* A 1919 crime trio: Lee Thayer, Bernard Capes, and Isabel Ostrander

The Mystery of the Thirteenth Floor, by Lee Thayer
The Mystery of the Skeleton Key, by Bernard Capes

Ashes to Ashes, by Isabel Ostrander

I am a very patient reader, but I must say that more than once while reading this crime/mystery trio of novels I felt like my tolerance was being tested.  Posted in order of annoyance (most to least), the main culprit here was Lee Thayer, whose book The Mystery of the Thirteenth Floor was actually a bit of a trial to get through.  

Forgotten Books, 2012
393 pp
paperback

My version is from Forgotten Books, one of my go-to place for reprints, but this book was originally published by The Century Company in New York.  In case anyone decides they're brave enough to read this novel, there are also e-versions available at archive.org.  

original Century edition, 1919, image from AbeBooks

I picked up this book because of my interest in more obscure women mystery writers of yesteryear.  Lee Thayer, full name Emma Redington Lee Thayer (1874-1973)  isn't exactly a household word in the genre, although she wrote some sixty books between 1919 and 1966.    The Thirteenth Floor is the first in her series featuring Detective Peter Clancy, who in this novel is but a mere teen,  but who will go on to solve several mysteries over the long span of his career.  Francis M. Nevins,  in Pronzini and Muller's  1001 Midnights: The Aficionado's Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction,   places him in fifty-nine out of Thayer's sixty books (780).   

The story focuses on the death of an attorney by the name of James Randolph Stone, whose death by stabbing occurs immediately after he has two of his employees witness the signing of his will.  The timing of the death and the fact that nobody could possibly have gotten into Stone's Manhattan office and fled (or hid him or herself)  in the scant amount of time before the discovery of his body lands this story in the impossible-crime zone.  When the will turns up missing, it seems that there are several people who are interested in retrieving it, and will (quite literally) stop at nothing to get it.  There is a police detective, and he latches onto the wrong person,  but detection isn't the actual focus here, as Thayer examines motives, character, and the past among her people as she takes us through the story to get to the answer of who killed Stone.  Now, that sounds pretty cut and dried, in typical whodunit fashion, but as it turns out, Thayer decided to take the longest way possible to get to that point, and in the meantime interjects romance, much melodrama, self-sacrificing (aka lying to protect someone else),  and memory musing to the tune of several pages that could have completely been left out or at least edited down to a few sentences to convey her point.  As far as the core mystery of this novel is concerned it was pretty good, and I really did want to know who killed old James Randolph Stone, but just as we're heading to the finish line, the author does something undeniably unforgivable in the form of what I'm sure was meant to be a last-minute showstopper.  Gah! I won't give it away but seriously -- this was beyond frustrating after putting up with all that came before. 

One more thing,  and that's  Nevins' warning in 1001 Midnights that 

"Thayer's novels move the speed of an arthritic snail trying to cross a piece of flypaper."

I couldn't have said it better.

 I'm happy to have read it, and to have discovered yet another more obscure woman author,  but unless I am running short on books someday, I'm not too sure I will be picking up another book by this author in the future.   Reader beware. Even my saintlike reading patience was not enough here.

*****

9780008242688

Collins Crime Club/Harper Collins, 2015

204 pp

hardcover

Moving on to book two, which was much less frustrating and had a crazy twist that I didn't see coming, is The Mystery of the Skeleton Key, by Bernard Capes.  I know Capes as a writer of horror/pulpy-ish fiction but not as an author of mystery/crime fiction. Not only was this Capes' first mystery novel, but it was also the first in Collins' Detective Club series, many of which have been reprinted along with their great covers

A country house in Hampshire is the scene for this story, although it actually begins in France, where two of the main characters, Vivian Bickerdike and the Baron LeSage, meet for the first time at a sidewalk cafe in the Place du Palais Royal.  Although the Baron is helpful,  Bickerdike isn't quite sure about him, noticing that the Baron

"could not, or would not, answer a direct question directly; he seemed to love secrecy and evasion for the own sake, and for the opportunity they gave him for springing some valueless surprises on the unsuspecting."

Their paths will cross again as they find themselves on the same train heading for the same destination, Wildshott, the Hampshire country home of Sir Calvin Kennett, who lives there with his son Hugo (a friend of Bickerdike) and his daughter Audrey.  Hugo (also called Hugh) is in a strange state of mind -- Bickerdike senses there's something not quite right with his friend, and Hugo promises to tell all after the upcoming shooting party.  But there are more important things that will take precedence first, since during the shooting the young maid Annie Evans is shot, and it turns out not to have been an accident but rather a solid case of murder.    The police are called and a certain  Sergeant Ridgway ("a clever dog!") makes his way to the scene, where he immediately latches on to the men in the house as possible suspects. While Ridgway investigates, Bickerdike does some clandestine sleuthing, looking both at the case and at the Baron, whom he does not particularly trust and certainly dislikes.   After the coroner's inquest, a suspect is arrested, imprisoned and sent to trial, which should have been the end of things, but the Baron, it seems, has been doing some investigating of his own.

The Mystery of the Skeleton Key is definitely best read by people who are true-blue fans of British murder mysteries, especially those set in an English country home.  Frankly, it's a bit of a rough go at times,   because it has a tendency to be a slow-moving, overly-written and wordy story.  It has its moments, especially during the trial, but for the most part it can be a bit of a slog, if you're not used to this sort of thing. The ending, however, was a complete surprise that I never saw coming (and most ingenious, I must say); on the other hand there is absolutely no clue leading up to what is coming down the pike since the Baron is a detective figure who holds his cards quite close to his chest --  we really don't know until the very end exactly how  he put two and two together to actually solve the case. It's sort of unfair, really, and when Julian Symons in his Bloody Murder said of this book that Capes "infringed" on the rules governing detective stories, I can see why.  All in all it was the ending that made it an okay read for me.

*****

9780267171392
Forgotten Books, 2017
333 pp
hardcover

Last, but not least (and among the three the one I enjoyed the most) is Isabel Ostrander's (1883-1924)  Ashes to Ashes.  This may sound weird, but I first heard of Isabel Ostrander a few years back while reading a Lord Peter Wimsey novel, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.  There's a scene where Lord Peter is looking over some bookshelves in a murder suspect's studio, and after discovering R.Austin Freeman among the lot also finds

"Through the Wall -- that's a good 'tec story, Charles -- all about the third degree -- Isabel Ostrander --..." (Harper Paperbacks, 1995, 196)

I have this habit of writing down book titles and authors found in books for later perusal, and the rest is history.  Anyway, Ashes to Ashes is neither your average crime story of the time nor  a whodunit.  We already know who the killer is, an egotistical, "impulsive" and not-so-clever man of the country club set by the name of Norman Storm. 

The impetuous Storm has squandered away the better part of almost four hundred grand over the last decade in bad investments and speculation, and now his New York City attorney has just informed him he's "reached the bottom of the basket."   As the fuming Norman is leaving his lawyer's office, he sees his wife Leila coming out of a downtown office building.  Later, at home he asks her about it, and she denies having been there, claiming instead to have gone to lunch with a friend.   As little things begin to build up (an overheard telephone call, an envelope with the name of the building where he'd seen her in the city), he comes to believe that Leila has been unfaithful, and during a confrontation, picks up a golf club and beats her to death. An ungrieving Norman knows that if caught he'll face the death penalty, but he's more worried about the publicity and disgrace.  After ensuring that Leila's death will be ruled accidental (you can actually see the gears grinding in this man's head as he sets up his elaborate plan), he congratulates himself on winning a "supreme battle of wits, his against the rest," including his friends, who, not aware of what he's done and to Norman's dismay, will continue to stand by him.   After Norman Storm learns the truth about his wife's supposed infidelity, he finds that he has "descended to the nethermost depths," but trust me, he hasn't even started his descent as events will ultimately prove.

Smug, superior, rash -- these are just three milder words that describe Norman.  He believes himself to be

 "immune, invincible! He could "commit any crime on the calendar and get away with it! There wasn't a living soul clever enough to hunt him down! He was the greatest murderer of the age, the cleverest man in the world!"

but in reality he is weighed down by the "invisible, intangible" bonds from which he struggles to free himself;  he's also a "prisoner in these chains of his own forging."  Normally I can squeeze out some sympathy for someone like Norman, but not in this case.   There is no room for it here, and I don't know about anyone else who's read this novel, but based on his personality alone (never mind his horrific deeds), I couldn't wait for him to get cut down to size.

 Ashes to Ashes worked well for me, not just because it was the least annoying of a read among these three books, but because it was so different. In this book the action is focused on the machinations of one man's mind, rather than the investigation of a crime or the quest for a solution, making it much more personally  appealing.  The writing isn't as dense as was the case with the other two, making it much more reader friendly,  although I will say she must have had a thing about exclamation points because they're everywhere.  This one I can easily recommend for readers like myself who are more into character than plot.

I think I need a modern crime read now just to clear my head.

*in which two very independent women embark on two very different paths: Miss Ferriby's Clients, by Florence Warden and The Green Jacket, by Jennette Lee

From different sides of the Atlantic come two very different stories involving two very different women.  The first of these is Miss Ferriby's Clients, written by a highly prolific Florence Warden (neé Florence Alice Price) whose biography  remains somewhat elusive.  There's a bit about her at Furrowed Middlebrow which notes that she was a

"Playwright, actress, and author of more than 150 novels which, .... 'specialized in courtship and marital dilemmas.'  She once bragged that she wrote more than a million words a year, and she routinely published 2 -4 books per year throught her career."

 The blogger at The Androom Archives adds that she

"was born in Hanworth as the daughter of a stockbroker. She was educated in Brighton and in France... In 1887 she married Edward George James. She wrote many more novels, but ... she received little money from her work and her financial situation became more difficult."

Fantastic Fiction offers a list of many of her books, as does The Edward T. LeBlanc Memorial Dime Novel Bibliography, and trust me, I've noted the ones that look like possible mystery novels for future reading.    For right now though, it's all about this book, Miss Ferriby's Clients.

North View Publishing, 2010
Kindle Version
originally published 1910

Young Welton Keynes and his brother Basil  had been brought up enjoying "every luxury" until the day that their father "found himself one morning a ruined man."  While nobody actually knew what had happened to dad,  it was believed that he'd offed himself while crossing from Dover from Ostend on a boat.   Basil was 18, and while he was supposed to have been on his way to Cambridge just after leaving Eton, he had to get a job as a bank clerk, while Welton, 24, found the job market tough.  Three weeks of looking brought nothing until one day he saw an advertisement for a secretary:

"...not over twenty-fve, University man preferred, by elderly lady engaged in philanthropic work.  Salary 500 pounds per annum."

Off to Chiswick he goes, where he gets directions to the elderly lady's home from a younger woman who a bit later talks young Walton into walking to her home, where her mother dishes out the dirt on Miss Ferriby.  She lets him know that "Miss Ferriby changes secretaries very often, and ... and nobody seems to know what becomes of them."  Mind you, this should have been Welton's  clue to walk completely away from this job,  but everything changes when he rescues an old woman "most opportunely" from an attack.  This second strange happening in the neighborhood makes him even more curious, and he returns to Miss Ferriby's residence the next day where he was "not in the least surprised" to find that the woman he'd rescue was Miss Ferriby herself.  He gets the job, but it doesn't take long for him to wish he hadn't. 

What's notable here isn't so much the mystery itself, but rather how the main criminal is portrayed. It's not a spoiler to let on that Miss Ferriby isn't the nicest of elderly women (in fact, she is one of the most brutal women villains in fiction of this era that I've read so far), and the first thing we learn about her is that she is "deformed and stunted," with an "enormous head."  She has "features large enough for those of a man." Her main "deformity", a "hunchback," is mentioned 21 times throughout the novel, and in describing this book, the publishers have noted that often "the main villain" in books of this era (as was the case in the Victorian era as well) was "physically disabled or disfigured ... to make him or her appear more villainous."  There are more than a few surprises in store for the reader of this novel, and seriously, by the time I finished it my head was spinning from all of the twists.

9781120761989
Kessinger Legacy Reprints
originally published 1917
331 pp
paperback

Next up is American author Jennette Lee's The Green Jacket. Jennette Lee (1860-1951) went to school at Smith, married in 1886, and then went back Smith in 1901 where she became an associate professor of English in 1904.  Bob Schneider at Women Detectives notes that she left academia in 1913 to become a full-time writer, with 22 books published between 1900 and 1926, and that "less than 15% of her output seems to be in the mystery/detective genre."   The Green Jacket is the first of a series of three novels to feature Miss Millicent Newberry, quite likely, as stated at Women Detectives, the first woman detective who actually owned her own detective agency.  Newberry is also notable in that she feels that she ought to have say in what happens with the criminals she's caught.  She doesn't believe that prison is always the right decision; as she tells her former mentor Tom Corbin, she "couldn't sleep nights, thinking of men in prison that never would have been there," if it hadn't been for her,

"Men that I knew weren't really bad -- drunk or mad or something!"

As she says, "I made up my mind that if I did the catching, I was going to have something to say about the punishment."  Indeed, some of the visitors to her office are former offenders she's caught, including women, who come and check in on a regular schedule much as if she were a probation officer. 

 The Green Jacket begins as Tom Corbin tells Milly he wants to partner with her. Her business is highly successful, and typical male that he is, he talks about how they are made to "work together."  As he says, Milly has the "good mind for details," but she needs him "to handle the case as a whole." He wants her to take on the case of the Mason emeralds, which he never solved when he was called in two years earlier "after some of the hardest work the office ever put in on anything."  It all came back to him that very morning when he saw a clipping about the death of a woman Corbin's detectives had suspected in the case, and now he tells Milly that she'll "never solve the case."  Milly needs time to think it over, changing her mind when a heavily-veiled woman walks into her office and asks her to take up the same case.  It seems that Mrs. Oswald Mason had gotten Milly's name from her now dead adopted daughter (Corbin's suspect), and they make plans for Milly to stay at the Mason home in the guise of a seamstress so that Milly can make some headway on discovering who stole the jewels.   The title refers to a piece of knitting that Milly works on as she works on the case.  It seems that she has a habit of starting something new for every case that she keeps up as long as it takes her to come to a solution.  She's also sort of a detective Madame Defarge -- reverse stitches in her work here and there are used as reminders of specific things she wants to remember.

I think it's just great that we have a woman writer creating an incredibly independent female detective whose business is going gangbusters, but if I never read another book by this author I'll be perfectly okay with that.  First of all, I don't even see a point to this detective story, something anyone who reads this will completely understand when all is said and done, because really, the only thing that happens is that Milly's on hand at casa de Mason to act as a soundboard for everyone's problems.  A few family secrets come out that have some sort of bearing on the theft of the emeralds, but when it comes right down to it, the whole story is just plain lackluster with much wringing of hands in the process.  Second, the coincidence of Mrs. Mason walking into the Newberry Detective Agency just after Milly and Corbin have their little talk about that very same case he couldn't ever solve is just too much.  And finally, really, this entire book could have been half of its size -- it made me so frustrated I just wanted to scream through most of it.

Truth be told, between these very independent women, I'll take the villain any time -- at least she was much more interesting than the crime solver.  So it's  definitely thumbs up for Miss Ferriby's Clients and a big thumbs down on The Green Jacket. 

According to the Evidence, by Hugh Pendexter

9781884449345
Black Dog Books, 2013
stories originally serialized 1906-1914
281 pp

paperback

Continuing my look at crime fiction and mysteries just up to the end of World War I, today's book is a collection of short stories by pulp author Hugh Pendexter, whose historical fiction is legendary.  Before I go on, I have to take my hat off to the blogger at Pulpflakes, who found way more than I did about this author.

According to the Evidence is a compilation of tales about a law firm known as The Bureau of Abnormal Litigation.  As author Jeremiah Healy writes in his introduction, these stories serve as a "window into our legal fiction of the early twentieth century."  The Bureau, which is often "called upon as a last resort in many peculiar cases,"  is headed by a certain Ezra Stackpole Butterworth, who sees himself as a

 "foolish, benevolent old man, who tries to help stupid humanity out of trouble." 

He has "mastered the peculiar happenings of life," and will only accept cases which are "abnormal," having always been

 "attracted to the unusual phases of life, called abnormal because so little observed."

When he first came to the law as a profession, he noticed

"many instances where the exact truth would have saved a case, but was ignored because of a fear it might not be believed, or because it impressed counsel as being trivial,"  

leading the Bureau to often refuse retainers in the "absence of any unique ingredient."   Butterworth's  fame has spread to the point that when reporters discover that he's going to be taking on a particular case, it is "sufficient to set the press-table to buzzing," while leaving the DA to wonder about "the inevitable surprise" that's sure to come.   Butterworth is not a detective, but he's sharp as a tack and doesn't miss a trick. He has an assistant, Jethuel who he often puts to work as a sort of private investigator, and another member of the firm who was invited to join the  Bureau to "look after the criminal branch" of the business.

Throughout the course of the thirteen cases the Bureau tackles in this book, circumstances are indeed a bit strange.  In "The Death Cup," for example, there's the statement of the maid who swears she she saw "one or more eyes" staring at her as she stumbles upon a dead body; in "According to the Evidence" (one of my favorites in this book),  an alienist's testimony as to the sanity of his client is called into question as he is forced under oath to relate his own strange visions, and in "Circumstantial Evidence," a pianist dies of a gunshot wound while alone in his apartment.    The shorter stories are fun, but the centerpiece in this book is definitely the novella-length "The Crimson Tracks," which not only has an entertaining mystery involving a strange manuscript, red footprints that come and go, and some pretty quirky characters, but also, given the time, a most ingenious solution to this bizarre case that I never saw coming.

the first appearance of Pendexter's "The Chelsea Vase," in Adventure (Vol. 8 #3, July, 1914) from The General Fiction Magazine Index

Pendexter's stories filled pages and pages of pulp magazines over the years, and luckily the good folks at Black Dog Books have taken the time to put some of these stories into collections like The Bureau of Abnormal Litigation, and  I have another anthology of Pendexter crime tales sitting on my shelves, The Voice of the Night, the stories of Jefferson Fanchon, "Inquirer"  in which Pendexter pits his crime solver against  an evil crime genius plaguing New York.

Bottom line: this book is a fun example of early pulpy crime fiction that would probably appeal to readers who are really into this sort of thing as well as readers of vintage crime who haven't yet discovered Pendexter.    Despite the title there's nothing supernatural about these tales -- just good old fashioned crime solving with a fun premise and a few curveballs thrown in to a) make the cases interesting and b) make the reader chuckle every now and then. I can see that it might get a bit tedious at times for readers of modern crime, but it's solidly right up my pulp-reading, fiction comfort-food alley.

*Trent's Last Case, by E.C. Bentley

9780008216269
Harper Collins, Detective Story Club, 2017
originally published 1913
212 pp
hardcover

"This mystery is all wrong."

In John Curran's introduction to this edition, he refers to Trent's Last Case as "one of the most famous milestones in the genre."  He quotes EC Bentley from his autobiography, Those Days (1940) where he writes

"Some time in the year 1910 it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to write a detective story of a new sort..."

and, "among the dozens of detectives" (long dominated by and modeled after Sherlock Holmes) currently filling magazine pages in a market that was "thriving," as Curran notes, "the stage was set" for just that.  Enter Philip Trent.

Trent is an artist who does fairly well, and also works from time to time as a journalist.  It is in this role that he becomes involved in the case of the death of American businessman Sigsbee Manderson, the "Colossus" of Wall Street, a man whose number one concern was the accumulation of his own wealth, often becoming "lawless or ruthless" in the process.  He's someone that no one will likely mourn, most especially the "tens of thousands of the poor;" in his lifetime he is "execrated" by the "financier or the speculator" as well.   And as Trent himself will come to remark later,

"Here's a man suddenly and violently killed, and nobody's heart seems to be broken about it, to say the least."

Trent's work in journalism has brought him a reputation for having "great powers as a detective," with "past successes" in solving cases which have left the police stymied.  However, in writing his detective as someone "as far away from Holmes," as possible, Bentley's Trent has good relations with the police, who are not an object of scorn or derision, but rather people with whom Trent has no problems in terms of cooperation.   In this case though,  even Trent has not-so-positive feelings about investigating Manderson's death; as he says,

"I tell you frankly, I wouldn't have a hand in hanging a poor devil who had let daylight into a man like Sig Manderson as a measure of social protest." 

But he takes on the case anyway and despite a number of suspects and theories, he quickly comes to a solution.  However, he encounters complications that lead Trent to question his confidence as a detective, the biggest of them arising in the form of the murdered man's widow, "The Woman in Black" of the American title of this novel.   I can't really say any more without giving away the show here, but as it turns out, it's probably a good thing that he didn't have his findings published in his newspaper.

There is no question as to the importance of this book in mystery/detective fiction history.   Curran refers to Trent's Last Case in  his introduction as  "one of the most famous milestones in the genre,"  "one of the earliest defining detective novels of the twentieth century"  and a book that "heralded, in fact, detective fiction's Golden Age," a statement with which any number of later detective fiction writers, critics, scholars, and readers concur.   I also can't help but think that  the switch to a more human sort of detective must have been a welcome change to contemporary readers.   Now that I've read this book after finishing a huge number of detective stories where the central character is a serious, Holmesian sort of figure where reasoning or science rules the entire story, I found that I quite enjoyed Trent's "fallible human" personality.  As Bentley wrote, quoted here at House of Stratus:

"I am not sure why Sherlock Holmes and his earlier imitators could never be at all amusing or light-hearted; but it may have been because they felt they had a mission, and had to sustain a position of superiority to the ordinary run of mankind."

Not so with Philip Trent: we watch him sort of crumble a bit while falling in love, lose his confidence more than once, experience doubt and anxiety, and eventually acknowledge his own "high-blown pride" and "the impotence of human reason." Frankly, I find his character quite a breath of fresh air at this stage of the mystery/detective fiction game. 

The twisty plot, however, is the true centerpiece of this book, and as I said to someone recently, I've read so much crime fiction that I feel sometimes like I know every plot possible.  However, Trent's Last Case came with a totally unexpected ending that made me say a not-so-quiet "bravo" in appreciation for a job well done. 

I can recommend this book with no qualms at all -- just please bear in mind when it was written (just coming out of the Edwardian era) when it comes to some rather objectionable content.  It is still a worthy read, even for the most modern mystery and crime fiction lovers.

And one more thing:  I LOVE these Harper hardcover reprints!!

*climbing back into my comfort zone: At the Villa Rose, by A.E.W Mason

9780755117390
House of Stratus, 2009
originally published 1910
258 pp

paperback

I'm back in my happy place (aka yesteryear) once more with this book, which is Albert Edward Woodley Mason's first installment of a series featuring Inspector Hanaud of the Sûreté.  I first came across this title while reading Martin Edwards' The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, where he describes how Mason got the idea of writing this book:

"On a visit to the then-renowned Star and Garter hotel at Richmond, A.E.W. Mason saw two names scratched on a window-pane by a diamond ring: 'One was of Madame Fougere, a wealthy elderly woman who a year before had been murdered in her villa at Aix-les-Bains, the second was that of her maid and companion, who had been discovered ... bound and chloroformed in her bed.'  The incident stuck in his mind, and visits to a provincial conjuring show, a murder trial at the Old Bailey, and a restaurant in Geneva supplied him with further material for the plot of a detective novel." (26)

Mason teamed his Hanaud with Mr. Julius Ricardo who wasn't a detective but rather, as Edwards describes him, "a fastidious dillettante who had made a fortune in the city of London."  In fact, as we meet Ricardo, he is in Aix-les-Bains in the second week of August where he normally spent "five or six weeks" as part of his "habit" at that time of year.  More specifically, he is at the Villa des Fleurs on a Monday evening,  where instead of gambling, he prefers to watch  "the spectacle of the battle which was waged night after night between raw nature and good manners." It is at the baccarat table where Ricardo lays eyes on Harry Wethermill, an "Englishman," and young Celia Harland, who is there with an elderly woman.  He watches them for a while, and the following night Ricardo and Wethermill walk back together to the Hotel Majestic where they're both staying, chatting about nothing.  On Wednesday morning, Wethermill bursts into Ricardo's rooms with a newspaper that carries the story of "an appalling murder" that was "committed at the Villa Rose."  The dead woman was the wealthy Mme. Camille Dauvray; her maid had been chloroformed and her hands tied behind her back.  The newspaper also reports the disappearance of Mme. Dauvray's companion,  a "young Englishwoman," whom Ricardo guesses was Celia, the woman with whom he'd seen Wethermill on Monday at the Villa des Fleurs.  The newspaper suggests that it was she who was responsible for Mme. Dauvray's murder; Wethermill suggests getting in touch with M. Hanaud, "the cleverest of the French detectives," since Hanaud just happens to be in Aix-les-Bains on holiday.    Hanaud warns both men that "the case is dark," but agrees to take it on.

the 1940 movie poster, with Kenneth Kent as M. Hanaud,  from WikiVisually

This really could have been a fine book, except for the fact that Mason decided to reveal the "who" way too early, and  then combined witness testimony and different narratives relating to the crime into one account to explain it all.  Gah! How disappointing!  Edwards refers to this as "lop-sided story structure," and I'm afraid he's spot on with that description.  Had the author put it all together in a different way, there's a hell of a story in there -- a fake medium with a conscience, rivalry, and a rather sadistic set of villains who, in at least one scene, find a sinister joy in causing pain to their victim.  All of the elements are there to have made the book a fun reading experience but they come too late -- by then the shock/suspense value is sort of lost.

I've been looking at what readers say about this book, all of whom noted the crappy structure that ruins the surprise, a point with which I agree, but what I don't agree with is the idea that these characters are, as one person said, "one dimensional."  As someone who pays close attention to the people who populate the books I read, there's a lot going on with the characters in this novel that is well worth reading.  If you're in this just for the usual crime, investigation, and solution, you miss a lot of the interactions between the evildoers and their victims, especially when it comes down to the motivations behind their actions.  The human interest is not just limited to the villains of this piece, either, but I can't say more without giving everything away here.

I will be revisiting Hanaud starting in 2019 when I creep into the Golden Age with my crime novel reading; I'd say that even though you now know  that things are going to be a bit "lop-sided" in the storytelling, it's still a good book and that there is a lot happening here to make it readworthy.  Read it slowly, don't devour it, and now, armed with knowledge of how it's going to be, sit back and relax, paying attention to the unfolding of the plot.

Recommended, certainly for readers  interested in twentieth century,  pre-World War I crime writing.  Frustrating it may be, but there's a good story within the lopsidedness.

*The Complete Judith Lee Adventures, by Richard Marsh (ed.) Minna Vuohelainen

9781943910229
Valancourt Books, 2016
546 pp

paperback

"Judith Lee is a young woman who calls herself a teacher of the deaf and dumb; in reality she is the most dangerous thing in England." -- 371

 In August, 1911 the popular magazine The Strand (Vol. 2, #248) first began to serialize the adventures of a young woman in a short story written by Richard Marsh (1857-1915) called  "Judith Lee. Pages from Her Life: I -- The Man Who Cut Off My Hair."  The book is really one of a kind in terms of the literary female detective to this point in time; it is also a stunning collection that is very much a valued addition to my own home library of early crime/mystery fiction. 

Judith Lee is a "teacher of the deaf and dumb," and uses what she calls "the oral system -- that is the lip-reading system" in her work.  Her father was, in fact, "one of the originators" of the system; her mother was deaf with a speech impediment "which made her practically dumb," but through lip reading quickly became able to understand what people were saying and to speak. As a result,  Judith has "lived in the atmosphere of lip-reading" all of her life.   Beginning with "The Man Who Cut Off My Hair," an adventure that she recounts as having taken place when she was a young girl, "this knack of mine," as she says, has led her into "the most singular situations ... the cause of many really extraordinary adventures." 

my photo from "The Man Who Cut Off My Hair," (17). Illustration by W.R.S. Stott

Over the course of these twenty-two adventures, Judith Lee will tackle (among many others)  jewel thieves, a bride with a penchant for disappearing, the Mafia, the theft of deadly curare, mysterious deaths in a lonely house;  while the stories are great, it's really Miss Lee that drew my interest throughout the book.  She is fiercely independent, has no plans or desire to marry ("Never, never, never!")  and travels the world as part of her work. She says of herself that she is a "woman, but no weakling," and takes lessons in jiu-jitsu as part of a duty to "keep my body in proper condition."   Her "gift," which includes being able to read lips in multiple languages, gives her the ability of "entering into people's confidence," but she expresses ambivalence about it at times.  For example, in "Eavesdropping at Interlachen," she says that

"There have been occasions on which, before I knew it, I have been made cognisant of conversations, of confidences, which were meant to be sacred, and, though such knowledge has been acquired through no fault of mine, I have felt ashamed, just as if I had been listening at a keyhole, and I have almost wished that the power which Nature gave me, and which years of practice have made perfect, was not mine at all." 

However, she goes on to acknowledge that "there have been times indeed when I was very glad indeed that I was able to play the part of eavesdropper."  Sometimes her eavesdropping becomes intentional as she notices people who just look wrong (for example in "Conscience"), and often she has "premonitory little shivers" which she feels are sent to her "as warnings," as in "Uncle Jack."  While some of the adventures in this book begin with Miss Lee trying to right a wrong, as in the case of a men wrongly sentenced to death, she also describes herself as "Nemesis," thwarting evildoers to the point of gaining a reputation among them, as noted in "The Finchley Puzzle:"

"Judith Lee is a young woman who calls herself a teacher of the deaf and dumb; in reality she is the most dangerous thing in England."

I didn't discuss these stories in any detail for a reason since this is a book that should be gone into with very little awareness of what they entail. The Complete Judith Lee Adventures is a joy to read, and in this edition we have the great fortune to have an excellent and most eye-opening introduction by Marsh scholar Minna Vuohelainen, who has written extensively on her subject, and who examines not only this book, but puts it into context along with Marsh's other work.  She also quotes Kestner's Sherlock's Sisters, which no aficionado of early female detective fiction should be without; he goes into the Judith Lee stories extensively as well.  It is truly one of my favorite crime/mystery reads this year, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

-------

note:
While I hate to draw attention away from Valancourt Books, there is another edition of Lee's complete adventures available from Black Coat Press, who is also in my top tier of small, independent publishers.

*2 Detectives: Astro, the Master of Mysteries, by Gelett Burgess and Dr. Xavier Wycherley, The Mind-Reader, by Max Rittenberg

9781616461034

Coachwhip Publications, 2011

622 pp

paperback

My latest stop along my journey into crime/mystery fiction of yesteryear brought me to this book, which despite its hefty weight and 600-plus page length turned out to be an ahhhhh read.  First of all, these books are early examples of stories in the psychic detective zone (Astro, The Master of Mysteries was published in 1912; Dr. Xavier Wycherley, The Mind-Reader came out in 1913); second, they both have this lovely early pulp vibe, and the third reason is that the plots of these stories are so out there that reading them is just pure pleasure for someone like myself who thrives on this stuff.

Even heftier than the weight of this book, the true title of Astro, The Master of Mysteries goes like this:

The Master of Mysteries; Being an Account of the Problems Solved by Astro, Seer of Secrets, and His Love Affair with Valeska Wynne, His Assistant

from Public Domain Superheroes

and there they are, the two main characters.  Of course, there's much more to this book than the romance between Astro and Valeska; in fact, we only pick up a vague idea of his feelings for her as the stories progress, right up until the very end when he starts dropping not-so-veiled hints.  In the publisher's note before the beginning of Astro, The Master of Mysteries, we're told that when this book was first published in 1912, it was done so anonymously.  It also provides another clue:

"The Introduction ... suggests there are three cryptograms hidden in the text. Two of these are known and easily discovered. (The first provides the name of the author, Gelett Burgess.) The third cryptogram remains a puzzle." 

In  Classic Mystery Stories (Dover, 1999)  editor Douglas G. Greene provides the way to solve the first two cryptograms, but goes on to say that he doesn't believe that anyone has "yet discovered the third cypher."  So we know we have mysteries within a book of mysteries before we even turn the first page.  Greene also reveals that

"Victor Berch, the scholar of popular fiction, has discovered that the Astro "Seer of Secrets" stories, were first published in 1905-1906 issues of The Sunday Magazine under the pseudonym Alan Braghampton"

and that Astro's real name is Astrogen Kerby. (131)  For a quick look at an Astro story published under the name of Braghampton, you can click here.

While I won't go into the twenty-four stories specifically, Astro is a medium whose spiel runs like this:

"...there are waves of the ether, --N-rays, X-rays, acitinic and ultraviolet vibrations, to which I am exceedingly susceptible.  I have an inner sense and an esoteric knowledge of life and its mysteries that is hidden from all who have not lived for cycles and eons in solitude and contemplation with the Mahatmas of the Himalayas!" 

He is adored by New York society, wears a turban and robes, and is fond of the hookah; he often refers to himself as the "Mahatma of the Fourth Sphere," is a "skilled and artistic musician," reads constantly,  and has a working knowledge of most subjects.  He's also a complete fake, aided by his assistant Valeska, and as the book goes along, he schools her in the art of his own charlatanry, all the while dropping hints to her that he's in love with her. Together, and often with the help of a police detective whose career Astro has helped to boost, they solve a wide-ranging variety of different mysteries that make for hours of fun reading.

Next up is Max Rittenberg's Dr. Xavier Wycherley, The Mind-Reader.  Wycherley is an interesting character who blends science, psychology, and his ability as a "mental healer" in solving problems, but he detests the idea of being considered as a detective. As we learn,

"Detective work was strongly distasteful to him unless it were to open out fresh experiences in the realm of the human mind."

 He can also astrally project, but it's his reading of auras that often provides all he needs to know about a subject.   According to Robert Sampson in his Yesterday's Faces: A Study of Series Characters in the Early Pulp Magazines Volume 2: Strange Days, (Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1984),   Wycherley made his first appearance in The London Magazine in March 1911, finding his way ("leaped the Atlantic," as Sampson says) into The Blue Book  later that same year.  (47)

The Blue Book Magazine, June 1911 

Wycherley refers to himself as a "specialist," but notes that his name would "not be found on the British register...", and that he is called upon throughout the world, "wherever there is call for my services as a mental healer."  As Rittenberg explains,

"The mental healer was a combination of scientist and humanitarian which is far from usual. As the latter, his warm human sympathies went out unceasingly to the weak, the oppressed, the suffering, the sick of body and the sick of mind. But as a scientist he would for the time being forget the patient in the subject."

We also learn that in his "younger days" he had to fight the "intense" prejudices of the English medical profession against "anything approaching hypnotism or mental suggestion..." and even though he's not on the registers, he keeps a consulting room in London. He also has a villa on the private Isola Salvatore on Lake Rovellasco where his patients often come for help.  He moves in and out of the highest circles of society and government, and for the most part, in his quest to heal minds (his life's work), often leaves it to people to do their duty, to do what is right.  This particular characteristic of Wycherley's is quite interesting, and says a great deal about the Edwardian milieu in which Rittenberg wrote.  As far as the stories go, they take him to several different places, with a wide variety of cases.  The first case, for example, finds him at Isola Salvatore where he does something that reminded me of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; while later he'll find himself in Felsbrunnen where he is thrust into the midst of a most bizarre and dastardly secret in an old castle.   He does have a strange quirk: he will sort of put himself into a trance to puzzle out a problem, often locking out the outside world except for the pain caused by a lit cigarette burning in his hands that wakes him up and brings him back around.  The cases themselves are most interesting, as we watch this man combine science, psychoanalysis, and often (it seems) downright mysticism to bring about some sort of resolution.  These are absolutely not your average crime stories, and well worth reading to serious pulp fans or fans of stories involving scientific or psychic detectives

Hats off to Tim Prasil at Coachwhip for collecting these two very obscure books and putting them into one volume.  I had so much fun here, although it did take me a while to warm up to Dr. Wycherley until "The Countess Plunges," which has such an amazing solution that I couldn't help but to be impressed.  Astro, on the other hand, I loved immediately, because you know right from the start that he is a complete fraud, and the fun is not only in watching how he solves the cases he's given but also in watching him teach Valeska his bag of tricks.   The book as a whole is most likely a niche read for diehard early pulp fans and people like me who are interested in off-the-beaten-path kinds of early crime/mystery fiction, but anyone who falls into those categories will absolutely love this book.

Recommended for fellow niche readers.  Have a great time with it -- I certainly did.

*Scientific detectives of yesteryear

"There is a distinct place for science in the detection of crime."

                                                        -- Craig Kennedy, Scientific Detective 243

The name John Thorndyke should be well known by avid crime/mystery fiction fans, but what about Luther Trant or Craig Kennedy?  What they have in common is that all three use science in some fashion to solve various mysteries,  Thorndyke in England and  Trant and Kennedy in America.

9780755103744
House of Stratus, 2001
originally published 1907
214 pp
paperback

 R. Austin Freeman's The Red Thumb Mark is the first of twenty one full-length novels to feature Dr. John Thorndyke; there are also a number of short story collections in which he does his scientific magic.  Freeman noted in the introduction to his 1909 Dr. Thorndyke's Cases that his stories have, "for the most part, a medico-legal motive,"  and that the methodology used in solving them is similar to what is "employed in actual practice by medical jurists."   According to Mike Grost, whose A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection is one of my go-to places online and  visited quite often when I am looking for books to read, Freeman was the "founder" of the "school of detectival realism." In that same introduction to Dr. Thorndyke's Cases, Freeman goes on to say that "the experiments described have in all cases been performed by me," so obviously this is a man whose feet were firmly on the ground sciencewise and someone who knew what he was talking about.  

The case of The Red Thumb Mark centers around the theft of a parcel of diamonds ("stones of exceptional size and value"  from the safe belonging to a Mr. John Hornby.  Whoever stole them seems to have either cut or scratched his thumb in the process, leaving "two drops of blood" at the bottom of the safe.  Along with a couple of "bloody smears" left on a paper, there was also a "remarkably clear imprint" of a bloody thumb mark.  Hornby's nephew Reuben has been blamed for the crime. Unfortunately for him, he'd earlier provided his aunt with a thumbprint for her Thumbograph (sort of like an autograph book using thumbprints) which matched the print from the safe. Fortunately, while his lawyer advises him to "plead guilty and throw himself on the mercy of the court..." since there was no possible way for a defense case to stand up against the evidence, Reuben swears that he is innocent, and Dr. Thorndyke agrees to take the case. 

I wish I had a lot of time to reflect on what's in this book aside from the mystery at hand and Thorndyke's scientific work. I'll just buzz through a few things here -- Thorndyke's views on the presumption of an accused man's innocence, the problem of  "hooligans" on the streets of London, and criticism of the Edwardian judicial system. Reader beware: the solution is easy to figure out, but that's okay -- there's plenty of other things going on this book that completely make it a worthwhile read. 

Moving on, we come to one of our own American crime solvers, Luther Trant. 

9781332612697
Forgotten Books, 2017
originally published 1910
364 pp, paperback

The authors of this book, Edwin Balmer and William MacHarg, were both reporters for the Chicago Tribune, so it's no surprise that most of the action takes place in this city.  There were, according to Robert Sampson in his Yesterday's Faces, Volume 2: Strange Days (1984), twelve original Luther Trant stories (17).  The Achievements of Luther Trant leaves out three of them, but 

original 1910 cover, courtesy of L.W. Currey

in the space of the nine stories we do have,  we watch as the main character Luther Trant evolves from a "callow assistant in a psychological laboratory" into a man whose fame has spread so widely that he could

 "not now leave his Club, even on a Sunday, without disappointing somewhere, in the great-pulsating city, an appeal to him for help in trouble."  

Indeed, after his first case, "The Man in the Room", in which he proved that a suicide was actually a murder,  young Trant asks for a leave of absence from his university job to "try the scientific psychology again," putting his talents to work in solving the mystery of the murder of Chicago's prosecuting attorney.  If that is successful, he notes, he'll resign and "keep after crime -- in the new way."

As we learn from the authors in the foreword, Trant's methods are real, as are "the tests he employs," and are

"precisely such as are being used daily in the psychological laboratories of the great universities -- both in America and Europe -- by means of which modern men of science are at last disclosing and defining the workings of that oldest of world-mysteries -- the human mind." 

 His research involves a number of experiments which measure physical changes in someone under stress that may be slight enough to go unnoticed by the human eye.  He believes that in scientific psychology

"there is no room for mistakes...Instead of analyzing evidence by the haphazard methods of the courts, we can analyze it scientifically, exactly, incontrovertibly -- we can select infallibly the true from the false."

In short, his idea is that by using these methods, which generally include some sort of "apparatus" or "device," including plethysmographs, automatographs, galvanometers (all real -- I looked them up), etc. (one time adding banana oil to the mix),  scientific psychology will be the future of police work. While most of the cops have tried everything but failed to solve the cases Trant is eventually brought into, they also start out wary of his methods. For example, in "The Empty Cartridges," one policeman asks him if he'll be doing his "psycho-palmistry," but has to sort of eat his words when all is said and done.

Of course with nine stories, some are better than others, and my favorite in this collection is "The Chalchihuitl Stone," which in a very big way reads like a cross between a mystery story and a good, old-fashioned pulp fiction yarn, complete  with ancient Aztecs and an expedition to Central America.  Another that reads as a pulp adventure is the above mentioned "The Empty Cartridges," which I have to say is also one of my favorites in this volume.  Some are pretty easy to figure out for the armchair detective, but all in all, it's a great collection that would likely have remained in oblivion had it not been for Hugo Gernsbach, who, according to Sampson, "found these device-oriented cases fascinating," and allotted five of them space in his Scientific Detective Monthly, with four more added  later to Amazing Detective Tales.  Below is a reproduction of Scientific Detective Monthly with  the red-haired Trant at the helm.

from Internet Speculative Fiction Database

I do need to say that while I enjoyed these stories tremendously and that I had a lot of fun reading them, there are several spots where the racist attitudes of the time are made very clear, so beware.  One more thing: had I known before buying my edition from Forgotten Books (a publisher I LOVE),  I would have picked up the Coachwhip Books collection, 2 Detectives, where Trant's adventures are paired with those of Inspector Addington Peace.  I know there are also e-versions of this book; online I'm not sure about.


If you look at the top banner on the photo above, you'll see two names: Arthur B. Reeve and Craig Kennedy, which takes us to book number three, volume 1 of  Craig Kennedy: Scientific Detective.  

9780857060136
Leonaur, 2010
448 pp
paperback

My edition comes from another favorite press, Leonaur, and it is the first of seven volumes of stories to feature "The American Sherlock Holmes."  Kennedy's first appearance was in in Cosmopolitan Magazine, December 1910, and his cases continued to be published through 1935 in a variety of different publications.   At the beginning of the section of stories called "The Silent Bullet," Kennedy offers readers his "theories," in which he says that "there is a distinct place for science in the detection of crime." He plans to

"apply science to the detection of crime, the same sort of methods by which you trace out the presence of a chemical, or run an unknown germ to earth."

Like Holmes, Kennedy  has a sort of sidekick guy, reporter Walter Jameson; unlike Holmes, as we learn in J. K. Van Dover's You Know My Method: The Science of the Detective (1994),

"Craig Kennedy does not search for identifiable cigarette ashes in rooms with twisted carpets, half empty wine glasses, torn bell pulls, and French doors slightly ajar." (172)

Kennedy is a professor at a New York University, and bemoans the fact that "no one has ever endowed a professorship in criminal science in any of our large universities."  As a detective, he investigates a variety of different crimes, ranging from poisonings to arson to fake mediums, always applying the latest science, scientific principles and methodology in each case.  I will say that in more than one case, I was actually appalled at how science was used at the time, especially in the story "The Silent Bullet," when Kennedy spoke of how he used blood tests to determine that the criminal was a "negro waiter."  This is quite frankly pure scientific racism, in which Kennedy reveals that in "adding to our knowledge of evolution," the Carnegie Institute had come up with a study linking the "blood of a certain branch of the human race" to "the blood of a certain group of monkeys, the chimpanzees," with "the blood of another branch" linking to "the gorilla."  By and large, though, most of the stories aren't like this, and actually in most cases have intriguing plots, some crazy enough (like one of my favorites here, "The Invisible Ray") to be great for readers of old pulp fiction.

All three books are but samples of what's out there in the realm of scientific detective stories, and aside from the reflected racism of the time, are actually quite enjoyable.  All of these books I would recommend mainly to people who are interested in the history of mystery/crime fiction, or to serious readers of old pulp fiction. 

*Detective Muller: Imperial Austrian Police, Volumes 1 and 2, by Augusta Groner

In the early 1890s, a woman in Austria who had only started writing crime in her 40s introduced a new detective, Detective Joseph Müller, a very different sort of sleuth than his British contemporary Sherlock Holmes.   His first case, "The Golden Bullet," revealed that Müller is a policeman with a heart; a man who, if he sees something worth salvaging in a criminal, he is likely to "warn his prey, once he has all proofs of the guilt and a conviction is certain"  ("The Golden Bullet", Vol. 2, 305).  His superiors despair; they know he is an excellent detective, who is "without a peer in his profession," but his "weakness" doesn't sit well with police authorities.  Strangely enough though, his talents are so valued by the very institution that won't take him on full time that they often hire him privately when a "particularly difficult case" arises.  Luckily for Müller, this very last case in his "public career" left him a man of means, because his boss had to let him go; he becomes, as the back-blurb reveals, "a member of that secret and shadowy organisation," the secret police.

It is incredibly difficult to find out much about Auguste Groner (1850-1929), which is strange, as a) she has been labeled, as Leslie Klinger tells us in his In the Shadow of Agatha Christie (2018), the "mother" of Austrian crime writing,   and b) her Müller stories remained popular for about 30 years. Even the review of Klinger's book at Open Letters Review neglects to mention her, while instead focusing on Australian and British women authors.  I went though my own collection of nonfiction books about crime writing including Barzun and Taylor, Haycraft, and even Lucy Sussex's Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre, and there is nothing written about this woman.  The only time she's even mentioned in any of my books is a brief bit in a paragraph by Stephen Knight in his Crime Fiction Since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity (2010) where he lists Groner's name (here Grüner) among contemporaries of writer Carolyn Wells, "who are now quite forgotten." (82)  Internet searching brings up little, so we just kind have to roll with what we've got, which is not much.

9780857062833

Leonaur, 2010

331 pp

paperback

Volume 1 of this "special two-volume collection" (so named by the publishers), introduces Müller before launching into four of his cases: "The Man With the Black Cord," which is actually novel length; "The Pocket Diary Found in the Snow," "The Case of the Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study," and "The Case of the Registered Letter."  My pick for favorite in this lot is the first story, as it involves the disappearance of an elderly man right out of his own bedroom, a truly-impossible situation; an old house, an inheritance, a strange neighbor, and of course, it is a great introduction to the detective, who, as we learn here knows exactly when and what to say to a villain that "gave him his power to touch the heart of even the most abandoned criminal."  We also see him at work, learning how he plies his craft -- including using a disguise, hiring a would-be prisoner as an assistant, and lots of foot time.   My least favorite story was "The Case of the Registered Letter," but the others are challenging little puzzles that left me scratching my head, wondering how the heck our erstwhile detective was going to figure them out.

9780857062864

Leonaur, 2010

326 pp

hardcover

Volume two offers three stories: "The Lamp That Went Out", "Mene Tekel: A Tale of Strange Happenings," and ironically, the last story is actually the author's first Müller tale,  "The Golden Bullet."    The first story involves the death of a stranger, found in an area of Vienna "known to be one of the safest spots" in the city.  "The Golden Bullet" is a locked-room/impossible crime mystery, in which the murder of a prominent man drives Müller to appeal to the criminal in a most unusual way, one with which his superiors do not appreciate.   My favorite in this volume is the second story, "Mene Tekel: A Tale of Strange Happenings," which actually reminded me much more of an old, pulpy adventure tale leaning a bit on the edge of sci-fi.  Here, Müller is called upon to watch over a Scandinavian scientist (without him knowing, of course), as he sets out on a journey to test his newest invention.  This story will take the reader from England to the ruins of Babylon before it's all over, with plenty of surprises all around.  Where all of the other stories in both volumes fall more along the traditional lines of whodunits, this one requires some suspension of disbelief, and it would certainly not be out of place in an anthology of archaeological adventure-pulp fiction.  I have a deep and abiding fondness for that very thing, so this story was right up my reading alley.   Other readers may not be as happy with  it as I was, because in more than one way it roams headlong into the valley of sheer farfetchedness (I know that's not a word, but it works), but its difference from every other story in this collection (and my keen love of the strange) was the biggest draw here.


Some of Groner's Müller tales are available online and in e-reader crime collections here and there on Amazon, but as someone who prefers the feel of book in hand, I'm grateful to Leonaur for publishing  this two-volume collection of her work.   I'll look forward to hopefully finding more of her work translated into English -- Auguste Groner is sadly neglected by modern crime readers, which is an absolute shame. 

recommended for readers who enjoy discovering the work of forgotten female writers, as well as people who enjoy early detective stories that feature a different sort of sleuth.  I personally thought these books were wonderful.

it's weird, it's obscure, but most of all, it's fun: The Mummy, by Riccardo Stephens

9781943910298
Valancourt Books, 2016
originally published 1912
232 pp

paperback

There are just some times when I want to curl up with a cup of hot chai tea (milk, no sugar,  thank you very much) and read something just for fun. No serious thought needed, no brain strain, just fun. And it doesn't hurt when there's a mummy involved -- it brings back good memories of childhood not only in terms of sprawling on the couch on a Saturday afternoon to watch the old black and white mummy movies, but also of reading countless pulpy stories involving Egypt, which I found fascinating back then. So when Valancourt announced that they were coming out with this book, I pressed that buy button faster than you could say Imhotep. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but when I started reading it, it turned out that it's indeed much more of a good, old-fashioned mystery novel rather than a book where a mummy is brought back to life by tana leaves.

As it also turns out, it's a book I can't really talk about too much without spoiling things for potential readers. The basic outline goes something like this:  a certain Doctor Armiston, who lives and has his practice in the West End of London, is called upon one day to come to give his opinion on how a man met his death.  He is taken to the Albany where he finds a young man who has died from a broken neck. After giving his opinion on the matter and sending for the police, he gets up to leave.  Opening the wrong door to go out, he finds himself staring at a strange object, which he is told is a mummy case, with a mummy inside.  According to the good doctor,

"It was my first introduction to the Mummy. I wish it had been my last."

And indeed, there will be more deaths, and with each one, the mummy case is on the premises.   Eventually, Armiston learns that the strange writing on the outside of the case contains a curse, promising vengeance on anyone who dares to upset the mummy's rest.  Being a man of science, Armiston isn't buying it, but no one involved is talking.  He is brought in to a society of "Plain Speakers," where, now that he is a member, he is privy to the truth of things.  Armiston will take it upon himself to try and figure out exactly what's behind this so-called curse before there are any further deaths, which are still unexplained.

Now, if this doesn't grab your attention, I don't know what will.  Granted, it sounds like the prelude to a horror film, but I can guarantee that this is a first-class mystery with a number of elements that blend with that same pulpy aesthetic that I've always loved. There are gentlemen at their clubs, strange "bohemian" societies, science gone awry, and of course, the element of detection.  On the back of this book there is a blurb that says this book "bears comparison with the works of Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson," and that is a good description that I can live with.

It won't be everyone's cup of tea, but it is most certainly mine. Granted, it can be boggy and slow in parts, but patient readers will be rewarded.   Highly, highly recommended to anyone interested in vintage mysteries with a touch of pulp on the side.  Very high on my internal shrieks-of-delightometer.

*an evil genius at work: Fantômas, by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain

1434450260
Wildside Press, 2009
originally published 1911
246 pp

hardcover

"Fantômas."

"What did you say?"

"I said: Fantômas."

"And what does that mean?"

"Nothing ...Everything!"

"But what is it?" 

"Nobody...And yet, yes, it is somebody!"

"And what does the somebody do?" 

"Spreads terror!" 

Fantômas is book two in this year's focus on crime fiction/mysteries that were made into movies.  Although I had planned on watching the movie today, I found enough time to take a look at it yesterday. To my surprise, the movie version isn't just one film but several serialized silents, so it didn't take as long as I thought it would since I only watched the film corresponding to this book. 

And oh, what a book it is!! Not only is it fun, but it ends in a complete cliffhanger so I had to buy book two,  The Exploits of Juve (Juve contre Fantômas), just to see what happens. I have this feeling that I'll end up with the entire set of  Fantômas novels if the ending of book one is any indicator.

The story begins in the Dordogne chateau of Beaulieu, the home of the Marquise de Langrune, at one of her regular Wednesday dinner parties.   Conversation comes around to the mysterious disappearance of Lord Beltham,  now being investigated by the celebrated  M. Juve of the Criminal Investigation Department. This conversation is our introduction to the mysterious Fantômas; it seems that the word is out that Juve believes this evil criminal is somehow responsible for Lord Beltham's disappearance and that Juve has "sworn that he will take him, and he is after him body and soul."   The very next day the body of the Marquise de Langrune is found in her room, her throat cut so deeply that it seemed almost as if "her head was severed from the trunk."  It seems that robbery was not the motive, and it also seems as though only someone in the house could have done this horrific deed.  Signs point to young Charles Rambert, a young man staying there as a guest (and who soon disappears)  but Juve, who is investigating, isn't quite sure.

The murder of the Marquise de Langrune is the first of a series of strange crimes and murders that take place at various locations;   Juve is convinced that they are all the work of a single person: Fantômas. Trying to catch him, though, is going to be tough. Some people even have doubts as to whether or not there is a Fantômas; one magistrate tells Juve that

"Fantômas is the too obvious subterfuge, the cheapest device for investing a case with mock honours. Between you and me, you know perfectly well that Fantômas is merely a legal fiction -- a lawyers' joke. Fantômas has no existence in fact!"

But Juve thinks he knows better -- he is obsessed with finding this elusive figure and has been after him for years.  The story begins to really heat up with the discovery of a body in a trunk at No. 147 rue Lévert, the rooms of a man named Gurn; even then, although Juve notes that "Everything points to Gurn," and while wondering if his imagination is getting the better of him, he can't help but think that

"about this murder, committed in the very middle of Paris, in a crowded house where yet nobody heard or suspected anything, there is an audacity, a certainty of impunity, an above all a multiplicity of precautions, that are typical of the Fantômas manner!"

As the crimes start to stack up, Juve employs all manner of disguises, subterfuge, and even applies the latest scientific methods of Bertillon  to try to rein in this mysterious evil genius.  Toward the end of the book it looks like things may just be going his way, but in this twisted tale, nothing is ever quite as it seems.

René Navarre as Fantômas

The movie version I watched is the old, silent version, starring Rene Navarre as Fantômas (1913).  It is a joy to watch, although since it's a part of a string of serials, it doesn't quite pick up a lot of what's in the book, nor does it really pick up the essence of this novel.  There are also some changes in character (I can't say who or I'd be giving one of the secrets of the novel away), and it starts with a crime that comes later in the novel, skipping the murder of the Marquise, for example. However, what it does reflect very, very well is Juve's obsession with trying to catch Fantômas.  Edmund Breon, who portrays the erstwhile Inspector, does such an excellent job in the role that it's not hard at all to see him not as the actor but as Juve himself.

Edmund Breon as Inspector Juve

The book was so much fun that I didn't even mind the cliffhanger ending, and now I'm caught up in Juve's ongoing quest to bring this mysterious evildoer to justice, so I know I'm  going to have many hours of entertainment ahead of me as I make my way through the books.  I'll most definitely recommend the book to people who are into classics, or into fun sort of pulpy mysteries or to those who want something very much off the beaten path.  This book (if you'll forgive the trite phrase) held me spellbound the entire time I was reading it -- and I can't think of a better recommendation for a couple of days' worth of sheer reading enjoyment.