Beware of the Trains by Edmund Crispin

First published in 1953; republished by Bloomsbury Reader on January 29, 2019

Edmund Crispin was the pen name of Bruce Montgomery, a British mystery writer and musician who did most of his crime writing in the 1940s and 1950s. To give you a sense of his style, here’s a sentence from the story “The Evidence for the Crown”: “This latter circumstance looked like presenting a difficulty, in that Blanche Binney, throttled shortly after lunch one May day on her own sitting-room hearth-rug, was clearly yet another instance of that favourite species of English homicide, the crime passionnel: and there were so many males in Lampoud, married and unmarried, young and old, overt and secretive, who might have resented the catholicity of Blanche’s affections, that the field of suspects seemed at first to be formidably large.” You’ve gotta love mid-century British mysteries.

Somebody chopped off the hand of the lady of dubious repute, and a local constable solves the crime after Crispin steers the reader’s attention away from the culprit. “The Evidence for the Crown” comes near the end of the volume and is one of only two stories that do not feature Oxford Don Gervase Fen and/or Detective Inspector Humbleby.

The other is “Deadlock,” a story told in the first person by a fourteen-year-old boy who is having a midnight adventure when he walks through some blood. A man has been murdered, and in the end, only the boy knows the truth about the murderer’s identity. “Deadlock” is an atmospheric and surprisingly poignant story. It stands as my favorite in the collection.

Another of the volume’s best entries (“The Quick Brown Fox”) explains why criminals are easily captured if they rely on detective stories for inspiration, given the difficulty of pulling off the complex crimes imagined in mysteries. Professor Fen makes good on that theory when he easily solves a murder and an apparent blackmail scheme by spotting the flaw in the murderer’s plan.

Actually, Fen solves most crimes pretty easily. “Beware of the Trains” is like a locked room mystery with a train substituted for the locked room. Nine passengers were riding in groups of three; none of them threw the body from the train. So who did? Humbleby and Fen unravel the mystery.

“Humbleby Agonistes” begins with Humbleby telling Fen about his visit to an old chum who shot at him three times from point blank range and missed. The old chum isn’t bad with a pistol, and in fact had just shot a man in the head in self-defense. Why did the old chum miss? The obvious explanation doesn’t quite make sense to Humbleby, but it takes Fen only a minute to puzzle out the answer.

Fen helps Humbleby resolve another murder, this one involving a love triangle (or maybe a quadrangle) and a seemingly unshakable alibi in “Otherwhere.” The latter story is one of several in which Fen contemplates the relationship between justice and karma.

Fen recounts how he saw through a perfect murder alibi in “Lacrimae Rerum.” He witnesses the murder of a cryptographer in “Within the Gates” and helps the police uncover a corrupt officer. In “Abhorred Shears,” he explains how poison was delivered to a victim in front of several witnesses. His examination of “The Little Room” in a house he is thinking about renting for a charity leads him to suspect (and solve) a crime.

In “Express Delivery,” Fen figures out how a murder was committed (thus proving who committed it) in a case involving suspects who all hoped to inherit from the victim. Fen solves a fairly easy mystery by deducing a robber’s identity in “A Pot of Paint.” In “The Drowning of Edgar Foley,” Fen views a body in the morgue by happenstance and soon discovers who murdered the victim.

Fen shows a bit of a dark side when he explains how a murder involving a missing car was accomplished in “Black for a Funeral,” while Crispin converts a locked room mystery into a ghost story in “The Name on the Window.” In “The Golden Mean,” Fen saves the life of a friend and then, by using a piece of esoteric knowledge, prevents his murder.

The Fen stories are all fairly short. Their brevity leaves little room for character development, although the respective natures of Fen and Humbleby become apparent over time. Fen is astute but a bit arrogant, while Humbleby is an honest plodder. From the days of Holmes and Lestrade, those characteristics have served the characters in British mysteries well. But these stories are about the mysteries more than the characters, and while they vary in quality, the resolutions are generally clever. More importantly, Crispin's leisurely prose style sweeps the reader along, although fans of modern thrillers in which characters are only eloquent when describing their guns might not have the patience to enjoy Crispin’s style.

RECOMMENDED

Jeeves and the King of Clubs by Ben Schott

Published by Little, Brown and Company on November 6, 2018

In his notes to Jeeves and the King of Clubs, Ben Schott describes P.G. Wodehouse as “the greatest humorist in the English language.” It would be difficult to argue with that characterization. Schott does justice to Wodehouse, capturing Bertie Wooster’s amiable ease, Jeeves’s droll wit, and Wodehouse’s playful style. Schott even ends the novel with an explanation of various words he used as a tribute to Wodehouse’s ability to enrich language by originating words or to use them in new ways.

Beleaguered Bertie Wooster is chastised by his new banker, loans money to Montague Montgomery to invest in a horrible play, wears Monty’s sandwich board while Monty delivers the cash, has a cautious encounter with Florence Craye, to whom he was engaged four times, and is warned to keep an eye on the allegedly seditious Roderick Spode, seventh Earl of Sidcup — all in just the first two chapters of Jeeves and the King of Clubs.

During the course of the silliness, Bertie plays matchmaker (between Monty and Florence) and spy (although the espionage, requiring a certain amount of thought, is naturally orchestrated by Jeeves), impersonates an Italian chef, conspires with his aunt, makes fun of British nationalist politicians, deftly evades the attentions of Florence, blackballs unpleasant applicants to his club (the Drones), and has his history, English, horse-betting, and sartorial choices corrected, repeatedly, by Jeeves.

The plot involves matrimony (a state that Bertie firmly opposes), a play for which Bertie must orchestrate a good review, and the unmasking of a spy, but as is typical of a Jeeves novel, most of the story follows Bertie as he sails through his leisurely life. The good-natured Bertie is one of the most likeable characters in fiction, but his ability to turn a phrase (actually Wodehouse’s ability, as channeled by Schott) sets him apart from the crowd.

The world can never have too many Jeeves novels, and if we can’t resurrect Wodehouse to continue writing them, Schott is a worthy substitute.

RECOMMENDED

A Time to Scatter Stones by Lawrence Block

Published by Subterranean on January 31, 2019

Lawrence Block has concocted some interesting plots in his many decades as a writer of crime fiction, some of them in his popular Matthew Scudder series. A Time to Scatter Stones is a novella-length Scudder story that has more dialog than plot. The dialog is often entertaining, and it is to Block’s credit that he didn’t pad a story in which very little happens.

Scudder met Elaine when Scudder was married and still an NYPD detective. He met her again years later, when he was divorced and sober. They’ve been together for years, but when they first met, Elaine was a working girl. Scudder still goes to AA meetings but Elaine only recently joined a support group for former prostitutes called Tarts.

Elaine has a friend from Tarts named Ellen. Much of the novel consists of Elaine and Ellen discussing the kinky (or not) desires of Johns who engage the services of prostitutes. Scudder happily joins those conversations and even more happily fantasizes about doing a three-way with Elaine and Ellen. Elaine doesn’t mind the fantasy, so all is well and good.

Ah, but the plot? Well, a former client of Ellen’s won’t accept that she’s left the business. He wants to keep her on the payroll and is threatening to rape her if she won’t give him what he wants, including things were never on Ellen’s menu. Scudder tracks him down and teaches him some manners. That diversion takes little of Scudder’s time, allowing him to get back to what he enjoys, which (since he no longer drinks) seems to consist of talking about and having sex.

The story is littered with amusing musings and bad jokes and discussions of various combinations of sex partners who the two retired prostitutes have encountered. If you’re looking for a narrative version of Red Shoe Diaries with a beat-down thrown in, this is the novella for you. If you’re a fan of the Scudder series and wonder what Scudder is doing in his senior years, the novella will answer your question. If you’re looking for a thrilling crime story, you might want to look elsewhere. I enjoyed it as a voyeuristic and not particularly realistic look at the lives of prostitutes, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a crime story.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Spirit of Science Fiction by Roberto Bolaño

Published in Spain in 2018; published in translation by Penguin Press on February 5, 2019

The Spirit of Science Fiction is an early novel that foreshadows Roberto Bolaño's later and stronger work. It was published posthumously.

While the novel begins with the interview of a writer who has won an award for his book of poetry, most of the novel is set in the past. Jan Schrella is a 17-year-old unpublished writer of science fiction, living in Mexico City with Remo. Jan is Chilean and, as he writes in a letter to Ursula K. LeGuin, Remo also “claims to be from Chile.” The story eventually suggests that Jan is Bolaño’s alter ego, although Remo is the novel’s narrator and main character. The Spirit of Science Fiction certainly has the feel of a fictionalized autobiography, although one wonders whether there might be more of Bolaño in Remo than in Jan.

Remo scrapes out a living writing book reviews and magazine articles about historic crimes. Their parents contribute the rest of their living expenses. Remo socializes while Jan writes letters to science fiction editors and writers. Some are fan letters, some recount his dreams, some contain ideas for stories, some ask the writers to pay attention to Latin America.

To alleviate his boredom (and because this is a Bolaño novel), Remo begins to attend a poetry workshop. There seems to have been an explosion of poetry workshops in Mexico, or maybe that’s just a rumor started by a mimeographed cultural weekly they get from a mysterious woman named Estrellita, who might be a poet and might be living with a son who is an artist, although the details of Estrellita’s life might also be based on rumor. In any event, Remo and José Arco decide to investigate the state of Mexican poetry. They find clues in graffiti. They listen to a professor discuss fate and the lack of meaning in poetry magazines, a discussion that provokes Remo, who believes that South Americans from poor countries are motivated by pride in their national poetry.

Remo meets and instantly feels romantic inclinations toward a woman named Laura, in the tradition of Latin men of romance (within hours of meeting her, she is “gradually turning into everyone and everything”). He pronounces his love for her before the evening is done, while she ponders how to break the news to her boyfriend. Yet Remo can’t get an erection because, paradoxically, their first kiss is too intimate a time for love-making.

Enigmatic characters populate Remo’s life, all of whom seem to have a hidden intellect and a desire to write poetry, including the toothless young mechanic who sells him a stolen motorcycle named Aztec Princess and the woman who complains that Jan has disrespected literature by constructing a table from science fiction paperbacks. The characters and their actions often have a surrealistic feel.

In the novel’s last section, Remo and Laura explore Mexican bathhouses and the erotic (or not) possibilities they inspire when strangers knock on the door. The ending comes across as Bolaño deciding he needed to end the story somewhere, but it abandons all the other characters, giving that section of the story a disconnected feel. Still, the lives of the characters and the atmosphere that Bolaño creates make it easy to recommend The Spirit of Science Fiction, perhaps as a prelude to his outstanding The Savage Detectives.

RECOMMENDED

The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on November 13, 2018

I didn’t know what a gloomy guy Jonathan Franzen is until I read The End of the End of the Earth. There’s no point in having a bucket list, he says, because it won’t change the fact that you’re going to die. Well, okay, but seeing every bird you possibly can before you die won’t change the fact that you’re going to die, and I’m not sure how Franzen squares that obsession with his rejection of bucket lists, except for his impression that bucket listers want to cheat death by “strategic vacationing.” I don’t have a bucket list but I’ve taken a lot of vacations, and I always thought they had something to do with enjoying life rather than cheating death. Maybe if the buckets are filled with birds, Franzen would have more use for them. Or maybe he’s just the kind of guy who sees the bucket as half empty rather than half full.

Franzen starts this essay collection by telling the reader that the “pure” essay, the personal exploration of an idea, is an extinct form, in part because subjectivity is the new norm in reportage, reviews, and even literature, which increasingly conflates fiction with autobiography. In an essay that explores the idea of essays, Franzen contrasts the subjective opinions of bloggers and activists on the left and right — the people who claim “the right not to hear things that upset them and to shout down ideas that offend them” — with essays that, like the best literature, invite you “to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.”

Franzen pushed my buttons from time to time, and I’ll gladly acknowledge that he might be right and I might be wrong. Maybe it really is too late to avert climate change and we should stop pretending that environmental doom is avoidable (although misplaced hope, in my view, is a necessary motivational tool to even incremental policy changes). To his credit, Franzen admits that he might be wrong, that maybe the focus should be on climate change deniers, a conclusion he pondered while writing and then abandoning an essay about birds. He eventually converted the essay to one about finding meaning in improving a world that is coming to an end. That’s a perspective I hadn’t considered. Inviting readers to consider new perspectives is an essayist’s greatest gift.

Most of these essays in this collection touch on Franzen’s love of bird watching and the anxiety it produces. I couldn’t tell from reading Freedom whether Franzen was on the side of birds or cats (fans of both are excoriated in the novel), but now I know. Franzen has a passion for birds. Cats, not so much.

Franzen makes an inspired defense of the ethical imperative to protect the environment in order to protect birds. I suppose one could translate that to an argument for saving all habitats to protect all wildlife, and for that matter oceans and possibly even places where people and their dogs might dwell.

One essay discusses the impact of unregulated hunting on bird populations in Albania and Egypt. Another discusses his frenzied attempt to see all the possible birds in a couple of Caribbean islands. His birdwatching trip to East Africa sparks his gloomy condemnation of bucket lists and tourism (because the world doesn’t need another picture of a giraffe, as opposed to, I don’t know, another sighting of a bird?). One of the more interesting bird essays discusses the decline of seabird populations and the simple ways that fishing fleets can avoid killing birds by accident. And the end of the end of the Earth turns out to be Antarctica, which has glorious penguins, although the essay morphs into a gloomy discussion of death before it becomes an amusing take on expensive tours to places most people don’t want to go. I’m glad Franzen went there and described the trip so that I can cross it off my bucket list as a vicarious trip taken.

Franzen writes about his personal experience with (and contribution to) the gentrification (and whitening) of New York City. He shares Sherry Turkle’s concern that smart phones and social media are reducing empathy. He dissects friendships (Bill Vollman and David Foster Wallace). In an essay about Sarah Stolfa’s photographs of patrons in a Philadelphia bar, he talks about the miserable lonely year he spent in Philadelphia. Being lonely and miserable is an undercurrent to many of the essays, but not to the same extent as his love of bird watching.

One of the most interesting essays addresses how readers feel about books when they cannot sympathize with the author, and how authors make readers sympathize with characters who are in many ways unsympathetic. He uses Edith Wharton and her novels to advance both discussions, but he also points to a string of unsympathetic characters (from the murderer Raskolnikov to the sociopath Tom Ripley to the pedophile Humbert Humbert) to whom the reader feels drawn, perhaps as a function of “the guilty pleasure of imagining what it would be like to be unburdened by scruples.” I think Franzen explained my love of crime novels that focus on criminals rather than good guys.

Bird watchers will probably love this collection. I grew a bit weary of the bird themes, but there are enough non-avian essays to make the book worthwhile for readers with more generalized interests.

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