The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie

Very fun fluff from the mistress of intelligent, if somewhat pedestrian, fluff -- just the thing to devour on a day off, when you have decided to try for the first time that old-fashioned egg-and-mayonnaise treatment supposed to be so good for lustrous hair. This experiment entails a lot of sitting around, with your head swathed in plastic wrap and a towel, so why not read? 

It's a tale of a country village murder, just as Agatha Christie invented it. Well done. Certainly we never see the murderer coming. And it's a Miss Marple tale, too, although that delightful lady, frustratingly, does not show up until the story is five-sixths finished. She is much more visible in the short stories that bear her name, rather than in the novels. As for the romance between Jerry and Megan, that is a little stiff. Bravo to Christie for trying to imagine herself into the mind of a man abruptly in love, but her sensibilities just aren't quite in it. Jerry limping on his "sticks" is too elderly and Megan too childlike for them to be convincing as a pair. Effeminate Mr. Pye is far more fun. (He reminds me of Georgie in the Mapp and Lucia novels.) "And then," he gushes the only time we meet him, "the dreadful old woman died, but of course it was far too late then. They just went on living there and talking in hushed voices about what poor Mamma would have wished."

Christie is at her best with old ladies like Mr. Pye or the five elderly spinsters whom he is gossiping about, or indeed with Miss Marple. I've always liked the way she uses sharp-as-a-tack old women to comment upon the twentieth century's mostly direful social changes. Her old ladies always know the routine of a correctly run country house, or what to wear to what occasions, but more importantly they know how to spot an unscrupulous man, or when to sack an unsatisfactory housemaid and never mind compassion for the lower orders, she's a thief who doesn't deserve a good reference which she would then use to prey on her next employer. The old ladies know "wickedness," and that human nature has not changed no matter that we've freed ourselves from corsets, hats, and (we imagine) bigotry and prejudice, not to mention silly old-fashioned inhibitions on our marvelous self-expression. It's all very refreshing. In one of her gentle arguments with her nephew Raymond, who is a very modern and enlightened and compassionate writer, Miss Marple notes what happens when whole generations decide to chuck most of what their ancestors knew about life. "Young people," she sighs, "say things that were never talked about in my day, but their minds are so terribly innocent ...." 

Dancers in Mourning by Margery Allingham

Boring, cold, confusing, voiceless. Either the author is out of her depth, or I am. "He had honestly forgotten whether a horror is a greater shock than an anti-climax." Say what? And the detective is burdened with a tragic on-site love affair, philosophically correctly described, but unfelt. No go.

The Master of Blacktower by Barbara Michaels

This is one of those tempting, plain, and slightly grubby tomes tucked in among its fellows, both the shiny-new and the well thumbed, on the local library's mystery shelves. Reinforced library binding, imprinted with a groovy, green-amber-brown Greek key design; pages as soft as velvet with age and use; no jacket, no blurbs, no summary. Chapter 1: "The Black Tower of Dunnoch. I saw it first at twilight ...."

I have a great respect for people who can sit down and think out a plot. As the years go on I grow more and more convinced within myself that I have no head for it. In this case, author Barbara Michaels has set herself the challenge of creating a romantic mystery in which, one, there is no murder or theft or kidnapping for anyone to solve, and two, the romantic hero plausibly and repeatedly rejects the heroine. The problem he is struggling with does prove to be, as Damaris realizes late, "so simple, and so deadly, that it took my breath away." But as mysteries go, Mr. Gavin Hamilton's problem is almost, almost intellectual and nothing more. The story is oddly bloodless, and yet coolly intriguing as a result. I read it over two nights (did I mention the large print?), and found it a very pleasant antidote to whatever dull thing was on the family TV. And by the way, there are no heavy-breathing sex scenes. This must be either because the book was written in 1966 before all that became the norm, or because Miss Michaels was an old-fashioned lady.

I say I have no head for plot construction. Perhaps I have always gone about it backwards. I envision Miss Michaels sitting at her desk in 1966, and reasoning out, first, how all the threads are going to come together and why. That must happen at some point in the creative process, but perhaps also there are other ways to compose plots, more naturally. Perhaps one can sit down "with a blank piece of paper and an idea," as the writers' manuals all advise, and simply start working, to find that in time, characters and events unfold as they will. Perhaps it is this method which enables prolific writers to write twenty and thirty novels in a lifetime. The biggest trouble I see with composing plots -- however it is done, and I am no one to speak because I've never had fiction published, no doubt for good reason -- is that they so often resemble each other. History and biography are always unique and are also real; essays, sketches, belles-lettres reflect a unique viewpoint real for that writer at that time. One fictional plot, on the other hand, seems so much like another.

The Master of Black Tower, for example, is Jane Eyre all over again, only much diluted. There are howling, cold, isolated north Britain locations. There is a dark, scarred, brooding, upper-class older man, and an eighteen-year-old, proud but orphaned governess type. There is an ominous mansion with a closed-off wing. We meet the flip and laughing local gentry woman, hard, blond, and well-dressed. We are shocked by revelations about the hero's past -- and present. We mourn the heroine's despair. There are good servants and bad servants. It is Jane Eyre even to the intervention of the supernatural towards the end, when Damaris, standing at a window and looking out at black night, seems to hear a call to go back.

All enjoyable, to be sure, but didn't Barbara Michaels as she typed busily away realize the resemblance? Would it have stifled her creativity if she had? It would stifle mine, but then perhaps I'm just a wimp when it comes to sitting down and working at fiction. I may be a wimp also when it comes to research. (This book seemed to show curiously little of that. Other authors routinely trowel in much more information on clothes and food alone, in a novel set in the mid-1800s.) I like research, but I ask myself -- if you have something valuable to say in fiction, even historical fiction, isn't endless research a kind of window dressing, pretty but in its details extraneous? Wimp, I am sure Miss Michaels would sniff.

I can heartily recommend The Master of Black Tower for a cozy winter afternoon, even as I eye Jane Eyre on my shelf and ask, what is the difference between competence -- a very noble thing -- and lush, extravagant, wildly gifted ability, not to say genius? There's a difference in vocabulary of course, in depth of character development and even in humor (" 'Am I hideous, Jane?' 'Very, sir. You always were, you know.' " ...' "Jane, leave me. Go and marry Rivers' "). There's a difference in the thickness of the book and in the size of the print. There is a difference in prolificity ...

...or so I hazarded a guess. My library copy of Black Tower lists Barbara Michaels as having written only one other book, called Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs. This was her first novel, then, and I was free to imagine her either sinking back into obscurity in 1966, or going on to become some sort of queen of romance. Indeed, she did the latter. The internet is wonderful. I typed her name in the search box. There she is, auburn haired at eighty, with her own website complete with FAQs, and sixty-six novels to her credit written under two other names at least, plus non-fiction.

God bless her. Charlotte Bronte wrote one. Probably not much researched. God bless the pair of them.

The Little Wax Doll by Norah Lofts

Originally appeared in The Times of Northwest Indiana

Norah Lofts was one of an impressive cohort of English women novelists who seemed to reach their prolific prime in the middle of the twentieth century, and who remain delightful, intelligent escape reading today. Mary Stewart was another, along with Angela Thirkell, Miss Read, and of course Agatha Christie. They were born early enough to be able to grace their writing with real information from a late-Victorian schooling, and yet they lived and created through the huge social changes of the 1950s and 60s, and so noticed things like hippies and the sudden ubiquity of four-letter words. Norah Lofts in particular had a talent for thinking up great titles for her novels, which tended to the historical romance genre. Silver Nutmeg and White Hell of Pity were just two of a few dozen.

Unfortunately, The Little Wax Doll is not one of Lofts' better efforts. Perhaps the rather dull title is a clue. The book is set in eastern England in the late 1950s, and concerns a Miss Deborah Mayfield, who returns from twenty years as a missionary in Africa to take up a teaching post in the small and beautiful village of Walwyk. Strange things go on, or rather, the villagers behave strangely. A girl shows up at school with welts on her back, and then defends her grandmother when Miss Mayfield says she suspects the old lady of having administered the beating. A boy and girl who like each other are kept apart by the boy's parents, with no explanation given. A boy becomes sick, and his parents' reactions range from hysteria to cool indifference -- and Miss Mayfield wants to know why.

There are possibilities in this novel, but the trouble is that the plot depends on the narrator (that is, the author), the characters, and the reader all taking witchcraft seriously. Since the author is clearly not sure whether she does -- this is after all "nineteen fifty-nine, the modern age," as Miss Mayfield is made to say -- we are left following the adventures of a protagonist who may be fighting true, supernatural evil, or who may just be stuck in the boondocks with a lot of elderly farmers having parties, naked, in the woods.

Still, one has to give Lofts credit for slogging through and producing yet another professional, well-woven story, including what she probably meant to be a startlingly eerie ending. At best, Miss Mayfield's situation makes the reader think about what it might have been like to live in places or times when "witchcraft" was a real terror, not so much for "victims" of it as for victims of accusations of it. Norah Lofts liked to spice her novels with the witchery theme from time to time, but in The Little Wax Doll, witchery is not the spice but the whole meal. It is the more indigestible for it.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

I came to this novel with somewhat of a handicap, namely the vague memory of having read that Christie did something remarkable and startling with the set-up of this, her first (so I had thought) published mystery. So I was on the alert for a twist, for the orchestration of a twist, beginning perhaps rather early in the story. You might say I had read the spoiler.


And as I got about halfway through, my memory jelled, I remembered the brilliant twist, and I could spot the murderer. Nevertheless Christie's work was very adroitly done. And what did surprise me was the appearance in this novel of her famed detective Hercule Poirot. If I knew about his arrival, I had forgotten it. He is introduced as already retired and famous, and only persuaded out of his garden by the propinquity of the murdered body in question, and the pleadings of a pretty girl in love.


Some people adore Hercule Poirot. I find him uninspiring. He is not nearly as simply delightful as Miss Marple, though he is a sight better than the utterly annoying Tommy and Tuppence, who do nothing but talk excitedly at each other, for chapter after chapter, about the mystery they are solving. Poirot's magician-like abilities render him more adding machine than even putatively human character. He lurks about as it were off-stage, seeming to come on only occasionally to make revelations in a silly, sing-song, French-flavored English which is meant to be adorable but rings hollow considering that Christie herself claimed in her biography to have been trained to French fluency in girlhood. Surely, bilingual herself, she would have no reason to depict another bilingual person as carrying on like a dance-hall comic.


Anyway. We will leave Poirot alone. What is wonderfully entertaining about The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the setting, so cozy and familiar through a hundred (mostly British) television series and movies that we forget it was probably Christie, in her books, who largely invented it. The little English town. The fine house of the local rich family. Terse, grim parlormaids in sensible shoes. The giddy daughter of the family, engaged to an unsuitable young man. The secretary or companion, unaccountably interested in poisons. English mists wafting over damp English gardens; prying spinster ladies; surreptitious meetings in the summerhouse, at nine-forty-five under a full moon -- but there was no moon. The butler distinctly said he had closed the window because it looked so like rain.


Agatha Christie must have enjoyed life tremendously, writing these delightful stories. If memory serves, she said she set about writing Roger Ackroyd after having read some other author's mystery, and being so disappointed in it that she told herself in amazement and some disgust that she could do better than that. And so she did, I am sure. I don't think I would be equal to all the weavings, thinkings, and tweakings she had to do to make the case come out right -- to get the murder done, the suspects in place, the clues both revealed and disguised, and all motivations, backgrounds, and timeframes made plausible and correct. This is not to speak of all of the foregoing being presented as a puzzle to the detective, who has to plausibly see what others do not see, but not so fast and so perfectly that the reader sees, too, and thus has nothing to chew on. When I realized that Christie had to actually figure out a way to make the murderer show an avuncular concern for a framed suspect's shoes, and more than one pair, well then -- I took off my figurative hat to her (no doubt a smart 1920s cloche).

I am not one of these people who sits down with a mystery with pencil and paper in hand, to try to solve it as I read. I simply meander along, enjoying the tale and the atmosphere as a bystander. What it means is that I can then re-read Christie later, because I've forgotten whodunit. Genuine mystery fans seem to be far more serious. Old reviews of Roger Ackroyd quoted in Wikipedia attest that, in 1926, professionals complained about it. Too many superfluous clues. A disappearance that did not matter (what! surely it did). The reader "sold up" by the ending. Her "most controversial" book, and to some "her masterpiece."

Goodness! Such passions. I hope in her long life she found time to plot a murder mystery at a mystery writers' awards banquet, or a conference of some kind. If she did, and I've already read it, I've forgotten it. Just think what I have to look forward to.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Originally appeared in The Times of Northwest Indiana

The definition of originality has been said to be, not that you create something new, but that you create something that cannot be imitated. Raymond Chandler did this when he wrote his four Philip Marlowe detective novels, beginning with The Big Sleep (1939). Here we meet Marlowe, the solitary, hard-drinking, tough-talking private eye working the seamier side of Los Angeles, solving crimes two or three steps ahead of the police (and the reader), and fending off crazed blondes with calm professionalism as he goes. What starts out as a case of blackmail quickly balloons into several interlocking cases involving porn, gambling, missing persons, and of course, murder. All of this takes place in a decidedly un-glamorous and strangely unpeopled L.A., full only of shabby office buildings, anonymous mom and pop diners, and plain frame houses amid drifting Pacific fogs. It rains perpetually.

There are great lines in the book -- "you have to hold your teeth clamped around Hollywood to keep from chewing on stray blondes," a voice was "as false as an usherette's eyelashes" -- and the mystery is mostly beautifully paced. But Marlowe, and Chandler's whole style, have become so iconic that it is hard to appreciate how original it all may have been. True novelty may be impossible to imitate, but it can be parodied (Steve Martin's film Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid comes to mind), and when it comes to lines about an usherette's eyelashes, it's hard not to find this beginning to be unintentionally funny. Marlowe himself, with his deadpan, I-shoulda-known-better narration, actually began to remind me of Bertie Wooster, the cheery, bewildered twit of P.G. Wodehouse's comic Jeeves and Wooster novels. There is little difference in tone between: "I was in the bathroom, wondering what there was going to be for breakfast while I massaged the spine with a rough towel" (Wooster) and "If you have anything that's worrying you beyond endurance, drop up ... I'll be oiling my machine gun" (Marlowe). Since both characters date from the same era, it may be that the slang of the time accounts for superficial resemblances between them. Gals "leg it," a detective is a "peeper," and when things are good they're "jakeloo." It is a bit distracting.

The question is, can anybody read The Big Sleep with pure delight today, just as a great tale? I found the solution to the mystery disappointing -- Chandler seems to have been known for messy plots, including totally unvisited subsidiary murders right in the middle of things -- and I doubt I will move on after this to Farewell, My Lovely, or the other two novels in this particular omnibus collection. It is all a piece of Americana, certainly, but as such has a kind of stale museum air to it that is, in the long run, uninviting. Maybe Chandler was original to a fault. He can be parodied, but not imitated and maybe not surpassed -- but, after one dose, he also can't be much further explored.