Hercule Poirot is a passenger on board a flight from Paris to Croydon (which was the main London airport at that time). Sometime before landing, one of the passengers is found dead – it is Madame Giselle who is a wealthy French moneylender; initially the cause of death is said to be a reaction to a wasp sting but Poirot spots the true cause of death: a poison-tipped dart which has been apparently fired from a blowgun. The case then becomes one of murder.

It is a classic locked room mystery with a murder being committed in a space occupied by thirteen people with no-one witnessing the crime and all of them conceivably could have a motive for the death. The joy is in the puzzle and trying to solve it before Poirot the first time you read it and enjoying the journey thereafter.

This is another of my favourite Agatha Christie novels and edges out other Agatha Christie  contenders Murder on the Orient Express and The Mystery of the Blue Train as my L6 entry (“Read One Book that involves a mode of transportation???) on the 2015 Vintage Mystery Bingo Golden Age Card because of the Tom Adams cover of the Fontana paperback version that I read when I was young (which is the image at the top of the page) – this is just a gorgeous piece of art; my absolute favourite Tom Adams cover is that for The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (below) which is inspired by John William Waterhouses 1894 painting The Lady of Shalott [looking at Lancelot from the Window] (further below).

2 good books on Tom Adams’ work in general (and the Agatha Christie covers he has painted in particular) are

• “Tom Adams Uncovered: The Art of Agatha Christie and Beyond” by Tom Adams & John Curran, 2015
• “Agatha Christie: The Art of Her Crimes” by Tom Adams & Julian Symons, 1981

 

This is the 9^th novel featuring the mysterious Albert Campion

Lugg is reading the obituaries from the Times aloud to Campion one morning and comes across one for an old school nemesis of Campion – R.I. “Pig??? Peters who has died aged 37. In the morning post that day Campion had received an anonymous letter inviting him to the funeral which has a curious reference to Moles (“Why should the mole move backwards? — it is not yet eleven.“). Campion attends the funeral where he meets Kingston, a bored local doctor who had looked after Peters in his dying days, and an old school chum Gilbert Whippet who also received an anonymous letter with the obscure references to moles.

Five months later in June, Campion receives a panicked phone call from a friend saying something about a murder. He drives down to the friend’s home where her father reveals the most assuredly dead body of R.I. “Pig??? Peters, his head having been caved in no more than 12 hours earlier.

A second funeral follows attended by some of the visitors from Peters’ first funeral and some not-so-grieving acquaintances of the late Pig. A little English village is now becoming very crowded indeed.

Thus begins Campion’s search, leading to a missing body, a grisly scarecrow and one too many beers for Lugg before he discovers the madman that planned more than a few murders.

 

I came to Margery Allingham relatively late in life having read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen in my teens (and before – I do have a school report from when I was aged 11 chastising my parents for letting me read “age-inappropriate literature??? such as Christie & Doyle) and Dorothy L Sayers in my twenties. I read my first Margery Allingham in my 40s after re-watching the Peter Davison Campion series when it was released on DVD.

This is a very short novel (technically a novella as it is just under 40000 words) and is very fast moving as a consequence with subplots that efficiently establish character and add a touch of levity to the proceedings without interrupting the emphasis of the novel.

It is unusual in that it is the only story told from Campion’s own point of view.

In my opinion, Allingham does tend to vary a lot in her work (in style and readability – I personally just cannot get into Tiger in the Smoke which many people say is her best) and I think that this is a good starting point for Allingham & Campion as it is a fairly traditional fairplay mystery with no rug-pulling twists and you can work out the perpetrator, method and motive from the evidence that is presented.

This novel was chosen as my L2 entry (“One Book that has been made into a Movie or TV Show”) on the 2015 Vintage Mystery Bingo Golden Age Card for 3 reasons – it is one of my favourite Agatha Christie novels, it has an unusual narrative structure and it is has been dramatised in some interesting & different ways.

The novel follows the murders of the title and their investigation as seen by Hastings, Poirot’s old friend. Before each murder, Poirot receives typed letters signed by A.B.C. giving the date and location of the next murder which move alphabetically – Alice Ascher is a tobacco shop owner who is killed in her shop in Andover, Betty Barnard is a flirty waitress killed in Bexhill and Sir Carmichael Clarke is a wealthy man killed at his home in Churston. With each victim is left a copy of an ABC railway guide.

The unusual structure is that each chapter is narrated by Hastings followed by a description of events in the life of Alexander Bonaparte Cust, a travelling salesman who received a head injury in the Great War and is subject to memory blackouts and constant headaches. This third-person narrative is supposedly reconstructed by the first-person narrator, Hastings continuing Christie’s commitment to experimenting with points of view as seen most famously in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

 

I like the ABC Murders because it is a chase novel with multiple mysteries – Is Cust ABC? Does he know if he is ABC? If he isn’t then who is? Why are the murders occurring? Can Poirot prevent a murder and break the sequence?

 

There are 3 contrasting TV/Movie adaptations that spring to mind

There is the 1965 film The Alphabet Murders with Tony Randall as Hercule Poirot which does emphasise comedy (and has a rather buffoonish Poirot) but I still quite like it as a film although Agatha Christie had some major issues with the script which is why Zero Mostel dropped out (for scheduling reasons) and was replaced by Tony Randall.

There is the 1992 TV version with David Suchet as Hercule Poirot which is much more faithful to the novel albeit with some minor changes and characters omitted mainly to fit in the time constraint of the broadcast slot available.

Finally, there is the 2009 version in the French TV series Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie entitled Les meurtres ABC which takes some very substantial liberties with the concept of Poirot (slightly less so with the story) and is also fairly comedic – it is Agatha Christie but not as we usually know it; this is one episode of the series that is available with English subtitles on DVD. I personally have a soft spot for this series (especially the later ones with Inspector Swan & Alice Avril (a Journalist)) but it is not one for the purists.

 

This is the 7^th Gervase Fen novel by Edmund Crispin.

A young actress, Gloria Scott [1], drowns after throwing herself off Waterloo Bridge. The news sends shock-waves around the film studio at Long Fulton where Gervase Fen, Oxford Don and amateur criminologist, happens to be working as a consultant on a bio-pic of the life of Alexander Pope the poet ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pope ) . With help from his friend, Inspector Humbleby, this tragic loss of young life leads them to many more dark places – Ms. Scott’s room has been searched and all signs of her real identity have been removed. Mere minutes before Humbleby interrogates her co-workers, one of them, a lecherous cameraman, is poisoned and more deaths are to follow.

This novel is set in a world that Bruce Montgomery (the real person behind the nom de plume of Edmund Crispin) knew well as a professional composer most often of film music (see http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0599736/ for a full list of the 32 films he worked on from 1949 to 1966 – 1961s Raising the Wind, a broad comedy, is an especially interesting film for fans of his novels as he wrote both the screenplay and the score for this film from the Carry On directing/producing team with a cast of classic British film comedy stars)

This does seem to be the Fen that people seem to be most divided over with some disliking it intensely – the usual criticisms are (1) the absence of the killer for most of the novel – he/she appears in person or by letter only at the beginning and end, (2) that Fen tends to stay in the background for much of the book and (3) the comedy is too much in the foreground.

Personally this is one of my favourite Fens precisely because of there is a more sophisticated level of humour than with some of the other Fen books mostly throughout (the start is a bit iffy from a humour perspective) and the fact that Fen has to act as an observer here because this is a world that is quite distinct from his usual intellectual milieu so we see what he sees. There are crimes but I am not sure it can really be classed as a pure mystery.

This is almost the end of the run of Fen novels in the 1940s and 1950s, The Long Divorce followed in 1952 along with some short short stories collected in Beware of the Trains (1953) and Fen Country (1979). One more novel appeared in 1977 – The Glimpses of the Moon – but Crispin/Montgomery turned to reviewing, editing anthologies (mostly of SF but there are 2 good Crime/Mystery anthologies) and writing Film Music (at least until the mid-1960s) – see David Whittles Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin: A Life in Music and Books for more details of his life.

 

I aim to complete my reviews of the set of Fen novels and short stories at some point in the future.

 

[1] Presumably the stage name of the actress is an homage to “The Adventure of the Gloria Scott??? by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

 

In the sleepy English village of Sanford Angelorum, professor and amateur detective Gervase Fen is taking a break from his books to run for Parliament. At first glance, the village he’s come to canvass appears perfectly peaceful, but Fen soon discovers that appearances can be deceptive: someone in the village has discovered a dark secret and is using it for blackmail. Anyone who comes close to uncovering the blackmailer’s identity is swiftly dispatched.

 

This is the 6th Gervase Fen mystery by Edmund Crispin – it is not the greatest whodunnit in the series but it has a great deal of humour most of which is derived not from the investigation but from the peculiarities of English village life that Fen meets in the course of his campaigning.

Not the best of Fen but still a very engaging read especially in a time of general election campaigning when faced with the absurdity and self-importance of politicians.

Simon Brett – The Tomb in Turkey: a Fethering Mystery

Hardback: 192 pages (November 2014 –UK, March 2015 – US)

Publisher: Creme de la Crime

ISBN: 978-1780290690 (Hardback)

 

THE TOMB IN TURKEY is the 16^th of the Fethering series of novels by Simon Brett.

Carole Seddon is not a person who normally enjoys holidays but her friend Jude persuades her to accept a fortnight’s free accommodation at a luxurious Turkish villa owned by Jude’s property developer friend Barney Willingdon.

Jude has already learnt that their host has a past darker than she believed from their past liaison – with enemies from his ruthless business deals and complicated love life and questions remain unanswered about what really did happen to Barney’s first wife, Zoe?

From their arrival the holiday is marred by a series of menacing incidents with threatening messages daubed on the walls of their villa upon arrival and their host is accosted by a knife-wielding man at a local restaurant.

So Carole and Jude start to do what they do best – investigate.

 

Like the previous Fethering novel I reviewed (The Strangling on the Stage) what you get here is a good solid character driven novel in an interesting milieu with characters who are believable if a little bit over the top.

I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did the last book as there really isn’t a strong whodunit here – pick the character who is most out of place and that is your killer BUT this is a nice traditional cozy mystery with just a little bit of dark humour and I will continue to try out more of the series now as a result of reading this one – it wasn’t as good as the last few Charles Paris mysteries but even a poor Simon Brett is still a mile in front of most authors for my money.

My copy was provided by the publishers, Severn House, via Netgalley.

Harriet Vane returns reluctantly to her alma mater of Shrewsbury College, Oxford to attend the annual Gaudy dinner. Expecting hostility because of her notoriety (see Strong Poison), she is surprised to be welcomed warmly by the dons, and rediscovers her old love of the academic life.

Some time later the Dean of Shrewsbury College writes to ask for help as there has been an outbreak of anonymous letters, vandalism and threats, apparently from someone within the college, and a scandal is feared. Harriet, herself a victim of poison-pen letters ever since her trial, reluctantly agrees to help, and spends much of the next few months resident at the college, ostensibly to do research on Sheridan Le Fanu and assist a don with her book.

This is much more of an Harriet Vane novel than a Lord Peter Wimsey novel – it is not a murder mystery (unlike my personal favourite Dorothy L. Sayers’ novel Murder Must Advertise) but it does have a great deal of suspense interwoven with the love story between Peter & Harriet and an examination of women’s struggles to enlarge their roles within the social climate of 1930s England (especially within Universities – at Oxford women were not able to graduate until 1920),.

In a sense it is the last pure Lord Peter Wimsey novel as the next one (Busman’s Honeymoon) is adapted from a jointly written stage play.

Overall, it is an excellent novel to read even if you don’t like crime fiction as it is very well written and does engage you when reread.

I am taking part in the Golden Age Card of the Vintage Mystery Bingo in 2015 (Golden Age Vintage Mysteries must have been first published before 1960) and am treating this is my L5 entry (“Read One Academic Mystery).

The Moving Toyshop is a comic crime novel by Edmund Crispin, published in 1946. The novel is the 3^rd to feature the detective and Oxford don, Gervase Fen.

Richard Cadogan (a poet & friend of Gervase Fen) is struggling to write and sets off for Oxford in the middle of the night for inspiration. However he gets stranded in Didcot – he then gets a lift in a lorry to Oxford as far as the Headington roundabout and then sets off to walk into town. He gets lost and stumbles into a toyshop where he discovers a dead body.

The next morning having awoken bruised and battered by an unknown assailant he tells the police of the incident but the toyshop has vanished together with the body and there is a grocery shop in its place.

Cadogan seeks out his friend Fen (who he knows to be an amateur detective) and the two of them set out to solve this apparently non-existent crime – a quest which involves a great deal of dashing around the countryside in Fen’s sports car (Lily Christine III), sitting arguing about English literature, the gathering of a set of eccentric side-kicks and even more eccentric villains.

They end up uncovering a series of barely plausible complex happenings on their road to the truth.

 

This is one of the great comic crime novels and , in my opinion, one of the best Crime Novels full stop.

It is full of charm & high jinks, very funny at times and incredibly literate with everybody in the novel constantly quoting poetry and Jacobean drama and the fourth wall being breached on more than one occasion (my favourite is the exchange when deciding which road turning to follow – “Let’s go left”, Cadogan suggested. “After all,  Gollancz is publishing this book.” – Victor Gollancz was a left-wing inclined supporter of socialist movements commissioning such works as The Road to Wigan Pier.)

 

I am taking part in the Golden Age Card of the Vintage Mystery Bingo in 2015 (Golden Age Vintage Mysteries must have been first published before 1960) and am treating this is my L3 entry (“Read One Book with an Amateur Detective”).

It could have been taken as L5 (“Read One Academic Mystery”), G4 (“Read One Locked Room or Impossible Mystery”), D6 (“Author whose first or last name begins with the same letter as yours” – Edmund Crispin was really Bruce Montgomery so MB reversed) or N2 (“Read One Book with a Place in the Title” – Toyshop)

Luca Veste – The Dying Place

Paperback: 408 pages (December 2014); Kindle: 1528Kb (October 2014)

Publisher: Avon

ISBN: 978-0007525584 (PB) , 978-1-61695-401-7 (E-book)

 

This is the 2^nd novel by Luca Veste featuring DI David Murphy and DS Laura Rossi.

DI David Murphy and DS Laura Rossi make a grisly discovery in front of a church in Liverpool of the body of a teenage boy – his torso covered with the unmistakable marks of torture.

They discover that the 17 year old boy had been reported missing by his mother 6 months ago but no one has been looking for him – he was a known troublemaker but did no one care if he was alive or dead?

The police soon realise that Dean Hughes is not the only boy who has gone missing in similar circumstances and that someone in Liverpool is abducting troubled teens with terrifying plans for them. Someone who thinks they are above the law.

 

The criminology background of the author is apparent as the story highlights the impact of violent crime on the families of victims and how society, the police and the media have an implicit (and sometimes explicit) hierarchy of victims.

But this is not a mere diatribe or polemic as the story is told well through multiple points of view which flow naturally and despite having the same lead characters is a different type of novel to DEAD GONE.

This is not at all cozy and is quite dark at points but it will make you think and make you keep turning the page.

 

Steve Cavanagh – The Defence

Trade Paperback: 305 pages (March 2015)

Publisher: Orion ISBN: 978-1-0491-5250-9

Eddie Flynn is a New York lawyer who has not set foot inside a courtroom for over a year (for reasons that become clear later on in the book).

He has to return to the courtroom when he has threatened with a gun in the toilet of a diner by Arturas and taken outside to meet his boss Olek Volchek, head of the Russian Mafia in New York who is facing murder charges. The reason for his sudden change of heart about returning to the legal profession – it is not the gun that is the incentive but that Oleks goons have Eddies ten year old daughter Amy in a safe house (or at rather ‘a safe for the moment house’) and that they have given Eddie a bomb lined jacket to wear in court to dispose of the prosecutions star witness.

To further show that they mean business they show Eddie a white gym bag with his ex-partner Jacks head in – he was made the same offer (albeit with the life of his sister as the incentive) and couldn’t make it into the courtroom through fear.

Thus Eddie has 48 hours to both keep Volchek a free man and hope that they stick to their deal (which he views as unlikely) or come up with a plan that saves his daughter first and himself if he can.

I am not usually a big fan of legal thrillers (the odd John Grisham has been my limit recently although I did like Perry Mason when I was younger) but I was persuaded to read this one by the reviews I read elsewhere which were glowing and by the fact that the writer is Northern Irish (I may be a blow-in (here nearly 15 years now) but I do support the local talent).

If anything the reviews were giving faint praise – this is a really really impressive debut novel.

Eddie Flynn is engaging character whom you do root for despite his murky past and present – he is a kind of ‘if you get given lemons you make lemonade’ guy who thinks on his feet and has friends who can help him out of an hole or both sides of the law.

The writing is fast-paced but very literate – it is a roller-coaster ride for Eddie but you keep turning the pages to see what is coming next.

I will certainly be looking out for the next book from Steve Cavanagh, which the author said at the launch at No Alibis, will be another Eddie Flynn novel.