When it comes to tides, I'm all at sea

Inspired by Gladys Mitchell, I picked up The Floating Admiral from the TBR shelves. This is the first collaboration by members of the Detection Club, published in 1931. I had expected it to be a spoof, but it's a serious work, and one I'm enjoying very much. There are twelve chapters, each written by a different author, many of whom I've met in Martin Edwards' short story compilations. Dorothy L. Sayers explained how the idea of the collaborative story came to be in an Introduction, and she also explained how it was written.

Except in the case of Mr. Chesterton's picturesque Prologue, which was written last, each contributor tackled the mystery presented to him in the preceding chapters without having the slightest idea what solution or solutions the previous authors had in mind. Two rules only were imposed. Each writer must construct his instalment with a definite solution in view - that is, he must not introduce new complications merely "to make it more difficult." He must be ready, if called upon, to explain his own clues coherently and plausibly; and to make sure that he was playing fair in this respect, each writer was bound to deliver, together with the manuscript of his own chapter, his own proposed solution to the mystery. These solutions are printed at the end of the book for the benefit of the curious reader.

In her Introduction Sayers also gives some of the oath that members of the club take at their initiation, regarding their work. I think their rules are good ones!

The author pledges himself to play the game with the public and with his fellow-authors. His detectives must detect by their wits, without the help of accident or coincidence; he must not invent impossible death-rays and poisons to produce solutions which no living person could expect; he must write as good English as he can. . . If here is any serious aim behind the avowedly frivolous organisation of the Detection Club, it is to keep the detective story up to the highest standard that its nature permits, and to free it from the bad legacy of sensationalism, clap-trap and jargon with which it was unhappily burdened in the past.

Considering the round-robin way this book was written, I find it a very cohesive story. Without the authors' names at the head of each chapter, I would never have guessed there were twelve writers. There are no real shifts in tone, and I couldn't have picked out the chapters written by Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie from the rest. The Floating Admiral of the title, Admiral Penistone, is found dead and drifting in a boat on the River Whyn, early one morning. He was stabbed to death sometime the previous night, after dining with his niece at a local vicar's home. Inspector Rudge from Whynmouth is called to take the case. I was happily following his investigation, until the question of the River came up. It's a tidal river, which may be a factor in when and where the Admiral's body was discovered. But I was reminded again how little I understand tides, and how little the explanations in books help, even when made to people as confused as I am. (And there's a whole chapter titled "Bright Thoughts on Tides.")

    "You want to know about the tides in the river?" [Neddy Ware, who found the body] replied, in answer to the Inspector's explanation of the cause of his visit. "Why, they're simple enough, so long as you remember that it's high water, Full and Change, at Whynmouth at seven o'clock."
    Rudge laughed. "I haven't a doubt it's simple enough to you," he said. "Personally, I haven't the foggiest idea what you're talking about. What on earth do you mean by high water, Full and Change?"
    "Why, merely that it's high water at Whynmouth at seven o'clock nearabouts, on the days when the moon is full or new," replied Ware. "Now, take this morning's tide, for instance. To-day's Wednesday, the 10th. It was new moon on Monday, that's to say it was high water at Whynmouth at seven on Monday evening. It would be about eight yesterday evening and half-past this morning. You can allow about six hours between high and low water, making it low water at half-past two this morning. The tide up here begins to flow half to three-quarters of an hour after low water at Whynmouth, or say soon after three. And that's when I went out fishing."

Maybe it's the math involved that throws me, as much as the science. As soon as I see "neeps" or "springs," I know I'm lost, even when (as here) the timetable is crucial to the mystery.

I'm glad to find this book so enjoyable, since last year I read about three more collaborations in Martin Edwards' The Golden Age of Murder, and rushed to order them. They're still on the TBR stacks. Ask a Policeman has the authors swapping characters, writing each other's detectives. In The Anatomy of Murder, the fiction writers take on real-life cases. And in Six Against the Yard, the authors match wits against an actual policeman, a Superintendent from Scotland Yard. Dorothy L. Sayers joined in each of these, but the last is the only one to include Margery Allingham.

Edited to add: I should have noted that Orientalism that runs through the book, starting with G.K. Chesterton's Prologue, set in Hong Kong. It unfortunately includes derogatory references to the Chinese, as well as the usual casual use of the N-word.

Trent's Own Case, by E.C. Bentley

E.C. Bentley's books first came to my attention through the letters of Dorothy L. Sayers.  She wrote him a very complimentary letter in 1936 after reading this book, his second featuring the amateur detective Philip Trent.  What really surprised me was to read "I am always ashamed to admit how much my poor Peter owes to Trent, besides his habit of quotation."  That set me off to find his first Trent book, Trent's Last Case, published in 1913.  I read later that it is considered the first modern mystery novel.  Agatha Christie said that it was "one of the three best detective stories ever written."  Sayers wrote that "Every detective writer of today owes something, consciously or unconsciously, to its liberating and inspiring influence."  Bentley supposedly wrote it on a bet with G.K. Chesterton, to show a detective getting every single thing wrong.

I admit, I had pretty high expectations when I started the first book, and it didn't quite live up to them.  I probably need to read it again one of these days.  Though I wasn't thrilled with it, I still picked up a copy of the second book, Trent's Own Case, when I came across it.  I read it over the weekend, though more than once I was tempted to give up on it.  It reads like a typical Golden Age mystery.  James Randolph's valet discovers him dead in the bedroom of his small mews house.   He was shot in the back just as he was pulling off his jacket.  The police find crumpled brown wrapping paper and cut string lying on the floor, near a safe set into the wall.  Philip Trent, an artist who has retired from amateur sleuthing, visited Randolph earlier in the evening, to discuss Randolph's unwelcome interest in Eunice Faviell, an actress friend of Trent and his aunt Julia.  But the police, led by Chief Inspector Gideon Bligh, discover signs of another visitor: a luggage tag with the name of Bryan Fairman, a psychiatrist on staff at a hospital Randolph funds. The tag shows that Fairman was to travel to Dieppe on the night-boat.  Bligh sends instructions to track Fairman, who is caught just as he prepares to commit suicide by jumping off the boat.  Meanwhile, a letter he wrote confessing to the murder is on its way to the police.  Fairman is arrested, but neither Trent nor his friend Bligh is quite satisfied with the case.  There is a missing heir, a missing gun, a missing will, and whatever was wrapped in that brown paper is also missing. With Bligh's blessing Trent takes on much of the investigation (to the point that I wondered what Bligh and his team were actually doing to solve the case).

I thought the mystery was interesting enough, with a twisty plot and an ending that I only guessed just before the murderer was caught.  I did want to find out who killed James Randolph, which kept me reading.  But the denouement was a long time coming, and I found my attention wandering more than once.  This was an easy book to put down, even mid-chapter.  As with many Golden Age mysteries, there was a tendency to introduce clues but not to explain their significance - and to withhold information from the police, which always irritates me.  And while Dorothy Sayers may have taken Trent as a model for Peter Wimsey, his quotations and piffle felt a bit forced to me, nowhere near as entertaining as Peter or Psmith waffling on.

There is also a book of short stories featuring Trent, but I think I'll pass on those.

The bells of Fenchurch St. Paul

The Nine Tailors, Dorothy L. Sayers

I have had a re-reading of this book in mind for a while, and when I remembered that it opens on New Year's Eve, I added to my Christmas reading list.  I had forgotten, though, that it ends in the Christmas season, a year later, so it fits in even better than I expected.  I don't know that I could ever pick a single favorite among the Peter Wimsey novels, but this would definitely be at the top of the list, with Strong Poison and Gaudy Night.

I expect that this is a familiar story to many people, so I won't say too much about the plot, which revolves around a stolen emerald necklace and a body that turns up in someone else's grave.  The story takes Peter to the Fen Country - which is actually familiar territory not just to Peter, raised in Norfolk, but also to his creator.  Catherine Kenney in her book The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers argues that this is one of the books where Sayers drew on her own background, as she did in Murder Must Advertise and Gaudy Night. Sayers grew up in the East Anglia village of Bluntisham, where her father was the rector of a church much like Fenchurch St. Paul, in this book. Kenney notes that buried in the churchyard there are members of the Thoday family, a name Sayers borrowed for important characters in her story.

One reason I enjoy this book so much is that it's the last of Peter's adventures on his own, with Bunter.  It takes place presumably while Peter is involved with Harriet Vane, but she doesn't play any part in the story (even in a throwaway line, as in Murder Must Advertise).  Nor does it have the other familiar characters from the series, except Peter's brother-in-law Charles Parker, Chief Superintendent at Scotland Yard, who appears later to help on the London end.  (I always miss Peter's wifty mother the Dowager Duchess).   Instead we get a vivid cast of local characters and criminal outsiders.  I am particularly fond of the Venables, the Rector and his wife, who offer Peter hospitality at the Rectory after an accident to his car leaves him stranded with Bunter late on a snowy afternoon.  While the Rector is a true shepherd to his small country flock, if a rather woolly-minded one at times, Mrs. Venables plays an equally important part in parish affairs and in their marriage.  It's a lovely partnership,

This book also shows Peter at his best.  On the very evening of his arrival, after a long and tiring day, he agrees to spend all night helping to ring in the New Year with the parish ringers, who have been left short-handed, rather than see the Rector disappointed.  He is a perfect guest, polite, unobtrusive, undemanding.  When a body is discovered improperly buried in the churchyard, he happily returns to the village to help investigate.  He is equally at home in the Rectory and the village.  He makes friends with Hilary Thorpe, recently orphaned and left impoverished after a magnificent emerald necklace was stolen many years ago from a guest at her family's home.  (She wants to be a writer, and I did wonder if perhaps later Peter introduced her to Harriet.)  When floods overwhelm the Fens, he and Bunter stay to help care for the villages taking refuge in the church, for more than two weeks.  Peter even tries to go to the rescue of a man caught in the flood waters; he has to be restrained at the water's edge.  True, he does spend a couple of days that Christmas home at Duke's Denver, irritating his sister-in-law the Duchess and her guests, but given how annoying Helen Denver is, I can hardly blame him for that.  We also get glimpses into the lighter side of the ever-correct Jeevesish Bunter, whose music-hall impersonations are popular in the Rectory kitchen, and who helps Peter defraud the Royal Mail to acquire a vital letter.

This story takes place over the course of a year, with crucial events occurring at New Year's, Easter, and Christmas. I think that makes it unique among the Wimsey stories, which generally cover a shorter period.  It is also unique of course because of the role the church bells play in the story.  Like many readers, I knew nothing about change-ringing before reading this book.  I had no idea that there are people who believe "the proper use of bells is to work out mathematical permutations and combinations."  I have to admit that I don't fully understand all the details of the bell-ringing, and as many times as I've read this book, I am still sometimes as lost as Wally Pratt.  But in the end Dorothy L. Sayers makes their role in the central mystery as clear as the proverbial bell.

Peter at Pym's Publicity

Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy L. Sayers

Seeing various posts on Peter Wimsey from the "As My Whimsy Takes Me" challenge has reminded me how long it's been since I've read the stories.  I was introduced to Lord Peter through the TV series with Ian Carmichael, when they were on PBS's Mystery back in the 1980s.  Once I found the books themselves I never looked back.  Lord Peter was my first literary love, and I re-read the books so many times over the years that they became almost too familiar.  So I started reading about Dorothy L. Sayers instead, and then looking for her other writings, including her letters.  What sent me back to the books, to Murder Must Advertise, was a posting on The New Yorker book blog on whether ad copy can teach us anything about the craft of writing.

I've always thought that Murder Must Advertise is the funniest of the Wimsey stories.  There is Peter masquerading as Death Bredon, a "cross between Ralph Lynn and Bertie Wooster" in horn-rims.  It struck me this time, though, that Peter is channeling Psmith rather than Bertie.  He piffles his way around Pym's, and like Psmith in the City, he is hardly ever to be found at his desk.  He also gets to play in a staff cricket match that shows him in his element, as one of the game's great players (which reminds me that I need to finish the Raffles stories).  True, he has a much more serious purpose, investigating the death of an employee, Victor Dean, which leads him to a gang of drug dealers.  But in between the investigations, we get to know Peter's fellow workers at Pym's, the different parts they play in the work of the ad agency, the details of the various ad campaigns, and the difficulties they run into, especially from the clients.  Sayers drew from her own experience working in an advertising agency to create this complex little world of Pym's.  And while there is a general consensus that she wrote herself into the stories as Harriet Vane, I think a case could be made for Miss Meteyard, the brilliant and acerbic Somerville graduate, who isn't beautiful but has interesting bones, who figures out not only the murderer but who Mr Bredon really is.

Peter often gets labeled a snob, which I've never understood.  I don't see how anyone could think that after reading this book.  He fits right in at Pym's, where "the atmosphere suited him well enough. He was a bonhomous soul, with the insatiable curiosity of a baby elephant..."  Miss Parton, one of the typists, sums him up: "He's a darling."

Peter in this book reminded me not just of Psmith, but even more of Francis Crawford of Lymond, the hero of Dorothy Dunnett's great Lymond Chronicles.  Peter has a second secret identity in this book, as the Harlequin who enthralls Dian de Momerie, his entrée into the drug gang.  The scene where he captivates her by diving from the top of a high fountain into its shallow basin is pure theatrics (not to mention mind-boggling). The stories he weaves for her and her associates, the games he plays with them, the physical stunts, are all Lymondesque.

The wonderful cast of characters also includes Charles and Lady Mary Parker, though sadly not the Dowager Duchess.  Bunter appears only briefly, at the end, and there is an oblique reference to Peter dining with Harriet Vane, "the one young woman who showed no signs of yielding to him..."  It is no compensation to have Helen Denver instead. Now, there's the ultimate snob.

I enjoyed this re-read so much that I think I'll be back with Peter before too long.