Christmas crimes
Patrick Cosg rave
They must have some new editors at Gollancz, for the latest Michael Innes, The Gay Phoenix (£3.40), is described on the jacket as being in a 'new and unexpected' vein. In fact it is not and, in its account of how one brother replaces another lost at sea and in the management of his life and fortune, runs into all manner of difficulties— with Appleby, even more urbane than ever, flitting in and out of the story until the moment of discovery—it recalls the delightful early Innes fantasy novels which followed his first two detective stories, Death at the President's Lodging and Hamlet, Revenge. That historical point made, it is noticeable how Innes, with this book and its predecessor, The Mysterious Commission has come back to form after a slack and indulgent period of several years. The Gay Phoenix, while not exactly vintage, has all the marks of character that made lnnes a classic.
I refer specifically, though, to the Innes manner—leisurely, learned, academic, world-weary. (There is a rich and brilliant vein of fantasy, too, but it comes out more clearly in the great adventure stories: Lament For a Maker challenges Buchan at his best.) And the manner—of which omniscience was a hallmark—is a too neglected aspect of the classical detective story. Neither of I nnes's first two great books had a great deal to offer in the way of detection (the ingenious solution in Hamlet, Revenge turned out to be wrong), but the utter confidence of manner and ambience swept one along.
Now manner (or perhaps I should say mannerism) is returning to the detective story, albeit in a subtly different way, especially among the women writers. Gone is the academic or social omniscience which used to cloak the great detective, and there is now instead a certain stylised stateliness which suffuses whole narratives. This is certainly the case in Anna Clarke's immensely attractive, The Deathless and the Dead (Collins Crime Club £2.95), in which a young working-class scholar, researching into the life of a passionate Victorian poetess, discovers a sinister connection between her death and the domineering family of the rich girl he is courting. There is not much mystery, but all of the characters are beautifully etched; the impossibility of various situations is easily evaded by a writing style as delicate as good china. Gwendoline Butler must look to her laurels.
Where the return to style has, on the whole, had a bad effect, is in the short story, once the staple of detective fiction. As Julian Symons has remarked, the classic 5000 wad short story, with beginning,
middle, end, clues, and deduction has quite gone, and writers now provide impressionistic little tapestries of irony and psychology. The trend is evident even in such entertaining collections as Macmillan's new Winter Crimes (edited by Hilary Watson at £3.25, and pinching the old Gollancz yellow jacket motif) and Ellery Queen's Crime Wave, (Gollancz £4.20). This is not to say that the collections are not good value: Winter Crimes is particularly so, with P. D. James, William Haggard, Mary Kelly and Audrey Erskine Lindop. The Queen volume, with twenty-four stories, has several stars, including a rare Ngaio
Marsh and a chilling Patricia Highsmith.
A Ruth Rendell story from Crime Wave also appears in (and gives the title to) that remarkable writer's The Fallen Curtain (Hutchinson £3.75), her first short story collection. In it she covers a remarkable range—from the modern Gothic ('The Venus Fly-trap'),
through a Highsmithlike story of a child ('The Vinegar Mother') to the possibly supernatural (*The Double'). I fear that Mrs Rendel I has almost given up detectives for crime, exploring, teasing out of events their fatal significance, turning over her characters as though they were specimens. There is no doubt that this is a most distinguished volume.
If, however, like myself, you hanker after the old-style detective story, then you must acquire Rex Stout's Three Witnesses (a distinguished addition to Hamish Hamilton's excellent Fingerprint reprint series, at £3.50). Three Nero Wolfe adventures here, all excellent value, though they are reminders of how much Wolfe got away with through the exercise of his personality rather than his brain. We have, of course, returned to this question of manner, and if you want to compare, in two newish writers, the two main modern strands of manner, then you should read Lesley Egan's Scenes 01 Crime (Gollancz £3.50) and Amanda Cross's The Question 01 Max (Gollancz £3.75). Miss Cross has yet to find herself: here her Eng. Lit. don, the cool and attractive Kate Fansler, visits Oxford and finds clues to the murder of a graduate student
outside the home of a deceased and highly distinguished novelist. The resolution is thin, there is too much not always accurate Oxonian musing (Duke Humphrey becoming the Duke of Humphrey) and, if the characterisation is often exquisite, the motivation is unconvincing. But there are signs, in an as yet rather inchoate and jumbled treatment of themes, that Miss Cross may yet become one of our best mannerists. Egan's style is much more assured in the treatment of further slices of hard-bitten but pleasantly sentimental life from the Glendale, Los Angeles cops.
The thriller—like the detective story—has its mannerists. Perhaps the best of them has appeared again after five years silence and, for me, Lionel Davidson's The Sun Chemist (Cape £3.95) is beyond question the book of the year. Davidson now lives in Israel, and his is the tale of an editor of Chaim Weizmann's letters who discovers that, before his death, the founder of the state was experimenting with a fuel that would render oil obsolete. The search for the missing formula involves the most complicated variations of skulduggery and duplicity (as well as dollops of love, sex and violence) an'd the most extraordinary thing about it all is that its basis—the Weizmann invention—is true. Every one of Davidson's masterly books, going right back to The Rose of Tibet, is completely original, invariably surprising, and beautifully written. I only wish he would write more, for there is nobody in the field to touch him.
The Sun Chemist has appeared in a year of highly distinguished thrillers. Gerald Seymour's second, The Glory Boys (Collins £3.95) also deals with the Middle East (Arab hit team travelling to London to assassinate Israeli scientist) and if it drags badly for the first third of the narrative (the time it takes the police to guess what is going on would be incredible even if they were stupid, which they are not supposed to be), the rest of the action is compulsive. Clive Egleton who, if he is no great master of characterisation, is a master of plot, also has an assassination (of the Queen, in Germany, by megalomaniac baddies run by the KGB) in State Visit (Hodder and Stoughton £3.95). Hodders have also produced a winner (tough Glasgow roman policier about a missing girl, with a superb evocation of that grimy city) in Laid/au', a first novel by William McIlvanney (£3.95). There is magnificent atmosphere, too, in Roderic Jeffries's Two Faced Death (Collins Crime Club £2.95), his second Spanish police adventure set in Mallorca; and Mr Jeffries has produced what is now a rarity, the completely surprise ending which points a worthwhile moral. Finally, I must salute Julian Symons and Penguin for the production of The John Franklin Bardin Omnibus (95p), three claustrophobic, utterly compelling, weird psychological detective stories published in the 'forties by a now almost forgotten master. By this volume alone the new Penguin crime series would be justified.
Previous page
