tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18578327522974806272024-03-12T18:13:44.361-07:00Howdunit?Blog about mystery and crime fictionStefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05000900457511641277noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1857832752297480627.post-87935772843548623982016-08-19T02:59:00.001-07:002016-08-19T02:59:30.206-07:00The Mummy Case (1933) - Dermot Morrah<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Dermot Michael Macgregor Morrah was one of those academics who wrote a detective novel just for fun. Born in 1896, Morrah earned a scholarship in Math at the New College of Oxford in 1914. After participating in the First World War, he changed his path and started dedicating to Modern History. In 1921 he became Prize Fellow of All Souls College and undertook an academic career. Shortly after though, he got married and had to interrupt his researches. From 1928 onwards, Morrah wrote leaders for the Daily Mail and The Times, as well as books about royalty and speeches for members of the Royal Family, including the Queen. As we may guess from the biography, Morrah was a very talented and eclectic man. Unfortunately, he wrote only one detective novel, <i>The Mummy Case</i> (1933), which I found very entertaining and amongst the best academic detective novels I have ever read. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">As someone may expect, the story is set in Oxford, mainly in the fictitious Beaufort College. At the heart of the tale, there is the academic rivalry between two eminent Egyptologists, Peter Benchley and Feodor Bonoff. One night, a dreadful fire occurs in the rooms of Professor Benchley, who has recently purchased from Bonoff an highly valuable mummy. The fire completely destroys his room and only one body is found inside, which is impossible to identify, along with a wristwatch and a set of keys. The University rapidly calls it an accident, and Benchley is named as the charred corpse. Two professors though, Considine and Sargent, are skeptical about this explanation, and start to investigate on their own. If the body is Benchley’s, after all, where is the mummy? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>The Mummy Case</i> is one of those novels clearly belonging to the Golden Age of detective fiction: the tone is lighthearted, the emphasis is always on the intellectual activities of the two sleuths, there is a lot of British humor and a group of well-depicted characters. Morrah reveals a pleasant wit and humor in his dialogues, but he is also capable of coming up with an intriguing plot. The story is filled with clever clues and some good red herrings, and the final explanation is very good as well. The main twist is allegedly guessable, but the (academic) motive of the culprit is wonderfully intellectual and ingenious. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Unfortunately, the narrative rhythm is not always driving: some passages, especially when the two sleuths talk about the case, are too long and wordy (with the exception of chapter 4, where Sargent applies his professional skills to analyze the case, and chapter 9, which is a good example of recapitulation). In the second part, the book starts to flag, but the final two chapters are so amusing that you have to forgive the author.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">As Mike Grost points out, we may find traces of the Realistic School writers, including Richard Austin Freeman (whose <i>The Eye of Osiris</i> (1911) involves mummies and Egyptology). The solution of the story involves the 'breakdown of identity', although not for the purpose of alibi construction.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Ultimately, this is one of my favorite academic detective novels, along with Anthony Boucher’s <i>The Case of the Seven of Calvary</i> (1937). Morrah is much more able than Boucher to convey the atmosphere of a College, with its customs and traditions, its rules and conventions.</span></div>
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Stefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05000900457511641277noreply@blogger.com0Bologna, Italia44.494887 11.34261630000003244.3136765 11.019892800000031 44.6760975 11.665339800000032tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1857832752297480627.post-58561164327008101692016-08-11T03:25:00.006-07:002016-08-13T02:07:21.454-07:00The Howling Beast, 1934 - Noel Vindry<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">More than a year ago, I wished for the publication of a new novel by Noel Vindry, one of greatest French Golden Age writers. At that time, Locked Room International had just published <i>The House That Kills</i>, Vindry’s debut, originally published in France in 1932 and translated by John Pugmire. This is the reason why, a month ago, I hailed enthusiastically the publication of <i>The Howling Beast</i> (1934), originally published as <i>La Bête Hurlante</i>, which is unanimously considered one of the best books of the French writer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Although I enjoyed <i>The House That Kills</i>, it was </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">somewhat contrived and a bit farfetched, at least with regard to the explanation of the second crime. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">On the contrary, <i>The Howling Beast</i> is truly a masterpiece which I strongly recommend. Structurally, it is very different from the typical Anglo-American Golden Age novels: Pierre Herry, wanted for murder, comes cross examining magistrate M. Allou and, after a moment of hesitation, decides to tell him the incredible story in which he is involved. Starting from the very beginning, Herry gives an account of a series of bizarre events which are set in a creepy castle, nearby Versailles, inhabited by Saint-Luce, a cynic and violent big-game hunter. The novel also involves a dangerous menage à trois, a guest disappearing into thin air, eerie creatures howling during the nights, and, of course, an impossible crime. Herry is pretty sure he has already lost his mind: after all, if he is not the murderer, who could have committed it? And, mostly, how?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The story is told through a long dialogue, which emphasizes the concision of Vindry’s style of writing. His prose might seem too simple and sharp, but it is actually very powerful. The author is able to create a subtle but vivid atmosphere of terror, which sets the ground for the account of the two impossible murders, whose explanation is absolutely brilliant. The novel reaches its climax in the final part, so you cannot stop reading and have to turn the pages as quick as you can to realize what really happened. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">As I noted in many French Golden Age novels, the microcosm is way more important than the single characters, which are usually roughly drawn. Here the cast is very tiny, but Vindry is mainly interested in the interaction between the characters and how this can strengthen the tension. A strong point is that although the tale is consciously set in another world — an isolated castle with no contacts with the outside — the story is credible and realistic, and sometimes I even sympathized with the characters.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">If I had to make a comparison with an Anglo-Saxon writer, I would choose Ellery Queen. The sharpness of Vindry’s prose, the tight construction of his plots, as well as the slightly gothic overtones might recall the early Queen of <i>The Egyptian Cross Mystery</i> (1932) and <i>The Lamp of God</i> (1935). </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">I already cannot wait for another Vindry to be translated, but I also hope John Pugmire will be able to publish other French Golden Age novels such as Herbert & Wyl’s <i>La Maison Interdite</i> (1932) and Gaston Boca’s <i>L’Ombre sur le Jardin </i>(1935).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Thanks John!</span></div>
Stefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05000900457511641277noreply@blogger.com0Bologna, Italia44.494887 11.34261630000003244.3136765 11.019892800000031 44.6760975 11.665339800000032tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1857832752297480627.post-59647034501143381252015-07-26T03:49:00.001-07:002015-07-26T03:53:54.857-07:00The Cask, 1920 - Freeman W. Crofts<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">It takes 219 pages before reading the word “humdrum” inside <i>The Cask</i>, the first novel written by Freeman W. Crofts. He did not know that such a word would be his nightmare. It is known that Julian Symons, inside his mystery genre survey <i>Bloody Murder</i> (1972), deemed as “humdrum” the work of some of the most famous British detective writers of the 1920s: alongside Freeman W. Crofts there are J.J. Connington, John Rhode, R.A.J. Walling, Henry Wade and many others. Symons used the term as a way of dismissing British detective writers he saw as dull and tedious, for they were focused more on the construction of the plot rather than on characters. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Symons had probably read a few novels by Crofts, but his judgment influenced many generations of scholars. Only in 2012 Curtis Evans published <i>Masters of the Humdrum Mystery</i>, a very good essay in which he revealed the real value of such authors as novelists: not only they produced fine fair-play mysteries, often well-written and well-planned, but their tales could be read as interesting social documents of the England post-WWI. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Freeman W. Crofts played a major role in the evolution of mystery. Born in 1879, he was an Irish engineer who wrote his first detective novel, <i>The Cask</i>, in 1916, during a long convalescence from illness. The novel appeared in print in 1920 and gained immediately a huge critical and popular success. At this time Crofts had obviously not invented yet Inspector French, but <i>The Cask</i> is considered one of his best novels. Together with Agatha Christie’s masterpiece <i>The Mysterious Affair at Styles</i>, written in 1915 and published in 1920, <i>The Cask</i> launched the Golden Age of detective fiction, usually delimitated between the two World Wars. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">According to the scholars, one the one hand Christie celebrates the Edwardian era, introducing the figure of an eccentric detective, Hercule Poirot, who investigates on a murder at an English country-house; on the other hand, Crofts writes a police-procedural, where three different sleuths (two police-officers and one private detective) investigate on the murder of a woman, whom body has been discovered in a cask. I think this distinction between the two texts is hasty and superficial. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Christie’s novel is the triumph of the eccentric and the bizarre: characters and clues are ambiguous and the logic of surprise rules the whole story. Croft’s approach, on the contrary, is quite the opposite: it is iper-realistic. With Crofts the readers go at school of detection, the real detection, conducted by methodical but fallible experts. The book follows the step-by-step investigation of the three sleuths, which continually find new informations, but at last they are not able to solve completely the mystery. It needs a confession by the murderer to answer all the questions the plot has posed. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The bigger difference between Christie and Crofts concerns the whole point of view about the mystery as a literary genre. Christie creates unusual situations in order to challenge and confound the readers through clues and red herrings. She plays the reader. Crofts has no intention to challenge the readers, he is constantly fair with them (also Christie is fair with readers, but in her own way). The character-drawing is not the strong point of Crofts, but he is very good at evoking the atmosphere of the 1910s (I loved the descriptions of Paris viewed through the eyes of an English-man, with its polite and kind people). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In Christie’s novel there is the unity of time and place and all the events are told through the distorted eyes of Hastings, whereas Crofts in <i>The Cask</i> changes the locations (London, Paris, Brussels) and he modifies continually the narrative point of view. Christie is influenced by Bentley, whereas Crofts follows in the footsteps the work of Richard A. Freeman, adding details and method. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Basically, there is nothing stagey and contrived in Crofts’ novels: his plots are logical and strictly believable and his solutions are always satisfying. We have to track the movements of the characters, talk to witnesses, analyze railway timetables and collect the evidences in order to break an apparently solid alibi. <i>The Cask</i>, indeed, contains the first of what will be a Croft speciality: the alibi plot. A suspect has a bombproof alibi and it seems impossible he has committed the crime, but the solution shows it actually is possible. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>The Cask</i> is neither a whodunit, for there are only two suspects, nor a howdunit (there are not impossible situations). Instead it is a pure novel of detection, accurate, well-written and enjoyable. It is an enormous work but never boring, rich of details and really well-constructed. The plot is ingenious and complex, but Crofts is able to handle it, and at last almost every detail fits solidly and smoothly. Crofts has a flowing prose style, clear and relaxing. The book could appear old-fashion nowadays, and the final chapter is probably rushed, but it is a great work, written when the ingenuity, fortunately, was a good thing.</span></div>
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Stefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05000900457511641277noreply@blogger.com5Bologna, Italia44.494887 11.34261630000003244.494887 11.342616300000032 44.494887 11.342616300000032tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1857832752297480627.post-85713614470409589962015-07-12T03:03:00.002-07:002015-07-12T03:03:57.286-07:00The Red Right Hand, 1945 - Joel Townsley Rogers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Joel Townsley Rogers, from Sedalia (Missouri), was a very prolific American writer: he wrote hundreds of short-stories and novellas for </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">the pulps over several decades (</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">science fiction, air-adventure, western, mystery etc). </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">The majority of his corpus is now almost forgotten, but he wrote at least two or three great novels that should not be ignored. We have to thank Ramble House Books, which has made available many of Rogers' rarest novels.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Alongside <i>The Hanging Rope</i> (1946), an exciting locked-room novella praised by such scholars as Robert Adey and Jack Adrian, the best-known novel of Rogers is <i>The Red Right Hand</i> (1945), which won the Gran Prix de Littérature Policièr in 1950.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">According to the French scholar Roland Lacourbe, <i>The Red Right Hand</i> is “un roman d’un brio éblouissant et l’un des deux ou trois grand chefs-d’œvre incontestables et incontestés de toute la littérature policièr”.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The narrator is Henry N. Riddle Jr., a brain surgeon from New York, who tells the creepy story of a two lovers close to getting married who decide to help an hitchhiker. And they suddenly disappear. Who is “corkscrew”, an evil-looking tramp with short legs and two terrible red eyes? Where is the right hand of Inis St. Erme, the young guy who was supposed to get married with Elinor Darrie? And who really is Henry N. Riddle Jr.?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">From the beginning, this novel is an attack to the nerves of the readers, a breath-taking tour de force in which Rogers shows his talent as storyteller, creating a bizarre and hallucinatory universe where everything seems possible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Rogers combines William Faulkner with John Franklin Bardin and Frederic Brown so as to create a baroque and surreal mix of stream-of-consciousness, torrential prose and flashes of pure terror. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>The Red Right Hand</i> is not a pure detective story, because there are neither the classic element of detection nor a sleuth, but the complex construction of the plot, full of clues and red herrings, is that of the greatest Golden Age novels. It is not an hard-boiled novel, but the mixture of action, violence and rhythm is powerful. It is not a noir, but it is alike disturbing and shocking. It is not a novel of suspense, but throughout the story there is an incessant tension and a blur of unforeseen developments that lurk behind a thick veneer of horror.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In brief, <i>The Red Right Hand</i> is </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">an exciting and clever “game of mirrors”, as well as </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">a great lesson of misdirection.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Influenced by Carr (the impossible situation, the creepy atmosphere) and Christie (the perfidy of the narrator, the ambiguous conclusion), Rogers adds a sense of death and terror which will take your breath away. A masterpiece.</span></div>
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Stefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05000900457511641277noreply@blogger.com0Bologna, Italia44.494887 11.34261630000003244.3136765 11.019892800000031 44.6760975 11.665339800000032tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1857832752297480627.post-25667431159908247542015-06-14T08:10:00.000-07:002015-06-14T08:17:24.162-07:00The Layton Court Mystery, 1925 - Anthony Berkeley<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Anthony Berkeley Cox was one of the great innovators of the Golden Age of detective fiction, an enigmatic and bizarre man who wrote detective stories from 1925 to 1939 under several pen-names, including Francis Iles. <i>The Layton Court Mystery</i>, originally published anonymously in 1925, was written in honor to the father, a great fan of detective fiction. Berkeley wrote it for pure entertainment and he introduced his most famous detective, Roger Sheringham: anti-Semitic, rude, fallible and pretentious, Sheringham was founded on an offensive person that Berkeley once knew, but he shared some characteristics both with his creator and the amateur detective Philip Trent, created by Edmund Bentley in <i>Trent’s Last Case</i> (1913). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">As Berkeley wrote in the dedication:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">"I have tried to make the gentleman who eventually solves the mystery as nearly as possible as he might be expected to do in real life. That is to say, he is very far removed from a sphinx and he does make a mistake or two occasionally. I have never believed very much in those hawk-eyed, tight-lipped gentry who pursue their silent and inexorable way straight to the heart of things without ever once overbalancing or turning aside after false goals." </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Apparently, <i>The Layton Court Mystery</i> is a classic country-house mystery: it takes place in a English country house, a property rented for a week end by the rich and ambiguous Victor Stanworth; there is a group of guests and a murder perpetrated in a locked room. Alec Grierson, a Sheringham’s friend, takes on the role of Watson. Moreover, the detection rules the whole story: Berkeley reports interrogations, researches, discoveries, true and false deductions, physical and psychological clues. Because of these reasons, some parts of the novel appear long-winded, with many useless conversations between Roger and Alec that add nothing to the plot. The story contains funny situations (the wrong deductions, the "dispute" with the bull), but has also many ingenuousness and improbabilities (how could a man kill himself shooting a bullet in his forehead?). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">As yet, the novel seems a simple whodunit, but I think there is more. Berkeley had probably read Bentley’s <i>Trent’s Last Case</i> (1913), Milne’s <i>The Red House Mystery</i> (1922) and MacDonald’s <i>The Rasp</i> (1924), but he did not copy anything: even though the story is not very original, the novel is well-plotted and fair with the reader, who has all clues to solve the mystery. Playing with the rules of the game and creating a detective who is an antithesis of Sherlock Holmes, Berkeley reveals both the qualities and the limits of the “whodunit” frame, and seems undermine (unconsciously?) the “scaffolding” of the classical mystery. The book shows the mastery of Berkeley as a plotter, in which you can see the bones of a revolutionary talent, even if it is far from being a masterpiece. The locked room problem has a disappointing mechanical solution, but the identity of the murder is a real surprise, which discloses the parodic nature of the novel. Especially in 1925 the solution must have been astonishing, and it is certainly the best device of the book. Martin Edwards has brilliantly pointed out that “Berkeley’s knack of coming up with an ingenious mystery solution that proves mistaken was unparalleled, and afforded him endless opportunities to indulge in ironic reflection on the nature of detective work” (<i>Anthony Berkeley's Golden Age Gothic Follies</i>, in <i>Mysteries Unlocked</i>, 2014, p. 102). I subscribe to his claim.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The ploy will be brilliantly modified, some months later, by Agatha Christie in her superb <i>The Murder of Roger Ackroyd</i> (1926).</span></div>
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Stefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05000900457511641277noreply@blogger.com0Bologna, Italia44.494887 11.34261630000003244.3136765 11.019892800000031 44.6760975 11.665339800000032tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1857832752297480627.post-72936848950346445702015-05-31T10:21:00.005-07:002015-05-31T10:21:58.938-07:00A new awareness?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The time for break the rules is ripe. The Golden Age is coming back.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I’m glad to see the recent increasing interest in reprinting forgotten Golden Age mysteries, mostly thanks to the British Library. Among the garbage that we are forced to see every day in the bookcases, the great novels of such authors like Crofts, Farjeon and Bude are finally back in the shelves. But the most important impulse comes from the work of the scholars: Martin Edward’s <i>The Golden Age of Murder</i> (2015) and Curtis Evan’s <i>The Spectrum of English Murder</i> (2015) are two landmarks that readers should not neglect. In their works, Edwards and Evans show that the Golden Age was a richer affair than much of modern mystery scholars would have us believe.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Modern scholars often don’t care about the complexity of the Golden Age period. They have divided this Era in two separated worlds: Hard-Boiled fiction and clue-puzzle mystery. This dichotomy came to be regarded as a sex war: American males on one side, British females on the other. The most part of influent mystery scholars claims that there was neither communication nor link between Hard-Boiled and mystery. They see the mystery as a genre dominated by rules and norms, unable to reach a literary value. This is a very incomplete part of the picture, which masks the strong cross-pollination of mystery during the two World Wars.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The recent studies of such critics as Lucy Worsley or P.D. James didn’t take into account the variety of nuances of the period, and they lost the opportunity to say something new about the Golden Age. <i>Talking About Detective Fiction</i> (2009) by James, for instance, is not as intensively-researched as I expected and I often disagree with her point of view. First of all I don’t find a real sense of being so selective in the history of the genre. There is no space for the great male Golden Age writers, for instance Anthony Boucher or S.S. Van Dine, which had a fundamental role in the evolution of mystery. Ellery Queen is never mentioned, and it is totally unacceptable. Secondly, I think that the idea of the “rules of the game” (those written by Van Dine and Knox) has been totally exaggerated by the scholars in the past, and James seemed having a fixation on Knox’s commandaments. She took them far too literally and I honestly don’t understand why. I recommend reading the superb essay of John Dickson Carr, <i>The Greatest Game in the World </i>(1946), in which he wrote: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">“Those who nail a manifesto to the wall, saying, “The beginner will do this, and must under no circumstances do that”, are in many cases quoting not rules but prejudices. [...] With all due respect and admiration for those who have compiled lists, it would not be difficult to show that they were often giving dubious advice and sometimes talking arrant nonsense”.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Thirdly, in the James’s book there are too many mistakes: for instance, the perpetrator of T<i>he Purloined Letter</i> by Poe is not the most unlikely suspect, and the James’s claim that the detective novel was not intellectually respected until Sayers wrote <i>Gaudy Night</i> (1935) is simply absurd, how Curtis Evans has perfectly revealed in the essay M<i>urder in The Criterion: T.S. Eliot on Detective Fiction </i>(2014).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Many scholars probably think that every Golden Age novel was set in a Country House, where people spoke like Maggie Smith in <i>Downtown Abbey</i>, detectives were snobbish gentlemen and a murder was a little inconvenience. This is nonsense: of course, there were writers for which the novels were simply entertainment, but for many others the reality was totally different. Honestly, though, there is nothing wrong in writing a simple good and well-plotted story, without implied messages. Many crime writers write bad stories nowadays having nothing to say about life, death and people.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">James privileged realism and credibility over ingenuity, but I think these are wrong criterions to analyze a fiction novel, mostly a crime novel. “Realism" is the curtain for those who are not able to write clever stories, and “credibility” has the duty to cover the lack of genius.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Many myths of the Golden Age have been unmasked yet: for instance, in the brilliant Evans’s essay <i>The Amateur Detective Just Won’t Do: Raymond Chandler and British Detective Fiction</i> (2014), he revealed not only that the Hard-Boiled fiction of Raymond Chandler had great affinity with classical mystery, but also that the american writer, despite what he wrote in his <i>The Simple Art of Murder </i>(1950), actually enjoyed the detective fiction of Freeman W. Crofts and Richard A. Freeman. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Yes, there is still a lot to do, but the time is ripe.</span></div>
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Stefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05000900457511641277noreply@blogger.com4Bologna, Italia44.494887 11.34261630000003244.3136765 11.019892800000031 44.6760975 11.665339800000032tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1857832752297480627.post-76439443186809790432015-05-22T06:03:00.001-07:002015-05-23T14:45:51.206-07:00The Third Bullet, 1937 - John Dickson Carr<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>The Third Bullet</i> is one of the most astonishing but undervalued works written by John Dickson Carr. Carr, an american detective writer who published over seventy novels in his superb career, was one of the most important exponents of the Golden Age of detective fiction, as well as the king of the locked room mystery. He introduced an essentially american view into a literary genre dominated by British writers: because of these motives he is almost forgotten by the genre scholars nowadays, with the exception of such critics as Roland Lacourbe, S.T. Joshi, and, obviously, Douglas Greene, who wrote the Carr’s biography in 1995. In a world in which scholars have divided the Golden Age between male American hard-boiled writers and female British writers, there is no space for Carr, who led the British detective novel to an unreachable level of ingenuity and complexity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In 1937, for the first time in his career, Carr decided to follow the 20 rules written by S.S. Van Dine: in <i>The Third Bullet</i> there are no descriptions, no atmosphere nor characterization, but only the exposition of the events. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Mr. Justice Mortlake was murdered in a pavillon, apparently by Gabriel White, a member of a radical society called the Utopians. He wanted the revenge against the Justice who had convicted him to a terrible corporal punishment for a banal steal (or probably </span>because<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> White was in love with Ida, one of the Justice’s daughters). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">When the corpse of the judge was discovered by Inspector Page, White was holding a caliber 38 gun from which one bullet had been fired. But the bullet shot by his gun missed the target and struck the wall behind Mr. Mortlake. In a vase was found another gun, from which one bullet had been recently fired. But the impossibilities were not enough: the post-mortem shows that neither the gun in the vase nor the caliber 38 had fired the fatal bullet. It’s impossible! There is clearly no way that anyone else could have entered and exited, except White. Who did it? Where did the third bullet come from?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The <i>deus ex machina</i> is the Colonel Marquis, described by Carr as “a mental forerunner of Colonel March”, who appeared in nine fantastic short stories signed by Carter Dickson starting from 1938. As Douglas Green points out in the Carr’s biography, “the only similarity between Marquis and March is their name […] Carr based the personality and physical appearance of Colonel March on his friend, the detective story writer John Rhode” (<i>John Dickson Carr: The Man who Explained Miracles</i> p. 225). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In <i>The Third Bullet</i>, Colonel Marquis is capable to explain with pure reason one of the most ingenious impossible crimes devised by the master in the 1930s: the plot is incredibly elaborate, full of psychological and also physical clues. It’s the triumph of impossibilities, as well as a superb challenge to the reader: even though some explanations are very Machiavellian, the final result is brilliant.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The story, written under the Carter Dickson pseudonym, was published in 1937 for a short-lived paperback series called New-at-Ninepence. After this publication, the novella was essentially forgotten. In 1946 Frederic Dannay made arrangements with Carr to print it in the <i>Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine</i>: the text was abridged by about 20 percent and it was printed in the January 1948 issue of the review under the John Dickson Carr name. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Douglas Greene in the biography claimed that Carr not only gave Dannay permission to abridge the story but even begged him to do so! Carr wrote to Dannay: “Look here, don't you think you had better do a lot of cutting in The Third bullet? I haven't seen the story since I wrote it; but I remember being uncomfortably verbose in those days”. (see <i>John Dickson Carr: The Man who Explained Miracles</i>, p. 224).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">For the majority of the critics, the shorter version is not as good as the longer: Barzun & Taylor deemed the shorter version as “ingenious but told without vim” (<i>A Catalogue of Crime</i>, p. 592); S.T. Joshi wrote that Marquis “remains nebulous through-out the work” (<i>John Dickson Carr: A Critical Study</i>, p. 55), and Douglas Greene claimed that Dannay “omitted large chunks of the story, including in several instances entire pages. Character descriptions, detail of the murder site, red herrings, and even some clues to the solution - all disappeared” (<i>Fell and Foul Play</i>, p. 293).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The story is very rare: when Carr decided to reprinted it in 1954, in <i>The Third Bullet and Other Stories</i>, only the shorter version was available. Only in 1991 Douglas Greene published the complete edition in the excellent book <i>Fell and Foul Play</i>. In France the story appeared inside <i>Mystère À Huis Clos</i> (2007), translated by Maurice-Bernard Endrébe. The French scholar Roland Lacourbe defined the story “un essai brillant, confondant d’habileté, et un chef-d’œuvre expérimental” (p. 569).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Needles to say, I subscribe to Lacourbe’s claim.</span></div>
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Stefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05000900457511641277noreply@blogger.com0Bologna, Italia44.494887 11.34261630000003244.3136765 11.019892800000031 44.6760975 11.665339800000032tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1857832752297480627.post-27481730947075507822015-05-11T08:09:00.002-07:002015-05-11T08:26:10.254-07:00The Rasp, 1924 - Philip MacDonald<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Between 1918 and 1926, in these eight years, some of the greatest mystery writers of all time made their first appearance: Agatha Christie, Freeman W. Crofts, Dorothy Sayers, Anthony Berkeley and S.S. Van Dine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In 1924 it was the time for a brilliant, innovative and undervalued master: Philip MacDonald. MacDonald was born in London in 1900 and made his debut* at 24 years with a classic whodunit puzzle, <i>The Rasp</i>, which was influenced by Edmund Bentley (for the setting and the characters), Richard A. Freeman (for the use of clues) and Freeman W. Crofts (for the importance of alibis). Some elements remind me of <i>The Red House Mystery</i> (1922) by Alan A. Milne, a classic country house mystery which was the model for many further English detective novels.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>The Rasp</i> is far from being a masterpiece, but it is a good first novel, with some interesting and clever elements. It is the first appearance of Colonel Gethryn, special correspondent for a London newspaper, «The Owl». He is very similar to Philip Trent, the protagonist of <i>Trent’s Last Case</i> (1913), but we can also find traces of Sherlock Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey, the detective created by Dorothy Sayers. First of all, the Colonel falls in love with Lucia, an enigmatic girl, like Trent did, but her innocence, unlike Evelyn from Bentley’s novel, is sure from the beginning of the story. Secondly, Gethryn is a depressed man, like Holmes, always in crisis when he doesn’t have any mysteries to solve. Thirdly, the Colonel has some features of Lord Peter Wismey: he is an artist, but also a mathematician, strong, smart and confident. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The love story between Laura and Gethryn through the story has a melodramatic tone, and this is one of the reasons why currently the novel appears a little old-fashioned. Although MacDonald is able to handle the whodunit elements (clues, detection and interrogations), the characters appear little defined and some explanations are absurd. The solution is logic, but the murderer is guessable and, as Nick Fuller says, «his resulting descent into madness [is] unconvincingly melodramatic». Gethryn, by the way, destroys the murderer’s alibi through skills that simulate Croft’s Inspector French.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">This novel is highly recommend by such critics as John Dickson Carr (at first he included <i>The Rasp</i> among his 10 favorite detective novels in the essay “The Greatest Game in the World”), and Barzun & Taylor, which deemed <i>The Rasp</i> as «classic and epoch making» (<i>A Catalogue of Crime</i>, p. 365). Recently the quality of the novel is called into question by scholars such as Roland Lacourbe, Philip Fooz and Vincent Bourgeois, which wrote without mercy: “une brochette de personnages stéréotypés, un mobile de crime peu original, un détective auquel nul indice n’échappe, un assassin qui se laisse aisément diviner et une solution de crime impossible […] bien décevante (<i>1001 Chambres Closes</i>, p. 341). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In my opinion MacDonald didn’t get the notoriety that he deserved due to the negative judgment that Julian Symons gave him in his essay <i>Bloody Murder</i> (1972). I totally disagree with him: he was </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">not only a very talented mystery writer, but </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">a superb novelist, who exhibited an astonishing mastery across a range of fiction genres. </span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">MacDonald wrote some of the finest British detective novels of all time, and the book <i>Murder Gone Mad</i> (1931) is one of the best crime novels I have ever read.</span></div>
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Stefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05000900457511641277noreply@blogger.com7Bologna, Italia44.494887 11.34261630000003244.3136765 11.019892800000031 44.6760975 11.665339800000032tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1857832752297480627.post-52577093845832839382015-05-04T04:02:00.000-07:002015-05-04T04:02:03.422-07:00La Maison qui Tue (The House that Kills, 1932) - Nöel Vindry<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>The House that Kills </i>is the first novel written by Noel Vindry, one of the greatest French Golden Age writers, originally published in France in 1932 as <i>La Maison qui Tue</i>. This novel, that has never been reprinted in France since its first edition, is now available in English thanks to John Pugmire, who has translated and published it by Locked Room International. I read only the English version, and I think that the translation by Pugmire fits perfectly Vindry’s style of writing: very simple, with a great flow and enjoyable. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Noel Vindry, almost forgotten outside France, is actually one of the best mystery writers in Europe during the Golden Age period: he wrote twelve locked room novels between 1932 and 1937, and he was called the “poète du roman-problèm” by Thomas Narcejac, “the French John Dickson Carr” by Roland Lacourbe and “the French Ellery Queen” by Igor Longo. Moreover, as John Pugmire says in the introduction of the book, Boileau and Narcejac spoke of his “unequalled virtuosity” and “stupefying puzzles”, at the expense of the coldness of his prose. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Starting from such a premise, it’s apparent which was the talent of Vindry: the creation of clever and brilliant plots, grounded on strange and impossible events, at last explained by means of the power of deductive reasoning.<br />
Vindry, who was born in Lyon in 1896, after 1915 became an examining magistrate (juge d’instruction) and was appointed to serve in Aix-en-Provence, a beautiful place in the south of France. The detective of Vindry, Monsieur Allou, who made his debut in <i>La Maison qui Tue</i>, is a juge d’instruction as well. He is a pure thinking machine, a figure about whom the readers learn almost nothing. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">This novel, a very good example of locked room mystery, contains three impossible situations. At first, in a remote villa, despite police presence in the house, two people die in impossible circumstances. The first is killed in a locked and watched room; the second is murdered in the presence of many witnesses. Subsequently M. Allou is shot inside his locked apartment. The witnesses outside the door hear something but they don’t see nothing. But the apartment is empty with the exception of M. Allou. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">With Vindry we understand which was the typical French approach to the detective novel during the Golden Age period. There were many differences with the Anglo-Saxon writers: the focus is not on whodunit but rather on howdunit. Indeed, as I noticed, in many French Golden <span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Age mysteries is easy to identify the murder: it happens in </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">La Maison qui Tue</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">, but also in other novels such as </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Six Hommes Morts </i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">by Steeman and </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Six Crimes Sans Assassin </i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">by Boileau. The real focus inside the French mysteries is on the plot, and this feature is led by Vindry to the highest level of complexity and ingenuity. Although the second murder has a very complicated explanation, with some coincidences, the first crime is well orchestrated and solved with cleverness. Vindry reveals to know Zangwill and Leroux very well, mostly because the first impossible crime is a good va</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">riation of those contained in </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">The Big Bow Mystery </i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">and </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">The Mystery of the Yellow Room</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Surprisingly for the Anglo-Saxon standards, M. Allou solves the case by the midpoint of the novel (after 70 pages) and then is himself attacked. Although it’s apparent that the first part is the best of the book (it contains a creepy atmosphere, nice sense of the rhythm, bizarre events and a lot of clues), I have also appreciated the second part, so I don’t agree with Soupart, Bourgeois and Fooz which said: “le rythme est soutenu jusq’à l’attentat contre le juge Allou qui rompt malencontreusement le charme”. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">At the end, we can conclude that <i>La Maison qui Tue </i>is a very good novel and it is a must-read now that it is finally available in English. I really hope that other Vindry’s books will be published in English in the future, at least his two masterpieces, <i>La Bête Hurlante </i>(1934) and <i>À Travers le Murailles </i>(1936). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The cover design by Joseph Gérard, by the way, is beautiful.</span></div>
Stefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05000900457511641277noreply@blogger.com2Bologna, Italia44.494887 11.34261630000003244.3136765 11.019892800000031 44.6760975 11.665339800000032tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1857832752297480627.post-80327251132066895672015-04-28T06:14:00.004-07:002015-04-28T09:03:50.736-07:00Trent's Last Case - Edmund C. Bentley, 1913<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">One of the most important pre-war detective novels was created for entertainment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Edmund C. Bentley published <i>Trent’s Last Case</i> in 1913, to make his friend G.K. Chesterton, who was a great fan of mystery, happy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">We have to admit that<i> Trent’s Last Case</i> was a sort of divertissement, a little parody of Conan Doyle’s detective novels.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The journalist and amateur sleuth Philip Trent was called by his newspaper to investigate the murder of a rich and hated businessman, Sigsbee Manderson. Trent is smart but not infallible, he is not able to solve the mystery and subsequently falls in love with Manderson’s widow, who is one of the suspects.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">It’s apparent the influence of Eugene Valmont on Philip Trent. Valmont debuted in 1906 in <i>The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont</i>, book of tales written by Robert Barr.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>Trent’s Last Case</i>, even though it conveys the feeling of an extemporaneous literary experiment, it has the ability to create themes, situations and characters which will be <i>cliché</i> in the Golden Age period: the murder of a rich but hated businessman, who had been killed before the beginning of the book; the villa as setting; the journalist-detective ready to solve the mystery basing his deductions on clues scattered the whole story; and, finally, an unexpected solution of the mystery. All these things are narrated by an enjoyable and elegant style of writing. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">This novel will influence authors such as Philip MacDonald and Anthony Berkeley, which make the debut in 1924 and 1925.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The writing of Bentley is ironic and sharp, even if in his prose lacks the sense of paradox which is typical of G.K. Chesterton. Especially, Bentley is able to break the boundaries with the sensation novel: he takes out the sensational elements which characterized the Eighteen Century and he sets the ground for the detective story based on fair-play-puzzle, as claimed by Thomas Narcejac.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">It’s hard to say who was the first to set the ground for a detective story like a game or a match between author and reader. Whether it was Bentley, Chesterton or Freeman, it’s complicated to say it for certain, but without doubt the moment was ripe between 1905 and 1914.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Howard Haycraft, in <i>Murder for Pleasure</i> (1941), deemed <i>Trent’s Last Case</i> as an essential link between the Romantic Era and the Golden Age of detective fiction, which began in 1920 with the publication of <i>The Mysterious Affair at Styles</i> by Agatha Christie and <i>The Cask</i> by Freeman W. Crofts. After Bentley, in the opinion of Haycraft, mystery writers had a better awareness of the differences between mystery and sensation novel.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">However, the contemporary literary criticism has softened the enthusiasm about the Bentley’s novel observed in the thought of authors such as Sayers, Christie and many others during the 1920s: yet Carr, in 1946, wrote that Bentley had arrived after writers like Chesterton, Mason and Freeman. Then came the critics of Chandler and others, and also Keating didn’t include <i>Trent’s Last Case</i> in his 100 best crime novels list in 1986. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In spite of everything, this novel can be defined an exciting <i>tour de force</i>, full of tricks and deceptions, that surprise the readers page after page. There are many holes, for sure, the minor characters are badly drawn, and one of them, Murch, suddenly disappears; also some tricks are implausible and some parts of the book are long-winded. But the plot is very good, the clues are well provided, and the solutions (yes, there are many solutions, and one of them will influence Carr for <i>The Ends of Justice</i>, 1927), are fantastic.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Not bad for a novel created for entertainment. </span></span></div>
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Stefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05000900457511641277noreply@blogger.com4Bologna, Italia44.494887 11.34261630000003244.3136765 11.019892800000031 44.6760975 11.665339800000032tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1857832752297480627.post-40187441062509985762015-04-23T08:36:00.003-07:002015-04-24T03:42:57.566-07:00The Egyptian Cross Mystery - Ellery Queen, 1932<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">On Christmas morning, in the city of Arroyo, in West Virginia, a murder was discovered. The victim, Andrew Van, an eccentric teacher, was found decapitated and crucified in order to form a huge T. Ellery Queen was present at the trial, but the whole story seemed absurd and totally obscure, and he was forced to come back home.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Six months later, a former professor of Ellery, Mr. Yardley, who lived in Long Island, called Ellery to come to Long Island because it was discovered the corpse of Thomas Brady, a rich businessman. The victim was found decapitated and crucified to a Totem, again in order to form a grim T.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">What can link two murders, committed in two different and distant towns? Probably these murders are linked by the name of a mad killer called Velija Krosac. The nightmare, for Ellery, starts now.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The fifth Ellery Queen novel contains vendettas, decapitations and crucifixions, it is full of darkness and sense of death. This novel is very different from the previous ones: if the three early novels are deeply influenced by Van Dine, and the fourth (<i>The Greek Coffin Mystery, </i>1932) is the triumph of plotting and the utmost level of whodunit, with <i>The Egyptian Cross Mystery</i> Queen starts to move away from the writing style of Van Dine. The prose is less magniloquent and more enjoyable than Van Dine's, the plot is more clear, the atmosphere is more vivid and the characters are more believable. The method of Queen is also more logical than Vance’s, less tied to psychological elements.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">In this novel Ellery is different from the previous books: he feels badly, powerless in front of the absurd profanation of the human body. Francis Nevins claims that the novel is so full of death and blood because it represents the metaphor of war. The reasons of vendetta are grounded on trivial but horrific elements, and these explain why the novel could become a war book: death rules uncontested. The atmosphere is dark and oppressive; </span>Danny<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> and Lee studied the reaction of people to the present of the evil in the world, and they prepared the ground for novels like <i>Cat of Many Tails</i>. The interesting climate of the novel is also an important starting point for the future creation of Wrightsville, «a small tight-knit American community that with the outbreak of war in Europe has become a boomtown» (Nevins).</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">What astonishes the readers is the departure from the whodunit frame: first of all, in the introduction Dannay and Lee distance themselves from the Egyptology, theme overdone by authors like Van Dine and Freeman; secondly, the writers give few clues to the reader (even though the one in the last chapter before the "challenge to the reader" is brilliant), the suspects are few and the whole atmosphere is imbued with death and it recalls some paintings by Bosch. Surprisingly, there are more holes in the plot here than in the previous novel, <i>The Greek Coffin Mystery</i>, which was more complex, full of clues and red herrings. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The reason behind the murders is very complicated, some explanations are hard to believe for the readers and many events don’t have any link with the story. Even with these issues, the novel is exciting and the solution, even if it has some holes, is amazing, a clear lesson of misdirection. It will influence writers like J.T. Rogers (<i>The Red Right Hand</i>) and Thomas Harris.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Velija Krosac, the crazy killer, reminds me of Keyser Soze, character of <i>The Usual Suspects</i>, a masterpiece directed by Bryan Singer in 1995.</span></div>
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Stefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05000900457511641277noreply@blogger.com3Bologna, Italia44.494887 11.34261630000003244.3136765 11.019892800000031 44.6760975 11.665339800000032tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1857832752297480627.post-82182707005453703072015-04-17T03:23:00.000-07:002015-04-24T03:39:07.175-07:00Whodunit?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I don’t like the word “whodunit” very much. It is a restrictive term that explains nothing. This word was coined around 1935 by Wolfe Kaufman and it pointed out the importance of “who-done-it” in the mystery fiction, the identity of the murder, reducing the detective stories as “mere puzzles”.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In the mystery fiction between World War I and World War II, when the Golden Age is usually delimitated, there was a real emphasis on plot, clues, thinking and puzzle, but they were virtues, not defects.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The term "whodunit", actually, doesn’t explain the real essence of Golden Age mystery: the power of ingenuity, the purpose of the writers to surprise the readers, with complex plots, bizarre problems, eccentric characters and unexpected solutions.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Many of the best-known writers of so-called whodunits were British - Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley, Dorothy L. Sayers, Michael Innes - but there were some great American authors that in few years revolutionized the genre: S.S. Van Dine and his followers, like Ellery Queen, Anthony Abbot, Charles D. King, and other masters like John Dickson Carr, Rex Stout and Clayton Rawson. The real question to pose in their novels is: howdunit? Locked room murders, people, houses, things that vanish into thin air and other impossible events: this is the Golden Age mystery.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">If we analyze the works of these authors, we could conclude that there is much more than simple “who-done-it” in their books: most of the Golden Age writers were brilliant highbrows and talented writers. As the great Igor Longo said years ago, speaking of ingenuity, plot and misdirection, even the third-class mystery Golden Age novels, if confronted with crime stories of nowadays, would win hands down.</span></div>
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Stefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05000900457511641277noreply@blogger.com0Bologna, Italia44.494887 11.34261630000003244.3136765 11.019892800000031 44.6760975 11.665339800000032tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1857832752297480627.post-28381494493568559072015-04-15T08:03:00.000-07:002015-04-24T03:37:50.072-07:00Introduction<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">There are some good reasons for having a blog on mystery and detective fiction. I have a blog already, but in Italian, and it is very difficult to communicate to the Italian audience of readers and students of the field. I realized that the world of academia and popular critics (all the indipendent-scholars) are totally separated. There is no communication between these two different universes. And it is a real problem.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In Italy, but not only here, we are tied to old and wrong ideas: the Golden Age novels as “mere puzzles” and “cozies”, the dichotomy between English Crime Queens and American detective novelists, and so on. In Italy, unfortunately, few academics know the opinions of great scholars such as Douglas G. Greene or Curtis Evans. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Writing a blog in English is a hard challenge for me, but I will try. I would like to share ideas, opinions and thoughts about mystery and detective fiction, speaking in particular about the great representatives of the Golden Age, the best and the most undervalued period in the history of crime fiction.</span></div>
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Stefanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05000900457511641277noreply@blogger.com0Bologna, Italia44.494887 11.34261630000003244.3136765 11.019892800000031 44.6760975 11.665339800000032