The Seven of Calvary by Anthony Boucher 

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

This 1937 mystery fits the criteria for genre of academic mystery: set at a university, professor as detective, international cast, cultured dialogue, learned digressions, and mild gibes at profs’ manners and ways.

Though this was the author’s first mystery, he takes pleasure is satirizing the conventions of the Golden Age mystery. For instance, the professor-detective, like Nero Wolfe, never stirs out of this room to investigate the crime. In fact, he has a graduate student be his Archie Goodwin, getting out and talking to persons of interest. The grad student narrates the story in an arch and faux-sophisticated tone, very much like Michael Innes in the Thirties. In an outrageous post-modern technique, the grad student and Boucher (rhymes with “voucher,” by the way) meet over chow to confirm with each other that fair-play has been the byword, that clues needed to solve the mystery have indeed be given to the reader.

The story moves steadily through plenty of action. Boucher misdirects too but the long-time mystery reader, while alert to being fooled, will not be cheated out of a good surprise either. It’s impressive that Boucher developed such a crackerjack story his first time out. This book well deserves its classic status. Although he did not return to a campus setting, he wrote many more mysteries and short stories. For many years he was the mystery reviewer for the New York Times. He has a convention of mystery fandom named after him, Bouchercon.

Minute for Murder by Nicholas Blake

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Cecil Day-Lewis, poet and translator of Latin classics, added to his probably low income as a prof by writing detective novels under a pen-name. As we’d expect from a professor of classics, his writing is erudite, witty, and lucid enough to put up with the usual British whodunit machinery of red herrings, beautiful blondes, and wacky characters.

The upside of Minute for Murder (1947) is that it is probably based on Lewis’ wartime experience working in the Ministry of Information, which Orwell also satirized in 1984.

Series hero Nigel Strangeways is working at the “Ministry of Morale” in the Visual Propaganda Division. He captures the tensions among different grades of staff and the problems of supervising talented but temperamental people. The material on the human factor and red herring combine to make this rather longer than the typical old-timey whodunnit, but he’s such a charming writer that we don’t mind.

The Case of the Careless Cupid by Erle Stanley Gardner

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

An affluent widow is in love with a wealthy widower. Although one of his nieces is sympathetic to the match, the other niece and her main-chancer boyfriend don’t want rich uncle to tie the knot. Insinuations that the widow murdered her first husband are bruited about, capturing the attention of the police and an insurance company that wants its dough back, plus all the money she made from investments on that dough. Ace lawyer Perry Mason is hired by the widow to defend her on the first-degree charge that she poisoned her husband with arsenic.

This 1968 outing, the 79th and third from the last of the series, has its problems, like more than couple of Mason novels written after 1960. The prose is mechanical. The characters tend to excessive explications, which is odd since Gardner usually handled dialogue more skillfully (he dictated the novels). The plot is not as intricate as usual. In fact, the ease with which we can identify the perps makes this border on an inverted mystery, which is highly unusual for Gardner.

On the positive side, Gardner, as is his wont, includes strong female characters. The widow is the kind of independent-minded, self-sufficient female Gardner respected. She’s an astute investor, turning a $100K into a half-million. She’s blunt: “I like what I like and not what I’m supposed to like because of mass rating. And I very much dislike the things I don’t like.” Gardner also features a real person, which is very uncharacteristic. The female pilot that takes Della and Perry to El Paso is Pinky Brier, the first woman to become a flight and aerobatics instructor in the early 1940s.

I’d still recommend it to Mason fans but also to readers looking for a quick uncomplicated read without subplots or extraneous detail. Perry springs into action numerous times. Watching him direct Paul Drake (his PI), his client, Della (his PA), and lead the cops on is always a kick. Gardner’s language is simple if stiff. The interesting legal issues and thinking keep the little grey cells engaged. The story has suspense and theatrics.

Maigret’s Failure by Georges Simenon

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

An obnoxious meat king, Ferdinand Fumal, has leaned on the Minister of the Interior to lean on our hero Maigret to help Fumal. Maigret meets Fumal and recognizes him as the bully, coward, and sneak back in his native village of Saint-Fiacre. Since Fumal claims he has received anonymous death threats, Maigret has to help the butcher baron, though it is clear to everybody that knows Fumal that, as they say in Texas, Fumal needs killing.

We get a glimpse of the social milieu wherein Maigret grew up (turn of the century rural France). Simenon gives us a portrait of an unsettled household – for all their money and comfortable stuff, Fumal’s domestic circle roils and churns in sinister ways. “Balzac without the length,” said Marcel Aymé of Simenon.