The re-run of copycat photoblogging.

It's been a while, but this is triggered by Chris Bertram's photograph posted here.

A street somewhere in Rome (I was actually lost when I shot this, in October 2002).

Anthony Horowitz, The House of Silk

Anthony Horowitz, The House of Silk
Mulholland Books/Little, Brown, and Company© 2011 Anthony Horowitz
ISBN 978-0-316-1970-4

While his wife is assisting her former employer (Mrs. Cecil Forester) deal with the severe bout of flu being suffered by Mrs. Forester’s son, Watson has returned to spend some time with Holmes.  Very soon, three cases engage Holmes’ attention.  First, art dealer Edmund Carstairs, asks Holmes to find the man who has apparently been following him.  He suspects the man of being Keelan O’Donaghue, the surviving member of a gang of thieves who destroyed (accidentally) a shipment of paintings he had sent to an American client.  And, it appears, this man has broken into his home and stolen a family heirloom necklace.  With the assistance of the street urchins dubbed the Baker Street Irregulars (especially Wiggins and Ross), Holmes traces the necklace to a pawn shop, and follows that up by tracking down the apparent thief—whom he finds murdered in a cheap boarding house.

The second case follows directly from the first—the young boy, Ross, who found the pawnshop, has disappeared.  He is found murdered, after being tortured.  Holmes traces him back to a school/home for young orphan/homeless boys from the streets of London.  Ross Dixon, to give him his full name, had run away from the Chorley Grange Home for Boys (presided over by the Rev. Charles Fitzsimmons).  This, however, appears to be a dead end, but for the piece of white silk tied around his wrist.

And the third matter Holmes is called upon to investigate involves the mysterious House of Silk.  No one knows what it is, or what it does.

Horowitz manages this fairly complicated narrative very well.   And he does an excellent job of the setting (London and its environs in winter), Watson’s character and narrative voice, and Holmes’ as well.  (Holmes is a difficult character, I think.  It’s difficult to make someone who is portrayed as being more-or-less emotionless, as a creature of pure logic, also as an interesting and occasionally empathetic friend.)  Lestrade has a fairly prominent role to play, and not as the complete dunce of a police inspector that Conan Doyle made of him.  Obviously, all this being Holmes, all three strands of the investigations are successfully resolved, although I can’t say that we feel particularly happy about the implications of the various resolutions for the characters involved.  As pastiches of the Holmes saga go, this is one of the best I have read.  [Horowitz has written one more—Moriarty (2014), which I intend to get to soon.]

Margaret Leek (Sara Woods) Voice of the Past

Margaret Leek (pen name of Sara Woods), Voice of the Past

Raven House Mysteries, 1981.

The third (and last) book in the series featuring (and narrated by) solicitor Anne Marryatt and set in a (very) small town in the midlands.  I think this was the best of this series [We Must Have a Trial (1980); The Healthy Grave (1980)], and this mini-series was the best of the three written by Woods (three books as Ann Burton about Richard Trent, a London  banker, and four as Marry Challis featuring Jeremy Locke, a London solicitor). (That’s a total of 10 books, not about Antony Maitland, all published in 1980 or 1981.)

[An aside.  One can never be sure about this sort of thing, but it seems at least possible that these books were written earlier (there’s little, if anything, that ties them to the 1980-81 period, except for a reference, in Voice of the Past to something that happened in 1979, a change that would be easy to make).  The primary characteristic of the books that argues for their having been written in the late 1970s is their attitude toward women in the workplace—it’s treated as an ordinary occurrence.]

Reading this book (and the others not written as Sara Woods) almost inevitably leads to a comparison to the Maitland books (of which there are 48, published beginning in 1962, with the final book in 1987—essentially two books a year—and four in 1980/1981).  One obvious difference is that Maitland was a barrister.  A second (in the case of the “Leek” books) is that the main character was a woman.)  Otherwise they have things in common.  In all three, the domestic life of the main characters is prominent.  In all three, the main character goes beyond his or her primary task and acts as an investigator.  If you have the interest, I think it’s fair to say that the Maitland books are, in general, better.  (They do have an interesting feature in that, by the mid-1970s, Woods realized she had tied herself down a bit by referring as often and as strongly as she did to Maitland’s World War II experience—including a severe shoulder injury.  So she set all the remaining books in the mid-1970s, with relatively specific dates.  I know of no other author of a long-running series who has done that.)

Nonetheless all three (non-Maitland) series have their points of interest, and in the case of Voice of the Past and its companions, one of those is the small village setting; the village is a stand-in, I think, for the larger family settings in the other series.

In Voice of the Past, a well-to-do, highly respected Baronet (and chairman of a local mortgage lending institution), Sir Lancelot Walker is shot, with his own shotgun, in the study of his home (with his wife Dorothy upstairs).  Suspicion falls immediately on his son-in-law (Arthur Kilburn), a commercial artist facing declining demand for (and declining income from) his work and seeking a loan to tide him and his family (wife Paula, two children) over as he re-orients his work.  Anne Maryatt, a local solicitor (and the narrator of these books) accepts Kilburn as a client, and begins a series of interviews to see what, if anything, she can find that might exonerate him.  It seems like a fruitless task, until her husband Stephen provides something from Walker’s past that might be worth exploring.

It happens that Walker and Stephen’s father Mark worked closely together in the immediate post-war years (Walker as a lender, Mark as a property appraiser) as the nearby town of Brompton grew explosively.  And now Walker is leaning on Stephen to shade, or outright falsify, his appraisal of a property that Walker wants to buy, and tells Stephen that he—Walker—and Stephen’s father committed fraud and that he will reveal Mark Maryatt’s participation in the fraud, if Stephen does not go along (as we learn quite quickly, Stephen ain’t gonna play).   But it obviously opens up a possible argument for the defense.

Unlike the other two books in the series, we basically see the entire trial, and the courtroom scenes are handled very well, including the climactic revelations.  I’ll admit that I picked out the killer quite early, albeit more by intuition than by any evidence whatsoever.  “Leek’s” handling of the courtroom revelations and their aftermath are very well handled, and all of the tensions (especially between Stephen and Anne) are resolved.  While this is not a great book (or mini-series), the courtroom scenes in particular worked well (barrister Benedict Tennant, Q. C., could give Perry Mason a run for his money) and parts of the denouement were suitably surprising.  Well worth the time if you can find a copy (they are available from used book sellers).

One of my projects for 2018 will be to take a new look at the Antony Maitland books.

Two Reviews: Melodie Campbell's The Goddaughter's Revenge and Edward D. Hoch's Sherlock Holmes stories

Two reviews:

Melodie Campbell, The Goddaughter’s Revenge
Rapid Reads/Orca Books © 2013 Meoldie Campbell
ISBN 978-1-4598-0489

Gina Ricci has (sort of) broken away from her family’s business, by opening a high-end jewelry store (Ricci Jewelers), in Hamilton (Ont.).  The family business is, by and large, illegal.  But someone, it seems, has removing the real, high-quality gemstones in the custom designed jewelry she creates, and replacing them with much lower quality stones.  She discovers this during a routine cleaning of a ring for one of her customers.  She decides to rectify matters by identifying the items that have been affected, “stealing” them, and re-replacing the stones with the real things.  But things begin to go wrong from the very beginning…

This seemed like a nice set-up—the stones involved all seem to have been replaced when Gina was on vacation, so who did it, and why, are pretty straight-forward.  And the things that can—and do—go wrong can make for a fairly amusing story.  But after a couple of disasters, it’s almost like Campbell lost interest.  The remainder of the book involves, not more and more convoluted problems in resolving the substitutions, but getting her relatives off her back.  And the book ends incredibly abruptly, almost as if she couldn’t figure out how to wind up the story in a convincing manner.  Fortunately, the whole thing took less than 2 hours to read.

Edward D. Hoch. The Sherlock Holmes Stories of Edward D. Hoch
Mysterious Press/Open Road Media, 2007
ISBN978-1-4804-5678-5
(Individual stories have various copyright dates)

Ed Hoch was one of the most prolific authors of mystery short stories ever.  For over 35 years, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine published one of his stories in every issue; in total, over 1000 of his stories appeared in print.  13 of these stories feature Sherlock Holmes (and Dr. John Watson, in all except the final story).  I had great expectations for these stories.

The problem with great expectations is that they are so often not fulfilled.  And I’m afraid that happened, for me at least, with these stories.  Hoch does a good job with the setting, I think (although it often seems a bit perfunctory) and he has the relationship between Holmes and Watson just right.  Unfortunately there were, for me, two ways in which the stories do not shine.  The first is what seemed to me to be a failure to capture Watson’s narrative voice.  The cadences of Watson’s style are so much a part of the stories that I at least felt that the rhythms of the stories were flat.  The second problem I had was he frequency with which Holmes would say something like “I guessed that…” something was the case.  Well…that’s just not right.

Overall, although these stories were not first-rate Holmes pastiches, they are readable.  And any dedicated fan of the Great Detective will want to read them.

An extended rant on a Nero Wolfe novella

Rex Stout, "The Next Witness," Three Witnesses (1956)
Reprinted by Bantam in 1994

I’ve been reading (very slowly—2-3pages a night) some of the Nero Wolfe novellas before going to sleep. And a few days ago I started re-reading (for at least the 15^th time) “The Next Witness.”  And I’ve spotted something that seems, well, wrong.

On p. 13 of the Bantam reprint (1994), Archie tells Wolfe (and us):  “His [Leonard Ashe’s) story is that a man phoned him…and said if Ashe would meet him at the Bagby place on Sixty-ninth street he thought they could talk Marie out of it, and Ashe went on the hop, and the door to the office was standing open, and he went in and there she was with a plug cord around her throat…” 

Two pages later, Wolfe and Goodwin arrive at the apartment building where the office is.  And, “In the vestibule I pushed the button that was labeled Bagby Answers, Inc., and when the click came I opened the door and led the way across the crummy little hall to the stairs and up one flight,’

So here’s the issue:  There was, apparently, no one in the office (alive) to buzz Ashe through the locked door in the vestibule—if Ashe was telling the truth.  This is not a problem for the prosecution, of course—Ashe buzzed, Marie Willis let him in, and he killed her.  But it is, or should be, a problem for Wolfe.  Assuming Ashe is innocent,--that he found Willis already murdered--how did he get through the door in the vestibule?  Had someone propped the door open?  If so, wouldn’t Ashe have mentioned that at some point?  In short, if Ashe was innocent, how did he get in and to the office?

Now, I have read this story a lot, and this never occurred to me before (I can be a little slow).  But it for sure should have occurred to Wolfe or Archie or to whoever was editing the story for publication.  It can be fixed with addition of three words.  Instead of “…and the door to the office was standing open…”, if we have “…and vestibule door and the door to the office were standing open…”, there’s no problem.  My point, just to be clear, is not that this problem can’t be easily resolved, it’s that, apparently, no one realized that it needed to be resolved.

But then there’s the second problem.  If Leonard Ashe is not guilty, who is guilty?  Or, more precisely, who can we prove to be guilty?  And here the answer seems to be:  “No one.” 

What do we need to do to prove someone guilty?  The classic answer, of course, focuses on motive, means, and opportunity:
Does this person have a motive for killing the victim?
Did this person have, or have access to, the means by which the murder was accomplished?
Did this person  have the opportunity to commit the murder?
Well, where do we stand with respect to all this?

Guy Under, Helen Weltz, Alice Hart, Bella Velardi, and Clyde Bagby all plausibly have a motive, and for all of them, it’s the same motive—to prevent the exposure of a blackmailing scheme operated by and through the answering service.  Everyone in the world had access to the means to commit the murder, assuming access to the apartment.  (The means was strangulation using one of the switchboard cords.

But what about opportunity?  Can we prove that Person A (B, C, D…) had access to and was present at the scene of the crime when the murder was committed?  Well, here we have a problem.  Unger and Weltz share an alibi—they were, according to them, together (in the company of Ralph Ingalls and his wife) on a boat.  Hart and Velardi share an alibi—they had borrowed Weltz’s car and were on the shore in New Jersey, cooling off (and presumably Weltz supports their statement about borrowing her car).

But Bagby has no alibi.  No one says, or can say, that he was at home (or anywhere else) when the murder was committed.  Clearly he had access to the building and the apartment—it was his business.  He (presumably) says he was not there.  But he could have been.  But can the police prove that he was there?  Did any of the tenants of the building see him entering or leaving at about the time of the murder?  As far as we know, the answer to that seems to be, “No.”  We might suspect Bagby, but I see no way to prove his guilt.  If he has a good lawyer, my guess is he would walk, guilty or innocent, the proof of guilt is insufficient (unless the police can turn up a witness placing him at the scene.)

Which, oddly enough, brings us back to Leonard Ashe. He has a motive (of sorts; I don’t think it was a particularly powerful motive).  If he was at the apartment, then he had access to the means of murder.  And he was there, so he clearly had the opportunity to commit the murder.  But…if he was the murderer, why didn’t he just quietly walk away?  Why shout for the police?  In fact, for me, that he did not sneak away, that he shouted out the window for the police is the strongest evidence of his innocence.  But the fact remains that the prima facie case against Ashe is stronger than the case against anyone else. 

Wolfe’s entire argument comes down to this:  Someone else (perhaps many someones) had a stronger motive.  But that is not—and should not—be enough to convict that “someone else.”.

(An addendum to this:
Wolfe was not called to testify in Clyde Bagby's trial, which, we are told, ended in a conviction.  But...

It's unclear to me what Wolfe could have testified to in any event. He *deduced* the existence of the blackmail plot, but his deductions are not evidence. Helen Weltz *confirmed* his deductions, but he can't testify to what she said (unless she is the defendant; I suspect the DA would give her immunity in exchange for her testimony); from an evidentiary point of view, what she told him is hearsay. Oddly, Bagby's defense lawyer could rationally subpoena him to testify to Ashe's efforts to get Marie Willis to eavesdrop, in an attempt to rebut the case against Bagby. The defense lawyer could (and, obviously, would) avoid any mention of Wolfe's deductions.

As far as I can tell, the only useful new evidence the police or the DS's office could find is someone who could place Bagby in or immediately around the apartment or building at the relevant time. That might give Bagby something to explain, and it would help us fill out the motive/means/opportunity trilogy. But Ashe's presence actually in the apartment/office at ((or around) the time of the murder seems to me like a pretty good defense...I actually don't see how a jury could vote to convict...)

A Christmas poem

Christmas Sparrow

Billy Collins

The first thing I heard this morning
was a soft, insistent rustle,
the rapid flapping of wings
against glass as it turned out,

a small bird rioting
in the frame of a high window,
trying to hurl itself through
the enigma of transparency into the spacious light.

A noise in the throat of the cat
hunkered on the rug
told me how the bird had gotten inside,
carried in the cold night
through the flap in a basement door,
and later released from the soft clench of teeth.

Up on a chair, I trapped its pulsations
in a small towel and carried it to the door,
so weightless it seemed
to have vanished into the nest of cloth.

But outside, it burst
from my uncupped hands into its element,
dipping over the dormant garden
in a spasm of wingbeats
and disappearing over a tall row of hemlocks.

Still, for the rest of the day,
I could feel its wild thrumming
against my palms whenever I thought
about the hours the bird must have spent
pent in the shadows of that room,
hidden in the spiky branches
of our decorated tree, breathing there
among metallic angels, ceramic apples, stars of yarn,

its eyes open, like mine as I lie here tonight
picturing this rare, lucky sparrow
tucked into a holly bush now,
a light snow tumbling through the windless dark.

Will Thomas, Old Scores
St. Martins/Minotaur Books © 2017 Will Thomas
ISBN 978-1-250-07796-7

Japan has sent a delegation (including an Ambassador, representatives of the army, navy, ministry of trade, and a cultural attaché) to London; the year is 1890.  And, thirty-some years after U.S. warships forced Japan to open itself to the rest of the world, the ruling class in Japan wants to play a major role in the world—and not as a subordinate country to anyone, and especially not in Asia.  Cyrus Barker, a private inquiry agent, becomes involved because members of the delegation have asked to see his (recreation of a) Japanese garden.

That night, Barker has gone to the house which is being used by the Japanese as their embassy—and was outside when the Japanese ambassador was shot.  He has, or course, been arrested.  (His assistant, Thomas Llewellyn discovers this when he realizes Barker is not in his house and decides to look for him at the embassy; Llewellyn is also arrested.)

Subsequently, following their release, Barker is summoned to the embassy and is asked to investigate the murder of the ambassador.  Despite the inherent difficulties of this task, he accepts.  After a long series of twists and turns, involving two rivals in the Chinese community in London, the disappearance—and reappearance—of one of the ambassador’s bodyguards, and much more, Barker is able to uncover the source of the murder.  We do not, however, reach what can be called a happy ending.  Although it is actually remarkably well-suited to the situation and the persons involved.

This is the ninth book in the series, and all have been very good.  In some ways, this is not as strong an entry.  In part, this is because the author spends a good deal of time in the first half of the book providing us with substantial exposition about Japan.  The information is important, and useful as we move through the events, but the fact that it is essentially a data dump slows the narrative considerably.  But the second half of the book is extraordinary.  And along the way, we learn a good deal about Barker’s background, and everything we learn is germane.  So in saying it might not be as strong as the previous books, I am far from attempting to discourage you.  It seems to me that, as the series continues, what we have learned, and what the characters have experienced on this book, will be of ongoing importance.