Mysterylist.Com started setting up individual web pages for classic mystery novelists, but this is impractical, especially considering that the author of this web site tried to read every novel in a series when doing such a page, and many are no longer available, so the page could not be completed in a lot of instances. Also, few of these authors fall into the 'best-of-the-Golden-Age' category or Grobius's Top 50; they are mostly modern authors who write in the tradition and who, while not having produced single masterpieces, qualify for this page by having produced a body of work that does set up their detectives as being worthy of inclusion in the pantheon of investigators. (However, some important Golden Age authors were omitted, so I will try to make up to some extent for it on the Series Pages.) There is absolutely no intention for this page to become definitive or even partially complete. E-mail is welcome. See also my Decalogue below about detective story rules, and a digression about London in the 1950s.
Category Pages:
British Police | Amateurs | Professionals | Private Eyes | Cops | Historical Detectives | Superheroes | Villains
This could eventually be a very large text-based web page. Click one of the links below to skip to that author -- Grobius, June 2001
Browne | Caudwell | Dickson | Freeman | Knox | Mortimer | Rivals of Holmes
Douglas G. Browne: Harvey Tuke (Public Prosecutor) |
These mysteries mostly take place in the 1940's, the end of the Golden Age, but are fascinating in their setting in an impoverished post-war Britain in transition from empire to influential but small country. I have only read two of them (in those wonderful Dover editions that are so hard to find now), although there are apparently several more that have never been reprinted. The Mephistopheles-looking Harvey Tuke, who is chief assistant to the Director of Public Prosecutions (the Merrivale-type Sir Bruton Kames, who is always dropping his cigar ashes on his waistcoat), along with the vulpine Assistant Commisioner (Crime) Wray of Scotland Yard, make up a triumvirate investigating some well-plotted, if not original, crimes. Their interplay with one another resembles the bonhomie of a Freeman/Thorndyke mystery, but with a lot more sarcastic exchanges, and there are nice Carrian bizarre scenes (not as cleverly or convincingly done as Carr's, however).
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Sarah Caudwell: Hilary Tamar (Law Professor) |
There are only four of these entertaining mysteries, published infrequently from 1981 until the author's death at the age of 60 in 2000 (her real last name was Cockburn, which is interesting given her abiding interest in sexual practices). A pity, because they have their own unique style, if somewhat reminiscent of Christie's bright young things Tommy and Tuppence, or even Dornford Yates. One has to make allowance for the dubious sexual habits of many of the various characters, although that adds to the humor; it is not even certain whether Hilary Tamar is a man or a woman (my opinion is that he is an old poof who is too discrete and reticent ever to have indulged in anything carnal -- good old Uncle Hil). The tone is generally of Wodehousian comedy and complexity (a well-made drawing-room play), with touches of a nice satiric wit, often laugh-out-loud funny. Nearly everybody in these books is intelligent and well-spoken, glibly verbose, even the villains, making these books a pleasure to read as 'escapism' though hardly profound -- as long as you appreciate this sort of thing. Plots are complex, though not of the 'locked-room' type, the typical comedy of errors where there are lots of coincidences, suspects all having their own agendas in diverting sub-plots, and happening to be involved in a crucial way in the events. The last one has an incredible (but fine) spaghetti plot involving multiple poisonings, where actual murder keeps getting pushed up and shot down until the final revelation -- a Mozart symphony of plotting.
The author was a tax lawyer at Lloyd's Bank and in addition to her expertise was certainly into the avoidance of unnecessary taxation. Hence her books involve chancery solicitors and barristers and obscure facts about the revenue codes. To most readers this is as obscure as Hawking's cosmological theories, but just as fascinating -- one doesn't have to be a chef to appreciate good cooking. And there is that wonderful book, quoted in Sirens, called The Guide to Comfortable Tax Planning, which ranks with the Necronomicon and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as one of the classic non-existent books of all times. |
Carter Dickson: Sir Henry Merrivale (Government Honcho) :: See Web PageR. Austin Freeman: Dr. Thorndyke (Medico-Legal Expert) :: See Web PageRonald Knox: Miles Bredon (Insurance Investigator)|
Ronald Knox was an influential Golden Age author (though his books are actually pretty lousy as detective novels, consisting of lots of boring stuff about faked footprints and elaborately tedious alibis -- '9:02 AM train to Didcot Junction, etc.' -- all in the Crofts manner). The most famous one was Footprints at the Lock, which has some nice descriptive writing about boating on the upper reaches of the Thames river and some good light characterization of Miles Bredon and his delightful wife Agatha; it is flawed by the absolutely implausible behavior of the primary suspects, and a needlessly complicated juggling of timetables, phony photographs, and other deceptions. Knox, by the way, was a Catholic priest, although he does not intrude his religion into his mystery stories, and in fact had to stop writing them by edict from his bishop as being 'frivolous' for a clergyman.
You will note, of course, that every one of these commandments has been violated at one time or another in a classic mystery novel. Since this list has been mentioned on this page, please see my updated version below. |
John Mortimer: Horace Rumpole (Lawyer) 
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Old Bailey Hack |
The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (Professional Detectives)William Hope Hodgson: Carnacki the Ghost Finder Edgar Wallace: Mr. J. G. Reeder
Carnacki was a psychic investigator of the 'scientific type' (camera, protective seals, electric pentacle, etc.), specializing in haunted houses. Sometimes the solution involves human agencies, sometimes the supernatural. The stories are told by Carnacki to his group of four friends over after-dinner port and cigars, thus have a light-hearted air that belies the occasionally genuine scariness. The best and most elaborate of the stories is called "The Hog," which is horror, not detection. Hodgson is more famous for his really haunting supernatural and science-fiction fantasies; he died on the Western Front in 1918.
This detective working for the Director of Public Prosecutions, with 'that ineffable air of apology and diffidence which gave the uninitiated such an altogether wrong idea of his calibre', is actually pretty ruthless, as well as seemingly omniscient. The few stories and books he is in (The Mind of Mr J. G. Reeder is the most famous, also the novel Terror Keep) deal mostly with gangsters and master criminals, but have some detection. He is fiftyish, platonically loves one Margaret Belman, wears square-toed shoes, a flat-topped derby, and a 'tightly buttoned frock-coat of antique design', carries a never-unfurled umbrella (swordstick), and loves the corny stage melodrama of the day for its 'idealistic' representation of life. Wallace was one of the most prolific authors of his time, but had very few series detectives of this sort.
Lawyers
Professionals in mystery stories are in most cases lawyers. This web site does not cover what are called 'legal thrillers', such as the vast and popular output of authors like John Grisham and Scott Turow -- although they often involve a mystery they are not Detection. Most of the lawyers that are mentioned here are not really detectives (except for Perry Mason), but tricksters involved with the aftermath of a crime. Among those worth recommending, either for nice courtroom drama or somewhat sleazy defense gambits, combined with detection, are:
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Miscellaneous
Among the many professionals there is no space to review here, but are well worth reading, are:
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If I ever find the time, I will include the following of my favorite detectives who at least have some standing in dealing with the authorities in the way of investigation:
There are no doubt others you can think of, hence the submission form at the bottom of the page.
A few more caveats based on this reviewer's prejudices (another 10 Commandments):
Mail Recommendation to grobius@sprynet.com
If you would like to write your own short precis of a series detective, please send it to me by regular e-mail (click the red grobius@sprynet.com for a standard e-mail screen and include your text either as an attachment or as a block in the message area). If I approve it -- judgement is mine alone -- I will host it on this site on another web page following a similar format to this one. Once there are at least three entries, that page will become reality, with its own link on the home page, so please feel free to submit your favorite detective!
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My first visit to London was in 1956 when I was a child, but here are some abiding memories, and later opinions based on observation over many years of revisiting:
(1) The war damage -- there were still large areas even in central London, especially around Blackfriars where lots of the big and most tastelessly egregious office buildings are now, spoiling the view of St Paul's from the Thames, that were ruins and were being slept in by derelicts. What they (the Revelopment Commission or whoever) did in the northern Cripplegate area at London Wall to restore it was horrendous, although lots of medieval and Roman stuff got unearthed. It has been improved since the London Museum moved there and the Barbican development was built in the 1970's (many people hate the latter, but I rather admire it, especially where it has been put over a series of moats and ponds, with the recovered Roman bits displayed).
(2) The pea-soup fogs and the acrid smell of coal smoke (which you also got when you opened a window on a train, since they were still using steam engines then), from all the fireplaces that were soon to be banned in the city, hence only 'clean' fogs nowadays. Car exhaust smells far more offensive than coal smoke, although nobody has tried to link that to lung disease with as much fervor as the anti-tobacco people.
(3) That horrible dirty-yellow sodium-lamp street-lighting that turned the whole sky orange but did little to light up the streets. Also, the road system out of London was really terrible -- a Sunday expedition on the A40 out Windsor-way was horrendous when it came to the evening rush back to London. There weren't that many families who had cars then, too, though lots of motorcycles with sidecars (under the Socialist government, your road/car license tax was based on the number of wheels you had! and three was considerably cheaper than four, hence also the popularity of 3-wheeled cars, which I never saw in any other country). Still, there were traffic jams.
(4) Anachronisms such as rag-and-bone collectors on horse carts, street criers ("cockles and mussles alive-alive-oh" if you know what I mean), onion sellers from Brittany on bicycles who provided huge strings of delicious bundled-up onions that would supply a household for three months (Mom would hang them up on a hook in the kitchen), cheap but really good antique (for me) stuff like war medals and bayonets, possibly lots of it 'fenced', in Portobello Road and other places that are now tourist traps -- could go on and on with this, but it is all GONE now.
(5) No fast food. In fact no restaurants to speak of outside of London, except for the more famous inns and hotels. On the other hand, lots of tea shops and fish-and-chips places. Forget trying to get anything at all on a Sunday. The Wimpey (from Popeye the Sailor) hamburger chain was the first in Britain in the class of the original US 15-cent Macdonalds and White Castles (class in the meaning generic rather than qualitative -- they were all comparatively at the true junk food level and delicously indigestible).
(6) PLUS SIDE: (a) Before Beeching dismantled the railway system except for the main lines, one could go anywhere by train, and trains usually ran on time and didn't break down. Also the local public 'Green Line' buses (they didn't really have intercity bus lines of the Greyhound sort then) ran frequently and had that nice double-decker format so you could see what was going on en-route from the top level. (b) Everything except for electronics (TV sets, phones, radios, and collaterally, cars, dishwashers, refrigerators and things like that) was very cheap. You could have a very good dinner of 'home'-cooked roast beef with soup, veg, dessert, cheese, and so on for the equivalent, even considering inflation, of two Big Macs. A pint of beer was only sixpence (so I've been told, since I didn't start drinking until I was 14); a pack of cigarettes for a florin (ditto). (c) While the Victorians had polluted certain areas with railways and their adjuncts, depressing acres and acres of grim row housing, and of course the horrendous factory areas to the north of London, there were no intrusive power-lines running all over the country, no huge pine-forest plantations, grown for the sake of the paper and furniture/housing industries, covering the hillsides, no destruction of the hedgerows and small-field farming layouts in the interest of huge agribusinesses who need large flat areas like a Kansas cornfield to be profitable (and to hell with levelling old neolithic burial mounds and things like that in the process). (d) Minor, but telling point, is that the pounds/shilling/pence system was still in effect. Hard to do math in, especially percentages, but since decimilization how much English literature will now become partly denuded because nobody will know what a tanner is, a bob, or even tuppence? But with a half-crown, now just 12 1/2 p (a quarter to US audiences), you could hire somebody to take a message all the way from one side of London to the other then, without a tip! In 1956 there were still farthings in circulation, soon to be abolished as valid coinage -- a farthing, when there were 240 pennies in a pound, was worth a quarter of that, i.e., 1/960th of a pound (like the 'mill' still used in the US when charging for gasoline, that point-9 thing on the per-gallon price that makes you think it's cheaper), which was worth about $5 US then, but all you could buy for one farthing was a gumdrop; they were tiny bronzish coins with a grouse or some sort of game bird on the tails side. (Not that I ever knew what a sovereign, sesterce, sou or shekel was, and that didn't really spoil anything except for just having to guess at what the value was -- so maybe this doesn't matter -- we have the expression "not worth a sou" but that could have been a year's wages for a French peasant in 1200. Same thing will happen to inches and pounds in another generation or so.)
When the old stage coaches were replaced by passenger trains, the canals by freight trains, when the trains were replaced by buses and cars, the barges and freight-cars by trucks and lorries, the ocean liners by jumbo jets, whatever, somebody always complained at the transition. They always will. One loses the convenience of habit, the comfort of custom; distrusts the new technology; regrets the loss of livelihood for the old workers. It's a human cycle, like the constant building-up and tearing down of Manhattan -- sad but inevitable.
As for the post-war architecture, I can only agree with Prince Charles that it is absolutely awful and should be torn down. However, on this point, much worse was done a lot later, and not to replace war damage, but out of insensitivity and economic greed, such as those horrible multistory car parks and red-brick shopping precincts in the middle of historic cities where perfectly good buildings were torn down for convenience; more of Historic Britain has been destroyed in this way than was ever done by the Germans. The worst thing about the post-war rebuilding was the total neglect of the existing infrastructure such as street layouts, and the lack of general planning schemes based on local demographics, i.e., neighborhoods.
Back to mysteries: One of the appeals of the Golden Age of British mysteries, especially when it comes to London, is to perceive that city in a different era, just as one appreciates Van Dine or Ellery Queen when it involves 1930's New York City. Of course, one can argue that Edwardian London and Wilsonian New York were also totally transformed from prior ages such as the early 19th Century, the pre-railway days of Pickwick and Poe -- no doubt, older people of their time complained of that just as much.