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.