Gardner, Earl Stanley

I had three of Earl Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason mystery novels, but couldn't finish any of them.  Mason's perpetual fencing with the police and the district attorney's office on behalf of his shady clients really turned me off this time around, so they're all in the "donate" bin.   

Gaboriau, Emile

 I must have bought this translation of Emile Gaboriau's Other People's Money (L'argent d'autres), first published in 1874, decades ago, but had never read it.  Gaboriau is considered one of the pioneers of mystery fiction and his detective, Monsieur Lecoq, is considered to have influenced Conan Doyle's creation of Sherlock Holmes years later.  

However, Monsieur Lecoq is not in this story; the detection is done by interested parties and by an otherwise anonymous Commissary of Police, who guides the detection of the financial maneuverings of the absconding cashier of the Mutual Credit Society, who has made off with embezzled millions.  The story gradually unravels the complicated secret life of the cashier, and of the other important members of the Mutual Credit Society.  It's an interesting book in many ways, revealing the relationship between the political and financial elements of French society of the day, but I doubt I'll read it again.  Grade:  C.  

Gallico, Paul

 Paul Gallico's The Zoo Gang consists of four longish stories, too short to be novels, too long to be short stories, but fascinating no matter what you call them.  The central character of each story is Colonel Pierre Roqubrun, an antique dealer on France's Cote d'Azur, playground of the rich and famous as well as the greedy and unscrupulous, and four of his former colleagues in the French Resistance of WWII.  During the war the gang was the scourge of the German occupiers of the Riviera; now they are all respected citizens with their memories of the perilous days at war.    

    In The Picture Thieves, a gang has stolen twelve famous Renoir paintings from a museum in Cannes.  Captain Scoubide, the local police detective, suspects that the Zoo Gang may be involved in this burglary as well as two other recent art thefts in the area.  His questioning leads the Colonel to wonder whether his former colleagues, now all respectable merchants and tradesmen, might indeed be involved, and if they are, how he can extricate them.  

In How To Stick Up A Million Dollar Riviera Gala, a whisper of a planned attack on a glittering society charity gala leads Colonel Roqubrun to ask the Zoo Gang to tell him how they would pull off such a heist; when they come up with a plan, he has the uneasy feeling that they might actually be planning to do it.  

In Snow Over The Cote d'Azur, the death of the Colonel's favorite niece from a heroin overdose leads him to declare war on the drug traffickers of the Riviera, using the special talents of his four WWII Resistance colleagues, although he has to apologize to them for blowing up a chocolate factory on his own that was being used to process drugs.  

Le Double Snatch finds the Colonel narrating the story of a double kidnapping as the final chapter unfolds before his audience.  

These are just great stories.  Grade:  A.  

Frazer, Margaret

•  Margaret Frazer's historical mystery novels featuring Dame Frevisse are set in the priory of St. Frideswide during the complicated reign of King Henry VI of England.  Dame Frevisse is the niece of the powerful and well connected Thomas Chaucer, son of poet Geoffrey Chaucer, the ramifications of whose political dealings sometimes reach into the cloistered walls of the priory. These tales are well written, preserving the manners and flavor of medieval England, but with language accessible to modern readers.   

In The Novice's Tale, saintly novice Thomasine, who is soon to take her vows as a nun, is dismayed when her aunt, hard drinking and brash Lady Ermentrude, descends upon the priory with her entourage, including a pet monkey, and demands that Thomasine leave the priory with her and marry.  When Thomasine resists, Lady Ermentrude flies into a drunken rage and rides off to Thomasine's sister's house, where she berates Lady Isobel and her husband, Sir John.  Shortly after Lady Ermentrude returns to the priory she has a seizure and becomes incoherent.  When both Lady Ermentrude and a servant who has drunk some of her medicated wine die Dame Frevisse realizes she must step in and investigate to keep the Crowner (coroner) from coming to the easy and convenient conclusion that Thomasine has poisoned them both to avoid being removed from the priory.  I found this story accurate in historical detail and believable as a mystery novel.  Grade:  A.  

I read The Servant's Tale years ago, but found it so sad and depressing that I think I'm going to skip it this time around, although as I recall, I found the details of the arrival of a troupe of players at the priory to perform a play to be very interesting.  It was the details of the lives of medieval peasants that got me down.  

In The Maiden's Tale, Dame Frevisse travels to London with Abbot Gilberd to escort the new Prioress to St. Frideswide, but before that can happen, she becomes involved in the political intrigues of Cardinal Beaufort, the Duke of Gloucester, and her own cousin Alice, wife of the earl of Suffolk, as Parliament convenes to consider contracting peace with France, the price of which is the release of the Duc d'Orleans, who has been a prisoner in England since the battle of Agincourt, twenty five years earlier.   This is a cracking good tale, based on a brief historical reference to a cousin of Suffolk, Lady Jane, known as "Jane with the blemish" for a large birthmark on her face, who had the fortitude to refuse to take vows in the convent she had been raised in and forced the world to let her live her own life.  Grade:  A.  

I got a bit bogged down in the complicated plot ramifications of an estate dispute in The Clerk's Tale.  Dame Frevisse and her prioress, Domina Elizabeth, have traveled to St. Mary's nunnery in the village of Goring to visit a cousin of Elizabeth's who is dying.  They arrive to find that Master Montfort, with whom Frevisse has dealt on previous occasions as Crowner, has been murdered in the nunnery garden.  That doesn't come as much surprise as almost everyone hated the greedy, grasping Montfort, who has been playing one side against the other in a legal dispute he has been handling in his new role as Escheator.  Montfort's son Christopher had succeeded him as Crowner and now must investigate his father's murder.  Grade:  B.  

I did not finish The Bastard's Tale, either.  Arteys, the illegitimate son of the Duke of Gloucester, is caught up in the political machinations of the ruthless and powerful men around King Henry VI, and Dame Frevisse must use what influence she has to extricate him from them.  

I gave a couple of these books grades of A, but I'm not sure I'll ever read them again; I love the well researched history, but in many ways the stories are just too intense. 

Link to a chronology of the history depicted in the Dame Frevisse books:  Chronology.  

Link to a chronology of the history depicted in the Dame Frevisse books:  Chronology. 

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 Henry 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.