Tuesday, February 6, 2007

50 Great Mysteries: Part 2

50 GREAT MYSTERIES CONTINUED

26. One Shot (Lee Child, 2005)
If you’re one of those readers who doesn’t like the “hard-boiled” genre, don’t be fooled. It’s true that Child, a terrific writer, at first glance comes across as the ultimate tough-guy adventure story-teller. In fact, though, most of his books are true detective stories, and lone-wolf hero Jack Reacher functions in the classic private eye tradition. Here, an old enemy has been arrested for an assassination in a Midwestern city; he sends a message to Reacher asking him to come to town. He knows Reacher detests him; so what can he possibly be after? Solid detection, not so different from that of Lieutenant Kerrigan (#8) results in an astonishing conclusion. Reacher’s next book, The Hard Way, is as good, and contains some wonderfully Holmesian ratiocinations at its beginning, but toward the end it becomes more of a straight-out thriller.

27. The Man Who Tried to Get Away (Reed Stevens [Steven R. Donaldson], 1990)
There are four “Man Who” novels by an author who’s a well-known sci-fi writer under his real name; this one is the third, and the most like a true detective story. The titular hero is on the surface a broken anti-hero: an ex-alcoholic whose weakness resulted, in the earlier books, in the death of his brother and the maiming of his partner/(ex)lover. Yet he’s actually a true hero, smart, tough, and sensitive. Here, he and his partner, who now hates him, are trapped in one of those isolated snowbound murder scenarios that turn up so often in crime fiction, but this one doubles in spades. Not only is there a murderer on the loose, but the estranged hero and heroine are fleeing from a gangster who has put a bounty on their heads, and may have tracked them down; worse, she is falling for a man who might be the (which?) killer. This is the best ever in this particular sub-genre (And Then There Were None has no snow); but see immediately below.

28. The Rim of the Pit (Hake Talbot [Henning Nelms], 1944)
Henning who? No-one’s ever heard of the author, or the book. Sometimes posterity gets it wrong. John Dickson Carr correctly called it “a marvel of ingenuity.” Another snowbound party, with less emotional angst than The Man Who Tried to Get Away, but with many apparently supernatural incidents, and, as in Carr’s books, impossibility following on impossibility.

29. The Maltese Falcon (Hammett, 1931)
Sam Spade on the prowl for the missing Black Bird. Probably the most familiar story on this list, but more because of the John Huston/Humphrey Bogart film version than the actual book. Read it to see how perfect Bogart was at incarnating the perfect hard-boiled detective.

30. The Long Goodbye (Chandler, 1950)
Was this Chandler’s next best Philip Marlowe novel? It’s probably the most coherent, in that it wasn’t cobbled together from Black Mask magazine short stories, but is all of a piece. Marlowe’s search for a missing man has a nice surprise ending, and after Farewell My Lovely it’s his most romantic case, in the bittersweet tone they all sought after and usually achieved. Next in line is, I think, The Big Sleep, but they all have to be read. There is no modern detective story without Chandler; he succeeded in his professional heart’s desire, which was to kill off the classical English murder-in-the-country-house-and-the-butler-did-it tradition (resurrected cinematically by Robert Altman in Gosford Park). He succeeded so well that today we are inundated with tiresomely grungy cops and other pointlessly unsavory investigators slinking “down these mean streets” of London and Glasgow, without any of Chandler/Marlowe’s saving wit; until one finally wants to scream, “Enough already. Lighten up!”

31. Winter House (O’Connell, 2005)
Another Mallory entry, following on the heels of Dead Famous. A police procedural and twisted gothic entwined make a story that moves between the distant past and the present day. A homeowner kills an alleged burglar with a scissors–but he turns out to be a hired killer, and she a missing child kidnapped sixty years ago after her family was massacred with an ice pick. That’s the relatively ordinary part of the story...

32. The Hound of the Baskervilles (A. Conan Doyle, 1888)
“It was the footprint, Watson, of a gigantic hound!” Doyle’s full-length works are not really detective stories and not really novels, but rather thrillers of novella length. Still, it would be inconceivable to have a “best” list of any kind of detective fiction without at least one Holmes title. Of the novellas, Hound is the closest to being a classic story of deduction such as one finds in the short stories about Holmes–though the others ("A Study in Scarlet," "The Sign of Four," and "The Valley of Fear") must also be read.

33. Wilders Walk Away (Herbert Brean, 1948)
“Other people die of mumps/Or general decay,/Of fever, chills, or other ills,/But Wilders walk away.” And so they do, over a period of almost a century. Journalist Reynolds Frame sets out to find how, and why, they keep mysteriously disappearing as they are seemingly just walking away. On the way he finds romance with the last Wilder–clearly a dangerous position to be in.

34. The Moving Toyshop (Edmond Crispin, 1946)
As “classic” as classic can get. Oxford Don Gervase Fen is the very British private detective. We can’t do better than to quote the Penguin cover: “The toyshop in the Iffley Road contains the strangled body of a grey-haired woman when a friend of Fen’s enters it one night. The next morning the toyshop has vanished and a busy grocer’s store occupies the site. And nobody’s surprised...”

35. The Doomsters (Ross MacDonald, 1958)
See Margaret Millar, #25 above.

36. Burn Marks (Sara Paretsky, 1990)
Paretsky has said that Philip Marlowe was the chief inspiration for V. I. Warshawski, though her take on the sociology and politics of Chicago is much more complex and politicized than Chandler’s on Los Angeles; and Marlowe probably wouldn’t be caught dead with even a hint of V.I.’s feminism. But they’d get along, and probably become lovers. As in all Paretsky’s books, a seemingly minor case (of arson) leads to the uncovering of scandal and corruption by V.I., and puts her life in danger. Blood Shot (1988), in which V.I. sets out in search of a friend’s missing father, is just as good, and explores the same sordid stew. Between them, the two novels take on much of the seamy side of America in the Reagan years. Remember those?

37. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (C. W. Grafton–father of Sue; 1955)
Could be a lot higher–but that could be said of many of these. A journalist sets out to prove a point about the legal system by framing himself for murder–bad move. A good courtroom drama in which unpleasant surprises abound. The Fritz Lang film version is adequate.

38. Strong Poison (Dorothy Sayers, 1930)
For me, this novel, and Sayers’ Lord Peter (aptly named) Wimsey books in general, bear out much of Wilson’s dismissal of the genre. Still, at some point one has to stop arguing with success, especially if it has lasted this long. Wimsey is smart and not as foppish as he sounds; Harriet Vane is an attractive woman-in-peril; and the inane plot still manages to be compelling.

39. The Duke of York’s Steps (Henry Wade, 1929)
Another “classic of the Golden Age” (Jacques Barzun’s epithet), belonging primarily to the peculiarly English genre of the complicatedly unbreakable alibi that a detective sets out to break. As the title suggests (to those who know London), a murder takes place in broad daylight in one of London’s most public venues. Neatly worked out. Can be re-read and re-read.

40. The Egyptian Cross Mystery (E. Queen, 1932)
As noted above, Queen was the most inventive plotter among detective story writers, sprinkling unidentified bodies, cryptic clues, and bewildering turns of events around slightly off-kilter settings (although like Carr’s his later work tended toward self-parody). The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) is as good a detective story, but lacks the exotic atmospherics of this one.

41. The Door (Mary Roberts Rinehart, 1910)
Yes, Rinehart is old-fashioned, but not nearly as fuddy-duddy as her reputation would suggest. In fact she wrote some excellent mysteries, of which this is the finest. It has a completely unexpected deus ex machina; and one of the very best of all “least likely suspects”--a statement I can make with a clear conscience, in confidence that the suspect will remain unsuspected by readers until the end. See also her surprisingly bloody The After House (1914).

42. The Sculptress (Minette Walters, 1994)
An idiosyncratic choice, but every list-maker has to be allowed at least one. As one reviewer said, the plot “strains credulity,” and it does meander, but the character of convicted murderess Olive Martin and the relationship between her and investigative author Roz Leigh, as well as the shocking conclusion of that relationship are, for this reader, unforgettable.

43. Trent’s Last Case (E. C. Bentley, 1913)
Yet another classic from “The Golden Age;” I could easily be persuaded to rank it higher than Strong Poison. And another “last case,” but Philip Trent has quite a different motive for making it his last than Drury Lane did. Trent wears his heart all over his sleeve as the noose tightens slowly but surely around–you guessed it.

44. The Amazing Web (Harry Stephen Keeler, 1929)
Keeler was an amazing web-spinner. His specialty lay in pulling incredible coincidences out of apparently unrelated hats, one after another, and then making them all come together at the end. The idea in his books was not to make the reader think “It could really have happened like this,” but rather to say, “Look what I’m going to do! I’m going to start with a butterfly flapping its wings in China (well, not literally), and an ad looking for 1200 men with suitcases to come to a certain place at a certain time, and move on to the last flight of Amelia Earhart (an uncanny prefiguring), and have a woman save a child’s life while its father is visiting the prison in which she’s incarcerated, and wind up with an innocent but apparently doomed man on trial in a Chicago courtroom, and, and, and–and in some bizarre fashion of which I am in total control it will all work out into one exciting story!” And so it does. This is his best.

45. The List of Adrian Messenger (Philip McDonald, 1958)
Written 27 years after Warrant for X; that’s quite a career. A plane goes down in the Atlantic; a dying man whispers “New broom sweeps clean” to a rescuer. Bodies pile up one after another all over Great Britain; what is happening, and why, and who will be next? Made into a tremendously exciting film by John Huston; it would be a shame not to see it on the big screen.

46. The Bone Collector (Jeffrey Deaver, 1997)
This was Deaver’s first novel featuring brilliant forensic scientist Lincoln Rhyme, a police consultant who is wheelchair bound because totally paralyzed from the neck down (think Christopher Reeve); and his tough-as-nails police detective legwoman Amelia Sachs (played by Angelina Jolie in the film, but Uma Thurman in her Kill Bill persona fits the book’s description of a former model better: more legs, less bust). Together they are a gender-bending revision of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. Then why no Stout on this list? To borrow a concept from baseball statistician Bill James, comparisons of career performance (Mays over Mantle) and peak performance (Mantle well over Mays) may give quite different results. Stout plays Mays to Deaver’s Mantle: an illustrious career, but no single performance as memorable as this one. The scene in which Sachs comes racing to Rhyme’s rescue is wonderfully cinematic.

47. The Thirty-Seventh Hour (Jodi Compton, 2005)
A noticeable omission from this list is any representative of the traditional “damsel in distress” genre. That is because I find such books very irritating–and that’s the best of them. Why doesn’t she just call a cop and get on with it? However, in a recent (“post-feminist”?) version, the woman in question is a tough cop, or prosecuting attorney, and not just herself but the law she’s supposed to uphold, and the integrity of her performance in that role, are in peril. Jilliane Hoffman, April Smith (Good Morning, Killer), and Robin Burcell are good at this genre, but Compton is the best of all. The sequel, Sympathy Among Humans, is equally chilling.

48. Sacred (Dennis Lehane, 1997).
It’s a bit of a stretch to call this a detective story rather than a thriller, perhaps, but it’s my favorite Lehane, and as in all his books its darkness is blood-curdling. Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro are one of the great male/female partnerships, and this book contains the most exciting moment of their partnership. Darkness Take My Hand and Prayers for Rain would do almost as well. It might rank higher, but I haven’t reread it yet.


49. No Defense (Kate Wilhelm, 2000).
Erle Stanley Gardner and Perry Mason move over, Kate Wilhelm is now the number one author of courtroom dramas. In this one of her (so far) nine cases, “Death Qualified” Oregon attorney Barbara Holloway fights the political establishment, the legal powers-that-be, and a dangerous crime lord to save the life of an innocent defendant: a typical day’s work for her. Her cross-examinations are brilliant, without Mason’s histrionics, and her out-of-court maneuverings tough and adventurous. In an earlier incarnation, Wilhelm was a topflight writer of sci-fi and intriguing novels of what might (or might not) be the occult.

50. The Whispering Wall (Patricia Carlon, 1969)
In this instant classic by an Australian writer who is too little known here, a bedridden stroke victim who cannot move or speak overhears a murder plot; she can only communicate by blinking. Wow! Like Sorry Wrong Number it’s not really a detective story, but in figuring out how she’s going to “act” to thwart the plot the helpless woman plays the role of a great detective.

Additional Thoughts:

The worst part of list-making is having to stop. Not in fact being able to stop here, I will mention, in addition to the parenthetical inserts above, some works omitted merely because the number “50" looks so definitive. Anything beyond what can be written with one Roman numeral unfortunately suggests that, as E. B. White wrote in his parody of Archibald MacLeish’s poetry, “I could go on like this forever.”
In no particular order, then, I recommend Elizabeth Sanxay Holden’s The Blank Wall (recently a good movie starring Tilda Swinton); Vera Caspary’s Laura (1943; one instance where you won’t lose much if you see the film version, with beautiful Gene Tierney as Laura, instead); Cameron McCabe’s The Face on the Cutting Room Floor (1936), a version of the “unreliable narrator” plot that questions the genre’s generally unquestioned assumption of determinacy; Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s D’Entre les Morts (1954), the source for Hitchcock’s Vertigo; Gaston Leroux’s fin-de-siecle genre-bending roman policier, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (La Mystere de la Chambre Jaune); Sayers’ Gaudy Night (1936), with Vane as the detective instead of Wimsey; and Helen Eustis’s The Horizontal Man, a dual personality roman-a-clef that takes place at Smith College, and so cannot go unmentioned by me.
I also tentatively add Katherine V. Forrest’s Apparition Alley (1997), in which lesbian detective Kate Delafield investigates a shooting (her own) for which a homophobic cop is being framed, while another cop who was on the verge of outing gay and lesbian (LAPD) officers is murdered. Unfortunately, Forrest interrupts the action every few chapters for bouts of hard-core sexual coupling, a la contemporary romance fiction (think Nora Roberts); but if you don’t enjoy that kind of prose, those scenes are narratively irrelevant and can easily be skipped. Still, an all-time mystery--especially for those who dislike the LAPD. As who doesn’t?
All these additions and afterthoughts aside, however, for real mystery buffs the simple truth is that there can never be too much John Dickson Carr/Carter Dickson, so more needs to be said about that prolific author. Ignoring those of his works that contain a little too much great-detective-whimsy, cheesy atmospherics, or uninspiring romances, still leaves, at a minimum, The Judas Window (featuring a surprisingly good courtroom climax), It Walks by Night, The Lost Gallows, Seeing is Believing, The Plague Court Murders, The Nine Wrong Answers, The Problem of the Green Capsule, The Ten Teacups–better stop now; after that you’re on your own. Generally speaking, the early Inspector Bencolin mysteries are the best. Sir Henry Merrivale behaves with slightly more annoying buffoonery than Dr. Gideon Fell, but it doesn’t really matter any more than Katherine V. Forrest’s sexual excursions do.

As for Agatha Christie, there can certainly be too much of her, but still there are several more of her books that ought to be read, even if one has to hold one’s nose at the silliness of Poirot and the blithering idiocy of his “Watson,” Jeff Hastings. My choices for the best of the rest are Toward Zero (no Poirot), Peril at End House, The ABC Murders, and The Clocks. Still and all, if like me you prefer 5th Avenue family mansions and jiggery-pokery about rare books to rural English family manses and small town murders, then I’d recommend going further into Elizabeth Daly before going on with Christie. Can’t get too much Daly.

Finally, apologetically, it’s obvious that there are very few non-English language works on this list of recommendations. That’s as it has to be. Though the detective story originates in France as well as in England, few French mysteries make their way across the Channel, let alone the Atlantic; that is even truer of other literatures. As with films, the American mass market establishes a huge cultural discount for works that can make it in the English language generally and the U.S. in particular.
Still, in addition to those already mentioned, look for Elisabet Peterzen’s The Last Draw (Sweden–women will love it, it will make men squirm); man-about-Europe Nicholas Freeling’sThe The King of the Rainy Country and Because of the Cats; and Peter Haug’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow (Denmark). The most noteworthy omissions from this now-extended catalog are the Inspector Maigret mysteries of the prolific Georges Simenon, and the two Wilkie Collins classics, The Woman in White and The Moonstone. As to the former, I haven’t found any of the Maigret books to be individually memorable (perhaps that’s my problem); see the Mays/Mantle comparison above. As for Collins, I thought The Moonstone was lengthily boring. And though I loved The Woman in White as a teenager, and Marian Halcombe is certainly one of the most powerful female characters in all of fiction, when I tried to reread it recently I just couldn’t get past page twenty. But any women (especially) reading this should absolutely try it.

Most of the books listed here are available at a good mystery bookstore; if one isn’t available to you, all the books are available from Amazon or Powell Books or abebooks.com

Post-Script: I’ve just finished reading Carol O’Connell’s Find Me, the 9th Mallory. A picaresque novel as well as a mystery, it’s dazzling, gripping, inventive, astonishing, with a heroine who raises the heroism bar. Not the kind of book you can’t put down, but the other–superior--kind, which you can’t bear to keep reading because you might finish and you never want to get to the end, an end that might be both too heartbreaking and too soon. Perhaps I should overcome my reluctance to resort to the rhetoric of “the best.” Publisher’s Weekly, after all, says O’Connell “sets the standard.” Very true.

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