Not Quite Famous

In April, Periphera gave us a delicious peek into the Golden Age of Mystery. It is fascinating to realize that almost a hundred years have passed, and this genre is as popular now as it was then. It might be because certain commandments had to be obeyed to the letter. Ronald Knox set these out in 1929.

1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
2. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
3. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
4. No Chinaman must figure in the story. [My apologies; unfortunately, Knox really did write this.]
5. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition, which proves to be right.
6. The detective himself must not commit the crime.
7. The detective is bound to declare any clues, which he may discover.
8. The "sidekick" of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts, which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
9. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

The names of the Queens and Kings of Crime during this era are familiar to us all. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham are all household names. So are John Dickson Carr, Anthony Berkeley and Freeman Wills Crofts. These were all British, of course, but Earl Derr Biggers, Ellery Queen and Mary Roberts Rinehart were prolific writers on this side of the Atlantic.

My interest has been in some of the mysteries written by the lesser lights of the time. There are several publishers who have made a great effort to keep some of these authors in print.

I really love books released by Felony & Mayhem Press. These are such high quality softcover books that it is a pleasure just to handle them, as well as read them. This press has republished many classic mysteries by well-known authors from several different ages. I have been rereading some of the Ngaio Marsh series, which features Superintendent Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard. Marsh was from New Zealand and could not resist setting several murders on her home islands that required Alleyn's expertise. More than once, Alleyn would just pop over to the other side of the world to help the New Zealand police.

In Overture to Death, Marsh follows the Knox recipe very well. Take one Squire, one Parson, one Parson's daughter, one Squire's son, throw in a couple of nosey-parker biddies and stir well. The background of the story is a local theatrical production that arouses all the emotions likely to cause trouble: envy, pride, vanity and hatred.

I am not as fond of Margery Allingham's Albert Campion, but since Felony & Mayhem has printed more of this author than any other, I look forward to trying a few more in the series.

Books put out by the Rue Morgue Press, run by Tom and (the late) Enid Schantz of Lyons, Colorado, are also keepers. I have collected and read most of them.

In the beginning of each book, the Schantzes include a comprehensive and entertaining essay about the author's works and life. Sadly, Enid succumbed to cancer in 2011, and Tom may be slowing down as well, because the quarterly newsletter has not been in the mail for some time.

One of the first of the Rue Morgue list that I read was The Chinese Chop by Juanita Sheridan. Sheridan led a very colorful life, and she used her experiences to broaden the lives of her readers. In The Chinese Chop, she introduces Lily Wu, a young Chinese-American woman; beautiful, intelligent and a sleuth as well. She partners up with Janice Cameron, a Hawaiian-born writer, to solve crimes.

The first of the four novels in the Lily Wu Quartet takes place at the end of World War II. The author does an excellent job of depicting the housing shortage in New York and there is an excellent feel for the customs, the clothing, and the lives of those uprooted by the war. The mystery deals with a murder in a rooming house that began life as a mansion.

The rest of the series is set in Hawaii, and here, as well, there is a wonderful sense of time and place.

By the way, a Chinese chop is actually a seal to sign documents and important paperwork.

One of my recent finds is the Resurrected Press. They have a list of books by authors who are new to me, and some of whom have been almost entirely forgotten. One such case is that of Archibald Fielding. Fielding's books are quintessential Golden Age British mysteries and they include the country houses, the list of eccentric characters and, of course, the astute detective––Chief Inspector Pointer in this case. But even more mysterious is the actual identity of the author. Even though more than 20 novels were published under this name, any records regarding A. E. Fielding were presumably lost during World War II. For a long time, the works were attributed to a middle-aged woman named Dorothy Fielding. Researches have found the woman in records, but no evidence that she ever wrote or published anything.

In Mystery at the Rectory, Fielding plots the tale of a well-loved rector who is murdered after delivering an unusual extemporaneous sermon. The clue to his death might be found in these last words.

In Murder in a Library, by Charles J. Dutton, there is the seemingly motiveless murder of a librarian in the library––not with a candlestick, however. In this case, Harley Manners, professor of abnormal psychology, is called upon with the hopes that he can shed light on the matter.

Resurrected Press has a long list of obscure authors whose works I am looking forward to sampling.

The British Library also has a nice line in republished crime mysteries, in its British Library Crime Classics series. I started with The Lake District Murder, by John Bude, one of several rural mysteries that take place in locations far from London.

In this story, the detective interest is split between the police professionals and a very likable pair of amateurs, a vicar and a doctor. This is a tale about a farmer who is on his way home one night when he runs out of gas. When he reaches a garage to fill up his gas can, he finds one of the garage owners dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. It is one of those murder-versus-suicide plots, but Inspector Meredith of the county police force doesn't accept the idea of suicide. The focus is on the process by which the police reconstruct the modus operandi.

There are two others in my vacation reading basket from the British Library Crime Classics collection. Murder Underground, and Death on the Cherwell, which are both by Mavis Doriel Hay. Hay attended Oxford, like Dorothy Sayers, and this latter book takes place at a fictional Oxford college. I don't suppose that either will be as well-crafted as a Christie or a Sayers, but I hope they will be entertaining.

Last, but not least, I want to include an Australian writer who deserves a little credit for her work; she is Mary Fortune.

Twenty years before the adventures of Sherlock Holmes were published, Aussie readers were treated to a serial featuring Detective Mark Sinclair, which appeared in the Australian Journal. This sleuth, like the more recent Ellery Queen, was the result of collaboration by two writers. Waif Wander and John Borlase put out nine stories in 1865, before their partnership broke up. The Journal began releasing more episodes of the Sinclair saga in 1868, and the series ran for several decades. At first, readers assumed that Waif Wander was the author of these cases, because the stories were attributed to W.W.

But almost a century later, in 1950, the true identity of the author was uncovered. She was Mary Fortune, who was born in Ireland, grew up in Canada, and moved to Australia in mid-century with her father, who went down under for the gold rush.

Mary married a policeman who patrolled the goldfields. She was a poet, a journalist and a prolific short story writer who eventually died in obscurity, circa 1910. One of her early stories was republished in the September, 2014 issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Titled "Traces of Crime," the story takes place at the height of the gold rush. This quaint tale is about an assault on a "female of a character so diabolical in itself, as to have aroused the utmost anxiety in the public as well as in the police." The unfortunate woman was so injured and abused that "her life was despaired of." Detective Sinclair goes undercover, and uses great ingenuity and perspicacity to catch the perpetrator of the crime.

There are several other fairly obscure authors flying under the radar who are favorites of mine: J.J. Marric, Nicholas Blake, Richard Bachman, Samuel Holt, Glyn Carr, Barbara Vine, Bernard Bastable, Salvatore Lombino and Robert Galbraith. Of course, the last of these is familiar as the pseudonym of J. K. Rowling. The others are all pseudonyms as well. Do you know their more famous monikers?

Hello and Goodbye! Aloha!

There is one magazine crossing my desk that opens up the world to me in fascinating ways. It is the monthly Smithsonian. An article about Hawaii was my latest find. Paul Theroux has travelled the world for 50 years, and he has visited more than 100 countries during his journeys. He has shared his travel experiences with the world through his best sellers. Throughout his travels, he says that he has relied on the kindness of strangers to take him in and share their stories. He admits to having an obsession with islands because his belief is that islands are small contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones. One of the traits Theroux has found in many island cultures is deep suspicion of outsiders. This has been most evident in Hawaii, where he has lived for 22 years––the longest he has resided in any one place. Despite this, he is still considered an outsider and has found it difficult to get any one to talk to him and explain Hawaiian traditions and culture in any significant way.

He explains this pattern in the recent May edition of the Smithsonian. He clarifies this by pointing out that what looks like hostility in Hawaii is justifiable wariness with an intention to keep the peace. He concludes that he is still trying to make sense of it all, but the longer he lives in this archipelago of seven islands, the more the mystery deepens.

As the years pass it becomes more evident to me that my experiences with Hawaii will be of the traveling-by-armchair variety, mostly through books like these.

My favorite Hawaiian experience comes from Charlie Chan, who is introduced in Earl Derr Biggers's The House Without a Key. The title refers to Honolulu as it was in the early 1920s, for these were the days in Hawaii when there was no need to lock a door. It was a land for the lotus-eaters; a paradise, but then there are always snakes in the grass, as Barbara Winterslip sees when she returns home from school on the mainland to find her father murdered. The culprit will be found because Charlie Chan, the best detective of the Honolulu PD, is given the case. Biggers models Chan upon a real-life Honolulu policeman, Chang Apana, whose exploits were newsworthy. Charlie's way of solving a crime lies not so much with the physical evidence at the scene, but in figuring out the personalities and the lives of the people involved.

It is a fair-play, golden-age type of mystery. I enjoyed this book thoroughly. I slipped easily into the era, to the place taunted by kona winds and eased by the trades, and into the story because the people were real and the plot plausible. I felt a touch of nostalgia for a place I have never been and a time that never really existed.

Chan's personality and his history come into better focus in The Black Camel. "Death is the black camel that kneels unbidden at every gate." This is the quotation used by Charlie Chan minutes after he is called to investigate the murder of Shelah Fane, a Hollywood actress who has just arrived in the Hawaiian Islands to wrap up a movie that had been begun in Tahiti.

Most of Charlie Chan's approach relates to a basic philosophy of what will be will be. Life is predestined, and so there is no use worrying about things not easily controlled, such as the weather, one's weight, and other facts of life. But he has no intention of behaving like the crane, which waited for the sea to disappear and leave him dry fish to eat, and which then starves to death. Thus, he proceeds and in his quiet, intuitive way knows he can find the murderer.

Charlie Chan has 11 children and, in this book, we are introduced to his oldest son, Henry, his oldest daughter, Rose, and the next in line, Evelyn. We also meet little Barry, who was born while he was helping the SFPD during his recent adventures in California in Behind That Curtain.

Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl sets her mysteries in post-Depression Hawai‘i. In Murder Casts A Shadow, it is 1935 in Honolulu and, even though the Depression has hit these tropical islands along with the rest of the world, the sugar industry has cushioned the effects of unemployment somewhat.

London playwright Ned Manusia has come to put his latest play on in Honolulu, and he feels quite at home here because he is of Polynesian extraction himself. He was born in Samoa. Ned has a second reason for finding himself in Honolulu: he has escorted three important portraits of the Hawai‘ian Royal Family from the British Museum back to their home.

Shortly after the portraits are delivered, the main one of the King Kalākaua is stolen and a main functionary of the museum, Abe Halpern, is murdered. Mina Beckwith, a reporter for the local paper, is onsite for this case and runs with it. She pairs up with Ned to dig into the background of the murder victim. Abel Halpern was a grandson of one of the original outsiders on the island. There are many rumors about his dirty dealings, so his murder comes as no surprise to many.

The Hawai‘ian Islands are the crossroads of the Pacific and people from all over had settled there over the centuries. Kings have ruled Hawai‘i for a few hundred years. The last, King Kalākaua, traveled to San Francisco for a visit. It was while he was there that the portraits were painted; then he mysteriously sickened and died. It is most likely that people wanting power in the islands had something to do with his death, although history books prefer the story that he died from kidney disease. Ned and Mina feel sure the past and the present are coming together and they are risking their lives to prove it.

This book is the first in a series and it was very appealing.

Hawaii's postwar era is the setting for Juanita Sheridan’s sleuthing duo, Janice Cameron and Lily Wu. In The Kahuna Killer, Janice, originally from the islands, has returned to write a book and clean up some papers her father left.

Before these gals have gotten settled, there is the murder of a hula dancer to shake them up again. There are whispers that a Kahuna, a kind of high priest, was seen performing old rites on a nearby beach. An old friend warns Janice that she is no longer welcome in his village. It is up to Lily to see things clearly and find the culprit in this vintage mystery. There are four mysteries in this series reprinted by the Rue Morgue Press, and at least in this one the mystery takes a backseat to the history––and I don't mind that.

A more contemporary view of murder in Hawai‘i is seen in Neil S. Plakcy's Mahu. Kimo Kanapa‘aka is a Honolulu homicide detective who has been in the closet for years. When Kimo sees a body dropped near a gay bar he doesn't report it right away, because he was in that bar. He gets caught up in the investigation of the murder while trying to keep his private life a secret. In this case, the truth comes out in more ways than one and Kimo has his hands full. Kanapa‘aka is featured in five books in this series. I found book one very enjoyable.

Another series set in Hawai‘i is by Victoria Heckman and it features a young cop, Katrina Ogden, who works in the records department of the HPD. Despite her assignment, she gets involved in a murder investigation. KO'd in Honolulu is the only one I have read so far in the series. Deborah Turell Atkinson has a series featuring Storm Kayana, an attorney, which is next on my TBR list. If anyone knows of a good mystery set in Hawai‘i, leave a comment, I would appreciate it.

You might have noticed the appearance of something like apostrophe marks that pop up here and there. The more recently published books use the appropriate mark, called okina, which is used at glottal stops in Polynesian languages. This is a pause like when you say oh-oh. It is really an apostrophe upside down and backwards like this (see left and below). As many of you probably know, in the Hawaiian language, there is an okina like this in the name of the state: Hawai‘i.