Edgar Box, pseudonym of Gore Vidal

 Gore Vidal wrote at least three mystery novels under the pseudonym Edgar Box in the early 1950's starring Peter Cutler Sargeant II, a public relations man whose clients get him into some peculiar situations.  As you might expect from Vidal, the books are all well written, witty and include some savage social commentary on the times.  

In Death In The Fifth Position, Peter Sargeant is hired by the Grand Saint Petersburg Ballet company to handle their public relations during their New York season.  Of particular concern to the company is the publicity surrounding their new ballet and the accusations that the choreographer, Jed Wilbur, is a member of the Communist Party.  When the principal ballerina in the new ballet crashes to the stage floor and is killed, allegations of murder lead to more bad publicity.  Grade:  A.

In Death Before Bedtime, Peter Sargeant is no sooner hired by conservative U.S. Senator Lee Rhodes to handle his publicity, when the Senator is blown up on the eve of his announcement of his run for his party's nomination for President.  Sargeant must determine whether this is a political assassination, or a more intimate murder for personal reasons, which abound among the varied members of the Senator's household.  Grade:  A.

In Death Likes It Hot, Sargeant travels to the far reaches of Long Island to handle the publicity for a lavish party to be held by a socially ambitious dowager.  When her niece, wife of a popular painter, is drowned in full view of most of the house party, allegations of murder soon surface.  Grade:  A.  

John Bude

 John Bude, pseudonym of Ernest Elmore, wrote approximately thirty crime novels, of which I have two: The Lake District Murder, published in 1935, and The Sussex Down Murder, published in 1936, both recently republished by the Poisoned Pen Press in their British Library Crime Classics series.  Both books are police procedurals following the investigations of Inspector, later Superintendent Meredith as he methodically unravels complicated crimes.

The Lake District Murder starts with an apparent suicide in a lonely country garage in the Lake District in England that eventually leads Inspector Meredith to uncovering an elaborate conspiracy which culminates in several murders.  

Grade:  A.  

In The Sussex Downs Murder, the bloodstained hat and battered car of a missing man, John Rother, are found abandoned in a lonely part of Sussex.  Later, bones turn up in bags of lime supplied by the missing man's brother from their jointly owned lime kilns.  Since the brother, William Rother, is known to have been at odds with his brother, who was believed to have been in love with William's wife, and since William is John's sole heir, William looks like the obvious suspect.  When William's body turns up in a chalk pit complete with suicide note, it looks like the case is over, until Superintendent Meredith patiently demonstrates that the easy answer is not always the right answer.  

Grade:  A.

Wish I had a couple more of John Bude's books.  

And, in the vein of "be careful what you wish for", it turned out that I did have another book by John Bude, The Cornish Coast Murder, his first attempt at a mystery novel.  This one, first published in 1935, seemed a bit more labored than the two others.  Julius Tregarthen, an unpleasant and overbearing local magistrate, is discovered shot dead in his house one stormy night.  It looks at first as if he was shot from the path along the cliff, but why were there three bullet holes in the windows, when one shot would clearly do the job?  The local vicar, a fan of mystery novels, helps the police inspector puzzle it all out.

Grade:  B.

Simon Brett

     I've always like Simon Brett's Mrs. Pargeter books. Mrs. Pargeter is definitely not your typical elderly Englishwoman detective; since she inherited from her late husband a fair amount of money, a strict moral code ("tell nothing but the truth, but not necessarily all of it"), a set of skeleton keys and a list of shady "business" contacts, there's not much that stands between Mrs. Pargeter and getting at the truth of the matter once she starts looking into it.  

In A Nice Class of Corpse, Mrs. Pargeter has moved into a residence hotel on the south coast of England.  Within days, two of the elderly residents have died under suspicious circumstances, and Mrs. Pargeter discovers that a substantial quantity of jewelry has gone missing.  

Grade:  A.

Having decided that the surviving residents of the hotel are looking backward to memories and not forward to life, Mrs. Pargeter buys a house in an up-scale suburban neighborhood, where she discovers that all her new neighbors have secrets they'd rather not have revealed, and that the woman from whom she bought the house is now Mrs., Presumed Dead.  The woman's husband is the logical suspect, but when he turns out to have an alibi, her suspicion turns to some of her new neighbors and their well hidden secrets.  Simon Brett indulges in some pretty savage social commentary on suburban life in 1980's Britain in this one.  

Grade:  A.

In Mrs. Pargeter's Package, she accompanies an old friend on a tour to the Greek island of Corfu. The friend dies; Mrs. Pargeter believes she was murdered and she herself becomes involved in an old Corfu family feud.  

Grade:  A.

The Body on the Beach is the beginning of a new series centered in the small town of Fethering on the south coast of England.  Carole Seddon finds a dead body of a middle aged man on the beach as she's walking her dog one morning, but by the time the police get around to investigating it, the body has disappeared.  Nettled by the police dismissal of her as a hysterical middle aged woman, Carole and her enigmatic new neighbor Jude undertake the investigation themselves.  

Grade:  B

I've read several of Brett's Charles Paris books, but apparently didn't keep any of them.  As I recall, Charles Paris is a struggling English actor with a fondness for alcohol and is one of the few ornaments of the British stage who did not make it into the cast of I, Claudius.   

Ernest Bramah-- Max Carrados Mysteries

Ernest Bramah's blind detective Max Carrados "sees" more clearly than sighted Scotland Yard detectives.  Having lost his sight, Carrados has developed his other senses to enable him to pick up on clues others miss.  

This book of short stories, Max Carrado Mysteries, was published in 1927, fourteen years after Carrados made his debut in mystery fiction.  Some of the abilities Carrados has developed after his accidental blinding, such as the ability to read newspaper headlines and handwritten words with his fingertips and his capacity for being able to pick a specific book off a shelf with unerring accuracy seem a bit far fetched, but Ernest Bramah apparently wrote an essay detailing cases where real blind people had developed each of the abilities he attributes to Carrados.  

A bit more difficult to swallow is the occasional intervention of the supernatural into some of the stories, such as "The Strange Case of Cyril Bycourt", where an electric power plant built on top of a mass grave of plague victims influences the lives and health of several people.  Still, the stories are entertaining and worth reading. 

Grade:  B.

I had forgotten that I had another book of Max Carrados short stories, Best Max Carrados Detective Stories, published by Dover in 1972.  This book incorporates two of the stories from Max Carrados Mysteries, but it also contains earlier stories, including the first Max Carrados story, "The Coin of Dionysis", first published in 1914, which explains Carrados' name change, the accident that resulted in his blindness, and the relationship with Louis Carlyle, the inquiry agent who brings him difficult cases.  I found most of these stories interesting and well worth reading, too.

Grade:  B+

Anthony Boucher

     I don't recall having read The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars, published in 1940, in the past, but probably did so.  The Baker Street Irregulars, as any fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories knows, were a rag-tag gang of street urchins who assisted Holmes on several of his cases.  In this book, they are a literary Sherlock Holmes fan society, dedicated to the preservation of "the Sacred Writings", the Sherlock Holmes stories.  There is, in fact, a real Baker Street Irregular society, founded in 1934 by Christopher Morley that continues to this day and upon which the society in the book is based.  

    The society in the book is a tongue-in-cheek nod to the real group; the fictional members are concerned about the proposal of a Hollywood film studio to make a movie of the Holmes story The Speckled Band, a story that caused me nightmares when I read it as a child.  The Irregulars believe that the scriptwriter chosen by the studio, an ex-detective named Stephen Worth, has nothing but contempt for the Holmes stories and will turn out a screen play that will make a mockery of the Sacred Writings, so some of their members converge on Hollywood to make sure that does not happen.  

    Worth is apparently murdered shortly after they arrive at a mansion provided by the movie studio, but the corpse disappears, and a series of adventures evoking the Holmes stories befall the Irregulars over the next few days, until a very real corpse turns up.

    I found the story an interesting Golden Age puzzle, even if it's a bit labored with all the references to the Holmes stories crammed into it, down to having a housekeeper named Mrs. Hudson and a not-too-bright police sergeant named Watson.   

Grade: B.  

    I found The Case of the Seven Sneezes to be a disturbing book, mainly because of a series of cat killings that may or may not relate to several human murders.  Members of a wedding party have gathered on an island to celebrate the Silver Anniversary of the wedding of the owners of the island.  Shortly after they arrive, they find they are completely cut off from the mainland with no means of escape, and a servant on the island is found injured after an attempt was made to cut his throat, echoing an unsolved murder that occurred on the eve of the wedding in 1914.  With a cast of unpleasant characters so confined, is it any surprise that more murderous attempts follow?  

Grade:  C.  I'm not reading this one again.  

John and Emery Bonett

In Dead Lion, Simon Crane, a young American literary agent, arrives in England intending to visit his uncle, Cyprian Druse, a noted dramatic critic and literary lion, only to find his uncle recently dead in an apparent accident.  Unsavory facets of his uncle's life began to appear, and Simon suspects his uncle may have been murdered, possibly by a woman with whom Simon has fallen love.  Sorting out her involvement from the half dozen other potential suspects keeps Simon busy.

Grade:  B

Earl Derr Biggers

 Another Golden Age mystery author, Ear Derr Biggers, is best known for his Chinese detective, Charlie Chan.  I don't have any of those books, but I do have The Agony Column, published in 1916, which I found mildly interesting.  

A young American visiting London on the eve of World War I amuses himself reading the posts in a newspaper Personals section, known as the Agony Column.  He falls in love with a young American woman and tries to attract her by writing a series of letters to her give details of a murder that has occurred in his apartment building.  As the plot develops, it becomes clear that war is imminent and that they will need to leave England immediately

Grade:  B

I was unable to finish the second story in this book, Fifty Candles, because the book was crumbling in my hands.  The glue had failed, the spine was coming loose and pages were falling out; I'll have to do some repair work before I can resume this one, although it wasn't really interesting enough for me to feel much desire to do that.

Anthony Berkeley

Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case, published in 1929, is a Golden Age classic.  But reading it this time, I found it dry and formulaic.  

A man is present at his club when another member receives a box of chocolates in the mail.  That member, Sir Eustace Pennefather, doesn't want them, so the first man, Graham Bendix, takes the box home to his wife.  They both eat some of the chocolates and, since she eats more of them than he does, she dies while he becomes ill but recovers.  

Scotland Yard is baffled by the case and has concluded that the crime is the work of a random psychopath. A group called the Crime Circle, led by Roger Sheringham and consisting of himself and five other people meet to consider the case.  As it happens, most of the members know one or more of the people involved in the case.  They take turns, each proposing a different solution on successive nights, each of which appears conclusive, at least until the next solution is proposed.

 At the end, have they arrived at the correct solution?  And if they have, can they prove it?    

Grade:  B

I found Berkeley's Trial and Error so tedious that I did not finish it.  Lawrence Todhunter, who has been told he has a heart defect that will surely kill him, probably within six months to a year, solicits advice from a group of male friends as to the best use that his time can be spent, without telling them that he's dying.  The friends conclude that murdering some person who is causing suffering to other people would be the best solution. The book was written in 1939, on the eve of World War II; several of the members mention assassinating a political figure such as Hitler or Mussolini, but they reject that idea because they conclude that someone even worse would come along to take their places.  

He decides instead to kill an actress who is causing misery to those around her; after she dies, another man is blamed for the crime, and Todhunter is forced to try to prove that he himself killed her.  

Grade:  C.  I just didn't find this one very interesting, particularly in light of the wholesale slaughter unleashed by WWII.  

Robert Bernard

 Deadly Meeting, published in 1970.

    I don't recall having been as deeply disturbed by this book when I read it decades ago as I was when I re-read it just now.  Sexism, sexual harassment, discrimination and homophobia are the accepted social norms of the day, and possibly may have seemed so to me then.  Today it sets my teeth on edge.

    Set in a small college in New England, the new chair of the English Literature Department runs roughshod over his faculty members, all of whom are male.  When they consider hiring new faculty members for the department, all of the candidates are also male.  One candidate who may possibly be Jewish is dismissed from consideration immediately.  The one brilliant female graduate student in the department is considered fair game for sexual harassment by the department chair, and there is no thought given to mentoring her for an academic career.  Indeed, there are some faculty members who still believe that the college should have no female graduate students enrolled.  

    When the department chair is murdered, suspicion falls on the remaining members of the department, most of whom have been blackmailed by the murdered man who has ferreted out their individual secrets.  In a desperate effort to shore up its faculty roster before classes begin, the college invites a distinguished Oxford scholar, Dame Millicent Hetherege, to join the faculty to fill in the term.  Dame Millicent turns out to have her own ideas of how a mysterious death should be investigated, and proceeds to do so.  

    The mystery itself is not particularly difficult; it was the social milieu of the time that brought back memories for me that I found disturbing, and that no one in the book apparently thinks of questioning any part of it.  One memory was that my faculty advisor in the history department continuously urged me to get my teaching credential so I could teach high school history, even though I repeatedly told him I had no interest whatever in doing that.  He wasn't very encouraging when I decided to go to grad school instead.   

    I have used the term "department chair" to describe the position of the head of the department; at the time, the term used almost exclusively would have been "chairman".  I remember one discussion when I was in law school in the early 1970s--there was a proposal to replace the term "chairman" with the new word "chairer".  The oldest member of the law school faculty was outraged that such a term could be considered.  He wrote the word on the blackboard and pontificated about how difficult a word it was to pronounce.  I wish I had had the nerve to go up and write the word "error" beside it and point out to him that he apparently had no difficulty whatever pronouncing that word, as it fell from his lips with great regularity.  Had I done that, I'm sure I would have passed into law school folklore, but alas, I did not have the guts to do it.

    Another piece that I found disturbing was that one of the faculty members had been arrested in the past for "importuning" a man whom he believed to be a fellow graduate student, but who turned out to be an undercover police officer who arrested him when he invited the cop up to his apartment for a drink and to listen to some classical music.  The sad days when police departments used bogus charges like that to harass gay and lesbian people are not that far distant from today.  As it was, the man was not gay but was convicted anyway.  I like to imagine what Judge Judy would have to say about a charge like that, something like, "So, let me understand this... he invites you up to listen to classical music and your mind immediately turns to sex?  And you're big, strong, trained police officer and you assume he's somehow going to overpower you and have his way with you?  Get out of my courtroom!"

It's taken us a long time to get where we are now as a society, where blatant and overt racisim, sexism, sexual harassment and homophobia are no longer routinely accepted without comment.  But it's also a short road back to those times, too.  

Grade:  B.  

Trent’s Own Case—E. C. Bentley and H. Warner Allen

 Although painter Phillip Trent had resolved to quit detecting, he is forced into it when he and his friends become involved in the murder of yet another obnoxious millionaire.  Trent finds himself personally implicated when his own fingerprints are found on a weapon at the scene of the crime, hence the title, Trent’s Own Case.

I have to say there are parts of this story that stretch the “fair play” code a bit; some of Trent’s evidence comes from observations he makes during the course of the case that are only revealed to the reader at the very end.  It’s still a well written and engaging story, though. 

Grade:  A

E. C. Bentley--Trent's Last Case

     Painter and journalist Phillip Trent, who has collaborated with Scotland Yard detectives on other cases, is summoned by an old friend to investigate the shooting of an American financier whose body has been discovered on the grounds of his English home.  The coroner's inquest concludes with a verdict of "persons unknown".

    Trent follows the chain of evidence and draws up a manuscript naming the financier's English secretary as the murderer, but leaves the manuscript with the financier's widow, with whom he has fallen in love, but whom he suspects of complicity in the murder.  

    Trent's conclusions turn out to be wrong.  

    Dorothy L. Sayers wrote the introduction to the copy I have; she emphasizes the break it made with the detective novel as it existed prior to publication of this book in 1913.  

    "If you were so lucky as to read it today for the first time, you would recognize it at once as a tale of unusual brilliance and charm, but you could have no idea how startlingly original it seemed when it first appeared.  It shook the little world of the mystery novel like a revolution, and nothing was ever quite the same again."  

    So much for the "'infallible sleuth', with his cut-and-dried clues--and cast-iron deductions, who plodded mechanically along the trail, always wearisome and always right."

    Trent’s conclusions, although carefully reasoned and based on the available evidence, are not not right, and that fact, when revealed to him, leads him to resolve to have nothing further to do with detecting mysteries. 

Grade:  A. 

Robert Barnard

It's been fun rediscovering some of the authors whose books have languished on the top shelf of my mystery collection; I've just been too lazy to haul out the step ladder and climb up to get them.  I only have two of Robert Barnard's forty some mysteries, but might hunt up a few more of them if I ever finish this project.  

In A Little Local Murder, a television crew descends upon the small town of Twytching to film a documentary of the town to show its "twin" city, Twytching, Wisconsin, what rural English village life is like.  As the various local characters vie for the privilege of being interviewed for the program, a local resident is murdered and a series of anonymous letters comes to light.  Grade:  B.

The Case of the Missing Bronte involves Scotland Yard Superintendent Perry Trethowan in the hunt for a previously unknown manuscript, possibly written by Emily Bronte.  Trethowan and his wife are shown a fragment of the manuscript by an elderly lady who has inherited it and other materials from a cousin who has family connections with members of the Bronte family.  When the woman is attacked and left comatose two days later, Trethowan realizes that someone else thinks the manuscript is legitimate and is willing to kill for it.  Grade:  B.

H.C. Bailey

 The only thing I have of H. C. Bailey's Reggie Fortune works is a book of short stories, Mr. Fortune, Please.  Reggie Fortune, a surgeon who is a consultant to Scotland Yard, solves puzzles that initially appear to be minor, but turn out to have wider implications.  He does this by applying crime scene investigation techniques that have become standard today.  Mr. Fortune's languid and off-hand manner contrasts with the zealous but misguided efforts of the police.  

Grade:  B, but only because of the illustration of the development of crime scene investigation methods.    

Marian Babson

It was with great delight that I finally finished off the books by authors whose names start with A and realized that the first of the B authors was Marian Babson.  It's been years since I've read any of the five titles of hers in my library, but that's mainly because they were all on the top shelf and it seemed like too much work to climb up and retrieve them.  My loss, I know, as I discovered when I started the first one, A Fool For Murder, couldn't stop reading it and finished it in one night. 

Some of her books are stand-alones, not part of a series of continuing characters.  I realized I had read the first three books out of the order of publication, but since they're not part of a series, that really doesn't matter.  

In A Fool For Murder, retired economics professor Wilmer Creighleigh writes a popular economics book, A Fool And His Money, that hits best-seller lists in both the UK and USA.  As his assorted relatives and friends gather to celebrate his triumphal return from an international book tour, murder strikes.  Grade:  A.  

Caterer Jean Ainsley, her brother Nick and his wife Mona have started taking culinary students as apprentices to supplement their executive boardroom catering business.  Their worst fear is that someone will contract food poisoning with their sandwiches and canapés as literal Death Warmed Up.  Grade:  A.

The staff of a struggling British newspaper is dying of "accidents" as the deputy managing editor tries to keep the newspaper afloat while he deals with the suspicion that he has sent these reporters to their deaths because someone is Dangerous to Know.  Grade:  A.

Reel Murder introduces aging actresses Evangeline Sinclair and Trixie Dolan and their assorted friends and frenemies.  Someone seems to be recreating scenes from Evangeline's old movies with murderous results.  Grade:  B.  

In The Cat Who Wasn't a Dog, Trixie rescues Cho Cho San, a rare Japanese Bobtail cat, from death in a taxidermist's shop only to find herself, Cho Cho, Evangeline and Dame Cecile Savoy, another aging stalwart of the British stage and screen, enmeshed in intrigue and murder.  Grade:  A.