10 crime fiction cliches I can live without

I read a lot of crime fiction — and in the past I have read more crime fiction than any dozen people of your acquaintance, unless your acquaintance includes people who read incredibly fast, are moderately obsessive about doing so, and have arranged their lives so as to yield a constant inflow of books. Noah’s Archives is what most people would call “the guest bedroom”, for instance; guests for me would be impossible, since it’s stacked pretty much floor-to-ceiling with boxes of books.

In my youth, it used to be that I could plough through just about anything for the sake of being able to say that I’d read it, and there were only a very, very few books that annoyed me sufficiently to make me shut them down and move on to the next volume in my teetering chest-high stack of “to be read”.  But I am older now, there are more calls on my time, and my disposition has transited from generally sunny to generally surly 😉  And in the intervening years, I’ve developed mechanisms for avoiding books that I have learned from experience will neither amuse nor instruct me.

This started by my realizing that there was no point in my even starting a book that had a swastika on the cover; neither World War II stories nor thrillers where some Nazi plot rooted in WWII is coming to fruition in the present day is likely to hold my attention, since I just don’t find those stories very interesting.  I expanded this to include any story which had the word “Templar” in the title, or on the cover. “Intrepid archaeologist fights against an organization of Knights Templar determined to keep their secrets while they strive towards world domination” is a story that might have interested me the first time, but the 50th or 100th time left me cold.

Over the years, I’ve found that there are certain story elements — let’s call them cliches — that authors are fond of including in their stories that annoy me, for various reasons, but which are not helpfully signalled by a swastika on the cover. I don’t expect writers to stop using most of these any time soon, but there’s a small chance that I might prevent one or two from moving forward down the path of least resistance.  In the meantime, I may be able to help you identify these cliches in books that you might consider reading, and perhaps I’ll save you the time and trouble of ploughing through them … you may even realize that you actually like this sort of story and gravitate towards it.  (Apparently there are myriads of middle-aged men who like nothing more than a 900-page paperback with a swastika on the cover, written by someone pretending to be Robert Ludlum.  All I’m saying is, I’m not one of those guys.)

1. The detective’s close friend is sociopathic and violent

I first noticed this in the Spenser novels of Robert B. Parker; it seemed obvious that Hawk was in the stories to do things that were violent and intimidating, which allowed Spenser to keep his hands clean. Spenser could stand by while Hawk broke someone’s bones in pursuit of information, then take that information and use it to solve his case. You’ll notice that Hawk doesn’t seem to actually solve any problems or answer any questions; he’s the heavy. There’s also a character like this in some Harlan Coben novels; a wealthy sociopath who enjoys it when the detective asks him to do something violent. (I got so bored with Harlan Coben’s stories that I got rid of all my copies of his novels, so I can’t check the name or details.) This is kind of like having Dexter on speed-dial. I really think this is cheating the reader. The author needs things to happen to move the the plot forward; has figured out that those things won’t logically happen without violence being done; but can’t bring himself to make his precious detective do those violent and inappropriate things because he thinks, probably correctly, that the reader will think the worse of the detective. So he invents a character who is there to do the violence that the protagonist cannot. That’s cheap.

2. “My BFF Velma” syndrome.

The detective has a best friend who is unattractive, or somehow challenged, or bitchy and gay, who is willing to endlessly listen to the theories of the detective, ask stupid questions, run errands, and make phone calls at pre-arranged times, but who never actually contributes anything original to the plot. The BFF is pretty much there to keep the detective from having to do chapters in internal monologue. That’s not a friend, that’s a spear-carrier. When the author couples this with a BFF who is from a background such that the detective gets to demonstrate tolerance and acceptance of different racial origins, or sexual preferences, or ability levels — that’s just tacky, tacky, tacky.

3. The amateur detective as wish-fulfilment fantasy

When I read about an amateur detective who has a lovely house, three well-behaved kids, a husband who cares about her feelings and initiates sex three times a week; a career that doesn’t seem to require her to actually do anything to maintain it (she can stay away from the office for weeks at a time); a slender figure and a large clothing budget; the ability to invite 6 people over for dinner at a moment’s notice and produce a gourmet meal; attracts admiring male glances whenever she goes anywhere; has great landscaping, pets, vehicles, handyperson skills, credit, exercise habits, etc., etc. — I don’t see a detective.  What I see is an author who is trying to live out a fantasy life. This has a long history; Dorothy L. Sayers is quoted as saying something like, “Whenever I am short of cash, Lord Peter gets a new piano.” It’s an indication to me that the books are worthless, because if the detective is required to demonstrate some skill, ability, or knowledge, she automatically has it instead of having to go to the effort of acquiring it. And most of the events of the books are more for the author’s pleasure than the reader’s.

4. Characters in historic times exhibit societal attitudes and mores that reflect more modern values.

99% of women in Victorian England did not treat their female servants as equals, agitate for the right to vote, argue with their husbands, have extra-marital affairs at the drop of a hat, pursue careers reserved to men, and prove themselves capable of unarmed combat or marksmanship. Similarly, ancient Romans did not consult their slaves’ opinions nor refrain from whipping them for reasons connected with conscience, people of colour in 1930s southern US states did not converse as equals with white people, and mediaeval monks did not regard non-Christian religions as potentially equivalent. Most of these are laudable and even highly desirable social tropes, and we are lucky to have achieved a higher degree of enlightenment and equality than our historic predecessors. But putting modern values into the mouths and lives of people in historic times does not, as some authors fondly think, mean that we’re all the same and always have been. What it means is that you have failed to understand historical context and are lying to your readers. I accept that, say, Florence Nightingale was at the cutting edge of social change. What I do not accept is that there were hundreds of Victorian Englishwomen who felt the same way and who solved mysteries while maintaining a lifestyle so onerous that they had to make their own soap.

5. The detective relies upon extra-sensory perception, witchcraft, telepathy, pseudo-science, and, to quote the oath of the Detection Club, “Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God”.  

Or, rather, they may do so in books that do not qualify as mysteries. But if you have a detective who tries to solve mysteries by having seances, using tarot cards, sucking blood from the veins of potential witnesses, discovering poisons hitherto unknown to science, practising naturopathy, palmistry or Lombrosian face-reading, or by having an unaccountable FEELING about someone’s guilt, not only do you not have a mystery, you do not have me as a reader. If we actually could solve mysteries with telepathy or Scientology, there would be no point in having a police force.

6. Detectives with an unusually specialized area of knowledge who constantly run across crimes that involve that area of knowledge.

For instance, the proprietor of the only “rare yarn” store in the world, headquartered in a small town, is constantly encountering book-length situations where someone nearby is strangled with yarn, or a piece of rare yarn is lying beside the body, or a yarn collector is killed, or the proprietor of a yarn museum comes to town and is killed just before making an important announcement to the national press. One such novel is fine. Two are barely possible. Four is entirely beyond the bounds of probability, and twelve is just asinine.

7. The female detective who is torn between the romantic attentions of two gorgeous men, one of whom is a police officer and the other a constant source of useful information; the male detective who is torn between the romantic attentions of two gorgeous women, one of whom is his ex-wife and the other a constant source of sexual interludes.

These ideas demonstrate both an inability to create realistic characters and an inability to plot sensibly. The reason the female detective has two gorgeous men at her beck and call is that her police officer friend gets her places that she can’t legitimately go, and her other friend does things like look up credit history that the detective cannot legitimately acquire, and the female detective gets laid a lot. Meanwhile, neither of the men does the realistic thing and finds another girlfriend, or beat up the other guy and send him packing, or occasionally run away with the other guy. This is wish-fulfillment fantasy coupled with cheating the plot into place. Usually male detectives with two girlfriends follow the same pattern; both provide useful plot material like arrest records and credit information, and sexual interludes that the author fondly thinks are interesting to the reader. One of the women is usually an ex-wife because the author wants to demonstrate that the man has qualities sufficient to attract a quality woman, but is single because he gets laid more that way, and gets to have twinges of regret for his sexy ex that make him more human for half a chapter. What usually happens in real life in these situations is that both women come to the realization that the man in question is a two-timing asshole and both leave, occasionally with each other.

8. An interesting plot hook in chapter 1 that is promptly forgotten as the book moves forward.

Erle Stanley Gardner was good at creating interesting plot hooks — for instance, a pretty young woman is being well paid to gain weight and comes to Perry Mason for advice. In Gardner’s books, the weight gain is the tip of the iceberg and leads inevitably to a complicated and illegal plot and a murder that, crucially, remain connected with the pretty young woman and her weight gain. In the work of lesser authors, the young woman is merely a pawn in a larger scheme and disappears offstage after about chapter four. I rarely find out what is really happening because I so object to being treated like a forgetful nitwit that I usually don’t get beyond chapter six or so.

9. Cats who solve mysteries and display human-like qualities in the process.

Also probably dogs, gerbils, chimpanzees and any other animal you can think of, but for some reason writers mostly seem to like to suggest that cats have innate detecting skills. These emphatically are not mysteries; they are fantasy novels with mystery elements, because cats in real life do not solve mysteries, are not telepathic, and have a brain the size of a walnut that is focused 99% on food and sleep. And I personally am not fond of reading books about cats unless they act like real cats. If you are the kind of person who likes to fantasize that cats are not amoral and vicious, but instead interested in cooperating with humans in the solving of crimes, then I’m in touch with the heirs of a deposed Nigerian prince and only need a few thousand to get his millions out of Africa.

10. People who act against their own best interests or simple common sense, just to make the plot move forward.

The second victim who refuses to bother the police with the unusual piece of evidence she discovered right after the first murder. In fact, second victims who do all kinds of crazy and stupid things against their best interests or any sane person’s better judgment; I usually visualize these characters as having “Next to Die” written on their foreheads in red Sharpie.  “I won’t tell anyone about the rare postage stamp I found beside the body until I have a chance to talk in a lonely location at midnight with my friend the philatelist” is really not something people do outside of books, and it’s unfair to suggest that anyone is such a complete suicidal nitwit merely to keep the plot moving. To quote Ogden Nash on the topic of the Had I But Known novel, “And when the killer is finally trapped into a confession by some elaborate device of the Had I But Known-er some hundred pages later than if they hadn’t held their knowledge aloof,/Why, they say, why Inspector I knew all along it was he but I couldn’t tell you, you would have laughed at me unless I had absolute proof.” Trust me, the inspector rarely laughs at anyone who is offering him information. And I object to those hundred pages of padding merely because you think I’m willing to accept that people who pick up rare postage stamps beside corpses are stupid enough not to mention it to the police, let alone wave it triumphantly on camera on CNN.

Well, that’s ten — or, rather, that’s the FIRST ten I can think of.  What are yours?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Greek Coffin Mystery, by Ellery Queen (1932)

Author:

Ellery Queen is a fictional detective in the books by Ellery Queen … who is  a fictional writer.  The fictional writer whose name is on a set of novels from 1929 to 1971 was actually two people, cousins generally known as Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, whose joint Wikipedia entry is found here. As Wikipedia makes clear here, quite a few books ascribed to Ellery Queen were actually written by other authors; this one, however, is certainly the product of Dannay and Lee. Dannay also managed the affairs of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (the original version of this post erroneously suggested that it was Dannay and Lee in tandem), and the Ellery Queen name appears on the cover of many books of anthologized short stories reprinted from the magazine. Complicated, isn’t it? There’s also an old-time radio program, a series of vintage movies, a television series, comic books, a game or two, and even reference books about the character and the authors.

Publication Data:

This volume is the fourth Ellery Queen novel to be published by the cousins. The first nine books in the series each have a number of common features; there is a nationality in the title, here “Greek”; there is an introduction written by someone known only as “J.J. McC.”, now not considered canonical, and the famous “Challenge to the Reader”.  This challenge stops the action of the book and speaks directly to the reader, asserting that every piece of information necessary to solve the mystery is now in the reader’s hands. This is, in fact, the case; this volume is a strict-form puzzle mystery as I have elsewhere defined this term. One interesting conceit of this particular book is that each chapter has a single-word title; examination of the table of contents reveals that the initial letters of the chapter titles, considered acrostically, spell out “The Greek Coffin Mystery By Ellery Queen”.

The book was first published in 1932 by Frederick A. Stokes in the U.S. and a little later by Gollancz in the UK.  The first paperback edition is Pocket #179, seen at the head of this post. Many paperback editions exist; this book has only sporadically been out of print since its publication. It is now available in multiple e-book formats.

Although I have a VG copy of the first paper edition shown above, I actually used an e-book from an unknown source as my reference copy for this review (I found it in my files and have no idea where it came from, possibly as part of a gift of a bundle of e-books from a colleague); pagination is impossible to guarantee and I have chosen to not give page citations.

About this book:

Standard spoiler warning: What you are about to read may discuss in explicit terms the events of this murder mystery in GREAT detail. Please read no further if you wish to preserve your ignorance. You will also probably find here discussions of the content of other murder mysteries, perhaps by other authors, and a similar warning should apply.

IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THIS BOOK, STOP HERE AND GO READ IT BEFORE YOU RETURN. YOU WILL THANK ME. I can’t be any clearer — your first reading of this book should be unsullied by any knowledge of its contents, and the less you know in advance, the happier you will be. 

The story begins with the death of wealthy Greek-American art dealer and connoisseur Gregor Khalkis; for once in a murder mystery, there’s nothing suspicious about the death. He’s been suffering from heart troubles for years that have left him blind and under the full-time care of a physician. It’s the disappearance of Khalkis’s will that is baffling everyone; five minutes before the funeral it was there, after the funeral it’s vanished. The house is searched, to no avail, and Mr. Woodruff, the family lawyer, calls in District Attorney Pepper. More searching, and no results. No secret passages or hidden compartments in the furniture or walls; no evidence that it was destroyed. Apparently the disappearance of the will is connected with its provisions, and someone’s desire to return to an earlier testamentary disposition of the Khalkis estate … but no one can figure out what happened. Finally Pepper calls in Ellery Queen, who deduces that the only possible location is inside the only object that’s left the house unsearched — Mr. Khalkis’s coffin. He convinces the authorities of the validity of his logic and they obtain permission to dig up the coffin. Unfortunately the coffin doesn’t contain the will. What it does contain is the strangled body of an ex-convict, a convicted forger named Grimshaw, jammed in on top of the late Mr. Khalkis. 

We soon meet the household and learn that Grimshaw had been admitted to a private interview with Khalkis shortly before their deaths. Khalkis has household staff (including the beautiful British secretary, Miss Brett, who might be romantically involved with Khalkis’s handsome young nephew Alan), relatives (including his mentally handicapped cousin Demmy, who acts as a kind of valet for the blind Mr. Khalkis) and the various employees of his art gallery and other business operations.

Ellery directs the activities of his father, Inspector Queen of the New York Police, with the assistance of DA Pepper, and a large group of officers immediately begin to learn everyone’s every movement. As is common in such fictional situations, it soon becomes apparent that most of the people in Khalkis’s life had recent acrimonious interactions with him, and many of them may well have had interactions with the deceased forger. Promptly upon the start of investigations, multi-millionaire Wall Street baron James Knox, friend of both the President and the late Mr. Khalkis, insists upon being briefed upon progress; Ellery announces that the case is solved. <gasp>

A few chapters previously, the people around Ellery were baffled by his insistence on performing a number of experiments with the contents of a tea-urn in Khalkis’s office, and the surrounding used teacups, lemon, et cetera. He boils water, pours it out, measures amounts — no one understands what’s going on, and they think he’s losing his grip. As well, Ellery seems curiously interested in Mr. Khalkis’s neckties; he’d had some new ones delivered for the use of his handicapped cousin in executing his valeting duties. Ellery doesn’t explain until this point, when he reveals that, first of all, the details surrounding the neckties reveal that Mr. Khalkis has spontaneously regained his vision, and second, that two mysterious people who visited Khalkis in his study the night before his death were not actually two people, and that Khalkis had gone through an incredible rigamarole to make it seem as though two other people had been there. This idea, Ellery reveals, is the result of his analysis of tea-cups and tea water. And therefore — Khalkis murdered Grimshaw.

Immediately upon this revelation — about halfway through the book — two things happen. One is that Miss Brett reveals that, oopsie, she forgot to mention that the used teacups were differently arranged than when they were found by Ellery, and Knox reveals that there was indeed a third man in that meeting with Khalkis and Grimshaw.  How does he know?  Knox was the third man.

At this halfway point in the novel, Ellery’s house of logical cards collapses and he sinks into depression; this event actually affects the remainder of his career and all subsequent books that feature him. He determines that because he has revealed the results of his analysis and been disproven, he will never again speak about his investigations until he is absolutely, completely certain of the identity of the murderer (rather like Saul’s conversion on the road to Tarsus). Although it’s not referred to specifically in later volumes, his detective career is forever changed by this event; it also changes the way in which his work is presented. When you think about it, it’s not sensible for a detective to hide the progress of his investigations from the police; this situation was apparently set up by the authors to create a structure for future novels that would delay the solution until the end of the book.

Knox now starts the second half of the plot in motion.  He had been dickering with Khalkis for the right to purchase a Da Vinci painting that had previously been thought to have been destroyed. But Grimshaw had become involved by going to Knox, announcing that he had stolen the Da Vinci some years ago for Khalkis, and Khalkis had apparently been unable to pay him for his labours. Finally Khalkis had agreed to make out his will in favour of Grimshaw and in the interim gave him a promissory note. Khalkis, Grimshaw and Knox had all met and drunk tea on that fateful evening, and then some unknown person had tampered with the physical evidence in order to lead Ellery away from the truth. Ellery soon determines that that unknown person must logically have been in partnership with Grimshaw.

Knox refuses to hand over the Da Vinci and announces that he’ll deny having it in his possession — and that it’s a copy anyway. Ellery then realizes that his deduction of Khalkis having recovered his sight was also incorrect; instead, handicapped Demmy is revealed to be colour-blind. Ellery grimly acknowledges his mistakes and gets back to work on solving the case.

Events now progress more rapidly.  The investigation receives an anonymous tip that the manager of Khalkis’s art gallery, Gilbert Sloane, is actually Grimshaw’s brother. The police discover that an empty house in Khalkis’s neighbourhood was the temporary resting place of Grimshaw’s corpse (until the murderer had the bright idea of disposing of it in the coffin) and they discover a shred of the burned will in a furnace in the empty house, confirming that the missing will indeed left the huge Khalkis estate to Grimshaw. This means that Sloane will actually inherit through his brother; they find a key to the empty house concealed in the Sloane home. Everyone rushes to the Khalkis Gallery to arrest Sloane — and he’s been shot. Superficially it looks like suicide, but Ellery makes a deduction that proves it to be murder. And everything grinds to a halt, because Ellery cannot find a thread of the tapestry upon which to pull in order to make progress with the case.

Miss Brent reveals herself to have been an agent of the British Museum, employed to track down the Da Vinci; she’s hired by Knox to help him with his executor’s duties on the Khalkis estate. And the British Museum is about to pull the lid off the case unless Ellery solves it in a hurry.  Soon, the missing promissory note shows up — half of it is used as the paper upon which a blackmail note is typed. The actual typing of this note is of interest; there’s a tiny typographical error that is shown to the reader but not further explained.

At about this point, the above-mentioned “Challenge to the Reader” breaks the flow of the action; you now have in your possession enough information to solve the mystery and identify Grimshaw’s partner and the murderer.  I will from this point on be reticent about what happens; I haven’t yet told you anything that would make any difference to your ability to solve the murder, since if you read the book everything will be available to you.  But henceforth, I will cut back drastically on my comments for fear of spoiling things for you.

It is safe to say, though, that there is a common theme in nearly all Ellery Queen stories that is repeated here; the false solution, then the true. At this point, Ellery makes an announcement about who is guilty of precisely what; this leads to a series of events that brings us to the final solution. Ellery has set a trap for the real killer, and I wager that you will be very, very surprised by the answer, which is revealed dramatically with Ellery being shot in the shoulder and the murderer dying in a hail of gunfire at the end of Chapter 33. Chapter 34 consists of Ellery recuperating from his wound and explaining everything, in great detail, to an assembly of suspects and investigators.

Why is this book worth your time?

The year of publication of this book is 1932.  In 1932, Agatha Christie had published a mere dozen novels, but including one of the most difficult mysteries ever written (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd). Ngaio Marsh was two years away from her first book; Margery Allingham was at the beginning of her career; John Dickson Carr had not yet published a Gideon Fell or a Henry Merrivale novel; Anthony Berkeley had published a number of excellent books including 1929’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case — and the “Golden Age” mystery was in its early stages. It was not completely newborn; perhaps adolescent; still finding its way, outlining the ideas that define the form, the boundaries of the genre, its passions, its likes and dislikes, its enthusiasms and hatreds. S.S. Van Dine and Ronald Knox had both published sets of rules as to what detective stories should and should not be; clever writers like “Ellery Queen” were casting off the old strictures and extending the boundaries of the form.

This particular story has to be one of the most difficult strict-form puzzle mysteries ever written and, frankly, they don’t make ’em like this any more. This book has more sheer logic and detection in it by the halfway point than in the entire oeuvre of your average cozy author; and by the end of the novel, more difficult chains of logic than the entire oeuvre of ten cozy writers. This book was written at a time when readers did not cavil at being faced with an extremely difficult puzzle and it has, over the years, maintained its place as one of the finest examples of such a puzzle. I haven’t worked out the ramifications of this in great detail, but I’ll suggest that this is one of Queen’s top two books — the other being The Chinese Orange Mystery — and one of the top 25 puzzle mysteries ever written. Just don’t make me name the other 23, please!

When I’m analyzing a puzzle mystery, there’s a process I go through that is crucial to determining its level of quality. Simply put, once I know whodunnit, I go through the novel again from the murderer’s point of view and see if everything makes sense. And I think you would be surprised at how often things just do not make sense when I do that. For instance, I recently looked at a poorly-written mystery by Frances Crane, The Applegreen Cat. (My analysis is here.) Among other problems, the plot consisted of a mystery that was difficult from the point of view of the reader — but ridiculous from the point of view of the murderer, who apparently deliberately waited until the country house was filled with house guests before embarking upon a killing spree among the servants. Another example is an early novel of Harlan Coben’s whose name slips my mind along with most of the details. Three-quarters of the way through the book, the protagonist discovers that the murderer has a cabin  in the woods filled with evidence, and this provides everything needed to bring the book to a close. The problem is, as I realized even before reaching the end of the novel, no murderer in his right mind would have left all that tasty evidence in place, sitting in an empty cabin for anyone who happened by. It’s rather like one of those plots where the murderer has the detective at his mercy, but stops to deliver a complete detailed confession before disposing of his nemesis. It helps out the book a lot, but lowers the murderer’s IQ by 50 points in an instant.

If you go through the process of analyzing things from the murderer’s point of view, everything in this book continues to make perfect sense. The murderer’s motives are clear; they make sense and continue to make sense once you know what they are. The only thing that trips up the killer is a trap set by the detectives that is also based on something that the murderer needs to see happen. The tiny clues left by the murderer are tiny accidents; they aren’t taunts left by the killer, or foolish oversights, but something small and careless like closing a door when it shouldn’t have been closed, or not predicting that a character may confess something that is not in his best interests in order to cooperate with the police. And there are not many puzzle mysteries about which this can be said. Nothing depends on coincidence, chance, acts of God or ridiculous motivation. Just about the only logical flaw in the entire novel is the size of the fragment of the will that is found in the furnace of the empty house, and the fact that it contains precisely the information that is needed to move forward; this is a bit of a stretch, but, you know, it could happen. All the clues you need are fairly there, and the Challenge to the Reader is accurate.

The other part of this book that is beautifully crafted is the false trail that the reader is meant to follow. I read this book as a teenager and I remember the sense of exultation with which I came to the conclusion that the authors wished me to reach; I’d spotted the tiny clues, I’d noticed the snippets of dialogue, and I’d realized what they meant. I felt smart. By golly, this mystery business wasn’t so hard after all, I thought. And then I realized that I’d been well and truly fooled, and that was what the authors had meant to happen. Up until that point, I’d merely failed to solve the mystery, or I’d guessed sort of randomly at a possible solution. This time I’d tried to solve the mystery, and I’d been fooled. And it may well be this book that started me on a lifetime of challenging my wits against those of the author.

In short — this is one of the finest strict-form puzzle mysteries that you will ever have the pleasure of failing to solve. In the past, for the benefit of a friend who hasn’t yet had the pleasure of encountering this mystery, I’ve taken a cheap paperback and torn it in half at the point at which the Challenge to the Reader appears, in order to give my friend the chance to give this mystery the attention it deserves without the opportunity to spoil it by peeking. There are not many mysteries worth doing that with. If you enjoy the experience, and you see a cheap paperback copy go by, pay it forward for a friend.

Notes for the Collector:

As of this writing, AbeBooks has on offer a Good copy of the first edition, inscribed by Frederick Dannay to his sister-in-law, for $500, and two unsigned copies of the first for $236 and $250. The second edition will set you back $175, and a copy of the first UK from Gollancz is listed for about $60. I am aware of an interesting edition from International Readers League in 1933, with a street map and floor plan of the Khalkis house (like the ones reproduced here, which are also in the first paper edition), and Abe has a copy for $75.

Some crazy person on ViaLibri wants $500 for the Bestseller Mystery/Mercury edition of 1941, and I can only think that it has about $490 in cash tucked between the pages. Amereon reprinted this title in 2001 and I can’t think why this particular book is bringing prices in the $75 range for an undistinguished hardcover with no jacket.

In paper, the 1942 first paper edition from Pocket is quite collectible because it’s a low-numbered book in that pioneering series, collected by many, even though, as you can see from the illustration at the top of this post, the cover art is downright unattractive — muddy, unexciting and dull. (When you look at the gaudy but exciting cover of The French Powder Mystery from the same company at about the same time, you wonder if the publishers were trying to make the Greek Coffin look boring!) Mine is a relatively nice copy and what appears to be a similar one on Abe is listed for $20; I’ve seen many copies of this book and many of them appear to have vertical creases in the cover, rolling, etc. There is a Penguin greenback available, of which there are many collectors, and many other editions.

There’s a Cardinal edition that has a great piece of “girlie leg art” on the cover and, for once, it actually depicts a scene from the book. One quirky favourite edition of mine has always been a uniform set of Signet paperbacks from the early 70s with a tightly-kerned Helvetica title and cover art of a pretty model posed within a box, holding an oversized prop that has something to do with the plot.  Possibly this has something to do with the fact that in many cases this was the first edition that passed through my hands; at this remove, they look quite camp. Your mileage may vary. The point is that, depending on what your budget and collector’s instincts might be, there’s something for you. My own recommendation would be the signed first, which is quite scarce with any signature, and for smaller budgets the best copy you can afford of the Pocket edition, unless you like “girlie leg art” in which case the Cardinal edition may suit you best.

2014 Vintage Mystery Bingo:

This 1932 volume qualifies as a Golden Age mystery; third under “D”, “Read a book already read by another challenger.” This volume was reviewed on February 17, 2014 at a blog called “Classic Mysteries”; the review is found here. For a chart outlining my progress, see below.