The Talleyrand Maxim

After reading The Middle Temple Murder, I downloaded another J.S. Fletcher book: The Talleyrand Maxim (is this where Robert Ludlum got his book-naming scheme? There’s another one called The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation. I think I’m saving it for last.)

I started The Tallyrand Maxim, decided it wasn’t remotely like The Middle Temple Murder, realized that stories about blackmail tend to make me really uncomfortable, and abandoned it for a Joe Muller mystery.

Then I picked it up again, and immediately became completely absorbed.

When a Man Marries

I’m having trouble putting into words how much I liked When A Man Marries. The is the second Mary Roberts Rinehart book I’ve read, and it’s not much like Dangerous Days. For one thing, nothing particularly tragic happens. For another, it’s mostly pretty funny (I suspect these two things are related). Also, it’s a mystery novel. And at first, I thought  a lot about those differences, but then it occurred to me that the things that make the two books similar–good writing, for example–are at least as important. After that, I got really absorbed, and mostly stopped thinking about anything that wasn’t actually happening in the book for a while.

The Middle Temple Murder

The Middle Temple Murder, by J.S. Fletcher, is another bestselling mystery novel, this time from 1912. Apparently Woodrow Wilson was among its fans. And although there are some iffy bits–there’s something amusingly unlikely about the beginning, and one too many coincidences at the end, I think it deserves fans.

The main character, Frank Spargo, is a journalist, a sub-editor on a paper called The Watchman. Strolling home from work in the small hours of the morning, one of the policeman he always says hi to as he passes by is like, “Hey, check it out! We found a body; come see!” The policeman then invites Spargo to accompany the body to the morgue. Eventually an actual detective shows up, and invites Spargo to investigate the crime with him. It’s kind of bizarre.

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab

Fergus Hume’s Mystery of a Hansom Cab was hugely popular in, like, 1887, but I’m not quite sure why. I mean, I didn’t figure out who the murderer was, sure, but I felt like Hume’s attempts at misdirection were more important to him than the integrity of the plot. Trying to figure out the solution isn’t a huge part of reading mystery novels, for me, but I like to at least have the option, and I think lying to the reader is the ultimate sin a mystery writer can commit.

Also, the crime wasn’t that exciting.

The Gold Bag

The first two Carolyn Wells mysteries I ever read were The Gold Bag and Vicky Van. I think the choice was dictated by them being the only two available on PG at the time, but it worked out well, since they sort of represent the best and the worst. I’ve read Vicky Van three or four times now, but I never reread The Gold Bag until last week.

The main thing I took away from my first reading of The Gold Bag was that Herbert Burroughs, the narrator/detective, was gullible and fond of leaping to conclusions. The book opens with Burroughs’ supervisor telling him, “Burroughs, if there’s a mystery to be unravelled; I’d rather put it in your hands than to trust it to any other man on the force…you go about it scientifically, and you never jump at conclusions, or accept them, until they’re indubitably warranted.” My Delicious bookmark (dated June 2006) says, “I’m sorry, an air of truth isn’t evidence, Mr. Burroughs.”

Actually, now that I’ve said that, I’m not sure anything else needs to be added. But I suppose I can’t let that stop me.

The Riddle of the Sands

The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers, is a spy novel from 1903 about two Englishmen who know they’ve stumbled upon some kind of secret regarding Germany’s naval plans, but aren’t quite sure what it is.

Carruthers, the narrator, is a clerk in the Foreign Office. As the book begins, he’s stranded in London after the social season has ended, and he’s pretty bitter about it. His vacation comes too late to join any of the house parties to which he’s been invited, so he ends up accepting a dubious-sounding invitation from Davies, an acquaintance from college who is yachting in the Baltic. When he arrives, Carruthers is shocked to find that Davies’ yacht isn’t shiny and adored with lots of brass fittings. Also, although he went to some effort to find a bunch of things Davies asked for — a stove, rigging screws, a prismatic compass — Davies says he probably won’t need them, and Carruthers comes to suspect that Davies only asked for them so that he could indulge his passion for throwing things overboard.

I cannot express how much I hate Philo Vance right now.

I don’t know why I keep putting myself through this. I loathe Philo Vance. I mean, S.S. Van Dine is hilarious in his insistence on always using the longest word available and out-footnoting everyone on the face of the earth, but even run-on sentences about “the lepidoptera of our café life” cannot make up for the hatefulness that is Philo Vance.

Books I have neglected to post about since finishing The Girl From Hollywood

I keep wanting to do a post about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ book The Girl from Hollywood, and how an absolutely appalling series of coincidences gets three different women involved with an evil movie director named, if I recall correctly, Wilson Crumb. One gets addicted to cocaine and becomes a drug dealer (although he cannot get her to sleep with him);another gets addicted to cocaine, becomes his mistress, and dies of pnuemonia after he hits her; and one, after semi-successfully fending off his advances, shoots herself. The two drug-addicted ones are in love with the same young man, who lives on a ranch modeled after Burroughs’ own, and the attempted suicide is his sister. His name is Custer, and he spends a while in jail for murder. It’s all pretty miserable. If I had no interest in reading the Tarzan books before, I really don’t now.

Anyway: things I have read since The Girl From Hollywood, and liked better:

The Leavenworth Case

Carolyn Wells apparently discovered mystery novels after having had one of Anna Katherine Green’s books read aloud to her circa 1909. The Leavenworth Case was Green’s first and best-known book, and if it wasn’t the one that Wells heard read, then probably all Green’s books were pretty similar, because The Leavenworth Case reads like a blueprint for all of Well’s mystery novels, mostly in terms of the setting and the general construction of events. Or maybe not a blueprint, because blueprints are kind of spare and simplified, by definition, and The Leavenworth Case is as overwrought as any mystery novel I’ve ever read.

Horatio Leavenworth, a wealthy retired businessman, is found dead in his library one morning, shot through the back of the head. His secretary, Trueman Harwell, seeks to enlist the aid of Mr. Leavenworth’s lawyer, Mr. Veeley, in watching over the interests of Mr. Leavenworth’s two nieces, Mary and Eleanore, but finds Veeley away on business. Everett volunteers to stand in for Veeley, and promptly falls in love with Eleanore, who, of course, appears to be guilty of the crime.

The Galloping Ghost

The Galloping Ghost is the second book I’ve read by Roy Judson Snell. The first was The Blue Envelope, which was an adventure for girls set in Alaska. I thought it was okay, but I questioned Snell’s choice of title: the blue envelope is largely irrelevant.

Can I say he’s got a problem with irrelevant titles after only two books? Because the ghost of the title is just a deus ex machina that occasionally drops by to give the detectives a clue to the mystery, and he’s not even as helpful as the detectives’ boy assistant Johnny, who basically provides the solution to the mystery by accidentally stumbling on clues near the local florist at every opportunity. His luck is so good that the book would only be half as long as it is now if he didn’t keep withholding information for no apparent reason.