Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge 2012: Wrap Up Post

In 2012, this was one of the first challenges I joined. I read vintage mysteries a lot when I was younger, had a lot of vintage mysteries in my To Be Read stacks, and needed motivation to read some of them.

My goal was to read (and review) eight books for two themes, Golden Age Girls (books by a female author) and Cherchez l'Homme (books by a male author). I finished my last vintage mystery for the year in late November. I am glad I joined the challenge because I did need the motivation.

Here is my list of books read, with links to reviews.

Golden Age Girls

1. Christianna Brand: Heads You Lose
2. Christianna Brand: Green for Danger
3. Ngaio Marsh: Night at the Vulcan
4. Phoebe Atwood Taylor: The Cape Cod Mystery
5. Helen Reilly: Lament for the Bride
6. Helen Reilly: The Dead Can Tell
7. Agatha Christie: Murder on the Orient Express
8. Agatha Christie: The Secret Adversary

 Cherchez l'Homme

1. Eric Ambler: A Coffin for Dimitrios
2. Akimitsu Takagi: The Tattoo Murder Case
3. S.  S. Van Dine: The Greene Murder Case
4. Earl Derr Biggers: The House Without a Key
5. Cyril Hare: With a Bare Bodkin
6. Cyril Hare: An English Murder
7. Rex Stout: Fer-de-Lance
8. Ed McBain: Cop Hater

My favorite book for this challenge (that was not a re-read) was The House Without a Key by Earl Derr Biggers. Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout is my favorite mystery ever, and I highly recommend it. The books by Cyril Hare were also re-reads, and maybe the ones by Agatha Christie. Christie wrote so many books, I am not sure which ones I read in my teens and twenties.

Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Helen Reilly, Akimitsu Takagi, S. S. Van Dine, Earl Derr Biggers, and Ed McBain were all new authors to me.

I look forward to joining in on the 2013 Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge. I know I will read at least eight vintage mysteries, or I may go as high as sixteen.

N is for Night at the Vulcan

Back in 2003, I read the first 15 mysteries by Ngaio Marsh featuring Inspector Roderick Alleyn. I started in late September and finished up in late November. I don't know why I stopped there, but I must have enjoyed most of them to read them all in two months.

This week I finished the next book in the series, Night at the Vulcan. I was glad that I had returned to the series, rediscovering Alleyn, his colleagues, and the charming writing of Ngaio Marsh.

From the Goodreads page for Ngaio Marsh:

Of all the "Great Ladies" of the English mystery's golden age, including Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh alone survived to publish in the 1980s. Over a fifty-year span, from 1932 to 1982, Marsh wrote thirty-two classic English detective novels, which gained international acclaim. She did not always see herself as a writer, but first planned a career as a painter.

Marsh was also very involved in the theater, and several of her novels center around art and artists or theatrical productions. Early the series, in Artists in Crime, Alleyn meets noted artist Agatha Troy, and they later marry. Besides Night at the Vulcan, these other books involve actors and acting: Enter a Murderer, Vintage Murder, Overture to Death, Death at the Dolphin, and Light Thickens. Ngaio Marsh was born in New Zealand. She lived both in England and New Zealand, and some of the novels are set in New Zealand or feature characters from New Zealand.


I am featuring this book as my selection for the Crime Fiction Alphabet for 2012 for the letter N.  Please visit the post at Mysteries in Paradise to check out other entries.

My thoughts on this book:

This was a very enjoyable vintage mystery novel. The story is pretty much equally divided between setting up the scene and arriving at the murder, followed by the detection and solution of the murder. The murder does not even occur until halfway through the story and this time, Alleyn and his team don’t show up until then also.

The story is set in the theater, and revolves around the arrival of a young, aspiring actress who is without funds and desperate for any job in the acting company. Martyn Tarne has recently arrived in England from New Zealand. The story of Martyn’s acceptance into the acting company was delightful and fun. A nice change from some of the more serious mysteries I read. I am a sucker for a romance in a story, whether it is believable or not. The descriptions and characterization of other participants in the company (actors, author of the play, director, costumers) were entertaining. There were snarky characters and loveable characters.

In this mystery, the story building up to the murder is better than the detection half of the book. In the first half of the book, the pacing is good; the story builds, the tension builds. The tensions between the characters are evident. The reader knows it is going to come to a head and someone will die. Who will it be? But when the police come on the scene the pacing slows; there are dead spots. I had picked out the murderer early on, but I had the motive entirely wrong, and by the time I was a good way into the book, I had decided I had to be wrong.

Here are a few other resources on the mysteries of Ngaio Marsh that I found entertaining and useful:

• Marsh Madness at In So Many Words...
• Margot Kinberg featured an overview of Roderick Alleyn for the Letter A for the Crime Fiction Alphabet 2012
• At the Golden Age of Detection Wiki, an article on Ngaio Marsh with analysis by Mike Grost and a bibliography with links to reviews.

Murder on the Orient Express: Agatha Christie

Murder on the Orient Express was published in 1934, it featured Hercule Poirot, the dapper, egotistical, and very intelligent and perceptive Belgian detective.

From the synopsis of the book at the official Agatha Christie website:

Travelling on the Orient Express, Poirot is approached by a desperate American named Ratchett.  Afraid that someone plans to kill him, Ratchett asks Poirot for help.

Thus begins an intriguing tale of a murder investigation in an enclosed environment, this time on a train. The plotting is superb, and there is subtle humor in the relationship between Poirot and the director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon Lits (also a Belgian). I found Christie's handling of the denouement, and the reactions of the "spectators" as the culprit was revealed, very moving, providing an emotional ending.

It is obvious I enjoyed this book, but I did read it after seeing the movie based on the book, and thus I knew the story from beginning to end. [I thought I had seen the movie recently, but in truth in had been nearly 3 years.  I still remember it vividly however.]

The movie is a good adaption, following the book very closely, and beautifully and tastefully done. Reading this book, I was paying more attention to how the story is told, how the author fools the reader until the very end. The fact that I could enjoy it so much, even though I knew the ending, speaks to how well Christie tells a story and entertains us.

In the film Albert Finney stars as Poirot. Other well-known actors in the film are: Martin Balsam, Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman (who received an Oscar for her performance), Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael York and Anthony Perkins.


This counts as one of my books for the following challenges:
Mt. TBR Challenge
Read Your Own Books Challenge
A-Z Challenge
Vintage Mystery Challenge
Cruisin' Thru the Cozies Challenge
Mystery & Suspense Reading Challenge

A Coffin for Dimitrios: Eric Ambler

Plot summary and description from The Mystery Lover's Companion by Art Bourgeau:

"In one of the great intrigue novels, a writer delves into the muddy past of a mysterious, international double-dealing spy. The writer of academic detective novels discovers the difference between fiction and reality when he becomes involved in murder."

In that book, the rating is Five Daggers (A True Classic).

When I read a book that is hailed as a mystery classic with so much already written about it, it colors my experience and my enjoyment. No way to avoid this really. I am thinking too much about the book as I read it. Looking for its classic elements, what makes it rise above the rest, rather than just going along for the ride as a new experience.

Did I enjoy A Coffin for Dimitrios? Most of the time, yes.

Does it have a good plot? Yes. My quibble is with the execution, how we get from beginning to end. This is a book that slowed down in the middle for me. I enjoyed the setup in the first few chapters and it had a great ending. But the advancement of plot in between was often told in narration by one character or another, and I was impatient for it to get somewhere. In fact, I think my problem with the book was being too impatient, reading too fast, not savoring the story as it unfolds. This is a book I will reread, and I think I will enjoy it more the next time.

Is the characterization good? Yes and no.  There was not a lot of depth, but true character of some of the players was revealed bit by bit. Were they victims or willing accomplices? What kind of person was Dimitrios?

What I did get into was the picture of evil and depravity.  Telling the story at turns from the point of view of criminals who really don't consider that they have done wrong or that there were other options in their lives was interesting and appalling. And it had a very unexpected ending, and I like that.

I do not know if I have read A Coffin for Dimitrios before. I am fairly sure I have read books by Eric Ambler, but it would have been many years ago. When I was younger (in my teens and early twenties) I read faster, read more, read a lot from the library, and read a lot of classics. But even then I was reading mostly mysteries (Rex Stout, Agatha Christie, Patricia Moyes, George Bagby, Allingham, Sayers).

This book and several others by Eric Ambler were written immediately before, during, and after World War II. I enjoy reading books from that time period to get the feel of what people were thinking and experiencing at that time. I recently read two books by Christianna Brand that were written around the same time as this book: Heads You Lose (1941) and Green for Danger (1944). Only Green for Danger was specifically about the war, but the daily events that affected people during and before the war were also mentioned in Heads You Lose.

I am looking forward to reading more Eric Ambler books. He published books from 1936 to 1981. At the top of my list are The Light of Day and Journey into Fear, because I have a copy of those two. Next I want to find other spy fiction, especially set around the time of World War II. There is a movie based on this book, with the same title as the original English title of the book: The Mask of Dimitrios. I would love to see this, but it doesn't appear to be available on DVD.

This counts as one of my books for the following challenges:
Mt. TBR Challenge
Read Your Own Books Challenge
Vintage Mystery Challenge
Mystery & Suspense Reading Challenge

Heads You Lose: Christianna Brand

About Christianna Brand. From the author description at Goodreads.

"She was born Mary Christianna Milne in 1907 in Malaya and spent her early years in India. She had a number of different occupations, including model, dancer, shop assistant and governess.

Her first novel, Death in High Heels, was written while Brand was working as a salesgirl. In 1941, one of her best-loved characters, Inspector Cockrill of the Kent County Police, made his debut in the book Heads You Lose. The character would go on to appear in seven of her novels. Green for Danger is Brand’s most famous novel. The whodunit, set in a World War 2 hospital, was adapted for film by Eagle-Lion Films in 1946, starring Alastair Sim as the Inspector. She dropped the series in the late 1950s and concentrated on various genres as well as short stories."


I was surprised to find out that Christianna Brand had only written seven mysteries featuring Inspector Cockrill. With that few, I could easily read them all. But after reading this one, I am not so sure I want to.  I have read some of her novels in the distant past I am sure, but it is long enough ago that I don't remember which ones.

Most of the action takes place in a mansion outside a small village. The owner of Pigeonsford Estate has five friends currently visiting when the murder takes place. Inspector Cockrill has known most of this group for years. It appears that one of them must be the murderer but he can't believe it is any of them.

What are my issues with this book? I am not sure. I felt the pacing was good, and read the book in less than two days ... fast for me. I did not have to force myself to finish it. I love the country house mystery sub-genre. But I think the characters were a bit shallow for me and I could not get to like them.

The revelation of the culprit was also a disappointment. I had considered that this character was the most likely suspect, but the explanation left me cold.  On the other hand, I know that mystery writer's essentially are creating fantasy situations that the reader must accept. Had I enjoyed the journey to the end more, I would have ignored my disappointment.

This is the first book in the series, and only the second novel published by Brand. I have read that Green for Danger, the second book in the series, is much better, and I am reading that next. I hope to find that I like it. I have seen the movie based on the book (also titled Green for Danger), and enjoyed it a lot. I know that the movie is a bit different, and I have (conveniently) forgotten the ending, so that won't be a problem.

Other reviews:
At a lovely site featuring Vintage Penguin paperbacks: A Penguin a week

Full of information: at the Golden Age of Detection Wiki

In-depth, and with great comments: at Mystery*File

This counts as one of my books for the following challenges:
Mt. TBR Challenge
Read Your Own Books Challenge
A-Z Challenge
Vintage Mystery Challenge
Cruisin' Thru the Cozies Challenge
1st in a Series Challenge
Merely Mystery Reading Challenge
Mystery & Suspense Reading Challenge

Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge 2012

This challenge is the one that motivated me to get involved with reading challenges.  I love mysteries from the 30's, 40's and 50's. My favorite author, period, is Rex Stout. I have read all the mysteries by  Sayers, Allingham, and Tey and still have a lot of authors I want to read or re-read.

 

Vintage Mystery Reading challenge 2012

Organized by: My Reader's Block

From January 1st 2012 to December 31st 2012
Goal: Read 8 books in one or more themes. Books must have been written before 1960 and be from the mystery category (crime fiction, detective fiction, espionage, etc.).

 Check this link for rules: http://myreadersblock.blogspot.com/2011/10/vintage-mystery-reading-challenge-2012.html



I am going to go for two themes, Golden Age Girls (8 books by a female author) and Cherchez l'Homme (8 books by a male author). I have a few authors in mind but in most cases don't have specific books chosen.

Golden Age Girls

1. Christianna Brand: Heads You Lose
2. Christianna Brand: Green for Danger
3. Ngaio Marsh: Night at the Vulcan
4. Phoebe Atwood Taylor: The Cape Cod Mystery
5. Helen Reilly: Lament for the Bride
6. Helen Reilly: The Dead Can Tell
7. Agatha Christie: Murder on the Orient Express
8. Agatha Christie: The Secret Adversary

 Cherchez l'Homme

1. Eric Ambler: A Coffin for Dimitrios
2. Akimitsu Takagi: The Tattoo Murder Case
3. S.  S. Van Dine: The Greene Murder Case
4. Earl Derr Biggers: The House Without a Key
5. Cyril Hare: With a Bare Bodkin
6. Cyril Hare: An English Murder
7. Rex Stout: Fer-de-Lance
8. Ed McBain: Cop Hater