The Lost Winner by Fei Wu

When I visited Shanghai last November my principal host was a young Chinese crime writer, Fei Wu (pictured above). I very much enjoyed our conversations and learned that, in addition to having a story in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Fei was just about to publish, via CITIC Press, a detective novel of his own called The Lost Winner. But it isn't any ordinary detective novel. It's a story in three dimensions...

I haven't read The Lost Winner myself, and it has yet to be translated into English and my Chinese is non-existent, but I've seen the book and the associated materials, including a rather wonderful model of the crime scene which I believe contains its own clues to the solution.

British and American writers of the Golden Age made steps in this direction. One thinks of Evelyn Elder's Murder in Black and White, with clues in the illustrations, and of Francis Beeding's The Norwich Victims and the less renowned but very interesting No Fury, both of which contain photographs. And there are other examples, but nothing on this scale of ambition. The closest to it that I can think of are the Crime Dossiers of Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links, starting with Murder off Miami, and the American versions of them, with compilers including Q. Patrick among others.

Fei Wu's book shows that the traditions of the Golden Age mystery are not only alive and well and enjoying popularity in unexpected parts of the world, but also that the tropes of classic crime are flexible and capable of ingenious adaptation. And, as the picture below suggests, construction... 

Forgotten Book - Angel in the Case

Milward Kennedy is a Golden Age author whose books I've covered several times on this blog, because I'm intrigued by his work. I'm a great admirer of Anthony Berkeley, as was Kennedy, and Kennedy tried to emulate his friend's innovative approach to the writing of crime fiction. But if Berkeley was uneven - and he was - then Kennedy was very, very uneven. And although he wrote some excellent books, I'm afraid that he also wrote some that were extremely disappointing - I'm a huge fan of the Golden Age, of course, but there's no point in pretending that even the best writers of that era always made best use of their gifts..

Kennedy wrote a couple of novels in the Thirties under a different pen-name, Evelyn Elder (his second wife was called Evelyn and I'd speculate that there was an age difference between them, hence the pseudonym). The first, Murder in Black and White, has been republished in recent times by Ramble House. The second is Angel in the Case, and that's a very rare title indeed. I've been hunting it for ages, and now a kind person has made a copy available to me, so this is my choice for today's Forgotten Book.

Let me start with the good news. The book is furnished with wonderful maps of the scene of the crime - they are just about the most appealing of any that I've ever seen in a Golden Age novel, detailed and attractive. Now for the bad news. To my mind, the story is dire. The writing is perfectly good, but the story did not hold any appeal for me at all.

The book begins with a police investigation into the drowning of a wealthy man called Curtis. He is a publisher, and the guests (and suspects) at his country house include a poet and a couple of writers. Scope here, I thought, for Kennedy to provide us with some entertainment, but apart from a passing nod to the Detection Club oath, the material is flat and uninteresting from start to finish. The eponymous Angel is an attractive female house guest, but I found her no more engaging than the rest of the cast. The mystery was desperately dull even before an American gangster was introduced (invariably a Bad Sign in a British Golden Age whodunit) with no attempt at characterisation, and precious little humour. Kennedy could do much better than this, fortunately. It''s a real shame about Angel in the Case, but I can only say that I wish that Kennedy had devoted more time to elaborating the story in an appealing way rather than concentrating on the maps.

Forgotten Book - Murder in Black and White

In 1931, Milward Kennedy wrote the first of three books under the pseudonym of Evelyn Elder. These are rare books, but the first Elder, Murder in Black and White, has recently been reprinted by Fender Tucker’s excellent small press, Ramble House. I strongly recommend Ramble House, who have brought back at reasonable prices a host of obscure titles.

This book contains, in effect, a ‘challenge to the reader’ in the Ellery Queen style, though it is not expressly described as such. The author says: ‘When teh reader has reached the end of Part Three he is in possession of all the facts needed to reach the solution of the problem. Such further facts as are introduced in Part Four (and they are virtually only two in number) are no more than confirmation of the theory which emerges from the rest of the book.’ So in a sense, Rupert Penny, whom I quoted a while back, was wrong in saying that The Talkative Policeman was the first English book to present this kind of direct challenge to the reader.

The novel shows us both the best and the worst of Kennedy. He was an intelligent man and a good writer, with a flair for ingenious ideas that suited the Golden Age. But somehow, all too often, the sum of the parts does not add up to as much as it ought. The narrative is strangely constructed, with far too many characters introduced too soon, and this becomes wearisome. I didn’t care about the people as much as I should have done, given that Kennedy was better at characterisation than some of his contemporaries.

And yet the idea of the book is very appealing. An architect and amateur artist, Sam Horder, takes a holiday in the south of France and becomes involved in a seemingly impossible crime. Real tennis, of which Kennedy was clearly a fan, plays a significant part in the story. Sam’s sketches are reproduced in the book – Part Two consists solely of them - and you can, if you care to do so, try to figure out the solution by studying them. He recounts the mystery to a friend, who plays armchair detective by doing just that. The sketches were actually drawn by Austin Blomfield, himself an architect and artist who went into practice with his father, an architect of distinction whose work included buildings at Lady Margaret Hall.

Overall, then, a book I found frustrating yet, from a historical perspective, very interesting indeed.