including another coincidence to help the detective along, and it turns out the murderer wasn't actually as clever or as careful as Tabaret had thought.

This isn't a "procedural" in the English style at all. It's full of Gallic high drama, and the whole book is driven by character interaction, by people desiring things intensely and taking often ill-advised steps to obtain or keep them. It's a roller-coaster ride of emotional beats that, if they were music, would be speed metal. The forensic aspects of the investigation are misleading more than they are helpful ((view spoiler)[and, in fact, the original cleverly detected details which pointed to a particular suspect turn out to be another complete coincidence, not a clever frame-up at all (hide spoiler)]), and the investigators, far from being the problem-solving plot mechanisms that most English detective novelists would produce starting half a century or more later, are flawed human beings with their own quirks and foibles that impact the plot as well as themselves. The narrator retains a stance of the inevitability of Justice, but the characters come to doubt it, and themselves, deeply.

I'm not sure who translated this particular version, or if they were English or French; the Project Gutenberg text doesn't credit a translator. The phraseology often reflects the original French more closely than a truly idiomatic English translation would, and there are some misplaced or missing commas (for example, comma before the main verb or before "that," or no comma before a term of address). The quotation marks need another going-over as well, since a number of them are missing, while others are where they shouldn't be. Some sentences phrased as questions are missing question marks, while a couple of sentences not phrased as questions do have question marks. There's even an its/it's error. Not a great edition, in other words, and Project Gutenberg is likely not to blame for most of it; they follow the original texts pretty accurately, on the whole.

Although I'm not a fan of the massive role of coincidence in the plot and the over-the-top melodrama, it was a thrilling ride for sure. I'm going to be a bit generous and include it in my annual recommendation list, though right at the bottom of the lowest tier. And I may venture on another Lecoq book, though if it's just like this it will be the last.

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Review: The Bittermeads Mystery

The Bittermeads Mystery by E.R. Punshon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The story opens with a man who's amazingly strong, stealthy (despite being large and apparently ungainly), alert, and an excellent tracker. He feels more like a larger-than-life pulp hero than the protagonist of a detective novel, and indeed this is less a detective novel than it is a thriller. The difference between the two often comes down to time orientation: the detective novel is about solving a crime in the past, and the thriller is frequently about preventing a crime in the future. Not that the main character does a particularly wonderful job of that, at least for the first half of the book. He's busy gaining the trust of one of the criminals, falling for the love interest while trying to work out if she was complicit in the murder of his old friend, and maintaining his undercover identity. There has been more than one murder, but it's not really a mystery who committed them; the trick is getting to a point where he can prove it and foil the villain's plans.

It's only around the middle of the book that we discover exactly who he is and get at least some idea of what he's trying to do and why (I guessed it before the reveal, but not a long time before). About two-thirds of the way in, I, but not he, figured out who the mysterious figure behind the crimes was; the main character is notable for his physical rather than his mental aptitude. I was never in any danger of being bored, though; the tension is well maintained, in part by keeping information unrevealed as long as possible. And then there's a race against time to save multiple people in different places, where seconds could count.

The style, particularly at the start, is excitable and overdramatic, again more like a pulp adventure novel than the urbane narration I'm used to in classic detective stories.

The author isn't good with commas, using them to splice sentences together, placing them incorrectly in sentences or leaving them out where they're needed, and not using them when he splits a sentence of dialog in two parts with a tag; he punctuates the second part, incorrectly, as if it was a stand-alone sentence. Today's authors do this kind of thing all the time, but a century ago it was less common, and publishers generally had better editors, who knew the rules even if the authors didn't.

Between the not-too-bright protagonist, the pulpy prose and the mediocre copy editing, I can't give it better than a Bronze-tier rating in my annual recommendation list, but if you ignore those things, it's exciting and full of tension and, at times, action-packed.

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Review: The Wrong Letter

The Wrong Letter by Walter S. Masterman
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

The introduction by G.K. Chesterton mentions unspecified faults with the book, which he however commends for fooling him about who the murderer was.

These faults, from my perspective, include simplistic prose mainly consisting of declarative sentences, some of which are comma-spliced, others of which are missing their question marks despite being phrased as questions. The paragraph breaks sometimes make it slightly confusing to work out who is speaking, since the author uses a break after a beat, even if the dialog that follows is from the person who was taking action in the beat.

It's a locked-room mystery, made less mysterious by the fact that in the discovery-of-the-body scene the amateur detective of the (unrealistic) amateur-and-professional pair opens the door of the murder room by manipulating the key, which is in the lock on the other side, with a pair of pliers, thus demonstrating how the murderer could have left and locked it behind them. However, nobody seems to pick up on this, and the police strip the entire room looking for secret passages.

I was finding it tedious, mainly because of the prose style, so I glanced at the ending to see what Chesterton was talking about, only to find that it breaks two of Ronald Knox's rules of detective fiction (rules 1 and 7, if you want to look them up and don't mind a big spoiler). So I didn't bother to finish it.

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Review: Flecker’s Magic

Flecker’s Magic by Norman H. Matson
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Short, and yet it seems much longer than it needs to be at times. This is because the main character, a 21-year-old struggling American artist living in Paris, spends so much time introspecting and philosophizing. He is dithering about what to wish for, having been given a ring by a young woman who says she's a witch (and can back it up by performing remarkable feats), and told that it will grant him one wish.

He has a vivid imagination, and can see the downsides of each wish he thinks of, which at least puts him ahead of most fictional people who are granted wishes - but it also means that he just wanders along through his life, procrastinating the decision while the deadline he's been given looms closer. He eats (very well; he's not a starving artist), he philosophizes, he paints, he sleeps, he havers, he dithers, he blathers. An old witch turns up a few times and advises him to wish for happiness, but, disgusted by her, he's also repelled by the idea (and worried that she might be the same person as the young witch, who he's fallen for, in the way of young men).

He fails to make a decision, and then the book goes into a series of long conversations which get increasingly nonsensical and self-indulgently pointless, and at that point I gave up on it. I can see it being interesting if you were around the main character's age and still looking for a philosophy of life, though even then, the philosophies of life it presents are diffuse, out-of-date and sometimes surreal. But for me, it wasn't interesting.

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Review: The Problem Club

The Problem Club by Barry Pain
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amusing and different. Club stories were almost as much a staple of English literature as clubs were of London life at one time, though this isn't a club in the Drones Club sense (with its own premises), but more like a supper club that meets each month in the private rooms of a restaurant. The members compete in quirky challenges like "who can steal the most handkerchiefs from other club members?" or "try to get someone to say to you, 'You ought to have been a giraffe'." It bears some similarities to G.K. Chesterton's The Club of Queer Trades .

The format of each story is the same. The month's challenge is announced (as a formal reminder) by the chairman, a rotating office among the twelve members, so each member is chairman once a year. The chairman doesn't compete, but adjudicates who among the other members has won. Most of the club subscription goes into a pool, which is taken by the winner or winners.

The chairman then goes around asking the members whether they have completed the challenge. It's all done on the honour system; these are pukka Englishmen, and while they might not blink at manipulating people (harmlessly) or bending the law a bit to complete the challenges, they would naturally never lie about whether they had won. Most of the entertainment value comes from the oddness of the challenges, the discomfiture of the non-winners and their unsuccessful attempts, and the ingenuity of the winners (though at least one winner is a winner by pure luck). Some people attempt to argue that they have won by a technicality involving the precise wording of the rules, and the chairman adjudicates. Once the prize is awarded (or not, if nobody has won; the prize is then added to the next month's pool), the next month's challenge is announced. The meeting then breaks up, and some members play bridge or otherwise socialise amongst themselves. Within this format, the stories are varied; different people, with different specialty knowledge or skills, stand out in each competition, the challenges are diverse, and the solutions even more so.

If you enjoy heist stories for the ingenuity of the plans and the ability of the characters to manipulate, this may be something you'd enjoy too. It's all good fun, nobody is harmed, and some of the club members set out to be clever and end up looking ridiculous.

Even though I found it amusing rather than hilarious, it was entertaining, and original and different enough that I've placed it in the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list. A lot of what I read is, inevitably, changes rung on old concepts, and this, despite being more than a century old, struck me as fresh and with further potential for development.

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