Settled out of Court by Henry Cecil

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

The English judge Henry Cecil (1902 – 1976) wrote comic legal fiction. Think of John Mortimer’s Rumpole stories. Cecil is more intellectual and less acerbic, but just as clever, funny, and enjoyable.

In Settled out of Court, Cecil examines the odd case of Lonsdale Walsh. The wealthy self-made financier has been sentenced to life upon being found guilty of masterminding the hit and run killing of his business partner Adolphus Barnwell. In prison he turns his acute mind to getting out of his predicament.

Money is no object to him so with his daughter and a recently released pal Lonsdale arranges for a versatile crook to help him break out of chokey and kidnap a judge, two attorneys, the dodgy witnesses and Barnwell’s feisty widow, Jo. Lonsdale’s goal is to re-examine the parties and prove he was convicted on perjured evidence.

Henry James said that Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs had a “hard lucidity.” Cecil’s lucidity is light, with plain prose, dazzling dialogue, and difficult legal points explained gracefully and comprehensibly. Fans of courtroom fiction and dry English humor will enjoy this short novel.

The Wreck of the Mary Deare by Hammond Innes

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

This 1956 mystery and adventure story gets off to an exciting start. One cold March night, in the English Channel, the three-man crew of the yacht Sea Witch doesn’t have enough on their hands dealing with a rising gale. They look up see the Mary Deare, a 6000-ton freighter, looming over them, almost capsizing their yacht. The skipper of the Sea Witch – our narrator – boards the Mary Deare, but finds that she has been abandoned by its crew.

The only one aboard is the captain who is half-crazed with anxiety and lack of sleep or chow. The Sea Witch’s skipper gets some information out of him, such as the desperate actions the captain took to put out a fire and keep the freighter floating. But more will have to come out during the tense courtroom scenes later.

This book was a best-seller when it was released in the middle Fifties. It gave Innes, a British writer, a solid reputation as a writer the reader could trust for an imaginative and well-crafted tale of suspense and adventure. He always presented a mystery to solve, too. Innes creates plausible characters who are human beings, not super-heroes. Counterparts in his own time were Geoffrey Household, Victor Canning, and Alistair MacLean and in our era James Rollins and Clive Cussler.

Death and the Dutch Uncle by Patricia Moyes

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Released in 1968, this is the eighth mystery starring Henry and Emmy Tibbett. Having recently been promoted from Inspector to Superintendent, Henry is getting used to his new duties and his office in New Scotland Yard bit by bit.

A petty hood who worked in hotel kitchens between temping on individual heists gets himself shot dead in the restroom of a private bar. Henry is assigned to the investigation.

It happens, however, that Henry and Emmy host a dinner with the brother of the victim in Death on the Agenda. Gordon Trapp is suspicious over the sudden deaths of two judges on an international board which adjudicates border disputes between countries. He tells Henry the two judges were to vote on a case between two newly independent African countries. I’m giving nothing away because the veteran reader of mysteries already knows the two sudden deaths turn out to be murders.

Because Henry and Emmy find themselves immersed in an international conflict, this feels more to me like an out-and-out thriller than a detective story. Though stable middle-class people, the Tibbets didn’t mind getting into breathless action. So this thriller reminded me of Margery Allingham in Traitor’s Purse or Nicholas Blake in Smiler with a Knife or Victor Canning in The Python Project.

Moyes was a traveler so sometimes her mysteries are set in England touristy areas or foreign climes. For instance, Down Among the Dead Men had the backdrop of sailing on England’s East Coast and Dead Men Don’t Ski was set in the Italian Alps. This one is set in rural Holland with scenery and houses rendered vividly. Moyes’ second husband was a linguist, so the character of the interpreter Gordan Trapp is persuasive.

There’s a diverse variety of people and places in Moyes’ books that makes them different from many mysteries. But she still retains the deft characterization, plot twists, exciting climaxes and surprising reveals that we like in traditional police procedurals, before whodunnits got socially conscious, regional, lengthy and dark in the Seventies.

A Dragon for Christmas by Gavin Black

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

For readers wanting to something different, try this thriller set in Peking in 1963. Canny Scotsman Paul Harris is a salesman of engines for marine craft the size of Chinese junks. Based in Singapore, he is assigned to the People’s Paradise to sell the commissars a thousand engines. But he meets with many situations that threaten to take his life.

Convincing characterization and an authentic background make the 250 pages, longer than I like for a thriller, go by in just a couple of nights. Paul Harris has a background that makes him a tough, clever and resourceful businessman and action hero. He and his older brother were born in China. During World War II he and his family were interned by the occupying Japanese. He had to become hardened and smart to deal with deprivation and violence in the camps. After the war, he and his brother started an import/export business that included a little smuggling to freedom fighters in places like Sumatra.

The real name of the author of the 13 books in the Paul Harris series was Oswald Wynd (1913 – 1998). He is most well-known for the excellent novel The Ginger Tree, a novel about a young English girl dealing with an unsettled personal life and turbulent times in China and Japan at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. That novel was made into a Masterpiece Theater production in the late Eighties.

Wynd was familiar with Asia because he was born a missionary child in Tokyo. He was captured during the war in Malaya and did time in a POW camp run by the Japanese. He has keen insight into the psychological effects captivity, semi-starvation, torture, and prolonged stress have on its sufferers.

Or Be He Dead by James Byrom

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

A best-selling writer in the true crime genre, Raymond Kennington is telling his story in the 1950s about his adventures in the 1930s when he wrote about a famous trial in the 1890s.

In a London made tense by the coming of WWII, Kennington alleges in his new book that Claude Neville Millington-Forsett was probably guilty of a killing that he was acquitted of in a famous trial of 1894. Millington-Forsett was a nasty throwback to the ethics-free Regency bucks and blades.

Kennington’s publishers are nervous about suits since Millington-Forsett won punishing damages for libel in the past. They send Kennington to Paris with his secretary, comely Josephine Canning, to confirm that Millington-Forsett has in fact shucked off this mortal coil and gone to his eternal deserts, which, the reader hopes, involve slow roasting. Once in Paris Kennington and Josephine kick over numerous rocks and generally get in the face of bad actors whose attention is dangerous to draw.

The premise is original, the adventures are engaging, and the romance tolerable though it provides fantasy fodder for middle-aged male readers who hold fast the delusion that women half their age will be attracted to them. The far-fetched plot twists that the reader is supposed to buy are balanced by the highly literate writing, which is clearly the product of an author who is well-read and a professional writer. The Paris settings feel more sordid and decadent than we usually find in a classic whodunit, but count this as another point that makes this mystery unique. Put this writer in the ranks with Nicholas Blake, Andrew Garve, Cyril Hare, and Michael Innes.

How do the English write the entertaining mystery so well and make it look so easy?

The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison

Review by Cyndi J. (cyndij)

THE WITNESS FOR THE DEAD is a fantasy mystery, set in the world Addison created for THE GOBLIN EMPEROR. You don’t need to have read that first, although it does explain the society and introduces the concept of the Witness for the Dead. The main character here is a minor one in that book. But no matter, if you haven’t read it, you’ll catch up fast. Witness for the Dead is a job description, a religious calling, and those who answer it have the ability to sense a recently dead person’s last thoughts and experiences.  This is a society of goblins and elves, who intermix and intermarry although some prejudice does occur.

Thera Celahar is a Witness, but he’s had some setbacks. He’s not the most self-confident goblin in the world due to a mistake in his past, but if he’s given his word to help he will do so, and he never gives up. He doesn’t lie for political expediency and he will find a way to (softly) speak truth to power. And so, he’s run afoul of higher-ups in several different areas and has been sent away from the emperor’s court to the city of Amalo. He’s content here.

An elvish woman has been found, presumably drowned, with no identification. Celahar is called to see if he can find out who she is, so she can be decently buried with the appropriate rituals. But all he can tell from her last memories is that she was murdered. Now it’s his job to investigate who she was and what happened to her.  Along the way he’ll get into the midst of a family quarrel about a forged will, have to subdue a powerful ghoul, find a serial wife murderer, comfort the dying after an airship explosion, and undergo an ordeal.

This is a wonderfully rich imagined world with excellent characters and great imagery. Slightly steampunky – there are airships, but don’t seem to be any other motorized vehicles. Great details, right down to the stray cats. Celahar himself is very interesting – dedicated, honest, and compassionate but also astonishingly self-effacing and lonely. Why that is will slowly and quietly come to light, in fact if you read too fast you might miss it.

The mystery of who killed the elvish woman is excellent as well – we get to watch Celehar slowly and painstakingly track down clues, question those who knew her, and build up a picture of who she was and why she was killed.

My only complaint is the one I had about the previous novel – the language. I sure wish I’d remembered the glossary in my copy of the previous book. All the names are multi-syllabic with a lot of Cs, Vs, Zs, and Hs. I had trouble even mentally pronouncing them and eventually my eye started to slide past, which obviously then gave me difficulty distinguishing between characters. Plus there’s a lot of dialect  for daily items like food and so forth, which also slowed me down. But in the end, it’s minor.

Lovely book. Highly recommended for those who like fantasy, and if you like mysteries as well you’re in for a treat.