The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  Trevis Tarrant is a wealthy young dilettante who believes that cause and effect ‘rule the world’. He is described as ‘interested in the bizarre’, and King supplies him with cases so strange as to verge on the eccentric. Tarrant lives in a modern apartment in New York, and has a Japanese butler, Katoh, who happens to be a doctor in his own country and, as Tarrant casually acknowledges, a spy while in the United States.

  The amiable but dense Phelan meets Tarrant for the first time in ‘The Episode of the Codex Curse’, in which a priceless Aztec manuscript vanishes from a guarded room in a museum. King was skilled at creating an intriguing premise for a story, although he sometimes struggled to resolve the puzzle with equal aplomb. ‘The Episode of “Torment IV”’ offers an exceptionally outlandish explanation for a Marie Celeste-inspired mystery, whereas ‘The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem’, a classic locked-room puzzle, is deservedly the most anthologised of Tarrant’s cases.

  The impossible-crime mystery is suited to the short story form, because suspension of disbelief needs to be much less prolonged, and King’s habitual wordiness is less in evidence in the Tarrant stories than in some of his novels. The Curious Mr Tarrant was published by Collins Crime Club, and the UK first edition is now famously scarce. The cleverness of King’s fiction was admired by Dorothy L. Sayers, and C.E. Bechhofer Roberts dubbed him ‘the Aldous Huxley of the detective story’, yet he failed to achieve popular success in his native country, and never had the same American publisher twice.

  Charles Daly King was a Yale-educated intellectual who served as a lieutenant in the field artillery during the First World War. After flirting with a business career, he concentrated on psychology, publishing books such as The Psychology of Consciousness (1932). His first detective novel, Obelists at Sea, appeared in the same year, and was swiftly followed by Obelists en Route (1934). Obelists Fly High (1935) is a dazzlingly ingenious Golden Age classic, which like its predecessors featured a variation of the Holmes–Watson duo in New York cop, Michael Lord, and the absurdly named psychologist, Dr Love Rees Pons. In 1937, King appeared in one of the ‘candid camera’ photographic clues featured in The Castle Island Case (1937) by Francis Van Wyck Mason, a historical novelist who occasionally dabbled in detective fiction.

  Presumably discouraged by the failure of his novels to make an impression in the US, King did not publish any more detective novels after 1940, and concentrated on academic work, not least ‘an electromagnetic study of sleep’. Ellery Queen persuaded him to revive Tarrant in short stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, while another was published in a fantasy and science fiction magazine, with Jeremiah Phelan named as the author. The Complete Curious Mr Tarrant, containing all twelve stories about the character, finally appeared in 2003. King also completed a novel about Tarrant in 1946. Boasting one of King’s characteristically odd titles, The Episode of the Demoiselle d’Ys remains suitably mysterious, never having been published, either in the US or anywhere else.

  Calamity Town

  by Ellery Queen (1942)

  Ellery Queen arrives in Wrightsville, a small town in New England, calling himself Ellery Smith, and looking for a furnished house to rent. He is hoping to settle down in tranquil surroundings, and make progress with his next novel. The destiny of Great Detectives, however, is to find peace and quiet elusive. Ellery duly tempts fate by moving into the supposedly jinxed ‘Calamity House’, owned by the wealthy but ill-fated family after whom the town is named. Inevitably, he is soon confronted by a tantalising mystery.

  Nora Wright, a member of the Wright family, was inexplicably deserted by Jim Haight three years earlier, shortly before they were due to be married. When Jim returns, just as unexpectedly, he and Nora are reunited. The wedding does take place this time, but before long, the couple’s relationship deteriorates. All the signs are that Jim is contemplating the murder of his wife, and a note he has scrawled in red crayon suggests that he is planning her death for New Year’s Day. Death does come to Wrightsville on the appointed day, but it is not Nora who is poisoned.

  The ingenious plot borrows ingredients from Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Francis Iles, blending them with originality and flair. Wrightsville life, and the passions swirling within its troubled first family, are splendidly evoked, and the literary quality and style of the novel meant that it represented a landmark in the long series of mysteries written by and starring Ellery Queen. The earlier books, starting with The Roman Hat Mystery (1929), subtitled ‘A Problem in Deduction’, were intricate fair-play Golden Age puzzles, which challenged readers to beat Ellery to the solution. The sequence of books from Halfway House (1936) onwards saw Queen responding to the lead given by Sayers, Berkeley and others in shifting the focus away from a pure intellectual puzzle, and as Queen’s biographer Francis M. Nevins put it, ‘making room within its intellectual rigor for more of the virtues of mainstream storytelling’.

  Calamity Town, the first of three novels set in Wrightsville, continued the process of evolution, and quickened its pace. Queen signalled that the puzzle was no longer the sole priority by changing the subtitle to ‘A Novel’, and abandoning the challenge to the reader. Subsequent Ellery Queen novels, such as the serial-killer mystery Cat of Many Tails (1949), displayed a similar impressive reluctance to be constrained by the original formula, and a shrewd recognition that times, and readers’ tastes, had changed.

  Ellery Queen was the pen-name used by two cousins, Frederic Dannay (born Daniel Nathan) and Manfred Bennington Lee (born Emanuel Benjamin Lepofsky; they also wrote four Golden Age mysteries as Barnaby Ross. Broadly speaking, Dannay came up with the plots of their stories, and Lee did the bulk of the writing. Dannay, passionate about the genre, was primarily responsible for a flood of anthologies of crime fiction, including the landmark compilation 101 Years’ Entertainment: the Great Detective Stories 1841–1941 (1941). He also masterminded Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which continues to be the premier magazine of short mystery stories to this day, more than 70 years after its creation. The Ellery Queen novels are said to have sold over 150 million copies, and although the Queen brand was slightly tarnished by the cousins’ decision to allow ghost writers to produce books under the Queen name, the Lee–Dannay duo made an influential and lasting contribution to the crime genre.

  The Red Right Hand

  by Joel Townsley Rogers (1945)

  From its opening lines, The Red Right Hand draws the reader into ‘the dark mystery of tonight’, and a world as surreal as it is grotesque. Where is the killer of Inis St. Erme? What did he do with St. Erme’s right hand? And what will he do next? St. Erme was travelling in his car with his fiancée, Elinor Darrie, from New York to Vermont, when they pick up a strange-looking tramp. Shortly afterwards, St. Erme is murdered.

  The hallucinatory events of the story are recounted by Dr. Henry N. Riddle Jr., a brain surgeon who can scarcely credit the evidence of his own eyes. A potential witness, Riddle may also be an unreliable narrator and a suspect. Is it true that there was ‘something hellish and impossible about that rushing car, its red-eye sawed-off little driver and its dead passenger’ that caused him to fail to see the tramp, who appears to be a homicidal maniac responsible for St. Erme’s death?

  The story is set in a rural Connecticut which seems disturbing and dangerous long before a mutilated corpse is discovered in a swamp. Locales such as the Swamp Road and Dead Bridegroom’s Pond have names as eerie and evocative as Rogers’ feverish descriptions. Character names—Professor MacComerou, McQuelch, Unistaire and Hinterzee among them—are equally sinister and memorable. Even more arresting is the lyrical prose. Riddle is haunted by recollections of ‘the distant baying of the hounds’, and ‘the voices of the locusts…the gray bird fluttering frantically in my face’ as he tries to make sense of the inexplicable.

  The Red Right Hand was a revised and expanded version of a novella which first appeared in the New Detective magazine. It enjoyed a par
ticular vogue in France, where it won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and earned comparison to the work of Edgar Allan Poe and John Dickson Carr. Even Robert Adey, doyen of impossible crime enthusiasts, and author of Locked Room Murders, admitted defeat in his attempt to summarise the solution to the mystery: ‘The explanation, given little by little, is impossible to describe fully here, and is dazzlingly brilliant.’ Suspension of disbelief, especially given the number of startling coincidences, is vital, but entirely justified by the quality of the story and the writing.

  Joel Townsley Rogers, like so many crime writers, began his literary career as a poet; later, he concentrated on writing for pulp magazines. His first novel, Once in a Red Moon, appeared in 1923, but Rogers did not return to full-length fiction for more than twenty years. Two other novels also expanded shorter pieces of work, but although he produced a vast quantity of stories, his reputation rests on The Red Right Hand.

  Strangers on a Train

  by Patricia Highsmith (1950)

  ‘The germ of the plot for Strangers on a Train’, Patricia Highsmith said, was: ‘Two people agree to murder each other’s enemy, thus permitting a perfect alibi to be established’. A similar idea had occurred to Baroness Orczy, and featured in one of her Old Man in the Corner stories, but it seems unlikely that Highsmith had read or heard of it. She had only limited interest in traditional detective fiction, and admitted that A Game for the Living (1958), her only novel in the form of a whodunit, was a failure. Her first novel, however, proved far more influential in the development of the crime genre than anything written by Orczy.

  Guy Haines, an architect, takes a journey to see his faithless wife Miriam. He wants to be rid of her so that he can marry again, and a casual encounter with Charles Anthony Bruno results in Bruno offering to kill Miriam in return for Guy disposing of Bruno’s father. Although Guy does not take the plan seriously, Bruno murders Miriam, and manages to avoid suspicion. Will Guy be able to bring himself to undertake his side of the bargain?

  Highsmith’s later novels often explore disturbing relationships between two men who find themselves drawn to each other, although few books match the brilliance of her debut. The novel is much closer in its central concerns to Crime and Punishment than to the artificial world of Agatha Christie or Ellery Queen. Nevertheless, Highsmith later became a frequent contributor to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine—her short stories include some of her most compelling and extraordinary work—and she was even elected to the Detection Club in 1975. The uncertain post-war world was ready for crime fiction that explored the ambiguities of guilt and innocence, and Highsmith’s subtle and ambitious writing paved the way for gifted successors such as Ruth Rendell, who wanted to take detective stories in a fresh direction.

  Shortly after Strangers on a Train was published, Alfred Hitchcock bought the film rights for a modest sum, and his 1951 movie version of the story, with a screenplay co-authored by Raymond Chandler, is itself a classic of suspense. The memorable climax at a fairground was not, however, based on a passage from Highsmith’s novel. The source was the Botley Fair scene at the end of The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin, who was not given a credit.

  The troubles that plagued Patricia Highsmith (born Mary Patricia Plangman) began early; her parents divorced ten days prior to her birth. She had a difficult relationship with her mother and step-father, and a series of failed sexual relationships, mostly with women. But her first-hand experience of emotional instability infused her novels and short stories with a rare depth and power.

  Her fourth novel, The Talented Mr Ripley, arguably her masterpiece, was the first of a quintet featuring a charming but amoral murderer. It remains the outstanding example of a crime novel with an anti-hero, but was published in 1955, four years after The West Pier (1951), first in a trilogy about Ernest Ralph Gorse, a British forerunner of Ripley whose misadventures were televised as The Charmer in 1987. Gorse’s creator was the under-valued Patrick Hamilton, brother of the even more underservedly neglected Bruce.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Cosmopolitan Crimes

  In Murder for Pleasure (1941)—which until the appearance of Julian Symons’ Bloody Murder in 1972 was the principal history of the genre—Howard Haycraft talked about ‘the marked inferiority of the Continental detective story—even that of France, with a few exceptions—when measured against the English and American product’. Haycraft reckoned that the explanation for this lay in ‘origin and tradition. In America the detective story was founded by one of its greatest men of letters of all time. In England it was fostered and advanced by such literary giants and near-giants as Dickens, Collins, and Conan Doyle. But in France the form began with a hack writer…As for the remainder of the Continent, it simply lacked the essential political and legalistic backgrounds of the established democracies and was consequently able to produce at best feeble imitations of the real thing.’

  Today, crime in translation is in vogue. Yet even during the period covered by this book, crime writers whose first language was not English were more active, and their work was more noteworthy, than Haycraft’s remarks suggest. In the past, British and American readers were more parochial in their tastes, and publishers had little incentive to pay for translations; even now, there is no English translation of many fascinating crime novels and short stories by gifted writers. It is admittedly true that the cosmopolitan rivals of Sherlock Holmes were not, by and large, as striking as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Great Detective, and their cases did not have an impact comparable to that of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ellery Queen and the other leading English-language exponents of classic crime fiction. To a modern reader, however, the early examples of cosmopolitan crime offer much the same fascination as the forgotten gems of Britain’s Golden Age of Murder.

  Haycraft made no mention of the Russian literary giant, Anton Chekhov, and was perhaps unaware of Chekhov’s forays into the crime genre. The early short stories about crime collected in A Night in the Cemetery (2008) are interesting, although minor in comparison to his finest work. The Shooting Party (1884) boasts a plot twist anticipating a similar device in a story by Agatha Christie, and so do early crime novels from Norway and Sweden, Stein Riverton’s The Iron Chariot (1909), and Samuel August Duse’s Dr. Smirnos Dagbok (1917). Duse’s detective, the lawyer Leo Carring, is modelled on Sherlock Holmes, and appeared in no fewer than thirteen novels.

  Even in their home countries, Riverton and Duse were not regarded as rivals to Doyle. Introducing the story collection A Darker Shade (2013), John-Henri Holmberg pointed out that ‘the first internationally successful Swedish crime writer, the pseudonymous Frank Heller…enjoyed considerable popularity not only throughout Europe but also in the United States during the 1920s’, but added that, apart from Heller, ‘the relatively few Swedish authors writing before the 1940s were highly derivative and were considered unworthy of critical notice’.

  A similar pattern was evident elsewhere on the Continent. The Hungarian-born Balduin Groller, for instance, was one of numerous European writers inspired by the popularity of Sherlock Holmes; eighteen of his stories about a Viennese Great Detective were collected in six volumes of Detective Dagobert’s Deeds and Adventures in and around 1909. Germany’s Paul Rosenhayn created another sub-Holmesian sleuth, the American Joe Jenkins, who enjoyed enough success to merit translation into English at a time when the Anglo-American reading public’s taste was much narrower than it is today. Friedrich Glauser, born in Vienna, wrote a series of interesting detective novels in Swiss-dialect German about Sergeant Studer; they were unknown to British crime fans during the Golden Age, but were finally translated and published with considerable success in the late twentieth century.

  In France, the picture was rather different. The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907) by Gaston Leroux was a popular locked-room mystery which introduced the journalist and amateur sleuth Joseph Rouletabille. Haycraft approved of the originality (at th
e time the book was written) of the crucial plot twist, and the fact that Leroux ‘unlike most of his contemporaries, played religiously fair with his readers’, but was properly sceptical about the story’s reliance on ‘the long arm of coincidence’. Leroux’s contemporary, Maurice Leblanc, created Arsène Lupin, another of those literary rogues who became progressively more law-abiding and less exciting as the years passed. Haycraft complained that Leblanc, even more than Leroux, over-used disguises and aliases to the point of tedium, but felt that he was ‘a rewarding author for those who will meet him half-way’.

  Haycraft admired the work of the Belgian Georges Simenon, but made no mention of Stanislas-Andre Steeman, or Noel Vindry, or of Pierre Boileau. Vindry remains little known in the English-speaking world, but during the Thirties he wrote a dozen novels which matched John Dickson Carr’s for inventiveness; like Carr’s Henri Bencolin, Vindry’s Monsieur Allou was an examining magistrate with a knack for unravelling impossible crimes. Boileau’s career as a crime novelist began in the Thirties, although it was not until he started collaborating with Pierre Ayraud, who wrote under the name Thomas Narcejac, that he earned widespread attention in the English-speaking world. Several of Boileau-Narcejac’s atmospheric post-war novels were adapted into highly successful films, such as Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, but some of their early work has yet to be translated into English.