Best Detective Stories by Cyril Hare

Don't be put off by the bland cover of Best Detective Stories by Cyril Hare. There are treasures within. Thirty delicious tales of mistaken identity (and murder), legal shenanigans (and murder), slow-burning revenge (and murder), trickery (and murder), robbery (and murder). Oh, and did I mention murder?

How could I not love a book by an author with the name Cyril Hare? Actually, that is a pseudonym for British judge and crime writer Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark. He was born in 1900 and died just shy of his 58th birthday. He published nine mystery novels, one children's book, almost 40 short stories, a radio play, and two stage plays. Quite an output.

Many of his short mysteries appeared in the 1950s in London's Evening Standard. We are fortunate to have so many of them collected here.

Joan at Planet Joan put Cyril Hare on my radar. My library doesn't have a single one of his books, but I discovered a few Kindle editions on Amazon. This book of short mysteries was only 99 cents. In case you are interested, there are three of his crime novels available as ebooks as well. Two of those will run you a whopping $1.99 each. For some reason, his most famous book, Tragedy at Law, is $2.09. Still, it's a bargain.

I plan on trying one or two of his full-length mysteries. I am sure they are as entertaining as his short crime tales.

These stories are all written with a light touch. After reading the first few you know there is going to be a twist, but darned if you will be able to figure it out beforehand. Some are written in the first person and some are told by a third-person narrator. No matter who is telling the story, there is always a touch of wry humor. 

These are the perfect mysteries to read at night before turning out the light. 

Calamity in Kent by John Rowland

This week I am recuperating in Broadgate, a pleasant little seaside resort town in Kent. OK. Not really. But, I am doing the next best thing and reading a tale about a young journalist who is recovering in the south of England after surgery. 

It is June. Jimmy London takes his morning stroll along the boardwalk before breakfast at Mrs. Cecil's boarding house. But one morning calamity strikes and he comes across a murder scene. You have most likely heard of the locked room mystery? Well, this is a locked lift puzzle. 

The operator of the lift (elevator to those of us in America) that takes bathers from the boardwalk down the cliff to the beach has opened the cage for the day and discovered the body of a man. With a knife in his back. The operator swears he locked the lift doors the night before and the locks had not been tampered with. 

Jimmy is young and ambitious and sees this as his opportunity to wrangle a job with The Daily Wire, a Fleet Street paper. He is the man on the spot. And, as luck would have it, his friend from Scotland Yard, Inspector Shelley is also visiting the town. He asks Jimmy to do some side investigating thinking that people might be more apt to share information with a journalist than the police. 

Jimmy will get his scoop and Shelley will get his murderer.

That's the plan anyway in Calamity in Kent another of those wonderful books from the British Library Crime Classics series (here and here).

This is the second one written by John Rowland that I have read that features Inspector Shelley. The other was Murder in the Museum that I didn't write about here. It was a good one, too.

I love that in the day, recovering souls were sent off to the seaside to rest and relax. I wish someone would send me. I also have a fondness for mysteries set in this time (before a bunch of technology) and place - England, of course.

Merry reading.

In Which I Finally Meet Miss Maud Silver

I recently made the acquaintance of Miss Maud Silver, the private investigator in the mystery series by Patricia Wentworth. My library suddenly has the books in the series on its ebook shelf. 

Grey Mask, published in 1928, is the first. The plot is pretty familiar and at times a bit complicated. There is an heiress who might not be a legitimate heiress but a shadowy group of people are out to 'remove' her. This criminal group has members that it has blackmailed into doing its evil deeds and everyone goes by a number instead of a name. A few characters take on an alias to protect their identity. There is the tattered romance between the main character Charles Moray and Margaret Langton. From the beginning we know that Margaret is part of the secret organization but we don't know why...yet. 

There are many characters and much of the action turns on coincidence and chance meetings and overheard conversations. There is a hint, too, that a character who is supposed to be dead is alive. I am about halfway through the book and trust that all will eventually be revealed.

Miss Silver doesn't make an appearance until well into the story. She is a retired governess and teacher. She knits. I suppose it helps her think. She is not at all like Miss Marple (Miss Silver came first) in that she is a professional detective and has an office in London. I suppose she gets paid although that is never mentioned. It also doesn't mention if she has employees but she seems to find out a lot of information by following people on her own.

Here is how she is introduced in her office:

...a small, light, room, very bare - furnished to the first glance at any rate, by a chair, a writing-table and Miss Silver herself.

The writing-table was immense, of the large old-fashioned flat kind with drawers all round it; the top was piled high with exercise-books of different colours very neatly stacked.

Miss Silver sat in front of a pad of pink blotting-paper. She was a little person with no features, no complexion, and a great deal of tidy mouse-coloured hair done in a large bun at the back of her head. She inclined her head slightly, but did not offer to shake hands.

It feels as if Ms. Wentworth threw every sort of mystery scenario into this first book. That said, I do find myself enjoying the tale even though the character around which the mystery revolves - the 'maybe' heiress - is quite annoying. She babbles constantly and that gets her in lots of trouble and wreaks havoc with the lives of the people trying to help her. She spends much of her time eating chocolates and writing letters to a school friend. (I can't really fault her for either of those last two things!)

I find it difficult to believe that it has taken me so long to begin to read the Miss Silver mysteries. I am glad that they are available to me as ebooks. My Kindle is so much easier to hold for reading in bed at night. Best of all, there is nothing in these easy-going mysteries to give me nightmares.