Historical mysteries, especially those set in the early decades of the last century, have been a staple of my reading diet over the past year or so. In the end, Wings of Fire disappointed me slightly. (But, then, most mystery novels do. They must operate on so many levels, and with so many moving parts, that a margin of failure is pretty much built into the enterprise.) Nonetheless, “Todd” is one of the most sophisticated “past” masters now practicing in the genre.

CHARLES TODD. Wings of Fire (1998).
Three descendents of the illustrious Trevelyan clan lay dead, new additions to a family crypt in the churchyard of a tight-knit, tucked-away fishing village called Borcombe. Vague doubts about their ostensibly non-homicidal deaths swirl like wisps of sea mist along the nearby coast of Cornwall. Scotland Yard, asked to investigate the matter, sends down Inspector Ian Rutledge, who here embarks on his second big case since returning to police service after his not-quite-complete recovery from shell shock. It’s just a year or so after the 1918 Armistice, and for Rutledge gruesome memories of the Western Front prove hard to separate from the gruesome family secrets that haunt Trevelyan Hall. All of the newly departed had connections to the Great War, either through combat or—in case of Olivia Marlowe, a poet who published pseudonymously as O.A. Manning—through an uncanny ability to evoke the horrors of combat. Rutledge, an avid reader of Manning, wonders how a woman and an invalid like Olivia could have understood so keenly the evil core of what he witnessed on the battlefields of France. Todd’s plot revolves around solving that conundrum. Skillfully using lines of verse from a Manning collection titled “Lucifer,” the author sets Rutledge on a hunt for literary clues that culminates in his discovery of a devil in the flesh, right there in bucolic Borcombe. Todd (the pen name of an American mother and son team) excels at taking the milieu of Golden Age British detective fiction and investing it with dark psychological shadings and clear-eyed social realism—qualities rarely found in actual mystery stories of the 1920s. This entry in the Rutledge series falters, though, in offering a resolution that is much too irresolute. A half-dozen mysterious deaths hang from the Trevelyan family tree, but Todd doesn’t fully clarify which of them were murders. A muddled final exposition also fails to illuminate several key details, swathing them instead in a haze of poetic allusion and Cornish superstition.

Here’s a review of the classic PI novel from which I quoted a while back.

HOWARD BROWNE, Halo in Blood (1946).
Circles. A halo is a circle. The Chicago Loop, where private investigator Paul Pine keeps an office, is a circle. Around the inner circle of the Loop are ringed outer circles, extending to Oak Park and Winnetka and Glencoe, and Pine works those circles in a case that pushes him around and around, down and down—corkscrew-like—until he ties the end of the case to its beginning, and thereby forms a perfect circle. Browne should be better known than he is. Writing in the manner pioneered by Raymond Chandler, he spins better similes than Chandler does (and boy, does he spin a lot of them), and he’s a better plot-spinner, too. To be sure, the raw material of this first novel of his does have a derivative quality: The wealthy patriarch John Sandmark calls Pine to his suburban manse and asks the sleuth to look out for his beautiful, wayward daughter, Leona. Sandmark doesn’t like Leona’s latest male conquest, an oily fellow named Jerry Martin. Pine, tailing the couple, watches as a gunman emerges from the night to shoot Martin dead. More murders follow, and Pine links the killing wave to a heist committed in San Diego a quarter-century earlier, and to a strange funeral that he chanced upon in the opening scene of this adventure. All of that linking culminates in a smash triple finish, with Pine pounding out three solutions (separate, but nested within one another) in order to bring the matter full-circle. What Browne lacks in originality, he makes up for in formal elegance.

(For a secondary illustration to this post, I plucked from the Web the cover of a 1940s pulp magazine that—as best I can tell—features the novel Halo in Blood under a slightly different title. “John Evans,” the author listed in the cover blurb, was the pen name under which Browne originally published his Paul Pine stories. Browne, by the way, was the editor of Mammoth Detective, among other pulps.)

To provide content for this journal, I am strip-mining my file of brief detective-novel reviews. (I’ve been writing these little squibs for several years now.) This one covers a fine, fine work that I read a couple of months ago.

James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978).
Crumley hits a series of notes that another virtuoso of the hangdog-noir style had sounded a quarter-century earlier. The Last Good Kiss, like The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler’s masterpiece from 1953 (note the valedictory wistfulness in both titles), builds an array of cockeyed triangles around an alcoholic writer, a woman who seeks to “rescue” him, and a sad-sack shamus whom the woman hires for that purpose. Yet in numerous ways Crumley charts new territory for the hard-boiled genre. Part of what’s new, in fact, is actual territory: C.W. Sughrue, part-time detective to the wealthy and degenerate, part-time bartender to their poor and equally degenerate brethren, calls Montana home. For him, dirt roads and an endless ream of black highway replace the mean streets of urban noir; instead of clipped wisecracking, he offers parched country wit, too dry even to be called sardonic. Sughrue is also distinctly a man of his moment, the tail end of the burned-out 1970s, a time when bitter memories of the Vietnam War and the acrid odor of the ’60s counterculture still hung low and thick over the land. Across that land, from Cauldron Springs in Montana to Colorado and Oregon and other points west, he drives an El Camino pickup—a halfling monstrosity, neither quite a truck nor quite a car, and a fitting emblem for a period when no one seemed to know which shape to take. In its plotting, too, Sughrue’s adventure departs from its precursor. Where Chandler typically scored his work with a regular drumbeat of killings, Crumley inserts a murder only in the final movement of his story. A pure quest narrative for much of its length, the story follows Sughrue’s search for the long-lost daughter of a woman who runs a watering hole in Sonoma, California, where Sughrue has tracked down the errant author. The daughter disappeared a decade earlier, first into a commune, then into the porn industry, and then presumably into some other false utopia. Even after the hero locates this damsel, she faces threats from a boorish ogre and a cruel, jealous crone. But which ogre, and which crone? Sughrue, on his Interstate odyssey, encounters multiple candidates for both roles.

Spring came along, and thoughts turned naturally to baseball—the crack of wood against horsehide, the sight of a fresh green infield, the annual return after a long winter of sentimental chatter about the National Pastime. Brimming with seasonal spirit, I read a mystery novel that uses the game (and the sepia-tinted memories of it that come easily to middle-aged American boys of a certain kind, of which I am one) as its background. The book, rather like a typical spring, fell somewhat short of its promise.

TROY SOOS. Murder at Fenway Park (1994).
The perils of a superficial approach to historical fiction are vividly on display in this sojourn through the summer of 1912, when Fenway Park was brand-new and the Red Sox were on their way to a pre-“Curse” World Series victory. As hero and narrator Mickey Rawlings tells the story, that golden summer was a blood-tinged affair. A utility player recently acquired by the Boston Americans (the team’s official name back then), Rawlings no sooner arrives at Fenway than he stumbles upon the freshly dead body of a Detroit Tiger, its face turned to pulp by a baseball bat. Other incidents, among them an ominous warning to keep quiet—a favorite bat appears on Rawlings’s hotel-room pillow, suggesting that his head might be next in line for a not-so-sporting clout—place the tale firmly in the genre of hokey melodrama. The characters that surround Rawlings, meanwhile, are as stale as yesterday’s open bag of ballpark peanuts. There’s a plucky suffragette who helps Rawlings play detective; a matronly Irish boarding-house keeper who serves him hot stew and stern, worried looks; a beef-brained police captain, ready for his next take in a Keystone Cops short; and a crew of snuff-spitting teammates, each one as pure of type as when Ring Lardner first envisioned him. Most disappointing of all is Rawlings himself, an ingenuous 19-year-old who lacks credibility both as an observer of life and as a solver of crime. The crimes in question have their roots in an actual scandal that involved Ty Cobb, the 1910 American League batting title, and efforts by gamblers (in a kind of warm-up to the Black Sox scandal of 1919) to throw that title to Cobb nemesis Nap Lajoie. Baseball in those “deadball” days was more innocent yet also more corrupt than it later became, and Soos’s lone achievement is to bring that paradox into focus.

Season of the Monsoon, set in Bombay (or Mumbai, as Indians have called its since 1995), leaps forward from Bombay Mail both in time and in realism. I saw no serial killers—that I know of—on my visit to Mumbai. But I saw much else that Mann had noticed, and skillfully captured, before me.

PAUL MANN. Season of the Monsoon (1992).
In a land that teems with death almost as thoroughly as it does with life, a slain and mutilated male prostitute usually wouldn’t garner much attention. When such a corpse turns up near the center of India’s Bollywood movie colony, however, several people take notice—not just the untouchable kuli who must dredge the body from a lake in northern Bombay. Film City nabobs are on hand, and so is Inspector George Sansi of the Maharashtra police force. A brown-skinned, blue-eyed wonder, with a mixed-race pedigree that makes him an ideal outsider’s insider, Sansi comes across as a figure of fancy, if not of fantasy. He has an Indian feminist mother, a well-to-do English father, a law degree from Oxford University, a scar to prove his valor in the fight against drug-running terrorists, and now, perhaps, a hip American journalist girlfriend. Taken as a whole, it’s almost enough to help him contain the multitudinous chaos of India. Almost but not quite. While Mann idealizes his hero, he doesn’t stint on realism in depicting the Indian scene in all its heart-breaking, awe-inspiring disarray. His pen captures plenty of apt detail: dung fires being lit at dawn, awakening a city where each life hinges precariously on another; a gangster’s lair, in which a glitzy dream of a Vegas bachelor pad somehow flourishes amid one of the dreariest slums on Earth; the fine bone china on which Sansi and his corrupt superiors dine while conferring at the Willingdon Club, a relic of the British Raj. Less compelling are details related to the crime under Sansi’s investigation and to his hunt for the criminal, whose identity becomes clear well before the novel’s finale. The certainties of karma, rather than the mysteries of murder, then take center-stage, and Mann—partly by dropping peculiar hints of reincarnation—adds an Eastern twist to the standard Western tale of how a serial killer meets his end.

In late January and early February of this year, I traveled to India. This was my first trip to the subcontinent, and it may well be my last—not because it failed to leave an impression on me, but because it left such a bewilderingly strong one. In fact, the title of this journal takes its inspiration from India. A loose translation of “the Nataraja,” as the dance of Lord Shiva is called, the phrase “cosmic dance” for me summons an image of inexorable, formless movement, out of which form mysteriously emerges—rather like the movement of culture.

I hope at some point to write more about what I saw in Bombay and Delhi and dusty points beyond. But for now, here and in a subsequent entry, I present capsule reviews of two thrillers set in India that I read after my return home. India, famously, is all about chaos. And there’s nothing like a good mystery yarn, or even a bad one, if what you want is to contain the reality of chaos within the illusion of reason.

LAWRENCE G. BLOCHMAN. Bombay Mail (1934).

Swift and sure, on track and mostly on time, a train hurtles across the plains and hills of central India. Moving to the rhythmic clatter of steel wheels on steel rails, it excavates a kind of core sample of the land and its people, allowing passengers to take in a timeless parorama: dun-hued mud huts and strange trapezoidal temples, men in red turbans and women in blazing-yellow saris. Just so does Blochman set this début novel churning forward and gliding past colorful terrain—from its tense beginning at Government House in Calcutta (where Indian Nationalists have detonated a bomb) to its neat finish at Ballard Pier in Bombay (where romance blooms between a pair of newly cleared former suspects, a pukka American fellow and a plucky Canadian lass). In between, Inspector Leonidas Prike of the Criminal Investigation Division sifts through clues to figure out who poisoned Sir Anthony Daniels and later shot the Maharajah of Zunjore. Both victims met their end while riding the Bombay Mail, and Prike vows to name the culprit before the train reaches its terminus. The mystery that he successfully unravels doesn’t quite belong in a first-class compartment, and neither do the thriller-like antics that come beforehand. Overall, though, this modest entertainment earns its fare as a sharply etched period piece.

The detective novelist Michael Dibdin, a Brit who lived in the United States and wrote about Italians crimes, died last month. Seeing his obituary spurred me to take down from my shelves a book by him that I bought years ago, on the strong recommendation of a friend, but had never read. So I read it, and discovered that it belonged on my all-time-best list. I’ll be stocking my shelves with more of Dibdin’s work.

MICHAEL DIBDIN. Ratking (1989).
A cardinal defect of the mystery novel, in many critics’ eyes, is its need to skimp on character development. Almost by definition, a whodunit must guard from the reader’s view the deepest thoughts and urges of all characters who might be suspects, lest it become apparent (say, through interior monologues) that they could or could not have done the foul deed in question. A certain shallowness therefore seems instrinsic to even the best-written examples of the genre. Dibdin, in this first entry in his series about Italian police commissioner Aurelio Zen, remedies that flaw by taking the narrative structure of so-called serious fiction and turning it upside-down. Near the end of his tale, once Zen has figured out who kidnapped the Perugian industrialist Ruggiero Miletti, who conspired with the kidnappers, and who then murdered the old patriarch, the author unfurls a tapestry of acutely imagined, finely woven data on several key suspects—their back-stories, their innermost drives—all of it comparable to what a “literary” writer would roll out in the early going of a novel. Somehow it all works, and brilliantly so. It works because, as in any good detective story, the detective well-nigh fills the characterization quota all by himself. Zen comes across initially as a comic figure. The four Miletti children and their consorts, who pull the unseen strings behind this case, all make sport of him. The local investigating officials alternately ignore, humor, and manipulate him. Yet Zen, beneath a phlegmatic exterior, possesses a questing intelligence and a stout survival instinct that lead him to a measure of truth (though not to justice, of course) and to victory in a bureaucratic battle (though not in the larger war, of course). The novel also works because of the compelling, albeit revolting, metaphor around which Dibdin has built it. A ratking, a cryptozoological creature formed when several rats fuse together at their tails, looms as the perfect image of how power operates in Italy. That this many-headed beast may not actually exist only strengthens the point.

Today (I’m writing this post on April 23), the world celebrates the birthday of William Shakespeare—the “Stratford man,” born in 1554, who ostensibly wrote the 38 plays, 154 sonnets, and assorted other works in verse that make up the most lauded body of literature by a single hand in all of history. Shakespeare also died on this day, in 1616.

Death figured prominently in the Bard’s writing—as a haunting off-stage presence in his love poetry, as an unavoidable plot device in his work for the stage. So it’s not surprising that those who write murder stories have frequently borrowed language from Shakespeare to create titles for their own work. Barbara Paul, herself a crime novelist, features on her Web site a compendium of book titles that later and lesser writers have extracted from the Shakespearean corpus. As the sample list below demonstrates, most of Shakespeare’s plays have provided inspiration for at least one mystery title, with Hamlet and Macbeth serving as especially rich sources. One book even garnered two titles from the same passage of Bardic verse:

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

The original British edition of Christie’s There Is a Tide bore the title Taken at the Flood, but her American publisher—as it did often, and often inexplicably—thought it knew better which cover line would grab the attention of U.S. readers. To me, it’s a genuine mystery why anyone would consider one bit of phrasing to be more apt, or more marketable, than the other.

The vogue among mystery writers for Shakespeare-spawned titles seemed to crest in the 1940s, when the genre attained a certain cultural maturity (or, arguably, a certain level of literary pretension). Over the past couple of decades, though, another trend in titling has emerged that signals a regression in sensibility. A Feta Worse Than Death, Sew Deadly, You May Now Kill the Bride—the cutesy pun has overtaken an expanding swathe of the mystery publishing field. The plague mainly afflicts books in the domestically inclined “cozy” subgenre, for perhaps obvious reasons. (Here’s a list of some other titles in this vein.)

Now, I happen to be a great enthusiast of puns; I look askance of those who look askance of them. But they have no place on the cover of a novel that presumes to derive entertainment from death. They give the game away. Titles drawn from Shakespeare’s work strike just the right note, finding balance—on the edge of a bare bodkin, one might say—between the thematic seriousness and the contrived theatricality that together give detective fiction its core identity.

• Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers (Antony and Cleopatra)
• Under the Canopy, Barbara Paul (Cariolanus)
• Hamlet, Revenge!, by Michael Innes (Hamlet)
• Glimpses of the Moon, by Edmund Crispin (Hamlet)
• Leave Her to Heaven, by Ben Ames Williams (Hamlet)
• And Be a Villain, by Rex Stout (Hamlet)
• How Like an Angel, by Margaret Millar (Hamlet)
• Poison in Jest, by John Dickson Carr (Hamlet)
• The Mouse Trap, by Agatha Christie (Hamlet)
• Dead for a Ducat, by Helen Reilly (Hamlet)
• No Wind of Blame, by Georgette Heyer (Hamlet)
• Alarum and Excursion, by Virginia Perdue (Henry VI, Part 1)
• Exuent Murderers, by Anthony Boucher (Henry VI, Part 2)
• Such Men Are Dangeous, Lawrence Block (Julius Caesar)
• There Is a Tide, by Agatha Christie (Julius Caesar)
• Sad Cypress, by Agatha Christie (Twelfth Night)
• No Friendly Drop, by Henry Wade (Romeo and Juliet)
• Behold, Here’s Poison, by Georgette Heyer (Pericles)
• Murder Out of Tune, by Frances Lockridge (Othello)
• Put Out the Light, by Ethel Lina White (Othello)
• Kill Claudio, by P.M. Hubbard (Much Ado About Nothing)
• Ill Met by Moonlight, by Leslie Ford (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
• The Quality of Mercy, by Faye Kellerman (The Merchant of Venice)
• Most Grievous Murder, by Sara Woods (Richard III)
• Enter Three Witches, by Paul McGuire (Macbeth)
• Dagger of the Mind, by Kenneth Fearing (Macbeth)
• To Fear a Painted Devil, by Ruth Rendell (Macbeth)
• Look to a Lady, by Margery Allingham (Macbeth)
• By the Pricking of My Thumbs, by Agatha Christie (Macbeth)
• Enter a Murderer, by Ngaio March (Macbeth)
• So Much Blood, by Simon Brett (Macbeth)

High school, as everyone knows, is a sterile-fecund, thrilling-deadening, freedom-graced prison house, a place that we can’t wait to escape, right up to the point when we do escape it and then can’t wait to return. We struggle there to carve a path to adulthood, and then spend our adult lives pining for the warm, bulky coat of emotional intensity that we must shed along the way. The phrase “high-school reunion,” which evokes the complete arc of an attraction-repulsion cycle, says it all. One way that some of us reunite with that fool’s-golden time in our lives, especially if we are film-makers, is by telling stories that shift classic tales of adult experience into a high-school setting.

Brick (2005), a film by first-time writer-director Rian Johnson, draws scenes and situations and even chunks of dialogue from the works of Dashiell Hammett, and adapts them to the barren stage on which of 21st-century adolescence unfolds. The upshot is a highly stylized, completely fanciful, but strangely recognizeable world: hardboiled high school. The school, unnamed but clearly located in the wastelands of southern California, has a post-apocalyptic look to it, an effect reinforced by the near absence of adults from its drab, bleached-out confines. (Maybe the “Peanuts” TV specials should share credit with Hammett for exerting some influence on the young auteur.) Down these mean hallways a man must go who is not himself mean. He is Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a scrawny, bespectacled kid who turns shamus after a note slipped in his locker sends him on a chase for “Em,” an old flame. Neither geek nor jock nor stoner nor one of the popular set, Brendan closely mirrors the classic fictional private eye—the outsider who knows how to play an inside game. He’s also a guy who can land a punch and, more important, take one. Enduring punishment has always been a distinguishing mark of this type, whose heroism has less to do with crime and detection than with his commitment to some doomed ideal, be it love or honor. As played with the straightest of faces by Gordon-Levitt, Brendan evinces a cool, convincing monomia; it’s a trait that arguably wears better on a 17-year-old than on an adult in the Sam Spade mode.

The plot that swirls around Brendan is of the self-immolating kind that typifies noir storytelling, in which moves and countermoves accumulate so fast and with such density of intrigue that finally you don’t care what happens. Action, though abundant, serves mainly as a coarse string on which to gather pearls of dialogue. That note in his locker directs Brendan to an isolated phone booth on an isolated highway. A confused cry for help from Em crackles from the receiver. (In Veronica Mars, a TV series about a girl sleuth that invites comparison to Brick, cell phones are a ubiquitous and much-used accessory. Here, they are peculiarly rare, as if their presence would violate some noir theme about the impossibility of communication.) Lately, Em has fallen in with a bad crowd, one whose hobbies include dealing drugs as well as doing them. To rescue her, Brendan descends into a campus underworld peopled by the likes of Dode, a druggie whose home base is the Dumpster behind a coffee shop; a crippled kingpin who calls himself The Pin (played with weary aplomb by Lukas Haas); Tugger, a muscle-bound lout in a muscle shirt who serves as “muscle” to The Pin; and Laura, a sultry rich girl who has a thing for guys lower on the food chain from her, including Brendan. Brendan’s investigation, aided by a nerdy friend whose moniker is simply Brain—Johnson names his characters with all the subtlety of a Dick Tracy comic strip—has its lighter side: The hero launches his quest by pumping suspects on whom Em “was eating with” during lunch period. But the case turns deadly serious, with news that an invaluable “brick” of heroin has gone missing along with Em, and then it turns just deadly.

I liked and admired Brick, but I didn’t warm to it, which I take to be part of the point. Reading the original stories of Hammett and his literary progeny, or (even more so) watching the classic films adapted from their novels, I do warm up to the material, but that’s because the dour vision at the core of such work comes rakishly packaged in layers of period style. The style wasn’t “period” at its creation, of course. In the 1920s and 1930s, lots of guys—not just knight-errant private eyes—wore fedoras. And if a guy in a fedora went looking for a clue, or a dame, or a bit of trouble, he could do worse than barge into a swank big-city nightclub, since swank big-city nightclubs existed back then. In Brick, Johnson dispenses with the smoky glamour that ingratiates us to films from the noir era, even as he takes up the clipped vocal tics and stark plot turns of vintage noir fiction. In transporting those qualities (the ones that actually mattered to Hammett, Chandler, and other “boys in the back room,” as Edmund Wilson called the tough-guy writers of depression California) to a prefab high-school campus in exurban LA, he reclaims some of the genre’s original dark grit.