CLASSIC MYSTERIES: REVIEWS BY A FAN, NOT A CRITIC

Winter of the Wolf Moon * * * *

2006-02-12T07:17:00.000-08:00

Steve Hamilton has written an excellent series about a former Detroit policeman (Alex McKnight) who was retired because he carries a bullet around next to his heart. Forcible retirement took him to the Upper Penninsula of Michigan, when he manages a small group of cabins that were built by his father. Hamilton does an excellent job of making the attitudes and culture of the UP come alive for us. More importantly, we quickly come to empathize with McKnight and the difficulties he faces as he tries to bring justice in a small way to the situations he finds himself facing. He is brave and ethical, though not a saint. In short, he takes the imperfect world as he finds, and does what he can to make events turn out better than would happen without his involvement. Or does he make things worse? All we can do is try, right?

Bloodline * * * *

2006-01-22T11:56:00.000-08:00

Gerry Boyle's Bloodline is one of a series about Jack McMorrow, a former New York Times reporter who has moved to rural Maine. Jack appears to be on the downward slide, but the reader wonders whether he really is failing, or instead is on his way to discovering a better way to live than most Americans have found. In this story, Jack investigates the problem of teenage pregnancy and how it affects the lives of the girls who experience it. He starts to write a magazine article about a girl who gave up her baby for adoption, but soon the case becomes a murder investigation.

Boyle has created a great character and his writing style is fast moving as well as entertaining. The series deals with the strengths and weaknesses of small town life in an insightful manner. The quality of the writing is very good, though perhaps not on par with the Hammett, Chandler and MacDonald. No one who likes mysteries should hesitate about reading all the books in this series.

The Falcon scoring system

2006-01-06T17:45:00.000-08:00

How would you score a mystery when reviewing for other people's benefit? I compare each book to the Maltese Falcon, and ask these questions.

Is the plot tricky and fast-moving?
Is the dialog fast and funny?
Are the characters odd and interesting yet believable?
Is there a minimum of gore?
Did they make a classic movie out of it, with big stars playing the key roles?

As you can see, five points is the maximum possible. that would be five stars, if I knew how to make stars.

Does anyone want to argue with this point system? What have I left out?

Devil in a Blue Dress * * * * *

2006-01-04T17:33:00.000-08:00

Easy Rawlins is the character created by Walter Mosley to tell us what it was like to be an African American in the United States in the middle part of the twentieth century. Devil in a Blue Dress, the first in the series, is set in 1948. Easy is hired by a white man to conduct an investigation in the black community. However, the trail eventually leads in a direction that white society does not like. The story is full of drinking and death, but Mosley shows the reader how these aspects of life in the black community were inevitable, given the conditions of the day. The writing style is impeccable, and if you read this one you will have keep reading about the life of Easy Rawlins in book after book. Fortunately for us, Mosley delivered a solid series about Easy. You should read the entire series, and this book is the place to begin. I have to believe that the Easy Rawlins books will be reprinted for at least a hundred years. The picture they paint is hard to take, but its accuracy is undeniable.

Out of Season * * * *

2006-01-03T18:32:00.000-08:00

Indianapolis detective Albert Samson is overweight and alway broke, but he is different from the usual tough guy sleuth in ways that allow normal people to relate to him. He is not a hard drinker and he still is attentive to his mother. He does not come across as particularly impressive, but the reader learns to respect his intelligence.

His creator, Michael Z. Lewin, usually manages to put social issues into high relief in this series. in Out of Season, Samson gets drawn into a fifty year old murder committed by the rich. Somehow a family from a different social stratum is involved. Anti-Asian racism swirls around the edges of this story.

The Samson series can be classed as one of the under-appreciated classics, in my opinion. If it is not still around in fifty years, then future readers will have lost many hours of satisfying entertainment.

Mexican Hat * * 1/2

2006-01-03T18:12:00.000-08:00

Kevin Kerney is a New Mexican police officer who was disabled by wounds to the knee and stomach. Despite his handicaps, he moves from one tough situation to another in this series of mysteries by Mciael McGarrity. In Mexican Hat, Kerney takes a part time job patrolling wilderness trails, but of course a murder occurs almost immediately. His experience in law enforcement makes him the logical choice to lead the investigation. The story touches on the historical rip off of the early Mexican landowners in New Mexico as well as the contemporary issue of militias in rural states.

Kerney is a likable fellow and I for one will keep reading the series to find out what happens to him Others might not agree, but I am not ready to call this series a classic, because about once every twenty pages the writing briefly comes across as choppy. Even so, these books are all darn good for reading.

And Then There Were None (aka Ten Little Indians) * * * * *

2006-01-03T16:48:00.000-08:00

Agatha Christie was one of the originals in detective fiction. And Then There Were None is one of her most famous. Those of us who know and love Christie’s books should all sit down and ask ourselves why we feel that way. When I revisited And Then There Were None recently I was shocked to discover that the mystery was only solvable by resorting to causes that can only be described as unlikely. Yet, the book is wonderful. The characters are interesting, the plot unfolds at a reasonable pace, and the story has just the right amount of description: enough to set the tone without boring the reader. Ten strangers are drawn to together on an isolated island under false pretenses, then one by one they get the axe. The suspense builds geometrically throughout the story. Then at the end, we the readers are completely befuddled, until Agatha takes pity on us and explains it all. Maybe that is why we love her work: she was brilliant at building suspense.

Dead Man Below Deck

2006-01-03T14:01:00.000-08:00

The pdf file for this book is available for free.

The first chapter is shown below.

Chapter 1. The Beginning

I walked past the dead man without noticing him. Well, not right past him; he was about ten feet away. This failure to notice what some people might regard as noteworthy caused the police to be suspicious. But the honest truth is I just did not see the body. After all, it was six in the morning. I was going out to pick up a newspaper and some bananas at the convenience store down the block. I was half asleep, not expecting anything unusual like a body by the door. Not exactly by the door; we have a second floor condo with a deck-type balcony. The body was directly under my deck on the neighbor’s patio. My front door opened at least ten feet from that spot so, as you can see, it was not directly in front of my eyes. Okay, maybe some people would have noticed it. But I was not your average person.

The convenience store was a block away. I wandered over there in the usual way. My early morning ritual on a summer morning being unvaried if at all possible. I circled the building, staying on the sidewalk and stepping over the dirt. The building was new, so we had a lot of dirt. The dirt was sometimes a little wet and I didn’t want mud on the bottom of my shoes. Then, I always followed the same route. I walked on the left side of the street until I was across from the convenience store. I crossed over and went in, being careful of cars seeking gasoline. The return trip was a mirror image of the first leg.

The convenience store was bright, clean, and airy. It was a very nice store. The people who worked there were wide awake, cheerful, neat and clean, and looked wholesome. The store had fresh bananas, donuts, and milk along with the usual conveniences. I always picked up the Milwaukee paper and this morning, a Saturday, my wife wanted me to get the Advertiser. An inveterate yard sale fanatic, she was looking forward to a full morning. Rather, she was looking to fill what would be left of the morning after she finally got up and dressed. That would be several hours from now.

Let me clarify so you don’t get the wrong idea: we didn’t read the Milwaukee paper because we were in Milwaukee. We didn’t like Milwaukee. Nobody did. Milwaukee was not like the rest of Wisconsin. It was more like Chicago. And we really didn’t like Chicago.

On the other hand, the Milwaukee newspaper was better than the one printed in Madison. The Madison paper did not even have the Dilbert comic strip. So we were driven to settle on the Milwaukee paper. Just don’t think that meant we liked Milwaukee or were the slightest bit interested in what went on there.

Quite the opposite in fact. As Milwaukee grew, it pushed its boundaries out. Those of us with homes in small towns like Fort Atkinson were in danger of some day becoming part of the ‘Milwaukee area.’ When that happened, we would be painted with the same brush, the brush that said urban problems – crime, pollution, traffic, and racial conflict. This was unfair and not our fault. If we wanted urban problems, we would live in the city for Pete’s sake. In fact, we proved our innate good sense by not living in the city. For the city to invade us was just not right. They could damn well grow in the other direction. That would be into Lake Michigan. Let them live in houseboats or in bubbles under the lake (the one they polluted whenever they got the chance).

While I was paying for the bananas and papers, a police car raced by the store, lights flashing and siren screeching. This was painful at the early hour and really not necessary. After all, there was not much traffic that had to be warned out of the way. Those guys liked to make a fuss just for the fun of it sometimes. The noise jarred our ears and caused all of us in the store to pause and gaze briefly out of the window before turning back to our respective tasks without comment.

The young woman behind the counter asked me if I had purchased gasoline (no) and would like a bag for the bananas (no). This proved to be a mistake. Since I was walking, a bag might have made it easier to carry my purchases. And, maybe, I did not look my usual debonair self with a bunch of bananas under my arm. Yes, I probably should have taken a bag, but until I had at least two cups of coffee, my brain cells did not function very well. Two large cups of coffee.

Back I went to the condo. Imagine my surprise when I saw the police car parked next to my building. Imagine my surprise when I saw the authorities clustered around my neighbor’s patio, right below my deck. Imagine my surprise when I saw a body on the ground not ten feet from the front door. Imagine their surprise when a middle-aged guy carrying bananas tried to push through the crime scene.

“You can’t come in here, sir. This is a crime scene.”

“But I need to get in my front door.”

“I’m sorry, sir. But you can’t come this way.”

Naturally, I wilted a bit. No coffee? I had put the pot on before leaving the building. Fresh coffee awaited, unreachable. And where was I supposed to go? The car was in the garage. The keys were in the condo. The automatic garage door opener was in the car. This was a difficult problem to solve without coffee.

I could sit down somewhere and try to struggle through the paper without coffee as unlikely as that sounds. But the only place to sit was in my neighbor’s patio chair which was next to the body, right in the middle of their precious crime scene. Impossible. So I turned away. Probably, I was going to walk slowly in aimless circles until the problem resolved itself or I fell into a coma. More likely, both would occur with my mind drifting away as my feet did their thing.

Perhaps it was just as well that one of the officers called me back. “Sir, do you live here?”

“I’m in the upstairs unit.”

“Right above this body, sir?” The implication escaped me, but a feeling of unease began to disturb me.

“We would like to ask you a few questions.” He said with a stone face.

“Can we do it over coffee? There is a fresh pot upstairs.” Clever of me, don’t you think? A chance to get at the coffee and I leapt on it.

The policeman stared at me for a moment. He seemed to think I was not displaying the proper regard for the gravity of the situation. After all, there was a dead man below my deck. Perhaps I should have been all a twitter - horrified, fearful, and excited. But heck, I saw dead bodies all the time on TV. It was no big deal. Well, if I had noticed it, I would, of course, have called it in and felt important for being so civic minded and alert. However, since I missed my chance at that moment of glory, I just wanted my coffee.

The policeman considered the situation for a moment. I thought maybe my offer of fresh coffee had dented his resolve about the sanctity of the crime scene. No such luck.

“Stand over here, sir. Someone will question you later.”

Stand around waiting for someone to question me? Arms full of bananas and newspapers? This could take hours. A couple of brain cells clicked together under duress and I whipped out my cell phone. I called my wife, hoping she would hear the phone ring. I did not expect her to answer it. She kept it inside a bag, inside her purse, which was usually inside a larger bag. The chances of getting through all of those barriers before the phone stopped ringing were a flat zero. But she would call me back.

And she did. “Ed! Are you all right?” Panic.

“Yeah, fine.”

“Where are you? What’s wrong?”

“I’m just downstairs.”

“Are you hurt? Why don’t you come up?”

Trying to cut through all the fear and panic, I interrupted her and spoke as quickly as possible. Repetition was important under these circumstances so that she would hear my message even if she tried to talk. “THE POLICE ARE DOWN HERE THEY WANT TO QUESTION ME ABOUT SOMETHING PLEASE BRING A CUP OF COFFEE DOWN DON’T WORRY NOTHING WRONG BODY BELOW DECK BRING COFFEE.” That should do it.

Silence. “I’m coming down.”

“Thanks. Don’t forget my coffee.”

The Doomsters * * * *

2006-01-03T11:31:00.000-08:00

The Doomsters by Ross MacDonald illustrates how well the mystery novel serves to illuminate social problems. Lew Archer is known as a crusader, yet a theme that runs through this story is the degree which self-centeredness led to personal disaster in his youth. One of the characters in The Doomsters is a drug addict who had turned to Archer for guidance when he was younger. Both Archer and the juvenile delinquent believe that Archer dropped the ball at a critical juncture in the young man's development, but readers will wonder if Archer really deserves that much recrimination. Certainly, his remorse must drive his crusading zeal, but maybe he is carrying around too much guilt.

Another theme in The Doomsters is serious and persistent mental illness. MacDonald punctures some stereotypes here, stereotypes that persist even today. He clearly shows mental illness as a disease that its victims struggle with, rather than suggesting that it reflects weakness of character. He also shows that it runs in families and that it can contain a genuine risk of violence. On the other hand, the homicidal maniacs in this story do not all have genetic predisposition as an excuse...

Lew Archer is different from Sam Spade in a lot of ways, but both are smart and tough and each carries a moralist around inside his head.

The Maltese Falcon * * * * *

2006-01-03T10:44:00.000-08:00

Dashiell Hammett's classic novel was faithfully presented in the Bogart movie. This is the kind of movie that proves that special effects are completely unnecessary, when telling a great story. Sam Spade is a wonderful character (in fact, all of the characters are fascinating and quirky). The dialogue is clever and fast. The action is unpredictable. This has to be one of the best mysteries ever written. If you claim to like mysteries, this one is not only a 'must-read', its a 'must-have-on-your-shelf.'

my favorite detectives make lists

2006-01-03T08:42:00.000-08:00

so let's begin with a list of classic mystery writers. This list is from a reader's point of view, so we are mainly interested in a good read. If you prefer Jane Austin to Ross Macdonald, you are on the wrong blog. And, by the way, on this blog 'classic' is defined as likely to be popular for many years. It does not mean it was written a long time ago by someone who couldn't get to the point of the story in less than 500 pages.

First partial draft of the author list (no particular order)

Arthur Conan Doyle
Dashiell Hammett
Agatha Christie
PD James
Raymond Chandler
Ross Macdonald
JD MacDonald
AA Fair (ES Gardner)
Rex Stout
Jonathon Gash
Lawrence Block
Stephen Greenleaf
Michael Lewin
James Lee Burke
Len Deighton
Walter Mosley
...(more later)