Castle Skull, John Dickson Carr

I don’t know why I persist in subjecting myself to John Dickson Carr. This is the third book of his I’ve tried, I think, and it’s just… not for me. His work feels stilted and contrived, lacking the style of someone like Dorothy L. Sayers or the breeziness of Agatha Christie’s best. His genius detective, all but infallible, all but omniscient, just gets on my nerves. In fairness, almost all of the clues are there, but it’s hard to solve the mystery (though in another sense, it’s obvious) when everybody is so opaque; not even the Watson really feels alive, despite the access to his thoughts you have with him as the narrator.

Just… not for me, and I really need to remember that; I’ve had the same problem with Dickson Carr’s other series detective, and I just… don’t enjoy the contrived nature of his plots.

This is the second book in the British Library Crime Classics line of reissues that featured the sealed book ending: if you could take it back to the place you bought it without cutting it open to read the ending, you got your money back. It’s sort of interesting to think about that kind of gimmick. I wonder how well it worked! I can’t remember which Golden Age book I’ve read did this now… maybe it was John Dickson Carr’s other book, though?

In any case, argh, I should have put this down and given up, but I still had the tiniest bit of curiosity to satisfy.

Rating: 1/5

The Honjin Murders, Seishi Yokomizo, trans. Louise Heal Kawai

The Honjin Murders is a classic Japanese murder mystery in translation, drawing very much from the sort of locked room mysteries favoured by John Dickson Carr, whose books are even referenced in the story. A couple are slain on their wedding night, and a mysterious three-fingered man is implicated, though the room the two were in was locked from the inside and no one should have been able to gain access.

It’s a bit of an odd set-up, because the story is told by a writer of detective fiction who only finds out about the murder later — it’s written as if it’s a true crime story being reconstructed after the fact, which does at times give it a blandness. There’s no real urgency to it, though partly that’s probably due to the translation. Other than the fact that it’s in translation, it’s not particularly uniquely Japanese; there are kotos and katanas and tatami mats, but exchange a few details and it’s a book by John Dickson Carr. That might be an upside, for you… however, I’m afraid I don’t really get along with John Dickson Carr, though I persist in trying.

It was so deliberately referential and so distant from the action, it just didn’t really work for me.

Rating: 2/5

Fell Murder, E.C.R. Lorac

Another British Library Crime Classic! Lorac’s work, as republished in this series, has been solidly satisfying for me, drawing sensitive portraits of people and places that make you care about the solution of the murder. It’s not a mere puzzle, as it can be in other crime fiction of much the same period. Fell Murder is solidly set in a particular landscape, which Lorac clearly loved and described in beautiful detail, so you can almost smell the hay and the damp earth and — yes — the cow sheds. It’s idyllic, even romanticised, and the characters are made sympathetic through their love of the land and their whole-hearted hard work. Even the crotchety old head of the family is dignified by his hard work and his fairness, despite his ruthlessness.

I found this a little slower than Lorac’s other work; I think because I could see who the killer must be far too soon, and thus didn’t appreciated the beating around the bush. In the final chapters of the book, I rather disliked Macdonald’s little gambit about Charles and Malcolm; what a needless risk, with more evidence due to turn up!

It wasn’t bad, and it definitely had its high points, but it didn’t totally work for me.

Rating: 3/5

Surfeit of Suspects, George Bellairs

I picked this up because it’s one of the British Library Crime Classics, of course, but also because I remembered one of the others in this series by Bellairs being pretty entertaining. Surfeit of Suspects begins with a bang, literally: dynamite is set off in the buildings of a small struggling joinery company, during a meeting of the directors. Scotland Yard get called in once the presence of dynamite becomes apparent, and Superintendent Littlejohn starts to pick his way through the tangled web of shell companies and marital mishaps to figure out what the motive might be.

It takes quite a long time to actually see the culprit; I never really suspected most of the potentials, though, because their motive didn’t seem clear enough, so surfeit of suspects is a bit of an exaggeration. There were lots of characters who could’ve done it, but you either suspected they didn’t have the guts or it was just too obvious and therefore obviously wrong. It’s not a bad set of thumbnail sketches of characters, though: you can almost smell the fug of old tobacco coming off some of them.

Bellairs was pretty workmanlike, and his writing is satisfying in that way I find specific to these Golden Age mysteries: you know that there’ll be no hanky-panky, you’ll find out whodunnit, and there’ll be a nice little puzzle along the way. The policemen are professionals, and there’ll be no intimidating of witnesses — though there might be (and there is) a clever scene in which the suspects are gathered to flush out the real criminal.

It’s a good thing I rate by enjoyment, rather than originality or any kind of objective measure like that, because I’d feel bad giving this a low score. If the formulaic nature of these Golden Age mysteries bothers you, most of the Crime Classics series won’t be for you; personally, there’s something very comforting about the world being put in its place. It’s all a mirage, of course — there never was a simpler time quite like this — but it’s a satisfying picture postcard of the past all the same.

Rating: 4/5