Forgotten Book - Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall is a novel which illustrates, among other things, the late Stanley Ellin's versatility as a crime writer. He was always, and will I think remain, best known as an author of short stories, most famously "The Specialty of the House", but he was also an accomplished novelist, equally at ease with the private eye story and with the novel of psychological suspense.

The first edition dust jacket of Mirror, Mirror, describes the book as "spellbinding, shocking - unlike anything else Stanley Ellin has ever written". The victim of the bullet lies on Peter Hibben's bathroom floor in his Greenwich Village apartment. What has happened? The scene seems like a nightmare, yet it is not. Peter's search for answers becomes a journey into his sexual past". The blurb concludes: "The disclosures will be disturbing to some, but you will not be able to put Mirror, Mirror down any more than you can guess the outcome".

The book was first published in 1972, and the date is significant. At the time, the publication of Portnoy's Complaint had ushered in a new era of frankness about sex; it's impossible to imagine this book being regarded as publishable even ten years earlier, even though the central plot twist was comparable to that in an earlier classic of psychological suspense (no, I'm not going to reveal which one!) I suspect that present day readers may feel that Ellin takes the then-new freedoms a bit too far at times, but it's certainly true that he manages to blend controversial material with a plot of classic ingenuity. The story is, in essence, a cunning refashioning of the "whowasdunin" type of mystery, and there is even a sort of cipher which provides a vital clue to the mystery.

Harry Keating included this novel in his list of the 100 best crime books; it also won a major prize in France. Keating pointed out, correctly, that as well as all the shocking stuff, there's plenty of humour. This was, in its day, a ground-breaking crime novel, and although I have some reservations about it, it is nevertheless a good example of the taut, readable prose of an author who was in the front rank of post-war American mystery writers, and deserves to be remembered. 

Forgotten Book - Something Like a Love Affair

Something Like a Love Affair was published in 1992, and not long after it came out, I seized the chance to ask its author, Julian Symons, to inscribe my copy. Under the inscription, in his tiny, immaculate handwriting, he wrote "A good title?" and then, under that, "A good book??" The title is not, I think, anything special, but the book is certainly a good one. It does, however, qualify for the description "forgotten". I've seen very little discussion of it anywhere.

In fact, I enjoyed re-reading Something Like a Love Affair even more than I enjoyed the story the first time around. One of the reasons is that now I can see more clearly than I saw then what he was aiming for, a fresh spin on a device introduced (unless there's an earlier example of which I'm unaware) by an author whom Julian and I both admired - Anthony Berkeley. It's a form of "whowasdunin" story. There are a few poorish reviews of this book online, but I take a different view: it offers a nice example of storytelling technique from a very talented novelist.

We know from the outset that the police have discovered a body, but we don't know whose body it is. The action then goes back a short distance in time, and we are introduced to Judith Lassiter. On the surface she has a lot to be thankful for: she is attractive, well-off,and has a doting husband. But she isn't happy, and as the story unfolds, we begin to understand why.

As in a number of his books, Symons combines a portrayal of mental disintegration with a cunningly plotted mystery. Nowadays, his fiction is much less renowned than that of his friend Patricia Highsmith, but I see quite a few similarities between what they were trying to do with the post-war crime novel. Highsmith was the superior literary stylist, but Symons' plots were cleverer. I've always thought it a paradox that it was she and not he who wrote a book about plotting suspense fiction. But much as I relished Something Like a Love Affair, I was struck by a passage which quotes from the day's newspaper headlines: trouble in the Middle East and global warming were major concerns then, just as they are today. As for the question marks.after "A good book", they indicate the modesty of the man. He judged his own work by exacting standards, but I think he was pleased with this one and I'd be pleased to have written it too.  

The Deaths by Mark Lawson - review

The Deaths, by Mark Lawson, is one of the most interesting books I read in 2013, and also the most thought-provoking. Although I've often listened to Lawson's radio programmes, and watched him on TV, I've never read his fiction before, although it's been clear for a long time that he's very interested in the crime genre. The Deaths is a book about crime, but it's also a mainstream novel, rather than avowedly a genre work.

That said, the central plot gimmick is one that was (to the best of my knowledge) dreamed up by Anthony Berkeley in the Golden Age of detective fiction. This is a "whowasdunin", when we know that murder has been committed, right from the outset - the opening line is "The deaths are discovered because of the country's sudden obsession with perfect coffee" - but are left to guess who the victims are, as well as whodunit.

This is a book set in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and focuses on four wealthy couples who live cheek by jowl, and whose apparently charmed lives are just about to turn rather unpleasant. There is a great deal of social comedy in this book, with some very funny lines, and acute observations. I struggled to like the characters, I must say, and it may be that Lawson overdoes their odiousness, but this is a gripping story which kept me fascinated from start to finish.

I have one or two quibbles. The idea that a PR guy would be sent out to negotiate a severance deal with a departing bank boss struck me as incredible,but then again, this book was not aimed at employment lawyers. I also wasn't convinced by some aspects of the life and career of one character who is a barrister. These points nagged at me, because it would have been easy to avoid them,but in the overall scheme of things, they didn't matter much. I've enjoyed discussing The Debts with someone else who has read it, and although in this post I'm keen to avoid spoilers, I can recommend it with confidence that others will enjoy it as much as I did..

Forgotten Book - Follow, as the Night...

I was encouraged to read today's Forgotten Book by an interesting post in that excellent blog Beneath the Stains of Time. Follow, as the Night..., also known as Your Loving Victim (a title that verges on a spoiler) was published by Patricia McGerr in 1951. Three years later, it was made into a film in France, the English title being One Step to Eternity. Sadly, there does not seem to be any DVD version on the market. If I could find a copy, I'd certainly want to watch it.

I say 'sadly' because this is a story that I found very enjoyable. As with McGerr's earlier books, notably Pick Your Victim, this is a "whowasdunin" type of story. At the outset, someone plunges from a balcony to their death. We then learn that a newspaper columnist, Larry Rock, invited the four women in his life to a party, intending to kill one of them. But which person did he have in mind to kill?

The story is essentially told in flashback, as we see how Larry met and then messed about his first wife, his second, his mistress and the girl he now plans to marry. Why would he wish to kill any one of them in particular? We soon see that Larry is a very nasty piece of work indeed, while some of the women aren't much better, though one of them is decent and likeable.

Very early on in this book, I asked myself how I would have tackled such a story if I'd had the same scenario idea as McGerr. I came up with an idea for a plot twist, and then set about trying to figure out an appropriate murder motive. By using this method, I did manage to anticipate what was going to happen, but it didn't spoil my enjoyment in any way. This is a short, snappy novel and it kept me entertained. No question in my mind, McGerr was a talented and inventive writer.

Forgotten Book - Murder in the Basement

Murder in the Basement, my Forgotten Book for today, is an Anthony Berkeley novel that I first read more than twenty years ago. Back then, to be honest, I was rather disappointed by it. There was less humour than I expected and the whodunit aspect was not as strong or as clever as in some of Berkeley's other books. But I've re-read it and revised my opinion dramatically. It's a much better book than I appreciated the first time around.

The structure is unorthodox. A newly married couple arrive at their new suburban house, only to discover that a body has been buried in the cellar. The corpse belongs to a woman, who has been shot, but Chief Inspector Moresby and his team struggle to identify her. Then they get a lucky break and work out that she formerly worked at a prep school. Enter Roger Sheringham, Berkeley's usual amateur sleuth. He has had a spell teaching at the school (talk about the long arm of coincidence!) and he's actually started writing a novel featuring his former colleagues. But which of the women was the victim?

I'd completely forgotten that this is a book with a "whowasdunin" element as well as a whodunit plot. The "whowasdunin" was most famously associated with Patricia McGerr, author of Pick Your Victim, but Berkeley beat her to it by nearly a decade and a half. It's a device that works well, and more than compensates for the subdued nature of the book that troubled me originally.

As usual, Roger Sheringham delights here in helping to thwart justice (or, perhaps, to do justice in a very unconventional way.) Berkeley was in some ways, it might be said, an amoral writer. But there's a cleverness about this unusual story that I didn't recognise as I should have done when I first read it, probably because I was expecting something different. I'm glad I took the time to give it another try. And it provides a reminder that it may be a mistake to write off a book, or even a writer, too readily. Something I'll bear in mind in relation to a new book I've just read, a rather overblown example of Eurocrime, that didn't live up to my expectations. Maybe I just wasn't in the right frame of mind for it.