Review: As A Thief In The Night

As A Thief In The Night by R. Austin Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Despite being a relatively late entry in the Dr Thorndyke series, this is one of the half-dozen or so available on Project Gutenberg (at time of review), which is where I picked it up. There isn't a lot of inter-book continuity to worry about with this series, so skipping over a few isn't a problem.

Compared to the earlier books, this is a more human and humane story, where we feel the emotional impact of the murders more than the cleverness of the intellectual problem. As often with Freeman's books, I did figure out the method of the murder early on, because the author kept dropping big hints about it, though it took me a lot longer to work out the murderer - partly because the detective, Thorndyke, has access to facts not made available to the reader until he explains them at the end. Not everything is fully covered in his explanation; we get the means and the motive, but there are some minor details left unexplained. (view spoiler)[Where did the murderer obtain the poison? Where did they hide the candle-mould when the police were searching? (hide spoiler)]

It's told from the point of view of a new character, a lawyer who knows Thorndyke and asks him to investigate the death by poisoning of the husband of his old friend and almost-sister, in order to lift the cloud of suspicion hanging over not only his friend but the whole household. He has a clear conflict of interest, and several times deliberately withholds information from Thorndyke because it points to one or another of his friends, but Thorndyke, with his typical approach of not telling anyone anything while he investigates and seeing through obfuscation, figures it out anyway.

Thorndyke shows genuine sympathy and consideration for his friend throughout, which is much more appealing to me than his chaffing, snobbish persona in the early books. The book came out in 1928, more than 20 years after the first book, so it's good to see that the author was growing in range and not just sticking with a successful formula. By that time, Dorothy L. Sayers had published several of her Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, and I like to think that Freeman was influenced by that sympathetic and considerate detective; I know she read his books (Lord Peter mentions them at one point), and it's likely he read hers too.

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Review: Have His Carcase

Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A solid and intriguing mystery, rife with clues, suspects and alibis and equipped both with a mysterious cypher and an ingenious solution. It progresses the Lord Peter/Harriet Vane relationship introduced in Strong Poison , in the sense that Lord Peter persists (for a while; he eventually gives it up) in asking her to marry him, to a degree that we would potentially consider sexual harassment today, and she consistently turns him down like a sheet, but does have a few thoughts that are favourable towards him.

In the coincidental manner typical of a cosy mystery, Harriet happens to be in an otherwise deserted coastal spot and to discover a body of a young man with his throat cut, on a rock which is going to be inundated at high tide. She takes photographs and a few portable clues, but isn't strong enough to move him to higher ground, so for most of the book the actual body is missing. For various reasons, they're able to trace the movements of multiple people quite accurately, but everyone who has motive also has a solid alibi for the presumed time of death (based on the state of the victim's blood at the time of Harriet's discovery). The young man was a refugee from the Russian Revolution as a child, and is now a dancer and gigolo at a small resort town; he was engaged to a well-off lady who tries to make out she's younger than she is, who was one of the ladies he regularly danced with. She's convinced that his stories of being a Russian prince are true, and that he's been murdered by Bolsheviks, but the evidence is far from conclusive that he was murdered at all, rather than committing suicide.

In contrast to earlier books, where Lord Peter doesn't participate in other characters' prejudice and slurs against Jews and black people, in this book he casually uses the word "dago" in dialogue with Harriet, which I found disappointing. Peter is still admirably clever in this book, but he's not so admirable in his personal behaviour as was the case in some earlier books, and this influenced my rating downwards, dropping it into the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list. In general, it's more conventional (for the time) in its outlook and less insightful into the human condition than others in the series.

The New English Library edition, which I have, is sloppily typeset, especially towards the end. Not only are there more than the average number of typographical errors, but in one chapter there are at least three places where entire lines of text have not been set.

It's complex, clever, and well worth reading, though not, in my opinion, the best of the series so far.

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Review: Dorothy L. Sayers: The Complete Stories

Dorothy L. Sayers: The Complete Stories by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The early stories, in particular, tend to be quite linear; they're the brief working out of an idea rather than a fully fleshed-out story, like the novels. As the collection goes on, they get stronger, and introduce more of what Sayers did best: all the parts that weren't the mystery, like the quirks of the characters and the description of the milieu. The later ones, especially those with one-off characters, often build up a powerful emotional atmosphere, only to bring in a twist at the end, revealing that the viewpoint character and the reader have both been working on false assumptions.

There are three groups, each (I think) presented chronologically within the group. The first is Sayers' most famous character, Lord Peter Wimsey, at various times of his life; he's single for most of them, but there are several where he's married. One of them involves the birth of his first child, and that's more interesting than the actual mystery (which I guessed, uncharacteristically); another involves that child at the age of six, with two younger brothers, and barely any mystery at all. They vary in quality and interest. The best of them are as good as a chapter from one of the novels.

The second group involves the unlikely amateur detective Montague Egg, who's a commercial traveller for a wines and spirits firm. The first story uses his expert knowledge in detecting the criminal; in later stories, he's (sometimes to an unlikely degree) involved in various other cases that happen to occur in his vicinity, in the usual crime-ridden Britain of a cosy detective. He's constantly quoting the little rhyming maxims of the Salesman's Handbook, treats his occupation as a calling, and is always ready to lend a hand to a fellow human being; he is, in fact, a good Egg. His powers of observation and deduction are a less showy version of Sherlock Holmes's. Particularly with the last few stories, he tends to offer a plausible explanation for the events and a likely suspect, and then the story stops without going through the tedious business of confirming it.

The third group are the one-offs, the stories featuring neither Wimsey nor Egg; none of their characters recur between stories, either. Here we see Sayers doing another thing she does well: building psychological tension, relieved at the end with a twist or, sometimes, a catharsis. Sometimes the viewpoint characters are witnesses, sometimes they're involved in the commission of the crime, sometimes they're even potential victims. Short stories allow an author to explore ideas that they're not sure will work at full length, and this is part of what Sayers is doing here, freed, also, from the constraints of working with established characters.

At their weakest, the stories in this volume tell too much rather than showing, deal with mostly trivial matters, end abruptly, and are forgettable. But there are plenty of strong stories too, and some well-drawn characters and clever situations. I personally felt that the Wimsey stories are mainly for completists; the Egg stories are worth reading for themselves; and the one-off stories are, at their best, better than either.

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Review: Strong Poison: A Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery

Strong Poison: A Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Upholding the highest standards in ebook production" - HarperCollins, nobody is fooled. You scanned a print book that probably had a number of typesetting errors already, and did your usual poor job of taking out the resulting OCR glitches. HC is consistently the worst of the major publishers when it comes to copy editing, and I don't recommend getting the HarperPerennial ebook edition if you have a choice (I didn't, since I got it from my library).

Setting that aside, this is a solid but, to me, not stellar entry in the series. In art as in life, Sayers was a paradoxical combination of High Church Anglicanism with a bohemian attitude to sexual morality, and we see both sides here. The High Church side comes in the form of the wonderful character of Miss Climpson, with her emphatic and digressive manner of speaking and writing, a completely different kind of digression from Lord Peter's mother, by the way, though they are both highly capable women under the apparent wooliness, and after all, isn't that what counts? Miss Climpson, who Lord Peter employs as an inquiry agent of the type that can go places and ask questions that a man couldn't, fakes several seances in order to get some key information, and that whole part of the book is, for me, the most delightful.

Representing the bohemian side is Harriet Vane. She, after some resistance, had yielded to the persuasions of her lover and gone to live with him without marrying him first, and was then furious when, after a while, he offered her marriage "as a kind of good-conduct prize". She then left him. On the night that he went to her seeking reconciliation, he fell seriously ill, and subsequently died, from arsenic poisoning - something she had been researching for one of her detective novels. There were also some coincidences between when she had bought poison under false names (for purposes of research) and when he had previously fallen ill with what was thought to be his old gastric trouble. These coincidences of date are never fully explained, and may just be coincidences, since they come about a month or so apart. She is now on trial, accused of his murder. Fortunately, Miss Climpson is on the jury, and is convinced she didn't do it, a conclusion with which Lord Peter agrees - and Lord Peter is (suddenly, and not completely convincingly) in love with her and determined to prove her innocence.

He has a tough job ahead of him, and a limited time to do it in. Initially, a lot of blind alleys and red herrings present themselves. But between Miss Climpson and another middle-aged lady who gets a job as a typist at the office of Wimsey's chief suspect, they do manage to find the evidence they're looking for, and it turns out the crime was carefully planned and boldly executed in a surprising way.

Sayers thought that the question of how a murder had been done was often more interesting than who had done it, and that's what we get here, though it isn't quite the "reverse mystery" pioneered by R. Austin Freeman. And indeed, the journey is enjoyable, and while we don't get quite the level of character development in Lord Peter that we've seen in earlier books, despite the powerful influence of love on his psyche, Miss Climpson more than makes up for that as far as I'm concerned.

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Review: The House Without a Key

The House Without a Key by Earl Derr Biggers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Charlie Chan, who makes his first appearance in this book, is a controversial figure. Some regard him as a pioneering positive representation of an Asian character in an age where the "Yellow Peril" was a more dominant trope, while others consider him an instance of a "model minority". Most of the discussion centres on the films, which were better known than the books, but the book series came first and set the tone.

I'm not qualified to weigh in on that debate, but I can tell you that this book is notably racist, even if Chan is seen as capable and treated with respect and friendship by the actual main character (a Boston Brahmin).

Yes, he's a secondary character in the first book in his own series, and doesn't arrive until a quarter of the way in. The viewpoint mainly follows John Quincy Winterslip, a 29-year-old Bostonian from a proud old family (referred to repeatedly in narration as "the boy" and almost always addressed by both his forenames), who has come to Hawaii on a mission from the family: to get his Aunt Minerva, who has been lingering there for some time, to come home. There are two different "strains" in the Winterslips, the Puritan and the "gypsy," and at first John Quincy seems all Puritan; but as the tropical setting works on him, he discovers that he isn't just the buttoned-up fellow that everyone thinks he is, and as he has various adventures connected with the case, he discovers that the "gypsy" strain is present in him after all.

The murder being investigated is of John Quincy's cousin Dan, a wealthy man who made his money by dark means (including, it turns out, "blackbirding," which is another word for slave trading, back in the 1880s, which is 30 years prior to the book's events). There are plenty of people with motives to kill him, but one clue after another leads to a dead end. The final resolution comes with a bit of help from coincidence; John Quincy happens to spot a watch that they've been looking for as a key clue on the wrist of the driver of a cab that he's being kidnapped into, which is entirely coincidental as it turns out, and this, along with some other information that is available to the characters but not yet to the reader, leads to a break in the case. (The fact that the watch was a clue at all is also down to a coincidence.)

So the resolution is a little bit of a cheat, although the process of chasing down the clues is interesting, varied, and an enjoyable ride. The evocation of Hawaii shortly before World War I - not yet a US state, not long a US territory, not yet thought of as part of America even by some Americans who know it technically is - is strong and sometimes lyrical, and the character arc of John Quincy, which is honestly the main plot to which the mystery forms almost a background, is well handled. All these aspects get the book four stars from me, though that's dropped firmly down to the Bronze tier of my annual list by the racism.

As well as the racism of the characters ("But he's a Chinaman!" Aunt Minerva exclaims, when told that Chan will be investigating), the narrative itself has racist undertones: the "Jap" servant (always called that), the "half-savage" native Hawaiian "member of a vanishing race," and the three different varieties of broken English that they and Chan speak, for example. People of different races getting on the trolley that John Quincy rides between Waikiki and Honolulu are referred to as "immigration problems". Yes, sure, the book was "of its time," blah blah. There are other books of the time that aren't this racist, and this one didn't need to be in order to do the things it does well. It could have represented the racism of the time without participating in it, but it did not.

If you can set that aside - and I fully understand if you can't - it has other strengths which make it an interesting read.

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Review: Wormwood Abbey

Wormwood Abbey by Christina Baehr
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Unlike almost every other book I've got via Bookbub in the past couple of years, this one is by an author who knows how to use basic writing mechanics. She also seems reasonably well read in English literature and has a good grasp on how the world of 1899 worked. There are a couple of Americanisms ("someplace" and "gotten"), but I didn't spot any anachronisms, unless you count the main character not questioning the story that a pack of wolves killed her uncle and cousin. The character, as she's presented, ought to have known that there had been no wolves in England for about 400 years at this point (unless this is an alternative enough world that that isn't true, but it seems, apart from the dragons, to be pretty similar to ours).

She's a clergyman's daughter, and she and her parents are genuinely devout; Christianity is woven into their lives, not just as something they observe outwardly, but in how they think and act. For me, it didn't come across as preachy, but readers who are particularly averse to Christian content may find it's not for them.

Edith, the main character and first-person narrator, goes with her father, stepmother and younger brother to a house in Yorkshire that has been in her father's family for centuries. He was estranged from his family, but his brother and nephew have died, meaning he has inherited it under an entail. Living there are his three nieces, the eldest of whom is about Edith's age (late teens to early twenties). He wants to break the entail, sell up, and settle the proceeds on the nieces, since his living from the church is adequate for his family's needs and he's a decent man. But what he and Edith don't initially realize is that the family has an ancient responsibility connected to a mystery in the area. (It's dragons. That's not really a spoiler, because it's obvious from early on, not least from the names: their surname is Worms, the house is Wormwood Abbey, the locality is called Ormdale, and their neighbour is Mr Drake.)

The story consists of Edith and her cousin Gwendolyn slowly coming to the point where Gwendolyn trusts Edith enough to confide in her about the secret, with side plots about a treasure-hunting lawyer (thoroughly objectionable), a pet salamander, and Edith's secret occupation as a writer of sensational mystery stories - of which Gwendolyn, who doesn't know the secret of her authorship, is a fan. I felt that the ending came abruptly, though it wasn't a cliffhanger; once the mystery had been revealed to everyone, the book stopped. Still, it is Book 1 of a series, so it's mostly setup.

The writing was competent, and the character of Edith, and her interactions with her family, showed some depth and dimension. Another reviewer has described her as inconsistent, but I think the different ways she responded to different situations through the book show a rounded character, who's confident in some circumstances and not in others. She's clever, principled, and capable, which is the kind of character I like to follow. There are currently three more books, and I've put the next one on my wishlist.

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Review: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sayers continues to develop as a writer, and Lord Peter as a character, in this fourth novel in the series.

The setup is a strong start. A very elderly general is found dead in his customary chair at the Bellona Club, Lord Peter's club, much frequented by military and ex-military gentlemen. Because he typically slept all day in that chair, nobody is quite sure when he died, which is important, because his sister also died either just before or just after him.

If she died just before him, his two grandsons, who are members of the club, inherit the bulk of her large fortune. But if she died just after him, her long-time companion, a distant relative the old lady took in, gets the lion's share instead.

Lord Peter is asked to investigate on behalf of the grandsons, who are friends of his. But in the course of his investigation, he has to deal with a conflict between the interests of justice and what is expected of someone in their "set."

The character of Lord Peter, by this time, is taking on some depth and complexity. The frivolous upper-class twit persona that was almost his whole character in the first book is very much a mask now, which he puts on occasionally when it suits him. When he's acting naturally, he's unfailingly respectful, empathetic, and quietly charming to the people around him, regardless of who they are, unless they start being narrow-minded or harming others. This is not how someone like him is expected to act, and he's starting to face the dilemma that his emotional training is making him feel bad about doing what his intelligence and sense of principle are telling him is right. He even has a couple of spats with his good friend Inspector Parker in consequence, not to mention being roundly abused by several of his club companions for acting like a damn policeman and not a sahib.

But he perseveres, and his empathy and intuition eventually solve the case and not only prevent a tragedy for an innocent bystander involved unwittingly in a criminal plot, but bring about an unexpected happy ending for a couple of the characters.

The mystery is clever, the unfolding of it engaging, and all of the parts that aren't the mystery make a thoroughly enjoyable story with some emotional weight and intelligence.

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