Susan Dunlap

In Susan Dunlap's Karma, published in 1981, Officer Jill Smith is a recently divorced member of the Berkeley, California, police force attending a ceremony conducted by the new guru in town, when he is stabbed to death in full view of the audience.  Since the area is part of her beat, Smith goes to work on the case immediately, trying to sort out the motives of the various characters around the dead monk.  As the case progresses, she begins to wonder if anyone is really what they seem to be.  Having lived in the Bay Area in the 1980's myself, I enjoyed the portrait of that diverse area.  Grade:  B.  

Officer Jill Smith's ex-husband Nat calls and asks As A Favor that Jill check on one of his co-workers, Anne Spaulding, who has not come to work at the Berkeley Welfare Office.  When Jill goes to Anne's apartment, she finds signs of a struggle, overturned furniture, blood on the walls and floor, and the missing woman's purse and drivers license.  Blood stained clothing has been turned in at the police station, suggesting that a body has been dumped into San Francisco Bay.  As Jill investigates, however, an unflattering portrait of Anne Spaulding begins to emerge, as does a very fresh corpse, and Jill begins to wonder exactly how Nat may be involved.  These books tend to be police procedurals, although I have a lot of trouble believing that proper procedure was followed toward the end of the book when Jill goes to arrest the suspect without waiting for backup.  Still, I'd give it a solid Grade:  B.  

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 What is there left to say about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories?  A Study In Scarlet, published in 1887, introduced both Holmes and his chronicler, Dr. John Watson to the reading public and also introduced the public to the idea of the application of scientific methods to the study of crime.   For those reasons, I would give A Study In Scarlet a B, although this time around I found Doyle's American narrative and language more irritating than entertaining.  Grade:  B.   

The Hound of the Baskervilles still gets an A, though.  I first read it when I was about twelve years old; my mother caught me reading it late at night and made me turn out my light before I found out that the hound was a real dog and not a demonic apparition, and I couldn't sleep for envisioning a spectral hound slathering at my bedroom door.  Well plotted, well written, it still gets Grade:  A.  

I also re-read the short stories collected by Sir Arthur's son Adrian Conan Doyle in A Treasury of Sherlock Holmes, which were published over the years in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow, and The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes.   After the first several books of Holmes stories, Doyle apparently tired of writing them and decided to kill Holmes off.  To accomplish this, he introduced the criminal mastermind, Professor Moriarty in the story "The Final Problem", in which he has Holmes, pursued across Europe by Moriarty, grapple with Moriarty on the edge of the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, with the result that both men apparently fell to their death.  Later, bowing to public pressure and financial needs, Doyle resurrected Holmes in "The Problem of the Empty House", in which Holmes reveals that Watson had misinterpreted the confused footprints on the edge of the Reichenbach Falls and that Holmes had climbed up to fake his own death.  This never made much sense to me because it's apparent during the course of the story that Moriarty's chief lieutenant, Colonel Sebastian Moran knew from the start that Holmes was still alive as he dislodged boulders above him in an attempt to kill Holmes then and there, so why the need to pretend to the rest of the world that he was dead?  

At any rate, it was a very satisfying exercise to revisit the Sherlock Holmes stories.  Grade:  A overall.  

R. B. Dominic

The writing team of Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Henissart, who usually wrote under the pen name Emma Lathen, also wrote a series of mysteries under the pen name R. B. Dominic between 1968 and 1983.  This series is set in Washington, D. C. and stars Congressman Ben Safford (D., Ohio) and his Congressional colleagues.  Although they wrote seven novels as Dominic, I only have three of them.  

As they did when writing as Lathen, the authors incorporate contemporary events and themes into their plots.  Murder In High Place gets Congressman Safford involved in the affairs of an unstable Latin American country as he tries to untangle the relationship between one of his hot-headed constituents and U.S. government departments that provide aid to that country.  This book involves the meticulous plotting and background research characteristic of Emma Lathen's work, but this book seemed to plod along with no trace of the wicked humor of the John Putnam Thatcher books, and I missed that.  Grade:  C.  

Safford gets involved with the Atomic Energy Commission in Murder Out Of Commission when a powerful utility company wants to build a nuclear power plant in a small town in his Congressional district.  Most of the residents are in favor of it, hoping the construction and other jobs it will bring in will revitalize the town, but activist residents of a wealthy neighboring town fear the potential consequences of a reactor safety failure.  Grade:  C.

The subcommittee Ben Safford is on is holding hearings around the country on Medicade fraud in The Attending Physician and Ben is chagrined to find that his Ohio district is next on the list to investigate fraudulent billings by seven local doctors.   This book reminded me of Emma Lathen's A Stitch In Time, written in 1968, where doctors were again the chief suspects in a variety of criminal activities.  Grade:  C.

Margaret Doody

 Margaret Doody's Aristotle Detective has been on my bookshelf for years and I am heartily sorry I never got around to reading it before this; it's a corker of a mystery novel set in Classical Greece.   Stephanos, a young man of about 22, is out for an early morning stroll when he comes upon a scene of confusion at the house of wealthy and prominent Boutades.  The man has just been discovered shot to death with an arrow through the throat.  Worse yet, Stephanos' exiled cousin Philemon is soon accused of the murder, even though he has not been seen in Athens since he fled two years before to escape a manslaughter rap for killing a man in a fight.  To make matters even worse, Philemon is also accused of having fought for the hated Persians against Alexander's Greek and Macedonian forces.

As the only adult male in the family, Stephanos is tasked with defending Philemon during the legal inquiry into Boutades's death; feeling inadequate to the job, he consults his former teacher, Aristotle.  With Stephanos doing most of the legwork and Aristotle feeding him questions and ideas to pursue, they are ultimately able to clear Philemon of the charge and reveal the real murderer.  Grade:  A+

Hildegard Dolson

 When Grace Dilworth, newly liberated following the death of her domineering father, returns from a cruise with a handsome young "art expert" in tow, tongues in stuffy Wingate, Connecticut, wag.  And when the young man is found impaled on the spears of the sculpture he and Grace have installed in the former rose garden of the Dilworth Arts and Crafts Center in A Dying Fall, septuagenarian Lucy Ramsdale and retired Inspector James McDougal must sort it out.  Lucy is entertaining as an amateur detective, but a little of her goes a long way.  Grade:  B.

Lucy is at it again in Please Omit Funeral.  She's invited an old friend, actress Alison Moffat, for the weekend and the two of them attend a party at the home of author Lawrence Dilman, renowned for his scandalous novel, Wayward The World, which has recently been the victim of a book burning by the self-appointed local morals guardian Georgina Hampter.  The party is rife with people who would like to murder Dilman, so it's not a surprise when someone does.  Grade:  B.  

 

Eilis Dillon

 I started to read Eilis Dillon's Death At Crane's Court, but remembered that there is some killing of cats that bothered me the first time I read it, so decided not to read it again.  As I recall, the characters were interesting, but I felt it was just too upsetting to read this time around.  Grade: D for that alone.

Sent To His Account is more to my liking.  Dublin accountant Miles de Cogan, who has come down in the world from the prosperous days of his youth, is astonished to find out that a cousin has died and left him sole heir to an estate and a small fortune.  When local bigwig Thomas Reid is found poisoned in Miles' drawing room, Miles and Inspector Pat Henley, son of one of Miles' former accounting clients, have to sort through local squabbles and intrigue to solve the mystery.  Grade:  A.  

Death in the Quadrangle finds Professor Daly, who appeared in Death At Crane's Court, back at his college in Dublin ostensibly to deliver a series of lectures.  In fact, the President of the college wants him to find out who has been sending him anonymous letters and who may try to kill him.  Before Daly and his old friend Inspector Mike Kenny can even begin, someone does actually kill the man, and suspects appear thick on the ground.  Grade:  B.  

  

Carter Dickson

I've chosen to list separately John Dickson Carr's books featuring Sir Henry Merrivale published under his pseudonym Carter Dickson because, well, it's my game, so my rules.  

I've always like these books a little better than the Gideon Fell books, probably because they tend to be a bit lighter and more fun than the Fell books.  Just as Gideon Fell was modeled on G. K. Chesterton, Sir Henry Merrivale was modeled on Sir Winston Churchill.  Corpulent, irascible, given to smoking cigars, this is the Churchill of the years between the war.  

Having said that, Nine And Death Makes Ten reminded me of most of the things I don't like about Carr's books, mainly the lovely but brain-dead female characters who develop an irrational dislike of the viewpoint male character and end up falling in love with him at the last minute, amid the air of frenzied hysteria the characters express.  The plot of this book, set on an ocean liner pressed into wartime service as a munitions transport with only nine civilian passengers aboard, strains credulity.  Grade:  C. 

 
And So To Murder does much the same thing: young female author takes an irrational dislike to male detective novelist, ends up falling in love with him.  Both characters are hired to write screenplays for a movie company, but someone on the premises apparently has it in for the young woman, first attempting to maim her with vitriol, then shoots at her.  The murder device is another of Carr's tricky bits involving timing that again strains credulity.  Grade:  C. 

 
I didn't find either of those books entertaining enough to ever want to read again, and when I picked up the next book, She Died A Lady, I remembered that I hadn't much liked it the first time I read it, so skipped it this time.  I don't know what Carr had against women, but most of the murder victims in these three books are women.  Not even giving this one a grade.  I do remember like the next one on the list, so I'll move on to that one.  

On the other hand, I've always liked The Curse of the Bronze Lamp, even though Sir Henry is over the top several times in this one.  The supposed curse is on a bronze lamp discovered during the excavation of an Egyptian tomb by an expedition led by the Earl of Severn.  One member of the expedition has already died, leading to speculation in the newspapers of a curse reminiscent of the experiences of the members of the expedition to excavate King Tut's tomb led by Lord Carnavon in the 1920s, ten years before this story is set.  When the Earl's daughter, who is determined to scotch the rumors of a curse disappears, the rumors gain even more credence.  It's up to Sir Henry to sort it all out. Grade:  A. 

 
A Graveyard To Let used to be on my OK list, but now I think it's slipped down to the ho-hum list.  Again, the plot depends on the split second timing that would never come off in real life.  Sir Henry is visiting an old friend, Frederick Manning, in New York who has invited him to witness a miracle.  The miracle does come off, Manning dives fully clothed into a swimming pool and vanishes before HM's eyes.  Later Manning is found barely alive from a gunshot wound in a nearby overgrown cemetery, and it's up to HM to sort it out before another attempt at murder comes off.  Grade:  C.  

The Cavalier's Cup also used to be on the OK list, but also has slipped down.  Once again, characters who have apparently taken a violent dislike to each other secretly admire each other, in this case a father-in-law and son-in-law.  The mystery involves the failure of burglars to steal an ornate, gaudy, golden cup encrusted with precious stones that was created by the family in the Victorian era to commemorate an event that occurred centuries earlier during the English Civil War.  The safe is burgled, the cup is left behind and nothing else is stolen.  Again, it's up to Sir Henry to solve the mystery.  Grade: C.  

I was never very fond of Night At The Mocking Widow, and rereading it confirmed that low opinion.  Sir Henry is lured to a small village to solve the riddle of who is sending poison pen letters to the local villagers; the letters have already triggered one suicide and shortly also lead to outright murder.  Some parts of this one are fairly plausible, but I guess I'm just tired of Carr's manufactured hysteria.  Grade: C.  

Behind The Crimson Blind is another one that never quite worked for me, and didn't this time, either. Sir Henry is on an incognito trip to Tangier, where he is snared into trying to capture a brazen jewel thief known only as Iron Chest because of the decorated iron box he carries.  Grade:  C. 

I don't know why Carr's female characters all have to be either brain-dead, hysterical sexpots or seemingly cold, aloof women only waiting for the right male to light their fires, but I'm tired of it.  Enough of it, I'll keep the Bronze Lamp, but the rest of these are headed for the donation bin.