Review: The Roman Hat Mystery

The Roman Hat Mystery by Ellery Queen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Crisp, efficient prose chronicles the crisp, efficient police procedure of Richard Queen, somewhat implausibly assisted by his amateur-detective son Ellery, who's a novelist, but appears to be able to take as much time as he likes to assist his father (what I call a "superhero job"). Ellery supplies the brilliance his dogged father lacks. As with "Nicholas Carter," the detective's name is the same as the author's pseudonym (two authors, in this case), but the narration is not first person.

The mystery is suitably intriguing. A man has been murdered in a theatre during a performance. Someone has carefully engineered, in what would normally be a packed house, that there was nobody sitting next to or in front of him, and he was in the back row. Nobody saw anyone come near him, at least that they are willing to admit. And, for no obvious reason, his custom top hat is missing - not in the possession of any other patron of the theatre, not anywhere to be found in an exhaustive search.

The victim is a dodgy lawyer suspected of being a mastermind of organized crime, but neither his home nor his office yields clear documentary evidence. He had a large income, but a small bank account. And, to add an extra layer of mystery, in the corpse's pocket is the purse of a wealthy man's socialite daughter, also in attendance at the play, but seated nowhere near him.

There are diagrams of the crime scene, reproductions of key bits of evidence, and a list of the characters to help you figure out the crime for yourself. I didn't, and while technically everything was there for one to do so, the detectives did have access to information hidden from the reader. It's clever, though, and well told, and I can see why the series was so popular. I have the second one from Project Gutenberg, and will look for more through my library.

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Review: The Wheel O' Fortune

The Wheel O' Fortune by Louis Tracy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A full-throated pulp adventure with all the hallmarks.

The hero, Richard Royson, is the heir presumptive to a baronetcy, though he is at odds with the current baronet, his uncle, and seems unlikely to inherit the wealthy estate along with the title. He is also out of work, having given a well-deserved thumping to the son of his employer for sexually harassing and/or assaulting a young woman in their employ. When he happens to be in the right place at the right time to stop a pair of bolting carriage horses and so save Irene, a beautiful young heiress, Irene's companion at the incident, a dodgy-seeming Austrian baron, gives him a job on a forthcoming expedition, funded by the heiress's grandfather.

The expedition's goal is to find some treasure cached by a Roman legion who had marched from Egypt to Saba (biblical Sheba) and looted it there, only to be ambushed by Nubians on their way back to the Nile and slaughtered to the last man - except for a Greek merchant, who managed to escape and write a papyrus giving the treasure's location. This document is now in the possession of the Austrian baron.

The expedition's funder is more interested in the archaeology than in the (to him, dubious) tale of treasure, to his credit, but he is the kind of person who will push on obsessively past obstacles - such as the fact that the location is in territory controlled by Italy, and an Italian enemy of the Austrian has convinced the Italian authorities to forbid the expedition to land anywhere other than a recognized port in their territory.

The hero is supposedly descended from Richard the Lionheart, and, like him, is larger than other men and a fierce fighter; there's a bit of semi-mystical nonsense about him feeling like he's been in Egypt before because his ancestor and namesake was. He's also a good sailor, which comes in handy on the voyage to Egypt and wins the respect of the comic sea-captain Stump. He's pretty much a standard pulp hero, in fact, able to learn Arabic quickly, fight a dozen men and win, and stay awake for 60 hours straight (involving strenuous desert travel) with no significant ill effects. Of course, he and Irene fall in love, even though he has no money (that he knows of) and she's the sole heiress to millions.

The ill-intentioned get comeuppance, the well-intentioned win rewards, and on the way we're treated to some good action scenes and, unfortunately, one of the most stilted scenes of romantic declaration I've ever read. Not that the dialog is particularly natural in general, but it grows even stiffer, to the point of being unintentionally comical, when Royson is having to talk about his feelings. The author also gives the standard speed of a camel at one point as being two and a half miles an hour, and then at a later point has an estimate of an hour and a half for camels to cover 10 miles.

There are some uncorrected scan issues in the Project Gutenberg edition, unfortunately, which I'll draw their attention to - they usually fix them quickly. Mostly the letter "i" rendered as a capital when it should be lowercase, but some misread letters too. Also, someone or something, either the author, an inept editor, or the scan process (or a combination), has inserted many commas where they should not be, such as before the main verb and after prepositions - the second one is a tic I've never encountered before, and I thought I'd seen most forms of comma abuse.

It's otherwise a solid pulp adventure, not one of the greats, but enjoyable, and the inevitable racism that comes with British people encountering Arabs and black Africans is kept to a low level for the time. Irene is appropriately intrepid, Royson is a decent, honourable man as well as a force of nature, and Captain Stump is amusing.

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Review: The hand of power

The hand of power by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a pulp novel that has everything. A secret society! A beautiful actress! Her wicked guardian! Her mysterious origins! A gentlemanly burglar! Disguises! Murder in the street! Kidnapping! Piracy! True Love!

Of course, every character is linked to every other by a chain of coincidence as thick as your wrist, and a key plot point hinges on a Convenient Eavesdrop, because the gentleman burglar happens to lodge with the mother of the other actress (the fake-French awful one), who has been recruited as a patsy in one of the schemes of the wicked guardian (who, in a separate plot thread, just happened to be passing when the head of the secret society fell ill), and the mother also is possibly the only person who knows the true origins of the first actress (the heroine), and happens to be telling her daughter all about it when the burglar overhears, and since he happens to know the people who are working in the heroine's interests and against her wicked guardian, he tells them. It's a big ball of yarn, after the cat has got at it.

If you can suspend disbelief hard enough, though, it's one of Wallace's typical gripping pulp thrillers. It's not clear for a long time what the heck is up with the guardian and the secret society and the heroine and the guardian's mysterious requirement for her to sit in a shop window writing at a desk, with a single rose in a jade vase, or for that matter why the burglar is involving himself. But the author tells it in a way that makes you want to keep reading and find out.

There's plenty of action, especially in the second half, and even a bit of high technology (for the time) - a listening device inserted into the villain's chimney. The characters are more or less stock, though the Scotland Yard inspector is from the records office and has never arrested anyone, which makes him different. There's a highly principled former accountant who is now, oddly, running a PR agency, which I would have thought was the opposite of something a highly principled former accountant would be good at. Perhaps he isn't.

The mastermind turns out to be someone I didn't suspect for a moment, and the hero certainly works for his happy ending, taking plenty of daring action. It would film well, like a lot of Wallace books (he was the most filmed author of the 20th century, and may still hold the record), and the film would be a rip-roaring thriller. Supposedly the 1968 German film Im Banne des Unheimlichen is based on it, but the plot and characters are completely different.

One of the best Wallace books I've read for action and suspense, despite the heavy reliance on coincidence to pull the plot and cast together.

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Review: Cynthia's Chauffeur

Cynthia's Chauffeur by Louis Tracy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the years before World War I, while P.G. Wodehouse was barely moving beyond school stories, this romantic comedy appeared, involving members of the British and American upper classes, false identity, disapproving elders, questions of finance in the context of marriage, rapid romance, and the British countryside, all elements the master was later to adopt as part of his standard fit-out.

Cynthia is the daughter of an American railroad tycoon. When George, Viscount Medenham, only son and heir of the Earl of Fairholme, comes across an old Boer War comrade whose car has broken down, meaning he can't fulfil his contract to drive Cynthia on a tour of the South-West of England, Medenham volunteers to help his old friend out by substituting for him until the car can be fixed. He little knows that he will fall in love with Cynthia almost immediately - and be unable to speak up, since he's claimed to be merely a chauffeur.

On their journeys to see lovingly described landscapes and landmarks, accompanied by Cynthia's scheming chaperone, who wants to fix her up with an impoverished French count, their relationship blossoms, the count is vexed, the chaperone panicked, both fathers get in a taking because their precious child has fallen into the hands of (they each believe) a schemer, and the unfortunate servants (including Medenham's own chauffeur) are torn between duties.

It doesn't rise to the level of farce later perfected by Wodehouse, but on the other hand, the romance is a lot less ramshackle and better developed than he typically achieved, too; for Wodehouse, romance is usually a plot complication rather than a plot. I saw the attractive qualities in the pair, and the shared delights in history and beauty that drew them together, and believed in their love, even though it progressed so quickly.

There are dramatic and adventurous moments in the book too, but they're not pushed so far as to become implausible, though the final crisis is a bit over the top.

I was disappointed with the same author's Karl Grier , but not with this one. It's not one of the all-time greats, but it's a sound, solid rom-com with adventure and travelogue thrown in.

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Review: A Husband by Proxy

A Husband by Proxy by Jack Steele
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not written in the hard-boiled noir style, but very much employing noir tropes. It opens with an underemployed "criminologist" (he doesn't call himself a detective, but is totally a detective) in his New York office with his name on the glass of the door, and a tall, beautiful woman coming in to hire him for something dubious. He goes on to be trailed by mysterious people, beaten up and nearly killed, while running hither and yon after clues.

There's a bit of a twist, though. The woman is hiring him to pretend to be her husband, something she needs so she can inherit under the terms of her uncle's will. By the coincidence that was such an important part of most plots at this period, after she leaves he gets another job - two in one day after a long dry period - to do an investigation for an insurance company into the death of a man who, as it turns out, is the woman's uncle from whom she is set to inherit. This places him in a conflict-of-interest situation, particularly since (on almost no acquaintance and not knowing key facts about her) he has fallen in love with her, and it looks suspiciously like she could be involved in the death.

I suspect this kind of "I trust her for no reason except that a wonderful girl like her could never" plot was being parodied by Edgar Wallace in The Angel of Terror , in which almost nobody believes that the villainess is a villainess because she looks so sweet and innocent. It's a trope that I've come across a few times in the literature of the period. Of course, people would also trust men they met for similar reasons; they belonged to a class that was supposed to have a highly developed "code," and showed all the signifiers, so of course they were trusted without further inquiry.

Apart from this rather stupid trope and the general thinness of the romance, and the inevitable coincidences and bits of good luck (alongside protagonist agency, at least), it's a good detective story, with a well-judged mix of action and investigation, and a personal stake for the investigator.

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Review: The Girl and The Bill An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure

The Girl and The Bill An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure by Bannister Merwin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This one relies heavily on coincidence.

"There is a lady, sweet and kind,
Was never face so pleased my mind,
I did but see her passing by
And yet I love her till I die."

The protagonist of this book doesn't quote that old song, but he might as well. It's one of those scenarios where he's never seriously been interested in any woman before, but he sees one in the street by chance and is instantly smitten. Then he meets her again, also by chance, and helps her change a tyre. And then she turns up at his apartment in pursuit of the "bill" of the title, a $5 note which has directions written on it for retrieving something important to her, which has come into his possession by... complete random chance. He then engages in multiple adventures on her behalf, even though she won't tell him her name yet (or what the papers are that she's trying to get back), because he's fallen in love with her and trusts her implicitly. Besides, the other people trying to get the McGuffin are nasty foreigners, and she's of his race, nationality, and class, so obviously he sides with her, quite apart from the instalove.

The adventure bits are fine. It's just that the hero, despite being a lawyer by profession, is a lot braver than he is smart, and a good deal of the plot that isn't driven by coincidence is driven by him being an idiot, though he does have his effective moments too.

We never do learn the name of the girl. He addresses her as Girl.

I picked it up because of an original publisher's advertisement in the back of another old book I read from Project Gutenberg. That book ( Cynthia's Chauffeur ) was better than this one.

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Review: Second Chance Circus

Second Chance Circus by Ryan Tang
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The worldbuilding on this one isn't so much weak (the usual issue with cozy) as it is incoherent.

In a barony which seems much larger than a barony would typically be, there are minor nobles below the rank of baron (normally the lowest rank of noble). It's populated with people who have names drawn from all over Europe, and the cities are similarly random in their naming, one sounding English, another Italian, and a third completely made up. Yes, it's clearly a secondary world, but my usual assumption is that this kind of mess originates from not thinking things through or not knowing much about the real-world originals, rather than from being creative.

There's a great deal of anachronism, which I think is supposed to be humourous; for me, it fell flat if that was the intention, as did the fact that the professors at the university have surnames which are the names of fonts (Baskerville, Roman and Arial).

The editing is also messy. There are quite a few words that are legitimate words that spellcheck will recognize, but are absolutely not the word the author obviously meant to type, or sometimes just not the right word for what he's talking about. It's particularly noticeable that he doesn't know what stirrups are; he uses the word for both reins and cart harness. He also seems to think that bunches of grapes are called "bushels". Partway through, we start to get extra commas between adjectives that shouldn't have them, and most (but not all) of the time, when a plural noun is made possessive, the apostrophe is in the wrong place, before rather than after the "s". Some creatures go from "he" to "it" or from plural to singular in the course of a paragraph. There are a lot of duplicated words and missing words, and occasionally words in the wrong order in a sentence. It's scruffy.

The story and characters are original, at least, not just made from box mix. The plot doesn't have a lot of urgency until near the end, and the characters don't have a great deal of depth, although they aren't just their role plus their archetype; they each have something unusual about them, which saves the book from being completely bland. The maid (who is more of an equal to the protagonist than a servant) is a skeptic, studying science by correspondence at university. The protagonist is a powerful necromancer with a good heart and a lack of self-confidence. The sidekick is an immortal caveman with an excess of self-confidence. Each character has something about them that you wouldn't expect, but they don't have any complexity beyond that, and there's no attempt to preserve a realistic point of view; the completely uneducated caveman apparently knows about turning things in to your professor for a grade, for example. Everyone always felt like a character in a book, and quite a simple book, rather than a real person.

I often say of would-be humorous fantasy that it needs to work as a story even if the humour fails. Since the humour in this one did fail completely and utterly for me, did the story work? It did, but I thought it was mediocre for most of its length. The characters were somewhat interesting, and the concept (which is what got me to pick it up) had potential, but the execution just wasn't at the level I'd hoped for, especially in the worldbuilding and the editing. I did put it down at one point to read something else, and ended up coming back to it, which says something, and I did finish it, and a tense climax that pulled together a few previously-set-up elements saved it from two stars. It's OK, but it lacks polish and depth.

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