Philip MacDonald, The Choice (1931)

Dr. and Mrs. Hale-Storford, newlyweds of six months, are entertaining guests at their house on the Devonshire coast near Polferry.  A violent storm has struck.  Dr. Hale-Storford is downstairs with two male guests; his wife Eve, his young male cousin, the housekeeper, Eve's sister, and Eve's friend are sleeping upstairs.  When the doctor and his guests go upstairs, they find Eve dead, her throat slashed, and no weapon in sight.

Cut to several months later.  No one has been arrested in Eve's death.  And more tragedy has struck: the young cousin has died when the doctor's sailboat sinks under him, and Eve's sister has fatally driven off the cliff road near the doctor's house.  Are these deaths coincidence?  Some think not, and Colonel Anthony Gethryn has been called in to resolve the case.

Also published as The Polferry Riddle, The Choice was one of Philip MacDonald's enjoyable Golden Age mysteries.  Part problem in detection and part thriller (a significant part of the book involves a frantic search for Eve's friend, who has disappeared in a taxi), The Choice offers present-day readers a step back in time.

As a nod to its publication under two different titles, I am assigning this mystery to the category "A Mystery by Any Other Name" for the Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge.

Rex Stout, Not Quite Dead Enough (1944)

Not Quite Dead Enough was originally published as a Nero Wolfe double--two novellas published in a single book.  The two novellas here are "Not Quite Dead Enough" and "Booby Trap."  While each covered almost 100 pages in the Bantam printing that I read, they were both printed with lots of space on the page, so they are really just long short stories.

Both are set in World War II New York.  For those of you thinking, "Well of course it was set in New York--Nero Wolfe never leaves his house," even when Wolfe stays home, his narrator and Watson, Archie Goodwin, frequently runs around New York City and the surrounding area.  And in fact in both stories Nero Wolfe is seen all over New York--quite actively so in "Not Quite Dead Enough," in which Archie comes back as a Major in the U.S. Army to try to convince Wolfe to help the government during the war.  Archie is horrified to discover that Wolfe has taken up healthy eating and jogging so that he can become a soldier.  Thus Archie has to come up with something to distract Wolfe from dreams of soldierdom.  Fortunately for Archie's hopes, a murder falls into his lap.  At its core, "Not Quite Dead Enough" is a puzzle with a very simple solution that is very hard to see.  At least it was for me.

In "Booby Trap," Wolfe is helping the Army with Archie's assistance when a grenade detonates in a senior officer's office.  Again Wolfe is out of the house, this time so he can go to the Army.  Readers of Nero Wolfe will know that the usual rule is that Wolfe never leaves the house on business, so this story suggests just how much the war has upset everyday life (at least in Nero Wolfe's household). This story seemed much more complex than "Not Quite Dead Enough," but I still enjoyed the first one more.

For the Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge, the category is the "Dynamic Duo" of Wolfe and Goodwin.

Hillary Waugh, The Eighth Mrs. Bluebeard (1958)

Doesn't this book have a great title?  I was favorably disposed even before I started reading, just on the strength of the name.  It also refers to color, so I can claim the book for category 1 (Colorful Crime) of the Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge.

The title character is Gene Taylor, a woman who has grown up in the school of hard knocks and is desperrate to make a dollar--or in this case $10,000, which is the fee she will get for marrying a serial wife killer in order to trap him when he tries to kill her.  Really.  For those of you with legalistic minds out there, this is not entrapment, because it's not the police who have come up with this plan.  It's J. B. Stanford, president of his own life insurance company, who is so furious that his agent sold a life insurance policy to Mr. Bluebeard on his 7th wife that he wants to make sure he has bulletproof evidence to put the guy away for good.   Jack Graham is the agent who had the misfortune to sell the policy to Mr. Bluebeard, and he ends up working closely with Gene on executing the plot to catch Bluebeard, and also falls in love with her.

I wouldl describe this booknas suspense, not mystery, because there's never any mystery about who the murderer is.  The chase and the battle of wits are the thing here.  I had a lot of fun reading the book.

I'm a long-time Hillary Waugh fan, so just a couple of notes for those of you who aren't familiar with his writing.  I think he's best known for his police procedurals like Last Seen Wearing . . . (1952), which was really ground-breaking for its time.  His first three books feature a two-fisted, independently wealthy amateur detective in New York City.  Those are interesting--I've read two out of theee--but I wouldn't go out of my way to find them.

Death Mask (1959)

Edith Pargeter's mystery career began long before she started writing the Brother Cadfael series as Ellis Peters.  Some of her earliest published titles were mysteries.  As "John Redfern" and "Jolyon Carr," she wrote several books with titles like Murder in the Dispensary just before and during World War II.  She then turned to writing novels and a few mysteries, mostly under her real name.  It was only in the late 1950s that she started writing under the name Ellis Peters.  (Some of her books from earlier, such as Fallen into the Pit, have been republished as by Ellis Peters.)

Death Mask, published in the UK in 1959 and in the US in 1960, is one of those early Ellis Peters titles.  It is a standalone told in the first person by Evelyn Keith, a man in his mid-30s who has returned to England after living in the Middle East.  A mere three hours after returning to England, having lost his job, he runs into the love of his life, Dorothy Almond. Dorothy is the widow of Bruce Almond and the mother of 15-year-old Crispin.  Crispin was living with Bruce at his archaeological dig in Greece when Bruce was crushed by a lintel on a temple in the middle of the night.  Evelyn ends up accepting Dorothy's offer of a job tutoring Crispin, who is now refusing to attend school or accept any kind of tutor.  When Evelyn meets Crispin, he quickly discovers that there is something going on with Crispin besides typical teenager attitude.  Maybe Bruce's death wasn't the accident everyone else thinks it was . . .

I liked this Ellis Peters pretty well.  It is really suspense, with very little detection.  That's OK, though, because the suspense is quite good.   Also, we do get Crispin's account of his detection Greece before getting taken back to England by Dorothy.  The setting is in the Mendips of England, with some very specific Mendip scenery, which is enjoyable for those who enjoy seeing the world in their mystery reading.

I am however giving this title 4 stars on Goodreads because it has that typical Ellis Peters flaw, sentimentality.  At least, I think it's a flaw.  Not all of her work is sentimental, but a lot is, and I find it rather cloying.   Crispin reminds me a lot of Dominic Felse in Peters' Felse family series, especially the Dominic of Fallen into the Pit, and the narrative tone is similar, even though this book is narrated by Evelyn and that one is third person.

For VMRC, this title satisfies the category Genuine Fakes.

Death of a Godmother

An important aspect of the Golden Age detective story was the puzzle.  The reader was expected to match wits with the detective and try to solve the puzzle before the detective.  Thus, a number of big names from the 1920s and 1930s will never be accused of writing exciting books, but these authors could construct a good puzzle.

John Rhode was one of these unexciting but good puzzlers.  His writing is a bit stiff and his characters are cardboard, but you can usually count on getting a good puzzle.  His detective was Dr. Gideon Priestley, a scientist who enjoyed solving puzzles in his study on Saturday nights with an intimate circle of good friends, who included a couple of police detectives and a physician.

Death of a Godmother is one of his later (1955) stories.  Almost all of the detection is done by one of the above-mentioned detectives, Superintendent Jimmy Waghorn of Scotland Yard, and Jimmy also solves the puzzle.  Dr. Priestley just weighs in on a couple of Saturdays in the study.  Unfortunately there's not many clues here and in retrospect I don't think there's anyway a reader could solve the mystery ahead of Jimmy.  Nonetheless I really enjoyed the story.  It feels like it is set in the Twenties (but it is the Fifties, with mentions of the Korean War) with a remote village, little forensic work, and a sad romantic backstory.  Rhode does work some humor in with the garrulous widow Mrs. Hopton who keeps getting a chance to feed Jimmy humongous meals.

For the VMRC, this mystery fills the Wicked Women category because of the godmother in the title.

Die All, Die Merrily

Die All, Die Merrily, first published in 1961, is by Leo Bruce.  I was eager to read another in the Carolus Deene series -- this is the eighth.  The title is a quote from Shakespeare's Henry IV Part One: 

Come, let us take a muster speedily:
Doomsday is near; die all, die merrily.

Nice cheery quote, hmm?  Fortunately, the emphasis in the book is not on doomsday but on traditional detection.  Unfortunately, this book just isn't as good as the last Leo Bruce I read, Our Jubilee Is Death.  Here, Carolus has his arm twisted into investigating a possible murder described in an audio recording.  The recording was found at the bedside of a man who then committed suicide.  According to the tape, the dead man went out, strangled a woman with a silk cord, left her dead  on a "green ground," and then went home, recorded his confession, and shot himself. The problem is that no body has been  found. The relatives ask Carolus to investigate because they can't believe he would kill anyone.  I won't say more than this to avoid spoilers, but really this story has a lot of potential.

Sadly, though, the full plot when revealed was wildly improbable.  The motive is weak and the murderer's actions seemed completely crazy, which otherwise the character isn't.  While I usually have no trouble with the inherent probability of amateur detective stories, this one just did not work for me at all. 

I also found that while this mystery had its moments, and probably could be enjoyed by the diehard reader of traditional British mysteries, it was not as witty as Our Jubilee Is Death, and ultimately a bit of a slog.

Classics Spin, here I come

So I joined the Classics Club earlier this week.  I had to hurry up and do it so I could participate in the Classics Spin next Monday.  I list 20 books from my reading list on my blog, Classics Club picks a random number between 1 and 20 on Monday, I learn what I'm reading next.  Or in this case first, since I haven't yet started any books for the Classics Club.

1. The Love Department - William Trevor
2. The Transformations of Lucius - Apuleius
3. Sentimental Education - Gustave Flaubert
4. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
5. Barnaby Rudge - Charles Dickens
6. The Stranger - Albert Camus
7. The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad
8. The Wonderful Years - Reiner Kunze
9. Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
10. Candide - Voltaire
11. I'm Not Stiller - Max Frisch
12. Therese Raquin - Emile Zola
13. Eugenie Grandet - Honore de Balzac
14. The Tartar Steppe - Dino Buzzati
15. The Late Mattia Pascal - Luigi Pirandello
16. I nostri antenati - Italo Calvino
17. The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
18. Buddenbrooks - Thomas Mann
19. The Makioka Sisters - Tanizaki Junichiro
20. The Crime of Father Amaro - Eca de Queiros

Ready to play!