The Rasp, 1924 - Philip MacDonald

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.

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, The Rasp, 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 The Red House Mystery (1922) by Alan A. Milne, a classic country house mystery which was the model for many further English detective novels.

The Rasp 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 Trent’s Last Case (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. 

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.

This novel is highly recommend by such critics as John Dickson Carr (at first he included The Rasp among his 10 favorite detective novels in the essay “The Greatest Game in the World”), and Barzun & Taylor, which deemed The Rasp as «classic and epoch making» (A Catalogue of Crime, 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 (1001 Chambres Closes, p. 341). 

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 Bloody Murder (1972). I totally disagree with him: he was not only a very talented mystery writer, but a superb novelist, who exhibited an astonishing mastery across a range of fiction genres. MacDonald wrote some of the finest British detective novels of all time, and the book Murder Gone Mad (1931) is one of the best crime novels I have ever read.

*Actually he had previously co-authored two novels with his father, Ronald.

La Maison qui Tue (The House that Kills, 1932) - Nöel Vindry

The House that Kills is the first novel written by Noel Vindry, one of the greatest French Golden Age writers, originally published in France in 1932 as La Maison qui Tue. 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. 

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. 

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.
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 La Maison qui Tue, is a juge d’instruction as well. He is a pure thinking machine, a figure about whom the readers learn almost nothing. 

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. 

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 Age mysteries is easy to identify the murder: it happens in La Maison qui Tue, but also in other novels such as Six Hommes Morts by Steeman and Six Crimes Sans Assassin 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 variation of those contained in The Big Bow Mystery and The Mystery of the Yellow Room. 

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”. 

At the end, we can conclude that La Maison qui Tue 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, La Bête Hurlante (1934) and À Travers le Murailles (1936). 

The cover design by Joseph Gérard, by the way, is beautiful.

Trent's Last Case - Edmund C. Bentley, 1913

One of the most important pre-war detective novels was created for entertainment.

Edmund C. Bentley published Trent’s Last Case in 1913, to make his friend G.K. Chesterton, who was a great fan of mystery, happy.

We have to admit that Trent’s Last Case was a sort of divertissement,  a little parody of Conan Doyle’s detective novels.

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.

It’s apparent the influence of Eugene Valmont on Philip Trent. Valmont debuted in 1906 in The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont, book of tales written by Robert Barr.

Trent’s Last Case, even though it conveys the feeling of an extemporaneous literary experiment, it has the ability to create themes, situations and characters which will be cliché 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. 

This novel will influence authors such as Philip MacDonald and Anthony Berkeley, which make the debut in 1924 and 1925.

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.

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.

Howard Haycraft, in Murder for Pleasure (1941), deemed Trent’s Last Case as an essential link between the Romantic Era and the Golden Age of detective fiction, which began in 1920 with the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie and The Cask 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.

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 Trent’s Last Case in his 100 best crime novels list in 1986. 

In spite of everything, this novel can be defined an exciting tour de force, 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 The Ends of Justice, 1927), are fantastic.
Not bad for a novel created for entertainment. 

The Egyptian Cross Mystery - Ellery Queen, 1932

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.

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.

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.

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 (The Greek Coffin Mystery, 1932) is the triumph of plotting and the utmost level of whodunit, with The Egyptian Cross Mystery 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.

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; Danny and Lee studied the reaction of people to the present of the evil in the world, and they prepared the ground for novels like Cat of Many Tails. 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).

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, The Greek Coffin Mystery, which was more complex, full of clues and red herrings. 

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 (The Red Right Hand) and Thomas Harris.

Velija Krosac, the crazy killer, reminds me of Keyser Soze, character of The Usual Suspects, a masterpiece directed by Bryan Singer in 1995.

Whodunit?

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Introduction

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.

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. 

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.