A Connoisseur’s Case by Michael Innes

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

This 1962 mystery is known as The Crabtree Case in the US. It is a late novel with series hero Sir John Appleby in his retirement. It begins with the Applebys taking a summer country walk and to Sir John’s chagrin, Judith wants to barge in on Scroop House, to look over the valuable antique furniture of a stately mansion.

Crossing an old canal and ending up at a pub run by on an obnoxious poser, they fall into conversation with Seth Crabtree, a stage rustic who seems to have walked out of Hardy’s The Woodlanders. As the former cabinet maker for mansion, he tells them of the glory days of Scoop House and its owner Mrs Coulson, a grand collector of objets d’art and antiques. Shortly after, the Applebys find Crabtree floating in the canal, shot dead. Though not as dramatic as the earlier novels, this still features tight, witty writing.

“Judith looked south—which was towards what Appleby had called the secondary motor road. All she saw was a momentary glint of light.

“‘I think,’ she said, `that I saw the sun reflected from the wind screen of a passing car. Right?’

“‘Right as far as you go. What you saw was a silver-grey Rolls-Royce Phantom V.’

“‘My dear John, it’s terribly vulgar to name cars—particularly astoundingly expensive ones. It’s only done by cheap novelists. You must just say: `a very large car.”

“Appleby received this with hilarity.”

Take that Ian Fleming, you brand name-dropper you. If you find this kind of thing as hilarious as Sir John and I do, you should read Michael Innes.

The Smell of the Night by Andrea Camilleri

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

In Sicily, like everywhere else, people aren’t into thrift as much they hope to make a big score for an easy-going old age. And the big score is exactly what Emanuele Gargano, the self-styled wizard of finance, promises. Gargano, in his forties, tall, elegant and so handsome that he seems to have stepped out of an American movie, cultivates a reputation as a brilliant wheeler-dealer in financial matters.

After almost the entire population of the province of Montelusa has entrusted him with their nest eggs, he suddenly vanishes. Having disappeared with everybody’s life savings, the previously admired figure becomes the most hated man south of Naples. Of course, in Vigàta, too, the manure has hit the ventilating device and enraged pensioners are on the look-out for the dastardly thief and their promised returns.

Series hero (this is Book #6) Commissario Montalbano accidentally gets into a situation, whose consequences he cannot foresee at the beginning. Although a senior investigator argues that the “financial wizard” has been rubbed out by the Mafia, Montalbano believes there is more to it than a gangland killing. Although this case is not part of his job, nosy,he gets deeper and deeper into it.

Maverick Montalbano does what he wants. To say the least, the energetic and emotional inspector is idiosyncratic. He seems to hold a special position, because he opposes orders and invents excuses to get around his superiors with few consequences. In addition, one can call his methods of investigation quite unconventional.

The author skillfully combines the criminal case with a view of Sicily and its inhabitants, so that one would like to pack the suitcases straight away and head for the Med. One feels sympathy with Montalbano who mourns the island’s transformation into a concrete wasteland. The nostalgic tone will remind one of Simenon saying goodbye to his Paris in the late Maigret novels of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Camilleri writes easy, less frilly prose but in no way unimaginatively. His stories are not overloaded, getting to the point right away. Also the humor comes in welcome doses, as in the other books. But too much Montalbano in a row could be tiring, so enjoy them in widely spaced readings.

The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

This is the first Lew Archer mystery –MacDonald named him after Miles Archer, Sam Spade’s murdered partner in The Maltese Falcon. Published in 1949, WWII hangs heavy over the story.

A distraught wife hires private detective Archer to search for her missing husband. It seems an almost inconsequential case, a matter that occurs in Archer’s agency every day. Nothing indicates crime is involved until we get into kidnapping and human trafficking in a case that will cost six lives.

Ross Macdonald is mentioned in the same breath as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and is considered one of the greats of 20th century American crime fiction. He took the classic whodunit thriller to a different level by exploring the question of the social and psychological “why” and influenced the hardboiled genre in the long term.

For instance, in this one, echoing Simenon’s view that given the right combination of interior and exterior pressures, anybody is capable of anything, Archer explains that war’s undermining of certainties, money and social pressures, opportunity or its lack, bad luck, and the wrong crowd cause good people to make mistakes that attract the attention of the law. For others who are just bad to the bone, “Money is just a peg people hang their evil on.”

This was his fifth novel, and so there are flaws. Some spots are slow. Other parts are over-written, which made Raymond Chandler mock the writing as pretentious (talk about the pot … ). Macdonald later learned to restrain the “fine writing” and he later outpaced Chandler, Cain, and Hammet, especially in the Lew Archer novels.

Maigret Goes Home by Georges Simenon

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

In this 1931 mystery, in the Quai des Orfèvres our favorite Chief Inspector accidentally comes across an anonymous note, “A crime will be committed at the church of Saint-Fiacre during the first Mass of the Day of the Dead.” The message was received by the police of Moulins, who shrugged – no doubt in a Gallic way – and passed it on to the Police Judiciaire de Paris.

Since Maiget spent his childhood at Saint-Fiacre, in the Allier, his curiosity is stirred and he goes immediately to the chateau, where his father had served as the loyal steward. Maigret attends the Mass in which the note forecasts the crime. Sure enough, the Countess of Saint-Fiacre dies of apparent heart failure.

The local doctor finds that the death of the countess was brought on by violent emotion. Maigret finds in the Countess’ missal a clipping from the Journal de Moulins announcing the death of Maurice de Saint-Fiacre, her son and heir. The latter had just arrived from Paris to the village, where he intended to sponge money off his mother to pay his copious debts. If the check bounces, it’s the clink.

The inquiry, conducted at the castle, at the village and at Moulins, takes place in a somber heart-rending atmosphere from the get-go. Maigret returns to the village of his childhood, with an aura of nostalgia. But it soon dawns on him that things have changed for the worse in the past thirty -five years.

The estate is no more than a shadow of what it was at the time when the Maigret’s father was serving it. The countess has sold off three of the four farms, since the death of the Comte de Saint-Fiacre. She has had to cover the profligate the investments and expenses of her son Maurice. The countess has allowed herself to be exploited by many “secretaries” who have been lovers. The last of these, Jean Métayer, feeling suspected and vulnerable, appeals to a provincial lawyer whose manner and way of speaking get up Maigret’s nose.

Upsetting somebody to death with a fake clipping is not a crime for the courts. But all agree that is was a disgusting moral offense. Maigret talks to people to get a bead on the milieu, as usual. Maurice de Saint-Fiacre, however, the day after the death, gathers all the suspects in a room.

The Case of the Demure Defendant by Erle Stanley Gardner

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Nadine Farr’s head-turning beauty is no help in dealing with her anxiety symptoms. Bad dreams. Jumpy. Feeling guilty. She has turned to the retro-named Dr. Logbert Denair, a psychiatrist who has her do a talk session under the influence of truth serum. Under sodium pentothol, she confesses to poisoning her uncle and then throwing the bottle with the cyanide pills into a small lake. Dr. Denair recorded the confession on reel to reel tape. Fearing the legal consequences but not wanting to hand the tape to the police, the good doc consults attorney Perry Mason concerning how to proceed.

Mason tells the shrink that the statements of a patient are confidential and protected by professional privilege, but evidence a crime has been committed must be reported to the police. Mason, also reluctant to run to the police (which may lead to a defamation charge), points out that since the confession could be a delusion caused by drugs and thus not legally effective, the doctor had better make further inquiries. Denair hires Perry to take the lead since and who would know better that the illustrious legal expert?

This 1956 mystery has a lot of surprises. As for Mason, he is accused by Hamilton Burger, with frank and inhuman glee, of fabricating evidence. Things look pretty dicey for our hero until the last few pages. I would highly recommend this as better than average to readers who know they are fans of Perry, Della, and Paul but readers not used to Gardner’s shenanigans with evidence may be put off by the convoluted plot.

The Third Angel by Alice Hoffman

Review Vicky T. (VickyJo)

There are many different types of love in the world. There is romantic love, familial love, platonic love…but sometimes, the hardest thing to do is to love yourself. Alice Hoffman explores all facets of love in her beautiful novel “The Third Angel.” She tells the story of three women, who have encounters with love that will forever change their lives.

We start in 1999. High powered attorney Maddy Heller has come to London to act as a bridesmaid in her sister Allie’s wedding. Allie, a famous children’s author, is having second thoughts about this marriage. What she doesn’t know is that Maddy has had an affair with Allie’s fiancé, Paul. This tangled triangle becomes further complicated when Paul is diagnosed with terminal cancer.

The book skips back in time to 1966. London is alive and swinging, and Frieda Lewis has left the country life to come to the city and be in the middle of the energy and excitement. She works in a hotel called Lion’s Park, where rock musicians occasionally stay. She meets an up and coming singer/songwriter, and falls deeply in love, knowing that his addiction to drugs, and his girlfriend, could ruin what might be a beautiful relationship.

The last third of the book takes place in 1952. Twelve-year-old Lucy Green is traveling by ship to London with her father and stepmother to attend her stepmother’s younger sister’s wedding. They stay in the lovely hotel Lion Park, where Lucy, who is currently obsessed with Anne Frank, meets a handsome stranger who befriends the lonely girl, and asks a great favor of her. By getting involved in a love triangle between three adults, Lucy’s life will be forever altered.

Hoffman weaves these three stories together on numerous levels; Lucy Green will grow up to be the mother of Maddy and Allie Heller, while Frieda will become Paul’s mother, Allie’s fiancé. The stories take place in the same hotel, Lion’s Park. And the women in these tales are all experiencing love, in all its incarnations. Hoffman shows us how love can be beautiful, bittersweet, and sharp enough to wound the heart. It can strike one suddenly, with no rhyme or reason. It can enrich one person’s life while at the same time destroying someone else’s.

This is one of those rare books that I wanted to read again the minute I finished it. I had an urge to read it back to front, and I may just do that. Hoffman is another one of those writers that uses language to effortlessly create moods and emotions in her readers. Her sentences are made to be savored, and I am in awe of her writing talents. She makes it look so easy.

The title comes from Frieda’s father, an old country doctor who always told her that there was the Angel of Life, the Angel of Death, and the Third Angel. When he went on his rounds, or was called out late at night, it was either the Angel of Life or the Angel of Death that rode in his car with him. But it’s the Third Angel that is the most curious. “You can’t even tell if he’s an angel or not. You think you ‘re doing him a kindness, you think you’re the one taking care of him, while all the while, he’s the one saving your life.”

This beautiful novel is a story of love, of forgiveness, of deep sorrow, and incredible joy, and enduring regrets. Hoffman breaks your heart while she examines the human condition, and the lives of women who have loved, and lost, and yet hope to love again.

From London Far by Michael Innes

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Richard Meredith is a middle-aged classics professor who specializes in Martial and Juvenal. As an absentminded intellectual (is that redundant?), he finds himself in his tobacconist’s shop and mutters a phrase from Dr. Johnson’s London, a Poem. He is surprised when the clerk opens a trap-door and ushers him down into the depths of London. He comes upon scores of art masterpieces. Against the smugglers of looted art, he finds an ally in Jean Halliwell, a young scholar in archeology with a specialty in Minoan weapons. In an exciting if far-fetched scene, they and two bloodhounds escape being put in a sack and dropped into the Channel by fleeing across the rooftops of London.

They proceed to have adventures that are so zany as to lead us readers to think that John Buchan’s rousers like Greenmantle are being parodied. As usual, the villains are bizarre. For example, one is an eccentric rich guy – with the hyper-American name of Otis K. Neff – that will call to mind the unhinged oil millionaire Jo Stoyte in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan by Aldous Huxley.

Also as usual, there are plenty of erudite laughs:

The man was … simultaneously enjoying the remains of a cigar and a thoughtful study of the girl’s knees. Habit apart, there seemed to be no reason why he should not study the superincumbent parts of her anatomy as well, for the girl was stripped for bathing to a degree which Meredith could not at all approve.

At 300 pages, some snipping in the middle and near the end would have been in order. But members of the thinking audience – i.e., us avid readers — will be able to pat themselves on the back for understanding allusions to The Perfumed Garden and knowing already what pygmalionism is.

It’s not, however, merely learned yuks. Innes describes rural Scotland and its remotes fastnesses so vividly we wish we could visit Caledonia someday. He makes wise observations of religion in Scotland, art appreciation, and the mentality of collecting. Published in 1946, it also touches on the heavy subject of Europe pulling itself together after the most destructive war in history.

I think that Innes had a middle-aged, male, middle-class, educated and bookish target audience in mind. However, he always portrays his female characters with lots of smarts and readiness for action. Against scholarly stereotype, Jean Halliwell combines dedication to fighting evil-doers with a zest for adventure. There’s a wonderful parody of academic disputation near the end when Jean incisively supports her position in an argument where she and Meredith are trying to account for the art collecting mania of Otis K. Neff.

Michael Innes was the pen name of J.I.M Stewart (1906 – 1994), an English prof in the UK, Ireland, and Australia until his retirement in 1973, after which he wrote mysteries full-time until about 1985. Most of his mysteries starred Sir John Appleby, a Scotland Yard Detective Inspector. But many of his books are stand-alone novels like this one and Lament for a Maker.