Futrelle, Jaques

American journalist Jaques Futrelle was the creator of the Thinking Machine cases, the most famous of which is "The Problem of Cell 13", republished in 1973 in Best Thinking Machine Cases.  In that story, the Thinking Machine, AKA Professor Augustus S. F. X. van Dusen, a scientist with a string of letters signifying professional degrees after his already impressive name, undertakes to escape from a prison cell by thinking himself out.  Of a slight physical build and an irascible temperament, the Thinking Machine is notable for his irritation with the use of the word "impossible", which leads him to take the bet.  

These stories, and additional one republished in 1976 in Great Cases of the Thinking Machine, were written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the author, Jaques Futrelle, died aboard the Titanic in 1912.   Unlike Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Thorndyke, Professor van Dusen makes full use of the technology of the day, especially the telephone, although most of the leg work in the cases is done by reporter Hx Hatch.   I'd have to give "The Problem of Cell 13" an A, but most of the rest of the stories get a grade of B.  I did get rather tired of van Dusen's often repeated dictum of "two and two always make four, not some of the time, but ALL of the time."  

Watson

Note:  This page will be updated from time to time to include more examples of the Watson convention.  

A "Watson" in mystery fiction is the detective's sidekick and first person narrator of events, so called after Dr. John H. Watson, the chronicler of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.  The Watson is usually presumed to be a bit dimwitted and bumbling, mainly to show off the superlative abilities of the detective himself.  In fact, Father Ronald Knox's Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction rule that says that the Watson must be slightly less intelligent than the average reader.  

I've always felt that dictum to be rather unfair to the original Watson of the Holmes stories, which show Dr. Watson to be intelligent and observant, although less so than Holmes himself.  The popular movie series of the 1940s featuring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson may have contributed to the image of Watson as bumbling and not too bright.

Although the first person narration can be helpful to the reader in that the reader sees everything the Watson, and presumably the detective, sees, the narrative form can also subject the reader to any mistaken observations or inferences or opinions expressed by the narrator.  The use of a Watson can be quite annoying at times, as witness Agatha Christie's use of Captain Hastings as the Watson of Hercule Poirot.  Christie introduced both characters in The Mysterious Affair At Styles, published in 1920, but eventually decided to do without him and sent him off to herd cattle in Argentina in Murder On The Links, published in 1923.  She brought Hastings back several more times over the years, but also brilliantly used the Watson convention to bamboozle the reader in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.  

Probably the next most notable use of a Watson can be found in R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke stories; Freeman actually uses several different narrators, but the most usual one is Dr. Jervis, Thorndyke's junior partner, who, like Thorndyke, is both a medical doctor and a lawyer and who assists Thorndyke in most of his cases.  Jervis sees the factual matters Thorndyke sees, but Thorndyke often possesses additional knowledge that Jervis does not have and refuses to disclose any inferences or opinions he has until the end of the case.  For example, in one case Thorndyke notes that the clothing of the murder victim includes the shell of a particular mollusk, but Jervis does not know, and this reader certainly did not know, that the mollusk was on the verge of extinction and therefore only found in two very limited geographic locations in Great Britain, which renders Thorndyke's zeroing in on a particular site as the scene of the murder unnecessarily mysterious.   

Freeman, R. Austin

 Once again I started these out of chronological order, but oh, well, it's my party and I'll read them in whatever order I want.  

R. Austin Freeman was the creator of Dr. John Thorndyke, who remains preeminent among the scientific forensic detectives.  Thorndyke is both a lawyer and a medical doctor who maintains his own laboratory where he can scientifically test materials and substances found at crime scenes.  

One of Freeman's earlier Thorndyke books, The Eye of Osiris, first published in 1911, finds Dr. Berkeley, a young colleague of Thorndyke's, involved with members of a family reduced to poverty by the bizarre will of an uncle who disappeared under suspicious circumstances two years earlier.  When bones appear on the uncle's property,  Berkeley calls on Thorndyke's legal knowledge as well as his scientific abilities to sort the matter out.  Grade:  A.  

The Stoneware Monkey, first published in 1939, begins with a narrative by Dr. Oldfield, a young doctor who encounters the murder of a police constable while on a temporary assignment in the country.  In addition to the murder, a sizable quantity of diamonds has been stolen that same night.  Later, the doctor becomes friendly with an artist, Peter Gannet, a potter whose primitively constructed pieces appear to sell unaccountably well.  When Gannet disappears under suspicious circumstances, Dr. Oldfield enlists the help of Dr. Thorndyke in determining whether the ashes of human bone discovered in Peter Gannet's pottery kiln are connected with his disappearance.  The hilarious explanation of modern abstract pottery art alone makes this one worth rereading.  Grade:  A.  

The Penrose Mystery, first published in 1936, finds Dr. Thorndyke, Dr. Jervis, and their associate Mr. Polton searching for a wealthy collector of antiquities, Daniel Penrose, who has disappeared shortly after showing a collection of valuable jewels to a lawyer whom he swears to secrecy.  I found the solution of this case to be bewilderingly complicated and improbable.  Grade:  C.  

Dr. Thorndyke's Discovery, published in 1932, with an alternate title of When Rogues Fall Out, is an "inverted" mystery tale, starting with the commission of the crime and then proceeding to follow its detection.  In this case, there are two crimes; first the disappearance of Mr. Didbury Toke, a collector of art objects and fence of stolen jewelry, then second the murder of Scotland Yard Inspector Badger, a zealous but secretive official investigator.  It takes Thorndyke's special skills to connect the two crimes and apprehend the unknown perpetrator.  Grade:  A.  I have to say this was a difficult book for me to read because the copy I have is a cheap paperback with center gutters so narrow you have to guess at some of the words.  This copy cost $.25 when it was printed, and as Mark Twain said of paying $7 for a five hour Wagner opera at Bayreuth, it was almost too much for the money.  

After slogging through approximately a thousand pages of short stories in The Famous Cases of Dr. Thorndyke, I have to confess some sympathy for Father Ronald Knox's Commandment against elaborate scientific plot devices.  For example, when the location of a crime is determined by the presence on the victim's clothing of a rare, almost extinct mollusk found in only two places in Britain, a fact known to Thorndyke, but not to the reader, this reader is inclined to be a bit cranky.  Thorndyke's absolute refusal to reveal any of his thought process during the case to either Dr. Jervis, his usual Watson, or to the reader until the dénouement, in case after case is irritating.  

I finished off the Thorndyke series with The Unconscious Witness.  Landscape artist Tom Pedley is blissfully paining a rural scene one day when he notices three people walking past; two men and a woman who appears to be following and eavesdropping on the two men's conversation.  A short time later the woman and one of the men return up the path separately, but there's no sign of the third man.  Pedley is intrigued by the eavesdropper and makes a sketch of the three figures, then forgets about it until the police come to question him about the murder of the third man.  A short time later a woman who claims to be an artist, but who has neither taste nor talent, moves into the studio next to Pedley's and begins to try to involve him in an intimate friendship.  I found the plot of this one involved so many coincidences that the whole thing was unbelievable, but the commentary on modern art is pretty funny.  Grade:  C.  

Artists In Crime

 It occurred to me that several of the mystery novels I've been reading involve artists as either suspects or victims, and I thought that might be worth exploring as I continue to read through my collection.  I'll be looking at each story involving one or more artists to see whether they seem genuine or phony.  And I will be adding to this post as I discover more Artists in Crime.  

First up would have to be Margery Allingham with The Estate of the Beckoning Lady, featuring Minnie Cassands, a painter who is driven to increasingly step up her production levels by an unfortunate quirk in the British tax codes; it seems the more she paints, the more her tax burden increases, and then her problems multiply when the local tax agent who's hounding her is found murdered.  The art in this is mostly decorative background to the complicated plot, but it all sounds good.  A particularly funny bit comes when a teenage relative is seriously disillusioned when he discovers that Minnie's conversation with two important party guests is not about Art, but about money instead.    

Agatha Christie involves artists in several of her books.  The murder victim in Five Little Pigs is artist Amyas Crayle, whose characteristic absorption in his work contributes to his murder in several ways.  Henrietta Saversnake, an artist in The Hollow, uses her sculptural work in an unusual way; she conceals the murder weapon inside the sculpture of a horse.  I found these two depictions of artists to be reasonably believable.  

Charlotte and Aaron Elkins' Alix London books deal less with artists and more with art conservation, and, thanks to Alix's disgraced father Geoffrey London, forgery and fraud in the art world.  A former American Art librarian at San Francisco's De Young Museum, Charlotte Elkins knows her way around the art world, and it shows in this series of books.  A Dangerous Talent leads Alix London to Santa Fe and Ghost Ranch to examine a painting alleged to be by Georgia O'Keefe that a client is considering buying. A Cruise To Die For finds Alix embroiled with a forged Monet... or was it a Manet?  In The Art Whisperer, Alix encounters a jargon spewing art museum director who has a personal vendetta against her, and in The Trouble With Mirrors, her beloved Uncle Tiny may have been involved in the disappearance of a priceless Cellini medallion from an Italian museum decades earlier.  I found all of these to be believable and very entertaining--it's a cracking good series of books.  

R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke is called in The Stoneware Monkey to examine ashes of human bone to determine whether they might belong to Peter Gannet, a potter from whose pottery kiln the ashes and bone fragments were recovered.  Gannet builds his pieces by hand, scorning use of the pottery wheel; his pieces appear something between a birds nest and a flower pot to the narrator, Dr. Oldfield, but are expounded by art expert Mr. Bunderby as, "this noble and impressive work ...typical of the great artist by whose genius was it created. .... Looking at it, we realized with respectful admiration the wonderful power of analysis, the sensibility--at once subtle and intense--that made its conception possible; and we can trace the deep thought, the profound research--the untiring search for the essential of abstract form."  When a viewer says he's not quite clear as to what was meant by 'abstract form', Bunderby replies that "The words 'abstract form,' then evoke in me the conception of that essential, pervading, geometric sub-structure which persists when all the trivial and superficial accidents of mere visual appearances have been eliminated.  In short, it is the fundamental rhythm which is the basic aesthetic factor underlying all our abstract conception of spatial limitation.  Do I make myself clear?"  The questioner naturally retreats in confusion from this flood of nebulous bloviation.  But then the moment of truth emerges to Dr. Oldfield when Bunderby presents as Gannet's master work a decorated jar that Dr. Oldfield recognizes as something he himself created by experimenting on the potter's wheel and decorated with indentations from his own latch-key and clinical thermometer and is now being passed off as one of Gannet's hand-built pottery pieces.  

Freeman also incorporates art and artists in the plot of The Unconscious Witness; landscape painter Tom Pedley witnesses the prelude to murder, then is ensnared in a friendship with a woman claiming to be an artist who has neither taste nor talent.  Her drawing skills are about the level of a nine-year old child, but she's very quick with the current modern art patter.  Freeman's hilarious satire of the jargon of the modern art world is not to be missed.  

Forrest, Katherine V.

 It's been years since I read any of Katherine V. Forrest's Kate Delafield police procedural novels, so I was pleased to see them next on the list.  

In Amateur City, LAPD homicide detective Kate Delafield arrives at the scene of a homicide in the building of the Modern Office corporation, where an overbearing, much hated manager has been stabbed to death.  The early hour of the murder and building security features limit the pool of suspects to the upper level managers, all of whom had reason to hate the victim.  More than just a routine police procedural, the book explores the internal police culture as it affects lesbian and gay police officers.  Grade:  A.  

Investigating Murder At The Nightwood Bar, homicide detective Kate Delafield finds a young lesbian murdered in the bar's parking lot with her own baseball bat.  Although initially suspicious and unhelpful, the bar's lesbian customers warm up to Kate after she fights off an attempted kidnapping of one of the women by a gang of young homophobes.  WARNING:  this book contains descriptions of sexual child abuse.  Grade:  A.  

Someone has killed a resident of The Beverly Mailbu and sat and watched during the three hours it took him to die.  The victim turns out to have been an informer during the dark days of the McCarthy Communist witch hunt era that affected the lives of many people working in the motion picture industry, including some of the other residents of the building.  Grade:  A.

Sleeping Bones entangles Kate in a web of international intrigue when an ancient fossil is found at the scene of a murder at the tar pits of Rancho La Brea.  Is the fossil real or a fake, and who is it that cares so much about it, anyway?  I found the plot of this one a bit more difficult to believe, but it's still an engrossing mystery.  Grade:  B.  

Evanovich, Janet

I started to re-read Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series, starting with One For The Money, and I just couldn't do it.   I enjoyed the series when I originally read them about twenty years ago, but this time around, I just can't.  The messes Stephanie gets into as a bounty hunter or skip tracer, the waffling between the two attractive men in her life, the old junky car, no, I just can't.  How many times can she get hit over the head before her brain turns to mush?  How much pasta can she eat before the cupcake turns into a muffin top?  The feral giraffe named Kevin roaming the streets of Trenton, New Jersey was a "jump the shark" moment for me even years ago.  I might try one more that I recall as pretty funny before I send the rest of them to the library donation pile and free up some space on my library shelves.  

So I decided to try one of the Lizzy and Diesel books, Wicked Appetite, to see how that series was.  The premise is that Lizzy is a baker of wickedly delicious cupcakes in a Salem, Massachusetts, bakery.  Two men pop up in her life, dark, vampirish Wulf, and beach bum Diesel.  They and Lizzy are all Unmentionables, people with special abilities.  The two men are seeking one of the seven stones that supposedly control the seven deadly sins.  In this case, the sin is gluttony.  Lizzy ends up working with Diesel to try to find the pieces of the stone before Wulf can find them and therefore the stone and achieve his desire of creating Hell on earth.  I have to say I got tired of this one pretty fast--the shtick stops working and I just get tired of it.  Grade:  D.  

I tried another Lizzy and Diesel book, Wicked Business, but that one's a "nope", too.  So all the Evanovich books are in the bin to donate to the library--maybe someone will like them more than I do.  

Erskine, Margaret

It's been years since I read any of the Margaret Erskine books I have; I had forgotten how interesting they are.  

Detective Inspector Septimus Finch is summoned from New Scotland Yard to investigate the brutal murder of rich, spoiled, narcissistic Lisa Harcourt, The Woman At Belguardo.   Although it looks as if her rejected boy toy did it, other suspects in the form of former lovers, an ex-husband and other people who had reason to hate her are plentiful, too.  Grade:  A.  

Something fishy is going on at No. 9 Belmont Square:  a famous opera tenor has arrived at the run down boarding house filled with elderly ladies in search of his long-lost love and the fabulous diamond she owned.  What he finds instead is at least one murder and possibly more.  It's up to Inspector Finch to sort it out before there are even more murders.  I found the plot of this one complicated and unlikely.  And note to authors:  please, please, PLEASE don't send young women out on dodgy errands to empty buildings on foggy evenings.  Grade:  C.  

I found the Case With Three Husbands convoluted and confusing.  I never did figure out all the complicated family relationships, and frankly didn't care.  Grade:  C.  

Inspector Finch has been temporarily seconded to a London suburb where crime tends to be of the white-collar, financial type rather than murder in Harriet Farewell, when a local resident is shot under the cover of a Guy Fawkes Night fireworks display.  The leading suspect is poor, mad Harriet Buckler, just out of a mental hospital where she has been since her son died in a car accident two years earlier.  Now she wanders the grounds of the family estate, gun in hand, and may have shot her blackmailing mother-in-law.  Grade:  A.