Martin Edwards's Blog, page 58

Death of the Living Dead by Masaya Yamaguchi

In the last few years, I've become increasingly fascinated by the inventiveness of Asian crime fiction. Even before my trip to Shanghai in 2019, I'd been reading a range of mysteries from the Far East which, although often very different from familiar western detective fiction, and sometimes quite outlandish, are often very appealing. Meeting Soji Shimada served to strengthen my interest in Japanese detective fiction, as did conversations with the critic and writer Steve Steinbock, who speaks Japanese and is a great fan of the country's crime writing. Their enthusiasm is infectious. Coincidentally, I've begun to have books of mine translated into languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which I find exciting.

I was, therefore, pleased, when I was contacted a few weeks ago by Masaya Yamaguchi, whom I've never met in person, but with whom I've been in touch for a while. He invited me to take a look at the newly published English translation - by Ho-Ling Wong - of his celebrated debut novel, Death of the Living Dead. and originally published back in 1989. This is a long book, unusual in structure and quite unlike any detective story I've read before.

As other commentators have already pointed out, this is a hard book to review, because of its extraordinary nature. But I can understand why a number of bloggers have enthused about it: see, for instance, the laudatory review on that excellent blog, The Grandest Game in the World. And as someone who has spent most of his life in Cheshire, it amused me that one of the key characters is called...Cheshire.

As the title suggests, this is a story about zombies, and that may put off some readers, who insist on rationality in their detection. But I think it's true to say that, within his own surreal universe, Masaya Yamaguchi plays fair with his readers in a truly mind-spinning mystery. At times, the pace is not fast, but the book is packed with intriguing cultural references - the chapter epigraphs come from John Lennon, Freud, King Crimson, Poe, Arthur Schnitzler, Neil Young, Robert Louis Stevenson and many more. There's a cast of characters, a map of a cemetery, a floor plan (of a 'west wing'), locked room mystification, and flashes of wit as well as a good deal of delving into the macabre - and a number of touches I wish I'd thought of. Yes, this is quite a book.

Forgotten Book - Such Bright Disguises

Steve Barge blogs as The Puzzle Doctor and his In Search of the Classic Mystery is one of my favourite crime fiction blogs. His enthusiasm for books he likes is infectious and I am especially impressed by the way he has championed the work of Brian Flynn, an author I must admit to having paid no attention until the past couple of years. Thanks to Steve, the Flynn books have been reissued by Dean Street Press. Flynn was what would now be termed a 'midlist author' - meaning, among other things, that his publishers never bothered much about promoting his work - and it is good that, so many years later, he is now receiving a fair amount of attention.

My eye was caught by discussion of Flynn's 1941 novel Such Bright Disguises and I've just read the book for myself. Steve doesn't discuss the story in his intro, but covered it in a blog post a couple of years back. Two more of my favourite blogs, Mysteries Ahoy! and Pretty Sinister Books have also discussed the story. These three bloggers are good judges (I don't say that merely because I often find myself agreeing with their opinions!) and it's noteworthy that they all have a lot of time for Such Bright Disguises.

This is undoubtedly an interesting and unusual story. The combination of inverted mystery and whodunit is highly intriguing, with several touches of originality. I haven't read much of Flynn, but my strong impression is that he was a very good ideas man. This is an invaluable trait in an author of classic mysteries. There were various highly surprising developments in the narrative which definitely took me aback. Overall, it's an ambitious piece of writing and I find that admirable.

One thing Flynn lacked (like so many authors, past and present) was a high-calibre editor. He was no prose stylist (although I suspect he thought otherwise) and the rapid shifts of viewpoint in some chapters diminish his attempts, praiseworthy as they are, to depict the characters in more depth than is commonly found in many Golden Age mysteries. (there's even a decorous sex scene). We have to digest sentences such as: 'Strange to relate when we recall Hubert, who was their only child, Ralph Grant was a total abstainer.' Some of the clunky writing was surely attributable to Flynn's hurrying too much with his work. He was - like a number of characters in the story - a finance man in local government - and, believe me, I know how difficult it is to combine a busy professional life with writing novels. I just wish he'd considered writing fewer books, and writing them a little more elegantly. 

Having had such an excellent idea, brimming with potential, I feel Flynn could have done more with it. The final section is oddly abrupt after a long and elaborate build-up. Faced with two deaths, the police seem to give up right away and call in the private detective Anthony Bathurst to do their work for them. I understand that including Bathurst may have seemed like a commercial imperative, but the haste of the wrap-up was unconvincing and smacks of a surrender to deadline pressure. As a result, this isn't the book it might have been, a masterpiece in the Ironist tradition, as good as anything written by Bruce Hamilton or Richard Hull. However, I don't want to damn this book with faint praise, because it is a striking and genuinely enjoyable read, which I am more than happy to recommend. Dean Street Press and Steve Barge deserve congratulations for making it available once again.

The Secret, Landscapers, and The Thief, His Wife, and The Canoe

When you write a screenplay about a real life criminal case (not that I've ever done it!) you have to make choices about how you handle the material. Choices about style, tone, the extent of fidelity to the facts, and so on. Will the story be told chronologically, or in some other way, for example with the discovery of the crime or the arrest of the culprit? How you tackle these questions will determine, to some extent, the success of the end result.

A case in point was The Salisbury Poisonings, which I  a couple of years back. That show was much acclaimed, and it did have plenty of merit but I think that with time, its limitations are increasingly evident. In retrospect, its failure to address the reasons for the crime and the Russian background seem, arguably, symptomatic of the attitudes in the West that prevailed prior to the recent invasion of Ukraine. Society didn't look closely enough at what was going on.in Russia.

I've recently watched three very different TV dramas based on real life crimes. One was The Secret, a 2016 series which took a relatively 'straight' approach to the material - a conspiracy by an Irish dentist and his lover to murder their respective spouses. It's an extraordinary case and I felt the writers handled the material very well. The performance of James Nesbitt as the homicidal dentist with supposedly strong religious convictions was especially fine.

Landscapers, starring Olivia Colman and David Thewlis, takes a very different approach. This story of another couple who kill is treated as a black comedy. Again it's been greatly praised, but I must admit to finding the episodic handling of the story as unsatisfactory as its tone. Colman and Thewlis are excellent actors, but I seem to be in a minority in finding the way the crime is handled to be far from appealing.

Rather better, I felt, was The Thief, His Wife and The Canoe, Chris Lang's version of the John Darwin fraud case. It's a fascinating story of a Walter Mitty character, played by Eddie Marslan, and his wife (Monica Dolan: excellent). I once listened to an account of the case by a police officer who was involved with it, and I think that this version owed quite a bit to Chris Lang's imagination. But the characters seemed to be treated with greater respect than in Landscapers and I enjoyed it. 

100 British Library Crime Classics

The one hundredth British Library Crime Classic has now been published. The title in question was, appropriately enough, a 'bibliomystery', Bernard J. Farmer's Death of a Bookseller, complete with a message on the inside cover from me to series fans. My association with the series dates back to July 2013, when I first met the then publisher, Rob Davies, who asked me to write intros for a couple of forthcoming titles by John Bude. I'd been writing intros for republished crime novels since the mid-90s, but it's fair to say that none had come close to the bestseller lists. And neither Rob nor I dreamed that the series would become such a runaway success.
It's interesting for me to cast my mind back to that stage in my career. I'd just published my sixth Lake District Mystery, The Frozen Shroud, but I was still a partner in my firm (although by that stage working four days a week). I was hard at work on The Golden Age of Murder, a project which had occupied me for years, and it seemed far from certain that book would even find a publisher. Suffice to say that the intervening years have been kind  and the Crime Classics have certainly played a part in my enjoyment of that time. Many have followed in the British Library's footsteps, sometimes splendidly, sometimes not quite so splendidly. From my point of view, it's marvellous to see so many long-neglected books becoming available again at affordable prices. The series' influence on the wider publishing world has been quite remarkable. Meanwhile my postbag (and the sales figures) indicate little doubt that the Crime Classics remain comfortably ahead of the field.  
There have been many British Library-related highlights for me during the past nine years. I loved being given the chance to write a new solution to Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case: short as it is, I've been gratified by the response from reviewers and readers. The same is true of reaction to the eighteen anthologies (with two more on the way) that I've edited for the series. My companion volume to the series, The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, was nominated for five awards and won one; among other things, it's now been translated into Korean and Chinese. I designed a murder mystery for a pop-up shop at the Library one Christmas and I've also held a weekend masterclass on classic fiction there and been interviewed in the Library's Conference Centre, with Ann Cleeves, by Mark Lawson. There have been lots of other events, including last year's lovely visit to Ely, with more in the pipeline. I'd like to pay tribute to Rob and his successors at the Library and express my thanks for their encouragement and faith in my suggestions..
Today the Crime Classics are famous enough to merit a mention in Anthony Horowitz's Moonflower Murders. All this demonstrates how much people enjoy a well-made and entertaining story. I certainly don't choose all the titles or authors for the series, but I'm glad to have played a particular part in the rediscovery of interesting novels by such varied writers as E.C.R. Lorac, Mary Kelly, John Dickson Carr, Richard Hull, C.E. Vulliamy, Anne Meredith, Peter Shaffer, Christianna Brand, Nap Lombard, Raymond Postgate, and Margot Bennett. Do I admire every single book in the series equally? Of course not; the range is, quite deliberately, too diverse for that. Do I think that the series has made a wonderful contribution to readers' pleasure across the world? Absolutely.  

A Visit to Kent

I had a wonderful time last week on a short but very packed visit to Kent. I was hoping to combine pleasurable socialising with research into some aspects of British crime writing heritage, but I didn't know exactly what to expect. As things turned out, I met some truly delightful people as well as a couple of friends who happen to be crime writers for whom I've a huge amount of admiration.

In Deal - a resort I'd never visited before - I had the pleasure of spending time with Frances Fyfield, a fellow lawyer as well as one of the finest British crime novelists of the past thirty years. She's always great company and an added bonus was that she threw a party for a friend and neighbour which led to my meeting a host of interesting people, including Nick Dear, whose highly successful plays include Frankenstein and whose TV work includes half a dozen episodes of Poirot. Deal obviously has a very cohesive literary community as well as two castles, and I was definitely impressed.

I also had the chance to visit Catherine Aird, who lives just outside Canterbury. Another real pleasure. Catherine is, I'm glad to report, working hard on her latest novel and at the same time turning her mind to the next. The passing years have diminished neither her wit nor the fertility of her imagination - she outlined a plot idea that I felt was really appealing. I wish I'd thought of it...

In addition I had the good fortune to be able to meet friends and family of Julian Symons. This was fascinating and I learned more about a writer in whom I've long been very interested. It was great to see the British Library editions of his books lined up the shelves along with his first editions. And not to mention the Edgars - see below! 

Finally, there was the opportunity for a small amount of sightseeing and I wandered along the front at Walmer (where Symons used to live) and also around the lovely old town of Sandwich. And no, I didn't get to eat a sandwich there... 

Forgotten Book - Mischief in the Offing

Sussex isn't a county that I know particularly well, but during my last two visits to Rye, I've made a point of travelling round and enjoying the county's coastline and the rural landscape. It's a nice part of the world, for sure. So I was tempted by the setting of Clifford Witting's Mischief in the Offing. The action of the story takes place in Wilchiston, a thinly veiled version of the village of Alfriston. 

The story begins with the arrival of a strange visitor at John Denman's cottage. An attractive young woman called Kay Forrester turns up, seeking sanctuary. She claims to have been molested by a man with a gun. John is a likeable fellow, but he soon has reason to believe that she isn't telling him the truth. And then a shot is fired at the cottage.

This is a good start, but after that the pace falters, to put it mildly. Witting's writing style can fairly be described as discursive, but here 'rambling' might be a better word. There's a lack of focus in the storyline and I found it difficult to care much about what was happening. Yet there are compensations, including the agreeable presentation of rural life (including a game of stoolball) and touches of Witting's amiable humour.

This book appeared in 1958, at the time Witting was elected to membership of the Detection Club, and there are one or two nice plot features, including a revelation in the final sentence. For me, though, the story lacked tension. I like the fact that Witting was not content to rest on his laurels as a writer, and didn't keep resorting to the same-old,same-old. But this one is a decidedly minor entry in his catalogue.

I Care a Lot - 2020 film review

I Care a Lot is a fairly recent film which blends thriller elements with black humour and makes a few s stinging points about capitalism along the way. Because it's set in the US, I was surprised to learn that the writer-director, J. Blakeson (Jonathan Blakeson) is English, born in Harrogate and educated at Warwick. Overall, I think he does a good job, because despite various flaws, this is an entertaining and watchable movie which is especially good in the early scenes.

Rosamund Pike is Marla Grayson, who - assisted by Fran (Eiza Gonzalez) - works as a court-appointed guardian of old people who are incapable of looking after their own affairs. It soon becomes clear that Marla targets wealthy individuals whose assets she can sell and profit from. This very lucrative business is supported by a lax judiciary and corrupt medical profession. It's all the more horrific because it seems believable.

Things start to get complicated when she picks on a perfectly healthy old lady who lives on her own. This is Jennifer Peterson, played by Dianne Wiest. Marla manages to get Jennifer confined to a hospital, having conned a judge (with the help of false medical information) that Jennifer can't look after herself. It soon becomes clear, however, that this time Marla might have bitten off more than she can chew. Jennifer is not the sweet innocent she appears to be...

There are some funny scenes involving a Mafia lawyer called Dean Ericson (Chris Messina) which I found truly enjoyable highlights. Peter Dinklage is also good as a bad guy who makes a formidable adversary for Marla. But it's Rosamund Pike who holds the film together, even when the script begins to wander in a rather unconvincing way. The climax to the story doesn't appeal to everyone, and it's not overly subtle, but on the whole I think it worked. An entertaining film which, every now and then, makes you think about how society treats vulnerable people.

Reader, I Buried Them by Peter Lovesey - review

I had an advantage when coming to review Peter Lovesey's new collection of short stories, Reader, I Buried Them. A number of the stories included appeared previously in anthologies that I've edited over the years. It's always a great joy to receive a submission from Peter. The quality is high - that's a given - but what I love particularly is the sheer variety and the consistent enjoyability of his writing. There are plenty of fine examples in this book.

Peter is a brilliant ideas man. Fresh concepts spring to his fertile imagination with astonishing consistency. In a pleasing introduction to the book, he tells a good story about his first published short story, 'The Bathroom', which earned the admiration of Ruth Rendell and her encouragement to continue with the short form as well as his novels. The story is included, and so is a splendid companion piece of non-fiction, 'The Tale of Three Tubs', which I featured in my CWA collection of essays about real life crimes, Truly Criminal. 

Some of the clever ideas may, I suspect, have sprung from a great idea for a title - such as 'A Three-Pie Problem', featuring Peter Diamond, and also the title story of the book. There are nods to Patrick Hamilton in 'Gaslighting' and to Edgar Allan Poe and Agatha Christie in other stories. The stories vary in length as well in style and one of the very shortest, 'Agony Column' is appealingly jokey. There's an amusing monologue at the end of the book and a comprehensive checklist that will be invaluable for Peter's many fans.

Need I add that I found this book highly entertaining from start to finish? And there was a little bonus when I looked at the back cover. There were three well-deserved encomia. One from Ruth Rendell herself. One from Val McDermid. And one from me. Great company to be in - a company of long-term Peter Lovesey fans.  

Forgotten Book - Jack on the Gallows Tree

I like Leo Bruce's Sergeant Beef stories, as I've mentioned on this blog a number of times. I haven't, however, talked about his second series, featuring the history teacher and amateur sleuth Carolus Deene. However, the time has come to sing the praises of a 1960 book, Jack on the Gallows Tree. It really is very funny, but at the same time Bruce manages to offer a teasing puzzle about motive as well as whodunit.

Deene has suffered from jaundice and heads off to the resort of Buddington to recuperate. But the real attraction of the place is that there is a teasing puzzle concerning a double murder. On the very same night, two elderly women were strangled. Each was left with a white lily. Plenty of people made have had good reason to kill one of them. But why both, and why on the same night?

There is a lot of pleasure to be had from the minor characters, including the hypochondriac Gilling, the fierce Miss Tissot, the pub landlady who abhors bad language, and two health fanatics, a couple called Baxeter. There are some laugh-out-loud lines. I was also amused by the reference to a book written by Rupert Croft-Cooke - which was Bruce's real name. For good measure, there are witty mentions of two leading crime critics of the day, Julian Symons and Maurice Richardson.

There is one element of the plot that is far from original, but I thought Bruce disguised it pretty well. There are also one or two appealing false solutions and a good climactic scene. For a good blend of mystery and humour, I'd say this book is hard to beat. I really enjoyed it.

A Walk Among the Tombstones - 2014 film review

Lawrence Block is one of America's leading crime writers and a winner of the CWA Diamond Dagger. He's not only prolific; he is talented and versatile. More than twenty years ago, I had the good fortune to publish one of his wonderful short stories, 'Looking for David', in an anthology I edited, Whydunit?, and he won an Edgar for it. So I'm not quite sure why it's taken me so long to get round to watching the film of his novel A Walk Among the Tombstones, but I'm glad I did.

The film is scripted and directed by Scott Frank, who was also responsible for the excellent The Queen's Gambit, and this earlier work displays similar virtues of crisp writing. And again Frank benefits from casting a high calibre actor in the lead role. Liam Neeson, who plays unlicensed private eye Matt Scudder does not, perhaps, have as great a range as some actors, but what he does, he always does very well and he's ideal for the role.

A drug addict approaches Scudder and asks him to help his brother, whose wife has been kidnapped and murdered. The brother is a drug trafficker and he's bent on revenge. Scudder declines the job at first, but is persuaded to seek out the kidnappers and learns that they have been responsible for more than one murder. A chat with a cemetery groundsman gives him a lead...

This is a very dark film, set in a New York where it always seems to be raining. The plot is sound rather than brilliant, and the pace is not electric, but Neeson's performance really holds everything together. I always enjoy watching his portrayal of crumpled decency and it's rather a shame that he hasn't appeared in any more adaptations of the Scudder stories.