Forgotten Book - She Had to Have Gas

I last read Rupert Penny's She Had to Have Gas a decade ago and duly reviewed it on this blog. I felt it began splendidly but then got a bit bogged down. Over the years, I'd forgotten the story (and even the fact that I'd read it!) but I was prompted to take another look as a result of a typically interesting comment from the very knowledgeable Art Scott.

Art mentioned the book in relation to my recent post on Richard Whittington-Egan's book about the Cheltenham Torso case. He highlighted the fact that Penny wrote his novel not long after the real life case hit the headlines. It's an intriguing connection and I was prompted to dig out the book from the vaults to see whether it cast much imaginative light on the Cheltenham mystery, which remains officially unsolved.

The short answer is no. The events of the novel are very different from those in the Cheltenham case. It's not simply that the torso which is central to Penny's mystery is female, it's that the characters and motivations are very different. Even so, it's not impossible that Penny was inspired to dream up his convoluted puzzle by the news story.

My edition of the book is the one featured in the above image, published by Ramble House, whose list is definitely eclectic and worth a look. If you were to come across a copy of the Collins Crime Club edition at a cheap price, I recommend that you snap it up - Penny is definitely collectible, and his firsts are hard to find in good condition, let alone in dust jackets.

 

Forgotten Book - The Murder of Martin Fotherill

Edward C. Lester is a little-known Golden Age writer who appears only to have written two books, both in the late 1930s. I hope to write about The Guy Fawkes Murder, the first of them, before long, but today my focus is on his second book, The Murder of Martin Fotherill. Both novels feature an elderly amateur sleuth called Moody. He's very much in the tradition of the Great Detective, and has an obliging Watson in the person of the narrator, a chap called Warrington.

The story begins with a man called David Fotherill reporting to the police that his brother Martin is missing. The authorities are not unduly concerned at first, but then a body is found...by none other than Moody. Needless to say, he feel impelled to investigate, and given that Warrington was a work colleague of both the Fotherill brothers, he calls on his assistance.

The book reminded me of the fiction of Rupert Penny, a very clever writer who poured out Golden Age mysteries in the run-up to the Second World War before giving up the genre. Rather like Penny, Lester shows himself a master of the Golden Age conventions. We are offered a cipher, a challenge to the reader, and cluefinder footnotes. There are also numerous references to major Golden Age writers, such as Crofts and Austin Freeman, while Lester also borrows one trick from Richard Hull.

I enjoyed this book, and it's a pity that Lester (about whom I know very little, other than that he attended Westminster School) did not continue to write detective stories. The story begins splendidly, though I must say I felt it sagged after about half-way, as Lester piled on the complications rather too vigorously - I felt myself losing the will to live during the unravelling of the cipher. But for all that, it's a fun mystery, and doesn't deserve the total neglect which has been its fate.

Forgotten Book - She Had to Have Gas

I’ve mentioned before my enthusiasm for the work of the little known Golden Age writer Rupert Penny, and my choice for today’s Forgotten Book is the last mystery that Basil Thornett wrote under that pen-name, She Had to Have Gas. It was published in 1939; during the war, Thornett worked, most appropriately, as a cryptographer, and after peace was declared, he did not return to the genre.

In this book, as with other mysteries featuring Penny’s regular investigator, Inspector Beale, the cop’s pal, stockbroker and journalist Tony Purdon, is on hand to assist. But it has to be said that Tony’s presence in the stories was never easy to justify, and here his role is pretty superfluous.

The book begins splendidly, with the owner of a modest East Anglian B&B worrying about the creditworthiness of her sole guest. She is right to worry: soon she has good reason to believe the woman has gassed herself. But then the body of the apparent victim disappears – what is going on? Meanwhile, the spoiled niece of a famous crime writer has vanished, and one is tempted to believe that she was living a double life in the guest-house. With Rupert Penny, though, nothing is simple.

In fact, the plot is so elaborate that it comes close to sinking under the weight of its own cleverness. As with a number of similar books, I found the opening scenes and the revelations by far the best parts of the story. In between,there was much that was verging on the turgid. But there is a 'challenge to the reader' and a cluefinder to compensate. Penny was an appealing author and this book, for all its flaws, appealed to me.

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.

Solving Mysteries

The world of mystery readers divides into two broad categories – those who like to try to solve the mystery themselves, before the solution is revealed, and those who simply enjoy the story and make no serious effort to work out what is going on. Many people I know, including some crime writers, are in the latter camp, but I’m firmly in the former group.

In the Golden Age of complicated plots and ingenious if unlikely solutions, I suppose many readers liked to figure out the answer to the puzzle, and this was why Ellery Queen introduced the Challenge to the Reader in his early books – an idea taken up, as I have mentioned recently, by Rupert Penny in The Talkative Policeman and some of his later mysteries. Agatha Christie set her challenges less explicitly, though she usually managed to ‘play fair’ with the reader by giving a variety of clues to the answer. Her great gift in this respect was a matchless ability to disguise her clues. Information is supplied so surreptitiously that you may not notice you are receiving it. Her ability to misdirect truly matched any conjuror’s.

Penny couched his Challenge like this: ‘At this point the intelligent reader, if he has not already done so, should be able to attempt the solution of the problem with every prospect of success by taking thought, eked out where necessary with a guess or two...The less intelligent reader may perhaps be allowed to guess first and think afterwards, always provided that he does not shirk the thinking...nothing can too strongly express condemnation of those who use guesswork alone....’

Plainly, he had his tongue in his cheek when he wrote this, and generally, there’s a sense of fun about Penny’s writing that gives it an enduring appeal. For my part, as an author, I do like to set an implied challenge to readers who want a puzzle to solve, by offering clues to motivation and hidden secrets during the course of the narrative. Of course, plenty of my readers aren’t interested in this aspect of the stories, preferring to focus on the characterisation, setting and evocation of a particular society at a particular point in time, but that is fine by me. A writer of mysteries is in the business of entertainment, and it’s possible to entertain on a number of different levels. Rupert Penny and some of his contemporaries focused too heavily on things like train timetables for the taste of modern readers. But the fact that the genre has moved on doesn’t mean that there isn’t much pleasure to be had, both for writers and readers, in plots with fairly clued puzzles .

The Longevity of Detective Fiction

An interesting feature of Rupert Penny’s The Talkative Policeman, which I mentioned the other day, was his introductory note, in which he expounds on what he sees as the lack of longevity of the detective story: ‘The detective shall find his grave at last as surely as the lifeless flesh he theorised upon.’

He identifies Holmes as the sole exception to this: he and Watson ‘are, first and foremost, characters, and the rest is incidental. At a guess, it is not impossible that Lord Peter Wimsey may one day qualify to keep them company.’ No mention of Poirot or Miss Marple here, and by the time Penny wrote this, Wimsey had solved his last major case!

For Penny, plainly, the plot was the thing, and this was no doubt why, after the Second World War, he did not return to the genre: it had moved on, and elaborate puzzles of the kind he favoured were no longer in fashion. It is a shame that he abandoned the genre, though, since he (like the much more eminent Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkeley, who also gave up writing crime novels in the post-war era) had genuine talent as a writer, a talent which in his case never fully flowered.

I suppose Penny would have been amazed had he been told that, more than seventy years after his debut novel was published, it has reappeared in a fresh and appealing version, courtesy of Ramble House. Of course, it is true that minor writers like Penny are forgotten by most readers nowadays, but the appeal of ingenious mysteries has by no means faded. The detective as a character, and the detective story as a form, have proved much more flexible, and thus enjoyed much greater longevity, than some of their creators over the years have anticipated.

Forgotten Books - The Talkative Policeman

Rupert Penny was one of the most interesting writers of the late Golden Age, and his 1937 debut novel, The Talkative Policeman, is my choice for today’s entry in Patti Abbott’s series of Forgotten Books. It is a book that was for many years almost impossible to find, but is now available at a modest price in a pleasing paperback edition, thanks to that splendid small press Ramble House, who have reprinted all the elusive Penny titles.

The book features a Challenge to the Reader, in the Ellery Queen style, and Penny claims (Ias far as I know, rightly) that he was the first British writer to adopt this explicit method of testing the reader’s ability to guess the solution to a highly convoluted puzzle. The book introduces Chief Inspector Beale, of Scotland Yard, a very likeable detective, who is accompanied almost at all times by his chum Tony Purdon, who acts as Watson to Beale’s Holmes. Nobody ever seems to object to Purdon’s presence at witness interviews, and this illustrates the artificiality of the story, in which plot complication is really all that matters (even though there are hints that Penny could have created more rounded characters had he chosen to do so – he did not lack literary talent.)

Beale is rapidly called in by the local force when the Rector of the small village of Wyre is found murdered. He has been battered to death by a blunt instrument. Yet he seems to have led a blameless life – so what can possibly be the motive for the crime?

Penny provides not one but two crime scene maps, and a miscellany of charts as a vast range of plot issues (including that old Golden Age stand-by, train times) are canvassed. The discussions are often very intelligent, and Penny (real name, Basil Thornett) was clearly a very smart guy – I gather he worked at Bletchley, the decoding centre, during the Second World War.

I enjoyed the period feel of this book, but it became over-long and one of the key characters almost disappeared from sight, a structural weakness. I confess I failed the Challenge to the Reader (though I did prefer my own solution to Penny’s, that was no doubt due to prejudice on my part!) The criticism often made of this kind of book is, of course, that the author pays too much attention to complicating the puzzle, and not enough to characterisation and setting. But a ‘fair play’ puzzle does have much to commend it, in my opinion. Where this book suffers in comparison to the best of Christie, for instance, is that there is too much technical stuff, and an inadequately portrayed culprit and motive. But the journey towards the denouement is an agreeable time-passer and the book has genuine historic interest.

Forgotten Book - The Lucky Policeman

Although I didn’t contribute to Patti Abbott’s series of Forgotten Books when I was sailing in the Med last Friday, I was busy at the time sitting in the sun and devouring a minor classic of the past which deserves to be highlighted this week.

Rupert Penny is a British writer who flourished briefly just before, and at the start of, the Second World War. He wrote convoluted puzzle stories in the best traditions of classic Golden Age detective fiction – and then he disappeared from sight (at least as a crime writer – a lover of flowers as well as ciphers and puzzles, he spent time working in Bletchley and he later became a doyen of the British Iris Society.)

Penny’s books were published in the UK by Collins Crime Club, but have become very scarce and expensive. Happily, that excellent publisher Ramble House has brought out several of his books, and supplied my copy of The Lucky Policeman. Suffice to say that it is the most enjoyable Penny novel I have read so far.

The set-up is excellent. An American shrink, Hilary Peake, has come to England and set up a private asylum (oddly, to my mind, it only has two patients, one of whom plays no effective part in the mystery, rather dashing one of my own theories about the puzzle.) When Simon Selby escapes from his quarters and disappears, we are presented with a variant on the ‘locked room’ concept, but matters take a more serious turn when a series of murders take place in the New Forest nearby. The local police are duly baffled, and send for Penny’s regular detective, the likeable Inspector Beale. Beale, as usual (although inexplicably) is accompanied by his pal and personal Watson, Tony Purdon, though Tony doesn’t play much of a part in the story.

There is a direct challenge to the reader to guess what has happened – shades of Ellery Queen and C.Daly King. I confess that I fell for Penny’s red herrings and got the solution wrong .The explanation for the mystery is cunning, if inevitably far-fetched and all in all this was wonderful holiday reading. Ramble House deserve heartfelt congratulations for making this lost classic available to modern puzzle fans at a very reasonable price.