When I was a teenager, my aunt Betty belonged to a book club.
Not just any book club, oh no. Betty, who spent much of her life being a Midwestern Republican version of Auntie Mame, loved mysteries. Police procedurals, cozies set in quaint English towns, armchair detectives, talented amateur sleuths, hard boiled private eyes, even the occasional thriller by Alistair McLean – she loved them all and read them almost to the exclusion of anything else. The only type of crime fiction I never saw her touch were the cheap little paperbacks by Mickey Spillane and his blood-soaked ilk, and she more than made up for it with Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner’s Donald Lam/Bertha Cool private eye series.
Of course she belonged to the Mystery Guild, Doubleday’s mystery/suspense/thriller book club, and read their titles every month. Oh, she also belonged to a lesser book club that periodically delivered omnibus volumes of three condensed mysteries from the lower ranks of publishing houses, but she had dropped that by the time I was old enough to read her favorites on my own. The Mystery Guild offered the best new mysteries every month, plus reprints of classic authors.
Betty also subscribed to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which my mother and I read as soon as she’d finished with it each month. EQMM, which is still being published, was a rare survivor of the pulp days and published some of the finest names in mystery fiction, including Rex Stout, Barry Perowne, Ruth Rendell and Hugh Pentecost, plus reprints of classic mystery fiction and a monthly “Department of First Stories” featuring new writers. Throw in the Quinn Martin TV series like Barnaby Jones and Cannon, and the Masterpiece Theatre rebroadcasts of British series, and one could almost say that Betty was a mystery fanatic.
Needless to say, I read a lot of mysteries during my tweens and teens.
Classic characters like Sherlock Holmes, Ellery Queen, Nero Wolfe, and Miss Marple…new authors like Robert B. Parker and Dorothy Uhnak…series like Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct and Dell Shannon's Capt. Luis Mendoza…I read them all. I didn’t necessarily understand just why Archie Goodwin and Lily Rowan taking vacations together was somewhat racy, or that Sherlock Holmes would have spent a lot of time in rehab today, but I still loved the neatly fitted together plots, sharply drawn characters, and crackling dialogue that has ever been the hallmark of a good mystery.
I still love a good mystery, even though I don’t devour them the way I used to. If anything, I find some of my old favorites even better now that I’m old enough to understand them. The verbal sparring between Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin is as funny today as it was eighty years ago, and Ed McBain’s soaring rhetoric as he sends Steve Carella and Fat Ollie Weeks and Meyer Meyer into the alleys and dark places of Isola always sends a shiver up my spine. I’ve also found modern favorites, from Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell pastiches to crossover series like Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden fantasies to J.D. Robb’s police procedurals about a tough New York detective fifty years in the future.
Unfortunately, for every Dorothy Sayers who uses the detective novel to explore women’s education and class issues, for every tough, kick-ass detective like Eve Dallas or conflicted PI like Vic Warshawsky or amateur sleuth with a complicated love life like Adrien English, I’ve encountered a dozen Mickey Spillane clones who talk like they’re imitating a dinner theater production of Guys & Dolls, or eccentric aristocrats who quote obscure Latin poets for no reason, or damaged detectives who should be in a mental unit instead of on the streets.
In short, I’ve read my share and more of Mysteries So Bad They’re Good.
Tonight for your consideration I bring two mysteries that should have been far better than they are. One is by an early thriller writer best known for a legendary character, while the other is by an erratic but often brilliant pair of cousins:
The Dream Detective, by Sax Rohmer - Sax Rohmer, born Arthur Sarsfield Ward, was an early 20th century thriller writer and former civil servant. Like so many English authors of the fin de siecle, he belonged to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the pioneering occult order founded by A.E. Waite and S. MacGregor Mathers, and occult themes frequently appear in his fiction.
Rohmer is best remembered today for a series of books and stories about Denis Nayland Smith, colonial police commissioner, and his sidekick Dr. Petrie as they battle the evil Dr. Fu Manchu. Despite justified criticism that these books are the ultimate expression of British colonialism and anti-Asian racism, they have remained surprisingly popular, while Fu Manchu himself was the inspiration for dozens of Evil Oriental Geniuses Who Hate Imperialists and Plot to Overthrow the West. Rohmer always claimed that he based Fu Manchu and his minions on actual people he'd known in Limehouse, a heavily Asian slum near the London docks. Given that Limehouse was a center for the opium trade, he may well have been telling the truth, although this scarcely excuses the Yellow Peril hysteria his books have fueled over the years.
Few know that Rohmer wrote plenty of non-Fu Manchu books, primarily mysteries and horror stories. Series characters included Paul Harley, Gaston Max, Red Kerry, someone or something called The Crime Magnet, and Morris Klaw, The Dream Detective.
Klaw, a peculiar little man who ran an early 20th century version of the Old Curiosity Shop, appeared in a series of short stories just after the Great War. Together with his daughter, the exotic and beautiful Isis, he solved crimes by taking a nap in the room where the dastardly deed had occurred. The solution would come to him thanks to his use of an "odically sterilized pillow," whatever that is, after which he'd let the bumbling police arrest the criminal. He justifies his unique methods as follows:
"It is clear you know nothing of the psychology of crime! Let me, then, enlighten you. First: all crime operates in cycles. Its history repeats itself, you understand. Second: thoughts are things. One who dies the violent death has, at the end, a strong mental emotion--an etheric storm. The air--the atmosphere--retains imprints of that storm."
Despite believing that "all crime operates in cycles," Klaw has a low opinion of criminals, whom he regards as nearly as bumbling as the typical British policeman:
[Criminals] destroy the clumsy tools of their crime; they hide away the knife, the bludgeon; they sop up the blood, they throw it, the jemmy, the dead man, the suffocated poor infant, into the ditch, the pool -- & they leave intact the odic negative, the photograph of their sin, the thought-thing in the air!" He would tap his high yellow brow. "Here upon this sensitive plate I reproduce it, the hanging evidence! The headless child is buried in the garden, but the thought of the beheader is left to lie about. I pick it up. Poof! he swings--that child slayer! I triumph."
Given this fascinating syntax, it's little wonder that Klaw, who is strongly implied to be immortal (and possibly Egyptian), is an unusual man. Among his fascinating habits:
- Spraying himself with a solution of lemon verbena to refresh his mind, a habit he evidently picked up from the ancient Romans.
- Wears a pince-nez with a brown bowler hat and a black floor-length cloak in the streets of post-Great War London, regardless of the weather.
- Greets visitors to his curio shop with a parrot that announces visitors by squawking, "Moris Klaw! Moris Klaw! The devil's come for you!"
And did I mention that he's an expert on archaic weapons, ancient musical instruments, and Egyptian pottery? And that his daughter is the only one allowed to touch the odically sterilized pillow?
This tasty, nonsensical stew is much more entertaining than one might think, and the plots are so ridiculous and the supernatural elements in each story so vividly described that it's profoundly disappointing to learn that almost all of the seemingly otherworldly crimes Morris Klaw investigates turn out to have been committed by human beings using exotic but non-magical methods.
It's also far less disturbing than Fu Manchu, despite the typical turn of the century British attitudes toward The Mysterious East lurking in the background. One almost wishes that Rohmer written more than one volume about this "humble explorer of the etheric borderland," even if brown bowlers and black floor length cloaks were a fashion faux pas even in 1920.
The Last Woman in His Life,by Ellery Queen – Ellery Queen was a giant of the detective story. Actually two cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, Queen began as the author of tightly plotted stories about an amateur detective who worked with his father, a police inspector, and ended as perhaps the single greatest editor of mystery fiction in America. Novels about his primary detective, also named Ellery Queen…a secondary series about the first known deaf detective, retired actor Drury Lane…Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine…anthologies, collections, edited reprints of unjustly neglected novels…Queen was the mystery field’s equivalent of the great science fiction editor John W. Campbell, Jr., with a more liberal worldview and a much greater regard for female writers and characters.
Queen’s own novels were extremely popular in their time, and the best are as good as any detective novel ever written. Like Dorothy Sayers in her last few Lord Peter Wimsey books, Dannay and Lee took their overly-intellectual detective and made him a human being who loved and suffered and ultimately was brought low by his own guilt. Cat of Many Tales, a brilliant portrait of New York succumbing to hysteria during a serial killer’s murder spree, begins with a guilt-ridden Ellery insisting that he’s done with playing detective and ends with him having a breakdown that nearly destroys him. It’s almost as if Queen foresaw today’s modern angst-ridden detective and blazed the trail for later writers.
That Ellery Queen is largely out of print while lesser writers are still available at the local chain store may seem absurd, but there's a reason: inconsistency. Unlike Sayers, who managed to keep Lord Peter recognizably Lord Peter despite humanizing him as the series progressed, Ellery Queen the character swings abruptly from condescending “thinking machine” to whacky Hollywood scribe to serious writer/editor in New York. By the time Calamity Town appeared in 1942, there were fifteen previous books featuring a very different Ellery Queen. The inconsistency is so obvious that some fans have openly speculated that the books are actually about two men named Ellery Queen, one a younger cousin, to account for the changes.
If this weren't bad enough, late in their career Dannay and Lee allowed the Ellery Queen name to be used on nearly three dozen ghost written books, most of which were not about Ellery Queen the detective. Some of these books were actually written by prominent science fiction writers Theodore Surgeon, Avram Davidson, and Jack Vance and were good in their own right, but the rest were generic hard boiled thriller that ranged from light but entertaining to literally painful to read.
Perhaps the most painful is The Last Woman in His Life. Although this one was written by Dannay and Lee themselves, it's far from his best. Set in Wrightsville (again), the characters, especially Ellery, are faded shadows of their earlier selves, while the town that almost became a character in its own right has become a candidate for urban renewal thanks to the passage of time. It’s a deeply sad book in almost every way.
What takes The Last Woman in His Life from melancholy to So Bad Its Good, though, isn’t the portrait of Ellery or Wrightsville or the pervading tone of gloom. It's not even the plot, which just barely worked then and would fall apart under the weight of modern forensics. It’s the murderer.
The set up is classic Golden Age of Mystery Fiction: a wealthy college friend of Ellery's, John Benedict, has returned to his birthplace to work on his will. Along for the ride are his best friend, Al Marsh, and his three ex-wives, all of them statuesque singers/actresses with a maximum of bust and a minimum of brains. Everyone assumes that Benedict plans to name one of the exes his heir, but which one?
Of course he's murdered after a dinner lasting just long enough to introduce the characters, and after a dying phone call to Ellery, he of course leaves a dying clue for his old college buddy to solve. There are also souvenirs of each ex wife in the room, including an evening gown from one, a pair of shoes from another, and a towering green theatrical wig worn by the thidr (yes, green - it was 1969, after all, so why not?). Naturally suspicion falls on the three women, and for much of the book it seems that the ex-wives club took a leaf from Murder on the Orient Express and collaborated on killing John Benedict.
Then Ellery unmasks the murderer, and it’s not a woman. In a denouement that is a textbook example of Freudian psychology used and abused, Ellery pins the killing on Al Marsh, the loyal best friend, who turns out to be a deeply closeted gay man!
Ellery knows that Marsh is gay, you see, because he likes erotic art featuring men and owns music allegedly by gay men, none of whom writes Broadway show tunes (and at least one of whom was not, in actuality, gay). Marsh, who had stood by Benedict through thick, thin, countless affairs and three ex-wives, breaks down in the face of the master detective's master deductions, and admits that he finally, finally decided to go for broke and admit his burning passion to the skirt chaser he'd loved for decades. And since John Benedict likes tall, statuesque women, not athletic men, of course Marsh decides that the only way Benedict will love him is if he looks like a tall, statuesque woman, so he steals the ex-wives' clothing, shoes, and that ridiculous green wig so he'll look properly feminine when he declares his love.
Yes, really. Despite being so straight acting and appearing that no one has ever guessed that he's gay, including three women who all have theatrical experience and thus presumably can spot a closeted gay man at twenty feet, Al Marsh is such an invert that he's compelled to put on drag when confessing to his dearest friend that it's been him all along. And despite supposedly being John Benedict's BFF since college, Marsh is so shocked that Benedict finds the outfit ridiculous and laughs before rejecting Marsh because, well, he's straight, that he goes berserk and kills the object of his desire, making sure to leave the borrowed drag behind to frame the exes.
That’s right. The last woman in John Benedict's life was a desperate, pathetic, cross-dresser in a green showgirl’s wig.
This seemed very deep to me when I read it in 1975 or thereabouts, and very sympathetic to poor, broken, lovelorn Al Marsh. In my own defense I can only say that I was fifteen, living in Pittsburgh, and didn't know any better. Today I do, and let's just say that I've come to the conclusion it's as well that The Last Woman in His Life was the next to last book Ellery Queen wrote, because it’s hard to imagine what even a ghostwriter could have done to top that.
So, friends and fellow mystery lovers - what are your favorite bad books? What detectives make you wish the villain would get away? What rivals of Sherlock Holmes are deservedly forgotten? Is it Colonel Mustard with a pipe wrench in the conservatory, or Miss Scarlet in the library with a dart gun primed with the poison from a rare Central American frog not yet known to science? Let's start our own Mystery Guild on this humid summer night....