Book #655

Reviewer: Ms Oh Waily

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By now it is clear that I have become a great fan of Dashiell Hammett’s work, and having a two week holiday in which to indulge myself in his works has only continued to confirm for me that his writing is not only sharp, but varied as well.  The 1931 work, The Glass Key shows this beautifully.  No private detectives to be found here, not many sardonic, funny and sharp one-liners, instead we have Ned Beaumont – gambler and best friend to local political boss (and apparent business man) Paul Madvig.

The story opens with Ned and Paul discussing politics and the Henry family -the father being a Senator whom Paul intends backing for re-election.  Paul clearly also likes the daughter and is intent on marrying her.

A little later Ned finds the body of the senator’s son a couple of blocks down the street from Paul’s club.  The death of the young man, Taylor Henry, begins to pose real problems for Paul Madvig.  His daughter, Opal, was Henry’s girlfriend and she suspects her father of murdering him because he disapproved of the relationship.  The other political faction, represented by Shad O’Rory in the novel, start to make plenty out of the non-investigation of the lad’s death (courtesy of Paul controlling the local District Attorney’s office) and this is escalated by Paul’s boots and all attitude to dealing with O’Rory.

Ned Beaumont works hard to keep the election work on target, Paul out of the electric chair, and to get his money back from a dubious bookie.  Unlike Paul, who seems to have trouble seeing too far ahead, Ned is very much the thinker of the pair.  He sees that Paul is being set up and manipulated due to his infatuation with Janet Henry (Taylor’s sister).  So he works as Paul’s ‘fixer’ and through his interactions with the various characters we build up a picture of life in the underworld and back-door, influence-peddling politics of prohibition America.
I had never come across the term ‘political boss‘ before reading this novel, so for those unfamiliar with their role in late 19th and early 20th century US politics the power and role of Paul may be somewhat confusing – and he may simply be seen as a corrupt businessman with a hand in the speakeasy workings of his city.

I enjoyed reading this story, but for different reasons to the earlier works I’ve reviewed.  Unlike Red Harvest for instance, where the story is told from the point of view of The Continental Op, here the story is told from the outside and we are never given a look at the thoughts or feelings of the characters except as they play out in their actions and words. There was less murder and mayhem, but still plenty of violence and corruption.  At one point Ned is trapped by Shad O’Rory while trying to lay his own trap.  What happens to him as a result is brutal and in keeping with Hammett’s tough, no-nonsense approach to the violent lifestyle of the underworld gangsters of the time.  Realism is king here. Having been beaten senseless and worse, Ned shows his stubbornness in this passage that typifies Hammett’s descriptive style.

Ned Beaumont was tugging at the door-knob.
The apish man said, ‘Now there, Houdini,’ and with all his weight behind the blow drove his right fist into Ned Beaumont’s face.
Ned Beaumont was driven back against the wall.  The back of his head struck the wall first, then his body crashed flat against the wall, and he slid down the wall to the floor.
Rosy-cheeked Rusty, still holding his cards at the table, said gloomily, but without emotion: ‘Jesus, Jeff, you’ll croak him.’
Jeff said: ‘Him?’ He indicated the man at his feet by kicking him not especially hard on the thigh. ‘You can’t croak him.  He’s tough. He’s a tough baby. He likes this.’  He bent down, grasped one of the unconscious man’s lapels in each hand, and dragged him to his knees. ‘Don’t you like it, baby?’ he asked and, holding Ned Beaumont up on his knees with one hand, struck his face with the other fist.

By the time you have worked your way through the initial chapters, identifying characters and who they are to each other you will be hooked enough to keep reading to find out if Paul is Taylor Henry’s murderer, and just what Ned Beaumont is all about.  In the end, I spent several hours straight reading in to the night in order to finish this one up.  It became a case of not wanting to put the book down until I had the solution to the crime, and I must say I enjoyed the entire story.

Well worth the effort and definitely deserving of a place on the list. Highly recommended reading from me.
Happy Reading everyone.

Book #664

Reviewer: Ms Oh Waily

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I have been lucky enough to get hold of an omnibus of Dashiell Hammett’s work and Red Harvest was one of the novels included in it.  With uncharacteristic hours at my disposal I whipped through the 160 pages of the story in less than two days, enjoying every minute of it.  Published in book form in 1929 it is apparently based on Hammett’s own experiences working as a Pinkerton.

In Red Harvest I get to meet The Continental Op for the first time.  He is the unnamed narrator of the story and works for The Continental Detective Agency, based out of San Francisco.  He is a repeat character in Hammett’s stories and is apparently one of the first major hardboiled detectives.  He becomes something of a template from which Sam Spade and others develop.

We join the Op when he arrives in Personville to meet with Donald Willsson, a local newspaper publisher, and to receive instructions for work he wants carried out.  The locals call the town Poisonville and as we progress through the story it is quite clear why.  The Op has walked in to a town with a power struggle about to play out.  Willsson is shot dead while the Op waits to meet him, and that sets him off looking in to his death.  Willsson is the son of the industrial magnate who once ran the city but through his own making handed over much of the power to competing gangs of criminals.

The Op ends up working, sort of, for Elihu Willsson – looking in to his son’s death, and cleaning up Poisonville for him.  This allows us to follow the Op on a trip through the underbelly of the city – corrupt police, criminal gangs and all of the unsavoury behaviour they indulge in.

There is much murder, mayhem and playing of dirty tricks.  The Op clearly being a master at manipulating people and situations, some of his actions are questionable at best.  It is a brutal story, with plenty of “lead” being thrown about, snitching, gangland violence and it only escalates as the story goes on.  Remarkably, it is quite readable, with no really gruesome descriptions.  The scale of the violence is pretty damning and the Op is certainly not a saint in any sort of guise.

Hammett’s language and writing style is very easy work.  I still feel like I’m watching an old Bogart movie as I read.  Here are a couple of examples of the sort of writing that peppers the story.

Describing the hurtling of a police car through traffic, with the Op ensconced amongst officers in the back seat:

Pat twisted us around a frightened woman’s coupé, put us through a slot between street car and laundry wagon – a narrow slot that we couldn’t have slipped through if our car hadn’t been so smoothly enameled – and said :
“All right, but the brakes ain’t no good.”
“That’s nice,” the grey-moustached sleuth on my left said. He didn’t sound sincere.

Out of the centre of the city there wasn’t much traffic to bother us, but the paving was rougher.  It was a nice half-hour’s ride, with everybody getting a chance to sit in everybody else’s lap.  The last ten minutes of it was over an uneven road that had hills enough to keep us from forgetting what Pat had said about the brakes.

While trying to escape a group of gangsters following a shoot-out at a remote location:

I spread the blanket there and we settled down.
The girl leaned against me and complained that the ground was damp, that she was cold in spite of her fur coat, that she had a cramp in her leg, and that she wanted a cigarette.
I gave her another drink from the flask.  That bought me ten minutes of peace.
Then she said:
“I’m catching cold.  By the time anybody comes, if they ever do, I’ll be sneezing and coughing loud enough to be heard in the city.”
“Just once,” I told her. “Then you’ll be all strangled.”
“There’s a mouse or something crawling under the blanket.”
“Probably only a snake.”
“Are you married?”
“Don’t start that.”
“Then you are?”
“No.”
“I’ll bet your wife’s glad of it.”
I was trying to find a suitable come-back to that wise-crack when a distant light gleamed up the road.

As you can see, we’re back in to the same style and territory as The Thin Man, only this time with more violence and dubious ethics.
All up I’d say it was a good retro read.  Quick and easy; the perfect short read if you love noir and tough guy detectives.

Happy reading everyone!

 

Book #632

Reviewer: Ms Oh Waily

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A goodly number of years ago I was mildly obsessed with 1920s and ’30s British crime fiction.  Specifically the grand dame, Agatha Christie.  When I had dispensed with her canon, I was left rather wondering what to do.  Thankfully for me, I learned about Dorothy L. Sayers and her creation, Lord Peter Wimsey.

I happily sat down to re-read The Nine Tailors recently and it was like walking in to a past world all over again.

The book opens with Wimsey driving his Daimler into a ditch on New Year’s Eve, having missed a rather nasty turn.  There is little else to do, but get out and walk in the miserable snowy landscape of the Fens, so that is what Wimsey and his manservant Bunter do.  They make their way to the village of Fenchurch St. Paul and become the guests of the local rector – Mr Venables – and his wife.

It turns out that there is something of an influenza epidemic going through the local populace and this threatens the good Reverend and assorted parishioners’ attempt at an impressive 15,840 Kent Treble Bob Majors.
The church of Fenchurch St Paul is a fine one, with eight bells.  Yes, this mystery is to be laid down in the most English of activities – change-ringing – and because of that I shall introduce you to the bells.

Gaude, Sabaoth, John, Jericho, Jubilee, Dimity, Batty Thomas and Tailor Paul.

Naturally Lord Peter is a bit of a dab-hand at bell ringing and takes the place of the ill man – Will Thoday.  Nine hours of ringing later and the goal is achieved.  Sadly the wife of the local squire, Lady Thorpe, dies the next day and as a result of her death Wimsey is acquainted with the tale of the theft of an emerald necklace of a distant, wealthy, and eccentric family member some twenty years earlier.  The Thorpe family having been haunted by this unsolved and unresolved case ever since it occurred in their home.

While all this is going on Wimsey’s car is hauled out of the ditch and repaired.  He thanks the good Reverend for his hospitality and heads on to his original destination in Walbeach.

Some months later, just after Easter, Sir Henry Thorpe joins his wife in the hereafter and is due to be buried with her.  Unfortunately when the sexton, Harry Gotobed, and his son are preparing the ground they come across something rather unexpected in the grave.  A body.  Or as Harry refers to it when talking to Mr Venables, ‘a corpus’.

“Well, sir, it’s about this here grave. I thought I better come and see you, being as it’s a church matter, like.  You see, when Dick and me come to open it up, we found a corpus a-laying inside of it, and Dick says to me —”
“A corpse?  Well, of course there’s a corpse.  Lady Thorpe is buried there.  You buried her yourself.”
“Yes, sir, but this here corpus ain’t Lady Thorpe’s corpus.  It’s a man’s corpus, that’s what it is, and it du seem as though it didn’t have no right to be there.”

As you can see, Sayers has a lovely turn of wit, even with the discovery of the body.  It is this body that begins the mystery, and the Reverend requests Lord Peter’s aid and advice in Fenchurch St Paul over the matter of ‘the corpus’.  From here we follow the trail of the Wilbraham jewel theft in tandem with the murder investigation.  In the process we get to know a little more about a few key villagers and perhaps less appealing, we also learn a bit about change-ringing.  And as is nearly always the case with this genre of crime fiction, the hero solves the puzzle of the dead man and the missing emeralds.

I will be honest with you, the change-ringing jargon is quite hard going if you are not an aficionado.  Luckily it does not extend too much past the first few chapters of the book in any great detail.  Each section is begun with a nod to it, and there are more understandable references scattered throughout the remainder of the story.  The bells are almost like eight extra characters, showing up throughout the story.

The writing is crisp, clear and often full of sly humour.  The solution to the mystery is not given away too early, but lead up to, and yet the ending is not completely predictable either.  Here are two more examples of Sayers’ writing style and humour.  The first, when she is introducing the subject of change-ringing and elaborating on it.

By the English campanologist, the playing of tunes is considered to be a childish game, only fit for foreigners; the proper use of bells is to work out mathematical permutations and combinations.  When he speaks of the music of his bells, he does not mean musician’s music – still less what the ordinary man calls music.  To the ordinary man, in fact, the pealing of bells is a monotonous jangle and a nuisance, tolerable only when mitigated by remote distance and sentimental association.

The second occurs when the local policeman, Jack Priest, arrives on the scene of the exhumation of the unexpected body.

“Half a minute, half a minute, sir,” interrupted the policeman. “What day was it you said you buried Lady Thorpe, Harry?”
“January 4th, it were,” said Mr. Gotobed, after a short interval for reflection.
“And was this here body in the grave when you filled it up?”
“Now don’t you be a fool, Jack Priest,” retorted Mr. Gotobed. ” ‘Owever can you suppose as we’d fill up a grave with this here corpus in it? It ain’t a thing as a man might drop in careless like, without noticing.  If it was a pocket-knife or a penny-piece, that’d be another thing, but when it comes to the corpus of a full-grown man, that there question ain’t reasonable.”

So, if you enjoy the golden age of detective fiction but have not yet come around to Dorothy Sayers, then it’s about time you did.  It is a great read.

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An explanation:

The title The Nine Tailors comes from an old tradition in small villages of ringing the church bell to announce the death of a person.  From Wikipedia:

In some parishes in England the centuries old tradition of announcing a death on a church bell is upheld. In a small village most people would be aware of who was ill, and so broadcasting the age and sex of the deceased would identify them. To this end the death was announced by telling (i.e. single blows with the bell down) the sex and then striking off the years. Three blows meant a child, twice three a woman and thrice three a man. After a pause the years were counted out at approximately half-minute intervals. The word teller in some dialects becomes tailor, hence the old saying “Nine tailors maketh a man”.

Book #652
Reviewer: Ms Oh Waily

I have discovered a love affair with the hard-boiled detective fiction from the 1920s and 1930s.  The stories are snappy, the dialogue is pithy and sometimes full of colourful, outdated idioms. The Thin Man fits in beautifully, showing all of these features.

We meet Nick Charles, retired detective, and his younger, glamorous wife Nora in New York for the Christmas season.  While waiting in a speakeasy for Nora to finish her shopping he is approached by a young lady, Dorothy Wynant, the daughter of a man for whom he did some work eight years earlier.  And there starts the downward spiral of the Charles’ quiet Christmas in New York.

Meeting Dorothy eventually embroils the couple in multiple murders, an absolutely dysfunctional family and some very interesting police and insalubrious ex-convicts.

We are taken through the process of trying to find Dorothy’s father, Clyde Miller Wynant, thought to be responsible for the murder of his assistant Julia Wolf.  He is the eponymous Thin Man of the title.  We learn all about Clyde’s manipulative ex-wife Mimi and her new husband Chris Jorgensen, and his two very odd children – Dorothy and Gilbert.  Throw in Wynant’s lawyer Herbert Macauley, police detective John Guild and ex-con Studsy Burke and an array of other minor characters and we have a very colourful story in the making.

It is quite an eye-opener looking in to life in the 1930s with the speakeasy culture and the pithy language.  The idea of  characters that wake up at lunchtime and stay out till the middle of the morning is quite decadent in an era of deprivation and poverty.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this and at a little over 200 pages in my Penguin Classic version, it was fairly quick even for a slow reader like myself.  I certainly plan to read the remainder of Hammett’s books on the 1001 Book List.

To give you a taste of the style of writing and the sorts of characters to be found in the novel here is an excerpt of Mimi Jorgensen (the ex-Mrs Clyde Wynant) trying to manipulate Nick Charles:

‘Nick, what can they do to you for concealing evidence that somebody’s guilty of murder?’
‘Make you an accomplice – accomplice after the fact is the technical term – if they want.’
‘Even if you voluntarily change your mind and give them the evidence?’
‘They can.  Usually they don’t.’
She looked around the room as if to make sure there was nobody else there and said: ‘Clyde killed Julia.  I found proof and hid it. What’ll they do to me?’
‘Probably nothing except give you hell – if you turn it in.  He was once your husband: you and he are close enough together that no jury’d be likely to blame you for trying to cover him up – unless, of course, they had reason to think you had some other motive.’
She asked coolly, deliberately: ‘Do you?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.  ‘My guess would be that you had intended to use this proof of his guilt to shake him down for some dough as soon as you could get in touch with him, and that now something else has come up to make you change your mind.’
She made a claw of her right hand and struck at my face with her pointed nails.  Her teeth were together, her lips drawn far back over them.
I caught her wrist. ‘Women are getting tough,’ I said, trying to sound wistful.  ‘I just left one that heaved a skillet at a guy.’

Well worth the effort and a nice slice of early 20th Century writing. Happy Reading everyone.