Some Other Strange Mystery & Crime Novels & Some Reference Books

There is a published list (on the Internet) of this mystery fan's top favorite "50" mysteries. However, there should be a secondary list of detective and crime novels that must be considered as "one-off" masterpieces (or if not that, well worth reading as curiosities).

Here are some "one-of-a-kind" books that have to be listed because of extraordinary plotting, supernatural elements, or something of the sort:

Modern Novels

• It Happened in Boston?...by Russell H. Greenan -- best art forgery mystery I've ever read (among its other virtures).

  The narrator of this peculiar masterpiece is a lunatic who is attempting to assassinate God and take his place, because he thinks he can run the world better. He is also the best artist since Leonardo; herein comes the art forgery plot. The characters are bizarre and funny. The writing is beautiful and witty. The vocabulary is impressive. Written in 1968, but hard to find (Bantam issued a paperback of this and a couple of other books by the author in the late 1980's: A Can of Worms and The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton also display his eccentric wit and weird fancies.)

• Felidae...by Akif Pirinçci --
  
  

  The sun has already pierced the steel-gray, icy clouds, showing them no mercy in melting them away, and shedding the first faint rays of the new year on the computer Gustav bought not long ago. In the last few days, I have been entering into it my memories of the Claudandus case. As might be expected, Gustav lost all interest in the computer after only two days, because even after ploughing through six instruction manuals he couldn't figure it out.

  
  All right, this was written by a cat named Francis (Gustav is his owner and is a jerk like Garfield's Jon). There seems to be a vogue now for detective stories with cat heros, but I have resisted reading any of them up to now, even though I love and admire cats. Read this one because of its beautiful cover picture, and the fact that the author is a German Turk who writes very well even in translation to English (kudos to Ralph Noble in that role). This book is about a mass murderer of cats, by a cat, who has some mad-scientist dream of breeding a super race of felines who will come to dominate the world and eradicate or enslave human beings. A very cynical version of Animal Farm which also reminds me of that appalling book Perfume and also of Jorge Luis Borges. No Englishman could have written this, but the Englishness of it is pervasive --i.e. the morality (in spite of the political incorrectness of defending Anglo-Saxon ethos these days). The gimmick here is of course that cats are just as smart as we are, and spend the time while we are asleep at night reading our books and playing on our computers, and discussing Kierkergaardian philosophy when they are not driven crazy by the pheremones of females in heat (smelly stuff to us humans, but what do we know about the powers and subtleties of smells?)
  
  
• Musclebound...by Liza Cody --

  [This book will not be released until the end of August '97, but I got to read an advance copy -- well, my wife works at a literary agency, so there!] Eva Wylie ("The London Lassassin") is an ex-professional wrestler who now 'works' as a live-on-the-site junkyard attendant, and occasionally does odd jobs for Cody's series detective Anna Lee (which books were also pretty good). Eva is extremely vulgar and loud and obnoxious, and is also a total idiot (she is maybe one notch smarter than her attack dog Ramses, whom she has to dominate every now and then by beating him up while he tries to rip out her throat -- she also has two other guard dogs, Lineker, who is smarter than any of this crew and hides away when trouble is brewing, and Milo, the horse-sized puppy who says 'Herf' and is named after the most famous wrestler of all time, the ancient Greek equivalent of Houdini who came to a very bad end -- that's the guy who decided to split a tree with his bare hands and got them stuck in the crevice when it closed on him and ended up eaten by bears or something -- jeeze, I'm getting way off the track). Anyway, dim as she is, she writes in the first person -- yeah, well, that's the genre for you -- with dialogue that's the Cockney equivalent of Elmore Leonard, hilarious and raunchy. She also happens to be observant when it serves the author's needs, so that you as a reader can be your own detective and solve the plot as it unfolds -- Eva certainly hasn't got a clue even though she sees all! Really scuzzy people abound, but this moron is so much above (or below) them that you can actually empathize with her. Very quirky and unusual book, definitely an original. (Really love incidental events such as the 'oops' with the claw hammer, the 'rumble' in the wrestling arena, and the 'right-under-the-coppers-eyes' doorstep.)
  By the way, 'Musclebound' is the fantasy name of the exercise spa she dreams of opening someday, Muscle-bound, Outward-bound, get it?
  
  

• A Leaven of Malice...by Clare Curzon -- real voodoo, really!

  [She writes Procedurals mostly, but this one has a true supernatural element, and is justifiably anti-cop too -- put this one right up there with The Burning Court. You wouldn't think this story would work, but it does.]

• The Tryst...by Michael Dibden -- fantastically interwoven plot

  [A convergence of plot elements worthy of Armadale, and in less than 200 pages -- a ghost story in 'reverse'. This is a very compelling story even if it isn't very pleasant.]

• Dirty Tricks...also by Michael Dibden -- almost an Evelyn Waugh sort of story like Black Mischief

  [Very different from The Tryst (versatile author); the -- not to mince words -- blow job in the dining room while the husband is carving the roast is hilarious and sets the scale of the whole book, a wonderfully immoral protagonist who gets his comeuppance!]

  ---

  Earlier 20th Century Novels

• The Thirty-nine Steps...by John Buchan --

  Got stuck the other day with nothing new to read, so I picked up this book again (Nelson Classics, HC, 1915, 170 pp.). Remarkably good still, in spite of quaint attitudes ("you're a real white man," Dagos, Jewish financiers, "the fate of Europe is in your hands," etc.). This was one of the first single-man-on-the-run books, trying to evade a nationwide manhunt both by the police and an evil German spy ring. Hannay is both clever and lucky in his evasive actions in the Highlands of Scotland. The plot is very fast-moving and effective (although there is a lot of coincidence -- just happens to stumble into the spy-master's hunting lodge on the moors, for example). This is not much like the movie, which was also quite good, but it is a true 'ripping yarn' and well worth the couple of hours involved in reading it. A great 'fast read' if you're cooped up in an airport.
  
  

• Rebecca...by Daphne DuMaurier
  
  -- one of the best Gothic novels since Jane Eyre (why didn't I have this book in this list earlier? oversight!) What brings this update on is the PBS yet-again "Rebecca" being shown in April 1997. It has Diana Rigg as Mrs Danvers, which makes this version classic in spite of who else is playing the major roles. [I have been in love with Diana Rigg for 25 years or so, and have to admire her role in this latest "Rebecca" as an old witch with gray hair and wrinkles -- she ought to be made a Dame of the British Empire, don't you think? This is the British Bette Davis]. Oh, as far as the book goes, well, it is a great book, isn't it? It is a wonderfully filmable story, and you can have Lawrence Olivier and Jeremy Brett playing Max DeWinter, with any engenu pretty actress as the nameless bride, and that great Mrs Danvers role that any serious actress would want to do (like Goneril or Regan or Medea).

  Excuse my going on at great length with this one...just saw the final episode, and it turns out, according to Russell Baker, that Diana Rigg IS a Dame now. This version of the story has also been updated in various ways: Mrs Danvers's relationship with Rebecca is now explicitly Lesbian; Maxim is not so sympathetic a character here, he really is an arrogant murderous shit (and even physically resembles Claus von Bulow); Favell, the blackmailing cad, is quite right with his accusations, you have to feel his frustration and empathize with it (another plum acting role for the right person, how to play a sleazeball one can identify with).

• The Red Right Hand...by Joel Townsley Rogers -- your worst nightmare, a truly psychopathic killer, and a case of mistaken identity based on one's assumptions about certain classes of people. Well worth a try, and the atmosphere is good.

  [Re-read this recently (10/96), as one does when doing this sort of list, and 12 years after my last reading of it, still found it extraordinarily creepy, even though it's a garbled mess storywise. Nice twist about what a gardener could be doing... well, I shouldn't say more.]

• The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck...by ??? -- absolutely appalling

  [Lost my copy of the book, but it was definitely weird--read it 2 or 3 times and can't remember who wrote it, probably don't want to know; the ending is really grotesque.]

• The Face on the Cutting Room Floor...by Cameron McCabe -- it is very hard to describe what this weird book is all about. Layers within layers, but a breezy prose style that is both irritating and imprecise in explaining what is actually going on.

  [The author's real name is Ernst Wilhelm Julius Bornemann, a noted sexologist; read the fascinating interview with him in the Penguin edition, his adventures with Orson Welles, Eartha Kitt, Lorne Green, etc. Re-read the book 11/96, and still can't figure it out--anybody could be, and is, the murderer. Actually, this book sucks, but it has a reputation.]

• Shadows of Ecstasy...by Charles Williams -- a 'metaphysical' thriller

  [When I was younger, I went through a Chestertonian paradox stage and enjoyed this sort of thing; now that I am a hard-set atheist, I don't, but it was worth the recent re-reading. The theological stuff is very irritating and just pig-headedly wrong. However, the premise and plot are good, and unusual -- a charismatic figure leads an anti-Western, anti-Colonial crusade in Africa (in the 1930s no less) based on an anti-intellect, pro-passion belief that death can be overcome by turning all one's pains, loves, and ambitions inward to build up the will to survive for centuries and actually achieve resurrection from the dead (which of course the Christian heroes regard as sinful and evil, but actually has some appeal). Interesting book with some good SF/supernatural elements. The Tories win. He wrote several like this.]

  ---

  19th Century

• The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner... by James Hogg -- this was Walter Scott's Ettrick Shepherd friend; it will amaze you (if you can find it).

  [I first read it in 1971 then again in Nov. 1996: click HERE for a review. This is a great Mystery, well, no--Murder novel]

• Caleb Williams...by William Godwin (Mary "Frankenstein" Shelley's father) -- this is really almost the first true 'thriller' ever written.

  [This is next on my re-read list, but it might take some time before then.]

• Armadale...by Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone is listed as one of the all-time greats, and The Woman in White. In contrast, Armadale is not a mystery novel at all) -- Hundreds of pages devoted to the line-by-line fulfilment of the elements of a really bad horoscope; an example of plotting expertise that should be observed by all mystery writers.

  [But I don't think this is worth the slog of reading more than once, like Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, a lengthy gothic novel that should be savored one time and then used as a door stop.]

• Uncle Silas...by Sheridan Le Fanu -- the first 'locked room' mystery apart from "Murders in the Rue Morgue," but that's not its virtue, which consists of two of the most repulsive people you will ever meet in fiction, Uncle Silas and Madame de la Rougierre, the housekeeper from Hell.

  [For Detective Story fans, this has one of the earliest 'locked-room' murders, although rather trivial; what's more affecting is the incredible sound of the pickax going into Madame's head, amazing for a Victorian author to so vividly convey a sound-effect -- this chapter ought to be brought up in how-to-write-fiction classes as an example of how to rivet the reader without necessarily having to go into explicit gruesome details.]

• Bleak House...by Dickens -- has a bit of detective work in it, but is obviously not a detective story; all kinds of crimes in it though (blackmail, coverups, obfuscations, absconding, revolting anti-justice law courts, you name it.)

  [Have read this several times, and each time there is something more in it -- one of the great novels of all time; Diana Rigg gave one of her classy (what else?) performances as Lady Dreadlock in the BBC television serial -- what a wonderful lady she is! When Lord Dreadlock offers her 'full forgiveness' for her sins, which is what the mystery was about, you'll break out in tears, or maybe just laugh if you want to see the wicked upper class suffer. And I can't get over the grotesque scene where Quilp 'spontaneously combusts'.]

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