Charlie Chan Carries On

Charlie Chan Carries On was the fifth Charlie Chan novel by Earl Derr Biggers (1884-1933). It was published in 1930.

An elderly American man named Drake is found murdered in an up-market London hotel. Mr Drake had been part of an American around-the-world tour group organised by a Dr Lofton. Circumstances suggest that one of the members of the party must have been the murderer.

It’s a tough case for Chief Inspector Duff of Scotland Yard. No-one has a decent alibi and there are several shady characters in the party. A key attached to a watch chain seems likely to be an important clue but discovering just what it is that the key unlocks proves to be a baffling mystery.

With no real evidence there is no way to prevent the tour from continuing but Chief Inspector Duff isn’t giving up. His hunt for the killer will take him to France and Italy and it will take Detective-Sergeant Welby to Calcutta and thence to Yokohoma. And the tour part will leave a trail of corpses behind it.

But what has all this to do with Charlie Chan? Nothing at all. At least, nothing at all until a fateful day in Honolulu (well over halfway through the book) makes this a case for Detective Inspector Chan of the Honolulu Police Department. And a case with an unexpected very personal significance for Charlie. And it now becomes a classic shipboard mystery story. All the possible suspects are on board the ship steaming from Honolulu to San Francisco and Charlie has six days to discover which one is the killer.

Charlie is not sure whether to be pleased or appalled that he will have the assistance of Kashimo on the trip. Kashimo is a young Japanese Honolulu P.D. detective renowned for his ability to bungle the simplest tasks. Charlie tolerates him for two reasons. Firstly, his bungling is largely due to inexperience and excessive zeal. And secondly, for all his faults there is one aspect of police work at which Kashimo excels. When it comes to conducting a search he is very close to being a genius. He can find a clue that no other living policeman could find. And Kashimo will find just such a clue on this voyage.

I’m a huge fan of both shipboard mysteries and murder stories set in exotic locales and this one scores highly on both counts.

Charlie Chan Carries On was famed by Fox in 1931 with Warner Oland as Chan. Unfortunately this is now a lost film. One of the later Sidney Toler Chan films, the excellent Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise, was also loosely based on the novel.

Despite their immense popularity in their day the Charlie Chan novels don’t (in my opinion) get as much respect as they deserve. Perhaps Biggers’ premature death in 1933 has something to do with this. Charlie Chan Carries On is not quite as good as The Black Camel but it’s still highly recommended.

Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana

Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana was published in 1958, providing another example of Greene’s ability to set his stories in places that were just about to hit the headlines (in 1959 Castro came to power).

Our Man in Havana is a spy story. It is the cynical, humorous and absurd tale of Jim Wormold, not exactly one of the shining lights of the British Secret Intelligence Service. Mr Wormold lives in Havana. He sells vacuum cleaners. He is moderately successful but unfortunately he has a daughter. That’s not unfortunate in itself but the daughter, Milly, is at the age at which daughters become very very expensive. Even worse, Milly has now conceived a passion for horses. She must have one. There is simply no way Mr Wormold can afford the upkeep on a horse as well as a daughter.

So it seems like a stroke of good luck when Mr Wormold is approached by Hawthorne. Hawthorne works for MI6 and he’s in the process of setting up an espionage network in Cuba. Hawthorne believe that a vacuum cleaner salesman is the perfect cover for a spy. Mr Wormold knows nothing of the world of espionage and has no interest in politics but the $150 a month plus expenses that Hawthorne offers him interests him quite a bit. So Mr Wormold becomes MI6’s man in Havana.

Initially Wormold is a bit worried by the fact that he nothing about the world of spies and knows nothing about recruiting agents but then he realises that it doesn’t matter. The network of agents he’s supposed to recruit don’t have to actually exist. The information he sends back to London doesn’t have to be real. It just needs to sound convincing. Pretty soon he has a whole network of imaginary agents and he’s sending off detailed reports to London with lots of disturbing information, none of it rel. He’s even sent them drawings of high-tech weaponry at a new top-secret military installation. The fact that these sophisticated weapons look a bit like parts of a vacuum cleaner somehow gets overlooked in all the excitement.

The head of MI6, C, is convinced that Wormold is  the most valuable agent they’ve ever had. The more fanciful his intelligence reports become the more certain C is that they must be true.

Things are going very nicely for Mr Wormold. Until somebody starts trying to kill his agents. Which is very disturbing since those agents don’t actually exist. Fiction is becoming reality.

Graham Greene of course had been a real-life spy for the British. He knew the incompetence and stupidity of MI6 at first hand. He knew that much of the intelligence provided by spies was simply fantasies concocted by the spies. The more intelligence you provide the more likely it is that the intelligence agency for which you work will continue to pay you. The intelligence doesn’t have to be true. It just has to be the sort of thing that the intelligence agency wants to hear.

Greene had converted to Catholicism in 1926. After the Second World War, and probably not coincidentally after his stint with MI6, Greene’s politics became steadily more leftist although it’s important to keep in mind that he was an old school leftist with nothing in common with the leftism of today. And while his Catholicisjm seems to recede into the background a little it’s also important to remember that he saw no conflict whatsoever between left-wing politics and Catholicism.

When he wrote this novel Greene seems to have been going through one of his upbeat phases (he was prone to frequent bouts of extreme depression). Wormold is more sympathetic than most Greene protagonists (you can’t really call any of Greene’s protagonists heroes). He’s a timid little man but he’s not a hopeless alcoholic and he hasn’t given in to despair or nihilism. He knows little about raising children but he’s managed to be a reasonably good father. He’s a nice guy. He isn’t very honest but he has no wish to do any harm to anybody. He thinks the espionage stuff is all very silly but if MI6 are foolish enough to pay him money he’ll take it. Even when he gets himself into deep trouble he doesn’t give in to despair. Whether he can extricate himself from the mess might be extremely doubtful but at least he’s going to try.

Despite the fact that Wormold never does any actual spying Our Man in Havana manages to be an enjoyable and exciting spy thriller. It’s also superb satire, and very funny. Greene’s contempt for spies is palpable and as in The Quiet American there’s an awareness of how much harm can be done by bungling intelligence agencies but it’s combined with genuine amusement.

A wonderful book. Very highly recommended.

F. Van Wyck Mason’s The Singapore Exile Murders

The Singapore Exile Murders was the fourteenth of F. Van Wyck Mason’s long-running and very successful series of spy thrillers featuring Hugh North of G-2, a U.S. Army intelligence officer. It appeared in 1939. Van Wyck Mason was a very strong believer in the virtues of exotic settings.

Captain North is already in a tight spot when the book opens. The British flying boat on which he was travelling from Hongkong to Singapore has run into a severe storm, so severe that it is forced down and takes shelter in the lagoon of a tiny uninhabited island. The aircraft is damaged and once the storm has blown itself out the flight to Singapore will be resumed. The danger is past. Or is it? In fact one of the passengers is destined not to reach Singapore alive.

The unexpected stopover gives North a chance to study his fellow passengers and they’re a more than unusually interesting lot. There are hints that some of them may not be quite what they seem. The wealthy Dutch businessman Barentse seems rather anxious about a big deal he is planning and about which he is very close-mouthed. His part-Javanese dancer girlfriend strikes North as am exceptionally jealous and perhaps even dangerous woman. Joan Buckley appears to be a respectable American girl but there are things abut her that just don’t fit. The White Russian Urbaniev might well be, like most White Russians, involved in plots. The haughty middle-aged Lady Helen Twining-Twyffort has her secrets. And muck-raking columnist Irene Walsh seems to be even better at discovering people’s secrets than the professional intelligence officer North, and discovering people’s secrets can be a risky business.

North is on a case, trying to track down a cashiered U.S. Army officer named Melville who has access to very highly classified material. North is intrigued to note that several of his fellow passengers are linked in some way to Melville.

Murder on an aircraft is an idea that was not used as often as you might expect in the interwar years although of course there were a few celebrated detective novels on that theme.

The first half of the book focuses to a large extent on North’s efforts to find the murderer, since it seems a reasonable assumption that the murder of someone linked to Melville is likely to be the key to finding him. North does discover the identity of the killer and finds that his difficulties have only just begun. The book now becomes more of a spy thriller but with plenty of plot twists still left up its sleeves.

North is a thorough professional but he’s also a man who enjoys the good life. By the good life he means high quality liquor and high quality women, both of which he consumes in large quantities. He is therefore by no means disappointed that there are two beautiful women who seem to be very intimately involved in the case. There is the glamorous part-Javanese dancer Madé Sayu, whose talents run to more than dancing. And there is all-American girl Joan Buckley. One of them might be a foreign agent. In fact both might be spies. Or both might be innocent. Fortunately both make charming companions so North doesn’t mind that he has to get to know them better, strictly in the line of duty of course. He also has to bear in mind that beautiful lady spies can potentially be quite deadly.

Naturally, this being 1939, there’s no graphic violence or sex. There is at times though a slightly grimmer atmosphere than you might expect. There’s some action and plenty of suspense.

The political aspects are interesting. The story takes place during the Munich Crisis in 1938. A major war seems imminent and no-one knows how many countries might eventually be drawn in. For an intelligence agent it’s a time of extreme paranoia. There are spies from several different countries mixed up in the Melville business, including Britain and Japan. The United States is of course at peace with all these countries but when it comes to the world of espionage every nation has to be considered a potential enemy. It’s actually the British rather than the Japanese that North is particularly worried by.

Van Wyck Mason’s spy thrillers are rather more serious in tone than most of the spy fiction of the inter-war years. They’re certainly too serious and too realistic to be regarded as pulp fiction. On the other hand they don’t have the literary pretensions of a Graham Greene or an Eric Ambler story. They are actually quite close in feel to John P. Marquand’s Mr Moto novels (such as Thank You, Mr Moto) although Marquand is a bit more literary and a bit more stylish.

The Singapore Exile Murders is a fine spy thriller. Highly recommended.

You should also check out Mason’s earlier The Budapest Parade Murders and the truly excellent The Branded Spy Murders.

three more Ellery Queen TV episodes

Over on my Cult TV Lounge blog I’ve posted some remarks on a further three episodes of the truly excellent 1975-76 Ellery Queen television series.

The episodes in question are The Adventure of the Blunt Instrument, The Adventure of the Lover's Leap and The Adventure of Veronica's Veils.

Here’s the link to the post.

Ellen Wilkinson's The Division Bell Mystery

The Division Bell Mystery, published in 1932, was the only detective novel written by British Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson. It’s a locked-room mystery of sorts and it’s hardly surprising that she chose to set her story in the House of Commons.

The British Government has been negotiating a loan with an American financier, a Mr Oissel. Oissel is having dinner with the Home Secretary in one of the parliamentary dining rooms. The Home Secretary has to leave his guest for a few minutes to vote in a division and while he’s out of the room a shot is heard. The Home Secretary’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, Robert West, bursts in to find the financier dead. It seems to be suicide - there was no-one else in the room and no-one could have left without being seen. But of course it was not suicide. It was murder.

West finds himself having to play amateur detective. It’s not that Inspector Blackitt of Scotland Yard isn’t competent but the case has political implications and there are things that the Government might prefer the police not to know. In fact the case could provoke a full-scale political crisis, especially given that the Home Secretary’s involvement in the loan may have been at best unwise and indiscreet.

West being a very young MP (just twenty-nine). He would probably be wise not to confide in anybody but he’s in over his head and he’s not at all sure what he should do and he ends up confiding in just about everybody. Including journalists, City financiers, old school chums, left-wing lady Labour MPs and the granddaughter of the dead financier.

Of course it’s important to find the murderer but for West, the Home Secretary and just about everyone else the main focus is on saving the government. In fact nobody really cares about the murder very much at all.

Given Wilkinson’s politics you might be concerned that they would intrude on the story. And you’d be right to be concerned. She treats us to endless lectures on feminism.

It’s interesting that Wilkinson, a firebrand left-wing Labour MP, chose to make her hero a Tory junior MP. And not just a Tory, but a thoroughly decent fellow as well. But in fact he turns out not to be the hero of the story at all - that rôle is filled by a rather embarrassing Mary Sue in the person of a female Labour MP.

The author seems much more interested in the political intrigues than in the murder mystery. As a detective story it’s an abject failure. There’s no actual detecting. The solution is pulled out of a hat. The vital clues are not revealed until the end. The solution is too obvious. Wilkinson fails to provide the other suspects with any viable motives and she fails to provide any convincing red herrings.

As a political thriller it had some potential but that potential is never developed. It gradually loses whatever slight interest it might have had.

The only bright spot is that we get some fascinating details about parliamentary procedure and the architectural oddities of the Houses of Parliament.

Once again the real mystery here is why the British Library chose to include this book in its Classic Crime reprints series. They’ve reprinted a few real gems but they’ve also reissued far too many mediocre titles. The Division Bell Mystery is a mess. Definitely not recommended.

Secret Service Operator #5 - The Masked Invasion

Operator #5 (later renamed Secret Service Operator #5) was a pulp magazine of which 48 issues were published from 1934 to 1939. Initially each issue contained a standalone novel although later in the run The Purple Invasion was a connected cycle of thirteen novels. Frederick C. Davis wrote the first twenty issues. Later issues were written by Emile C. Tepperman and Wayne Rogers but all the novels were credited to Curtis Steele. The first novel was The Masked Invasion.

The hero of the series was a young man named Jimmy Christopher, who poses as a fashionable photographer named Carleton Victor but who is in fact Operator #5 of the United States Intelligence Service. He gets some invaluable assistance from a young Irish lad named Tim Donovan (Having the hero assisted by a brave teenaged boy was obviously a good way to appeal to the likely readership of pulps). Jimmy also gets occasional help from his identical twin sister Nan (yes I know that if they’re brother and sister they can’t be identical twins but hey it’s only a story). Jimmy’s dad, an ex-Secret Service man, also pitches in at times.

The Masked Invasion begins with a blackout in New York City but it’s more than a blackout. Everything stops working, including cars and even devices powered by batteries. There have been a series of these blackouts, each longer and covering a larger area than the previous one. There’s some dastardly plan behind all this, probably connected with the sinister Loo Kong (the Yellow Peril theme would be explored more fully in later issues) although Loo Kong is not the mastermind behind it.

The blackouts are caused by a Negative Ray machine invented by a brilliant but eccentric scientist. Obviously the Negative Ray machine will have to be tucked down but in the meantime other precautions must be taken. Fortunately only petrol engines are affected by the ray so the U.S. Government takes immediate steps to have powerful diesel-engined cars built. And diesel-engined aircraft, and even a couple of diesel-engined blimps. There’s only a cursory attempt to explain the Negative Ray machine - something to do with capturing and magnifying cosmic rays - but there’s no need for detailed explanations in a pulp story.

As soon as Nan is introduced into the story you just know that she’s going to get herself captured and held as a hostage in order to put pressure on Jimmy. This is pulp fiction and this story follows the pulp conventions to the letter.

Jimmy Christopher is your standard square-jawed action hero, heroic and noble and patriotic. The villains are totally evil and villainous.

As far as the chief villain is concerned there are two choices in this type of tale. His identity can be kept secret until the end, which has advantages from a dramatic point of view. Or his identity can be revealed immediately in which case there’s more opportunity to develop the full flavour of his particular evilness and the motivations which drove him to evil. The second option is probably the wiser choice. In this story, when the villain is unmasked, we can’t help feeling that we have no idea why he chose villainy as a career.

The mastermind has assistants that represent every source of paranoia that could be conceived in 1934 - there’s the wily Asiatic Loo Kong, there are communists, anarchists and even Czarists!

The plot is fast-moving and filled to the brim with action. The central idea is a good one and of course out means the stakes are high. The survival of the nation is in peril. It’s not just the Negative Ray and the Darkness. The conspirators have also employed pirates to seize dozens of ships which are now on their way to the United States filled with a vast army of armed cut-throats, and they’re foreigners to boot.

The style is pure pulp. There are no shades of grey. The armed blimp attack is fun and the body count is off the scale. The violence is plentiful but never graphic. There is of course zero sex. It’s all good clean fun. And it works. There were better science fiction/action pulps (such as Dusty Ayres And His Battle Birds or Dr Yen Sin or Doc Savage) but The Masked Invasion gets the job done with efficiency and energy. Recommended.

Edgar Wallace’s The Daffodil Mystery

Edgar Wallace’s The Daffodil Mystery was published in 1920. While Wallace was best known for his thrillers he wrote straight murder mysteries as well and The Daffodil Mystery falls into the latter category. It also appeared under the alternative title The Daffodil Murder.

Mr Thornton Lyne is a very rich young man. He owns a very lucrative business which he inherited from his father, his own contribution to the business being negligible. He has enjoyed every advantage in life. He fancies himself as a poet although those who have have read his one small published volume of verse are inclined to disagree. He is a poseur. He is also a very unpleasant young man and he has been making himself particularly offensive to one of his female employees, a Miss Odette Rider. She has rejected his advances and since spitefulness is another of his unattractive qualities he is determined to revenge himself upon her. His idea is to engage the well-known private detective Jack Tarling to help him frame Odette for an imaginary crime. Tarling indignantly refuses.

And then Thornton Lyne gets himself murdered. His body is found, minus coat and waistcoat and wearing slippers. Most curiously a bunch of daffodils has been placed on his chest.

Scotland Yard calls on Tarling help in this case because of a curious note, written in Chinese, found on the body. Tarling had been a very successful police detective in Shanghai and he has a Chinese assistant, Ling Chu. Ling Chu is most emphatically not a servant but a colleague and is a formidable detective in his own right.

The evidence all points towards Odette’s guilt but Tarling finds her to be a charming young woman and while nothing will deflect him from the path of duty he finds himself hoping that Odette will prove to be innocent.

The plot has some of the outrageousness you expect from Wallace but in spite of its convolutions the solution is simple and makes sense. As you might expect from Ling Chu’s presence the events of the present day have links to events in the past in China.

In 1920 the idea of the fair-play mystery has not yet been formalised. Insofar as writers played fair with their readers they did so by avoiding impossibilities in the plotting and by providing a puzzle that the detective could plausibly solve based on the clues available to him, clues that were not necessarily revealed to the reader until the ending. In spite of this there is one definite clue that does point very clearly to the identity of the criminal. Unless of course (like me) you manage to miss its significance! There are multiple suspects and they’re all quite plausible. And there is an unbreakable alibi as well.

Of course being a Wallace novel it has more action than the average detective novel.

The golden age of detective fiction had scarcely even begun when The Daffodil Mystery appeared but the idea of a murderer adding some bizarre touch to the victim’s body (in this case the daffodils) was one that would be used quite often by golden age writers, notably John Dickson Carr in the wonderful The Mad Hatter Mystery and Ellery Queen in The Chinese Orange Mystery (and the latter of course has a China connection as well).

Ling Chu is quite an interesting character. He is honest, but sometimes he is honest in a misleading way. He takes care of the investigation of most of the vital physical clues including some very puzzling footprints. He’s not quite an early anticipation of Charlie Chan. He’s a lot more ruthless for one thing - he has his own ideas about the way to interrogate suspects and they’re not for the faint-hearted. Sometimes bad men try to lie to detectives but they don’t lie to Ling Chu.

Tarling also has a certain nostalgia for his earlier career in Shanghai when the rules under which policemen operated were much more flexible. Working for Scotland Yard can be a bit restrictive.

It's perhaps worth pointing out that despite the China connection and the slightly lurid cover this is not by any stretch of the imagination a Yellow Peril novel.

The Daffodil Mystery represents the slightly less outlandish side to Edgar Wallace but it’s still thoroughly enjoyable. Recommended.