Ellery Queen Short Story Collection #7: The Best of Ellery Queen: Four Decades of Stories From the Mystery Masters

God save our gracious Queen, long live our noble Queen, God save the Queen. …Ellery Queen, that is. Let’s salute The Best of Ellery Queen, edited by Francis M. Nevins, Jr. and Martin H. Greenberg.

Synopsis:

Stories deal with a dead man’s coded message, a surprise party, a poisoning, a murdered boxer, the death of an alumni, the theft of an antique doll, and a tontine

Source: Amazon, but here’s a Goodreads link

SPOILERS BELOW

Remember when I reviewed Wild Cards #18: Inside Straight, and my copy of the book had been printed with the wrong back cover synopsis? Well, this time, it’s Goodreads that has done goofed, as their currently listed synopsis seems to be from a different book entirely. Normally, that means I’d copy the synopsis myself from the back of the book or the inside of the dust jacket; but that wasn’t an option in this case, because I was reading from a library copy that was missing the dust jacket. Hence, for the first time, resorting to Amazon’s product description for something to put in the synopsis section. But let’s not dwell.

So, Ellery Queen. I recently read The Greek Coffin Mystery, which I’d heard praised as one of his best, but found it not quite to my taste. However, I’m not one to give up easily. If Queen’s novels didn’t do it for me, perhaps I could find more enjoyment in his short stories. With this in mind, I picked up The Best of Ellery Queen, which promised to assemble the creme de la creme of the various short stories published over the length of is 40 year career.

Alas… my opinion of them remains mediocre. I found the stories to be decently clever, moderately enjoyable… but never spectacular. Nothing about them really reached out and grabbed me, making me desperate to read me; the way, for instance, the extremely clever impossible crimes and cynical humor delivered by my first foray into the Dr. Gideon Fell series did.

As for the stories themselves, I’d hold up “The Glass-Domed Clock” and “The Dauphin’s Doll” as the best of them, in terms of writing and the cleverness of their puzzles. The weakest mysteries, on the other hand, were “GI Story” and “Wedding Anniversary”, both of which I was able to easily solve before reaching the end – something that I rarely manage, despite my interest in the mystery genre. “My Queer Dean!” was also fairly obvious in its gimmick; but in that case, I found the story itself well-written enough to compensate, keeping me entertained with its clever spoonerisms.

In any case, with this, I’m finishing my look at Queen. I think I’ll be delving into the oeuvre of Clayton Rawson next. He’s slightly late to be classified as belonging to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction; but since he seems to specialize in the type of “impossible crime” story that most interests me, I’m willing to be lenient in my categorization.

Final Rating: 3/5

The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories

A dull light runs through Rue Morgue’s darkest darkness. Magic, descriptions, sorcery. The mystery is still endlessly continuing to be made. Even the Yellow Room and the Orient Express become courts of judgement. Let’s use the sublime, glimmering longsword of truth to slice mysteries apart and create order from The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, edited by Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert.

Synopsis:

In the “Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, ” Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert bring together thirty-three tales that illuminate both the evolution of crime fiction in the United States and America’s unique contribution in this highly popular genre. Tracing its progress from elegant “locked room” mysteries, to the hard-boiled realism of the ’30’s and ’40’s, to the great range of styles seen today, this is a gold mine of glorious stories that can be read for sheer pleasure, but that also illuminate how the crime story came to explore every corner of our nation and every facet of our lives.

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

My exploration of the classics of the mystery genre continues, with this beast of a book. I happened to stumble across it while investigating collections which included Ellery Queen stories, and thought it might be just the thing to add some breadth to my experience. I nearly accidentally overlooked Queen; who knows how many other brilliant authors I just haven’t happened to hear of? With this collection, I had the chance to sample a broad array of different authors and styles of story.

Now, with no less than 33 different stories included in this collection, I don’t really have time to write up reviews of all them; so, I’m just going to give my impressions of a select few. This collection includes detective stories of all types – Sherlockian brilliant private investigators, Chandleresque hard-boiled noir gumshoes, detailed police procedurals – but my interest is primarily in Golden Age of Detective Fiction-style fair-play whodunnits, so that’s where I’m going to be focusing most of my attention.

The story which opens off the collection is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. Now, while I’d never actually read this particular Poe story before, I’d picked up details of it through pop-cultural osmosis. In particular, I think it’s fairly well-known that the story’s big twist is the reveal of the murderer as an orangutan with a razor blade. Whenever I’ve heard this brought up, it’s always been in the context of a joke – ho ho, an orangutan with a razor, how ridiculous. It therefore surprised me how seriously the story was written, with the detective’s logic painstakingly laid out and explained. Presented in proper context, the conclusion didn’t seem ridiculous at all.

The second story, by contrast, struck me as a pretty weak inclusion: “The Stolen Cigar Case” by Bret “The Hitman” Hart… no, wait, sorry, that should be Bret Harte, with an E on the end. My mistake. The story, in any case, is not really a detective story at all, but a rather petty and mean-spirited parody of Sherlock Holmes. Maybe I’m just being thin-skinned about it, I’m sure there’s probably someone out there who got a laugh out of it; but the whole reason I picked up this book is because I enjoy mysteries, not because I want to read stories taking the piss out of them.

“The Problem of Cell 13″ by Jacques Futrelle was more like it: a nice little locked room problem featuring a brilliant but eccentric detective. Good stuff, enjoyed it a lot.

“The Doomdorf Mystery” by Melville Davisson Post was another interesting locked room mystery. This time, the solution turns out to be that the death was not murder at all, but an accident. Now, in your standard classical fair-play mystery, that would be a foul: clear violation of Van Dine’s 18th. However, to cite Van Dine himself in his explanation for the seventh, “Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader’s trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded.” Sure, such an ending would be a disappointing anticlimax if given a full novel’s worth of build-up; but this is a very brief story, so it does not require as much investment. I thought it rather clever and well-told, so no complaints.

“Missing: Page Thirteen” was rather odd. The first half was a rather fine puzzle regarding the mystery of the theft of a valuable paper; but the second half of the story seemed to abandon the detective genre altogether and launch into an entirely separate and unrelated gothic horror story. Color me confused about this one.

“The Beauty Mask” by Arthur B. Reeve just came off as ridiculous. Consider this another argument for Knox’s 4th: if you base your story on pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo, you’ll end up looking a right fool just as soon as science moves on enough that even the layman can tell you were talking out your ass.

But let’s skip ahead to one of the most interesting stories in the collection. “The Footprint in the Sky” is by John Dickson Carr, writer of the Dr. Gideon Fell stories, but features a different detective: Colonel March, a Scotland Yard detective who specializes in cases that appear impossible or supernatural. This was a very well-presented puzzler, and makes me want to check out the series Col. March is from. Let me just wiki up some info about it, and… holy shit, Boris Karloff played March in a TV adaptation of the series in the 50s? Now I really have to read the rest of these stories.

One of the most famous stories in this collection is probably “Rear Window” by Cornell Woolrich – original published under the title “It Had to be Murder”, but reprinted here using the name of Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation. It was definitely the most suspenseful of the stories in the collection – oh, the various noir tales might have had bullets flying in the protagonist’s direction every other page, but this one alone had the slow build-up and sense of real danger to get my pulse racing.

A big disappointment was William Faulkner’s “An Error in Chemistry”. The opening bit went on about Faulkner’s brilliant writing; but frankly, I didn’t think much of it. Half the time, the sentences seemed to stumble over each other or veer off into non-sequitors such that I could hardly make out their meaning. Maybe I’m just too low-brow to appreciate fine art produced by a high-falutin Nobel Prize-winner. Hmph.

A story which did strongly catch my interest was “From Another World” by Clayton Rawson. The gimmick of a magician-detective solving crimes based on his knowledge of misdirection and sleight-of-hand is of course a very interesting one, and this story presents a very clever closed room problem. What really stuck out at me, though, was the inclusion in the plot of a woman in a one-piece swimsuit and a room closed using duct-tape seals. <Good!>

The story in the collection I liked least was “See No Evil” by William Campbell Gault. Frankly, I would not call it a detective story at all; it is a personal family drama. It cannot really be said to be a mystery, because it contains no clues – we are simply informed at the end that a different suspect confessed to a different police officer, clearing all suspicion from the main characters.

I would not call “Words Do Not a Book Make” by Bill Pronzini a detective story either, since it focuses on a pair of blundering criminals and no actual deduction is performed by the detectives… but at least I found the story amusing, which puts it a step up over “See No Evil”.

There’s plenty more I could say, of course, about the other stories in the book… but like I said, this review would go on way too long if I tried to talk about them all, and I’ve already gone on for longer than I intended. So, I’m going to bring this review to a close.

…Oh, alright, one more. I liked the characters in “Lucky Penny” by Linda Barnes, and thought them interesting enough that I might consider reading more from that series. Okay, there, done.

Final Rating: 4/5

Ellery Queen Detective #4: The Greek Coffin Mystery

I don’t owe you anything, you’ll only die a dream forgotten. I’ve got my pride, so hear me sing: I’ll never let you steal my coffin. Let’s exhume The Greek Coffin Mystery, by Ellery Queen.

Synopsis:

From the very beginning, the Khalkis case struck a somber note. It began, as was peculiarly harmonious in the light of what was to come, with the death of an old man. Georg Khalkis, internationally famous art dealer and collector, died of heart failure. After his funeral, his attorney found that the will was missing and immediately called in the district attorney.
When Inspector Queen and his son, Ellery, are brought in to solve the mystery of the missing will, Ellery mentions the one place they have not searched for the will . . . the coffin! Upon exhumation of the Khalkis coffin they find that it contained not one body — but two!

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

In my recent binge of Golden Age detective fiction, I was mortified to realize that I’d somehow accidentally overlooked reading any works by Ellery Queen. What an oversight! The Ellery Queen books are notable, of course, for their “challenge to the reader” – pausing the story to inform the reader that all clues necessary to solve the case have now been presented, and encouraging them to have a got at it themselves to see if they can match the detective’s deductions. Ellery Queen also gets a few shout-outs in Umineko no Naku Koro ni, that epic work which first inspired my exploration of the Golden Age classics – most notably the whole issue of the “later Queen problem”, of course; but also, Will’s declaration in Episode 7 that “No one would dispute that a coffin is a closed room” is likely a play on an Ellery Queen line: “Explain the closed room? Why should I? A coffin is not a closed room.” So, I really have no excuse for missing Queen on my first run.

Well, I obviously couldn’t let this stand. I set about for an Ellery Queen mystery novel immediately. I selected The Greek Coffin Mystery on the basis of a blurb proclaiming it to be one of Queen’s “most popular, confounding, and brilliantly plotted” mysteries. So, what did I think? …Well, I can’t say I quite agree with that enthusiastic praise.

I mean, the premise was quite good, with them unearthing the coffin to check if the will had been hidden inside and unexpectedly discovering a second corpse. The overall plot, however, struck me as a bit over-clever, what with the true culprit having left false clues pointing towards no less than three other suspects. I mean, really! One false trail I’d buy; but make things too convoluted, and my suspension of disbelief starts to slip. The only comparable thing in any of the other mysteries I read was Philo Vance making cases against five innocent suspects before proceeding to the guilty one. In that case, though, it was just Vance himself having a bit of fun winding the police inspector up by making spurious cases based entirely on vague circumstantial evidence; whereas here, the culprit was actually running around planting all of the false clues around to be discovered.

I also feel like it was a bit of foul play to have the culprit turn out to be one of the police investigators examining the case, rather than any of the people thus far treated as suspects. It doesn’t technically violate the Knox Decalogue, since the character is not himself the detective and was introduced fairly early on, but it doesn’t feel fair. Van Dine would agree with me, for his fourth rule forbids not only the detective but also all other “official investigators” from being the culprit. If you have a house with a dozen people in it, and one of them is murdered, and the police come to investigate, and then it’s revealed that the culprit is actually one of the newly arrived police officers… well, it’s a cheap trick, not a fair puzzle.

Those grievances aside, the novel was basically decent. I don’t regret checking out an Ellery Queen work; but I don’t think I’m going to further explore the series like I did for Dr. Gideon Fell, either.

Final Rating: 3/5

Pathfinder Tales #32: Hellknight

Circles and rings, dragons and kings, weaving a charm and a spell. Blessed by the night, holy and bright, called by the toll of the bell. Let’s armor up for Hellknight, by Liane Merciel.

Synopsis:

The Hellknights are a brutal organization of warriors dedicated to maintaining law and order at any cost. For devil-blooded Jheraal, even the harshest methods are justified if it means building a better world for her daughter. Yet when a serial killer starts targeting hellspawn like Jheraal and her child, Jheraal has no choice but to use all her cunning and ruthlessness in order to defeat an ancient enemy to whom even death is no deterrent.

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

In Cheliax, a mysterious killer is using an evil artifact to murder tieflings and steal their souls. It falls to three unlikely protagonists to uncover the nefarious scheme motivating the crimes: Jheraal, a tiefling Hellknight working to protect her secret daughter; Ederras, a paladin of Iomedae with a checkered past who is drawn back to the city by news of his brother’s untimely death in an incident related to the serial killings; and Velenne, a wicked sorceress who worships the archdevil Asmodeus and shares a complicated past with Ederras.

What really sold me on this book were its beautifully written characters. I was immediately invested in the various relationships: Jheraal and her daughter Indrath, who can pass for human and was given up for adoption so that she might live a life free of the discrimination and prejudice directed at tieflings; and Ederras and Velenne, who are drawn together by mutual attraction even as they are torn apart by their differing faiths and alignments.

It’s funny: when the plot of this book is looked at objectively, not much was actually accomplished. The protagonists recovered and neutralized the evil artifact being used in the killings, yes; but the assassin went free, and the graveknight who was behind the whole thing can’t be brought to justice on the grounds of already being an immortal undead that can’t get any deader. Normally, that kind of non-resolution really sours me on a story. But the way this was written, I got so much more invested in the characters themselves than what they were doing. Even though all they’ve really done is maintain status quo in Cheliax, it feels like a victory, because of the relationships they have forged with one another and the ways their characters have developed. I came to love these characters, and dearly wish they could have gotten another novel. The fact that it makes me desperately wish for more is a sign of its quality. I can recommend this novel as a Pathfinder story of the highest quality.

Final Rating: 5/5

Pathfinder Tales #30: Bloodbound

We’re blood bound. We aim for the sun. The luminous moon will take us high over ground. We’re blood bound. Let’s collect the stars with Bloodbound, by F. Wesley Schneider.

Synopsis:

Hunters of the Dead

Larsa is a dhampir – half vampire, half human. In the gritty streets and haunted peaks of Ustalav, she’s an agent for the royal spymaster, keeping peace between the capital’s secret vampire population and its huddled human masses. Meanwhile, in the cathedral of Maiden’s Choir, Jadain is a young priestess of the death goddess, in trouble with her superiors for being too soft on the living. When a noblewoman’s entire house is massacred by vampiric invaders, the unlikely pair is drawn into a deadly mystery that will reveal far more about both of them than they ever wanted to know.

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

Back to the world of Pathfinder. This time, our protagonists are Larsa, a dhampir enforcer for a secret order of vampires; and Jadain, a cleric of the death goddess who is on the verge of being cast out of her order by her hard-line superiors for being too soft. Unlikely circumstances lead to this awkward pair teaming up to hunt down a renegade vampire.

The story this time was really good. Larsa and Jadain were both strong, well-developed characters, and the narrative POV alternated back and forth between them to give them both their individual problems and struggles equal emphasis. Their journey, too, was interesting, with the awkward pair blundering into a number of interesting conflicts on their journey to confront the rogue vampire. I ended up getting really invested in these characters and their adventure.

In my opinion, the biggest flaw in this book is the lack of a lesbian romance between Larsa and Jadain. I got my hopes up, I squee’d every time there was a bit of subtext like intimate hand-holding… but nothing ever came of it. Disappointing.

Perhaps I should explain why I got my hopes up in the first place. I mean, the majority of books I read don’t contain lesbian romances, and I don’t hold it against them; I view the lack of such as the default, and have to go out of my way to track down books that do contain lesbians (and even then, half the time just end up meting out a Dead Lesbian Penalty). And, in general, I regard these sorts of licensed novels to be exactly the kind of work to discourage risk-taking and envelope-pushing: an author is brought on as a hired gun to write a story in the setting, but sternly warned not to do anything controversial that might hurt the brand. A perfect recipe for mediocrity.

In this case, though, I thought things might be different. F. Wesley Schneider is no hired gun; he’s the co-creator of the game and editor-in-chief of the publishing company. He’s also openly gay, as stated in his author bio. So, I thought, here is someone with the perspective to want to write an LGBT-inclusive story and the clout to actually do it. Thus did I raise my expectations, and set myself up for disappointment. Oh, sure, a number of the vampire characters are implied to be gay or bisexual – but that’s just the usual villain morality exemption. It’s okay to write the villains as gay, you see, because they’re depraved, debauched deviants – sexual immorality is just another aspect of their evil. Our protagonists, on the other hand, are the heroes of the story and thus role models, and so are required to be safely heteronormative.

Again, I don’t want to make too big a deal of this. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have blinked an eye, just expecting from the very beginning that things would turn out this way by default. It’s my own fault for developing unrealistically high expectations. And I don’t want to give the impression that I’d just like lesbians shoehorned into every story I read – I explained in my review of That Witch! how I require couples to actually have chemistry and make sense together. I only got my hopes up because Larsa and Jadain did have moments were they seemed to spark.

Anyways, long story short: good book, liked reading it, but falls short of perfection.

Final Rating: 4/5

Rhapsody of Blood #1: Rituals

You can run on for a long time, run on for a long time, run on for a long time. Sooner or later, God’ll cut you down. Sooner or later, God’ll cut you down. Lets take vengeance on Rituals, by Roz Kaveney.

Synopsis:

Two women – and the workings of Time and Fate.

In a time too long ago for most human memory, a god asked Mara what she most wanted. She got her wish: to protect the weak against the strong. For millennia, she has avenged that god, and her dead sisters, against anyone who uses the Rituals of Blood to become a god through mass murder. And there are few who can stand against her.

A sudden shocking incident proves to Emma that the modern world is not what she thought it was, that there are demons and gods and elves and vampires. Her weapon is knowledge, and she pursues it wherever it leads her. The one thing she does not know is who she – and her ghostly lover, Caroline – are working for.

RHAPSODY OF BLOOD is a four-part epic fantasy not quite like anything you’ve read before: a helter-skelter ride through history and legend, from Tenochitlan to Los Angeles, from Atlantis to London. It is a story of death, love and the end of worlds – and of dangerous, witty women.

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

A book about a goddess of vengeance who kills other gods who rose to power using the dark power of human sacrifice? How could I possibly dislike a novel with a premise like that? Well, to start with, it could begin by incurring a Dead Lesbian Penalty right off the bat. That’s a good way to get off on the wrong foot with me.

Honestly, this book was an exercise in frustration. I wanted to like it, I really did. I did, in fact, greatly enjoy several parts of it – the story of Emma and Elodie, for instance; or the time Mara and her companions faced the Bird. But there were just so many things about the storytelling that drove me up the wall. The anachronic order, for instance. Emma’s sections proceed forwards through time in a sensible linear manner; but Mara’s are framed as her telling a long, rambling story to Aleister Crowley, and wander back and forth through time without apparent rhyme or reason. There’s the whole split structure of the book, come to that. When you alternate between two different protagonists as viewpoint characters, I assume that the story is building up to them eventually meeting. But their stories are completely separate; they never actually interact. And then there was the anticlimactic ending – everything’s been building up this mysterious shadowy dark lord figure as a threat; but then the final confrontation isn’t with him at all, but with some random extradimensional beings of pure mathematics that don’t have anything to do with anything that’s happened thus far. Huh?

The good parts of this book, were very good. But the overall presentation was just too flawed for me to overlook, and impacted my enjoyment of the story. Combine that with the Dead Lesbian Penalty, and this series is off to an awkward start with me.

Final Rating: 2/5

Dr. Gideon Fell #13: The Case of the Constant Suicides

Grab a brush and put a little makeup. You wanted to! Hide the scars to fade away the shakeup. You wanted to! Why’d you leave the keys upon the table? You wanted to! I don’t think you trust in my self righteous suicide. Let’s investigate The Case of the Constant Suicides, by John Dickson Carr.

Synopsis:

THINGS THIS MYSTERY IS ABOUT –

Four insurance policies…
A leather and metal dog carrier…
Some very old scotch whisky…
A missing diary…
A quantity of dry ice…
The license plate MGM 1911
A dressing-gown cord…
A disjointed fishing rod…

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

If you recall, the last Dr. Fell mystery I read was The Crooked Hinge; and I came away from that one feeling it lacked a certain indefinable something that I couldn’t put my finger on. Well, good news, everyone: the moment I started reading this story, it immediately leaped out at me what the previous one had been lacking – humor! That charming sense of wit which so surprised and charmed me when I first encountered it in The Third Coffin. This story opens up with two academics, both coincidentally named Campbell, who have been having a long-running feud in the newspaper’s editorial section over minor bits of obscure historical trivia which no-one else cares about, finding out that they’ve accidentally been double-booked for the same train compartment. That, right there, is exactly the sort of absurd situation which is comedy gold; and before I had even gotten to what the mystery is, it had me more interested in this story than I ever was in the last one.

Now, I am reading this book from the collection Four Complete Dr. Fell Mysteries. I remind you of that fact because, if you happened to click the Goodreads link I always provide, you might have noticed that the version of the book they show as a sample picture has a cover which completely spoils one of the major mysteries. Reading from the collection, I remained spoiler-free. I did, in fact, manage to figure out that plot point on my own – despite, in fact, being at a considerable disadvantage due to not knowing that “artificial ice” was how people at the time referred to what we in modern America call “dry ice”.

But just when Dr. Fell was going into has explanation and I realized that he was indeed talking about dry ice, I started patting myself on the back for getting something right for the first time – only to have my train of thought completely derailed by Dr. Fell’s analysis:

“Carbonic acid gas. One of the deadliest and quickest-acting gasses there is.”

– Dr. Gideon Fell, The Case of the Constant Suicides, Chapter XV

At this, I really must object. Dr. Fell has previously made certain comments regarding alleged common knowledge which I personally found dubious. For instance, in To Wake the Dead, he pontificates quite a bit about the well-known usage of soberstone rings by the Romans. While my research turned up that the Romans, like the Greeks before them, thought amethyst had the power to prevent drunkenness – the Greek name “amethystos” indeed literally means “not drunk” – I could not come up with any reference to the specific type of engraved bracelet Dr. Fell assures us were all were all the rage with Romans. At that time, however, I held my tongue. Maybe there’s a reasonable explanation, I thought; maybe it’s something that isn’t true, but is a misconception that was commonly believed at the time. For instance, I can take references to Nero fiddling while Rome burns in stride; because while fiddles had not yet been invented at the time, it’s pretty much become immutably enshrined in pop mythology. But this is just a step too far. For, the terrible carbonic acid gas which Dr. Fell makes so much ado about the deadliness of, is nothing more than common carbon dioxide.

I really must protest at that. OECD’s guidelines don’t classify carbon dioxide as toxic or harmful. Sure, enough of it in the air will asphyxiate you; but so will any other non-oxygen gas. And it is certainly not the deadliest gas there is: it takes a concentration of 70,000 to 100,000 ppm of carbon dioxide to cause suffocation, whereas, say, carbon monoxide is dangerous at as little as 100 ppm. I mean, I’m willing to allow for carbon dioxide as a killing mechanism in a case such as this, where it is specifically noted to be a small room with poor ventilation – I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it used under far less plausible circumstances in other media. Detective Conan, maybe? Or was it Spiral? Not Junji Ito’s Uzimaki, you understand, but the anime based on Spiral: Suiri no Kizuna… You know what, just forget it. The point is, I’ll buy even an implausible means of murder if you make it sound scientifically reasonable; but feed me an obvious line of bullshit that makes it seem like you don’t know what you’re talking about, and suddenly something I’d normally accept now seems ludicrous.

So, the previous book had a good mystery, but I felt was kind of lacking in the narrative department. This book, by contrast, had a really great narrative, but I felt the mystery aspect was flawed. Ultimately, I think that makes them about equal in terms of grade – I enjoyed reading this one a lot more than I did the other, but The Crooked Hinge is technically speaking probably a better mystery.

Final Rating: 3/5

And since this was the last book in Four Complete Dr. Fell Mysteries, I should give that an overall ratings as well. Let’s, we’ve got a 5, a 2, and two 3s… that’s 13 out of 20 stars, or 3.25 out of 5. But I don’t give fractional stars, so I’m rounding that down to 3. And with this, I think I’ll be taking a small break from Dr. Fell in order to look at the accidentally-neglected Golden Age detective Ellery Queen.

Final Rating (Four Complete Dr. Fell Mysteries): 3/5

Dr. Gideon Fell #8: The Crooked Hinge

What the hell’s going on? Have you gone undercover? You were here, now you’re not; been replaced by another. ‘Cause it’s still your face, but there’s something strange; not the one I remember. Let’s open The Crooked Hinge, by John Dickson Carr.

Synopsis:

This 1938 Dr. Gideon Fell British mystery is considered one of the best locked room mysteries of all time. John Dickson Carr has contributed to The Crooked Hinge: A Dr. Fell Mystery as an author. Carr’s other mysteries include Papa La Bas, Nine Wrong Answers, and Dark of the Moon.

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

The third Dr. Fell novel included in Four Complete Dr. Fell Mysteries has a case of spot-the-impostor, as two different men both claim to be Lord Farnleigh. Naturally, the dispute leads to a murder under seemingly-impossible circumstances, and it’s up to Dr. Fell to figure out the culprit.

The story was… decent, I guess. It just didn’t grab me the way some of the other Dr. Fell mysteries have. I can’t say why, exactly; but it fells like something’s lacking. Plus, all the discussion of the lurid and grotesque details of Satanism seemed a bit tonally off. Yeah, a few other Dr. Fell mysteries have had intimations of a spooky atmosphere, but they’ve tended to be pretty understated; here we have Dr. Fell happily going on about the use of baby-flesh in cosmetics by devil-worshippers. I find it a bit off-putting.

I also didn’t find the ending fully satisfactory. Not, I should hasten to add, that there was any problem with the mystery itself – unlike To Wake the Dead, I thought it was perfectly fair, all clues presented and no cheats like secret passages. My problem was rather with the narrative surrounding the mystery. It had the feeling of one of those horror-movie stingers I absolutely despise, where it’s revealed in the final few seconds that the monster is still alive and the heroes haven’t accomplished anything after all. Satanists are still at large, spreading heresy and promoting baby-flesh cosmetics! There’s no telling who’s joined the cult! Who can you trust!? Pfeh. I prefer stories with conclusions that are more… you know, conclusive.

Final Rating: 3/5

Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope

I’d give some opening lyrics, but you already have the Star Wars overture playing in your head; and what could compete with John Williams? Let the Force be with us as we look at Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope (originally titled Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker) by George Lucas (but actually by Alan Dean Foster).

Synopsis:

Luke Skywalker challenged the stormtroopers of a distant galaxy on a daring mission – where a force of life became the power of death!

Luke Skywalker was a twenty-year-old who lived and worked on his uncle’s farm on the remote planet of Tatooine … and he was bored beyond belief. He yearned for adventures out among the stars—adventures that would take him beyond the farthest galaxies to distant and alien worlds.
But Luke got more than he bargained for when he intercepted a cryptic message from a beautiful princess held captive by a dark and powerful warlord. Luke didn’t know who she was, but he knew he had to save her—and soon, because time was running out.

Armed only with courage and with the light saber that had been his father’s, Luke was catapulted into the middle of the most savage space war ever … and he was headed straight for a desperate encounter on the enemy battle station known as the Death Star!

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

When I wrote my review of Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, I kind of knew I was taking cheap shots at an easy target – it’s pretty well known as one of the odd, early tie-ins written before the Star Wars Expanded Universe really knew where it was going and what it was doing. Criticizing it is just about as easy as criticizing the Jedi Prince novels – which I’m not above doing, since those were actually some of the first Star Wars books I read as a kid, alongside the Galaxy of Fear spinoffs; but that’s going off on a bit of a tangent. The point is, since I actually liked Alan Dean Foster’s Alien universe novelizations, and Splinter of the Mind’s Eye isn’t really representative, I decided to give one of his more serious Star Wars novelizations a shot in the interest of fairness. And, since I’d heard that Foster was the ghost writer for the original tie-in novelization of the original movie, that was the natural place to start. Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was the first entry in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, but this was the first entry in the Star Wars universe period – it was released in 1976, before the movie itself.

While the book’s cover gives credit only to George Lucas, anyone familiar with Alan Dean Foster’s other movie novelizations can easily spot his characteristic work. There’s that hard sci-fi streak which compels him to put a bit more thought into the ecology of various worlds than original creators did, giving answers to unasked questions about Tatooine – for all those of you two saw the twin suns and, rather than being filled with a sense of awe and majesty at this alien setting, asked “So, how do orbital dynamics work in a binary star system?” There’s the parts which stick a little too close to the movie script, jumping back and forth between various viewpoints within a single scene, which works in a film when we can see the cuts but can be a little jarring in printed form when each paragraph break switches between the viewpoints of Luke and Darth Vader.

…But I only poke at his quirks out of a sense of fondness. Honestly, he does a pretty good job with the writing. Like I said, if he has a fault, it’s being too literal in his adaptations, trying to mimic in his writing certain narrative devices that are much more effective in a visual medium. And while that is a flaw, his devotion to the source material means that he preserves the merits of the original – so when the original is a great classic like A New Hope, the novelization ends being pretty damn good.

Of course, what you really want to know is how the book is different from the movie. It was based on the original shooting script of the movie, not the final product, so there are some differences; for instance, it has Luke making two separate trench runs on the Death Star, whereas the film edited them together into one. Also, Star Wars lore hadn’t quite crystallized at this point, so there are some parts that contradict current canon: Senator Palpatine being only the first in a line of Emperors following the fall of the Old Republic, for instance, or Darth Vader being only one of a number of Dark Lords of the Sith.

Ironically, something that manages to align pretty well with later canon is Obi-wan telling Luke about his father. It’s pure luck, since Anakin and Darth Vader were still separate characters at this point; but the scene emphasizes how Obi-wan isn’t comfortable being truthful yet doesn’t want to lie, so resorts to telling the truth “from a certain point of view”:

“How,” he asked slowly, “did my father die?”
Kenobi hesitated, and Luke sensed that the old man had no wish to talk about this particular matter. Unlike Owen Lars, however, Kenobi was unable to take refuge in a comfortable lie.
“He was betrayed and murdered,” Kenobi declared solemnly, by a very young Jedi named Darth Vader.” He was not looking at Luke.

– Star Wars IV: A New Hope, Chapter V

In terms of things left out, I think the biggest omission is the destruction of Alderaan. Oh, it still happens, obviously; but there’s no description of it happening, and no Obi-wan sitting down after feeling a million voice cry out and terror and be suddenly silenced. There are other minor points I could quibble about, but that’s the only one which I felt hurt the story.

Other than that, yeah, I’m going to say this novelization is pretty good.

Final Rating: 4/5

Dr. Gideon Fell #9: To Wake The Dead

Wake up you sleepy heads, get out of bed. If we make some noise, we’ll wake the dead. Let’s raise a racket over To Wake the Dead, by John Dickson Carr.

Synopsis:

Wealthy young Christopher Kent has undertaken a bet: that he cannot work his way from South Africa to England without recourse to his own bank account. With less than twenty-four hours left before he can reveal himself and win the bet, Kent arrives at a London hotel he knows, hoping to scam a meal–only to find himself trapped in a room with a half open trunk and a dead woman’s body.

Source: Goodreads

SPOILERS BELOW

To Wake the Dead, the second novel included in the collection Four Complete Dr. Fell Mysteries, starts off with a promisingly mysterious premise: a woman found strangled to death in a hotel room, just a couple of weeks after her husband was murdered in his house and witnesses reported seeing a mysterious figure dressed in a hotel bellhop uniform. It’s exactly the sort of setup that is just bizarre enough to make me extremely curious as to how all the weird elements are going to be tied together at the end.

Unfortunately, when the solution comes, it relies on a hackneyed old trope that is one of the greatest sins a writer in the genre can commit: the use of a secret passage. I refer you to my distinguished colleague, Dlanor A. Knox:

Knox’s 8th: The use of secret passages is FORBIDDEN!

<Die the death! Sentence to death! Great equalizer is the death!>

Now, I might have been lenient if the passageway in question was in the Four Doors house. It was mentioned early on that the house’s builder had a reputation for liking tricks such as hidden doors and secret passages. I would have considered this adequate foreshadowing that secret passages were a possibility; the original ten Knox rules allowed that one secret passage might be acceptable if the story establishes beforehand that it is set in the type of building where it would not beggar the imagination that a secret passage exists – an old mansion constructed by a notable eccentric, for instance. But this story, after mentioning the house-builder’s passion for such devices, then immediately cuts such speculation off at the knees by, on the very same page, presenting the reader with an assurance that there are no such secret passages in Four Doors. And it does not break that promise – no, instead, the secret passageway upon which this story hinges its mystery is instead located within the jail cells of the local prison!

Well, obviously! Who can blame the police for never up till now noticing the secret escape passage that lets any inmate go for a leisurely stroll whenever he wishes – it is after all a SECRET passage, impossible to find unless you already know that it’s there. Which of course the savvy reader could no doubt deduce – despite the fact that there is never any clue to the existence of such a passage, for of course the architectural details of the police station are never discussed in depth. But the mention of secret passages in an entirely different context, and the swift assurance that they do not exist in the type of mansion where they might actually reasonably be expected to be found, is of course perfect foreshadowing that they do in fact exist in precisely the place where they might least reasonably be expected to be found. Q.E.D.

That’s just dirty pool. It isn’t playing fair in the slightest. It is heresy of the highest order against the Knox Commandments; and while I would not bat an eye at such a ludicrous plot contrivance appearing in a Hardy Boys mystery, it is entirely unbecoming of a fair-play Golden Age detective story.

A note about the rating: I most enjoyed reading this story, and would recommend it over just about any other book I’ve given a two-star rating. But the fact is, this is a detective story, and so must be judged on its merits in that regard – and as a mystery, it fails. It was a dirty, low-down, no-good cheat in its answer, denying a satisfying or sensible solution to the problem it posed. Therefore, I cannot give it a passing grade.

Final Rating: 2/5