Most men, they'll tell you a story straight
through. It won't be complicated, but it won't be interesting either.
—Ed Bloom, Big Fish (2003)
Alfred Walter Stewart had a long career as a
professor in chemistry and a university lecturer in Glasgow and Belfast, but
more importantly for the purpose of this review, he also wrote detective novels
under the name “J. J. Connington”. He was a well-regarded figure in his day,
and John Dickson Carr gave him some praise in his famous essay The Grandest Game in the World. One of
Dorothy L. Sayers’ better novels, The
Five Red Herrings, is in part an homage to his book The Two Ticket Puzzle.
Unfortunately, academic disinterest and snobbery
levelled against the Golden Age of Detective Fiction have seriously harmed
Connington’s reputation. If you hear about him at all nowadays, it will be
classed alongside the similarly-maligned John Rhode, Freeman Wills Crofts,
Henry Wade, or R. Austin Freeman. (None of these writers were mentioned by P.
D. James in Talking About Detective
Fiction, and Julian Symons mentions some of these authors only in passing.)
He will be called an ingenious technical writer but someone who couldn’t
entertain a drunken fish— a Humdrum, in other words. After reading his book The Case With Nine Solutions, I can
propose two explanations to explain this nonsense. Either Connington and his
fellow Humdrums have been unfairly attacked, or I need to start hanging around drunken
fish more often.
The first explanation seems more likely, because
unlike, say, Freeman Wills Crofts, Connington succeeds admirably in bringing
his characters to life and making them seem like real people with real emotions.
Not only that, he manages to throw in social commentary that would confound
anti-Golden Age snobs if they bothered to read his books, and he combines it
with a brilliantly-clued puzzle and some small asides about chemistry that make
me wish he was my lecturer in university.
But I’m really getting ahead of myself here. Let’s
tackle the plot first and foremost. Dr. Ringwood is sitting comfortably at home
when a colleague, Dr. Trevor Markfield, drops in to visit. The social call is
short-lived, however, as the maid of the SIlverdales telephones: a fellow maid
is seriously ill and she requires Dr. Ringwood’s help. The fog outside is
intense, so Dr. Markfield kindly offers to pilot Ringwood to the correct
street, but Ringwood manages to get muddled up and drives up to the wrong
house. He enters, suspecting something is amiss, and inside, he finds a young
man who has been shot twice in the lung. He spurts out a mysterious cryptic
dying message and expires.
There’s no phone in the house, so Dr. Ringwood goes
next door, to the correct house this time, and diagnoses a case of scarletina
before calling up Sir Clinton Driffield to ask for help. He decides to wait at
the house, since he can do nothing for the ill maid, and when the police
arrives, Sir Clinton makes some excellent deductions to prove that the murder
took place elsewhere. They then head to the Silverdale residence, but nobody
answers the doorbell. This is because the maid has been strangled in the
interim, and the other girl has only escaped with her life due to her illness…
Thus begins a hunt for a particularly unlikeable
killer, who seems to have murdered three people when the corpse of Mrs.
Silverdale is discovered. The dead man next door turns out to be her potential
lover, Hassendean, and he seems to have been universally disliked: a nasty bit
of goods whose only advantage in life was his connections. But is this a case
of double murder? An accident? A suicide pact gone wrong? What are the titular
nine solutions?
Well, The
Case With Nine Solutions is an impressive title, but a more appropriate one
might be The Case With Nine Possibilities.
This is because the book focuses on the deaths of Mrs. Silverdale and
Hassendean, and the nine solutions are the nine possible combinations when you
consider that every unnatural death must be the result of accident, suicide, or
murder (unless you’re in a John Rhode novel, but that’s a discussion for
another day). This is the only thing that comes close to a disappointment in
the entire book— everything else weaves itself into a complex web of
cryptograms, anonymous messages, footprints in the soil, alibis, deceptions,
love affairs, and disguises. The solution turns out to be a simple one, and the
final chapter consists of entries in Sir Clinton’s notebook, with some clues so
ingenious I never spotted them, and my jaw dropped in surprise and admiration
when I read the clue that was the key to Mrs. Silverdale’s death. The solution
is not mind-blowingly original – the publisher is not the killer, if that’s
what you were betting on— but it’s excellently constructed. The clues slip
right under your nose.
Sir Clinton’s deductions are truly admirable— take
note in particular of his opening scene, where he deduces just why Hassendean
was murdered elsewhere, and the reconstruction of the maid’s murder in Chapter
4 is a particularly impressive passage. (It’s little wonder Carr thought highly
of Connington’s work— you can see some influence on Carr’s own work,
particularly the impressive reconstructions of Dr. Gideon Fell.)
So the plot is a triumph, and that makes the
engaging characters and social commentary interesting extras to an already
superb book. Golden Age authors are much maligned for not striving towards
literary ends, and Connington indirectly thows his two cents into the argument
early on:
All three of them were experts in death, and among them there was no
need to waste time in polite lamentations. None of them had ever set eyes on
the victim before that night, and there was no object in becoming sentimental
over him.
Critics like P. D. James love taking authors to
task for their supposed upper-class worship— you’d get the idea that every
amateur detective was a Philo Vance or Lord Peter Wimsey clone! But this is an
outrageous lie invented by people who have no idea what they’re talking about—take
a look at this unflattering portrait of an upper class character, an
influential relative of the dead man:
Dr. Ringwood, watching the change in the situation, reflected
sardonically to himself that a title had its uses when one came to deal with a
snob.
“That old bounder was rude to the Inspector on principle; but when Sir
Clinton Driffield asks precisely the same question, he’s quite amenable,” he
thought to himself. “What a type!”
If that wasn’t enough, you even get some social
commentary in the opening pages, after Dr. Ringwood complains at length about
the difficult life of a medical practitioner:
“Still got the notion that human life’s valuable? The war knocked that
on the head,” Markfield commented, rubbing his hands together to warm them.
“Human life’s the cheapest thing there is. It’s a blessing I went over to the
scientific side, instead of going in for physicking. I’d never have acquired a
good sympathetic bedside manner.”
And then there are some great side-lectures on
chemistry, which are interesting, clearly explained, and not too long. In
Chapter 8, for instance, Sir Clinton lectures about the purpose of taking a
mixed-melting point. It is an informative and clearly-worded passage, and I
just love asides like this from people who knew what they were talking about.
Connington wasn’t some fellow who pulled the first complex-sounding term out of
a chemistry textbook to artificially inflate his level of intelligence—he was a
lecturer in the subject and dealt with this kind of stuff daily. When these
explanations are given, they sound like a professor is having a one-on-one with
a student who’s having trouble understanding the course material.
Overall, The
Case With Nine Solutions is a triumph, and I’d argue a masterpiece in the
genre. Connington keeps a firm grasp on all his plot threads and the resolution
is most satisfactory. It’s a must-read for fans of the Golden Age of Detective
Fiction, and it’s a good book from an unfairly maligned author. It shows creativity
in its set-up and pure ingenuity with its clues, and that’s a quality that
can’t be scientifically quantified. An author either has that magic or hasn’t
got it— and Connington puts on a grand performance that proves he’s definitely
got it. It’s combined with skilful writing that makes this an unadulterated
pleasure to read. I highly recommend it.
But where can you find this masterpiece? The good
folks at The Murder Room have got you covered. A Kindle edition of the book has
been released, and it is a bargain, especially when you consider how much
sellers ask for copies of the old hardcover. You can find the Kindle edition here.
For a list of the currently available books by Connington (more are apparently
due in February if The Book Depository is to be believed) visit The Murder Room’s website.
Patrick Ohl ©2013
The 19-year-old Patrick Ohl spends his spare time
writing controversial reviews in order to expel his bitterness at the world.
For this reason, he was awarded a multimillion dollar contract to publish his
memoirs, entitled I Can’t Stand Postmodernism. Unfortunately, after signing on the
dotted line, he woke up and has been unable to return to the dream since to see
if the book was a success. However, that doesn’t faze him, and he still intends
to make millions of dollars and use his international fame and influence to
bring some well-deserved attention to forgotten authors like this one. His
reviews can be found on his blog, At the Scene of
the Crime.
2 comments:
Best of luck to her with the surgery...goodness. And thanks for hosting this review, Kevin...I'll have the links today, Evan Lewis next week.
Thank you, Todd. I forgot to make the link change notice before I scheduled the review.
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