Bit of a diversion here.

When the holidays come around, I tend to reread the Golden Age of Detection... i.e., my favorite mystery authors.  Lately it's been Ngaio Marsh -- somehow I've managed to collect a third of her oeuvre, almost without noticing.

I long to reread Margery Allingham's Police at the Funeral.  (It is one of my very favorite Campion novels.)  My copy is, alas, buried deep in the storage unit.  So are nearly all my other Allingham books.  8(

The library hasn't got it, either, which is why I never got to read it until I moved to Vegas.

Margery Allingham, along with Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie, was one of the queens of crime fiction.  Except... you never knew if an Allingham would mean a mystery or a thriller or something else.  That's part of what I love about her work.

The Telegraph calls Margery Allingham: the Dickens of detective writing.

GAD spoilers.

(The links contain the spoilers.)


The Strand Magazine has a lovely piece on the detective of Margery Allingham, who is one of my very favorites of the gentlemen detectives.

The Great Detectives: Albert Campion is full of spoilers.  Do not read it unless you've already read the series.  I enjoyed the piece a lot, but again, I have read all the books many times over.

You could read the first six paragraphs of the essay and not be terribly spoiled -- possibly teased into reading the series that way.

Or into finding the BBC series Campion; it had two seasons and starred Peter Davison of Doctor Who fame.  That's how I discovered Campion myself.  :)  Huzzah for Mystery! on PBS.

A Christie quote and some thoughts.

"Politicians don't have time to look at the world they're living in.  They see the country they're living in and they see it as one vast electoral platform.  That's quite enough to put on their plates for the time being.  They do things that they honestly believe will make things better, and then they're surprised when they don't make things better because they're not the things that people want to have.  And one can't help coming to the conclusion that politicians have a feeling that they have a kind of divine right to tell lies in a good cause."

From Passenger to Frankfurt by Agatha Christie.

Myself, I can't help wondering if Agatha herself thought this.  I wish I could ask her.  My favorite bit has the white background, the penultimate line.

It's a very talky book.  Afraid that I sat it down several times to get a breath from a certain level of overkill -- alas, not what you'd think in one of her mysteries!

Completely not related to that, I figured out some things in it and that made me happy.  I used to think she was just too good at puzzles.  She is; but I always read too fast because I want to know far more than I want to figure out whodunnit.

Ellery Queen taught me that if I just stop a bit and think, instead of rushing along, that I can figure things out.

So I've been able to tag the murderer and/or perp in a few Christies lately, and that's pleased me.  8)

What actors do (from Killer Dolphin).

"I think," Alleyn said, "we'd better, both of us, remind ourselves about actors."

"You do?  What about them?"

"One must always remember that they're trained to convey emotion.  On or off stage, they make the most of everything they feel.  Now this doesn't mean they express their feelings up to a saturation point.  When you and I and all the rest of the non-actors do our damnedest to understate and be ironical about our emotional reflexes, the actor, even when he underplays them, does so with such expertise that he convinces us laymen that he's in extremis.  He isn't.  He's only being professionally articulate about something that happens offstage instead of in front of an official audience... nor does it mean he's superficial or a hypocrite.  It's his job..."

Ngaio Marsh, writing this in Killer Dolphin (1966), was a playwright as well as a mystery author.

I like this observation.  Very clever, isn't it?  We get so attached to the characters they play, how often can we really get ourselves to believe the actors themselves aren't more like the characters?

But I wonder about it.  Surely some actors don't want to work this hard all the damned time.

Granted, a murder investigation would be unusual... but... still, I wonder.

BTW, I'm fond of this novel and certain characters.  I'm a sucker for many of hers set in theaters.

You came here...

"I demand an explanation.  I intend to hold you to account for alienating the affection of my wife."

"Affections," Wolfe said.

"What?"

"Affections.  In that context the plural is used."

"I didn't come here," he said, "to have my grammar corrected."

"Not grammar.  Diction."

That's Nero Wolfe.  Sound familiar?

If that's not where the inspiration came for Mark Gatiss to write the opening scene of The Great Game, I'd be amazed.  (No, actually, I'd be curious to find out what his inspiration was, but I digress.)  But Mark's a fan of the Golden Age of Detection, and Nero Wolfe is one of the more famous detectives to follow Sherlock Holmes...

You can find the above scene, uncut, in Three at Wolfe's Door.  :D

Some Buried Caesar

Some Buried Caesar is one of my very favorite Nero Wolfe books by Rex Stout.

I am very fond of a great deal of Caesar, but I had several spots marked in the library book as I read along. Here's three direct snippets... so you can see why! :D

Nero Wolfe

Come and help me admire stupidity.

Archie Goodwin

... whereupon I informed her that it was now working hours and that I would be moving through the throngs too energetically for pleasant companionship.  She stated that up to date she had failed to detect any taint of pleasantness in my make-up...

The throngs

They looked excited and purposeful, as if they had just had news of some prey that might be pounced on for dinner.

A quick primer on Ellery Queen.

I've been suggesting other Golden Age detectives lately on Twitter; but not because I dislike Arthur Conan Doyle. Some readers may, like me, find that ACD isn't enough for a year or more.

I'm quite fond of GAD mysteries. :)

Ellery Queen was several things. The pseudonym of a writing team, two cousins, who I tend to call the Queen cousins. A gentleman detective who writes detective novels. A detective character in novels. And, not least, the name of a man whose true name we never know: Ellery Queen is not his name.

Plus the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine still going strong. "And there's EQMM, bless its bloody heart" Ellery writes to Tony Boucher [paraphrased].

This is not counting the Ellery Queen house novels -- contracted out to ghostwriters, see Wikipedia -- nor the Barnaby Ross novels.

The Golden Age of Detection.

Skating past That Show, I was thinking of some other famous detectives. JDCarr is a forum for mystery fans who love that era.

I found it after I got addicted to Ellery Queen.

It's John Dickson Carr I was thinking of, though. Not because he's the best writer -- no, alas, he's not. For bizarre puzzles that were locked-room mysteries, Carr was the very king.

Some I'd recommend:

The Arabian Nights Murder
The Case of the Constant Suicides
He Who Whispers
Patrick Butler for the Defence

(one of my very favorite Carr characters, Patrick is)

The Problem of the Wire Cage
The Burning Court
The Crooked Hinge
The Hollow Man


Note that I do NOT recommend Carr's historical novels. They make me crazy in a bad way. I struggled through The Devil in Velvet and that's not something I'd wish on anyone. Oy. I know I read some Merrivale, but he's an exceedingly annoying character; as bad as Poirot used to be. I can read Poirot now, he hasn't the power to frustrate or annoy me any more. :D

Style curiosity?

I've been reading through Ngaio Marsh's mysteries steadily.

Last Ditch has a style variation that appears to be the author's; I don't think it was a house style choice, but I could be wrong, of course. :]

On pages 206-207, there are two styles used:

• "Doctor Carey" when beginning a paragraph of narrative;
• but "Dr. Carey" when otherwise used in narrative

I don't have any examples marked from my own reading for dialog.

Why does this matter? Well, I didn't notice it myself until it was in two pages facing each other. This may have been a house style choice, it may not have, it's hard to say.

But I wonder. If this had been a job, I would have queried this.

Style choices matter. They'll be invisible to some readers, and not to others. Certainly this style question didn't wreck my interest in the mystery, but when confronted by the difference, I marked it. :D


In case you're curious, I read the hardcover edition from Little, Brown (1977).

Ngaio Marsh

Ngaio Marsh is incredible. I can't quite put my finger on why I can't stop reading her writing, or how she sucks me in so hard. But she does.

When I told Dad how hard I found to stop reading, he nodded and said it was her pacing. It's excellent. Even her subchapters -- sometimes only a page long -- don't let me stop reading.

I really get impatient near the end, because that's when she very deftly muddles you. I have never read anyone who glued me to the page like this. I think I know who did it, but--!

I'm also curious, if you have read Ngaio Marsh, whether you notice that she sometimes shifts POV very briefly and without warning. Like Elizabeth Bear, it works.

It oughtn't. But she's so good that I notice it, and merely continue on.

Here's a bit from her:

The coroner summed up at considerable length and with commendable simplicity. His manner suggested that the jury as a whole was certifiable as mentally unsound, but that he knew his duty and would perform it in the teeth of stupidity.

I crack up every time I get partway through this. I can't say that Ngaio does this all the time -- if so, I haven't noticed. But when I read the previous page, it's even funnier. That'd spoil the scene, so I can't post that. :D You'd dislike me intensely.

I began with her final novel, Light Thickens. I've read five more within a week's time. I'll be sorry when I've got through all thirty-two... except that wow, what incredible writing.


The quote is from Death at the Bar.