I’m still reading brilliant mysteries (mixed in with a few non-brilliant ones) this summer from my fabulous new Brilliant Mystery Outlet, the local thrift shop.
Here are the latest highlights:
A Case of Spirits, by Peter Lovesey, 1975: They’re billed as Sergeant Cribb adventures, but Cribb is the least of the attractions. He’s just a tight-mouthed stiff-upper-lip Brit from Scotland Yard (kind of a redundancy). However, Lovesey’s platform is absolutely riveting: in the 1970s, he wrote this series set in late 1800s London, crafting each of his mysteries around a different fad of the time. This one is crafted around seances, which were very hot stuff in the late 1800s. For the record, I love metaphysical stuff, especially if it involves ghosts, so long as I don’t have to be the person actually interacting with the ghosts (although seances are too obviously gimmicky for even me to take seriously). And Lovesey is a consummate craftsman—yanking you back and forth from suspect to suspect all the way. Now I’m reading all the Sergeant Cribb mysteries I can get my hands on.
Mrs. Pollifax and the Golden Triangle, by Dorothy Gilman, 1988: When I used to stay at my grandparents’ vacation cabin in the Sierra Nevadas with them as a teenager, I spent a lot of time reading the books in the built-in bookcase in the spare room. This, unfortunately, mostly consisted of Reader’s Digests. But there was one rather rambunctious light-hearted mystery about some wacky old woman and a bunch of happenin’ young hippies. . .much like myself in a few years, I fancied. So I read that one over and over again. I don’t remember the title, but the wacky old woman’s name was Mrs. Pollifax.
I was reluctant to read this Mrs. Pollifax now, all these years later, for fear that my adolescent taste in literature would cause me a pain too great to bear. So you can imagine my surprise and enormous pleasure to find that Gilman is, in fact, a wonderful mystery writer who just happens to be deeply conversant with various countries around the world, including the Southeast Asian countries of the Golden Triangle.
She wrote another mystery—not a Mrs. Pollifax—set in Burma called Incident at Badamya, which I read earlier this summer and also loved. Dorothy Gilman is one of my new heroes.
Appleby’s End, by Michael Innes, 1945: Innes was one of the mystery writers recommended by Raymond Chandler in a letter to a friend in Raymond Chandler Speaking, so I’ve been familiar with that name for awhile. The particular book Chandler recommended—Hamlet, Revenge!—was awfully thick wading for me when I tried reading it a few years ago, so I was a little apprehensive about this one, too. But within a few pages I was a total convert. The weird and fascinating Raven family had my undivided attention right off the bat, and when the unwitting protagonist and young Ms. Raven came upon the decapitated head of the Ravens’ cranky old ostler staring at them in the snow, I definitely jumped on for the ride. Although I figured out the solution before the end, making the finale less than noteworthy, I was still shrieking periodically, “I love this book!” throughout practically the whole thing, making it worth bringing up here.
Only When I Larf, Len Deighton, 1968: I just finished this one this morning, and I could hardly wait to wake up for it. I would’ve finished it last night except for this business about getting up early and working all day, which unfortunately interferes with my late-night reading proclivities.
Although not technically a mystery, this wonderful thriller about 1960s con artists is constructed terrifically—each chapter a first-person narrative from the point-of-view of one of the three con artists, following their adventures in a spiral that both includes each characters’ backstory of hair-raising character-building and gradually widens, until different events are being described in significantly different ways, lending great tension and intrigue to the story within the story and dragging you to an ending constructed in the classic mystery manner. The premise is gripping—these people make a living out of selling large, highly-improbably objects they don’t own to unsuspecting fools in a hurry to be parted from their money. The plot is fantastic—eventually the leader and the follower unwillingly swap places in front of their marks to launch their most audacious plan to date, also conveniently destined to be their last, as the leader is clearly getting too old for these kinds of dangerous shenanigans.
And the characters themselves are just great. Just GREAT. No matter how fed-up they get with each other (and, as the follower says candidly about the leader at the end of Chapter One, “I never upset him—really upset him I mean—when it’s an operation. Other times I upset him quite a lot.”), they are still driven periodically to leap into spontaneous improvisational theater with each other, tearing around their hotel rooms, running on the furniture, yelling in accents, and in one case winding up headfirst in the (cold) fireplace among the shovels and pokers.
Oh, and as an added bonus? It seems these types of monumental cons are, in fact, based in reality. As cited at the front of the book, even wilder cons than the ones in this story were pulled in 1966, 1965, 1963, 1962, and 1949, beginning in 1925 when someone not only successfully sold the Eiffel Tower as scrap metal, but came back a month later and did it again.