The Great Merlini

After writing about Hake Talbot's Rim of the the Pit a little while ago, it may skew the focus of the blog to write about another English language detective story here. I don't mean to write many reviews of non-Japanese books; but once in while I hope it won't hurt. Since a recently bought ipad makes reading ebooks practical for me, I downloaded a book I'd been wanting to read since I heard about it in a review on the blog At the Scene of the Crime, The Great Merlini (2012), a collection of  Clayton Rawson's Great Merlini short stories. The edition I read was the iBooks version published by MysteriousPress; since the introduction by Eleanor Sullivan is copyright 1979, I take it that this is a reprint (or digitalisation) of an earlier edition.

The Great Merlini is Clayton Rawson's detective, a magician and supplier of magic tricks to other magicians (does that sound familiar?), who sometimes helps the police with baffling, apparently impossible crimes. I had read two of the stories in anthologies, and also the four novels, Death from a Top Hat (1938), The Footprints on the Ceiling (1939), The Headless Lady (1940) and No Coffin for the Corpse (1942). All the novels are enjoyable books with a lot of ingenuity. Death from a Top Hat and No Coffin for the Corpse both feature excellent locked rooms, and Rawson repeatedly finds new tricks to play on our expectations as experienced detective story readers. And then Merlini really is an excellent detective: high spirited, but with his eccentricity more or less limited to his profession; an amateur, but one with a real specialist knowledge relevant to the kind of cases he gets involved in. The characters tend towards familiar types of mid twentieth century American crime fiction. In particular gruff, no-nonsense Inspector Gavigan, constantly irritated by the bizarre crimes he has to investigate is a figure I seem to have met many times (perhaps a William Demarest role).

The two short stories that I already knew are probably the best of Rawson's work. In particular, "Off the Face of the Earth" is a brilliant impossible crime. A man claiming to be from another world has predicted the disappearance of the judge who ordered his detainment as a material witness in another case. The police suspect that the judge himself wants to disappear in any case, as he is under investigation for corruption. Two detectives tail him to the station, where they see him enter a phone box. When he doesn't come out, they go to look and find the phone box empty, the receiver off the hook and the judge's voice at the other end, giving a mocking message to the detective. It's a very nicely worked impossible crime; and Rawson manages to go one better by having Merlini himself disappear from a phone box that the narrator and Inspector Gavigan are watching later in the story.

"From Another World", the other often anthologised story, is a neatly worked out "sealed room murder", literally sealed in this case, as there is paper tape pasted over the doors and windows, all part of a test of a claimed possessor of psychic powers, who is found unconscious in the room with her millionaire patron, who has been murdered. Suspicion naturally falls on the fake medium; but the real weapon is not in the room. This is very well done. I saw through the trick, so to speak, but didn't find it a worse story for that.

None of the other stories in the collection are on this level. Many are deliberately elementary short short stories, some used as contests for readers to test their skill on in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. All of these are competent for what they are; but the mystery or the deductive element is sometimes not very interesting (a tedious discovery of contradictions). There are two or three other longer short stories, of which the best was "Nothing is Impossible", I think. A rich investigator of UFOs is shot in his locked study. His son in law is with him, but i) unconscious, ii) naked (his clothes are next to him arranged as if he was still wearing them). The detectives find no gun in the room, only a set of tiny three toed footsteps. The set up is another of Rawson's attempts to keep the locked room up to date. Instead of traditional supernatural suggestions, we have extraterrestrials and Rhine's parapsychology as background in the stories. This makes the stories now an interesting window on the time.

This was the first ebook I've read. On the whole the printsetting was no worse than most publishers. I noticed two forgivable misprints ("If s" for "It's" twice), presumably an OCR error; but it looked like someone had gone through and made a reasonable attempt to get rid of such errors. My iBooks edition did have one big and rather disappointing mistake. The story "Nothing is Impossible" was evidently meant to have an illustration of the three toed footprint. This is missing there, but turns up in the middle of a later story, "Merlini and the Photographic Clues", where we really don't want it at all.

Rim of the Pit

Somehow, although I had read several histories of the detective story, the name of Hake Talbot had never registered, until learning Japanese brought me back to reading detective stories recently. His Rim of the Pit (1944) appears in quite a few lists of classic locked room mysteries. So, to fill in my education, I took a look at it, as an interval between the Japanese detective stories I mostly read.

The setting is an American forest wilderness. The lodges of two partners in the logging business are separated by a short walk. The wife of one of the businessmen is a spiritualist; and now she is calling up the ghost of her first husband, to ask his permission to cut the trees on one part of the land he had left her. But the ghost that appears seems miraculous beyond the possibilities of a fake seance; and it comes with a deep hostility to those that have called it up. Soon we have a Carr style mystery, with a locked room and footsteps that end in lonely untrodden snow, so that the witnesses can only think that a man has taken flight. For local colour the North American windigo legend is adapted to the idea of possession by ghosts. The dead, as evil spirits, can possess a man, directing his actions, while giving his body supernatural powers.

The style of the book is incredible. With huge self confidence Talbot pours out an endless stream of the clichés of popular writing: "A sneer curled Madore's thick lips", "Rogan saw Jeff's great shoulders bulge under his hunting shirt","Lights appeared over the brow of the hill. Madore's eyes darted to them in superstitious terror. Rogan took advantage of this to step in, catch the half-breed's wrist and twist it behind him until he dropped the knife". The attitudes of an old book are always going to be at odds with a modern reader. Mostly I have no problem with such things. Talbot's attitudes perhaps seemed so unpleasant to me, because unlike other dated writers, that's all he has.

The mystery is very closely modeled on Carr; and it looks quite promising as it is being built up. I guess that this setup in the first part of the book is what gets the book mentioned. The second half gets more tedious, as the characters track back and forth between the houses. The solution sort of works, if you're feeling generous; but it's not one of those wonderful "Oh, of course. How did I miss that?" solutions that the best mysteries have. There are a couple of good ideas in it, but they are not the impossible crime part.

When I read a really negative review of something that other people like, I suspect that the reviewer is missing something. Search for this title in other blogs and you'll find plenty of good reviews. So doubtless I'm missing something. At the moment I'm not really inclined to be fair, just snarling a little over the waste of my time.

Agatha Christie's Confession

This is really a blog for Japanese books; I'm not going to have a review of one ready for a few days. So I thought that since detective stories are one of the blog's themes, I could just quickly note down an idea about Agatha Christie's famous disappearance. I imagine that thousands of readers have had the same idea; but I've never actually seen it written down. So here it is.

In 1926 Christie disappeared mysteriously for ten days. There was a massive search for her; and she was eventually found at a hotel in Harrogate. Some thought it was a publicity stunt, others that she had lost her memory under psychological stress. Her husband had just told her that he wanted to leave her for another woman. Until she was found, there were people who suspected him of having killed her. When I first read about it, the general view was that it was certainly a reaction to the stress of the impending divorce, perhaps with some attempt to embarrass her husband or his mistress, which is the line that Wikipedia currently favours.

In fact just four years after the incident, Christie published a short story, which reads like a confession to me; and it gives a picture of her actions much like what others have supposed. "The Affair at the Bungalow" (1930) is one of a series of short stories, later published in The Thirteen Problems (1932), in which guests at a party tell of mysteries they have experienced, and the other guests try their hand at solving them, with Miss Marple always finding the correct solution at the end.

For the rest, I can't avoid giving the plot to that particular story away. So stop now, if you care.

The Solution Depends ...

Pocket Books edition of The New Adventures of Ellery Queen from 1945.

Spoilers after the break.