Something Old: The Spherical Ghoul, by Fredric Brown

Something New: White Corridor, by Christopher Fowler

“The Spherical Ghoul,” by Fredric Brown, centers on the unusual events that befall a mortician inside a locked morgue. A ventilation shaft plays a key but unpredictable role in this locked room mystery.

Brown was a professional writer, which means he wrote a lot, and he wrote across genres, writing just about anything he could for money. He never hit the big time. Some of what he turned out was workmanlike, and some of it was just below masterpiece level.

In his best mystery novels, including The Screaming Mimi and Night of the Jabberwock, Brown excelled at introducing an ordinary character with a simple desire, and slowly immersing him in a plot of ruthless complexity. In The Screaming Mimi, our hero sees a beautiful woman, and knows she’s out of his league, but he wishes that he could spend just one night with her. In Night of the Jabberwock, the protagonist is a small-time newspaper editor, good at his job and happy with the role he plays in town, but he wishes he could break just one real news story in his life. Both of them are in for the night of their lives.

“The Spherical Ghoul” is a short story without the scope of his full-length work, but it has a nice mundane-turned-macabre touch that will give you an idea what he can do. It’s in the collection Homicide Sanitarium, and in Bill Pronzini’s anthology Tales of the Dead. If you want to try one of his books, I suggest Night of the Jabberwock for you Golden Age/puzzle types, The Fabulous Clipjoint for those looking for a more straightforward crime novel, and The Screaming Mimi for you noir types. Brown had something for everybody.

Christopher Fowler does not have something for everybody, but he does have a lot. He also writes across genres, but is now focusing on mystery. His series, about London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit (PCU), is a heady mix of the puzzle and the procedural, the old and the new, the natural and the supernatural. It features the aging, eccentric, and occasionally brilliant Arthur Bryant and the slightly-younger-but-still-aging John May, who together founded the PCU to focus on unusual crimes that might not get the focused attention needed to solve them. As a unit not in the mainstream of the department, the PCU is continuously fighting for its budget and survival, and Bryant in particular knows that he’s unlikely to work at anything useful again if the PCU is shut down.

The latest, White Corridor, centers on the unusual events that befall a coroner inside a locked mortuary. A ventilation shaft plays a key but unpredictable role in this locked room mystery.

Most of his earlier Bryant and May books have been billed as locked room mysteries, but none of them was. I’m delighted to say that this is not only a locked room mystery, it’s a locked room mystery with an extremely clever new solution.

The locked room isn’t the only thing going on here. There are three plot strands: Byant and May are trapped on the road in a snowstorm, a killer is stalking two people across the English countryside, and the PCU is faced with an impending royal visit.

I found the pace at the beginning a bit frustrating—as often happens with multiple viewpoint books there isn’t the same amount of incident in the different strands so some are more interesting than others–and was particulary impatient with the killer’s back story, but after the first few chapters everything starts to tick along quite nicely, and the plots all mesh beautifully at the end. The real charm of the series is the long (60 years!) and loyal relationship of Bryant and May. His previous books are worth reading too. Start with the first in the series: Full Dark House.

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Bonus Bookfling: Just because it’s the first in the series doesn’t mean Full Dark House was the first book about Bryant and May. They also feature in a horror novel, Rune, that was published in the early 90’s.

Something Old: The Problem of Cell 13, by Jacques Futrelle

Something New: The Book of the Dead, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

This year marks the 100^th anniversary of the publication of one of the greatest stories ever written. “The Problem of Cell 13″, by Jacques Futrelle, was published as a serial in The Boston American newspaper in 1907, and it has been published and re-published many times since. I would imagine that aside from a half-dozen stories by a guy named Doyle it is the most anthologized mystery story ever.

Brains and ingenuity are the stock-in-trade of Futrelle’s character, Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen. After quickly learning the rules of chess he defeated a world champion in an exhibition, and the newspapers have dubbed him The Thinking Machine as a result. The Problem of Cell 13 features the consequences of a bet that Van Dusen makes in the course of a friendly dinner discussion. He bets that he can “think himself out” of a jail cell, that is, that he can “so apply his brain and ingenuity that he can leave a cell”. He has to cleverly make use of the limited resources available to him to accomplish what he wants to do.

Arrangements are made with the warden to have Van Dusen admitted to a cell, and treated like any other prisoner. And then the fun starts.

If you know how to read, then you should read this story. Early on it was recognized as a classic, and when Queen conducted his informal poll of writers and critics to select the best detective story ever in 1950, The Problem of Cell 13 came in sixth. (Doyle had a story higher on the list, as did five other very worthy writers. More on those another time.) I don’t think it has slipped very far down the list since.

Futrelle wrote more than 40 stories about Van Dusen. As you might guess, the stories have puzzles to be solved at their heart, and Futrelle was also a born storyteller who had a way with narrative drive. You can read them all here:

http://www.futrelle.com/

Start with Cell 13, and then try a lesser known but no less brilliant story called “The Problem of the Crystal Gazer.”

In 1995, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s thriller Relic was published. It was a mind-blower. These guys took the high concept of a thriller and added the ingenuity of an old-fashioned detective story to come up with the best mystery/crime/suspense/thriller/horror novel since The Silence of the Lambs.

Since then they’ve written 10 more books, some standalone, some in a series. The Book of the Dead, out in paperback several weeks ago, again takes place against the setting they have exploited so successfully, the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, and again stars FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast and his evil brother Diogenes. The Preston/Child books wander wonderfully across the line separating the supernatural from the natural, and often you don’t know which kind of book you’re in until the end.

In Book of the Dead, Pendergast finds himself in solitary confinement in a jail cell. He has to cleverly make use of the limited resources available to him to accomplish what he wants to do. Interestingly enough, he does exactly what The Thinking Machine did over 100 years ago! In this particular case they really are using the ingenuity of an old-fashioned detective story.

That’s terrible, you might say. Well, maybe. I admit I would have enjoyed the story more if the writers had tipped their hats by having Pendergast say something along the lines of “Just a trick I learned from my old friend Futrelle.” Certainly Preston and Child have demonstrated that they can come up with great ideas on their own, and these particular items are not at the core of the story.

But sometimes it’s hard to resist borrowing, especially when an idea is so good, and so little known to the public at large. While you’re reading Futrelle’s Thinking Machine stories on that web site I provided above, why don’t you pay close attention to one called, “Kidnapped Baby Blake, Millionaire,” and compare it to a certain story written by a man named Poe 60 years earlier.

Always steal from the best.

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Bonus Bookfling: Jacques Futrelle was only 37 years old when he went down on the Titanic after making sure his wife got into a lifeboat. Read more about Futrelle’s life and the Titanic tragedy in this Mystery Scene article by Jeff Marks.

The game is afoot! There are few phrases in the mystery genre that are so recognizable and so quoted. But what does it really mean?

First, the sources. In perhaps the most exciting start to any Holmes story, Watson is awakened by Holmes in the middle of the night at the beginning of “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange”:

“Come, Watson, come!” he cried. “The game is afoot. Not a word! Into your clothes and come!”

The phrase was first popularized by Shakespeare, most notably as used in the famously rousing St. Crispin’s Day exhortation to the troops in Henry V:

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips.
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’

Clearly this is a hunting metaphor, derived from the fox hunt. The “game” is in fact the fox, that is, the quarry or the prey. This can also be seen in Shakespeare’s other use of the term, in Henry IV Part 1; Act 1, Scene 3. Hotspur and Worcester are trying to convince Northumberland of the brilliance of their plan, but Northumberland points out to Hotspur:

“Before the game is afoot, thou still let’st slip.”

In other words: “But you’ve let the hounds off the leash before the fox is even loose, as you always do, you rash doofus!”

It’s almost certain that Doyle knew of the term from Shakespeare. As a staunch traditionalist, he defended Shakespeare against Johnny-come-lately’s like Shaw, and firmly believed in the beneficence of the British Empire. It’s pure speculation on my part, but it seems likely that the St. Crispin’s Day speech would have been one of his fondest passages.

Did Doyle use the phrase anywhere else? The newest and best canonical reference is Leslie Klinger’s New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Klinger says that Doyle used the phrase in only one other place, in The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge:

“I could tell by numerous subtle signs, which might have been lost
upon anyone but myself, that Holmes was on a hot scent. As
impassive as ever to the casual observer, there were none the
less a subdued eagerness and suggestion of tension in his
brightened eyes and brisker manner which assured me that the game was afoot.“

This is a direct comparison Holmes to a hound on the hunt, and certainly Doyle did this kind of thing all the time. If we take a further look at Abbey Grange, we see that the hunting references are used throughout, such as this one:

“We will draw the larger cover first.”

Klinger calls this “a shooting metaphor, meaning to draw the fox from his covert or temporary lair. When the animal ‘breaks cover,’ the hunt begins.” (pp 1179). But Klinger doesn’t comment on the meaning of “The game is afoot.”

I think it’s clear that Doyle was also using “The game is afoot” as a hunting metaphor. Nowadays the phrase is often used more generally to invoke excitement and the sense that something thrilling is about to start, and that what is about to start is some sort of game or challenge. Klinger even uses it as his sign-off in his introduction to The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, indicating that the reader can turn the page for the fun to start.

The new meaning has come about largely because of the word ‘game’ and its connotations in the mystery field. For many years when there was more emphasis on the puzzle mystery then there is now, the mystery was described as a game between the writer and the reader. Over time through the process of folk etymology the new meaning has begun to outshine the old.

I don’t imagine I’m the first person to consider the origin and meaning of this phrase. There’s got to be some article in the Baker Street Journal about it, or some essay somewhere by a Holmesian scholar. Does anyone know of one?

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Bonus Bookfling: The Klinger book is a wonderful resource. The annotations are knowledgeable and not intrusive. It’s easy to read the text without tripping over footnote references, and equally easy to find the annotations if you want them. See here for Jon L. Breen’s review in Mystery Scene.

A few years ago I noticed something mildly unusual about the titles of the Matt Scudder books by Lawrence Block. See if you notice the same thing. Here are the titles of the first four:

The Sins of the Fathers
Time to Murder and Create
In the Midst of Death
A Stab in the Dark

Block wrote these books about Scudder from 1976-1981. They were good, but didn’t appear to be leading to bestseller status. But then he wrote Eight Million Ways to Die, a seminal book in the field. Even at this point he thought he was done with the character, but he went on to write another classic, the prequel When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, and it was off to the races. Here are the next four titles:

Eight Million Ways to Die
When the Sacred Ginmill Closes
Out on the Cutting Edge
A Ticket to the Boneyard

Notice anything yet? No? Then take a look at the next three:

A Dance at the Slaughterhouse
A Walk Among the Tombstones
The Devil Knows You’re Dead

That’s 11 books in a row with five words in the title! I noticed the pattern after book 7, and thought it was an interesting marketing choice. I can only think of one other writer who has gone for a series with the same number of words in the title. Robert Ludlum started with The Scarlatti Inheritance and followed up with The Osterman Weekend, The Matlock Paper, The Gemini Contenders… 17 three word titles in all during his lifetime, with more still continuing to appear after his death. S.S. Van Dine did it too, but his pattern involved more than just the number of words.

Here’s Scudder book number 12, which doesn’t conform:

A Long Line of Dead Men

When this book came out I wondered why they changed the pattern. I said to myself, “Why would they do that? 11 in a row, and then they changed it!” It would have been easy enough to call the book, for example, Long Line of Dead Men, or This is the 12^th Scudder, or even This Title Has Five Words. I mentioned it to a buddy of mine who also liked the Scudders, and he just looked at me like I was crazy.

But he was unfamiliar with the mystery world in general and unaware of the long tradition of using patterned or sequenced titles. Sue Grafton with her alphabet series, and Janet Evanovich with her One For the Money, Two For the Dough, etc., are the most direct examples, but other writers such as Van Dine, Ellery Queen, John D. MacDonald, and C.W. Grafton (yes, her father) were doing this kind of thing long ago.

So I decided to ask an editor I know, who can usually answer these kinds of questions. I said to her, “Why would they do that? 11 books in a row, and then they changed it!”

She looked at me like I was crazy.

She assured me it was a coincidence, and that no one else in the world would ever notice such a thing, and by the way, did I know I was crazy?

I was unruffled by this obviously uninspired opinion.

At the next Bouchercon (the World Mystery Convention) I saw Larry Block himself waiting for an elevator in the hotel lobby. I saw my chance to settle the matter and satisfy my curiosity. Knowing that the titles may have been chosen by his publishers I asked him, “Why would they do that? 11 books in a row, and then they changed it!”

He looked at me like I was crazy.

What do you think? What are the odds of 11 books in a row being published with five word titles? Has this ever happened before in the history of publishing? It had to be done on purpose, right?

Or am I just crazy?

Something Old: And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie (Novel, 1939) and (Play, 1943)

Something New: Identity, by Michael Cooney (Movie, 2003)

Did you know that there are two different endings to Agatha Christie’s famous And Then There Were None? It’s true: she wrote the novel, and then later on changed the ending when she re-wrote it as a play. It hardly seems fair, does it? One of the greatest mystery plots of all time and she was able to ring her own variation on it.

The central idea is so brilliant you can just imagine her cackling with glee as she worked out the details. Ten people on an island, most of them invited there by the mysterious owner of the island for reasons unknown, are murdered, one by one. The fear and tension increase throughout the book, as characters alternately make alliances or lash out at each other, because no one knows who to suspect, or who to trust.

After the success of the book, Christie turned it into a play, with all the same characters and the same overall plot, but with a significantly different ending. Christie knew her plays as well as her books—as Ira Levin has pointed out, she is the only playwright to come up with three outstanding mystery plays, while no one else has been able to write more than one—and she knew the theater audience would want a happier ending, so she gave them one.

If you haven’t read both endings it’s worth it. If you haven’t read either yet, read the novel, and then power through the play to get to the end. For those of you who don’t like to read (!) I am now going to give away both solutions.

I’m using the Bookflings Blinder to conceal the solutions. Just select the text to see it. Here is how the novel version ends: Are you kidding me?? You’re not going to read them?? Oh, all right. Everybody dies. At the end of the book everyone is dead, and no one is left on the island. It turns out one of the victims faked their own death, then continued killing everyone else off, then commits suicide that looks like murder. He leaves a journal behind that explains things to the police.

And here is how the play ends: Eight people die. The two left at the end are a man and woman, more or less a romantic couple by this point. They discover the plot by the villain, and foil it in time to save themselves. The play came out in 1943 and was a huge success.

60 years pass. In all that time almost no one had successfully used the And Then There Were None formula. John Slade wrote a half-horror, half detective story called Ripper that wasn’t bad, but nothing else stands out.

Then in 1997 along came the movie Identity. 10 people end up stranded at a decrepit motel in the middle of a storm, with the roads washed out in both directions. To add a little spice to the mix, one is a police detective transporting a dangerous murderer. After all the relationships are established, one of the people is found dead with room key Number 10 on their bodies. Then another person is found dead, with room key Number 9, then another with room key Number 8, and so on.

Although all the characters have their dark sides, John Cusack and Amanda Peet are the appealing lead characters, with Ray Liotta adding his brand of barely controlled menace to the mix. Like Slade’s Ripper, it’s part horror/thriller; the deaths are all brutal and there are plenty of chills, but most of the murders occur off-screen, and there is no gratuitous blood or guts.

Now some people were disappointed with the ending to this movie, and I can understand why. If you think you’re going to get a third solution to Christie’s famous plot, well, you are, but really not in the way you expect. Halfway through, everything changes, and you realize you’re watching something quite different from what you thought. If you roll with this twist, then you will still appreciate the movie. It’s not quite a fair-play detective story, but it is very ingenious, and it does have a couple of really nice surprises along the way.

I’ve given the writer of the screenplay, Michael Cooney, credit for the movie above, since he came up with the story, but director James Mangold did a terrific job bringing this to the screen.

It’s definitely worth a look.

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Bonus Bookfling: Of course And Then There Were None was not the original title of the book by Christie. It’s gone through several name changes, as have many of her books. But the titles have now been standardized in the UK, US, and Canada, and And Then There Were None is the new canonical title.