Review: The Corbin Necklace

The Corbin Necklace by Henry Kitchell Webster
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A family of rich Midwesterners (their grandfather came in and, someone actually says aloud, chased the Indians off a bunch of land and took it) are preparing for a wedding. The grandmother, still alive at an advanced age, is rumoured to be planning to give an heirloom pearl necklace to the young bride as a wedding gift. The young woman doesn't particularly want it, and in fact doesn't particularly want the groom, either, as it turns out, but feels obligated to accept both, for reasons which unfold.

There's a big coincidence at the heart of the plot, but since it's more to set things up than to resolve them I don't mind as much as I otherwise would. The pearl necklace is a classic McGuffin, and both it and its less-valuable duplicate disappear, reappear, and are generally complication and suspicion generators throughout.

The bride's name is Judy, and her younger brother is consequently known to one and all as Punch, though he's officially John Corbin III. He's a clever, loyal and courageous 13-year-old, who takes his responsibilities seriously, and considers preventing the theft of the necklace to be one of them. He's effective, too.

The family's neighbour, never named, is the narrator, mostly an observer of the action because of a broken leg, though he does facilitate a few conversations. There's an older man who seems to have a past as some sort of law enforcement agent, who takes effective action as well, and is one of those characters that you'd like to hear more stories about. (As far as I know, though, there were not any.)

The groom is, without being malicious or villainous, still thoroughly despicable in his adherence to his background's assumptions about what he's owed and who it's right to inconvenience so that he gets it. It's a relief to everyone when he finally departs. Meanwhile, the tyrannical old lady is more flexible and fair-minded than you might expect.

It's a genial mystery in which there are no murders and no police, and all of the characters are distinct, believable, and the possessors of some depth. The author was a prolific producer of fiction, who said once that to make a living from fiction you had to churn out a lot of possibly inferior stuff, but this is decent, by the standards of the time and of today.

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Review: The Man in the Brown Suit

The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This started out very promising. The two narrators have strong voices (different ones from each other), and the female narrator, Anne, seemed strong and sensible. In a setup reminiscent of Wilhelmina in London , she is the daughter of a long-deceased mother and a vague father who dies, leaving mostly debts, so she must make her own way in the world. Her way of doing so is to turn amateur detective, having come across a clue to a mystery but being unable to make the police take her seriously. This sends her off on a boat to South Africa, and on the boat she meets various people: a kind older woman, the other narrator (an MP), the MP's two secretaries, a clergyman/missionary, and Colonel Race, who's rumoured to work for the Secret Service.

We know from the prologue that there's a sinister mastermind called "the Colonel," who doesn't usually get his hands dirty, but gives criminal tasks to other people to do (fairly standard stuff, see, for example, Kate Plus Ten by Edgar Wallace). A wrinkle with this mastermind, though, is that he also always finds someone to frame for the crime. A supposedly Russian dancer who isn't actually Russian was one of his catspaws, and she has evidence of one of the frame-ups, and is planning to extort the Colonel.

Well, it's obvious what happens next. And thus kicks off the mystery, which Anne has stumbled into by happening to be in the right place at the right time - but she then takes action, which, while headstrong, isn't completely stupid.

What is completely stupid is that she gets decoyed into danger not once, but twice, with the same simple trick (like that idiot in Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery ). She does bravely go deliberately into danger again by pretending to fall for it a third time (though the text says it's the second time, it's the third), after (view spoiler)[surviving the second incident by complete lucky chance and, by complete coincidence, connecting back up with her love interest, who she's seen for about 10 minutes at this point but is totally in love with. It's only the fact that they do spend some time together getting to know each other that saves it from my "thin-romance" tag, though, like Anne herself, it doesn't really deserve its narrow escape (hide spoiler)].

The identity of "the Colonel" was a complete surprise to me, and something of a cheat. (view spoiler)[We have had him as a viewpoint character, and he has misled us deliberately in his diary. Also, nobody ever even raises the question of whether Colonel Race might possibly be "the Colonel," even though that is literally his rank. (hide spoiler)]

So it's a mixed bag. On the one hand, Anne has an appealing voice and takes action as a protagonist. On the other hand, she makes some outstandingly stupid choices, has to be rescued not just by her love interest but by the author's heavy Hand of Fate, is the kind of female protagonist that all the men want, falls in love with someone she's barely met, and gives a speech about how women want to be dominated by men. On balance, it's... not great, with a lot of wasted potential. I'm dropping it down to three stars - not a recommendation - although it was teetering on the border of slipping into the lowest tier of my annual recommendation list.

This is an early Christie, and early Christie was not that great. It's a lesson to all of us that even the most admired authors usually wrote a few stinkers, or at least books that weren't even close to their later standards, at the start of their careers.

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Review: The Clue of the Twisted Candle

The Clue of the Twisted Candle by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A writer of clever mysteries is manipulated by someone he believes to be a friend into shooting another man dead accidentally. His wealthy, influential "friend" has done this because he once wanted the woman who is now the writer's wife, and she turned him down.

The writer's actual friend, a Scotland Yard assistant commissioner, tries to prove his innocence. But later, the false friend is murdered in what appears to be a locked room...

A strong classic mystery from Edgar Wallace. Sure, I guessed a couple of the twists, though not how the locked-room murder was achieved. The villain isn't a cheap, cartoonish stock villain; he's well characterized, and believably and thoroughly villainous. (Though to make him so thoroughly awful, Wallace has to make him not English.)

The romance is a bit thin, as they often are in Edgar Wallace, and the love interest is far too young for the detective, but she is resourceful and brave and intelligent, so there's that.

It's been eccentrically edited by someone who thinks that an exclamation mark is a good thing to end a question with, rather than a question mark, and does this constantly. They were also weak on commas after subordinate clauses. I'm blaming an unknown editor, because Wallace himself reputedly rarely did any editing on his books, and I've not seen these quirks in other books of his I've read either.

Wallace's books are all thriller, no filler, and there's plenty to keep you glued to the page.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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