DP54Cover - Deadly Pleasures

18
Deadly Pleasures
THE JUDAS WIN-
DOW was published
under Carr’s pseudonym
“Carter Dickson.” About
25 years later it was reprinted
in the U.S. under
the rather obvious,
but logical, paperback
title The Crossbow Murder.
The victim was murdered
in a locked room,
and an arrow is in his
body, but where is the
crossbow that shot it?
Certainly, it is not within
the room that was locked
from the inside.
This is also one of the
best courtroom mysteries I’ve read. Dickson’s series sleuth,
Sir Henry Merrivale, acts as defense attorney because he
believes the accused to be innocent. Faced with a locked
room, he claims that there is always a “Judas Window,” a
way to get around it, but what it is will await his summation
to the jury. Meanwhile, “the Old Man,” as he calls himself,
complains of “the blinkin’ awful cussedness of things in
general,” while he proceeds to break the law to defend his
client. The world’s leading expert on impossible crime
mysteries, Robert Adey, has called this book “perhaps the
best locked room novel ever written.” Right now, I can’t
think of a better one.
Rue Morgue Press has consistently reprinted
humorous mysteries from the past. Recently, they have
reprinted more “serious” writers such as Carr, Catherine
Aird, and H. C. Bailey, but there are subtle touches of
humor in all their work. Take Bailey, whose SHADOW
ON THE WALL (1934), the first book about his most
famous series detective, Doctor Reggie Fortune, has
recently been reprinted by Rue Morgue at $14.95.
Fortune is an unofficial advisor to Scotland Yard and helps
out in a case involving the wealthy and politically connected,
one in which he is present at the first crime. Drug
addiction among the rich, very prevalent in England
between the World Wars, is important to the story. He is
pitted against a group he playfully calls “the mischief
makers unlimited.” Fortune is an appealing character with
his common sense and strong social awareness. It is too bad
that his speech tends to be so annoying, with his dropping
most g’s and incessant exclaiming of phrases such as “My
dear chap!” and “My only aunt!”
The mystery is a bit slow getting started, and
Reggie’s detective work is never totally plausible or entirely
fair to the reader. I prefer him in short stories, a form
in which he wrote for many years before essaying a novel.
Still, the writing in SHADOW ON THE WALL is civilized,
the ending is satisfactory, and the book introduces, in an
inside joke, Bailey’s other series detective, shady attorney
Joshua Clunk.
John Laurence, the pen name of John Laurence
Pritchard (1885-1968), is another of those worthwhile
writers almost completely forgotten now. Perhaps it is
because of his 15 mysteries, only one was reprinted in the
U.S. He was a versatile author, writing about science,
airplane construction, and true crime in addition to his
fiction.
MURDER IN THE STRATOSPHERE (1938)
displays his knowledge of science with its tale of a balloon
expedition into space to do what satellites do so much
better now: forecasting the weather. One of the crew dies
in the air, creating a sensation since the victim was
broadcasting live from twenty miles up when stricken. The
death might have been passed as due to natural causes
were it not for Dr. Thomas Morton who claims that it was
due to botulism poisoning.
Laurence makes the journey compelling since the
balloon is due to go up 25 miles, “higher than any humans
have ever gone,” on “the greatest adventure the world had
yet known.” The trip is suspenseful, and the detection
stimulating. Unfortunately, limning characters is not a
particular Laurence strength. Of the five people in the
balloon (not counting the victim), two are almost complete
ciphers, so the number of legitimate suspects is small.
There are a few good fair-play clues, though most of the
detection and the motivation, are far from persuasive.
Still, Laurence writes well and does a good job of creating
additional interest by holding his solution until almost the
very end.
Books About the Mystery
It’s hard to think of anyone more important to the
mystery field than Anthony Boucher, and finally he has his
own biography. Better than that, ANTHONY BOUCHER:
A BIOBIBLIOGRAPHY by Jeffrey Marks features a
remarkably complete listing of all that the prolific Boucher
wrote. A bonus is finding, in one place, all of Boucher’s
selections of the best mysteries of each year, as he
published them each December, from 1951 through
1967, in his “Criminals at Large” column in the New York
Times Book Review. This book is published in trade
paperback, for $35, by McFarland (phone 800-253-
2187 or on the web at www.mcfarlandpub.com).
Other pluses in this book include discussion of how
far ahead of his time Boucher was on social issues and his
translations of Latin American mysteries, including the first
by Jorge Luis Borges to appear in English. We get a good
picture of the various illnesses that beset Boucher, who
appears not to have had a truly healthy day in his life. His
mother was a doctor and accompanied him when, as an
adult, his chronic asthma forced him to go away for periods
to the desert. I wish there was more information on their
relationship.
With all that is good in this book, there are also
distractions. There are grammatical errors and some
awkward word usage. “Typos” are many, as is repetition.
The biographical portion of the book is divided into
Boucher as respectively man, author, editor, and critic. His
radio work is repeated in two places, as is discussion of his