Agatha Christie 100 - The Man in the Brown Suit

The re-read continues apace, and we are now going to take a look at The Man in the Brown Suit. This novel, published in 1924, is Agatha Christie's second adventure story, following The Secret Adversary, which I will return to in a future post.

The novel introduces us to Anne Beddingfield, a young woman of no means whose father passes away in the early parts of the story. She is taken in by the family's London solicitor, and while in that big city witnesses a man falling onto the underground rails after which the body is searched by a man who claims to be a doctor, though Anne suspects otherwise. And then a murder takes place in a house belonging to Sir Eustace Pedler, a man of a lot more means who is just about to travel to South Africa. Anne manages to finagle her way into the coterie surrounding Sir Eustace and onto the ocean liner Kilmorden Castle where various mysterious events take place.

As mentioned above, this is an adventure thriller and definitely not a fair play mystery. This being Christie, there will still be some clues that will need solving, but even though Colonel Race - one of Christie's returning characters - is in this one, don't expect many deductions. Things just happen, mainly because Anne is a headstrong, impetuous character who's in a bit over her head. Though it has to be said that she learns from experience and by the time the novel ends she's come quite a way.

This is fairly typical of a 20s thriller, with lots of romance and incredible stuff happening over and over again. Though longer than The Mysterious Affair at Styles, it was a very quick read - a true page turner. A lot of fun, but on the whole fairly insubstantial. I'll give it a 30 out of a 100 - quite a bit below average for Christie. (Remember, the ratings only apply to Agatha Christie's works - if a novel gets a 30, it would probably beat a lot of non Christie works...)

1987

2003

The Swedish title, Mannen i brunt (literal translation: The Man in Brown), is obviously no improvement on the English - it's just shorter.

Fun fact: This novel was the last Christie novel to be translated into Swedish, and there are in fact only two Swedish editions of this story. (Yes, yes, if you want to count hardback and paperback as different editions, well, then there's more than two editions. But I tend to separate editions as publications with different cover art, and that is the definition I will use hereafter.)

I was actually not aware of the edition from this century before writing this post, but it turns out that it's a large print version published for some reason or other. It's as obvious and dull a cover as you can create, really.

The one I have is therefore quite obviously the earlier one, which has an evocative cover focusing on the elegant Anne and the ocean liner that features in more or less half the story. The covers for the 80s Christie publications in Sweden were created by an Englishman called Leslie Quagraine, and he has a fairly distinctive style which often produced fine results. This, for instance, is one I like.

Agatha Christie 100 - The Mysterious Affair at Styles

As most everyone in the mystery field will know, 2020 marks the 100 year centenary of the first publication of an Agatha Christie mystery. To mark this occasion, I have decided to try and re-read all Agatha Christie novels. If I am to read all 66 of them in a year I will have around five days for each novel. We'll see if I can keep up the pace throughout this year.

Accompanying this re-read I will try to make a post on each novel. I won't dwell too much on the contents - but I will give a summary and a short opinion with ratings out of 100 (very appropriately). Instead I'll focus on the Swedish editions of each story, the covers and some of the publishing history of Agatha Christie in Sweden.

My re-read will be in chronological order, however with a bit of a twist. As I mentioned above, there are 66 Christie novels. Exactly half of them are Poirot novels, so every other novel I read will be a Poirot novel.

As for the other books, I've divided them into three categories: Marples (12 novels), Tommy & Tuppences (4), and everything else (17). Hey, you say, why don't Battle or Race get their own categories? Just because. Race only has two starring roles, so that would be a pretty tiny category. And even though Battle has as many starring roles as T&T, I feel that the latter are much more distinct as their own thing. To be honest, the Battle stories could have featured really any copper and no one would notice any difference.

Anyway, I took these three categories of Christie novels and mixed them up, spreading out the two smaller categories so I never have to read two books from the "other" cathegory close to each other. Easy as a somewhat heavy pie.

And so, without further ado, let's get on with the first Agatha Christie novel ever published - The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

The story takes place during WWI, when Captain Arthur Hastings has been sent home from the front. He comes across an old acquaintance, John Cavendish, who invites Hastings to stay with him and his family at their family home, Styles. The mater familias, Emily Inglethorp, has recently married a much younger man, Alfred, much to the chagrin of everyone else in the family. One night, the old lady is found on the brink of death. She only manages to utter the name of her spouse before expiring. Luckily, in the village is an eccentric Belgian former policeman, Hercule Poirot, whom Hastings has had the fortune to meet some years earlier...

This is a very good debut from Christie. It's got a good cast of suspects - the whole family and friends living at Styles - and several good red herrings to divert suspicious towards many of them. It also has a very ignorant narrator in Hastings, who manages to misinterpret every situation it is possible to misinterpret. Poirot is fairly active in this one, running around and acting more eccentric than I remember him from other stories. The solution he produces is not bad at all and follows well from everything we've been told throughout the novel. I'd give this a 68 out of a 100. It's not absolutely top tier, but well above average. One of the best of Christie's first decade.

1929

1935

1953

1963

1972

1984

2000

2015

2020

Agatha Christie's early Swedish publishing history is a bit chequered. This novel was actually not the first to be translated - it had to wait until 1929, when three other novels had already been published in Sweden. When it finally appeared, it received the title En dos stryknin (literal translation: A Dose of Strychnine). If you ask me, the Swedish title is a bit better, though none of them are fabulous. The English one is neutral to the extreme, almost sounding like one of those Victorian melodramas. The Swedish title isn't particularly alluring or eye-fetching, but at least it still conjures up an image of a mystery.

In Sweden, Agatha Christie was often published in different series. The main ones are the mid 60s Zebra series, Delfinserien from the 70s, and the simple Bonniers editions from the mid 80s. We've had several titles in the mid 10s lately as well. Unfortunately, I don't think any of these editions feature the complete works of Christie, which means that if you want to collect Christie's entire oeuvre in Swedish, you'll have to put up with owning books in quite different styles.

In this case, the edition I own is the paperback from 1963 above. I like that cover quite a bit. Like the covers surrounding it, it focuses on Alfred Inglethorp's sinister appearance. The name of the series this edition belongs to is clearly indicated at the top of the cover.

The 1972 edition belongs to Delfinserien. As you will see in future posts, I will generally gravitate towards this latter edition, because they are to me the quintessential covers. Delfinserien often featured somewhat surreal covers, with a very distinct look. The mid 80s covers are also quite good with the very distinct style the author's name is featured in. This one is actually one of the most non-descript of this series.

The two earlier covers are quite generic in my opinion, and quite what that train is doing on the second cover, I don't really know. The mid 50s cover is more indicative of the contents, and while not a favourite of mine is still perfectly all right as a cover.

As for the first two covers from this century, they're not to my tastes. The 2015 one is indicative of modern book publishing and doesn't appeal to me much, while the 2000 edition has a photography, which can be an effective cover in some cases, but this one of some coffee cups is a bit meh. 

 Finally, an anniversary edition came out in 2020, celebrating the 100 years since the novel's first publication. I like this one better than the previous one, though I could do without the black anniversary circle.

God jul!

I'd like to take this moment to wish you all happy holidays over the end of this year. I sincerely hope that next year will be exactly what you want it to be, especially if that includes reading, watching and discussing mysteries!

As is quite obvious, I didn't quite get back to this blog during the end of the year, partly because of the series of - hopefully - interesting discussions on Edgar Allan Poe and his groundbreaking works in the mystery genre. If you haven't already taken a look, then hie thee over to the now increasingly Christmassy The Invisible Event (the link is to the fourth of five parts in this discussion topic).

But mainly it's been because I haven't been able to read as much as I had hoped, and therefore I haven't had much to discuss here. So instead of promising when I'll return, I'll simply promise that I will return. I have several ideas swimming around in my mind, and we'll see if one or two of them can't come to fruitition.

Take care of yourselves and each other, and if you have the inclination to feel just a tad Swedish over the holidays, then do what we do and watch some Disney!

Challenge the Impossible - Edward D. Hoch

Things have been a bit sporadic here on the blog the last few weeks, mainly because it's summer. And after this post, I will take a longer summer holiday, which means that you should not expect new posts here during at least July and August. Cue Cliff Richard song from 1963 here.

However, before this well-deserved time off, I will leave off with the final collection of stories in the Dr. Sam Hawthorne saga by short story maestro Edward D. Hoch. "Challenge the Impossible" collects the final fifteen Hawthorne tales, all published in the 00s and now collected by the always reliable Crippen & Landru. As always, all stories are called "The Problem of..."

We start off with "... Annabel's Ark", wherein a new veterinarian has moved to Dr. Sam's corner of the world, and one night someone kills a cat in her establishment - even though there was no way of entering the building.

A slight-ish tale to begin with, which mainly seems to exist so Dr. Sam can meet his future wife Annabel. Of course Hoch tries to inject the story with a bit more so we're not just stuck with the impossible killing of a siamese cat, but I don't think he really succeeds with this one. A bit of a disappointment, to be honest.

"... the Potting Shed" follows. In this story, a man is killed in his potting shed and the only means of entry and escape is a small window. Most suspects can alibi each other, and the only other suspect is a pregnant woman...

This is definitely a bit better, though I'm not convinced by Hoch's solution here. It's audacious and will make the reader's eyes bulge, but I don't think it works, because it assumes that Dr. Sam is rather stupid.

In "... the Yellow Wallpaper", Dr. Sam has lost his previous nurse, Mary, who goes off to join the war effort, but is saved by the return of old nurse April. In this tale Dr. Sam comes across a woman who's been locked into her attic by her husband because she is mentally not all there. However, as he comes for another visit, the woman has suddenly disappeared from the locked attic.

We haven't had the best of starts to this collection, and this tale is not entirely convincing either. The trick played to explain the vanishing... I just don't think that it would fool two reasonably clever people. I'm not going to say that it's a total loss - I think we're on an upwards trajectory here - but it would have been a lesser effort in any of the previous Hawthorne collections.

In "... the Haunted Hospital", a patient is complaining about seeing a ghost in her room for two nights running. Then, a little later, another woman is found dead inside the same room - even though it was under watch during the entire night.

Now we're getting somewhere. The culprit is easily found, and the subplot about the robber is a bit hokey, but this had a working solution. Not one of the greatest Hawthorne tales, but an entertaining read.

"... the Traveler's Tale" gives us a story where a hiker reports having seen a man and a woman dead in a house somewhere off in the woods. When sheriff Lens and Dr. Sam come to investigate, it turns out that the entire house is locked and sealed.

This is clearly the best tale so far, giving us a true locked room mystery (or even a "locked house"). Again, I don't think the villain is very well hidden, but the solution to the impossibility makes up for that.

Dr. Sam and Annabel are newly married in "... Bailey's Buzzard", and are visiting on a ranch belonging to a friend of Annabel's. When Annabel and her friend are out riding, the latter suddenly vanishes into thin air - only to turn up murdered some distance away.

I liked the setup of the problem here, but felt some disappointment with the solution. I'm sure it was just me, but it felt to me that Hoch obfuscated some information that would have helped the reader in solving the crime. Mind you, it's not a total loss, I just have some reservations about parts of the narrative.

"... the Interrupted Séance" gives us a married couple are trying to come into contact with their son who's gone missing after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor - well, it's mainly the wife who wants to - and have engaged a medium to conduct a séance. But even though Dr. Sam and Sheriff Lens are right outside the room where the séance takes place, the medium is somehow killed and no weapon can be found inside the room.

So, not a whole lot of suspects here, and I think the motive is almost impossible for the reader to work out. And yet this is a very entertaining tale with some fine misdirection by Hoch. He introduces a couple of extra characters just to keep the reader guessing, and the explanation of the impossibility isn't bad either.

In "... the Candidate's Cabin", Sheriff Lens is about to contest his last election. His competition is fighting a bit dirty, and one morning the sheriff gets a distress call from the campaign manager. When Sheriff Lens arrives he is lying dead in his cabin, and all signs point to Lens being the murderer...

Another really good story here where everything looks very black for Sheriff Lens until Dr. Sam comes to a late rescue. The motive is perhaps a little bit too obscure, but that doesn't really stop this from begin the highlight so far.

Northmont's having a war-bond rally to support the military efforts in "... the Black Cloister", and an actor with ties to the town has been invited by the mayor. However, as the event begins, a man comes at him with a gun - loaded with blanks - and the actor falls over, dead.

This is structured a bit differently than other Hawthorne stories. There's hardly a crime in it - there's a subplot where Dr. Sam becomes interested in a fire that killed a young man, and this subplot is where the impossibilites come in. However, that being said, it's still a very good story, very entertaining and also perhaps a bit more plausible than several other stories in the Hawthorne saga. Also, the mayor survives this tale, so that's gotta count for something too, right?

In "... the Secret Passage", Dr. Sam is pressured into taking on the role of "Unlock Homes", collecting scrap metal as another initiative for the war effort. Along with some newspaper reporters, he visits an old man who has a secret passage between his study and his bedroom. However, just a little later, the old man is found dead in his study, which is locked and seal - even the secret passage!

The solution is so easy and yet satisfying. The main drawback here is that the motive is entirely hidden and just revealed during the denouement which makes it incredibly hard for the reader who wants to play along and find the murderer. But a very clever story nonetheless.

A young man is despondent because he is about to be drafted, and this at the same time as his girlfriend has found out that he is pregnant. So, after a night on the town, he is driven home by Dr. Sam when he escapes from the car and dives into "... the Devil's Orchard". And even though the exits are being watched and there are no tracks leading to the wall surrounding the orchard, he simply cannot be found the next day when the whole place is searched.

The solution felt just a tad like a cheat, to be honest. I don't think the clueing gives the reader much chance to find out how the miracle was worked. It's a fine problem and a fine story, I just feel that Hoch could have done better with his misdirection here.

A man with delusions and a leg in a cast claims that "... the Shepherd's Ring" can make him invisible. And as he has a major grudge towards a neighbour, there's some worry that something might befall the latter. So Dr. Sam and Sheriff Lens are guarding the neighbour's house when one night they see the delusional man outside the door - and when they enter, the neighbour is dead...

This was fun. Perhaps it's a bit too easy to find the culprit - the cast of characters is a bit too skimpy to hide the villain in - and I don't think this scheme could have worked in a million years, but the explanation to the impossibility is nevertheless not bad.

Dr. Sam and Annabel take a bit of a holiday in "... the Suicide Cottage", a building where at least two people have been found dead after taking their own lives. Unfortunately, Sam and Annabel go out for dinner, but as they return one of their neighbours is hanging dead from the ceiling in their living room, even though the house was locked and no one could have entered.

This is another highlight of the collection. The only drawback is the killer hiding where they did, which stretches plausibility too far. The rest of the story, the setup, the impossibility, the characters, the explanation, etc. is very good indeed.

In "... the Summer Snowman", a young man is found killed in his own house. Dr. Sam is one of the first on the scene, but he cannot find any weapon in the house, where the doors were locked and bolted.

Another fine story, with yet another motive that is much too hidden from the reader who wants to play along. However, the culprit stands out somewhat, because I think Hoch is a bit obvious in some of his clueing.

And then we get to the final Hawthorne story, "... the Secret Patient", in which a war prisoner is placed in Northmont's hospital, with Dr. Sam being responsible for his well-being. However, the prisoner is killed one night by poisoning, even though he was not given anything that was not tasted by any of the guards.

Yeah... Unfortunately, Dr. Sam didn't really get to go out on a high. Everything here is much too obvious - I don't know, is there really anyone who won't realise who the prisoner is? Or for that matter, who the culprit is? The only good bit is how the poison was administered, which is clever. I only wish it was married to a better tale.

Conclusion

This is perhaps the weakest of the Hawthorne collections - it starts off  badly and finishes with one of the stories that are easiest to see through. That doesn't mean that this is a total washout - not by any means! There are a number of very fine stories (everything from "... the Interrupted Séance" to "... the Suicide Cottage" is a very entertaining read), and it's obvious that Hoch's imagination was flowing freely even in his later years. If you liked the earlier collections, there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't get this one as well.

It's been a privilege to follow along with the Hawthorne saga, and it's with some sadness and melancholy that I finished the final tale here. But Crippen & Landru have promised further collections from Hoch - there's at least three in the pipeline - and even though they won't feature exclusively impossible crimes, I am 100 % certain that they will give us a lot of entertaining and puzzling mysteries.

As usual, TomCat likes all the wrong stories - and dislikes all the wrong ones as well - but he seems to have enjoyed this volume just as much as I did, over on Beneath the Stains of Time. The Puzzle Doctor over at In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel is much more correct in his evaluations of the individual stories. :)

Let me wish you all a wonderful summer, and I'll see you again here when we reach the autumn months!

The Man Who Read Mysteries - William Brittain

Another collection from specialist publisher Crippen & Landru, this one collecting all the "Man Who Read" stories by William Brittain, and also featuring a selection of stories from the same author's Mr. Strang series.

It's a bit unfortunate that we only get a sample from the latter series, but as editor Josh Pachter tells us in his informative introduction, otherwise we would have had a collection with forty-three tales, which is a bit unwieldy. But I certainly hope that sales of this volume were promising and that we'll see a second collection with the rest of the Mr. Strang stories.

From that you'll probably infer that I liked this collection, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. As always, we'll take a look at the individual stories first and then return to my overall assessment.

The first half of the book is dedicated to Brittain's "The Man Who Read" stories - a bit of a misnomer since it's not just men reading... Anyway, first out is "The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr". This is the story of a young man who wants to get rid of his uncle, and because he idolises all our favourite impossible crime writer, he decides to commit the murder in a completely locked room.

So what we get is an inverted tale with a funny ending. Not generally my thing, as you all know, but at least it's quite amusing and it's also interesting to follow the protagonist as he plans his impossible crime.

Things pick up a lot with the second instalment of the series, "The Man Who Read Ellery Queen". Unlike the first story, which was sort of a parody, this is much more of a regular mystery story, written as an homage to the great cousins. In it, a man who's recently been admitted to a house for the elderly gets a case to investigate when a neighbour has a valuable coin stolen.

This is a fine mystery with good clueing, but to be honest, I don't feel it has a whole lot of Ellery Queen about it. There's no challenge to the reader - though Brittain makes a nod to this staple of EQ's early novels - nor is there any dying message or a collection of items where one thing happens to be different in some way. It's just simply a fine mystery, well worth reading, like most Ellery Queen tales.

Next comes "The Man Who Didn't Read", and what he didn't read was Edgar Allan Poe. Here we have two men, one of whom has killed the other's wife in a car accident. And then the former agrees to help the latter with building a new room in his house...

Yeah, you all know where this is heading. This isn't really a mystery, it's a suspense story building to a climax. And when the climax is obvious, it does take away most of my enjoyment.

"The Woman Who Read Rex Stout" is an interesting inversion of genders - both in title and content - where a circus lady investigates who killed her protegé/surrogate daughter.

This story does in fact have a dying message of sorts, so at least finally we got one here. I think Brittain does a bit better in his evocation of an author here, and this is really a fine mystery. A good surprise ending to boot.

It's interesting that it's only with story no. 5 in this series that we arrive at Agatha Christie - in "The Boy Who Read Agatha Christie". This is another winner of the series, where several high school boys go into different shops in a small town and do more or less crazy things, and a young exchange student from Belgium manages to deduce the reason for this behaviour.

I think this has some Chestertonian traits as well - "where is it best to hide a tree? In a forest" - but Christie did the same thing here and there, and as a story the whole thing works pretty well. I'm not sure it's wholly fairly clued, but a good read nonetheless.

And the other household name of the genre gets his pastiche in "The Man Who Read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle". A man in a small town receives a letter from an old acquaintance which obliquely refers to the great detective, and then suddenly he is approached by people from an intelligence agency who want to find the hidden message in the letter.

To be honest, this isn't much like anything Doyle wrote. It's really just an amusing story with some Holmesian references and some code cracking that seems rather far-fetched. Not a total loss, but it's not a particular highlight either.

I mentioned Chesterton before, and of course Brittain writes his own Chesterton take-off. "The Man Who Read G. K. Chesterton" is a Roman Catholic pastor named Charles Kenney, and when one of his flock is found dead from a presumed suicide, he is not so sure and manages to get his superior to agree to an investigation of the case.

This was another fine story with a simple but easily acceptable solution to how the murder could be jigged into looking like a suicide. Isn't Father Kenney's last remark a bit un-Christian?

"The Man Who Read Dashiell Hammett" should move us into more hard-boiled territory, but instead we get a story with an old librarian who is asked by his superior and a prospective financial backer to use his mystery reading skills to find a valuable first edition volume that the latter has hidden somewhere in the library.

So what we get is actually a pure fair play mystery with our protagonist applying his reasoning to clues supplied by the financial backer. It's another good story, where the clues are perhaps just a tad too far-fetched for the reader to solve them, but nevertheless a good read.

Two delivery men have come with a load of valuable art pieces to a rich man's house in "The Man Who Read Georges Simenon". But as they unload the paintings they become somewhat suspicious of the man who met them claiming to be the security guard.

Now, I haven't read much Simenon, but I didn't really get a "Maigret feeling" from this one. Others who are more well-versed in Simenon's oeuvre may disagree, but to me this was a fairly slight tale with not too much happening in the way of plot. A bit of a disappointment, to be honest.

The previous stories have all referenced pretty big names in the mystery field, but for a reader today the subject matter of "The Girl Who Read John Creasey" feels rather more obscure. In this tale, a police officer tells his family about a case where a man was killed in a hotel room, just managing to breathe out a few words before passing away.

So, this is another dying message story. The culprit felt rather obvious to me, but the clues are pretty good and I thought the story fairly amusing on the whole. I did get annoyed with the mother's constant admonitions of her husband. "Not at the table, dear..." Bah.

The final story in this set is "The Men Who Read Isaac Asimov", a pastiche of the great doctor's Black Widowers stories. At a dinner party, a journalist tells a story of an entrepreneur who's created a grand competition for his customers to try to find out the combination to a safe where he has put a thousand-dollar bill.

This might be the one story in this series that best evokes its subject matter, because this is pretty much a Black Widowers story in everything but some of the window dressing. There are clues based on words and numbers, the characters are pretty much non-entities and everything is just really lovely. It's not a story where I'd manage to find the solution in a million years, but I really liked this one.

Moving on to the Mr. Strang half of the book, which begins with "Mr. Strang Gives a Lecture". Our protagonist is a high school teacher who solves crimes of different varieties. In this case one of Mr. Strang's pupils is accused of having committed a robbery, using Mr. Strang's car. Still, the teacher is not convinced that his adept was the true culprit.

A fairly good introduction to a new series. I'd have to say that the policeman in charge is a bit obtuse in his observation of the car's odometer. But it's a fun little story with some good conclusions drawn by Mr. Strang before we reach the end.

"Mr. Strang Performs an Experiment" is fairly topical with a female pupil accusing one of Mr. Strang's colleagues of improper advances, and so Mr. Strang designs an experiment to find out whether she is telling the truth or not.

A story that fits perfectly in our modern world. There's not much of a mystery in this one, it's simply a story of Mr. Strang's experiment where he attempts to catch the accuser out in a lie. Clever, but not the strongest story here.

"Mr. Strang Takes a Field Trip" was previously discussed in this post. It's a great little impossible crime tale.

Our next story sees Mr. Strang take on the drug trade in "Mr. Strang Versus the Snowman". One of Mr. Strang's pupils is living with his uncle, and the latter is suspected of being one of the key people in the drug trade. So Mr. Strang manages to get himself invited into their home...

A nice, fairly clued story with some fine misdirection by Brittain, though the main clue only arises due to a mistake by the bad guy.

In "Mr. Strang, Armchair Detective", our protagonist is challenged by a big city cop that he won't be able to solve a case that the latter is in the middle of right now, simply by sitting back in his restaurant chair and draw conclusions.

So, another fine story with Mr. Strang reasoning himself to a probable solution by picking up on clues in the cop's story. To be honest, this should have been the "The Man Who Read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" story instead.

Mr. Strang visits an old teacher friend in "Mr. Strang Interprets a Picture", and notices a drawing made by a young boy whose later been hospitalized. And when he manages to connect the drawing with a bank robbery, surely the villains cannot hope to get away?

This is perhaps just a bit too far-fetched to be entirely successful. I guess it could work like that, but the conclusions drawn by Mr. Strang stretch incredulity just a bit. An enjoyable read, nonetheless.

The final story in this series is "Mr. Strang Takes a Tour", where the elderly teacher is on a bus trip from the US to Canada and then back again. When a wooden cross is stolen from a fellow passenger, Mr. Strang gets suspicious.

And manages to build a chain of deductions that leads to the arrest of a fugitive. A fun story, and perhaps especially interesting as a study of American tourists going to a foreign country...

Conclusion

This was a rather wonderful collection. There are a couple of misfires - two of the stories in the "The Man Who Read" series are only so-so - but the average quality of the tales in this volume is very high indeed. This is particularly recommended for folks who like Edward D. Hoch's stories - the Mr. Strang series is very Hoch-ian, both because of Brittain's writing style and because of their content.

It's worth noting that the stories in the "The Man Who Read" series aren't particularly uniform. A couple of them are parodies while others are homages. And the Asimov one could almost have been a pastiche, had Brittain just changed the names a bit.

Being the impossible crime nerd that I am, that's really the only complaint I can come up with - too few impossible crimes! Though the one that is in this collection is really very good. It's just that it's been featured elsewhere and so wasn't new to me.

As I said above, I really hope that C&L can find a way to get the rest of the Mr. Strang stories published, they are very good indeed.

The Christmas Card Crime (ed. Martin Edwards)

With this volume we're now up to the third Christmas related anthology in the British Library Crime Classics series. Is this a story of diminishing returns, or has Edwards found a couple of bonafide winter classics for this new book?

What is obvious from the table of contents is that most of the authors here have not been featured (much) in previous anthologies, so that should mean that we can't draw much of a conclusion just from the author list. But even though these are relative newcomers to this anthology series, there are still some heavy-hitters here. The main draw has to be John Dickson Carr, who finally gets a story selected for these anthologies, but names like Cyril Hare, Baroness Orczy, Ronald Knox and Julian Symons are nothing to sneeze at either.

Baroness Orczy - A Christmas Tragedy

Lady Molly and her companion are visiting with the disagreeable Major Ceely and his daughter Margaret over the winter holidays. One night, the major is found dead in the gardens, having received a gunshot wound in his back. As he had lately quarreled with a suitor of his daughter's, that young man is suspected of the crime.

For a story from the turn of the century (the old one), this wasn't half bad. I mean, there's not much fair play and a whole lot of melodrama and admiration of the "dear lady", and the callousness of a certain character is obvious, but the story zips along quite nicely and doesn't overstay its welcome. And there's actually a bit of a surprise in that the obvious suspect is not the guilty party!

Selwyn Jepson - By the Sword

A young-ish ne'er-do-well is staying with his benefactor cousin and his family over the Christmas. Unfortunately, not only is he skint and trying to finagle some money from his wealthy cousin, but he has also fallen for his cousin's wife. And when he is denied a loan, he takes the fateful decision to get rid of the person standing between him and a fortune (and a woman).

Yeah, we've seen this plot before... Lots and lots of times. This really is the first plot you'll think of when someone mentions the words "inverted mystery". There's not all that much to distinguish it from other stories of its ilk, either. The only thing that differentiates these stories from each other is what in the end leads to the miscreant being apprehended, and I can't say that that bit excited me much either. So a bit of a dud, to be honest.

Donald Stuart - The Christmas Card Crime

Trevor Lowe, a famous dramatist (and our detective) is travelling with some companions on the train towards Cornwall, but when the train gets stuck in the snow the passengers decide to wander along the track to an inn to spend the night there. But along the way a fellow passenger, a young woman, is attacked and nearly hanged from a bridge, and when they reach the inn, she vanishes during the night and another passenger is found killed.

I thought this had a pretty exciting set-up and enjoyed the beginning quite a bit. But unfortunately it soon descends into silliness and melodrama, and unfortunately Stuart leaves a couple of huge plot holes unexplained when he tries to tie everything up at the end. (For example, how on earth could the party of passengers fail to notice that one of them was missing while the female passenger was attacked?) I was sorry to see that the promising beginning was not realised by what followed.

Ronald Knox - The Motive

A famous lawyer relates the tale of a case that somewhat stumped him. A man first made an attempt at another man's life by tricking him into swimming blindfolded in a pool and slowly letting out the water so he couldn't climb out again. And then some time later the same man is accused of having killed a fellow train passenger who vanished completely during the night.

This was much more like it. I like Knox's humour, and though I can't say that this is his best story, it still grabbed my attention. I'm sure I've read it before somewhere, but I didn't remember much about it, which perhaps doesn't sound like ringing endorsement, but as I said, this appealed to me quite a bit.

Carter Dickson - Blind Man's Hood

Already discussed in this post.

Francis Durbridge - Paul Temple's White Christmas

Paul Temple is given an assignment in Switzerland to identify a criminal who's being held there.

This is a short short, so the description will necessarily also have to be short. It's not much of a story, and there's not much detection available either. But it is quite short and gets in and out before the reader has had time to register his disappointment...

Cyril Hare - Sister Bessie or Your Old Leech

A young man is being blackmailed by someone in his adopted family, and he is now quite certain that he's identified who it is.

Bleh, I really don't like this type of stories. Nasty people doing nasty things to each other. Yuck. If I remember correctly, Hare's short stories were often of this type, unlike his novels which are generally much better.

E. C. R. Lorac - A Bit of Wire-Pulling

An old industrialist has been receiving threatening letters, and requests the company of a police officer during the New Year's celebrations when he's visiting with his daugher and son-in-law. During the night's festivities, the son-in-law sees someone through the window, and the industrialist is shot. But the culprit manages to get away, with tracks in the snow being the only traces left behind.

Kind of an impossible story, and it could have been so much better. Unfortunately, it's dead easy to see through the villain's plot. It really doesn't bode well when the reader can foresee the solution to each unexplained phenomenon as soon as they are presented. In the hands of a more experienced impossible mystery writer, I think this could have been an outstanding story, because there's a lot to recommend it otherwise. I definitely liked reading it, it was just a disappointment to see that Lorac didn't once manage to offer any surprising resolutions.

John Bude - Pattern of Revenge

Two men are rivals for a woman's affections, and then one day she is found killed in her cottage. The tracks leading to the crime scene look like those of a man with a wooden leg, and of course one of the rivals has just that.

Well, I thought the explanation for how the tracks were obfuscated - if you didn't realise from the description that they would be, well, then I'm sorry - was pretty good, but that doesn't really rescue this story from mediocrity.

John Bingham - Crime at Lark Cottage

A man arrives at the titular cottage, where a woman and young girl are living. It is soon obvious that the woman is very fearful of something, and rather quickly the visiting man begins to reason out why.

From the outset, there are really only two explanations that are possible, and it doesn't take long before it's obvious which one it will be. The surprises are fairly well telegraphed in advance as well. Not a particularly strong story.

Julian Symons - 'Twixt the Cup and the Lip

The bookseller Mr. Payne is leading a double life where he is also a robber. In this case he is out to rob a department store of some Russian jewels that are on display there. He recruits a gang of helpers to carry out his plan...

This is a typical Symons story of a crime, where we follow along more or less in real time, but fortunately, this is from early in his career, before he turned to psychological crime stories and that kind of drek. So this actually managed to hold my interest for the main part of the story. The final twist is quite amusing, though it may be the most obvious example of the "Chekhov's Gun" trope I've come across in a while.

Conclusion

Well, obviously there are quite a lot of stories with winter settings - though in some of the cases here, that particular setting isn't a huge part of the story - and Edwards has managed to ferret out a couple of worthy ones here. The obvious highlight is the Carr story, but that is available elsewhere in better collections. But Knox and to some extent Orczy and Lorac also bring the goods.

There's also nothing that is horribly bad here. There's just a couple of disappointments or stories where the plot didn't appeal much to me - as usual!

1. Miraculous Mysteries - no surprise there, this is an impossible crime anthology, so it has lots of things going for it that elevate it above all the other collections.
2. Silent Nights - the quality of the collections from here on is fairly uniform, but I think this one just manages to go to the top. A good variety of stories and a few really good ones.
3. Blood on the Tracks - a collection with few standouts and some truly bewildering inclusions, but on the whole it was still a worthwhile read.
4. The Long Arm of the Law - starts off spottily, but gets better and better, and even though it finishes with one of the worst stories I've ever read it's still distinctly above average.
5. Serpents in Eden - the very definition of average with two highlights and no real disappointments.
6. The Christmas Card Crime - even more average than the previous anthology, with just one highlight and a couple of disappointments as well. 
7. Crimson Snow - a rough start and ending to this anthology belies the fact that it collects a solid bunch of stories, perhaps only marred by the fact that there is no true highlight here.
8. Continental Crimes - a disappointing read on the whole where the great stories are few and far between.
9. Resorting to Murder - there's a bunch of easily forgotten stuff here. But also one awesome story that means that it manages to avoid being placed last.
10. Murder at the Manor - I was thoroughly disappointed that this didn't feature any true country house mysteries. I think there was one fair play mystery among the whole bunch of stories.

The Puzzle Doctor seems to have enjoyed this collection quite a bit over at In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, and Kate had many good words for it over at CrossexaminingCrime. And of course inverted mystery fan Aidan over at Mysteries Ahoy liked all the stories I had a hard time with...

The Zanzibar Shirt Mystery - James Holding

Here we have another collection of short stories from specialist publisher Crippen & Landru. In this volume, we get the complete output of Leroy King stories by author James Holding. The entire series, consisting of ten tales, is included.

All the stories of this series use the same naming convention - The Nationality Thing Mystery. As the savvy mystery reader will know, this is the very same convention used by Ellery Queen in their early novels. And this series is very much a homage to Queen. The lead characters are a pair of cousins, writing mysteries as a team under the pseudonym Leroy King.

These ten tales all take place on a round-the-world cruise, where the cousins - King Danforth and Martin Leroy - and their wives are seeing the sights around our pale blue dot (though it has to be said that the ship seems to be taking a somewhat circuitous route). The stories were mainly written during the 60s (with one straggling tale from '72), and even though there is an obvious homage to Ellery Queen - though these stories are nowhere near as formal as Queen's early novels, I'd actually say that this is closer to what EQ was writing in the 50s - they stand on their own feet as mysteries.

Most of the stories are a bit dissimilar from regular mysteries insofar as they are not really murder (or crime) investigations per se. Instead, our protagonists run into or are told about some peculiar situation, apply their reasoning skills and often find a criminal perpetrator behind the situation in question.

The first story here is "The Norwegian Apple Mystery", where a female passenger is found dead in her bed one morning with a piece of apple stuck in her throat. There are some anomalies, though, and Leroy King - let's call our cousins that - suspect that foul play may have been involved.

A fine introduction to the series which is representative of the series as a whole. The reasoning is sound and though I'm hesitant to call this fair play (the culprit is pulled out of a hat towards the end), I was greatly entertained.

"The African Fish Mystery" takes place off the cruise ship, in South Africa where the cousins and their wives have decided to take a trip through the wildlife. Their chauffeur tells them the tale of a man who had previously hired him simply to drive along the river so he could go fishing from time to time. The cousins get a hunch that perhaps fishing was not the ultimate goal of that trip...

Again, a story where our detectives simply build up a case from something that seems fairly innocuous at first glance. A fun story, though there's hardly any crime in it.

Next time we meet our travellers, in "The Italian Tile Mystery", we find ourselves in Positano on the Italian Amalfi coast. They are staying at a guest house, and the hostess tells them of an extraordinary tiled table that she was given by a guest before he passed away.

And so our friends Leroy King can start building up an interesting plot with a code cracking exercise that is perhaps just a tad too far-fetched. But codes and ciphers are fun, so I forgive Holding.

In "The Hong Kong Jewel Mystery", we're - more or less - back on the ship. It's moored in Hong Kong harbour, and a gang of painters are touching up the outside of the hull. But during the stop someone breaks in and steals valuables from several cabins - including those belonging to Leroy King!

And so our friends the authors have to help the Hong Kong police with first finding the culprit and later where he hid the valuables. The police are awfully magnanimous in taking help from a pair of mystery authors, I have to say. A nice enough story, though perhaps the least successful so far.

Our heroes spot someone is emptying out some kind of toiletries through a cabin window in "The Tahitian Powder Mystery", and when they later spot one of their fellow passengers acting somewhat suspiciously, could there be something criminal brewing?

With a bit of a twist at the end, this is perhaps the most frivolous of the stories. Fun, but mainly if you read it in the context of the whole series. I don't think it'd work as well as a standalone.

Back in Africa, the intrepid world travellers have once again gotten off their ship and are travelling around in "The Zanzibar Shirt Mystery", where they run across a drunkard in a bar who is wearing a very distinctive shirt - in fact, it's so distinctive that they are certain that the shirt actually belongs to one of their fellow cruise companions.

And from such mundane beginnings, Leroy King build up a case where a potential heir is being discredited by another one. Fun, but a tad inconsequential again.

"The Japanese Card Mystery" features another co-traveller, this time a Japanese business man who happens to have a niece who is a mindreader - at least she is able to tell anyone who phones her which card they have picked from a deck of cards.

This really is rather slight - the whole premise rests on one single thing, and it's not very hard to figure the whole thing out. But Holding still manages to give his stories a certain something that elevate them above the ordinary.

And in "The New Zealand Bird Mystery" we are introduced to yet another cruise passenger, but this time it's a dead one! Someone has killed him in the harbour of Hobart, Tasmania. And when some time later Leroy King find a mysterious message to the victim, they begin unravelling the plot behind the murder.

This is rather more substantial than the last few stories. One of the better stories here.

"The Philippine Key Mystery" takes place off the cruise ship, in the harbour of Zamboanga, where our four protagonists have met some of the locals, and during dinner in a seaside restaurant they notice that one of the local kids is wearing a loincloth that seems to be made out of prison clothes.

And from such humble beginnings we get the story of a prison escapee and how Leroy King reasons out how he escaped and alerts the authorities to his whereabouts. This whole story is more or less a flashback which sets up what we got to read about on the first few pages and is then solved in another few paragraphs towards the end. This might be the least successful tale here - it really feels padded.

Our final adventure with Leroy King is "The Borneo Snapshot Mystery, where one of the cousins cannot sleep and so is wandering about the ship at night. He comes across a dead body, lying battered at the bottom of a flight of stairs. And even though the ships crew thinks it might be a simple accident, the cousins have a different take on things.

This story is more or less two halves - the first one gives us an explanation of the mysterious death, and then there is a follow-up which solves why everything happened as it did. A good ending to a lovely set of stories.

Conclusion

This really is right up my alley. I feel that there is some similarity between the way these stories are set-up and the stories of the Black Widowers by Isaac Asimov. Unlike most mysteries, in several of these stories we are not sure that there is actually a crime committed. Sometimes it turns out that way, but not always. And it's certainly mostly a cerebral experience, there's hardly any real time action. I think the fairest way to describe them is that they are true armchair detective stories (even though there are hardly any armchairs featured). And all that fits the Asimov series as well.So if you like the Black Widowers, you will most probably like this series as well.

However, these are not really stories for anyone who enjoys modern mysteries or craves characterisations and/or psychology. These are straight up puzzles for the reader to exercise their brain with. But that's the stuff I like, as you probably all know by now, and therefore this is wholeheartedly recommended. One of the most entertaining mystery collections I've read. It's amazing that I hadn't heard much about them before being alerted to Crippen & Landru's publication.

TomCat was equally impressed with the collection over on Beneath the Stains of Time, and I see that he made the same Black Widowers comparison as I did. :)