Something Old: The Purple Parrot, by Clyde B. Clason 1937
Something New: Running Blind, by Lee Child 2000

At first glance you wouldn’t expect to find many similarities between these two books. Clason wrote formal detective stories about Theocritus Lucius Westborough, a small, fussy professor of antiquities who helps the police solve baffling murders. Child writes thrillers about Jack Reacher, a gigantic former military policeman who wanders the United States helping people with his detective smarts and his ability to beat the hell out of just about anybody. But there is a connection.

Clason’s The Purple Parrot was a detective story about an impossible murder. The victim was found dead in a room with only one door and one window. Outside access to the window seemed impossible, and the only door was guarded by a butler, who swears that no one went in or out at the time of the murder. If you read it for the first time today, you wouldn’t believe it, for it uses one of the hoariest devices in fiction, and is almost certainly not practical. But at the time it was a relatively new and fun idea.

In Running Blind a serial killer is knocking off ex-military women in their own homes in a grotesque and seemingly impossible fashion. The women are found dead of suffocation in their own bathtubs, which are filled with green paint. There is no apparent cause of the suffocation. Reacher gets involved when the FBI decides that he fits the profile of the killer, and he ends up joining the investigation on a we’re-watching-you-carefully basis.

Now I’m not going to give away the solution of either of these books. But I am going to tell you something in the next paragraph that will be a big clue, especially if you’ve already read one of them. So don’t read on if you don’t want to know.

The thing is that both books have the same solution! Yes, Lee Child reached back into detective fiction history and re-used an old, almost stereotypical plot device from the 30’s. For those of you who really want to know the solution, I’m typing the next sentence in hidden text, so it’s invisible unless you select it with your mouse. Spoiler: In Clason’s book, the murderer hypnotized a key witness so that the witness would deny seeing the murderer enter and leave the room. In Child’s book, the murderer hypnotizes the victims into letting him kill them! End of spoiler.

I have to say that Clason’s solution is slighlty more believable, and as a bonus he includes a very plausible and more practical false solution to the mystery. And this book, like all the Westborough mysteries, is full of interesting information about antiquities. Meanwhile, the Child book is a faster-paced, modern story with Jack Reacher beating a lot of people up in the most satisfying manner. And both books feature great old-fashioned detecting by a brilliant detective. How can you beat that?

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Bonus Bookfling: Select the text for the answer to yesterday’s trivia question: Lawrence Block provided a blurb for Westlake’s One of Us is Wrong, which was written under the pseudonym Samuel Holt. The blurb included the phrase “God save the Mark,” as a pointer to Westlake’s seminal 1967 novel.

Something Old: Sir Gilbert Murrell’s Picture, by Victor L. Whitechurch.
Something New: Too Many Crooks, by Donald Westlake

Victor L. Whitechurch was a canon whose hobby was railroads and trains. He was an amateur expert on the subject, and when he started writing detective stories in the 1890’s, he made his character a railways expert too.

That character, Thorpe Hazell, was a train-loving vegetarian exercise fanatic, nearly always stopping in the middle of an investigation to eat boiled rice and perform aerobics, which made for a very eccentric character in the 19th Century. The mysteries he solves are all intriguing, with genuine clues and interesting detection. But one stands out as his supreme achievement.

“Sir Gilbert Murrell’s Picture” is the story of the aftermath of a caper crime. In this case, thieves have stolen a valuable painting from a train — by stealing not just the picture but the railway car it was on too. No problem, you may be thinking to yourself. They probably decoupled the last car and shunted it off the line. But the car they took was in the middle of the train, fifth from the front and back. And the train never stopped moving between stations! At one station there were nine cars on the train, at the next there were only eight, and no one was any wiser until they went looking for the painting.

Hazell is called in to find out how it could have been done, and it’s one of the finest problems ever posed in detective fiction, with a fiendishly inventive solution. You can get it in the collection Thrilling Stories of the Railway, or in Sayers’ Omnibus of Crime. Both are readily available on www.abebooks.com.

Donald Westlake is one of the greatest living mystery writers. He’s won three Edgars, written several bestsellers, and he revitalized the comic mystery back in the 1960’s with his con man stories. He writes a bunch of different series, but my favorites are his Dortmunder caper novels and short stories.

Dortmunder, for those who haven’t had the pleasure, is a crook. In each of the books he’s in, he somehow gets the idea for a grand theft, such as stealing an entire classic car collection, or recovering money from someone else’s bank heist that had been buried and then submerged under a lake when a new reservoir was created. At first the ideas seem slightly outlandish, but still feasible, and then Westlake adroitly adds layers of lunacy to the larceny until the whole thing is bursting with outrageousness. They are among the very few crime novels that are laugh-out-loud funny.

Westlake had a collection out last year, called Thieves’ Dozen. All but one feature Fred Dortmunder in a variety of capers. All but a few are outstanding. One of those few is “Too Many Thieves”, which goes beyond outstanding. In this story Dortmunder decides to rob a bank by tunneling directly into the bank vault. To say that things go wrong from the moment they break the surface would be accurate, but wouldn’t prepare you for the joy you’ll get from the ingenuity, humor, and reverses along the way. Buy it, get it, read it.

It’s the finest caper story ever written by Westlake, which makes it the finest caper story ever written — a certain story by Victor L. Whitechurch notwithstanding.

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(Bonus Bookfling: Westlake Trivia question: for which Westlake novel – published pseudonymously — did Lawrence Block provide a back-cover blurb that let the savvy reader know it was actually a Westlake book? Answer tomorrow.)