Last night I finished Isolation Ward by Joshua Spanogle. (The first half of this Rolling Review was posted on August 7^th.)

The pace picks up in the second half of the book, as our hero Nathaniel McCormick works out his romantic interests and starts to unravel the twisty plot, which is fun and unpredictable. But the pace never reached that racing out-of-control feeling you get with the best big beach books.

There are three main reasons for this, and one of them has nothing to do with the writing itself. The paperback jacket copy says, “A deadly epidemic. A terrifying race against time. A young doctor on the edge…” But there is no epidemic, and consequently no race against time, which may explain a little of the letdown I felt. After the first three illnesses which we learn about in Chapter One, no one else gets sick. The title , of course, also is misleading.

The second problem continues from the first half. The character of McCormick never settles down to become someone we can root for. He analyzes and over-analyzes the things that he says and that others say to him, which helps to develop his character, but at times he’s callow, at others wise, and often just stunningly foolish, as when he receives a videotape containing criminal evidence and he leaves it in his car instead of taking it to the police, or at least putting it back in the unimpeachably safe spot he got it from. Then when it’s stolen he it takes him an inordinate amount of time to realize that the thieves didn’t want the clothes they stole, they wanted the incriminating evidence.

The other problem that diffuses excitement in the second half is that no clear-cut villain comes to the fore. There are no less than seven major characters in the book who are involved in creating or covering up the crimes, five of which are focused on in the second half, and none of them becomes McCormick’s main opponent. So it’s our hero against… several other people. Even the climactic final scene has our hero against… three other people. The conflict is murky when it should be clearest.

I finished this and the suspense at the end was well-done. It’s good - it’s just one of those books that is not as good as the blurbs have made out.

Yesterday I surveyed the Great Pile, and I picked up Flawless, by Joshua Spanogle, probably because it has a striking cover, and because it was on top. I read the back cover, which had several great blurbs, as follows:

“A Smart, Fast-Paced Medical Thriller… Spanogle is a First-Rate Writer.” The Washington Post

“Spanogle delivers a real jolt of excitement” Publishers Weekly

“A plot that moves as rapidly as a lethal virus.” Entertainment Weekly.

I immediately put the book down, because all the blurbs were for his first book, Isolation Ward. So I found a copy of that and I read the first half last night and this morning.

It starts off with a punchy, documentary style description of the progression of the the illnesses of three women admitted to the hospital in Baltimore. It’s fast, it’s authoritative, and it’s just a bit scary. Two quick pages so you know something bad is going to happen, then we find out more about the sick people, and something about our narrator, Dr. Nathaniel McCormick, who works for the Centers for Disease Control and has come to Maryland because of the three scary illnesses.

It’s a really good start. But then I hit two problems.

First, it turns out McCormick is a smart-ass. At least that’s what he keeps telling us, and that’s what all the other characters keep telling him. It’s his bane in life to tell it the way he sees it, and then to get in trouble for it.

But I don’t see it. Case in point: he’s brought to a grave containing a murder victim. The cops are there, forensiccing all over the place. McCormick realizes they’re not protected against the invisible tiny deadly mystery killing thing, so he yells at them and tells them to all get the hell out of the grave and get covered up.

And the cops get mad at him. And he gets in trouble with his boss because of it. Because he may have saved their lives? Hmmm.

Now there are a few scenes where McCormick is actually being a jerk, but they are few and far between compared with the ones where all the characters just decide that he is. And honestly, I have never understood why I need to spend my entertainment minutes with a jerk, anyway.

Second problem. The book has slowed way down. There were the three people who got sick right away, and there was the guy in the grave on page 135, but in between it was just a bunch of interviews and everybody telling our guy he’s not nice. Now the plot has been manipulated so that because he’s a jerk, he’s conveniently being kicked out of the local investigation and being sent off to San Francisco to work on the only important lead they have. And where, incidentally, his two ex-girlfriends live, too.

So I have my doubts here, just short of the half-way mark. But… the writing is good. The sentences are interesting. The scenes are fast. And Spanogle really does have a great authoritative tone. So I’m going to finish it, and I’m looking forward to the second half, because I reckon that’s when the plot will start moving “as rapidly as a lethal virus.”

Something Old: The Other Side of Dark, by Joan Lowery Nixon, Delacorte, 1986

Something New: Down the Rabbit Hole, by Peter Abrahams, Geringer, 2005

I read The Other Side of Dark, by Joan Lowery Nixon in a single sitting today. It’s only about 180 pages, and it’s written for young readers, so it didn’t take long. I wish it had taken longer.

Here’s the situation. Stacy wakes up in the hospital and doesn’t know why. She’s thirteen years old, but when she moves around under the covers a bit, she realizes she weighs a lot more than she should, and she has breasts. Feeling like she’s in the wrong body, she starts screaming.

It turns out she’s been in a coma, and has just woken up. She and her mother were shot 4 years ago, and so Stacy is seventeen, not thirteen. She has to deal with this, and all the changes in her life, her family, and among her friends – and she has to try to remember who shot her!

This is a wonderful book. Joan Lowery Nixon was a great writer (four Edgar awards!) who was well-known for letting the girls she wrote about find their own way out of problems, and Stacy is no exception. When she first realizes that whoever shot her might come after her again, her first response is fear, but immediately afterward she thinks:

“I’m tired. I’m angry. And I’m scared because I don’t know what’s going to happen next. The guy without a face who murdered my mother. And Stacy McAdams. I wonder who will find the other first.”

After that the pace never lets up, and Stacy becomes an indomitable heroine who will make you want to stand up and cheer.

Down the Rabbit Hole, by Peter Abrahams, is also a book for young readers. Ingrid Levin-Hill, thirteen years old, just wants to get to soccer practice, because “if you miss a practice, you miss the game.” She’s never walked to the soccer field from school before, but she thinks she can do it. Ingrid gets lost and winds up in the wrong part of her hometown, Echo Falls, and she meets Cracked-up Katie, who arranges a cab for her. But Ingrid leaves her red Puma soccer cleats behind.

The next day Cracked-up Katie is murdered, and the police want to talk to anyone who saw her recently, and Ingrid has just got to get her shoes back…

Ingrid loves Sherlock Holmes, and often tries to solve problems using the WWSD method. She’s trying to get by in school, hopes to win a part in the school production of Alice in Wonderland, and loves doing what she’s best at: soccer. She gets discouraged, but not easily, and she slowly works out what’s happening in Echo Falls, and who’s behind it.

Unlike Nixon’s book, Down the Rabbit Hole is written in the third person. So rather than seeing the world through Ingrid’s eyes, you see it as it is, and you’re able to interpret danger signs that she misses. Ingrid becomes your daughter, and you want to protect her, keep her safe, and in the end you become so proud of her.

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Bonus Bookfling: Peter Abrahams is well-known as an adult thriller writer, and his characters in those books get all manner of hell thrown at them. I told him recently I was worried that he might start treating Ingrid the same way, but he promised not to: “I would never do that to Ingrid!”

Something Old: Fen Country, by Edmund Crispin

Something New:The Night of the Wolf, by Paul Halter

Edmund Crispin was a great admirer of John Dickson Carr. Upon reading Carr’s The Crooked Hinge, he was inspired to write his own detective novel. The Case of The Gilded Fly (Obsequies at Oxford in the US), was published in 1944 while he was an undergraduate at Oxford.

Crispin went on to write eight more exuberant, literate, and clever books, all of them starring a cynical yet whimsical Oxford professor named Gervase Fen, who was partly based on W.E. Moore, and partly on Carr’s detective Dr. Gideon Fell, whose initials he shared.

Crispin was a member of a small group called the Carr Society whose members gathered to create and relate stories in the style of Carr, and his books Swan Song, The Moving Toyshop, and The Case of the Gilded Fly all contain locked room mysteries that Carr would have been proud of. The Moving Toyshop is frequently recommended as his best book, but I recommend either Buried For Pleasure or Love Lies Bleeding, which began life as one of the stories Crispin told at a meeting of the Carr Society. Surely a great pleasure of Crispin’s life must have been the moment when Carr nominated him as a member of the Detection Club, with Agatha Christie seconding.

Crispin was also one of the best writers of detective short stories ever to pound a typewriter, and you should certainly try to get a copy of Fen Country, the posthumously published collection of stories about Fen. The first story in that collection, “Who Killed Baker”, also originated at the Carr Society, but was the idea of another member, Geoffrey Bush, and Crispin wrote the story with Bush as co-author. No one has ever been better than Crispin at writing tight, fair-play detective stories, with every clue hiding in plain sight.

Paul Halter is a great admirer of John Dickson Carr. Upon reading Carr’s The Crooked Hinge, he was inspired to write his own detective novel. The Fourth Door was published in 1987 while the author worked as an engineer in his native France.

Halter has gone on to write many more books since then, mainly about his detectives Alan Twist or Owen Burns, and he sets them all in England in the first half of the 20^th Century, because as he says:

“Le Londres du tournant du siècle est le décor idéal pour une histoire policière. Ses maisons de briques rouges, ses policemen, ses Docks, ses ruelles et son brouillard, bref, le monde magique de Dickens ou de Sherlock Holmes.”

Many of his novels are locked room mysteries, but none have been published in English. I have read two in manuscript courtesy of the translator John Pugmire, and though the writing is not quite at the high level of Carr or Crispin, the ideas are brilliant.

Halter is better in the short story form, and here English readers are in luck, for Pugmire and Robert Adey have published Night of the Wolf through Wildside Press. (I wrote a review of it here.) In short, all the stories have clever ideas, and some successfully evoke an unsettling atmosphere of creepiness to complement the strangeness of the puzzles.

Crispin and Carr became friends, and died a year apart, in 1977 and 1978. They both would have been proud to see their torch picked up by Paul Halter and carried into the next century.

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Bonus Bookfling: Another great (and underrated) writer of short detective stories is Bill Pronzini. His collection, Small Felonies, is worth hunting down and can be had for a song.

This is the third and final Rolling Review of Vinnie’s Head. I’ve now finished this book. (The previous portions of this review were posted on July 31^st and 29^th.)

Sometimes with this kind of book the writer has a hard time with the end. So many questions have been raised, and poor Johnnie has answers to almost none of them through the first 200 pages: in fact the book just got more complicated as it went along. It’s difficult to have multiple plot strands wrap up in the same place and time without messing up the pacing of some of them.

Not only that, but sometimes a writer has to bear down to get all this done, and it’s difficult to maintain a light touch with dialog and incident.I was hoping that Lecard could at least keep the wit in place, and sustain disbelief long enough to get through to the end. But I underestimated him again.

Lecard finishes the book off with a bang. All the plot strands he opened up are closed off in a Rowlingesque manner, it just gets funnier, and there is a killer of a plot reverse that is wholly unexpected and extremely satisfying

I still have a small reservation about one character whose interactions with the rest of the crew seem a little unbelievable, but at the same time this character brings in so many laughs and is so integral to the book’s finish that it’s hardly worth mentioning.

Do what you need to do to read this book. Buy it now, or put it on your list for the BookBringer in December, or remember to buy the paperback next year. But don’t miss it!

In Mystery Scene’s 100^th issue I listed the 5 Most Ingenious Impossible Crimes. In fact, the list could have been called the 5 Most Entertaining Impossible Crimes, since I excluded some of the cleverest of these (The Three Coffins, for example) if they weren’t terrifically well written.

You can get that issue of Mystery Scene here. In the meantime here are the Next 5 Most Entertaining Impossible Crimes:

6. What a Body! By Alan Green (1950)

This won the Edgar award in 1950 for Best First Mystery, and I doubt there have been many firsts better than this one. Set at an exercise resort, this very funny book gently lampooned physical fitness enthusiasts, and the murder victim was the fittest and most enthusiastic of them all. The unusual and absolutely original impossible crime had the victim found dead in a locked room wearing pajamas with the pajamas covering the wound. Hard to explain but oh, so easy to read.

7. Have His Carcase, by Dorothy Sayers (1932)

Now let’s not have any arguments here. Sayers did write some very hard-to-get-through books, The Nine Tailors being the classic example. But she was one of the best idea generators the mystery has ever seen, and she also invigorated the form when she started the Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane romance, which features in this book. It’s well-paced, fun, entirely original, and her insanely impressive knowledge of literature permeates without polluting. The puzzle here is a body found dead on a beach with no footprints to account for the murderer, and there is also no accounting for how Sayers came up with this brilliant idea.

8. Invisible Green, by John Sladek (1977)

This book would have made the Top 5 were it not for the fact that Sladek deliberately wrote it as a throwback to the Golden Age, and some of today’s readers may find it a bit stagey. In fact it’s a gentle parody of the classic puzzle novel, with not one but two impossible crimes: one is a murder in a locked room with a new kind of solution, and the other a murder that takes place while all the suspects are together in a room across town from the victim. An absolute gem.

9. Hard Tack, by Barb D’Amato (1991)

D’Amato loves the classic puzzle mystery, and has had several successes incorporating inventive ideas into the modern mystery thriller. This is one of her Cat Marsala “Hard” mysteries, and has journalist Cat on an ocean-going boat trip when one of the passengers is found with a slit throat in a locked (and guarded!) cabin. It was no small thing to come up with a brand new solution to the locked room mystery in 1991, but D’Amato pulled it off. And as with all the books in the “Hard” series, there’s a fantastic, nail-biting action scene at the end as Cat fights it out with the killer.

10. Whistle Up the Devil, by Derek Smith (1953)

A masterpiece of ingenuity. This is a sprightly tale of amateur detective Algy Lawrence and his attempt to prevent the impending murder of Roger Querrin. He fails, despite being one of three people guarding the murder room while the crime occurs. Another murder in a locked room follows – this one a killing of a prisoner in a locked cell. This is one of those Golden Age mysteries without much connection to police procedure and reality – Algy is buddies with the police superintendent and gets to do whatever he wants. But it’s fast, friendly, and fabulously, fiendishly clever. Watch out for a future blog dedicated to this book.

Something Old: Blast, by Tony Kenrick, Robindale, 1983

Something New: Scavenger, by David Morrell, Vanguard, 2007

In David Morrell’s new thriller, Scavenger, former New York police detective Frank Balenger is deliberately sucked into a drama he wants no part of, and ends up fighting to save the life of the woman he loves.

It’s a way-cool setup: Balenger’s girlfriend, who he acquired in the earlier book Creepers, is kidnapped along with five other phenomenally capable people, and is sent out on a deadly scavenger hunt for reasons unknown. At the same time Levenger is manipulated into joining the hunt from the outside, and it’s a terrific combination of enigma and adrenaline. Morrell drops you in a sleek race car and launches you on a tense high-speed chase.

As time goes on the ride deteriorates somewhat, and the engine coughs a little. By the end of the book some of the questions that flew by too quickly to notice are easier to see, and you might find yourself asking “But why would he do that?” too many times. But as Morrell has pointed out in essays, nothing makes for better suspense than a scavenger hunt combined with a deadline, and that’s what we have here. Along the way there is some fun detail about time capsules, and an interesting but not quite convincingly executed concept about video games and reality.

In Tony Kenrick’s Blast, former New York police detective Gene Charters is deliberately sucked into a drama he wants no part of, and ends up fighting to save the life of the woman he loves.

It’s a way-cool setup: the mayor of New York City receives a letter announcing that a bomb is going to go off in the Hotel Amsterdam lobby at a specific date and time, and that “no matter how hard you look, you will not find it in time.” This turns out to be true, and more bombs, an extortion demand, and a very twisty plot follow. Charters is not hired by a worried citizen, or the police — he’s threatened with death by a second villain if he doesn’t find out who is setting off the bombs. Why does this villain want to know? Well… you should read the book.

This is a fun, beautifully paced, and witty book that deserves to be better known. The central premise — the way the bomber is hiding the bombs — is brilliant and original (I can’t believe the idea hasn’t been lifted for a movie), and the way our hero outwits the bomber, the city of New York, the creep who hires him, and the actual evil behind it all, are all diabolically clever.

Kenrick was an Australian who lived in Connecticut, Toronto, and Majorca, and worked in advertising, and his North American language is dead-on.

Unlike Morrell’s Scavenger, Blast is not a thrill ride from beginning to end. A lot of the narrative drive comes from the curiosity generated by the seeming impossiblity of the killer’s ability to tell the police where the bombs will go off in advance without the police being able to stop them. You won’t believe it when you find out.

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(Bonus: Kenrick wrote another terrific little book, A Tough One to Lose (1972), about kidnappers who abscond with an entire jumbo jet full of passengers. But this being Kenrick, they don’t just hijack it, exactly: they make it disappear altogether.)