Peter Dickinson – A Tribute

I recently reread Peter Dickinson’s Some Deaths Before Dying (1999) – it may have been the fourth time I’ve read it – and was deeply impressed still again by the magnificent story-telling. Sure, there have been other books in which the detective is bedridden and must rely on the footwork and interview skills of others: The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey and The Wench is Dead by Colin Dexter come immediately to mind. But those two books center on police detectives who are professionally trained and experienced at solving mysteries. Dickinson’s protagonist is a 90 year old woman with ALS, paralyzed from the neck down and barely able to speak. Her determination to understand the events leading up to her husband’s death draws in two other women who are willing to help her in her quest. It’s an amazing book.

When I first retired from 40 years of teaching, I decided to start a mystery readers group at my local library, and fortunately my efforts were welcomed by the library. For our first meeting, I wanted to choose a book that would attract people who were already mystery lovers and perhaps some other readers who were not familiar with classic mysteries. I chose Dickinson’s The Yellow Room Conspiracy (1994). The title harks back to two classics: The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908) by Gaston Leroux and The Yellow Room (1945) by Mary Roberts Rinehart. The story itself is set in England in the period between world wars and thus reflects the time of The Golden Age mysteries. And it’s a compelling story of love and loss. We had a stimulating discussion, and the mystery group continues to this day.

Peter Dickinson (1927-2015) died not long ago on his 88th birthday. Unfortunately Some Deaths Before Dying was his last mystery (though he continued writing prize-winning children’s books for many years afterwards). He simply could not write mysteries fast enough to meet his publisher’s demands and so he gave up on them. But what a legacy he has left behind! His very first mystery, The Glass-Sided Ant’s Nest (1968) – also published as Skin Deep –   won the Golden Dagger from the British Crime Writers Association and was a finalist for the Edgar Award in the United States. His second book, The Old English Peep Show (1969) did the same; Dickinson was the first author to win two Gold Daggers in a row.

His books are never formulaic, even those in his Jimmy Pibble series. The Glass-Sided Ant’s Nest is about murder among a New Guinea tribe that is housed in London; The Old English Peep Show is a country manor mystery, but the killers appear to be a pride of lions. Two of his mysteries create an alternate history of the British royal family: King and Joker (1976) and Skeleton-in-Waiting (1989). In these books, the eldest son of King Edward VII did not die in 1892 but instead went on to rule as King Victor II, and Buckingham palace is the scene of the crimes. Among my other favorites of Dickinson’s books are The Last House Party (1982), again set in the period between wars, and Hindsight (1983) with its World War II backstory of the relocation of London’s children to the countryside.

For many, many hours of fascinating reading, Peter Dickinson, I salute you!

Dance Hall of the Dead (1973) – Tony Hillerman

This is the second book in Tony Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee series set in the Four Corners area of Arizona/New Mexico. The series almost didn’t happen: Hillerman’s agent, on reading the first book, The Blessing Way, suggested that he cut Joe Leaphorn and “all that Indian stuff.” Fortunately Hillerman persisted, and an editor at Harper & Row suggested that Leaphorn’s role be enlarged. A few books later, Jim Chee was created. (Hillerman had briefly lost the rights to Leaphorn and so had to invent a new Navajo detective; when he regained those rights, Leaphorn and Chee became a team.)

Dance Hall for the Dead won an Edgar award for Best Novel and was well-deserving of the honor. As a traditional mystery, it has all the requisite elements: several murders, a cruel and devious murderer, clues, red herrings, and a distinctive detective. But it has so much more: Joe Leaphorn is a man who lives in two worlds, a protagonist with the knowledge of the modern police detective and the skills of a traditional Navajo tracker. Like some of the Native American sleuths who have followed him (I’m thinking particularly of Jane Whitefield, Thomas Perry’s Seneca ‘guide’), Leaphorn has the ability to remain still for hours, while keenly observant his surroundings.

In addition to the hunt for the murderer, there is a search for a missing Navajo boy in the high desert, where winter is fast approaching; thus the setting becomes, as is true in most of Hillerman’s books, an important element of the book. And the reader will, of course, learn much about both Navajo and Zuni cultures, as well as some fascinating archeological information (about Folsom man).

I had read a few of the later Hillerman best-sellers, like Thief of Time (1988) and Coyote Waits (1990), but it was interesting to go back to a much earlier book in this series. Joe Leaphorn was a marvelous addition to the world of detective fiction.

A Sleeping Life (1978) – Ruth Rendell

Unlike many fictional detectives, who are often eccentric loners,  Reginald Wexford is a family man: happily married, with an adoring wife and two grown daughters. In A Sleeping Life, one of his daughters is unhappy in her marriage, and his attempt to understand her situation makes him wonder about his own.

Set in 1978, A Sleeping Life brings the reader into a time when women were questioning much about their lives. Like Parker’s Finding Rachel Wallace (reviewed here), it gives us a glimpse of the feminist movement of the time.  Rendell was called “the biggest anti-feminist there is” by Ms. Magazine  for her portrayal of a radical women’s group in An Unkindness of Ravens (1985), but here, she seems sympathetic to the plight of both Wexford’s daughter Sylvia and that of the murder victim, Rhoda Confrey.

Rhoda Confrey, a middle-aged, unattractive woman, is someone whom society might well have assigned the role of caregiver to her elderly father. But by suddenly coming into money, she escapes that fate and goes off to live her own life in London. What then leads to her death by stabbing in her hometown? And what exactly was her life like in London?

Wexford and his longtime friend and assistant, Michael Burden, go up several blind alleys in their attempt to solve the mystery of Rhoda’s life and death. Rendell provides many clues, cleverly distracting the reader from their significance.  A finalist for the Edgar Award (at a time when very few women were nominated for Edgars), A Sleeping Life is one of my favorites of Baroness Rendell’s Wexford books.

 

The Way Through the Woods (1992) – Colin Dexter

This is the tenth Inspector Morse mystery and one of the best. (It was awarded the Gold Dagger by the British Crime Writers Association.) When Morse and Lewis investigate the case of a Swedish student who went missing a year earlier, the twists and turns abound.

There are two British authors whose use of unusual words always leads me to compile a list to investigate after I’ve finished the book: Reginald Hill and Colin Dexter. Dexter was a crossword constructor for years, so his love of language comes as no surprise. I don’t mind; it’s fun to discover meanings of words like “boustrophedon,” and one can usually get the gist from the context and look the definitions up later.

Dexter’s style in this book is more complex than usual: he uses diary entries, newspaper articles, letters and even religious confessions, as well as narrative, to tell the story. There are multiple points of view as well, but all these elements are blended into a book that pulls the reader steadily along to its surprising conclusion.

I’ve read this book at least four times and there are still things that give me pause. It’s clear to me that some of the events are left deliberately ambiguous (e.g., who is the woman who rings Morse’s doorbell at the end?).

I’m always surprised when people who say they are fans of the Inspector Morse TV series (and Inspector Lewis and Endeavor) confess that they have never read Colin Dexter. If you are one of them, it’s time to start!

Another Golden Age? My Favorite Series Authors, 1990-2015

When I became a member of the online group DorothyL back in 1994, my reading of mysteries really accelerated. In addition to the wonderful Golden Age mysteries I’d read and loved for a long time, and the new crop of female writers who followed upon the success of Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky in the 1980s, there appeared to be so many other fine contemporary writers, male and female, of whom I’d never heard. I’m still a DorothyLer, and I’ve accepted the fact that I’ll never be able to keep up with all the great mysteries out there.

But I’ve been thinking lately that the last 25 years (1990-2015) might be considered by some as another “Golden Age.” And so I’m writing this post to discuss the authors who have made the strongest impression on me. A very subjective list (aren’t they all?) but made a bit easier by the fact that I’ve submitted to DorothyL every year a list of my Top Ten mysteries for the year, and I’ve kept my lists archived on my computer. Some authors’ names appear again and again on my Top Ten lists.

So here are my nominees for the contemporary Golden Age. I’ve grouped them to make it a bit more manageable.

The Class of ’36:

Robert Barnard, Reginald Hill and Peter Lovesey are three British authors who were all born in 1936. They all had academic backgrounds and, for a time, they travelled together in the UK calling themselves “The Class of ’36.” Sadly, Reginald Hill died in 2012 and Robert Barnard in 2013; Peter Lovesey is still publishing wonderful mysteries. The books of all three men have consistently made my Top Ten lists over the years.

Please see my tribute to Robert Barnard published in 2014, on this blog.

 

 

 

Reginald Hill was best known for his series of books featuring the beer-swilling, blasphemous Superintendent Andy Dalziel (pronounced “Dee-Ell”) and the more refined Sargent Peter Pascoe. If I had started with the first one, A Clubbable Woman (1970), I might not have continued; but Hill just kept getting better and better, and the one I read first was On Beulah Height (1998) because it was garnering so many rave reviews and award nominations. It was fabulous! Then I went back and started the series from its beginning. So many good ones – I’ll just list a few: Bones and Silence (1990), Recalled to Life (1992), Pictures of Perfection (1994), a personal favorite. A few of the later books were perhaps a little too scholarly for some readers, and even the earlier ones sent me to my Chambers Dictionary with a long list of words to look up, but the last three were just superb: Death Comes for the Fat Man (2007), The Price of Butcher’s Meat (2008), and Midnight Fugue (2009). I put off reading Midnight Fugue for a year or so when I realized it was to be the last one, but when I finally read it, I thought, “What a way to go out!”

Peter Lovesey had written a series of successful Victorian mysteries and some excellent standalones – including the terrific Gold Dagger winner, The False Inspector Dew (1982) – before he began his Peter Diamond books. But it’s the latter series, beginning with The Last Detective (1991), that has elevated Lovesey to the my Top Ten list over and over. Lovesey has placed his prickly police detective in the city of Bath and given him a great variety of complex mysteries to solve: Bloodhounds (1996) is both a parody of mystery readers’ groups and a locked room mystery; Diamond Dust (2002) combines poignant tragedy with an amazingly twisty plot. And the high quality of the books continues – the last two I read (The Tooth Tattoo (2013) and The Stone Wife (2014)) were as clever and intriguing as the earlier ones.

The Expatriates

Two women, one British, one American, moved to Italy in the 1970s and remained there, each writing a wonderful detective series. Donna Leon, an American author who resides in Venice, created the better known (at least in the US) of the two series. Her detective, Commissario Guido Brunetti, first appeared in Death at La Fenice (1992) and has been featured in a new mystery every year since then, a total of 25 books. Among my favorites are Acqua Alta (1996) – which brings back two characters from La Fenice, Flavia Petrelli and Brett Lynch; Flavia has recently reappeared in Falling in Love (2015) too – as well as A Noble Radiance (1998), Uniform Justice (2003), and Blood from a Stone (2005). Brunetti is a family man, so in addition to the mystery element, most of Leon’s readers, myself included, look forward to the warm and witty scenes of Brunetti with his professor-wife Paola and his two teen-age offspring, Raffi and Chiara. Many of Leon’s books have been adapted for German TV as the “Commissario Brunetti Mysteries”; the series is visually beautiful and well-acted, and is available with English subtitles.

The British writer, Magdalen Nabb, set her books in Florence, and her detective is Marshal Salvatore Guarnaccia of the Carabinieri, who makes his first appearance in Death of an Englishman (1981). The Marshal is an endearing character, often underestimated by his superiors, who becomes involved in the lives of the people he meets through his investigations. My all-time favorite of the series is The Marshal and The Madwoman (1988 ) for its detailed retelling of recent Florence history and its colorful portraits of even the minor characters. Other favorites include The Marshal at the Villa Torrini (1994), The Marshal Makes His Report (1991), and the last four in the series : Property of Blood (2001), Some Bitter Taste (2002), The Innocent (2005), and Villa Nuova (2008). Magdalen Nabb died in 2007, so there will be no more of the Marshal, but Soho has released all of her Florentine mysteries in beautiful new editions.

Both Leon and Nabb do a masterful job of putting the reader into the Italian cities they depict. One can feel the heat of August in Florence as the Marshal makes his way through the streets of the “Madwoman’s” neighborhood, and can follow Brunetti through the alleys and over the bridges of Venice as he wends his way home from the police station. (The Leon books have lately included maps of Venice.) And their central characters become incredibly real as each series progresses. Occasionally I’ve been asked to compare Brunetti and Guarnaccia, and what I say is: If I were having a dinner party, I’d invite Brunetti and Paola – they are witty and urbane and would keep the conversation lively. But if I were upset about something, I’d want a hug from the Marshal. (Unless it was August.)

The New Yorkers

Three writers, who have used New York City (or a facsimile thereof) as the backdrop for witty and well-plotted crime novels, have repeatedly made my Top Ten lists: Lawrence Block, Ed McBain, and Donald Westlake. (I’m using the term ‘crime novels’ here because Westlake’s books aren’t mysteries; they’re comic heist stories.)

Lawrence Block has written an incredibly large number of books, including four crime series. The books that I love are those about Bernie Rhodenbarr, bookseller and burglar. They are often funny and full of social commentary, yet hold up as well-plotted mysteries. As it happened, I started with the 6th book, The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (1994), and I can’t recall why, as I’m not much of a baseball fan. But I liked it enough to read the next, The Burglar Who Thought He was Bogart (1995), and being a classic movie buff, I loved that one! So of course I had to start the series from the beginning, and found many more that I delighted in: The Burglar Who Liked to Quite Kipling (1979) (Block at his funniest), The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian (1983) (a great twisty plot), The Burglar in the Library (1997) (a witty send-up of Agatha Christie). There have only been two more since 2000, but it’s always fun to be back with Bernie, and I hope for more.

Ed McBain is a hero of mine. Imagine sustaining a series for nearly 50 years (1958-2005) and still keeping it fresh – that’s what McBain did with his 87th Precinct novels. The last few books he wrote were as good or better than the earlier ones. Romance (1995) was the first one I read, and I found it funny and romantic (of course) and a delight to read. I was determined to read all the others that had preceded it, which was no small task: many of the books were out of print, so I had to obtain them from used book sources, (before Amazon really got going in that market and made it easy). Consequently, I read the books in the order I could find them, which was pretty random. But it didn’t matter too much – character development wasn’t the reason to read McBain. Not that the characters don’t change a little over time (though they don’t age much); it took a little effort to keep track of Kling’s love interests. But the dialogue was so good and the stories so entertaining that I persisted till I’d read them all, while still keeping up with the new ones as McBain published them. The grand total: 57 books. Favorites include: Like Love (1962), Tricks (1987), Widows (1991), Ax (1964), Fuzz (1968), Calypso (1979) and Fat Ollie’s Book (2003). (I wouldn’t advise starting with this last one – read a few books with Fat Ollie as a minor character first.)

While several of the authors above write mysteries that could be categorized as ‘clever’ or ‘witty’, Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder books are best described as ingenious and hilarious. These are caper novels, not mysteries; each cleverly planned heist, whether of artwork, jewels, or simply money, goes awry with disastrously humorous results, and part of the fun is to see John Dortmunder plot his way out of the problems that arise. Drowned Hopes (1990) is Westlake’s tour de force, as the Dortmunder crew attempts an underwater robbery (again and again), but other favorites of mine are Get Real (2009), Bad News (2001), Good Behavior (1986), Jimmy the Kid (1974), and What’s the Worst that Could Happen? (1996).

The works of all three of these New York writers have been filmed – poorly. None of the film adaptations comes close to the book. The Hot Rock (1972), based on the first Dortmunder novel, is actually pretty good though Robert Redford is miscast as Dortmunder. Bank Shot, with George C. Scott as Dortmunder (renamed Ballentine), manages to be outright boring, and the less said about the other Dortmunder films the better. Bernie Rhodenbarr was given a sex change to Bernice as played by Whoopi Goldberg in the awful Burglar (1987); I think that ended Bernie’s film career. McBain’s 87th Precinct has fared better: a few of the earlier books were made into movies I’ve not seen (1958-60); a TV series (1961-62) was shown on American TV with Robert Lansing miscast but otherwise doing well as Steve Carella, and Norman Fell and Ron Harper well-cast as Meyer Meyer and Bert Kling respectively, and featuring guest stars like Leonard Nimoy and Dennis Hopper at the beginning of their careers; Fuzz (1972), with a screenplay by McBain, was played mostly for comedy with Burt Reynolds as Carella and Yul Brynner as “The Deaf Man”; and then there were a few made-for-TV movies (1995-1997), two with Dale Midkiff, who actually looked the most like my idea of Carella.

And Two More Brits

I’m just going to give these last two a brief mention, as I plan to review some of their books in posts this fall: Colin Dexter, who created the wonderful Inspector Morse books (1975-1999),  and Ruth Rendell, better known for her “psychological” mysteries, but writing the Golden Age-like Inspector Wexford series for nearly fifty years (1964-2013). Among my favorite Morse novels are Last Seen Wearing (1976), The Wench is Dead (1989), in which Morse solves a case from his hospital bed just as Alan Grant did in Tey’s Daughter of Time, and the twisty The Way Through the Woods (1992) (reviewed here). The Wexford books that I most enjoyed are Best Man to Die (1969), A Sleeping Life (1978) (reviewed here), and The Monster in the Box (2009).

Many of the British writers’ characters have been dramatized by British television and shown on American TV as well; the casting in most cases has been impeccable. John Thaw was so good as Inspector Morse that Colin Dexter admits that the actor influenced the way he wrote about the character. Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan were perfection as Dalziel and Pascoe, and George Baker aptly filled the role of Wexford in 50 episodes of that series.  All three series went on for so long that the authors couldn’t keep up with the demand for TV scripts, so many of the episodes were written by others; not surprisingly, these seldom lived up to the quality of those based on the books.

So that’s my list! I might have included Margaret Maron, whose Deborah Knott series (1992-2015) has recently concluded after 20 books, but somehow, despite the excellence of some of those books, I don’t feel the same affection for them as I do for the ones above. Which authors would you include in your Golden Age list?

All of these books are available online, many as e-books as well as paperbacks, and a few others have been recently reprinted. Here are links to their pages on Amazon:

Barnard, The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori

Barnard, Murder in Mayfair

Hill, On Beulah Height

Hill, Pictures of Perfection

Lovesey, The Last Detective

Lovesey, The Tooth Tattoo

Leon, Death at La Fenice

Leon, Uniform Justice

Nabb, The Marshal at the Villa Torrini

Nabb, The Marshal and the Madwoman

Block, The Burglar who Thought He was Bogart

Block, The Burglar in the Library

McBain, Romance

McBain, Widows

Westlake, Drowned Hopes

Westlake, Bad News

Dexter, The Way Through the Woods

Dexter, The Wench is Dead

Rendell, The Monster in a Box

Rendell, Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter

Note: If you make a purchase using one of these links, I receive no payment; however, at no cost to you, my daughter’s green living blog, HealthyGreenSavvy.com, will receive a small commission.

Golden Age Mysteries: My Favorites

The Golden Age of Mystery is usually defined as the period between World War I and World War II, or roughly 1920-1940; some people would extend it into the early 1950s. As for me, I like to think of the Golden Age as beginning with Trent’s Last Case in 1913, interrupted by WWI, and then continuing into the early 1950s (so I can include the best of Josephine Tey, who’s clearly a Golden Age author). Below I list my favorites –  a subjective list, of course. The order is somewhat random, I confess, but I think the first three are truly my top three.

1. Trent’s Last Case (1913) by E.C. Bentley – The book that introduced a detective who’s fallible and human, at a time when most mystery authors were creating omniscient Sherlock Holmes clones. Read my review of it here. So many Golden Age authors (Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie among others) admired this book as one of the outstanding pieces of detective fiction of all time, and Sayers even copied an important plot point for her first mystery, Whose Body.

2. Strong Poison (1934) by Dorothy L. Sayers – The beginning of the Lord Peter/Harriet Vane romance as well as a well-plotted and humorous mystery. Though others may prefer Gaudy Night or The Nine Tailors – both of which I’ve enjoyed – I find them too weighed down by feminist rhetoric or showy scholarship (into bell-ringing!). You can find my review of Strong Poison here.
3. To Love and Be Wise (1950) by Josephine Tey – It’s so difficult to choose just one of Tey’s books, but this is a sentimental favorite. I love Brat Farrar too, and many people would say it was her best book, but I just can’t choose a book without Alan Grant! And as for The Daughter of Time, I find it brilliant on some days and tedious on others. Reviews of all three: TL&BW, BF, DoT
4. The Long Divorce (1951) by Edmund Crispin – Many people would choose The Moving Toyshop as Crispin’s best book, but I’ve never liked it that much; maybe the over-the-top finale is just too much for me. For complete hilarity, I’d go with Crispin’s Buried for Pleasure instead. Long Divorce, on the other hand, while still quite humorous, puts the emphasis on the mystery, as Crispin’s Oxford don detective, Gervase Fen, travelling incognito as “Mr. Datchery,” solves a case involving poison pen letters and murder. People who enjoy humor that is eccentric and scholarly (though never pompous) will enjoy this one.
5. Flowers for the Judge (1936) by Margery Allingham – Allingham wrote so many novels about Albert Campion (and she kept on writing them through the mid-1960s) that it’s difficult to choose. I really like Sweet Danger, in which Albert meets Amanda Fitton for the first time, and Dancers in Mourning (which I review here). But Flowers for the Judge is especially entertaining, both for its look at the world of publishing and for the amazing disappearance in broad daylight of one of the members of the publishing house.
6. Clutch of Constables (1968) by Ngaio Marsh – Like Allingham, Marsh is another of the great British writers who continued to write Golden Age mysteries long after the period was over (until 1982, in fact). I might have chosen Artists in Crime (1938) instead, the book in which Roderick Alleyn meets Agatha Troy –  notice a certain romantic theme in my favorites (see Strong Poison and Sweet Danger mentioned above) – or Death of a Peer (1940) (reviewed here) for its exuberant silliness – another theme in my favorites (see Buried for Pleasure above and Appleby’s End below). But I truly love this one that features Troy in the leading role. Here’s my review.
7. The Long Farewell (1958) by Michael Innes – Like Marsh, Michael Innes wrote Golden Age mysteries from the 1930s to the 1980s. Some of them are very funny (like Appleby’s End with its bizarre train ride); others – chiefly those written in the 1940s –  are more like spy novels, and some are pure mysteries. The Long Farewell is in the last category and shows Oxford scholar Innes at his best, as his detective Sir John Appleby investigates the suicide (or was it murder?) of a bigamous Shakespearean scholar. In addition to his Appleby novels, Innes wrote a series of books about Charles Honeybath – most of which I don’t like – and a few non-series books that are very good, particularly A Change of Heir and Christmas at Candleshoe. (The Disney studio bought the title, Candleshoe, and then threw away the book, so the film and the book have nothing much in common.)
8. Trial and Error (1937) by Anthony Berkeley – Berkeley wrote a series of good mysteries in the 1920s and 1930s featuring the writer/sleuth Roger Sheringham. In 1929 he created a character named Ambrose Chitterwick (“a mild little man of no particular appearance”) and placed him in a Sheringham book, The Poisoned Chocolates Case.  An unlikely detective, Chitterwick appeared in two more of Berkeley’s novels, The Piccadilly Murder (1929) and Trial and Error (1937). For me, it’s really a toss-up between Poisoned Chocolates and Trial and Error. But I’m choosing Trial and Error for the uniqueness of the plot, wherein a murderer tries to prove he committed the murder so an innocent man won’t be convicted of the crime. Berkeley also wrote under various pseudonyms; as Francis Iles, he was the creator of the creepy Before the Fact, the basis of the Hitchcock film, Suspicion.
9.  The List of Adrian Messenger (1959) by Philip MacDonald – Starting with The Rasp (1924), MacDonald wrote a series of mysteries in the 1920s and 1930s about detective Anthony Gethryn, then brought him back for one last bow in this book, a finalist for the 1960 Edgar Award.  Adrian Messenger gives a list of ten men’s names to a friend at Scotland Yard; then the plane carrying Messenger is blown up, and Gethryn must investigate each of the ten men to find if any of them is still alive and which one is the murderer. This was made into a film of the same name in 1963, starring George C. Scott as Gethryn, and featuring people like Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis and Robert Mitchum in fairly obvious disguises. The movie is fun, though not nearly as clever as the book.
10. The House of the Arrow (1924) by A.E.W. Mason – Mason is most often remembered – if he’s remembered at all – as the author of The Four Feathers, a wonderful adventure story. But he also wrote a series of five detective novels featuring Inspector Hanaud, an eccentric French detective who may have been a precursor of Hercule Poirot. The House of the Arrow may be Mason’s best, though At the Villa Rose, written in 1910, is a close second. In Arrow, Hanaud must help a young heiress prove that she hasn’t murdered the woman who left her all her fortune. Publisher and critic Bennett Cerf said of this book: “Its startling but thoroughly logical conclusion, which took me completely by surprise, still impresses me as the cleverest piece of literary sleight-of-hand I have ever read in a detective story.” There have been three British film versions of this novel (1930, 1940, 1953), none of which I’ve ever seen, but I think I’m going to try to track them down!

All of these books are available online, many as e-books as well as paperbacks, and a few others have been recently reprinted by wonderful publishers like Felony & Mayhem or Stratus. Here are links to their pages on Amazon:

Trent’s Last Case

Strong Poison

To Love and Be Wise

Brat Farrar

The Long Divorce

Buried for Pleasure

Flowers for the Judge

Sweet Danger

Dancers in Mourning

Artists in Crime

Clutch of Constables

Death of a Peer

The Long Farewell

Appleby’s End

Poisoned Chocolates Case

Trial and Error

List of Adrian Messenger

House of the Arrow

At the Villa Rose

Note: If you make a purchase using one of these links, I receive no payment; however, at no cost to you, my daughter’s green living blog, HealthyGreenSavvy.com, will receive a small commission.

The Big Sleep (1939) – Raymond Chandler

This was a big year for Raymond Chandler and his fans. Billy and Ray, a show about Chandler’s writing the screenplay for Double Indemnity with Billy Wilder, opened off Broadway. A new book, The Black-Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black (the pseudonym of author John Banville), carrying on the exploits of Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe, was published. The real-life model for Marlowe, a PI named Samuel Marlowe, was revealed. And a libretto for an operetta, The Princess and The Pedlar, co-written by Chandler in 1917, was discovered. So it seemed like Chandler was everywhere when my book group and I set out to read The Big Sleep this past September.

Chandler is not known for his plotting, so it’s not surprising that The Big Sleep leaves some threads dangling at the end; we’re never exactly sure who killed the chauffeur, for example. (The 1946 movie version is even worse, as the three screenwriters, one of whom was William Faulkner, were clearly under instructions from the studio to stick Lauren Bacall’s character into as many scenes as possible, in order to capitalize on the public’s desire to see Bogart and Bacall together.) There is a homophobic element throughout the book as well, not an uncommon thing in hard-boiled detective fiction of that time. And Chandler’s women, with one exception, are pretty awful too.

So why is Chandler so revered? And why was The Big Sleep a finalist for the Anthony for “Best Mystery of the Twentieth Century”? (The others were Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon [see my blog posts on these two], Sayers’s Gaudy Night, and duMaurier’s Rebecca, the winner of the award.) Clearly it is his style.

The book is filled with similes that have come to be known as Chandlerisms:”The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings.” “The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.” There is also a lot of description of people and the clothes they wear: 

            “She wore pale blue slacks and they looked well on her. She walked as if she were floating… Her eyes were slate-gray, and had almost no expression when they looked at me. She came over near me and smiled with her mouth and she had little sharp predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pith and as shiny as porcelain.”

The character of Marlowe is the prototype of all the sardonic, wise-cracking PIs who come after him:

” ‘Tall aren’t you?’ she said.

‘I didn’t mean to be.’ “

By coincidence, I was rereading Robert B. Parker’s Looking for Rachel Wallace [see my blog post on this book] at the same time as I was reading The Big Sleep, and it was obvious how much Parker had learned from Chandler. Many of Marlowe’s quips, like the one above, would feel right coming out of Spenser’s mouth. Both books use the image of the knight as a symbol of the detective and his code. Indeed, the knight appears on the first page of The Big Sleep in a stained glass panel, and reappears several times, once as a chess piece (“Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights”) and near the end on the same panel as on page 1 (“The knight in the stained glass window still wasn’t getting anywhere”). Parker too is explicit about Spenser’s code of chivalry, and his girlfriend Susan often refers to him as “Galahad” or “Lancelot.”

Almost anyone who writes hard-boiled detective fiction today is compared to Chandler. And if the setting is Los Angeles, the comparison is inevitable. Of Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), one critic says: “Mosley’s going to be compared with Chandler, but he has a clarity and precision that Chandler never achieved,” and another says “Easy Rawlins is cut from Philip Marlowe’s cloth, but he goes him one better.” The Los Angeles Times says of Robert Crais’s L.A. Requiem (1999): “After Chandler we had James M. Cain and after Cain there was Ross MacDonald and currently we have Robert Crais.”

So, is this a great detective novel? I don’t think so, not by today’s standards. But was it an incredibly influential book? Absolutely.