John Bucan, The Thirty Nine Steps

 John Buchan's suspense novel, The Thirty Nine Steps, published in 1915, is a classic spy and pursuit novel.  Mining engineer Richard Hannay, having made a modest fortune, has recently returned to England from Africa and is feeling bored and disenchanted with life in London.  Longing for adventure, he takes in a neighbor, Franklin Scudder, who regales him with a tale of a conspiracy to assassinate an important public figure who is due to arrive in London in three weeks, and who is soon after found stabbed to death in Hannay's apartment.  Knowing that both the police and the mysterious people who murdered the man will soon be pursuing him, Hannay find's Scudder's notebook and takes off for Scotland to elude them and to decode the notebook, from which he learns that the real plot is to steal England's naval secrets.  

The chapters in the book were originally published as a magazine serial, which enhances the suspense.  It's a classic, but suspense novels aren't to my taste.

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.