G.D.H. and M. Cole | Ellen Wilkinson | John Rhode | Arthur Durham Divine | Father Ronald A. Knox | Thomas Kindon | Sir Basil Thomson | H.M. Richardson | Ernest Robertson Punshon | Christopher Bush | Cyril Hare | Edmund Crispin | Richard Keverne | Dermot Morrah | Herbert Jenkins | Geoffrey Household | Eric Ambler | Arthur Williams | Vincent Cornier | Arlton Eadie | Georges Simenon | Seicho Matsumoto | Kyotaro Nishimura | Shizuko Natsuki | Norizuki Rintarô

A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page

British Realists

G.D.H. and M. Cole

The Brooklyn Murders (1923)

Superintendent Wilson's Holiday (collected 1928)

• Superintendent Wilson's Holiday
• In a Telephone Cabinet

A Lesson in Crime, and Other Stories (collected 1933)

• A Lesson in Crime

Mrs. Warrender's Profession (collected 1939)

• The Toys of Death

Birthday Gifts (collected 1946)

• Birthday Gifts
• A Tale of Two Suitcases

Henry Wade

Policeman's Lot (collected 1933)

• The Missing Undergraduate
• The Three Keys

John Rhode

Night Exercise / Dead of the Night (1942) (Chapters 1 -4)

The Shadow on the Cliff (1944)

Dr. Lancelot Priestley stories

• The Elusive Bullet (1931)

Ask a Policeman

• Death at Hursley Lodge (1933)

Richard Keverne

Inspector Artifex stories

• Cast-Iron Alibi (1941)

Ronald A. Knox

"Solved By Inspection"

"The Motive" (1937)

Thomas Kindon

Murder in the Moor (1929) (Chapters 1, 2, 3, 6)

Sir Basil Thomson

Mr. Pepper, Investigator (collected 1925)

• The Vanishing of Mrs. Fraser

Clifford Henry Benn Kitchin

The Death of My Aunt (1929)

Herbert Jenkins

Malcolm Sage Detective (collected 1921)

• The Surrey Cattle-Maiming Mystery
• The Stolen Admiralty Memorandum

Dermot Morrah

The Mummy Case (1933) (Chapters 1 - 7)

Christopher Bush

The Case of the Good Employer (1966)

Cyril Hare

Tenant for Death (1937) (Chapters 1 - 10, 14 - 17, 23, 24)

Death Is No Sportsman (1938)

An English Murder (1951) (Chapters 1 - 13, 18)

Death Among Friends / The Best Detective Stories of Cyril Hare

• Name of Smith (1952)
• Weight and See
• The Heel
• A Life for a Life
• Line Out of Order
• Monday's Child
• Tuesday's Child
• Thursday's Child

Edmund Crispin

Beware of the Trains (collected 1953)

• Beware of the Trains (1949)
• "Lacrimae Rerum"
• Within the Gates
• Abhorrèd Shears
• The Quick Brown Fox
• Black for a Funeral
• Deadlock (1947)

Fen Country

• Outrage in Stepney (1955)
• A Country to Sell (1955)
• Blood Sport (1954)
• Death Behind Bars (1960)
• The Undraped Torso (1954)
• Wolf! (1953)

Vincent Cornier

Barnabas Hildreth stories

• "Duel of Shadows" (1934)

"The Courtyard of the Fly" (1937)

Arthur W. Upfield

"Wisp of Wool and Disc of Silver" (1948)

Geoffrey Household

Rogue Male (1939)

"Keep Walking" (1968)

Arthur Williams

"Being a Murderer Myself" (1948)

Non-English Language Realists

Georges Simenon

Le petit docteur (The Little Doctor) (collected 1943)

• Les amoreux aux pantoufles (Death in a Department Store / The Slipper Fiend)

Seicho Matsumoto

Ten to sen (Point and Lines) (1957)

Koe (The Voice)

• Kanto-ku no onna (The Woman Who Wrote Haiku) (1960)

Kyotaro Nishimura

Misuteri ressha ga kieta (The Mystery Train Disappears) (1982)

Shizuko Natsuki

"The Sole of the Foot" (translated 1981)

"Divine Punishment" (translated 1991)

Norizuki Rintarô

"An Urban Legend Puzzle" (2001)

This article discusses various British writers in the realist school, and some non-English language writers influenced by the British Realists, such as Simenon and Matsumoto. For an article on the realist school as a whole, click here. Certain writers listed above are discussed in other articles: Arthur Upfield in the section on Tribal Detective Fiction.

The Coles

The Coles' mysteries often involve ingenious murder devices; these machines are to Coles' personal slant on the "scientific" approach of the Freeman school. Their earlier works of the 1920's sometimes emphasize the following up of physical evidence through deduction, in line with the Freeman-Crofts school once again. The Croftsian interest in faked alibis is also sometimes present. These Croftsian approaches are less prominent in their later work of the 1930's. There is a similar change in emphasis on the criminals in the two periods. The earlier work tends to look at white collar crime, and presents an exposé of crooked businessmen; this probably reflects the Coles' socialist beliefs. By contrast, some of their best works of the 1930's feature a scathing satirical look at prominent, successful writers, and their corrupt personal and professional lives. This was perhaps a world that the Coles knew first hand, so it gives an inside, jaundiced look at the intelligentsia of the period, just as Henry Wade knew the police and politics as an insider.

One of the Coles' strengths was their sharp characterization; despite a somewhat dry writing style most of the characters in their stories "come through". Superintendent Wilson seems much more vivid than Crofts' Inspector French, for example. So do the various victims, killers and suspects. Wilson is not a plodder, like French too often seems like. Wilson has very intense curiosity, combined with the professional skills that help him to analyze and investigate problems. His character is convincing as a "thinker".

There is usually a note of satire in the Coles' characterizations; it is quite sharp, but it is only one element of a realistic portrait, and restricted to specific aspects of the characters' personalities and behavior. The Coles' satire can be profitably compared to that of their contemporary and fellow Croftsian Henry Wade. The different attitudes of the Coles and Wade can be summarized as cynicism (The Coles) and despair (Wade). The Coles believe that there is a lot of corruption in England, and that many people are practicing it. All of the Coles' characters have free will, and they choose to engage in bad behavior or not, according to their moral fiber. In the Coles' villains one or more aspects of a character has gone rotten, made wrong choices, and is now engaging in corrupt activities. The same person could easily have chosen a more honest route. The Coles are eager to expose these corrupt activities, satirize them in detail, and hope that society will do something about them.

The Coles' writing never turns into the all encompassing picture of moral and practical failure found in Wade's work. Nor do the Coles' characters represent such absolute social types as do Wade's. In Wade's world, people, especially men, are falling to pieces after World War I. Their immense failure on all levels leads them into crime and other social problems. Crime reflects systematic failure in the relations of society, especially in war, race relations, and the support owed the young by the old. The failure of a Wade character is almost structural, representing their role in a dysfunctional society, rather than personal, as it is in a Coles story.

The Coles' storytelling style has some paradoxes. It often seems plain and unadorned, but it can make for very interesting reading. One reason for this is the amount of sheer mystery in the Coles' tales. The detectives are always investigating some mysterious situation, and the mysteries once solved lead to more mysteries to investigate in turn. There is an effect of continuous unfolding, especially in some of the Superintendent Wilson tales.

"Superintendent Wilson's Holiday" is a tracking of trails of evidence story, in the realist school tradition. It also shares some imagery with an Australian detective story, Randolph Bedford's "The Bardoc Finn", from his omnibus Billy Pagan, Mining Engineer (collected 1911). Both stories build up an elaborate outdoor landscape, complete with map.

Birthday Gifts

Birthday Gifts is a chapbook containing four Wilson tales. The title story is the best, a little Golden Age mystery with a scientific slant. "Birthday Gifts" also shows the realist school's fondness for settings at country inns and resorts. Sayers' Montague Egg stories frequently have such settings, as do Knox' The Footsteps at the Lock and Marsh's Death of a Fool. The realists' interest in backgrounds causes them to paint a detailed picture of such places, and I feel that I know what a typical pub or inn of the era was like from reading their tales.

The other three stories are reprints from the Coles' earlier collection, Wilson and Some Others (1940). "A Tale of Two Suitcases" is a police procedural, whose best aspect is its political background. The tiny "Glass" is just an anecdote, built around another of the Coles' "sinister machine" ideas. "The Motive" is the weakest tale in the collection. It has some plot similarity to Loel Yeo's "Inquest". In fact one wonders if the apparently pseudonymous Yeo is really the Coles, although what motive two professional writers like the Coles would have to disguise their identity is beyond me. Elements of liberal satire in Yeo's work seem consistent with the Coles' approach. However, Yeo's literary style seems very different from the Coles'.

The Brooklyn Murders

A good trick trivia question: where does The Brooklyn Murders (1923) take place? Answer: in London. It deals with murders in the theatrical family of Sir Vernon Brooklyn, hence the name. This first novel of the team is signed by G.D.H. Cole alone. It introduces Superintendent Wilson, but he shares detectival honors in the book with a young couple doing amateur detection. The year before Agatha Christie introduced her own amateur detectives Tommy and Tuppence in The Secret Adversary (1922). The Brooklyn Murders is a novel of considerable charm. We watch as both the police and the couple follow up clues, explore timetables, and try to either validate or explode alibis, all features of the Crofts tradition. The novel also has good characterization and storytelling, although like most of the Coles' work, it is fairly slow moving. The Coles' steady methodical pace of plot unfolding, and lack of padding do help sustain interest throughout their narratives, however. So does the fact that the story sticks relentlessly to detection. The Coles seems genuinely interested in mystery and detection, here and in their other works. The tale builds up an mandala like effect, with each bit of alibi together with its witnesses and locations becoming part of the design. The locations in the tale involve the Golden Age enthusiasm for maps and architecture. The initial crimes show the Coles' love of symmetrical plot constructions, which appear again in their Counterpoint Murder (1940). The sheer size of the story, and the feel of being plunged into a complex, highly imagined world, recall Cleveland Moffett's Through the Wall (1909).

Wilson's relationship with his wife here anticipates that of Crofts' Inspector French, who makes his debut one year later in Inspector French's Greatest Case (1924). So perhaps the influence between the writers was a two way street, with Crofts influencing the Coles, and vice versa.

The Murder at Crome House

By contrast, the Coles' much touted novel, The Murder at Crome House (1927), is an annoying, badly plotted mess. Despite its length, it has much less plot than most of the Coles' short stories we are recommending here. In fact, were it published anonymously I would never have recognized it as being by the same authors. The interesting looking clues at the beginning about photography turn out to have nothing to do with the case, a fact eventually pointed out by the authors. There is no science, and the faked alibis are obvious.

Ellen Wilkinson

The Division Bell Mystery (1932) is the only detective novel of Ellen Wilkinson. It reminds one of the work of the Coles. Like the Coles, Wilkinson was active in left wing politics - she was a Labour M.P. for over twenty years in Britain. Her book has the satiric tone of the Coles' work, and its focus on members of the British high life. There is a sly sense in both the Coles and Wilkinson that the British ruling classes are full of eccentrics that shouldn't be allowed to run a small firm, yet alone a great country. Also that they are quite willing to cover up the most outrageous messes - see the Coles' The Blatchingford Tangle (1926), for instance.

Wilkinson's novel has a Background: The House of Commons, and government ministries that relate to it, such as the Home Office and Number 10 Downing Street. Wilkinson knew this background from first hand, from sitting in Parliament. Like other authors of the Realist school, she drew her Backgrounds from her own personal experience.

The solution to the murder in the novel also recalls the Coles' techniques. It is perfectly sound technically. However, it is unbelievable that Scotland Yard would not have found the solution long before they do in Wilkinson's story. In fact, without giving away the solution of the story, the Yard's failure to find the missing clue right away seriously misleads the reader, and functions as a failure of fair play. Because of this, no one can consider Wilkinson's book a landmark in the history of impossible crime fiction.

Much better handled is the subplot about the notebook. The notebook business is also better integrated with the political Background in the story, leading to some of Wilkinson's best satirical chapters.

Many of the political attitudes of the Tory M.P. hero seem annoying today. His passivity in terms of doing any political action for anyone seems defeatist. He seems to believe, that since the glory days of the British Empire are over, that there is no point in doing anything for anybody. All he seems to value is the raw power the Empire once had. He is also merely perplexed by the poor people marching for bread in the story, regarding them as a conundrum. But he regards the fall of Britain's great country houses due to taxes and modern expenses a cultural tragedy. This genuinely upsets him. One can see that we are in a country, that even in the throws of the Depression, that still regards the upper classes as more real and more important than the lower. One wants to shake this guy, and tell him the real cultural tragedy is the way Britain never educated its poor people.

There are three woman characters in the story:

• One is a young Labour M.P., perhaps a portrait of Wilkinson herself. She is self-made from a poor background, decent, hardworking, and intelligent. She keeps trying to help the hero, with whom she is in love.
• Another is the heiress, with whom the hero falls in love. She has few virtues other than being rich, pretty and well dressed in a series of high fashion outfits. Despite this, the hero is immediately besotted with her, and stays so, despite any revelations about her less than admirable behavior. Admittedly, love is not under rational control, and the hero is going to love whom he feels like. Still, it is hard not to see ideas about class and gender underlying his feelings, ideas that seem really offensive. Wilkinson's novel suggests that sinister social forces underly the mating dance, that it is a heavily politicized activity.
• A third character is an older woman, a heiress who married into the aristocracy, and who has become an influential hostess. She is clearly a portrait of the young heiress' future. She also treats the young woman M.P. with terrible scorn. This sort of political hostess is clearly what the British political system wants women to be. They are not supposed to get involved in politics directly, unlike the woman M.P., rather they are just supposed to hostess political gatherings and be rich.

John Rhode

Even at his best, John Rhode's Dr. Priestley tales are pretty mild stuff. The best I have read is "The Elusive Bullet" (1931). This story is plainly inspired by Freeman's "The Blue Sequin" (1908), with perhaps a dash of S.H. Adams' "The One Best Bet" thrown in. This story, and "The Purple Line", are unusual in that they are solved through mathematical analysis - this is very rare in mystery fiction; it is consistent with Dr. Priestley being a mathematician. Dr. Priestley's character is that of a snappish old grandfather, the sort of character E. Nesbit burlesqued as the Psammead in Five Children and It (one of my favorite titles). By contrast, I didn't like "The Vanishing Diamond", the highly touted novels The Claverton Affair (1933) and Death in Harley Street (1946), or the Rhode - John Dickson Carr collaboration, Drop To His Death (1939). These tales are in no way offensive, but they lack inspiration.

Rhode wrote the opening section of The Detection Club's round robin, Ask a Policeman (1933). This novella length chapter covers the murder and its initial investigation. It is splendidly imagined, with much social satire, and a sly sense of humor running throughout. The satirical element also extends to a spoof of detective stories, with the Golden Age formula of murder among the social elite stretched to its absurd breaking point. The basic setup, the murder of an influential millionaire press baron, evokes E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1912). It is deliberately absent a solution: Rhode left that to his Detection Club colleagues, 5 of whom provided their own solutions to the case. Anthony Berkeley's is the best of these: it has some logical analysis, as well as a funny spoof of Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey.

The Secret of High Eldersham and The Shadow on the Cliff

Rhode also published novels under the pseudonym Miles Burton, usually about wealthy investigator Desmond Merrion. Two of these share much common imagery: his first Merrion book, The Secret of High Eldersham (1931), and The Shadow on the Cliff (1944). Merrion is an ex-Navy Intelligence Officer, and he always loves being on boats. So does his man Norwood. Norwood does sleuthing too, and is fantastically helpful, in the tradition of such sleuth-servants as R. Austin Freeman's Polton, H.C. Bailey's Sam, Dorothy L. Sayers' Bunter, and Margery Allingham's Lugg. These writers are all in the Realist school, or the Bailey school that partially derives from it.

The Shadow on the Cliff has a good Background of English country life. It focuses not on the country homes of the rich, but a more working to middle class environment: farms, country inns, fishermen, and the countryside itself. Rhode liked stories set in small villages. He also had a fondness for settings of pubs, typically as places where dirty work was done in small communities. Rhode liked hired hands as characters. These include assistant innkeepers, farmhands, and factotums on country estates. Such people take part in a network of relationships in his villages. They also tend to be ignored by other Golden Age writers, so they gave Rhode something original to write about. Rhode likes to suspect higher ups: in Ask a Policeman, these are at the highest strata of English society; in Cliff and Eldersham, they are the local authority figures and rich people. There is a distinct strand of anti-authoritarianism in his personality. Rhode's characters get around by a great variety of transportation; unlike other realist school writers, he liked old fashioned kinds like horses and buggies, as well as wheelbarrows and dollies. Rhode likes scenes in church graveyards. People often work at night in Rhode: Gruber in his workshop in Cliff, the farmers in Eldersham, the many pub keepers in his books, the soldiers in Night Exercise. Although they often stay up all night detecting, Rhode's characters crave sleep more than anything. Rhode also liked nocturnal settings. He was fascinated by lamps of all kinds, flashlights, the moon, and any other source of illumination. He is very good at describing both moonlight and fog.

In his stories the detective often seems to stay in the same room previously occupied by the murder victim, an odd approach not found in many other modern writers, even sleeping in the murder victim's bed. In his first novel, The Paddington Mystery (1925), the hero actually discovers the corpse in his own bed and bedroom. One can find some precedents in Victorian writers: in Volume 1, Chapter 13 of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1861 - 1862), the detective hero who is tracking the fate of his missing, probably murdered best friend and roommate, falls asleep on his friend's bed, and has a memorable dream about the detective search he is on. Similarly, Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Story of the Physician and the Saratoga Trunk" (1878) in New Arabian Nights has a scene in which the protagonist finds a corpse in his bed. Stevenson read Braddon's book as a teenager, and it made a deep impression on him.

H.C. Bailey's characters like sensory stimulation, from strongly flavored foods, flowers, bright colors, and religious rituals. The many quotes in his stories, often from songs and hymns, also bombard his characters with music and poetry. I can identify with Bailey's characters - I share all the same enthusiasms listed above. By contrast, Rhode's like tobacco, alcohol, drugs, meat and the sea. This is much harder for me to identify with: I have never smoked, drinked, used drugs or gambled, and am definitely NOT an addictive personality, unlike many of the characters in Rhode.

Rhode's men love to disguise themselves. The disguises tend to cover his men's heads, and enlarge them; there is clearly something phallic about such imagery. While some men are emphasizing their phallic characters with their disguise, the witch cultists in Eldersham are uniformly dressed in women's clothes, both men and women, according to witch tradition. This gives an androgynous effect. All of the imagery in Rhode, whether substances or disguise, tends to a transformative quality. Characters wish to change their identity or nature, especially at night. Rhode's heroines tend to be androgynous. Mavis in Eldersham is a Tomboy, drives speed boats, and is called more like a boy than a girl by one of the characters. The stepmother in Cliff manages the estate. The heroine of Cliff is a Naval Officer, a Wren, and wears a uniform. Her aunts are single women who run a farm, do much heavy labor, and dress in mannish work clothes. Feminists will like these gutsy characters, but feel sorry that they never get to do any amateur detection. By contrast, women who show traditional femininity are treated with contempt. These include the overdressed Mrs. Gruber in Cliff, and the society woman in Eldersham. These ladies don't work and are dependent on men. They are rotten to the core, in Rhode's world view.

Rhode liked to include elements of small time crime in his plots, especially dealing with the illegal sale of meat by farmers. This allows for plot complication, and also establishes a certain air of raffishness and disrespect for law among his villagers. Although the killing of farm animals is a constant in Rhode's world, it has sinister overtones. It is often linked to overtones of human sacrifice, for example, through parallelisms in the plot (Eldersham) or surrealistic imagery (Chapter 7 of Cliff). There are stone altars in both books with hints of human sacrifice: the pagan altar in the grove in Eldersham, and the natural rock Tregeagle's Bed in Cliff.

The Shadow on the Cliff shows Rhode's skill at plotting a fairly complex story, and having all the pieces dovetail properly. Rhodes contributed the superb opening section of Ask A Policeman, setting up the plot, the murder, the characters and their movements and motives. He didn't do any more, as befits the first chapter of a round robin. In some ways, Cliff is also all set-up material. It is pure mystery storytelling all the way through, and pretty well done. There is little "fair play" or great creativity with puzzle plot in the Agatha Christie sense. At the end of the story, we learn one of the characters did it, but there is no especially creative mystery puzzle idea in the solution. There is also little detection by any classical definition. The detectives learn things mainly by being told them by witnesses. Eventually, the detective gets a theory, which seems to be right. The solution continues the good storytelling of the rest of the novel by a well told account of the crime. It is most pleasant to read, but more as a piece of storytelling than for superb revelations. The passivity of the detective is mirrored by other characters. The author creates an excellent spunky heroine, and then nearly drops her from the novel's second half. The young hero of the story also almost disappears.

The Secret of High Eldersham (1931) is one of those mysteries that degenerates into a thriller. It starts out with a murder mystery, but by the end of the book all focus on this has been lost. This is too bad, because much of the book is well written. Chapters 12 - 16 form a separate section, largely dealing with the river and a mystery thereon. Rhode's detective Merrion eventually solves this mystery, uncovering an ingenious criminal scheme. Both the river navigation and the criminal scheme show the influence of Freeman Wills Crofts. Merrion's romance with Mavis, fears that her father is involved with the crime, and desire to protect her family from the authorities recall the amateur detective hero of Crofts' The Pit-Prop Syndicate. Similarly, the spies' communication scheme in The Shadow on the Cliff seems Croftsian.

Both Eldersham and Cliff start out in a pub, then move on to an outdoor setting in the English countryside. This setting, a river in Eldersham and a cliff in Cliff, is described with full Golden Age devotion to landscape architecture. Although no maps are included in the books, one could easily draw a map of both settings. Rhode loved landscape. The landscape literally speaks out at the end of The Shadow on the Cliff, in a way that reminds one of the modern theories of J. G. Ballard.

Night Exercise

The novel known as Night Exercise (1942) in Britain and Dead of the Night in the US is one of Rhode's few non-series mystery novels. Like R.A.J. Walling, Rhode's book provides a first hand account of war time Britain. The opening chapters (1 - 4) vividly describe a Background of the British Home Guard doing a war exercise in preparation against a possible Nazi invasion of Britain. These entertaining chapters show many of Rhode's strengths as a storyteller. They take place in a small English town, and we meet many of its local inhabitants, especially the tradesmen and farmers who are Rhode's favorite people. Everybody in the town gets to take on a new role, and almost a new identity, as part of the war time exercises, and this often involves new clothes and appearances. The local pub plays a central role. Many means of transportation in town are employed. The landscape of the town and its surrounding countryside is described in vivid detail, and made the setting of the exercise. In fact, the town's landscape is the actual subject of the story. It is looked at in interesting new ways, as part of the war exercise, as well as being seen in its traditional English usage. Most of the opening chapters take place at night, and show Rhode's gift for describing nocturnal illumination, weather and sounds. All of this marks the story as very personally Rhode's own.

Unfortunately, after this well done first third of the book, the mystery plot that Rhode propounds is perfunctory. The rest of the book has little interest, although occasionally the book shows charm. There are some mild detective developments in Chapter 9.

The central character of the story, Major Ledbury, is both an Army officer and a novelist. In this he resembles Rhode himself, who followed both professions. Ledbury even has the same rank as Rhode, that of Major. One wonders if the portrait has a degree of autobiography. Rhode would have been 57 in 1941, when the novel is apparently set: exactly the same as Major Ledbury in the book. Certainly Rhode's inside knowledge of Army work gives an extra edge of detail to the depiction of the war games in the novel. Also a bit unusual: the way that Ledbury's wife and children are briefly and proudly alluded to in the novel (Chapter 8), but never put in an on-stage appearance. If their glowing descriptions are intended as a tribute to Rhode's own family, this would make sense. Rhode would feel comfortable praising them. But he would not want to exploit them by dragging them on stage as characters in the story.

Arthur Durham Divine

A. D. Divine's "Flood on the Goodwins" (1933) is a little spy thriller, not a puzzle plot mystery. It has a Background of boating near the English coast that recalls both Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode. As in Crofts and Rhode, much emphasis is placed on navigation. The encounter of the hero with a smooth talking stranger recalls Crofts' thriller, The Cheyne Mystery (1926). And the final seascape/landscape of the tale recalls the maritime chapters of Rhodes' The Secret of High Eldersham (1931). Divine was a South African who lived in England, according to Michael Cox' anthology The Oxford Book of Spy Stories (1996), where this short story is reprinted.

Father Ronald A. Knox

Father Knox' short tales show the same logic as his longer works, but without the overelaboration and unbelievability of a novel like The Footsteps at the Lock (1928). The best part of that work has nothing to do with mystery; it is the lyrical description of the Oxford countryside at the beginning of the book (Chapters 2 and 3). This description reminds me a little of Matthew Arnold's poem "The Scholar-Gypsy", which also takes place in the countryside around Oxford. The two works seem complementary. Knox' use of a river and its locks is especially fascinating. The flow of water down a river can represent both the flow of life and of time; Knox draws on this imagery very naturally by making the progress of his characters down their river journey the subject of a timetable mystery. I especially liked the garden on the island at the lock. It is beautiful, and also somehow suggestive of the secret mysteries of life. The two young men in the story seem to be "doubles" for each other as well, something that also unlocks a whole world of symbolism for the author. Knox is also helped in his evocation of the countryside by his map, one of the best features of the traditional detective story.

Similarly, Knox's last novel, Double Cross Purposes (1937), is at its best in the lyrical description of a Highland Scotland setting in its opening (Chapters 1-5). These early chapters show Knox's prose style at its witty best, as well. Like The Footsteps at the Lock, this too involves a river with an island. Both novels contain a map, with which the reader can follow all the action. After this, Knox propounds a very long drawn out story. There are some mild moments of ingenuity in the puzzle plot, which is set forth in Chapters 7-8, and solved at the end (Chapters 19-20). Both of the best ideas in the puzzle, those concerning the map and the body, are somewhat in the tradition of R. Austin Freeman; so is the novel's theme of a search for antiquarian treasure. A personal note: I found reading this book stimulating to my imagination, a very good thing. It is far from perfect, but it seems to suggest vistas and encourage one's flight of fantasy. This is especially true of the opening chapters.

Knox's first mystery novel, The Viaduct Murder (1925), does not star his series detective. Instead, a group of amateur sleuths tries to solve a murder on a golf course. The book starts out with charm, but its mystery plot eventually dissolves into dullness.

One wishes Knox wrote more short stories. "Solved by Inspection" involves his insurance detective, Miles Bredon. (Later, Dorothy L. Sayers will give Lord Peter Wimsey the middle name Bredon, and set him to work undercover as Mr. Bredon in Murder Must Advertise, perhaps in homage to Knox.) Although apparently written years apart, the murder methods in "Solved By Inspection" and "The Motive" (1937) are related. Both of these tales are real classics of the form. His late Sherlock Holmes pastiche, "The Adventure of the First Class Carriage" (1947) is charming, but less personal in its plotting than the other two tales. It shows Knox's faithfulness to the tradition of "the breakdown of identity" right into the late 1940's. It also contains some of Knox's evocative descriptive writing.

Thomas Kindon

Murder in the Moor

• It stars two policemen detectives.
• There is a careful timetable describing the events of the story.
• Scenes of travel by railroad and motorcycle occur.
• The characters include an engineer and an inventor, reminding us of the scientific subjects of much Realist school fiction.
• Some lead sheeted tinned food also reminds one of Crofts' ingenuity with crafts.
• The use of Backgrounds.

Murder in the Moor has not one but two Backgrounds:

• The early, and best, chapters take place against the bogs and tors of Dartmoor. One of the characters uses surveying and bearings to get around, much like the navigation in Crofts' The Sea Mystery (1928).
• The middle chapters contain a different Background, that of an engineering manufacturing firm. Such an inside look at a factory and its business is especially Croftsian. However, Kindon seems more oriented to on the job personality conflicts and labor management disputes than does Crofts, and less interested than Crofts in the technical operation of the firm.

Kindon's novel is mediocre as a mystery plot. It is chiefly interesting for the Background of Dartmoor in the first three chapters. The use of a natural Background recalls Ronald Knox' use of the Oxford countryside in The Footsteps at the Lock (1928), and to a lesser degree the Coles' "Superintendent Wilson's Holiday". Like Knox, Kindon is exceptionally poetic and lyrical in describing the Dartmoor landscape. The writing often evokes a sense of wonder at the remarkable scenery of Dartmoor, and the tone is closer to Chesterton's evocation of the marvelous in the everyday, than the prosaic tone of Crofts or Wade. Kindon's novel furnishes a nice contrast to R. A. J. Walling's The Corpse With the Blue Cravat (1938) (known as The Coroner Doubts in Britain), which is also set in Dartmoor, but which looks more at human activities on the moor.

There is a good deal of rollicking humor and wit in the novel. The use of such unforced humor reminds one of Agatha Christie. So does the gently satirical, good natured evocation of various British types among the suspects. It fact, Kindon's characters in the early chapters are in general so likable that one hesitates to call them "suspects". They seem more like nice people who just happened to be around when the murder occurred.

One of the absurd characters Kindon's hero meets, at the start of Chapter 6, reminds us that X-File type believers in the paranormal are not just a phenomenon of the 1990's, but were present waiting to be satirized in the 1920's as well. Here this true believer is fascinated by the ruins of ancient British stone circles, a subject Agatha Christie handled in a rather similar fashion in "The Idol House of Astarte" (1928) the previous year (in The Tuesday Club Murders). Christie was also Devonshire born and raised, not far from the setting of Kindon's novel, and such remnants of ancient British paganism were probably a prominent subject of inquiry among local residents.

Sir Basil Thomson

Sir Basil Thomson's Mr. Pepper, Investigator (collected 1925) contains a famous story about a woman whose mother disappears while they are on a trip to Paris. Or perhaps we should say a story with a famous plot, because it is much referred to, but never by name. For the record, it is "The Vanishing of Mrs. Fraser". John Dickson Carr cited this story in his famous radio play, "Cabin B-13" (1943), where he gives a deliberately very different, and ingenious solution to same basic situation as Thomson's tale. In some ways Carr's solution is "fairer" and even cleverer than Thomson's, because he ... (well I shouldn't give away Carr's solution, but it is one of the more subtle pieces of misdirection I have come across: the reader expects one thing, and Carr does something else). Carr merely calls Thomson's tale "the old story" as if he wanted to give credit, but couldn't remember the name of the author. It is to be found in Dorothy L. Sayers' second omnibus, where I have finally read it, and a delightful story it is. There is a good deal of well done Parisian background, and the detection is vivid. The solution involves science, as in the realist tradition.

Thomson's tale reminds one of Anna Katherine Green's "Room No. 3" (1909), which takes place in a country inn in Ohio. Here the mother is found dead outside the hotel; but just as in the Thomson and Carr tales, everyone in the hotel claims not to have seen her. Green's version, probably the earliest of the three, shows an abundant, overflowing storytelling imagination, and is one of her best thrillers.

This story ultimately anticipated a whole lot of other writers as well. Evelyn Piper's Bunny Lake is Missing (1957) explores a similar situation, for example. I haven't read this book, but I have seen Otto Preminger's great film version: certainly the finest achievement in Preminger's distinguished career. Preminger is not interested in ingenious solutions, but has an emphasis instead on the social and moral implications of the plot. In the film, when the young woman reports that her daughter is missing, no physical evidence remains that the daughter ever really existed. Only the mother's love for the child has any survival into the present. The cold hearted police inspector doubts the child is real, and considers her a figment of her mother's imagination. He completely discounts the importance of the mother's feelings. This allows Preminger to explore his central personal theme of the privacy of subjectivity, the idea that people fail to penetrate to other's personal views (see Andrew Sarris' article in The American Cinema for a broader discussion of this theme in Preminger's movies). The mother's personal feelings fight a tremendous duel in the film with the impersonality of Society, in the form of the police. We see two worlds in conflict: an impersonal one, where society dictates what roles people are to play, and a personal one, where feelings of love are all-important.

On a more mundane level, Green's tale, and Thomson's after it, is the first I know of to contain a common suspense situation: people see something in a room, rush out and bring back the police, but when they return the room has been entirely redecorated, with new furniture, wallpaper, etc. This plot has been used a million times on TV, and is especially popular on spy shows. It is quite photogenic, and very effective in the film medium. However, there was already a long tradition of British thrillers and American dime novels when Green and Thomson's tales were published, with Edgar Wallace, J.S. Fletcher, Buchan, etc., and it is possible there are earlier appearances of this idea as well. (I also like that Green's story is one of the few classic detective works to mention my home town of Lansing, Michigan.)

Thomson's story is also an early burlesque of detective fiction. Mr. Pepper's dogmatic detectival pronouncements, half-wrong and half-right, and their collision with the ultimate realities of the case, reminded me more that a little bit of Jack Ritchie's 1970's Henry Turnbuckle stories. The comic tone nearly exactly matches that of Ritchie. I wonder if there are other good natured spoofs of detective stories in early Golden Age fiction. Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime were collected in book form in 1929; reportedly they appeared in magazines in 1928.

Thomson was a real life member of Scotland Yard, and most of his books are now considered to be early police procedural works. Like Freeman Wills Crofts, another early author of police fiction, he enjoyed writing about France. Here Britishers traipse over to Paris to investigate a crime, just like in Crofts' The Cask (1920).

H.M. Richardson

H.M. Richardson's "The Man Who Made Rings" (1929) shows many of the features of the realist school in general, and Crofts in particular. It has a policeman hero. Its crime involves an elaborate timetable. The timetable is manipulated through the "breakdown of identity". It involves trains. All of these are familiar aspects of the writings of Freeman Wills Crofts. The title character blows smoke rings - he is not a jeweler. The story is fairly well crafted, and contains some mildly surprising twists and turns. However, it seems to lack brilliance. Also, it assumes that crooks are almost superhumanly gifted at impersonation and disguise, being able to fool a man's valet of many years. This skill at impersonation seems to be common in English detective stories of the 1920's, and is a convention one just has to accept. I have never heard of Richardson before, or of his (?) hero Detective-Inspector Fawsett. He is a bit soapy and slick, sneaking up on witnesses and suspects, just like Crofts' Inspector French. This story, like the first chapter of Philip MacDonald's Murder Gone Mad (1931), offers a vivid portrait of England's commuter train system of the era.

Richardson is presumably the Henry Marriott Richardson who wrote just two mystery novels: The Temple Murder (1926) and The Rock of Justice (1928). He was 50 when the first book appeared; by the time of this story, just three years later, he falls off of the mystery map.

Ernest Robertson Punshon

Owen is an Oxford educated young man who has been forced to take up police work by the Depression. He seems like a cross between the Scotland Yard heroes loved by the Crofts school, and the sort of gentlemanly figures found in writers like Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh. Edgar Wallace also included a young policeman with an upper crust background in Sergeant Sir Peter (1929 - 1930). Unlike the unglamorous Sgt. Bell, Owen is handsome, well educated and socially sophisticated. He is much more of what Englishmen of the time would consider a romantic lead. He also seems younger, and much less experienced as a detective than the highly intelligent Sgt. Bell.

Owen has a superior, too: Superintendent Mitchell. Unlike Bell's obnoxious Chief Inspector Carter, who is always grabbing credit for his work, Mitchell is a decent person, although a bit intimidating at times. Mitchell is also openly skeptical of the police system, more than Owen is, and often gets off humorous one-liners containing Punshon's satirical thrusts.

Genius in Murder

Punshon's book has some of the earmarks of the Crofts school. Its detectives are Scotland Yard policemen; they are not eccentric and use plenty of leg work and investigative persistence. The admirably complex plot, made up of a combined, interlocking series of crimes, resembles somewhat the jigsaw construction of Crofts. There is some impersonation in the story, and some concerns over a character's dubious identity - this latter material involving Mr. Codrington is among the book's best. Mild attention is paid throughout to alibis and to alibi busting. A villainous fence in the tale reminds one a little bit of such characters in Crofts, although we never get an elaborate Croftsian criminal Scheme. There is a Background of sorts - many of the characters are involved in a stock transaction involving the Crude Metals Corporation, and we get an inside view of some of the financial and business practices of the era. While the characters have their foibles, and are often engaged in fairly shady transactions, no one is especially eccentric in the often surrealist intuitionist tradition. This sort of detailed look at British business is a Crofts specialty.

We also get a satiric inside look at life in Scotland Yard in the 1930's, which Punshon depicts as involving endless jockeying for position among mediocrities, while lower downs do all the hard work. This satiric skepticism is very different from the idealizing of the police we get in Crofts. Indeed, Punshon's bubbling comic tone and sustained comedy of manners resemble such intuitionist writers as Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh more that it does Crofts and his school. Both the lower downs at the Yard, and the lower and lower middle class characters among the suspects, are seen as engaging in all sorts of sneaky survival strategies to help them cope with an intransigently hostile British society and its upper crust rulers. Punshon shows a lot of sneaking sympathy for such characters. As in Crofts, the viewpoint is closer to the middle class and tradesman than it is to the aristocracy. There is a strong sense of dissatisfaction in Punshon's work, a sense that Britain could be a much better place for the small businessman.

The early scenes in the book involving a family crypt near a country house mansion recall R. Austin Freeman, and such works as Dr. Thorndyke's Discovery (1932). These scenes have one of Freeman's common plot motivations: the disposal of the body. A later setting in an isolated woods near the house also recalls Freeman and his fondness for country paths. A printer character recalls Freeman's many craftsman, and there is also a landscape painter - another Freeman favorite. There is also a secret code in the story - Punshon manages to throw in everything but the kitchen sink.

Some of his plot twists are surrealistic. There is a pleasant sense that genuinely odd, unexpected things are coming out of nowhere. The connections that keep getting established between different sections of the plot, and remote characters in the book, are also fun reading. There is a rich history of surrealism in detective fiction, one that that cuts across all schools of mystery literature.

A limiting feature in Punshon's work, and oddly enough, in Crofts' too: the amount of actual detective work done seems limited to the personal efforts of one policeman. In Van Dine school writers, there are whole teams of highly effective police, who vacuum up huge quantities of information about the suspects. They can also call upon police in other regions to carry out investigations. By contrast, here Sergeant Bell's own shoe leather is used to find anything out. His police superiors are so busy playing politics and jockeying for position that they never have time for any real detective work. So Bell is something of a one man band. The same often seem to be true of Crofts' Inspector French. Although the police are much better human beings in Crofts' world, Inspector French too is good at politics, and knowing how to get along with his colleagues.

Crossword Mystery

Owen stars in Crossword Mystery (1934). The first half of the novel features Owen's sleuthing at a country house. It is a comedy of manners in the tradition of Agatha Christie. These sections have plenty of charm. While Owen is a policeman, he is undercover here, and essentially operates in the same manner as the amateur sleuths beloved by Golden Age intuitionist writers. Numerous mysteries pile up; in the second half of the work, these are eventually explained as being the result of various Croftsian Schemes. This second half of the work is much darker in tone. It is much closer to the traditions of the Crofts school. The seaside setting of the book, its detailed landscape topography, its occasional interest in alibis, radios and clocks, and the motorcycle ridden by hero Owen, also seem like Croftsian features.

Also involving Realist School traditions: the book contains a complete crossword puzzle, one in which clues to the mystery are concealed. It seems directly in the tradition of Dorothy L. Sayers' "The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager's Will" (1925). Even the sort of definitions used in the crosswords in Sayers' and Punshon's works seem similar. The 1948 British paperback edition of Crossword Mystery contains a brief rave review by Sayers praising Punshon's novels, by the way. This is probably an excerpt from one of Sayers' 1930's newspaper columns.

Crossword Mystery continues some of the social and political points of view found in Genius in Murder. Once again, Punshon knows a lot about business practices of the time. The activities of the two brothers who are retired stockbrokers are at the center of the book's plot, as is a financial speculator who wants to build a large resort hotel. Also in Punshon traditions: concern about lost business opportunities for Britain's lower and middle classes.

Punshon extends his satiric scalpel here to foreign regimes. The book's characters are horrified by the rise of both Communism and Fascism abroad. A late chapter in the work has a brief but savage satire of the then one-year-old Hitler regime in Germany.

The subplot here about the resort hotel seems directly anticipatory of the cruise ship sections in Crofts' Fatal Venture (1939) (known as Tragedy in the Hollow in the United States). It is hard to believe that Crofts did not read Punshon's story. So the influence between the two men runs both ways.

Christopher Bush

Christopher Bush published a huge number of mystery novels from the 1920's through the 1960's, mainly starring detective Ludovic Travers. Many deal with hard-to-break alibis.

The Case of the Chinese Gong

The novel contains an homage to G. K. Chesterton, who was a master of the impossible crime. The Case of the Chinese Gong is an example of how Bush's interest in alibis reaches the borderline of the impossible crime tale. Bush here also shows an interest in stage trickery, just as did his contemporaries, John Dickson Carr and Dorothy L. Sayers.

The Case of the Good Employer

The private investigation firm run by Travers often investigates its own customers - Travers is afraid they are lying to the firm, and attempting to either swindle it, or get it involved in illegal business. This gives Bush a justification for such Freeman-like investigation of the lives of the hero's acquaintances. It is not just curiosity, but a urgent attempt to detect if any hidden problems affect the firm. Bush shows a fascination with surveillance devices, used to observe the customers and other suspects in hidden ways. These perhaps reflect the scientific detection tradition of Freeman, although such devices were rarely used by Freeman himself.

There are also features here that recall Freeman Wills Crofts. Bush's series detective hero, Ludovic Travers, is a non-hard-boiled private inquiry agent, recalling the equally middle class private investigators that run through Crofts. Travers' detection here takes him through a realistically detailed France, just as in Crofts' The Cask (1920). If the book's medical characters and knowledgability about painting and the art world recall Freeman, the depiction of an English gaming establishment and a French engineering concern echo Crofts, and his skill at depicting small businesses. Travers' own detective firm is given a full small-business treatment, showing both the mechanics of its operation, and its occasional attempts to outwit the official police to collect rewards for recovering property before the police do it. The reward-collecting schemes of Travers' firm, recall a bit the schemes of the bad guys' businesses in Crofts, although Travers' firm always stays within the law. In both Crofts and Bush, there is a sympathy for the money making schemes of middle class, small business tradesmen. Both authors' characters show plenty of get up and go.

Bush shows skill in depicting the different kinds of mental operation of the firm's different detectives. Each has their own "cognitive style". The suspects in the tale and their own mental approaches are also well characterized, and furnish a key clue at one point. These mental styles of detectives and suspects tend to relate to how they carry on their business and professional activities.

As in Crofts, everything that the hero thinks is fully shared with the reader at all moments here. Both authors perform detection throughout, with the solution being revealed step by step throughout the story, rather than being saved up for the last chapter finale. Bush's detectives are always comparing what people tell them, with a logical analysis of what reality actually is, looking for discrepancies and hidden patterns. Bush encourages the reader to do the same. Both detectives and reader are constantly analyzing the events in front of them, in the true, admirable detective tradition.

Cyril Hare

Tenant for Death

The characters in the books are involved in a series of businesses, and Hare provides inside looks at how these run, in the Crofts tradition of Backgrounds on the world of work. Instead of one business forming the entire Background of the novel, however, as in most of the Crofts school, Hare offers of series of mini-portraits of several different enterprises, at several different class levels of British society. We see the big time financier running an elaborate scam in the City, London's financial district; middle class workers at a housing agency; and a working class newspaper seller. This series of mini-backgrounds is somewhat unusual in the Crofts school. So are the humor and social satire with which Hare conducts his narrative. The financier, and the massive scandal his frauds invoke, recall the victim in E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1913), another pioneering book in the Realist School tradition.

The mystery technique of the novel's puzzle plot also recalls Realist School traditions, with a standard approach of the School used in the book's ingenious finale (not named here to avoid spoilers). The book involves an alibi, of a sort, but one of a different kind than usually seen in mystery novels. On the down side, the book has too many coincidental relations between the characters, that turn out to be just that - coincidences - rather than being logically explained as part of the mystery plot.

There are also R. Austin Freeman-like aspects of the book. The plot centers around a mysterious personage, about whose life other people only get fragmentary glimpses. Such dimly observed events at the center of a mystery occur in many late Freeman novels. As in Freeman, the person comes out of nowhere, and even the details of him renting his house or opening a bank account are only glimpsed partially.

Hare's largely conservative political ideas are full of contradictions. Although this is poor logic, it also makes some interesting reading. Hare shows colonialism and Empire building as admirable, and seems to have no realization that the British Empire was less than ten years from disintegration, at the time of his writing. Hare treats the financial setbacks of upper class characters as tragic, but snobbishly views the hard working efforts of working class characters to better themselves as mere uppitiness (the book's least pleasant aspect). Conversely, there are a lot of signs that British society is full of dissatisfaction at all levels, from upper-middle class people who want to emigrate, to lower class radicals. The "good breeding" of the upper classes is always being compared favorably to the ill breeding of the lower here. Apparently, any sort of style or gracefulness was a monopoly of the rich in 1937 Britain. No wonder the British people later so enthusiastically embraced the Mods, the Rockers, the Teddy Boys and the Swinging Sixties, all movements that allowed working class Brits to show some style and flair.

Death Is No Sportsman

Death Is No Sportsman is at its best in its storytelling, which is absorbing throughout, and poorest in its solution, which is not that inventive. In this it resembles his later An English Murder. Both books are fun to read, but neither offers much in the way of puzzle plot ingenuity. Hare mainly follows his characters all over his wonderfully imagined river landscape. He eventually comes up with some mild surprises about their movements, but never actually turns his story into one of those intricate alibi plots beloved by Realist School authors. This is both good and bad: Bad in that Hare never creates much of a puzzle, and perhaps good in the sense that such alibi-time table stories can get awfully wearying! Still, this Inspector Mallett book can be seen as belonging to the Crofts tradition, with a policeman hero, a Background of fishing, a detailed topography and map, a setting on the water, and much information about business.

The characters and social background here recall the preceding Tenant for Death: we have corrupt businessmen and their sinister schemes, a young Gentleman who gets involved in some two-bit plotting himself over his lady love, and a well-to-do, sophisticated woman involved in affairs. However, the actual intrigues of all of these people are subtly different than in the first book, making for pleasant variations. The crooked business schemes are especially juicy, in their satirical depictions of moral rot in British business of the time. They form a scathing look at the upper classes.

Hare also expresses some ecological concerns, that seem more relevant today than ever. The obnoxious, upper class murder victim here is obsessed with power and control over others, at all levels. In this he resembles the politicians to come in An English Murder. Hare links his desire for control over money and business, control over nature and the environment, and control over women as sinister actions with a common root cause. In this, Hare anticipates many current social critics.

Hare's story also briefly condemns his lower class villagers for lacking sexual morality. Hare echoes in a mild way Gladys Mitchell's The Saltmarsh Murders (1932), which also depicts a traditional English village whose peasant inhabitants are sexually uninhibited. Both novels feature a village girl who has a baby out of wedlock, both feature the vicar's dominating battle-ax of a wife as a character, a woman who runs the village with an iron hand. However, Hare's attitude towards his village is far more indulgent than Mitchell's ferocious tome. His biggest satire is directed at the village's upper class Chief Constable, a memorably awful expressor of upper class attitudes.

The lawyer, Stephen Smithers, is interestingly characterized. Abrasive, rude, high-handed and egotistical, one first suspects that Hare is setting him up as a villain. However, as the tale progresses, one gradually discovers that he is among the most honest and truthful of the characters, virtues that compensate a bit for his outrageous personality flaws. He and the police are also about the only people who can offer any effective resistance to the book's upper class monsters.

Suicide Excepted

Tragedy At Law

When the Wind Blows

An English Murder

In the Internet discussion group GAdetection, Tony Medawar revealed that An English Murder was based on Murder at Warbeck Hall, a half hour radio play first broadcast by the BBC on 27 January 1948 as Play No. 2 in the series "Mystery Playhouse presents The Detection Club, a series of plays specially written by its members". The story's politics do seem somewhat more appropriate to the immediate post-war period in Britain.

Neither An English Murder nor Death Is No Sportsman are at all mainstream like. Their storytelling very purely follows the narrative conventions and structures of traditional Golden Age fiction. In An English Murder, we have all the suspects gathered into an isolated country house; in Death Is No Sportsman, we follow the characters around one of the beautifully executed, map-based country landscapes beloved by Golden Age writers. Yet both books offer so little in the way of puzzle plot that they seem on the margins of what I value so highly in traditional mystery fiction. They seem more like eccentric curiosities than true classics. Both could use some of the plotting ingenuity that marked Hare's first mystery, Tenant for Death.

Short Stories

Hare also wrote a series of six mini-mysteries based on the "Monday's Child" nursery rhyme. All but one are genuine mystery tales, and most are pretty good, showing concision in their telling. They tend to deal with crimes short of murder, a welcome change of pace more authors should try.

Among the non-mystery crime tales that turn on "twists", "Line Out of Order" has one of the more inventive plots. It also offers a portrait of government agents versus political radicalism, to go along with An English Murder.

"A Life for a Life" is not any sort of crime or mystery tale at all. Yet it is a good story. It concentrates on the serious problems of an "ordinary" middle class Englishman, and relates these to political difficulties of history.

Edmund Crispin

Edmund Crispin's short story work is a fusion of detective story traditions. Much of it involves ingenious alibis and other manipulations of time tables and schedules, in the Realist tradition. He occasionally uses science based plots as well, and there is a strong element of police procedure in the stories, both Realist approaches. But Crispin also has an amateur detective who does much pure thinking, and several of the tales involve ingenious impossible crimes, both associated with the Intuitionist tradition. Crispin's best short tales have full-fledged mystery plots, of the complex kind one associates with novels. Crispin also creates admirably complex chains of deduction, in several of his finales.

It seems unfortunate that the gimmicky anti-detective story, "Who Killed Baker?" (1950), is probably Crispin's best known work in the short form. Such real detective story gems as "Beware of the Trains" (1949) and "Black for a Funeral" should be much better known. On the average, the earlier stories in Beware of the Trains are better than the later ones in Fen Country. Too many of the latter do not really create a full puzzle plot mystery. They also tend to be shorter and less substantial than the earlier tales.

Quite a few people seemed charmed by Crispin's novels, but I am not one of them. The three I have read so far, The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944), The Moving Toyshop (1946) and Swan Song (1947) seem unpleasant. The plots are thin, detection is often de-emphasized in favor of comic digressions, and the characters lack appeal.

Richard Keverne

The title of Richard Keverne's "Cast-Iron Alibi" (1941) echoes a phrase from Sayers' Unnatural Death (1927). Keverne's style seems closest to that of Freeman Wills Crofts, a founder of the British realist school to which Sayers belonged. The tone of the writing echoes Crofts', being somewhat flat, but also cheery and good natured. The creation of alibis is also a specialty of Crofts. So is the use of policeman heroes, such as Keverne's series sleuth, Inspector Artifex of Scotland Yard. And so is the use of trains in the tale, something that always seems pleasant to me. The way Keverne's policeman protagonist discusses the case with his wife recalls Crofts' Inspector French, who also frequently consults with his wife, in charming scenes full of high comedy. And there is a middle class ambiance to the tale, that once again seems Crofts-inspired. However, I have read too little of Keverne's work to firmly place him in this or any other tradition. According to Adrian, he shared a publisher with both the realist Henry Wade, and E.C. Bentley. The title of his 1934 collection, Artifex Intervenes, anticipates that of Bentley's Trent Intervenes (1938), by four years. This story's plot is also fairly clever, but easily guessed.

Dermot Morrah

Dermot Morrah wrote a single mystery novel, The Mummy Case (1933). The early sections (Chapters 1 - 7) of this book show mild charm, with its Background of Oxford life, and its good natured storytelling. Morrah also shows a pleasant wit and humor in his dialogues, which attempt to be clever in the tradition of Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward.

The mummies and Egyptology aspects of the novel show the influence of R. Austin Freeman's The Eye of Osiris (1911). So do some plot twists in the book, and the intellectualism of the characters. The amateur detectives in the tale are two dons. They include an archaeologist, who uses his professional skills to help solve the case; these scenes in Chapter 4 are the most inventive part of the novel. The book is at its most Freeman-like in these scenes, which show scientific skills carefully applied to crime solving.

The solution of the story involves the "breakdown of identity", although not for the purpose of alibi construction. The "breakdown of identity" is a plot approach, found in both Freeman, and many other Realist School writers.

There is no sign whatsoever of any Croftsian influence: no police detectives, no timetables, no alibis.

Another mystery novel set at Oxford appeared the same year as Morrah's book, J.C. Masterman's An Oxford Tragedy (1933). It is nowhere as pleasant, mainly being a gloomy and depressing psychological study, whereas Morrah's novel is a complexly plotted mystery story. Both novels focus on a group of dons, both administrators and professors, with the students having a small supporting role in the background. Both take place at a single, fictitious Oxford college. Both have plots about academic disputes concerning a scholar's life work. It is unclear which book was published first.

Morrah's novel was known to Dorothy L. Sayers, who reviewed it for her newspaper column. Sayers would soon produce her own novel of University life, Gaudy Night (1935). Before any of these writers, the American Croftsian Milton M. Propper published The Student Fraternity Murders (1932).

Herbert Jenkins

The original magazine publication date, if any, of Jenkins' Malcolm Sage stories is not known. They are set in Britain after World War I ended in 1918. One of the stories, "The Gylston Slander", contains action dated August 12, 1919. They were collected in book form as Malcolm Sage Detective in 1921, so perhaps they appeared in magazines circa 1919 - 1920. Jenkins self-published all his books, an unusual procedure for the day. Many of his other works, such as the Bindle series, were humorous tales.

Jenkins' work has some similarities to R.Austin Freeman's. Malcolm Sage, like Thorndyke, is a private investigator; he is hired by the insurance companies, similar to the arrangement in Thorndyke's books. Sage, like Thorndyke, emphasizes photography in his work. He is also skeptical of fingerprints. Most of the clues he follows up on in his cases fall within the parameters of Freeman's world. He deduces things from maps, in "The Surrey Cattle-Maiming Mystery", reminding one of Freeman's "31 New Inn" (1911) - and Borges' "Death and the Compass" (1944). In "The Strange Case of Mr. Challoner", he makes deductions from the medical evidence left behind on the body. "A Lesson in Deduction" shows what can be learned from footprints. While Sage uses medical and physical evidence in his detective work, he is less scientific than Thorndyke: he does not attempt to use cutting edge science, or go as deeply into the world of science as Freeman does. "The McMurray Mystery" deals with the murder of a scientist in his laboratory, and looks at the implications of longevity research on modern civilization. The Sage stories tend to lack fair play. That is, the clues Sage notices about the corpse in "Challoner", for instance, are not shared during the course of the story with the reader. They are only set forth during Sage's final summing up. A similar lack of fair play has often been noted in some of Freeman's scientific stories. The reasoning based on these clues is often excellent, and forms a high point of the tales.

There is no sign of any Croftsian influence in Jenkins' book, such as police detectives or emphasis on routine; this lack of influence is not surprising, given the publication date of just one year after Crofts' debut in The Cask (1920).

As Sage points out, he is sometimes more interested in setting traps for the villain, than in detecting his original crime. This is true in the best of these tales, "The Surrey Cattle-Maiming Mystery" and "The Stolen Admiralty Memorandum". This gives a flavor of the inverted story to these two works. More ingenuity is expended in the net spread to catch the criminal, than on the original crime itself. These traps often involve considerable social comedy.

"Challonner" could be a model for Christie's "Dead Man's Mirror". Both are locked room stories, both have mechanical solutions, both have a similar floor plan and approach. The article on Christie also suggests that the Sage tales influenced the framework of her Partners in Crime (1924).

Geoffrey Household

Geoffrey Household's work is often about manhunts to the death. In his most famous book, the spy thriller Rogue Male (1939), a British hunter who fails to kill Hitler is in turn stalked by Nazi spies. Household has written several later novels that are variants on this theme. At first glance, this subject seems identical with Richard Connell's story, "The Most Dangerous Game" (1924), in which a mad hunter stalks human prey. Connell's story has been filmed so often, both officially and not, that the Internet Movie Database has a special keyword, "most-dangerous-game", to allow users to access all versions of it. But the tone of Household's work is very different. Unlike the free form hunt across the jungle of Connell's tale, which echoes animal hunts, Household's stories instead resemble the tailing of suspects in detective novels. In a story like "Keep Walking" (1968), the hero is in fact tailed by the police of a Communist country. They use all the techniques of shadowing and monitoring familiar to us from detective fiction. The shadowing of suspects has an ancient history in detective fiction: one can cite examples from the British Casebook writers of the early 1860's, for example. Two famous examples are from the novels of R. Austin Freeman: A Silent Witness (1914), and Mr. Pottermack's Oversight (1930). Watching the hero of "Keep Walking" trying to evade the police is precisely like Mr. Pottermack's dilemma in Chapter 8 of that book. Freeman's episode is an inverted detective story. It poses a problem: how can the hero outmaneuver the police? It is not a mystery - all facts are known to the reader - and yet it is a problem to be solved by Mr. Pottermack's imagination. Household's story provides a similar mental challenge to his hero, and to the reader. "Keep Walking" is not a puzzle plot mystery, but it does present a problem to be solved.

The whole structure of Rogue Male has a format similar to one of Freeman's inverted detective tales. We see the hero trying to commit a crime, the assassination of Hitler. Then we see the Nazi police try to track him down. The moral point of view is the direct reverse of Freeman's: here the man who attempts the killing is the good guy, and the Nazi secret police who try to track him down are bad guys. But the form is similar to Freeman's. There are differences: in Freeman the point of view shifts from the criminal at the beginning, to the detectives in the second part of the tale, whereas Household keeps the point of view on the hunter throughout.

Rogue Male also has a finale at one of Freeman's favorite locations: a country lane. The hero living outdoors in the countryside seems an echo of Mr. Pottermack, as well as Thomas Kindon's Murder on the Moor (1929). Also Freeman-like is the crafts work in the book's finale, finding a solution through technology to one of his problems.

There is an emphasis on daily life in Household's tales. His heroes, now being stalked by monstrous conspiracies, would give anything to be able to settle down and enjoy their former existence as ordinary people. Their encounters with daily life throughout their adventures have a poignancy. It is as if they are locked out of the Garden of Eden. This too is rather Freeman like. Mr. Pottermack wants nothing more than to be able to cultivate his suburban garden. Taking part in ordinary daily life is his highest dream. But unfortunately he is being hounded by a vicious blackmailer. One also recalls the hero of Freeman's A Silent Witness, who is actually being stalked throughout the book by a nameless conspiracy, who want to kill him for something he innocently witnessed. This too is very Household like.

Eric Ambler

Eric Ambler's The Mask of Dimitrios (1939) shows affinities with the writings of Freeman Wills Crofts, especially in its early sections. The detective hero of the book does his sleuthing by the patient interviewing of witnesses and gathering of facts. At one point in the novel, around halfway through Chapter 4, he compares himself to a Scotland Yard inspector in his methods, using "patience and persistence" - and in England in 1939, those methods were defined in fiction largely by Crofts. There is a detailed, Croftsian Background in the work - the political history of Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria between the two World Wars. As in Crofts, the hero does much traveling around to many different countries of Europe. Like Crofts' Inspector French, the hero is affable, polite to the point of soapiness with witnesses, always being agreeable and low key in the hopes they'll talk. As is typical in Crofts, and some of his followers, we see the detective's thoughts at all times, and share fully in his investigation throughout the tale. As in many of the Realist school, the author shows concern over racial prejudice - here the ethnic feuds of the region. The villain of the tale is involved in many ingenious criminal schemes, especially smuggling; such schemes are common in both Crofts and his followers. The methodical, even pace of the storytelling also recalls Crofts.

The subject matter of Ambler's novel is the hero's attempt to research the life of the criminal Dimitrios. Attempts to reconstruct the complex past history of a series of events, such as the life of Dimitrios, also have predecessors within the Croftsians - see Crofts' The Cask (1920) and Sayers' The Nine Tailors (1934). Such jigsaw like putting together of past events is an especial characteristic of Croftsian writers.

The sleuth of the story is a professor of political economy turned author of detective fiction. As a former professor and expert on European politics, he is typical of the scholar sleuths of the Realist school. As a detective story writer, he seems to be the author of British Country House, Golden Age style fiction, which he is always contrasting with the "realistic" crime story he is investigating in the novel. Such distancing of one's own realistic work from the fantasies of the British Country House mystery are not too uncommon among Croftsians. Crofts himself portrayed his work as an attempt to add realism to the genre. Such Croftsian writers as Dorothy L. Sayers and George Simenon attempted to bring further literary values to the detective story, beyond the escapism of their contemporaries.

There is only a little commentary on detective stories. At the start of Chapter 4, Ambler refers to East Lynne (1861) by Mrs. Henry Wood, a further example of the affinity of Realist school writers to the Sensation novelists. Colonel Haki much prefers American and British detective stories to those of the French.

The Mask of Dimitrios eventually turns into a sordid and unpleasant book. Despite its fame, it cannot be recommended.

The Mask of Dimitrios has some plot affinities with Mr. Arkadin (1955), an excellent mystery film directed by Orson Welles. Welles also worked on a version of Ambler's Journey Into Fear (1940).

Arthur Williams

Arthur Williams' comic gem "Being a Murderer Myself" (1948) is a delirious reducto ad absurdam of the Freeman inverted tale. It focuses on that Freeman specialty, the destruction of the corpse, and reminds one of such Dr. Thorndyke novels as The Stoneware Monkey (1938). Williams is a skillful prose stylist, with a gift for just the right comic tone. This is the only known story from this writer; "Arthur Williams" is a pseudonym of a South African writer whose identity has apparently never been published. The story was adapted as Arthur (1959), a half hour episode of Hitchcock's TV show - please see the article on Alfred Hitchcock for a discussion.

Vincent Cornier

Unfortunately, none of the other Cornier works I've managed to track down in old magazines or anthologies are very good. A collection of Cornier's short stories has been announced for publication at some unspecified future date. We will all have to wait, to see what it can add to Cornier's reputation.

Vincent Cornier's "The Flying Hat" (1929) is one of the more demented and implausible impossible crime stories. It reads as if R. Austin Freeman had suddenly lost his marbles, and decided to write an impossible crime tale. There is the gathering of evidence based on scientific analysis of dust and grime, there is the interest in crafts work, in this case, metal casting, and there are the ingenious (?) mechanical devices used for the crime itself, all straight out of Freeman's work. The grime analysis (in section III of the story) is genuinely impressive, and might have graced one of Freeman's better tales. Another plus: Cornier's exuberant plot inventiveness, which if it never achieves quality, at least manages quantity. There were times in the early part of this story when I had the exhilarating feeling I was reading a Carr or Queen story, as mystery piles upon mystery. However, the impossible crime plot's very disappointing solution is a wild farrago, far from the sober realism of Freeman and his school, or the clever ingenuity of Queen and Carr. Nor does the behavior of the characters ever become remotely believable or natural. And there are major plot gaps: how does the killer get ahold of the victim's hat? And why are there so few marks in the snow? There is also some virulent racial prejudice. All in all, this story will not eclipse John Dickson Carr's reputation. Weird sociological question: why is the British scientific school so interested in freezing? Robert Eustace, Freeman, the Coles, Valentine Williams and Cornier here are all into freezing as the technological marvel of the age. Their interest stretched at least from 1901 to 1937. American scientific detective writers are all into lie detectors, instead.

Some of Cornier's 1930's works were much better. The non-series story, "The Courtyard of the Fly" (1937) is a clever impossible crime tale. It is less science oriented than much of Cornier's work, as well as being much shorter than the typical Hildreth tale.

One of Cornier's series detectives was British Intelligence agent and police officer Barnabas Hildreth. The series apparently started in the 1920's; by 1946 there were fifteen short stories in the series, mainly in British magazines.

"Duel of Shadows" (1934) is a very creditable scientific detective story in the Hildreth series. The tale was also reprinted by Ellery Queen as "The Shot That Waited". The science is a lot more plausible here than in many Cornier works, and the plot is ingenious. As in many of the Hildreth works, there is much emphasis on crafts work, here wood working, furniture restoring, and bullet manufacture. Both the crafts work, and the antiquarianism here and elsewhere in Cornier, come out of the Freeman tradition. When he reprinted some of Cornier's tales, Ellery Queen pointed out their influence from Freeman. By the way, Ellery Queen wrote that Cornier's name is pronounced in the French manner, cor-nee-ay.

Some of the Hildreth's are much more science fiction stories than they are mysteries. "The Smell That Killed" (1935) is a routine high-tech weapon story in the tradition of H.G. Wells and Richard Marsh' The Beetle. It is hardly a mystery at all. Agatha Christie also wrote stories in this tradition, including the Poirot play Black Coffee (1931) and the Mr. Quin story "The Face of Helen". The best parts of Cornier's tale are the descriptions of a golden body. Cornier had elaborate descriptive skills, and a bizarre imagination.

The first Hildreth story "The Stone Ear" is another minor tale that is more sf than mystery. It anticipates the glass work in the Coles' novella, "The Toys of Death".

Mystery elements in Cornier's "The Cloak That Laughed" (1935) are present, but very perfunctory; mainly this is another tale centering on technology. The description of the golden cloak itself is the high point of this otherwise ordinary tale. It is an elaborately thought through object, worthy of one of the symbolic romances of Hawthorne. Unlike Hawthorne, however, it does not seem to symbolize anything. A basic theme in Cornier's fiction is the union between the natural and the mechanical. Many of his plot ideas involve mechanical objects that behave like living things ("The Cloak That Laughed", "The Stone Ear") or living organisms that develop mechanical features ("Duel of Shadows"/"The Shot That Waited", "The Smell That Killed"). The Cloak is an especially complex fusion of the natural and mechanical in this regard. One wonders if Cornier had read Hawthorne's "The Artist of the Beautiful", which also deals with the natural and the mechanical.

Cornier continued to produce new Hildreth works into the 1950's, for EQMM. The late Hildreth story "The Monster" (1951) is full of "sick" material, and makes grim, unpleasant reading. It does have a fairly clever mystery plot, however, one than is based on that Realist School approach, the "breakdown of identity". The tale also shows the influence of Seamark's "Query", reprinted in EQMM during the era in which Cornier was writing for that magazine. Both stories deal with the question: under what circumstances can someone commit a murder, and be free from any punishment from the law? Cornier develops a very different answer from Seamark. But his story treatment is similar, with a chorus of baffled legal observers in both tales. A much earlier American work, Charles Felton Pidgin and J. M. Taylor's "The Affair of Lamson's Cook" in The Chronicles of Quincy Adams Sawyer, Detective (collected 1912), deals with similar issues, and provides a third solution to this problem.

Cornier's "O Time, in Your Flight" (1951) shows his faithfulness to the Realist paradigm, 22 years after "The Flying Hat". It focuses on that Croftsian staple, the alibi, and an alibi based on a clock, just as in some of Dorothy L. Sayers' Montague Egg stories. Cornier also includes some "science" in the tale; his explanations of the origin of chicken pox seem like delirious pseudoscience, not real science. They continue the Camp-like nuttiness of his earlier fiction.

Arlton Eadie

Arlton Eadie's "Written in the Waters" (1929) contains a good clue based on botany, and a reasonably well plotted detective story written around it. This story's modest but real plot merits are sabotaged by all the attention Eadie pays to promoting racial stereotypes. One gets an uncomfortable feeling that perhaps a substantial subsection of the British mystery of its era (the 1920's) was virulently racist. Although Eadie wrote over a dozen mystery novels, he is completely forgotten today.

Georges Simenon

Georges Simenon's work shows the influence of Freeman Wills Crofts. His Inspector Maigret is a policeman, just like Crofts' Inspector French. Both officers solve crimes by patient, routine investigation, realistically depicted in step by step fashion by their authors. Maigret walking down a suburban street at the opening of his first published case, M. Gallet décédé (Maigret Stonewalled) (1931), reminds one of French sleuthing on suburban streets in The Box Office Murders (1929). Both do a lot of traveling, going to different cities. Both writers have an international orientation, with their characters coming from all over Europe, and their detectives solving international crimes. Both are nationally based, French in Scotland Yard, Maigret with the Sûreté, and both interface with a lot of local police officers. Both study physical clues, and make deductions from evidence left behind at crime scenes. Both detectives are married, and discuss their work with their patient wives. Both have to use considerable tact to deal with difficult suspects.

While Simenon's works reflect Crofts' in their detective work, characters, and social background, their plotting technique does not completely follow the standard interests of the British realists. There is little emphasis on alibis, or on the "breakdown of identity" used to create them - although Simenon characters often have more than one identity, often to aid in their criminal activities. Science and engineering play a smaller role in the Simenon stories than in Crofts, although there is the murdered man's interest in mechanical gizmos in M. Gallet décédé. Simenon will later introduce a doctor detective, Jean Dollent, in the book The Little Doctor (collected 1943). Physician detectives are part of the traditions of the realist school. The careful account of Simenon's characters' financial status and activities, also reminds one of such British realist writers as Crofts and, especially, Henry Wade. Simenon's characters are often middle class, just as in the realists. Crofts included a portrait of adultery in The Cask; Simenon has may unhappy couples in his novels. Simenon's non-mystery works in which guilty people are psychologically pursued by their crimes perhaps owe something to the inverted detective stories of which the British realists were so fond. The gloomy, downbeat tone of some of Simenon's work also reflects the tragic tone of much British realist writing.

Many of Maigret's interviews with suspects are essentially psychological portraits of the characters in the book. This technique is very popular in modern mystery fiction, especially private eye tales, and one associates it with Raymond Chandler, and even more with Chandler's follower Ross MacDonald. But here it is in Simenon, in a fully developed form in the first Maigret novel M. Gallet décédé (1931), long before either Chandler or MacDonald. This gives this Simenon book a peculiarly modern flavor. Many of the chapters seem more like the detective fiction of the 1990's than of the 1930's.

The many complex, original criminal schemes in Simenon's tales remind one of the similar criminal operations in Crofts books like The Pit-Prop Syndicate (1922) and The Box Office Murders (1929). Simenon's plotting style often involves two separate plots. The first is a scheme by some crook; the second is a counterscheme developed by a second crook in response to the first. The detective and the reader only see a confused trail of evidence left by the two schemes. Their job is to try to see into the two level scheme behind it. Sometimes this works brilliantly, as in "Death in a Department Store". (This story has also been anthologized by Ellery Queen as "The Slipper Fiend".) But all too often, it results in a non fair play mystery. It is hard to see how any reader could deduce the real nature of the plot and counterplot from the clues given. They are just too complex, and largely hidden from the reader, with only a handful of scattered clues suggesting what is really going on. And M. Gallet décédé, while it starts out with some vivid writing, eventually devolves into a series of tangled coincidences.

La Nuit du carrefour (Maigret at the Crossroads) (1931) is one of Simenon's most Croftsian works. Maigret eventually uncovers a criminal scheme similar to those Crofts wrote about in The Pit-Prop Syndicate and The Box Office Murders. As in Crofts, this scheme is more oriented to fraud than murder: it's a commercial enterprise. And as in Crofts, it centers around a technological location. What seems less Croftsian is the extraordinarily creepy atmosphere of the opening sections (Chapters 1 - 6). Reading these chapters made me extremely nervous. I have no idea of how Simenon achieves this effect, because there is nothing overtly sinister going on. There are no supernatural events à la John Dickson Carr, and no conventional suspense technique or events. There is just an apparently normal middle class suburb. But the reader constantly waits for some totally ominous catastrophe to erupt. The sheer placidity of everything is frightening. Maigret himself seems to do no real detection, but rather to just stand around and observe the suspects. His lack of action engenders a helpless feeling in the reader. So do the hints that something monstrous or abnormal is going on at the house of The Three Widows in the tale. Paradoxically, when the solution finally comes, it is far less frightening than the body of the story. It deals with mere criminality, something that seems far more familiar to the reader than the nameless dread which dominates most of the novel. Also, here Maigret finally takes action and does things.

The great director Jean Renoir filmed La Nuit du carrefour the next year (1932), in collaboration with Simenon as a scriptwriter. I have never had a chance to see this film. Andrew Sarris thought it was botched, Jean-Luc Godard thought it the greatest French detective film, and André Bazin ignored it entirely in his book on Renoir. One could see why it would appeal to Renoir: the character of Else and her relations to the men in the tale recall Renoir's previous film, La Chienne (1931). Also, the story involves a complex cat's cradle of relationships among the characters, looking forward to Renoir's Toni (1934) and The Rules of the Game (1939).

The film director Akira Kurosawa was a big fan of Simenon, and he reportedly wrote his detective movie Stray Dog (1949) first as a novel, before shooting it as a film. Kurosawa's detectives are policemen, like Maigret, who engage in realistic, ploddingly detailed police work. Like Simenon, and the British realists before him, Kurosawa explores a great many locations, in this case, the poorer districts of Tokyo. The extreme heat, which constantly afflicts the characters, also is present in such Simenon novels as M. Gallet décédé, where it affects his heavily built Maigret perhaps more than it would Kurosawa's athletic star Toshiro Mifune.

Seicho Matsumoto

Ten to sen / Point and Lines

Matsumoto's story unfolds against the background of a government scandal, involving bribery between businessmen and government officials. This is exactly the sort of situation featured in Akira Kurosawa's film, The Bad Sleep Well (1960), which makes an interesting cross reference to Matsumoto's novel. Kurosawa's treatment is very melodramatic and adventure oriented, whereas Matsumoto focuses on a straightforward realism, never losing focus on the detective work in the book.

Matsumoto's tales tend to focus on sinister murder conspiracies against the innocent. The conspiracies tend to be worked out in great detail, often involving faked alibis. There is a pleasing sense of mathematical symmetry in Matsumoto's plots.

Suna no utsuwa / Inspector Imanishi Investigates

The second half of the book is more of a pure thriller or suspense story, with only a little mystery left. It reminds one of some of the suspense short stories in Koe (The Voice). I like the second half of the book much less than the first, and in general do not enjoy Matsumoto's thrillers anywhere as much as his mystery stories.

The story also shows Matsumoto's gift for misdirection. Several times Matsumoto makes it look as if his plot were going one way, only to pull off the opposite direction a few chapters later.

Some of the reviews quoted on the back of Suna no utsuwa occasion some comment. It has become a truism of criticism that police procedural writers are trying to paint a picture of their society, and more than one reviewer duly states this about Matsumoto. I don't agree. While Matsumoto is indeed realistic, it is hard to see that he is attempting to build up a systematic picture of Japanese society, à la Balzac. Instead, Matsumoto mainly seems concerned with creating mystery plots, together with exploring a few specific subjects that seem to interest him: policemen and their wives, train travel, men with hidden mistresses, bar hostesses, stage and film actors, newspaper reporters, life in South Western Japan, where Matsumoto grew up.

The unnamed reviewer for The Milwaukee Journal compares Matsumoto to Anton Chekhov. This is very true. Matsumoto, like Chekhov, often creates a character by revealing some small aspect of their behavior or personality. This small piece somehow evokes a whole person, in ways that are mysterious, yet somehow very effective. There is also a low keyed intimacy of tone that recalls Chekhov, at once realistic and sensitive, and a gift for lyrical description of both scenery and everyday life.

Kanto-ku no onna / The Woman Who Wrote Haiku

The Cooperative Defendant

"The Cooperative Defendant" also shows Matsumoto's fondness for waste spaces: railroad yards, industrial lots, lonely road sides, country areas that are just being built up into cities, deserted beaches are all favorite Matsumoto locales. These are all areas that have some small aspect of human occupation, but which are typically nearly deserted, and almost in their natural state. There often seems to be water nearby, whether the sea, a famous waterfall, or just a small irrigation pond, as in this tale. Such American pulp writers as Norbert Davis and MacKinlay Kantor also were fascinated by such spaces, although one doubts either had any direct influence on Matsumoto.

Matsumoto's characters often have complete life histories, something one also finds in Hugh Pentecost. Their various professions can show unexpected links to the murder plot.

Kyotaro Nishimura

Kyotaro Nishimura's novel Misuteri ressha ga kieta (The Mystery Train Disappears) (1982) shows some similarity to both Matsumoto's work, and the Croftsian tradition from which it springs. Both authors are fascinated by trains and railway timetables - a feature also of Crofts' work. Both authors star low key but intelligent policemen as sleuths, in the tradition of Crofts' Inspector French. Like French, both sleuths do much traveling to different cities in the course of their investigations. Both authors focus relentlessly on detection, without padding or digressions.

There are also ways in which Nishimura directly reflects Matsumoto, but not necessarily any earlier Croftsian traditions. Both authors have corpses without any ID found near rail road yards. Both like to include magazine writers and actors among their characters.

Above all, detection and detective technique shows similarities between the two authors. Both try to reconstruct elaborate criminal schemes. They do this bit by bit throughout the book, instead of all at once at the end. They use much imagination to come up with possible descriptions of the bad guys' activities. These imaginative ideas are often proven correct. Logic and reasoning is extensively employed. Sometimes reality seems to contradict them, however, or they reach a point beyond which they have not yet reconstructed, with no clue to get them any farther. Both policemen often find themselves up against a blank wall in their sleuthing. They get a bit discouraged, but persist. They keep investigating and learning more details. They also keep chewing over ideas in their mind, trying to find solutions to things that puzzle them. Suddenly, insight occurs, and they discover some new fact, or come with a new hypothesis, that explains away their difficulties. These moments are the most exciting in their books. They are the emotional and intellectual climaxes of their stories. These moments of insights allow a great deal of further reconstruction. Ideas start flowing, and more fruitful detective work also is enabled, allowing them to build a much more detailed picture of the criminals' schemes.

This process has analogues in the books of Crofts. For example, in Mystery in the English Channel (1931), Crofts' detective Inspector French comes up with a hypothesis, finds it looks good, then does a lot of investigation on it. He eventually will conclude it is wrong, and then start over with a new hypothesis. Crofts devotes some ingenuity to making a hypothesis originally look true, and then turn out to be false. Also, French eventually doubles back on some discarded ideas, and shows that they are true after all. This too takes ingenuity. French devotes much effort to reconstructing the crime. The reconstructions are very detailed models of what possibly happened. They can be modified as French gets new ideas and new data. Building such reconstructions is a key part of Crofts' technique. All of this is fairly similar to the approach used by Matsumoto and Nishimura. Matsumoto and Nishimura place more emphasis on the moments of insight that extend their original ideas, then do Crofts. Also, Crofts tends to contradict an original idea, and start over, while Matsumoto and Nishimura tend to extend and build upon earlier concepts.

Matsumoto's stories involve Croftsian style alibis, and are closer to the classical puzzle plot detective novel. Misuteri ressha ga kieta, by contrast, involves reconstructing how a Big Caper was done. This gives it much less of a puzzle plot feel.

I cannot read Japanese, and my knowledge of Japanese mystery fiction is restricted to the handful of novels translated into English. So it is impossible for me to build up any detailed map of the influences among Japanese mystery writers. Based on my very limited state of knowledge, one could guess that the relationship between Matsumoto and Nishimura was one of direct influence. Matsumoto (1909 - 1992) is of an earlier generation than Nishimura (1930 - ), and it is very common for a younger writer to show the influence of a famous older one. Although both writers show features that ultimately derive from Crofts, there is no sign of any Croftsian feature found in Nishimura which is not found earlier in Matsumoto. This suggests that these features could have transmitted to Nishimura directly from reading Matsumoto.

Misuteri ressha ga kieta refers to Akira Kurosawa's classic ransom film, Heaven and Hell (1963) (often known in English as High and Low).

Shizuko Natsuki

Shizuko Natsuki's "Divine Punishment" (translated 1991) is an inventive mystery with a clever puzzle plot.

Shizuko Natsuki's detectives use techniques familiar from Seicho Matsumoto. They try to reconstruct the crime, employing a great deal of reasoning about how it might have taken place. They also gradually get ideas which take them to a deeper and deeper level of insight to the crime. Watching the police as they mentally grope towards that insight is one of the main dramas of the tale.

Shizuko Natsuki (1938 - ) is also of the same generation as Kyotaro Nishimura (1930 - ), and one suspects that this era of Japanese writers was strongly influenced by Seicho Matsumoto.

Also like Matsumoto, Shizuko Natsuki's tales embody a great deal of sociological detail about Japanese life. This detail is fascinating to read. "Divine Punishment" and "The Sole of the Foot" offer an inside look at Japanese temples, and their social and financial relationships with the public. This is a subject of deep interest to the author. "The Sole of the Foot" is not as puzzle plot oriented as "Divine Punishment", but it goes even deeper into its social analysis.

Another Shizuko Natsuki specialty: the public inquiry, in which police and public collaborate to provide information about wanted men, stolen money, and other investigation foci. She weaves ingenious plots out of the different ways information flows between the public and police during such investigative campaigns. The events in such campaigns usually occur over a considerable period of time. She shows step by step how more and more information is accrued, and from a huge variety of sources. The kinds of information that appear are often quite different from each other; so are the kinds of people that provide them, their motives, and the different approaches they use to uncover the data.

Norizuki Rintarô

"An Urban Legend Puzzle" (2001) is partly a homage to Ellery Queen. Its detective characters are patterned after Ellery and his father, Inspector Queen. More importantly, it shows the superb deductive reasoning typically found in the Queen books. It also uncovers layer after layer in the mystery plot, also an EQ tradition. This is an ingenious puzzle plot story.

But the actual content of the mystery is squarely in the Crofts-influenced tradition of Seicho Matsumoto and his successors. The plot deals with alibis and timetables. Also, as in Matsumoto and his followers, the truth emerges after a long discussion between the detectives on the case, in which they grapple with alternative ideas and approaches to the case, and only gradually come up with new ideas, after much mental struggle and effort. These discussions involve reconstructing the activities of various potential criminals among the suspects. They also emphasize logic and reasoning. All of this is very much part of the Matsumoto school approach.

"An Urban Legend Puzzle" can be found in the anthology Passport to Crime: Finest Mystery Stories from International Crime Writers (2007), edited by Janet Hutchings. It also appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 2004.