Double Double – Ellery Queen (1950)

It’s impressive to think that a detective novel could feature seven murders, and yet not for a moment feel like a mystery.  How the writing duo of Ellery Queen pulled it off, I’m still not quite sure.  Double Double follows detective Queen going about his days doing a bunch of things – playing matchmaker, buying a swimsuit, going on a picnic, getting a drink at a bar – and it ends up feeling like a book about a man with nothing better to do than running a never ending series of whimsical errands.  Yeah, people do occasionally wind up dead (quite a few of them, in fact), but there’s just never a mystique to it or a sense of purpose.

We’re back in the small town of Wrightsville, for what is apparently the last of the Queen novels set there, and wow, I guess I actually read them all in order.  This is the sixth Queen in a row that I’ve consumed in sequence, starting with Calamity Town (1942), and correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve just passed through what’s regarded as his better work.  I’ll leave that discussion for another time, but “meh”.  Calamity Town was the obvious highlight, shifting the Queen stories to something with a bit of humanity in them; this in the form of the living/breathing town of Wrightsville.  Then the stories became a bit too much about humanity, with Queen becoming a shell shocked charade of perpetual self doubt.  I guess we’re kind of straddling that with Double Double.  Queen’s still incredibly gun shy and riddled with misgivings, and it gets a bit tiring watching him second guess himself for 250 pages.  Wrightsville too is a shell of its former self; a never ending list of townsfolk and landmarks, but the spark that animated it all in Calamity Town and The Murderer is a Fox is missing here.

Rendezvous in Black – Cornell Woolrich (1948)

Remind me never to mess with Cornell Woolrich or any of his surviving relatives…  Rendezvous in Black is a tale of revenge, and it is some astoundingly dark revenge.  A bereaved man, with no idea which of five people were responsible for the careless accident that killed his fiancé, decides to get revenge on all five.  The vengeance is exacted not directly on the five suspects, but rather on the women that each loves most.

In other words, a madman goes on a rampage, killing five innocent women.  Oh, but it’s so much more than that, and Rendezvous in Black enshrines Cornell Woolrich as one of those authors for which I now have to track down absolutely everything written.  This is not the conventional mystery that I read – hell, it might not even really be a mystery – but I enjoyed it just as much as the cream of the crop out of the Golden Age.

Phantom Lady – William Irish (1942)

Scott Henderson is miffed that he’s been ditched by his wife on date night.  Not wanting to waste dinner reservations and tickets to a hot show, he picks up a complete stranger at the bar on a lark: they’ll enjoy a night out on the town with no expectation of making a connection or ever seeing each other again.  His companion is nice, but not especially memorable.  That proves to be a problem when Henderson returns home to find his wife murdered, the police already at the scene of the crime, and there’s some damning evidence that he’s the guilty party.

Henderson finds himself without an alibi, as he doesn’t even know the name of the woman that he was out with.  Even worse, various witnesses throughout the night – a barman, a cab driver, the wait staff at the restaurant – all testify that he was flying solo.  Sentenced to death, and with the days ticking down, Henderson spends his time behind bars while his best friend races to piece together his shattered alibi.

The Secret Dancer – Norman Berrow (1936)

I’ve been intrigued by the title of this book for a while, and I can’t quite explain why.  There’s something to it – a haunting quality, maybe similar to The Last of Philip Banter or The Shade of Time – where it strikes this chord of curiosity and I have to find out what it means.  Granted, you can’t judge a book by its… err, title, but like some nice cover art, a well chosen name can add some extra allure to a read.

Of course, it helps that I’ve loved the books by Norman Berrow that I’ve read so far.  He has a way with words and can turn out a memorable line to rival the best of them – see also Theodore Roscoe, Anthony Berkeley, Anthony Boucher, Christianna Brand, and – in his first few decades – John Dickson Carr.  I’m astounded that it’s been over a year since I last picked up anything by Berrow, as what I’ve read so far places him towards the top authors of the Golden Age.

The House That Kills – Noel Vindry (1932)

About two years ago I picked up The House That Kills and The Howling Beast by Noel Vindry, and this year I padded out my collection with The Double Alibi and the somewhat recently released Through the Walls.  So maybe I should actually get around to reading one, right?  I ended up picking The House That Kills due to my love of murderous rooms (see The Madman’s Room, Mr Splitfoot, The Red Widow Murders, etc), despite the fact that I seem to recall some people being critical of the book.

To be clear, this is not really a “room that kills” (err… house that kills) book, despite its name.  There’s no haunted house consuming it’s victims under a shroud of horrors from the past; rather it’s a gang of mysterious strangers terrorizing a family.  But man, it’s an absolutely crazy ride, and I’m so happy that I went with it.

Murder in Mesopotamia – Agatha Christie (1936)

I’ve always been under the impression that Murder in Mesopotamia is one of Christie’s big novels, although I’m not sure how that thought formed.  The title definitely stands out, with the reference to Mesopotamia being a bit more memorable than, say, Easy To Kill or The Secret of Chimneys, and maybe my mind draws a bit of an association with the “exotic travel” titles like Death on the Nile or Murder on the Orient Express.  Plus, the book did feature on the Roland Lacourbe list of top impossible crime novels, although I’ve come to learn that isn’t exactly a guarantee that a novel will in fact feature an impossible crime.

Whether Murder in Mesopotamia is actually a staple of Best of Christie lists or not, it didn’t really work for me.  This is actually the first Christie novel that I struggled to get into.  That’s not to say that it’s a bad book in anyway, it’s just that I didn’t find myself sucked into the characters, location, and story in the way that I’ve come to expect from Christie’s work.  The Christie magic was missing.

To Live and Die in Dixie – Theodore Roscoe (1961)

If any Golden Age author can tell a story, it’s Theodore Roscoe.  Yes, I take great comfort in the prose of the likes of John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie, Henry Wade, Anthony Berkeley, Herbert Brean, Rupert Penny, or Norman Berrow.  And Christianna Brand… well, she’s just sublime.  But Theodore Roscoe can paint with words in a way that I haven’t encountered with other authors.  I’d be fine reading a Roscoe book that doesn’t even feature any mystery – but, I mean, come on, give me a mystery…

Which takes me to this read – To Live and Die in Dixie.  Is it a mystery novel?  Roscoe wrote a breadth of pulp, ranging from tales of The Foreign Legion to jungle safaris and adventures of the United States Navy, so there isn’t a guarantee that anything you pick up by him is going to be a story of detection.  But I suppose it’s a silly question to pose in the case of To Live and Die in Dixie.  It’s right there on the cover: “A mystery novel by Theodore Roscoe”.  Why then can’t I find a single review of this book?  I mean, this is the guy who wrote Murder on the Way – a zombie laced impossible crime (published in 1935 no less) – which is easily one of the best entries the genre has to offer.

The Man From Tibet – Clyde Clason (1938)

I’m a sucker for a story within a story.  Think the likes of the breathless French Revolution flashback midway through John Dickson Carr’s The Red Widow Murders, or the sea captain’s bizarre yarn in Anthony Boucher’s The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars.  When executed well, these miniature tales sweep you right out of the core story and leave you with the drunken feeling of “wait, what book am I reading?”  It’s like you get an extra short story for free along with the novel.

Clyde Clason’s The Man From Tibet starts off with an absolute whopper of a story within a story; a 20 page account of a westerner’s perilous journey into Tibet, which at the time was completely closed off from the outside world.  I found myself so absorbed in the tale that I simply didn’t want it to end.  The fact that I had sought out The Man From Tibet for the locked room murder that it offered was the furthest thing from my mind.  And thus I became enamored with Clyde Clason.

They Rang Up The Police – Joanna Cannan (1939)

I can’t quite recall why I bought this book.  I want to say that I saw it on some list of worthy Golden Age mysteries, but by the time my copy arrived in the post, I couldn’t remember what had spurred the purchase.  While I was at it, I had apparently snagged another Joanna Cannan novel (The Taste of Murder) on account of it being a cheap Dell map back edition.  So here I was, with two Joanna Cannan books and no real idea of who she was or what I was in for.

Thankfully I was in the mood for a decidedly British mystery, and They Rang Up the Police offers a nice cottage-laced version of that.  An elderly mother and her three spinster daughters form an unusually close-knit family in small town England.  They simply do everything together, and so when the eldest daughter disappears after a night spent sleeping outside, the others are thrown into a panic.  The thought of someone leaving the house in the morning without announcing their departure is simply unfathomable.  Eventually, “they rang up the police”, and after much badgering, the mother pulls enough strings to get a detective sent down from Scotland Yard.

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders – Soji Shimada (1981)

It’s been a long time since a book left my jaw hanging on the floor.  Too long.  I mean, man, I’ve read some really solid mysteries in the past year, but I can’t say that I’ve had a meme worthy reaction when a revelation came.  Skimming back through my reads, it was nearly a year ago, with Christianna Brand’s Death of Jezebel, that I had my last true “holy shit” moment.  And after completing The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, my heart’s pumping, I’m resisting the urge to sprint through every Japanese honkaku impossible crime novel on my shelves, and my next read is already feeling like a let down.

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders isn’t a stranger to top impossible crime lists, and I knew that I was going to get something crazy.  The big shin honkaku novels that I’ve read so far – think the likes of The Eight Mansion Murders, The Decagon House Murders, The Moai Island Puzzle – have all been insane in the best way, and The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is viewed as the genre innovator that started it all.