Musclebound...by Liza Cody (1979) --
[This book will not be released until the end of August '97, but I got to read an
advance copy -- well, my wife works at a literary agency, so there!]
Eva Wylie ("The London Lassassin") is an ex-professional wrestler who now 'works'
as a live-on-the-site junkyard attendant, and occasionally does odd jobs for Cody's
series detective Anna Lee (which books were also pretty good). Eva is extremely
vulgar and loud and obnoxious, and is also a total idiot (she is maybe one notch
smarter than her attack dog Ramses, whom she has to dominate every now and then
by beating him up while he tries to rip out her throat -- she also has two other guard
dogs, Lineker, who is smarter than any of this crew and hides away when trouble is
brewing, and Milo, the horse-sized puppy who says 'Herf' and is named after the most famous
wrestler of all time, the ancient Greek equivalent of Houdini who came to a very
bad end -- that's the guy who decided to split a tree with his bare hands and got them
stuck in the crevice when it closed on him and ended up eaten by bears or something --
jeeze, I'm getting way off the track). Anyway, dim as she is, she writes in the first
person -- yeah, well, that's the genre for you -- with dialogue that's the Cockney
equivalent of Elmore Leonard, hilarious and raunchy. She also happens to be observant
when it serves the author's needs, so that you as a reader can be your own detective
and solve the plot as it unfolds -- Eva certainly hasn't got a clue even though she
sees all! Really scuzzy people abound, but this moron is so much above (or below) them
that you can actually empathize with her. Very quirky and unusual book, definitely an original.
(Really love incidental events such as the 'oops' with the claw hammer, the 'rumble' in
the wrestling arena, and the 'right-under-the-coppers-eyes' doorstep.)
By the way, 'Musclebound' is the fantasy name of the exercise spa she dreams of opening
someday, Muscle-bound, Outward-bound, get it?
A Leaven of Malice...by Clare Curzon (1979) -- real voodoo, really!
She writes Procedurals mostly, but this one has a true supernatural
element, and is justifiably anti-cop too -- put this one right up there with
The Burning Court. You wouldn't think this story would work, but
it does.
The Tryst...by Michael Dibden (1989) -- fantastically interwoven plot
A convergence of plot elements worthy of Armadale, and in
less than 200 pages -- a ghost story in 'reverse'. This is a very compelling
story even if it isn't very pleasant.
Dirty Tricks...also by Michael Dibden (1991) -- almost an Evelyn Waugh
sort of story like Black Mischief
Very different from The Tryst (versatile author); the -- not to
mince words -- blow job in the dining room while the husband is carving the roast
is hilarious and sets the scale of the whole
book, a wonderfully immoral protagonist who gets his comeuppance!
Chatterton...by Peter Ackroyd (1987) -- not really a mystery novel
One of my favorite non-mystery writers (the 'biographer' of London) wrote this 'crime' novel in his early career. The theme is based on art and literary fraud, plagiarism, and impostures. The premise is that Thomas Chatterton, the pre-Romantic 18th-century poet who committed suicide at the age of 18, faked it and went on to write imitations of other poets such as Crabbe, Smart, Gray, and Blake that he passed off with the aid of his crooked bookseller ally in Bristol as being genuine. A modern hack gets hold of an MS 'confession' by an older Chatterton admitting this and decides to write a book about it. Many of his friends are also involved in frauds and the like. Turns out in the end that the Chatterton MS is ALSO a fake, done about 1850 by the book dealer and his son. It is also posited that Chatterton killed himself accidentally trying to cure himself of the clap, with a mixture of arsenic and laudanum he is too drunk to remember the 'right' dosage for -- not a suicide after all. The books switches point-of-view in a mix of modern times, Chatterton's period, and the mid-1800s (with George Meredith posing as the dying Chatterton as shown on the cover). Well-written and witty book that I highly recommend.
Earlier 20th Century Novels
The Ka of Gifford Hillary...by Dennis Wheatley -- A hack writer of the 1940s-50s, famous for the great horror novel The Devil Rides Out.
This is really an excellent thriller (probably Wheatley's best, and not marred by the racism common to his other books). Hard to categorize: Science-fiction (a death-ray machine), Supernatural (spirit separated from the body in suspended animation), Mystery (not who, but how will this untangle), Spy novel (a sub-plot that is very amusing), Legal and Financial thriller (the machinations of lawyers and the board room), and Horror story (buried alive). Also a touch of Dickens's Christmas Carol. Sir Gifford is 'murdered' by his wife's lover, who is in turn murdered by the wife; his dream self ("Ka") is separated from his body and he is able to witness all of the events occurring as a result of his 'death' but not able to interfere. The plot is far too complicated to summarize yet is very ingenious and satisfying. Loose ends and predicaments are all worked out nicely, and the characters are very well depicted too. Wheatley's masterpiece (unless you count The Devil Rides Out).
The Thirty-nine Steps...by John Buchan --
Got stuck the other day with nothing new to read, so I picked up this book again
(Nelson Classics, HC, 1915, 170 pp.). Remarkably good still, in spite of quaint attitudes ("you're a real white man," Dagos, Jewish financiers, "the fate of Europe is in your hands," etc.). This was one
of the first single-man-on-the-run books, trying to evade a nationwide manhunt both by
the police and an evil German spy ring. Hannay is both clever and lucky in his evasive actions in the Highlands of Scotland. The plot is very fast-moving and effective (although there is a lot of coincidence -- just happens to stumble into the spy-master's hunting lodge on the moors, for example). This is not much like the movie,
which was also quite good, but it is a true 'ripping yarn' and well worth the couple of
hours involved in reading it. A great 'fast read' if you're cooped up in an airport.
London Times Crossword Clue: "His adventures involved a number of steps to get girl into the long grass (6)."
-- H(Ann)ay.
Rebecca...by Daphne DuMaurier
-- one of the best Gothic novels since Jane Eyre (why didn't I have this
book in this list earlier? oversight!) What brings this update on is the PBS yet-again
"Rebecca" being shown in April 1997. It has Diana Rigg as Mrs Danvers, which
makes this version classic in spite of who else is playing the major roles. [I have been
in love with Diana Rigg for 25 years or so, and have to admire her role in this latest
"Rebecca" as an old witch with gray hair and wrinkles -- she ought to be made a
Dame of the British Empire, don't you think? This is the British Bette Davis]. Oh,
as far as the book goes, well, it is a great book, isn't it? It is a wonderfully filmable
story, and you can have Lawrence Olivier and Jeremy Brett playing Max DeWinter,
with any engenu pretty actress as the nameless bride, and that great Mrs Danvers
role that any serious actress would want to do (like Goneril or Regan or Medea).
Excuse my going on at great length with this one...just saw the final episode, and
it turns out, according to Russell Baker, that Diana Rigg IS a Dame now. This version
of the story has also been updated in various ways: Mrs Danvers's relationship with
Rebecca is now explicitly Lesbian; Maxim is not so sympathetic a character here, he
really is an arrogant murderous shit (and even physically resembles Claus von Bulow);
Favell, the blackmailing cad, is quite right with his accusations, you have to feel his
frustration and empathize with it (another plum acting role for the right person, how
to play a sleazeball one can identify with).
The Red Right Hand...by Joel Townsley Rogers -- your worst nightmare,
a truly psychopathic killer, and a case of mistaken identity based on one's assumptions
about certain classes of people. Well worth a try, and the atmosphere is good.
[Re-read this recently (10/96), as one does when doing this sort of list, and
12 years after my last reading of it, still found it extraordinarily creepy, even though
it's a garbled mess storywise. Nice twist about what a gardener could be doing...
well, I shouldn't say more.]
The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck...by Alexander Laing -- absolutely appalling [read this many years ago, lost my copy, but got one recently via the Internet, one of those old WWII GI paperbacks, printed 'sideways' or landscape]
Took me a while to get through it, but my opinion hasn't changed. It is definitely worth reading if you are into the historical evolution of the 'psycho' mystery. All of its elements (book dates from the early 1930s) can be found in authors like Stephen King and Thomas Harris. I'm sure that this book was influential in its time, even if forgotten now. They were reprinting it nearly 10 years later for mass distribution for GI's, so it must have been a 'mass-market bestseller' in its time.
The setting is in a fictional Maine, small town in the back woods that depends entirely on its state-financed private medical school. Fine idea, it provides a place to train rural doctors who could never afford to go to Harvard or Johns Hopkins, but it depends for its existence on keeping local politicians happy, hence no scandal allowed. Well, Gideon Wyck, one of the only two world-renowned doctors here, has gone insane and is inducing the birth of monsters (mermaid fetuses, etc.) -- by himself impregnating local nurses and waitresses, whatever, subjecting them to drugs and baths in cold 'substances', then placing them in the nearby haven for wayward women until he can see the results, in order to finish his definitive book (with Dr Alling, 'Prexy' of the College) on genetic engineering as we would call it nowadays. On one mysterious night, when all sorts of events happen, including a lunatic rampage by a blood donor who claims that his blood has just died in someone he gave it to. Turns out it was Gideon Wyck, who in turn turns up a few months later in the student dissection morgue in the college (much other stuff in the meantime). Before this all gets resolved, after some very typical 1930s incompetence, as in the Philo Vance novels, by the police and coroners, with an appendiced, adequate but disappointing detective novel solution, there are some very nasty revelations, including stuff about cancer, deformity, monstrosity, hints of the occult (never borne out), and a very gruesome murder of one of the monster mothers down in Greenwich Village, New York -- the most effective episode in the book, and very sadly left unavenged in the denouement.
No, I did not like this book. But it is definitely a landmark if you look at it historically. I've never seen it mentioned in the histories of mysteries, except maybe its title, but I'm convinced that it had a major influence, like the Pulps, on what developed later.
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The Face on the Cutting Room Floor...by Cameron McCabe -- it is
very hard to describe what this weird book is all about. Layers within layers, but
a breezy prose style that is both irritating and imprecise in explaining what is
actually going on.
[The author's real name is Ernst Wilhelm Julius Bornemann, a noted sexologist;
read the fascinating interview with him in the Penguin edition, his adventures
with Orson Welles, Eartha Kitt, Lorne Green, etc. Re-read the book 11/96, and still
can't figure it out--anybody could be, and is, the murderer. Actually, this book sucks,
but it has a reputation.]
Shadows of Ecstasy...by Charles Williams -- a 'metaphysical' thriller
[When I was younger, I went through a Chestertonian paradox stage and enjoyed
this sort of thing; now that I am a hard-set atheist, I don't, but it was worth the
recent re-reading. The theological stuff is very irritating and just pig-headedly wrong.
However, the premise and plot are good, and unusual -- a charismatic figure leads
an anti-Western, anti-Colonial crusade in Africa (in the 1930s no less) based on an
anti-intellect, pro-passion belief that death can be overcome by turning all one's
pains, loves, and ambitions inward to build up the will to survive for centuries and
actually achieve resurrection from the dead (which of course the Christian heroes
regard as sinful and evil, but actually has some appeal). Interesting book with some
good SF/supernatural elements. The Tories win. He wrote several like this.]
19th Century
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner...
by James Hogg -- this was Walter Scott's Ettrick Shepherd friend; it will
amaze you (if you can find it).
[I first read it in 1971 then again in Nov. 1996: click
HERE for a review. This is a great Mystery, well, no--Murder novel]
Caleb Williams...by William Godwin (Mary "Frankenstein" Shelley's
father) -- this is really almost the first true 'thriller' ever written.
[This is next on my re-read list, but it might take some time before then.]
Armadale...by Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone is listed as one of
the all-time greats, and The Woman in White. In contrast, Armadale
is not a mystery novel at all) -- Hundreds of pages devoted to the
line-by-line fulfilment of the elements of a really bad horoscope; an example of
plotting expertise that should be observed by all mystery writers.
[But I don't think this is worth the slog of reading more than once, like
Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, a lengthy gothic novel that should
be savored one time and then used as a door stop.]
[Update a couple of years later. I DID reread it and you can see my review at Armadale.]
Uncle Silas...by Sheridan Le Fanu -- the first 'locked room' mystery
apart from "Murders in the Rue Morgue," but that's not its virtue, which
consists of two of the most repulsive people you will ever meet in fiction,
Uncle Silas and Madame de la Rougierre, the housekeeper from Hell.
[For Detective Story fans, this has one of the earliest 'locked-room'
murders, although rather trivial; what's more affecting is the incredible
sound of the pickax going into Madame's head, amazing for a Victorian
author to so vividly convey a sound-effect -- this chapter ought to be
brought up in how-to-write-fiction classes as an example of how to
rivet the reader without necessarily having to go into explicit gruesome
details.]
Bleak House...by Dickens -- has a bit of detective work in it, but
is obviously not a detective story; all kinds of crimes in it though (blackmail,
coverups, obfuscations, absconding, revolting anti-justice law courts, you
name it.)
[Have read this several times, and each time there is something
more in it -- one of the great novels of all time; Diana Rigg gave one of her
classy (what else?) performances as Lady Dredlock in the BBC television
serial -- what a wonderful lady she is! When Lord Dredlock offers her
'full forgiveness' for her sins, which is what the mystery was about, you'll
break out in tears, or maybe just laugh if you want to see the wicked
upper class suffer. And I can't get over the grotesque scene where
Quilp 'spontaneously combusts'.]
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