The Tragedy of X

"Well," said Inspector Thumm suddenly, "plain or fancy, it's a puzzler, and Mr. Bruno thought you'd be interested."

Inspector Thumm of the New York Police and Walter Bruno, the district attorney, call up on Drury Lane, retired Shakespearean actor, for help in a particularly puzzling murder case. Lane had been a help on a previous case. 

Harvey Longstreet, of the brokerage firm De Witt and Longstreet, was poisoned on the streetcar. He was a travelling with his business partner and other associates, but Longstreet wasn't very popular, and any of them would cheerfully have seen him dead. But how was it done? It was raining and the windows were closed; the streetcar was full after the Longstreet party got on and they didn't make any stops. The poison was fast-acting and everyone who could have done it was there.

The conductor of that street car sends a letter to Thumm saying he had information; his body is found bashed on the head and thrown from a ferry boat. And Longstreet's partner De Witt is murdered on a suburban train. The Commuter Murders! 

After Lane has heard the facts of the first murder, he says he knows who did it, but can't prove it. I read this twenty-five years ago, and I remembered the nature of the clue that Lane sees (though he doesn't disclose it until the end) but had still forgotten who the muderer was. But it is one of the best Queen mysteries, and shows up on best overall mystery lists as well. After reading Drury Lane's Last Case recently, I thought it was time to reread this one. Highly recommended!

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Golden Age (1933). Train. 

Earl Derr Biggers' The House Without A Key (#1925Club)

"Amos!" cried Miss Minerva, "That man--why he--"

"Charlie Chan," Amos explained. "I'm glad they brought him. He's the best detective on the force."

 

1925 saw the first of the six Charlie Chan mystery novels. (And I don't know how many movies, etc...)

John Quincy Winterslip has left Boston to come to Honolulu to see what his Aunt Minerva is still doing there. Proper Bostonians don't go gallivanting off to the tropics and even though she's there to see her  cousins Dan and Amos Winterslip, it's time she come home.

But when John Quincy gets off the ship he learns Dan was murdered the night before. He also discovers that while Dan has been living an upright life for a while, he was a black sheep back in the 1880s, and there's still more than one person who would be happy to see him dead.

John Quincy's initial instinct is to pack up his Aunt Minerva and head back to Boston at once, but the Winterslip honour is at stake.

And anyway there's a girl, actually two girls, his distant cousin and Dan's daughter Barbara Winterslip, but more importantly Carlota Maria Egan, beautiful and also the daughter of a suspect.

It's a fun one in the Golden Age mystery tradition, more American than British, not an amateur detective, a few more chase scenes and a bit more violence. (A fist fight! An abduction with an escape!) John Quincy hangs out with Charlie Chan and comes to the correct solution, just a bit later than Chan and Chan has to rescue him. The romance is completely satisfactory.

In fact, really the only downside is that, though I last read it twenty-five years ago, I remembered the murderer and the solution. But I'm quite sure I didn't guess it the first time.

Biggers, already a professional writer, created Charlie Chan because he was impressed by an actual detective of Chinese ancestry on the Honolulu police force Chang Apana and disliked the whole idea of the Yellow Peril.

It's the 1925 Club week! Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting.

 

I see Fanda also read the novel and enjoyed it this week. 

 

Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery

'[an] editor...asked me to provide him with a more original piece of fiction. I might have refused, but there was murder in my soul, and here was an opportunity."

Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery of 1892 is one of the earliest locked-room mysteries. In his introduction, quoted above, he claims it's the earliest, but then his detective discusses the solution to 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', a clear predecessor. Let's just say it's early... 😉

Arthur Constant, an up and coming lefty politician, moves to the East End of London to get to know his potential constituents, is found murdered in his bedroom, locked from the inside, windows unbroken and locked from the inside, chimney too narrow for anyone to go down--you know the drill. How was it done?

And who'd want to do it anyway? (Because of course it wasn't suicide.) Arthur Constant was such a nice man, helpful to his neighbours, loved by his friends, etc. The only possible motive is that of a fellow labour leader Mortlake who may have thought Constant was after his girl, and the police soon fix on him as the murderer. 

There are two detectives on the case: Grodman, a former police detective, now retired, and writing his memoirs. He lives in the neighbourhood and is called to break the door when Constant's landlady gets worried. And Wimp, the detective who replaced him on the force, whom Grodman disdains as incompetent. (And Grodman may be right.)

I find it a bit astonishing how influential this is. Various possible solutions to unlocking the room are discussed, only to be dismissed; I swear I've seen all of those answers used in subsequent locked-room mysteries. And the type of the actual surprise murderer shows up in a few subsequent mysteries, too, but it would be spoilerish to say which. The book is on the Howard Haycraft/Ellery Queen list of the Cornerstones of Mystery, and deservedly so.

It's a pretty good read, too, though I did find it a little slow in the middle. It's also often funny. One of the suspects is a poet, Denzil Cantercot, forever talking about the Beautiful: "Life was very serious to him. He never wrote comic verse intentionally."

I got it from Project Gutenberg, but for a cover I used what seems to be the eBook Amazon sells. 

Vintage Mystery, Gold. A Town Scene: Stalking a murderer on the streets of East London.

That's eight! Completing the challenge, though it's likely I won't stop there.

Call Mr. Fortune by H. C. Bailey

"You look very young."

"I try to be."

It's Reggie Fortune delivers that snappy (?) comeback.

This is the first book in the series and our hero starts as something of a lazy dilettante. "At Oxford, at his hospital, he did what was necessary to take respectable degrees, but no more than he could help." Now out of school, the first story 'The Archduke's Tea' starts with his father, Dr. Fortune, delivering young Reggie a lecture. Reggie will be taking care of his father's medical practice while the father goes on vacation. And he'd better do it right. His first call is to a Continental archduchess living in the neighbourhood.

"She was a serene Highness of the house of Erbach-Wittelsbach, which traces its descent to Odin, and had an independent realm of nearly two square miles,..."

On the way there Reggie and his father's driver Gorton come across the body of a man killed in a hit and run accident. He looks a lot like the Archduke, but isn't. Is somebody trying to kill the Archduke? Of course they are. So who? The Archduchess? The brother-in-law? The two of them working in cahoots? And will the police actually be able to solve the case, or will the solution be squelched due to political pressure?

The second case 'The Sleeping Companion' has a similar setup: Reggie gets called in on a case in place of his father. A woman is having bad dreams. Why?

By the end of those two cases, though, Reggie is a dilettante no longer and knows this is what he wants to do. He hangs out his shingle in London as a consulting detective, and in the remaining four cases in this book, he's a professional. His medical background comes in handy. In the third case 'The Nice Girl', he's called in by Scotland Yard to investigate the death of Sir Albert Lunt, a businessman with lots of enemies.

Three more cases round out the book. One of the stories I thought weaker, but mostly they're pretty entertaining. As the Wikipedia article on H. C. Bailey suggests, Reggie's education and general demeanour--and maybe the name, too--put him in a class with Lord Peter Wimsey, but I found him less exasperating than Lord Peter. Wikipedia also says the stories are darker and more political, but that really only shows up in the last one of these, which does turn on government corruption. This is the only book of Bailey's I've read, but now I do plan to read more, and the second in the series, Mr. Fortune's Practice, also a collection of stories, is available from Project Gutenberg (as was this one) and is already downloaded to my Kobo.

Call Mr. Fortune came out in 1922, with the stories appearing individually in the year before that. So...

Vintage Mystery, Gold, Piece of Furniture: The picture on the cover above will represent the second story, 'The Sleeping Companion.' That's the murderer's hand creeping in at the side, while Miss Weston has been drugged and is sleeping in the chair.

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

There's going to be some spoilerish things in this, so be advised.

Gabriel Syme wanders into the London suburb of Saffron Park, a 'place not only pleasant, but perfect.' 'It had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art.' Syme is himself a poet, 'a poet of law, a poet of order; nay, he said he was a poet of respectability.' He gets into a verbal squabble with red-headed Lucian Gregory, the established poet of Saffron Park, who is none of those things, but rather the opposite. (While at the same time, Syme admires Gregory's sister Rosamond, equally red-headed.)

Syme is also a detective, working for Scotland Yard. He was approved at joining by a mysterious man in a dark room.

Gregory proclaims himself a radical anarchist, but Syme accuses him of being a wannabe. Gregory refutes this charge by introducing Syme to a secret society, the leaders of which are named after the days of the week; at the very next meeting, to which Gregory takes Syme, Gregory expects to be elected the new Thursday. Sunday is the leader of this anarchist society.

Syme launches into a speech that results in his being elected the new Thursday. Aha, thinks Syme! I will now be Scotland Yard's man on the inside. But he has confessed his status as a policeman to Gregory, and sworn not to denounce him, so he has to figure out how to use his new insider-dom without breaking his vow.

At the very first meeting of the seven weekday leaders, Sunday announces one of them is a policeman. Yikes, thinks Syme, I've been found out already. But no, it turns out Gogol is also a policeman in disguise, and while Syme is mostly relieved he hasn't been detected, he's also a little ashamed he didn't do more. Gogol is escorted by thugs off the premises to some unspeakable fate.

On leaving that first meeting, Syme is pursued by another anarchist principal, the Professor de Worms. Does the Professor know Syme's a policeman? Syme tries to escape, but is eventually cornered by the Professor, who...reveals he's also a policeman. That makes three out of the seven. If only they'd organized!

I was perfectly ready to generalize after this, and yes, it quickly turns out six of the seven anarchist leaders are policeman in disguise. Is Sunday as well? 

Of course he is. (I have to say I saw that a mile away, or at least 90 pages away out of the 160.) But Chesterton handles it amusingly and suspensefully enough, and, in fact, Sunday is exactly that unseen policeman who first approved Syme's joining the force (and the other five policeman/anarchist leaders, as well.) The six pursue Sunday (or maybe Sunday is pursuing them) until a final recognition and no crime is actually committed, no dynamite thrown, the Czar not assassinated, even Gogol turns out to be alive after all.

It is Chesterton, and the name Sunday might be a clue. This is fairly early in Chesterton's career (1908), Father Brown is in the future, and Chesterton has not yet converted to Catholicism. Wikipedia tells me he was suffering a crisis of faith as he was writing this. Sunday is a deus absconditus. He tells his policemen, "You heard the voice in the dark, and you never heard it again. The sun in heaven denied it, the earth and sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. And when I met you in daylight I denied it myself." Sunday goes on to explain why he allowed this, and so the book is a kind of theodicy, a justification of God, and an explication of why there is evil in the world. Like all theodicies, I didn't find it very convincing myself...

But until it got there it was a pretty amusing thriller.

There are the usual Chestertonian provocations. Only someone who's meat-eating and beer-drinking can be a proper Englishman, and not a lowly anarchist. Well in fact, I eat meat and drink beer, and have no desire to be a proper Englishman, so this should slide right past me, but I admit to being bothered by it, a little. But it is Chesterton, so one has to either not read him, or not be bothered by that sort of thing.

Do I dare call it a crime book? Well, in the end, it is a bit more Piers Plowman than Bulldog Drummond, but it does start with a Scotland Yard man trying to prevent a murder, so...

Vintage Mystery, Gold, Two People.

I actually read it in a copy from Project Gutenberg, but found online the cover shown above which fits the book pretty well.

Ngaio Marsh' Overture To Death (#20BooksOfSummer)

Overture to Death (1939) is a classic village mystery from the golden age: there's Jernigham, the master of the local manor house; his son; Copeland, a rather high Anglican rector; his daughter; the village doctor; the husbandless Mrs. Ross; and two absolutely impossible (but amusing!) spinsters.

You know what happens to the son and daughter, of course...

It's one of the spinsters who gets murdered, though there's a question if the other one was the target. The event takes place an amateur theatrical performance for the benefit of the local church. Miss Campanula sits down to play the piano for the overture, and well, consider the title.

I found this one very amusing; the two spinsters and their rivalry was very deftly handled, very amusing. The lovers were believably plagued. Marsh knows her theatre and her writing on casting and rehearsals was hilarious and altogether believable. The list of possible suspects was small and it was pretty clear who had done it, but the cluing was very well done.

Marsh wrote thirty-three mysteries involving her detective Roderick Alleyn and I've read ten or so; this jumped to the top of the list of those I've read, and the interwebs (at least in the form of the late mystery blogger Noah Stewart) seem to agree. Recommended!

An entry in the Just The Facts mystery challenge hosted by Bev at My Readers' Block.

Golden Age. When. During a performance of any sort.

#RIPXIII: Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca

Hubert the book prop and Rebecca

Well, I was probably the last person this side of Aldebaran who had neither read the book nor seen the movie. I've fixed that now.

What took me so long? It's clear I should have read this a long time ago.

My defense is: it is a great work of suspense, so suspenseful that I had to read it slowly, pausing at times in dread, particularly the first half. (Up to the scene of the dress. You know what I mean.) It was very nearly painful. It is so very easy to imagine yourself (at least I thought so) into the position of the young narrator arriving at this mysterious, voluptuous house, full of people who understand all the social rules that you do not, uncertain and alone. Haunted and haunting.

Shiver. And du Maurier does it all without ghosts, with just the words, Je reviens. 

The second half was a little easier in a way. While the first half was psychological suspense, the second half was driven more by the suspense of events; it is much faster moving, but for that less emotionally moving. In the immediate aftermath of that scene with the dress, I was on the edge of being exasperated with our narrator, and so events needed to move more rapidly; otherwise the narrator will seem too weak-willed. But events overtake her.

And it moves to a tremendous ending. That final twist? Impressive and sly.

"I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth. This was what I had done."

Read because it was on my Classics Club list and I was double-dared to for #ccdare:

And for RIP XIII:

And those opening scenes where the narrator first falls in love Maxim de Winter occur in Monaco. How many other Monaco books even are there?

Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the Velvet Claws

"I told you what she was--all velvet and claws!"

That's Della talking about Eva, Perry Mason's very first client (as far as we know) in the first Perry Mason mystery ever from 1933. Della's got the hate on for the client:

"I hate everything she stands for! I've had to work for everything I got. I never got a thing in life that I didn't work for. And lots of times I've worked for things and have had nothing in return. That woman is the type that has never worked for anything in her life!"

Who knew Della Street had so many class resentments?

And that's not the only way in which the mystery is different from others in the series. Perry tells the client at one point, "I'll protect you, just as long as you pay cash." Would a later Perry Mason ever say that to a client? Now sure he was a more successful lawyer as he went on, but I seem to remember him taking a one dollar retainer on more than one occasion.

And there's no courtroom scene! And Perry slugs someone not once, but twice!

Still it's identifiably a Perry Mason novel. Sure, it's a little more noirish than later novels, but there was always a bit of noir to Perry Mason, and it's not just the TV show music. In addition to Perry and Della, Paul Drake, the private eye, is there; Perry bends the rules on behalf of his client to the point where he's potentially at risk himself. The client is innocent, though the misdirection on that point is very good in this novel. So most of the usual elements are there.

The basic setup is this: Eva (at first under a false last name) is caught with a man who's an aspiring politician when a holdup in a bar goes wrong. The local scandal sheet knows they were there. Can Perry manage to keep their names out of it? Then the owner of the scandal sheet is murdered. Well, it's a scandal sheet: there are plenty of suspects, and not just the client.

This usually shows up in lists of best Perry Mason novels and I would have to agree!

Vintage Mystery Challenge. Golden Age. How. Death by shooting.

Charles Dickens' The Mystery Of Edwin Drood

Hmm. I just read and blogged about this novel less than a year ago, and that was already a reread. Maybe I'm just a bit obsessed by what happened to Edwin Drood? We'll never know, of course, and realistically it could very well be that Dickens himself hadn't made up his mind. He radically changed the ending of Great Expectations after finishing it. So then, the question is, what was Dickens likely to have decided should have happened? Or the more answerable question might be, what do I think should have happened?

In case you're not as obsessed with Edwin Drood as I am: it was Dickens' last novel and he died with it half-finished in 1870. Edwin Drood, a young orphan of some means, disappears about halfway through the pages we have. He had been engaged to be married to Rosa Bud, but just before his disappearance they broke it off. His watch and tie pin are found by the side of a river near the last place he was seen. Accident? Murder? Wilful disappearance? All are possible.

The two main suspects, if it's murder, are Neville Landless, a young half-Indian man, also an orphan, and in love with Rosa Bud; The other is John Jasper, Edwin's uncle, addicted to opium, and also in love with Rosa. Everyone is in love with Rosa in the novel.

Well, I speculated about the possible resolutions in that previous post, so no need to repeat myself here.

What particularly struck me about it on this rereading is the modern feeling of the politics. Neville is dogged by assumptions of guilt simply because of his race. Mr. Sapsea, the mayor of the town, and Mr. Honeythunder, a 'philanthropist'--it's the word used, but Dickens would completely approve of thinking of them as scare quotes--retail condemnations publicly because of his skin color and nothing else. I'm reminded of so many cases, but let's say particularly the Central Park Five.

The extent of Jasper's overall villainy remains obscure to me, but he's definitely at his most villainous in a #metoo moment of teacher-student politics and emotional blackmail. In the chapter 'Shadow on the Sun-dial', he corners the frightened Rosa; she's perfectly aware of his obsession with her; she was his student but has already fled from that. But now she will entertain his declarations of love or he'll arrange that Neville is convicted for murder, guilty or no. Rosa had to give up her music lessons earlier; now she feels she has to flee her home as well.

Maybe I'm just seeing contemporary political concerns in everything these days and reading Dickens anachronistically. That's possible. But it really doesn't feel like it.

Vintage Mystery Challenge. Why. It's an author you've read and loved before. (And obsessed over?)

Back To The Classics. Reread A Favorite Classic.

E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case

"I suppose everybody has at least heard of Trent's Last Case."

Dorothy Sayers wrote that in an undated talk she was going to give on radio but didn't. It may once have been true, but I doubt it is anymore, even among serious readers of mysteries. Trent's Last Case by E. C. Bentley came out in 1913, it was the first Trent case Bentley wrote, and Bentley wrote only two more. There aren't a lot of them and it's a long time ago. Its fame has long since yielded to obscurity.

Which is kind of a pity.

Part of its importance is just because it came early, it's true. Trent, a painter and a newspaper reporter, is supposed to be a genius detective and we're told of other difficult cases he solved for which he revealed his solution in the Record, a London newspaper. He may be a genius detective, but in this one he's wrong not once, but twice, a trick picked up by Ellery Queen on more than one occasion. And Trent falls in love with a suspect, which definitely was an influence on Dorothy Sayers herself, cf. Strong Poison, and it was a motif that went on to have a long history, going from the innocent and hardly suspected Mrs. Manderson in this one to the accused Harriet Vane in Strong Poison, to Sam Spade's actually guilty of something love Brigid O'Shaughnessy in Maltese Falcon, to the even guiltier love object of Kinsey Millhone in Sue Grafton's 'A' Is For Alibi.

The setup is this:  the first chapter tells us Sigsbee Manderson is a big man in finance; the second that he's dead, shot through the eye. Who did it? He was estranged from his wife and he was ferociously jealous of John Marlowe his personal secretary. He'd also created enemies among the American labor movement; they had a long reach; was it some American anarchist who killed him? This came out a year before Arthur Conan Doyle's Valley of Fear, another novel where the long arm of American labor was featured, and I wondered if it was an influence there as well, though it may be that Pinkerton's and Haymarket rioters were simply in the air.

Or was it somebody else entirely? I suspect you know the answer to that question, even if you haven't read it.

Anyway, it was pretty good, I thought. A little overwritten at the start, but then it settled down. There was some rom, but it was a little lacking in com, which is a pity and a surprise since the C in E. C. Bentley stands for Clerihew, also the name of a comic verse form he invented:

George The Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

Vintage Mystery Challenge. Gold.  Why. Best Of List.

Michael Innes' Lament For A Maker

Lament For A Maker is the third of Innes' Appleby novels and came out in 1938. Appleby is at a fairly junior point in his career, a detective-inspector; he comes into this one late, and as he says, "It was in no sense--it never in any sense became--my case." His job is simply to round up the initial suspects. Of course he solves it. Or does he? One of the other characters says, "John Appleby, that clever London man, would have it the Guthrie case defeated him." In any case, by the end we know what happened.

J. I. M. Stewart, the man behind the pseudonym Michael Innes, was a professor of English and ended up an Oxford don. Especially in the earlier novels in the series, he tries different styles, borrowing at will from earlier literary works. Appleby's End, one of my favorites, is a pastiche of Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm, except I prefer it to the original. This one is Innes' take on a Wilkie Collins novel such as The Woman In White or, even more so, The Moonstone.

Both of those are great novels. The Moonstone is high on my pile for rereading at the moment, though it has been a month or two. And both are constructed as documents written by the various players in the book, each in their own style. And there's the rub.

The first document in this is a seventy page narrative written by Ewan Bell, a provincial Scottish shoemaker, and it's written in a nearly (to me, at least) impenetrable Scots dialect. Douce, gleg, stammagasted, dreich, meikle, (alright, I kind of knew that one) quean. I just wasn't prepared for a book where I'd need a dictionary at my side. After that we get narrations from a London swell, a pedantic lawyer, an Australian surgeon, and John Appleby himself. All those were easier but already I was off my stride.

As a consequence the absurdity of the plot struck me more negatively than it might. Evil near twin, amnesia, potential incest, ghosts, mad laird, creepy tower--it had it all and not necessarily in a good way. There were amusing bits, though, and while I saw my way through most of the solution, the final reversal remained a surprise.

So OK, but not my favorite Appleby. (I'd probably plump for Appleby's End.) If you do read it, I found this Scots dictionary to be practically a necessity.

Vintage Mystery Challenge. Golden Age. When. Set During A Recognized Holiday. The first death occurs on Christmas Eve.

Charles Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Can we talk about the mystery of The Mystery of Edwin Drood?

The Mystery of Edwin Drood was Charles Dickens' last novel and it was approximately half-finished when he died in 1870. Had he completed it, it probably wouldn't have been his best novel, but, hey, it's Dickens. It's still pretty good.

But the fun for mystery readers is precisely that it is unfinished. Dickens was influenced by his friend Wilkie Collins' hit The Moonstone and he thought he'd try his hand at a mystery plot. He's used crime and even murder elements before, but in Edwin Drood he seems to be constructing a plot with fair play cluing. And over the years, there have been plenty of attempts to say where those clues were going. But spoilers are impossible because nobody knows how it would have ended.

Edwin Drood is about to take a position in an engineering firm, a share of which he has inherited from his father. The job will take him to Egypt. He's also about to marry Rosa Bud as soon as she leaves school; they've been pledged to each other forever; their marriage was a favorite plan between their fathers, both dead now. But Rosa and Edwin can't seem to do anything but quarrel when they actually meet. And before Edwin's disappearance, Rosa tells him it's not a good idea they get married.

It's Edwin who is dead or missing when the book breaks off.

His best friend and closest relative is his uncle John Jasper, only six years older than Edwin, a church musician, and an opium addict. Edwin doesn't see it, but Jasper is also in love with Rosa.

Two other orphans, Neville and Helena Landless arrive in Cloisterham, the town where Rosa goes to school and Jasper leads the church choir. They're taken in by Mr. Crisparkle, a minor canon of the Cloisterham cathedral. They're from Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and are half of Indian ancestry. As Eurasians they're immediately subject to local prejudice. Neville immediately finds Rosa attractive and Edwin thinks the same of Helena, but this is intolerable, and Neville and Edwin end up in a brawl practically as soon as they meet. Boys.

Edwin's watch and tie pin are found at the edge of a weir, but there's no sign of him.

So the question is: is Edwin Drood dead? Or did he just disappear of his own free will? And if he's dead, who killed him?

I think it's pretty clear Neville is the first red herring. He's simply too obvious, and Dickens is too sympathetic to the downtrodden to make him actually the perpetrator.

In John Forster's biography, quoted in the introduction to my Penguin edition, Dickens muses about about a plot where an uncle kills his nephew, and is given a big scene in his condemned cell at the end of the book. Angus Wilson, author of the introduction is inclined to accept that as the plot outline. It is true that Dickens has used the prison cell scene before to great effect: think Fagin at the end of Oliver Twist.

This is a perfectly possible outcome, but I don't like it, for two reasons: 1.) the way Jasper behaves when he learns that Edwin and Rosa have called it off. He's clearly shocked, but is he shocked in the way he would be if he'd just learned he committed a murder that was unneeded? I don't think so. It's an idea that occurred to Dickens according to Forster, but I don't think he'd handle it this way if that was where he was going.

And 2.) Dickens typically shows sympathy for the addicted. He might, of course, feel differently about opium addiction than alcohol addiction, but I keep thinking of the alcoholic Sydney Carton (of Tale of Two Cities.) I think he would have allowed Jasper to redeem himself, though it would likely be at the cost of his life. Mr. Wickfield (in David Copperfield) is another example. Dickens' world view became darker as he aged, but he still seems to me to sympathize with Jasper, and I don't think he'd make him the murderer.

So if I don't think Neville Landless killed Edwin Drood, and I don't think John Jasper did so either, what was Edwin Drood's fate? I think he's still alive. In the notes reproduced in the back of the Penguin, Dickens writes, after trying out various name possibilities for Edwin, "Dead? or alive?" I think Edwin left the country to discover what he thought about Rosa, and wanted to be anonymous when he left.

I suspect Edwin would need to be returned to England at the end of the novel, possibly to save Neville from a false charge of murder, and it will have to be Jasper that does it, probably at the expense of his life somehow.

But who knows? Your guess is as good as mine.

Golden Age. Moon. That's a moon on the cover. It's a detail from A Moonlight Scene by Atkinson Grimshaw according to the back cover of my Penguin. My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt.

Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop

It's dark days, both literally--it's overcast and rainy here in Toronto this week--and metaphorically, in the world at large. What better time for a comic mystery?

The Moving Toyshop, as far as I'm concerned, is one of the best.

I've read it, oh, a few times before, but the cover shown is the copy I got from the library. All the rest of Crispin is safe here on the shelf, but The Moving Toyshop has gone AWOL. No doubt I'm the guilty party who pressed it on somebody somewhen as a novel sure to please. If you don't already know it, let me press it on you.

The novel starts with poet Richard Cadogan in a funk and needing adventure, or at least a vacation; he wheedles an advance from his publisher to fund a brief getaway (from London) to Oxford. Train schedules fail him; he hitchhikes and finally walking into Oxford, where he arrives after midnight. He finds a toyshop where not everything seems right: it's unlocked, and he enters, hoping to find the owner and tell him his awning was untied and the shop was open. Instead, he finds the body of a woman, apparently strangled. He's knocked unconscious and locked in a closet. In the morning when he wakes up, the only exit is the window. He uses it.

"'Well, I'm going to the police,' said Cadogan. "If there's anything I hate, it's the sort of book in which characters don't go to the police when they've no earthly reason for not doing so."

Cadogan actually says that later, but he acts on his strongly felt sentiment. The police take him round, but the toyshop has moved, and there's no sign of a body, and rather pityingly, the police suggest he have that bump on his head looked at.

Half-convinced he is losing his mind, Cadogan goes to see his old friend, Professor Gervase Fen of Oxford. Enter the hero detective of the novel:

"He was a tall, lanky man, about forty years of age, with a cheerful, lean, ruddy, clean-shaven face. His dark hair, sedulously plashed down with water, stuck up in spikes at the crown. He had an enormous raincoat and a carried an extraordinary hat."

That must be Fen on the cover, I guess; there's the spikes in the hair and the hat.

This is the sort of novel that involves a crazy will, a lorry driver who reads Lawrence, a schoolteacher who defends Jane Austen in a bar, suspects with nicknames derived from Lear limericks, and more than one chase scene involving bicycles and drunk undergraduates.

The solution is improbable in the extreme, and perhaps not entirely convincing, but that isn't why one enters The Moving Toyshop. Come for the toys.

And an extraordinary hat.

Golden Age. Hat. My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt.