Something Old: Banacek (1972-74)

Something New: Jonathan Creek (1998-2008)

Banacek was an early 1970’s American television show about a slightly annoying man who investigated impossible crimes.

Actually, I’ve found that men and women who saw the show when they were young now have one of two different memories of it.

Men: “Banacek had the ultimate male lifestyle fantasy, with a mansion in old-town Boston, exotic cars, a high-paying, freelance job, and pretty girls at his beck and call.”

Women: “Banacek was a smarmy, smirking pig, and if he’d been a real person no self-respecting woman would have touched him with a ten-foot pole.”

Having recently watched all the episodes, I’ve got to side with the ladies.

Banacek was actually based on the movie The Thomas Crown Affair. In the movie, of course, the investigator is Faye Dunaway and McQueen plays the crook, but apparently the network didn’t like the idea of a criminal as the main character. So in the show, Banacek plays the freelance insurance investigator who in return for recovering stolen money, valuable art, or high tech machinery, charges 10% of the value of the item recovered. He’s only called in as a last resort when the insurance company can’t recover the item themselves, and don’t want to pay off on the policy.

His main rival is one of the insurance companies’ employees, Carly, and like just about every other continuing character on the show, she was even more annoying than Banacek. The producers of the show apparently couldn’t decide what to do with this character, since she was variously sleeping with Banacek, not sleeping with him but jealous, engaged to his most acrimonious rival, and, in one episode, his assistant!

There were other competing insurance investigators, and they all exhibited a small-minded dog-in-the-manger meanness that by comparison made Banacek look like a saint. And even his driver Jay, who was used mainly for comic relief, was introduced in an episode in which he tried to undercut Banacek’s work and take his commission for himself.

So why would anyone watch this show? Well, beyond the trappings, the main point of Banacek was that in his role of freelance insurance investigator, he was faced with what seemed to be an impossible theft each week. While there were a couple of complete clunkers, in general the quality of the impossible crimes was very high indeed. Some of these were re-used from earlier books and short stories, but not particularly well-known ones, so they should stymie most viewers, and others were brand new. In one example, we witness a guard get on an elevator carrying a briefcase full of cash. It’s a special elevator designed to go to only one other floor. But when it arrives, the guard is gone, and the briefcase is empty. In addition to the original and clever idea, this episode was one of the few that developed the plot and added important clues throughout the show. For most of them, you can watch the first five minutes and the last five minutes and still get all the value out of them.

In the end Banacek lasted only 17 episodes, and that was probably a few too many.

Jonathan Creek was a late 1990’s British televison show about a slightly annoying man who investigated impossible crimes. Jonathan works as an illusion designer for a famous stage magician, and therefore has exactly the kind of tricky mind needed to help reporter Maddy Magellan figure out the strange crimes she likes to investigate.

Unlike Banacek, this show thrived on the relationship between two adult characters, although that relationship cannot be said to be healthy. Maddy is driven, talkative, frank, and impulsive, while Jonathan is unambitious, introspective, and geeky. Each is ready with a snappy insult at any moment to keep other people at a distance, and these insults keep flying even after they grudgingly acknowledge that they like each other.

Every episode has Maddy trying to whip up Jonathan’s analytical interest in a crime that’s been committed, which with rare exception turns out to have been impossible. Again unlike Banacek, the show is gripping from start to finish, with excellent and fair clueing both to the criminal’s identity and the impossible method. Like Banacek, the impossibilities are the real star of the show, and series writer David Renwick put together a doozy for nearly ever show.

A few of them were, I believe, original problems and solutions on Renwick’s part. We have a woman who dreams real-life events that she could have had no knowledge of, a killer who walks into a garage and disappears, and, in one of the best, a woman is seen to enter a room via a window and disappear. The window and only door to the room remain under observation constantly, but the woman can’t be found in the quite literally empty room.

Here again many of the impossible gimmicks are old wine in new bottles. One of the most baffling episodes is Mother Redcap, which combines an ancient locked room murder method with an ingenious idea contained in a little known story by Peter and Anthony Shaffer from the London Mystery Magazine. Another episode is a clever variation on an idea from Herman Landon. But whenever Renwick does this he adds enough twists and turns that the origins are unrecognizable until you see the final solution.

And, anyway, who am I to complain about a wonderful detective show that has a mix of something old, and something new?

Bonus Bookfling: A new Jonathan Creek is filming now! This new Christmas special will be shown in the UK in December 2008. Watch for it in the US on BBC America. Canada, I don’t know what you’re going to do.

Something Old: The Baffle Book (1928), Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay

Something New: The Baffle Book (2006), Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay

Sometimes something old is something new. If you noticed The Baffle Book (“Fifteen Fiendishly Challenging Detective Puzzles”) in bookstores or on Amazon in the last year or so, you might not have known that it’s a reprint of an 80-year-old book.

In 1928, two minor New York detective story writers, Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay, published a book of 30 short mysteries to be solved, with answers in the back. They’d invented a game, played “in New York studio parties last winter” that they variously called “Clues”, “Baffles”, or “Baffling Mysteries”, and in which they set mystery problems for party guests to play. The stories were also printed up in magazines, and then collected in The Baffle Book. Readers were encouraged to score themselves on how well they did using a points-per-question system, or to buy two copies and play competitively with friends at Baffle Parties.

These were the first mini-mysteries, but they’re a bit more fleshed out than the more recent incarnations, with a fair amount of descriptive detail. And you need to pay a little closer attention to solve these, especially those in the first book, which don’t always depend on one single trick, but actually require some analysis.

The book was popular. Vanity Fair said that the game was “sweeping the country like new brooms”, and 1929 and 1930 saw The 2^nd Baffle Book and The 3^rd Baffle Book. The first book was translated into German, Hungarian, Spanish, and Swedish.

Some of the Baffles came with diagrams or charts, showing samples of evidence or clues found at the crime scene, and readers or players needed to interpret fingerprints, perform handwriting analysis, and decode secret messages in order to solve the mysteries. (The idea behind the Baffle Books was later extended by Dennis Wheatley, who sold actual crime dossiers, collections of hair samples, bloodstains, police reports, and so on, which could be used to solve fictional felonies.)

In 2006, the fine independent Boston publisher David R. Godine issued a trade paperback version of The Baffle Book, consisting of the first 15 puzzles from the original book, which held 30 in all. Interestingly, although the puzzles are referred to as “old-fashioned” on the back cover description, no mention is made of the fact that this is an excerpt of an older book. In fact the original introduction is retained exactly as it was written in 1928, including the line about the puzzles being used in “studio parties last winter.”

No selection or editing has been done on the puzzles themselves, and so, as the back cover proclaims, they remain gloriously old-fashioned. The first 15 mysteries from the original Baffle Book are reprinted exactly as they were, and since each puzzle really is a very short story, the flavor of the late-20’s period comes across, although the wisdom of retaining phrases such as “his Negro servant” is debatable. New York still had an elevated train, the rich people have servants galore, “gangsters” are everywhere, and all the cops in Chicago are Irish.

As far as I can tell the only thing added to the original text is a note about the typeface used to produce this new edition. Presumably Godine saw an opportunity to put out a puzzle book at low cost, since the original Baffle Books have fallen out of copyright.

If you enjoy mini-mysteries, five-minute mysteries, ten-minute mysteries, or even the Encyclopedia Brown stories, then you might have fun working out these slightly more challenging puzzles. Or perhaps you’ll just want to settle down in an armchair with a hot mug of tea, read about old-time New York and Chicago and London between the wars, and revel in how everything old is new again.

Bonus Bookfling: At least one writer of mysteries found inspiration in the Baffle Books. According to Doug Greene, John Dickson Carr worked out the plot to his book The White Priory Murders after reading The Sandy Peninsula Footprint Mystery in the original Baffle Book.

Something Old: Stronghold, by Stanley Ellin

Something New: The Husband, by Dean Koontz

Stanley Ellin (1916-1986) was surely one of the best writers in the history of the mystery short story. Beginning with his first published story, the classic “The Specialty of the House,” Ellin wrote stories outside the usual run of detective fiction being published by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in the 1940’s and 1950’s, and Fred Dannay, editor of EQMM, published many of his stories and promoted him heartily.

Ellin won two Edgar awards for his short stories, and although his novels may be slightly lesser known in the genre, he won another Edgar for his 1972 book Mirror Mirror on the Wall. At the time on the cutting edge with respect to the use of sex in crime fiction, it has dated a bit now, although the plot is dazzlingly pyrotechnic. Meanwhile, several of his other books have not dated at all, like House of Cards, The Dark Fantastic… or Stronghold.

Written in 1975, Stronghold is an unusual tale of a hostage-taking and a ransom demand, with a non-violent protagonist you would think little prepared to take on the kidnappers. Marcus Hayworth, along with the other leaders of a Quaker community in upstate New York, had at one time tried to help a young troublemaker named James Flood. Despite their efforts, Flood came to no good, and now has returned to the community to seek revenge by taking several members of Hayworth’s household hostage and demanding a four million dollar ransom. Hayworth himself is not one of the hostages, and instead of calling in the authorities he decides on a bold plan: he will devises a strategy intended to free the hostages without paying the ransom–and without violence in keeping with Quaker philosophy.

Don’t imagine for a minute that you can’t be ruthless without being violent. Hayworth’s first move in the stand-off is breathtakingly audacious. Before the tense standoff is over both Hayworth and the reader have had to examine their own convictions several times over.

Dean Koontz has been writing since 1968, and his first of many bestsellers came in 1980 with Whispers. Most of the time he writes either straight thrillers or thrillers with a bit of the paranormal mixed in. Until recently I would have said that my favorite Koontz was either The Servants of Twilight or Watchers, both of the paranormal variety. But in 2006 he wrote The Husband.

The Husband is an unusual tale of a hostage-taking and a ransom demand with a non-violent protagonist you would think little prepared to take on the kidnapers. Mitchell Rafferty is a professional gardener, and one day on the job his cell phone rings. It’s his wife:

“Mitch, I love you,” Holly said.

“Hey, sweetie.”

“Whatever happens, I love you.”

She cried out in pain. A clatter and crash suggested a struggle. Alarmed, Mitch rose to his feet. “Holly?”

Some guy said something, some guy who now had the phone. Mitch didn’t hear the words because he was focused on the background noise.

Holly squealed. He’d never heard such a sound from her, such fear.

She was silenced by a sharp crack, as though she’d been slapped.

The stranger on the phone said, “You hear me, Rafferty?”

The stranger goes on to demand two million dollars in ransom money, money that Mitch doesn’t have, money that the stranger knows Mitch doesn’t have. The kidnappers prove via a violent demonstration that they are serious, and Mitch finds out that, gardener or no gardener, he will do just about anything to get his wife back. You’ll believe it too. There are a couple of mind-blowing plot twists along the way, and a very satisfying ending. Don’t miss it.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Something Old: Carolyn Wells
Something New: Carolyn Wheat

Back in 1913 Carolyn Wells (pictured left) produced a manual on how to write detective stories, called The Technique of the Mystery Story. She later released a revised edition. It has practical advice and in particular very good details on clueing. Since it is now out of copyright, you can read it for free (in the original edition) online at

http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/ToMmenu.htm

But of course Wells was better known as a writer of mystery stories, most famously for her detective Fleming Stone, who faced locked room mysteries time after time. She was the first writer to specialize in the locked room mystery, and although most of the stories today seem unrealistic and disappointing due to their reliance on secret passageways, those same passageways were wonderful and mysterious to a more naïve reading public a century ago.

Wells also wrote light verse and children’s books, and between those and the locked-room stories, not many people remember what a good mystery manual she wrote. It’s overshadowed by the popularity of her novels, but at the time, it must have seemed like a gold mine to aspiring writers, since there was much less available in the way of writing instruction than there is today.

One person who appreciates that today is Carolyn Wheat, who is herself an outstanding writing instructor in the field of mystery and suspense. She has run many successful seminars and writing classes, and a few years ago she wrote How To Write Killer Fiction: The Funhouse of Mystery and the Roller Coaster of Suspense. Wheat reviewed all the existing manuals first (including Wells’) and then wrote the best book on how to write a mystery ever written. Wheat clearly distinguishes the different techniques for mystery and suspense, and unlike most how-to manuals, which feature generic information about how to write a book with a mystery label stuck on, this one really gives you the inside scoop on the specific ‘tec techniques you need to know.

Wheat also wrote her own mystery series and many award-winning short stories in the ‘90s. Her series was about lawyer Cass Jameson working in the New York City legal system, something Wheat had done for years herself. The series has been over for a while now, and Wheat has said she won’t be continuing it, although she may start a new series. But a new generation of writers has access to a new gold mine of information, written by another Carolyn.

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(Bonus Bookfling: Mike Grost, as usual, has some interesting insights to offer about Wells’ novels at the Classic Mystery and Detection website. And you can read more about Carolyn Wheat here. )