ALAN GREEN – What a Body! Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1949. Dell, paperback, 1951.
The dust jacket blurb calls this first mystery “the funniest, risibility-ticklingest book … since Wodehouse.” It isn’t that good, but it does have its moments — so many of them, in fact, that What a Body! was voted a Best First Novel Edgar. It is not only comical in the droll, barbed fashion of the Forties, but has an “impossible crime” plot of the sort that John Dickson Carr loved to hefuddle his readers with.
When Merlin Broadstone is murdered in his fourth-floor room at the Broadstone Hotel on the island of Broadstone, Florida, millions of people cheer. Broadstone, the “Caliph of Calisthenics,” the “Dictator of Diet,” had made a fortune by zealously depriving people of liquor, tobacco, starchy foods, slothful behavior, and the joy of sex — all in the name of health and fitness. The Broadstone Hotel (and Broadstone Island) is a large and austere health spa, his monument to clean (if unhappy) living; it has been open only short while, and is populated at the time of Broadstone amazing demise by hundreds of his followers, members of his immediate family, and a number of VIPs, among the a Democratic senator, a Republican congressman, and a famous criminal lawyer.
And Broadstone’s death truly is amazing. It seems he was shot to death inside his locked room, through a window open only a few inches, and at an angle that indicating the fatal bullet came from the swimming pool in the courtyard below. Not only that, but there is evidence that the murderer somehow entered the locked room after the shooting, on an inexplicable errand. According to Police Lieutenant John Hugo, the book’s nominal hero (who spends more ti courting Broadstone’s sexy blond niece, Sandra, than he does detecting), the person responsible is someone “who can walk on the surface of a body of water six feet deep while remaining invisible. He must also be a guy who has a compulsion to put pajamas on his victim after shooting him and who would walk through the walls of a locked room to do so.”
The immediate suspects include Sandra; Broadstone; brother-in-law, Arthur Hutch; and the four other member of the family, none of whom liked the tyrannical old faddist; Senator Happy Ned Dumbrow, the owner of different island that Broadstone didn’t buy; a hulking young man named Lovechild who has a penchant for togas; and Daniel Joyce, the plump and middle-aged family lawyer to whom the damnedest things happen. It isn’t exactly love-smitten and bumbling Hugo who determines which of th4g is guilty and explains how the crime was accomplished (a simple and dexterous solution it is, too); actually, one of the suspects has to do it for him.
The only real flaw in What a Body! is Green’s determinedly author-omniscient style, which at times becomes intrusive and gets in the way of continuity. The same is true of his only other mystery, They Died Laughing (1952), an equally clever and amusing locked-room puzzle about the murder of a TV comedian — on and off television.
ARTHUR PORGES “Her Last Bow.” Stately Homes #1. First appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1957, Collected in Three Porges Parodies and a Pastiche, edited by Michael H. Kean (Magico, 1988) and in The Adventures of Stately Homes and Sherman Horn: Being the Compleat Sherlockian Writings of Arthur Porges, edited by Richard Sims (The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, trade paperback, 2008).
Arthur Porges’s Wikipedia page begins thusly: “Arthur Porges (20 August 1915 – 12 May 2006) was an American writer of numerous short stories, most notably during the 1950s and 1960s, though he continued to write and publish stories until his death.” I haven’t found an accurate countless of the short fiction, essays and poems he had published over his lifetime, but the list is a long one. He, on the other hand, never wrote a novel.
He began writing science fiction in 1950. “Her Last Bow” is not his first work in crime fiction, but it is close to it. It is his first story to appear in EQMM, and it is also the first of several adventures of Stately Homes stories he wrote over the years.
It is also a Locked Room Mystery, as Jane Marple’s body is found in one such. The room is completely inaccessible, with only a five inch circular opening in the door to be found. Even more puzzling is the way in which the body has been mutilated, sliced up vertically, from head to toe, and then tied up together again.
The tale is humorous (his assistant is a gent by the name of Sun Wat) but not as laugh-out-loud funny as Robert L. Fish’s stories of Schlock Homes stories are. I could expound on the tale considerably, but I have decided that I have already told you enough about the plot for you solve it on your own. (The story is only five pages long.) I do not own either of the two collections of Stately Homes stories, but I wish I did.
The Stately Homes series —
Her Last Bow (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Feb 1957
Another Adventure of Stately Homes (ss) The Saint Mystery Magazine (UK) Nov 1961
Stately Homes and the Invisible Slasher (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Feb 2001
Stately Homes and the Invisible Giant (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Feb 2003
Stately Homes and the Impossible Shot (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Feb 2004
The Return of Sherlock Holmes,
Part I of III
by Matthew R. Bradley
The Granada Television productions starring Jeremy Brett adapted 43 of the 60 works in the Sherlock Holmes canon by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) into 41 episodes, two of which drew upon a pair of short stories each. Those 41 comprise four series: The Adventures…(1984-1985), …Return… (1986-1988), …Case-Book… (1991-1993), and …Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes(1994). The titles match four of the five books collecting all 56 short stories, the majority of which were first published in The Strand Magazine—Adventures(1892), Memoirs (1894), Return (1905), Case-Book (1927)—with the outlier being His Last Bow (1917), yet there was not a one-to-one correspondence between them.
Granada’s Return included adaptations of 11 stories scattered among all except The Case-Book, which I will analyze in this three-part post, as well as two of the four novels, The Sign of the Four (1890) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). In the interests of full disclosure, as one who grew up watching the Twentieth Century-Fox and Universal films starring Basil Rathbone, long before Brett assumed the role, I consider him the definitive screen Holmes. Yet those films, which at Universal were updated to the present, often drew little if any of their plots from Doyle, so between the interpretation of Brett (1933-1995) and its comprehensiveness, Granada’s is likely the definitive version of the canon.
Only one of the short stories adapted for Granada’s Return (in which Edward Hardwicke replaced David Burke as Dr. John Watson for the duration), “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (The Strand, December 1891), is from Adventures. Watson and his wife, Mary, who curiously refers to him as James, are visited by her friend Kate Whitney, whose husband, Isa, has spent two days at the Bar of Gold opium den in Upper Swandam Lane. Agreeing to extricate him, Watson locates a repentant Isa, and is about to conduct him into a cab—not to mention out of the story—when he is buttonholed by “a tall, thin old man” with a pipe who secretly reveals himself to Watson as, gasp, Holmes, there on an unrelated case.
En route from Middlesex to The Cedars, his client’s home in Kent, Holmes explains that on an errand nearby, she unexpectedly caught a glimpse of her husband, Neville St. Clair, who by all rights should have been doing business in town, at the den’s upstairs window, from which he quickly vanished. By the time the lascar manager denied his presence and she returned with the constables, the room’s only occupant was his lodger, professional beggar Hugh Boone, recognized by the horrible scar disfiguring his lip. He was arrested after the discoveries of blood on the window-sill and Neville’s coat on the Thames tidal mud-bank below it…weighed down with 421 pennies and 270 half-pennies in the pockets.
No sooner has Holmes reluctantly told Mrs. St. Clair that after a week he thinks Neville is dead than she produces a letter she has just received—unmistakably in his hand, and with his signet-ring enclosed—saying, “All will come well….Wait in patience.” After finding “the key of the affair” in the bathroom, Holmes takes Watson to the cell of Boone, whom two swipes of a wet bath-sponge reveal as, you guessed it, Neville. Posing as a beggar for a newspaper article years earlier, using make-up skills from his prior stage career, he had discovered how lucrative it could be, and gave up reporting for a new profession, but having unluckily been spotted by his wife, he wanted to spare his family from any shame.
“The Man with the Twisted Lip” (8/13/86) was directed by Patrick Lau and adapted by Alan Plater; their only other Holmes credits were, respectively, “Shoscombe Old Place” (3/7/91) from Case-Book and “The Solitary Cyclist” (5/15/84) from Adventures. None of the story takes place in Baker Street, to which Plater relocates the opening, eliminating Mary while adding landlady Mrs. Hudson (Rosalie Williams), who shows Kate (Patricia Garwood) in to Watson, awaiting Holmes and soon off to fetch Isa (Terence Longdon). Otherwise extremely faithful, the episode expands upon Doyle, e.g., with Mrs. St. Clair’s (Eleanor David) trip through the “vile alley,” surrounded by desperate young mendicants.
Plater gives Neville (Clive Francis) dialogue exemplifying the “remarkable faculty for repartee” that, along with his pitiable appearance, distinguished Boone among beggars, quoting Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Bible, W.S. Gilbert, and Wordsworth. The lascar (Albert Moses) is given several lines and a Malay—rather than Danish—assistant (Ozzie Yue) to help eject Mrs. St. Clair. There is a nice scene in which Holmes talks through various points of the case with, instead of Watson, his respected Scotland Yard colleague, the good-natured Inspector Bradstreet, played here in Denis Lill’s first of three Granada appearances, succeeding Brian Miller in “The Blue Carbuncle” (6/5/84) from Adventures.
Doyle’s brief description (“Holmes stooped to the water jug, moistened his sponge, and then rubbed it twice vigorously across and down the [sleeping] prisoner’s face”) is built up into a more dramatic climax, as Holmes repeatedly immerses the huge sponge and seems about to smother a cowering Boone with it. Neville is mortified to learn that the lascar’s delay in posting the letter had caused his wife distress. Their reconciliation—not addressed in the story, where Bradstreet merely agrees to hush the whole thing up, since no crime has been committed—is effectively and wordlessly depicted as he timorously takes her hand in the background, behind the bonfire in which he burned Boone’s effects.
“[The Adventure of] Silver Blaze” (December 1892) and “…the Musgrave Ritual” (May 1893) debuted in The Strand and were collected in Memoirs; my edition uses the shorter titles. In the former, Holmes and Watson travel to Dartmoor to help Inspector Gregory—“extremely competent,” if lacking imagination, in his only appearance—investigate the disappearance of the titular favorite for the Wessex Cup and death of trainer John Straker, employed by Colonel Ross at King’s Pyland. After stable-boy Ned Hunter was drugged with powdered opium in his curried mutton, the horse vanished from the locked stables, while Straker was found at the bottom of a hollow, his skull shattered by a heavy weapon.
Gregory arrests race-track tout Fitzroy Simpson—seen earlier seeking information from Ned—who had a weighted walking stick, and whose allegedly lost cravat was clutched in Straker’s hand, but he admits that the evidence is circumstantial; adds Holmes, “A clever counsel would tear it all to rags.” Moreover, a wound on Straker’s leg is thought to have been accidentally self-inflicted by the delicate cataract knife in his other hand, with which he had curiously equipped himself. Holmes and Watson find horse tracks, first alone and then accompanied by a man’s, which lead partway home before doubling back to nearby Mapleton stables, managed by Silas Brown and the home of second favorite Desborough.
Furious on seeing groom Dawson being questioned, Brown totally changes his tune after Holmes speaks to him privately, leaves the cringing trainer with undisclosed instructions, and explains that having encountered the wandering horse on the moor, he had concealed it to ensure his large bets on Desborough. Without explanation, Holmes assures Ross that Silver Blaze will run in the Wessex Cup, telling Watson his “manner has been just a trifle cavalier to me. I am inclined now to have a little amusement at his expense.” Gregory, his attention drawn to “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” says, “The dog did nothing in the night-time,” to which Holmes replies, “That was the curious incident.”
Sure enough, four days later, a horse bearing Ross’s colors but unrecognized by him wins the Wessex Cup, and Holmes says that washing his face in spirits of wine will reveal his eponymous marking. As for the killer, Holmes identifies him as…Silver Blaze, who had instinctively lashed out with his steel shoe when Straker—a familiar presence that did not alert the stable dog—prepared to nick his tendon subcutaneously, having practiced on the sheep. Straker lived a double life, bet heavily against Silver Blaze to pay debts incurred on behalf of a mistress with expensive tastes, and made sure, as Simpson could not have known, that Ned’s meal would conceal the taste of the opium, found solely in his portion.
Directed—like Brett’s Baskervilles (1988)—by Brian Mills, “Silver Blaze” (4/13/88) was adapted by John Hawkesworth, who developed the series for television and again adds Mrs. Hudson, bringing Holmes the telegrams requesting aid from Ross (Peter Barkworth) and Gregory (Malcolm Storry). The episode exemplifies how direction and performance can affect interpretation; Mills and Jonathan Coy, as Simpson, give an ominous feel to his visit, which in retrospect we know to be relatively innocuous. Holmes’s interactions with Gregory play far less cordially, omitting Conan Doyle’s “My dear Inspector, you surpass yourself!” when he proactively brings Straker’s, Simpson’s, and Silver Blaze’s footwear.
Holmes shows sympathy by placing his black-gloved hand reassuringly on those of maid Edith Baxter (Manda-Jayne Beard), who is obviously discomfited in recalling Simpson’s approach to Ned (David John), and Mrs. Straker’s (Sally Faulkner) summons early the next morning to help locate the body of her husband (Barry Lowe). Unlike in the story, Holmes is able to give Dawson (Nicholas Teare) a coin before Brown (Russell Hunter) appears. Once more, the climax is made more dramatic, with Holmes—seemingly in a “Twisted Lip” redux—brandishing another huge sponge to clean off Silver Blaze’s face himself before the start of the race, rather than merely advising Ross to do so afterwards.
“Musgrave” opens as Holmes, urged to store some of the papers inundating their Baker Street rooms, draws from the large tin box housing the records of his early cases a small wooden one. It contains relics related to the titular ritual: “a crumpled piece of paper, an old-fashioned brass key, a peg of wood with a ball of string attached to it, and three rusty old discs of metal.” As in “The Gloria Scott” (The Strand, April 1893), “the first [case] in which I was ever engaged,” he tells Watson of the third he’d tackled while rooming in Montague Street near the British Museum, to which “I trace my first stride towards the position which I now hold,” engaged by an old college acquaintance, Reginald Musgrave.
He is “a scion of one of the very oldest families in the kingdom” whose manor in western Sussex, Hurlstone, is “perhaps the oldest inhabited building in the county.” Widowed butler Richard Brunton’s days as a Don Juan seemed over when he became engaged to second housemaid Rachel Howells, who had fiery Welsh blood, but he threw her over for the head game-keeper’s daughter, Janet Tregellis. Sleepless one night, Musgrave caught Brunton going through some family documents, which he’d been comparing with a hastily concealed map, and dismissed him on the spot, yet was reluctantly persuaded to give him one week in which to salve his honor by appearing to resign of his own volition.
After two days, Brunton disappeared, leaving behind most of his belongings, notably his boots, and on the third night after that, Rachel—hysterical and recovering from brain-fever—vanished as well. Her tracks led to the lake, which when dragged revealed not a body but “a linen bag [containing] a mass of old rusted and discoloured metal and several dull-coloured pieces of pebble or glass.” The paper Brunton had been consulting was just a copy of the curious catechism that begins, “Whose was it?/His who is gone,” and has since the mid-17th century been recited by each Musgrave in a coming-of-age ceremony; Holmes is convinced that solving the riddle of the ritual will answer all of their mysteries.
Using mathematics and his peg-and-string tool, Holmes follows the cryptic directions to the cellar, “as old as the house,” wherein Brunton’s muffler is attached to a large, heavy flagstone with an iron ring. Raising it, they find his body beside a brass-bound wooden box with the old key in the lock; Brunton had clearly lifted the stone to enter the hole with the aid of, and handed the contents to, Rachel, who either deliberately closed him in or kept silent when he became trapped, and threw the evidence into the lake. Inside the bag were coins and, unrecognizable, “the ancient crown of the kings of England,” hidden by Sir Ralph Musgrave, “the right-hand man of Charles the Second in his wanderings…”
“The Musgrave Ritual” (7/30/86) was directed by David Carson, who’d contributed two episodes to Adventures; a mainstay represented in all four series, Jeremy Paul won an Edgar Award for his teleplay, and would be nominated for “The Problem of Thor Bridge” (2/28/91) from Case-Book. Dispensing with the flashback structure, he makes Holmes—accepting an invitation to Hurlstone “to escape my lethargy” and collate the records of his early work—and Watson both participants. Already acquainted with Brunton (James Hazeldine), and impressed with his intelligence and knowledge of the Musgrave history, Holmes speaks far less cordially to Watson of Sir Reginald (Michael Culver) in the show.
Paul economically visualizes the romantic triangle as the unseen Rachel (Johanna Kirby) watches Janet Tregallis (sic; Teresa Banham) bawdily seduce Brunton up in the hayloft, interrupting his vision of a rider carrying a bag containing the crown. Tregallis (Patrick Blackwell) even gets a brief onscreen appearance, albeit no lines; when Brunton is found, Janet loudly accuses the jealous Rachel of killing him, and he is asked to take her away. Holmes make himself further disagreeable with cocaine before the mystery occupies him, while Watson provides his forensic expertise to Inspector Fereday (Ian Marter), not found in the story, where Reginald merely says that the county police “are at their wits’ end…”
Retaining much of Conan Doyle’s dialogue, Paul also creates a new scene that dramatizes Brunton’s recruitment of an understandably skeptical Rachel to help him lift the stone, claiming to regret his dalliance with Janet and promising that they can flee together with the treasure he believes is beneath it. Although Rachel is scathingly contemptuous when they find nothing of any apparent value, the visuals suggest that the wooden support holding the slab open slips out of place accidentally, rather than being deliberately dislodged by her. And while the story leaves her fate completely open, the episode ends with Janet screaming as she sees Rachel’s body surface in the lake, presumably a suicide.
To be continued.
Edition cited
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes in The Complete Sherlock Holmes: Doubleday (1930)
EDWARD D. HOCH “The Alexandria Solution.” Jeffrey Rand, formerly of British Intelligence. Published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, December 2008. Not yet reprinted or collected. (I may be wrong about this.)
What this story is most remarkable for, perhaps, is that (as we are informed in the introduction to it) it is that new story to appear by Mr. Hoch in EQMM. In this tale, Rand is now retried from his long time position as the head of the Department of Concealed Communications for British Intelligence, In this tale he and his wife Leila are on vacation in Egypt, where he agrees to help a store merchant decipher a message consisting of several columns of numbers.
Before he is finished with the task, he leans that the man who hired him for the job was an imposter, the real Rosco Mathers already known dead for some short while. And what is the significance of the coded message?
As usual for Hoch and the long list of stories written, the telling is clear and precise; perhaps a little too much so, but this is certainly too small a comment to make to be worth quibbling about. But it is worth mentioning that the story is a minor matter. Not uninteresting at all, mind you, and if I say “minor,” that’s a word worth using only in relative terms. Compared to the work of Hoch’s contemporaries, let’s say, it’s a tale well worth savoring in its own right.
A. A. FAIR -Widows Wear Weeds. PI’s Donald Lam & Bertha Cool #27. William Morrow, hardcover, 1966. Dell, paperback, date?. Reprinted several times since.
Donald Lam is hired to stop a blackmailer from making more demands, or so he thinks. The blackmail is fake, intended to establish an alibi, but it creates ideas which prove to be fatal for the would-be blackmailer. The murder scene is set up to be embarrassing for Sergeant Sellers, and Donald will have no part of the policeman’s subsequent story.
There is a definite need for the suspension of disbelief in reading stories such as this. The characters carry on, year after year, almost as if no earlier stories had ever been written. Sellers and Hamilton Burger fight to nail the hides of Lam and Perry Mason to the wall, grudgingly accept defeat (and victory for justice), then go right back at it.
Disbelief fails in this case. Sellers beats Lam up in his frustration, but they remain on the same quasi-friendly terms as always.Terribly padded, even for the extremely short length.
I may have miscalculated and come back to the blog a few days too early. There are still lots of things to be done that should have been done while I was away, and while I thought I was back, they weren’t done and they still have to be done, and it’s best if I’m the one does them. So bear with me for a while longer, if you so kindly would. See you again soon. Thanks!
RAYMOND MASON – Someone and Felicia Warwick. Gold Medal s1248. Paperback original; 1st printing, October 1962.
Felecia 19, is the daughter of the town drunk and is widely known as the town whore, although of the unpaid variety. The first 14 chapters all end with same ominous harbinger of events to come: “Someone was going to kill Felicia Warwick.”
This is a detective story, one in which the victim is known far in advance. Who among her man lovers and those (occasionally) rejected will be the one who kills her? This is also a novel about a small town filled with jealousies and hatreds, mostly sexual in nature, and it has a nifty ending.
ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Worried Waitress. Perry Mason #77. William Morrow, hardcover, 1966. Pocket, paperback, 1967. Reprinted many other times.
A waitress who wants to ask Perry Mason for advice in a restaurant is invited to come to his office, Her story concerns her aunt’s financial problems and the discovery of several thousand dollars hidden in her closet. Mason advises the waitress to move out of her aunt’s house, but it is too late. The aunt is attacked, and the girl is accused.
A trial is inevitable (in this case a hearing), and it brings to light an impersonation of a blind woman, a struggle for control of a manufacturing corporation, plus a fight for community property.
Dialogue carries too much of the action and the story. People don’t really talk this way, except on old radio programs.
It was last Tuesday night, just an ordinary night. The parking lot was well lit, but the night itself was dark and cloudy. Jon and I were walking back to our car, The way was downhill, not steeply, but you could tell it was trending down rather than up.
We were, I think, within an arm’s length from the car when I suddenly realized I was lying down, face on the pavement. There was no in between that I can recall. I was walking, then I was down. I scrambled up, brushing myself off when I heard Jon say, “Dad, your face is bleeding.” And so it was.
We rushed to the Emergency Room, where we ending up staying the night while they did all sorts of pokes and prods, and asking all sorts of questions. I didn’t have many answers, but they suggested I stay over anyway.
And they allowed me to leave by five in the afternoon. Complete with 20 pages of discharge information, and a lengthy list of instruction and appointments to tend to, starting Monday, two days hence. I have been sleeping a lot in the meantime.
I would post a photo, but I don’t believe the ICC allows such horrendous auxiliary material to be posted on blogs. I could be wrong about that. In any case, in the photos I’ve had taken of me the past few days, I looked ten times worse than I actually felt at the time. I do look as though I had a hand-to-hand fist fight with a fifteen foot wall. And lost.
It will be a while before I recover from all this. I can’t imagine otherwise, and there are too many appointments to follow up with, starting next Monday. Don’t go anywhere, if you can help it. I’ll be back with the blog as soon as I can.
strong>JAMES GRADY – Six Days of the Condor. W.W.Norton & Co., hardcover, 1974. Dell, paperback, 1975. Also published as Three Days of the Condor (Dell, paperback, date?). Film: Also as Three Days of the Condor (1975; directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, and Max von Sydow).
Six Days of the Condor is a riveting book that subsequently became a riveting movie starring Robert Redford with the “Six” of the title halved to “Three.” The story’s central character is a young man named Ronald Malcolm (code name: Condor), a book-reading specialist for the CIA. He works with a small group of people in an unobtrusive building in Washington, D.C., doing just that — reading books, particularly mysteries, and passing along information (field tips, authors who seem to know too much, etc.) to CIA headquarters.
Then one day the unthinkable happens. It is Malcolm’s tum to pick up lunch, and when he returns to the building he finds every one of his fellow workers massacred.
Frightening enough, certainly, but then the real terror begins. He phones CIA headquarters to report the killings and is instructed to meet a couple of agents at a specific location in the city. When he shows up, an attempt is made on his life, which tells him that either the CIA itself or an element within the agency ordered the killings and they are now trying to make it a clean sweep.
The terror, of course, involves not knowing-not knowing why the killings took place or whom he can trust. He becomes a man truly alone, with every suspicious face in the crowd a potential threat
This is a harrowing novel, with unsettling and far-reaching implications. No one who reads it can fail to be disturbed in one way or another.
James Grady’s other novels include a sequel chronicling the further adventures of Ronald Malcolm, Shadow of the Condor(1975). More recent titles are Runner in the Street(1984) and Razor Game (]985).
Devoted to mystery and detective fiction — the books, the films, the authors, and those who read, watch, collect and make annotated lists of them. All uncredited posts are by me, Steve Lewis.
