The House Without a Key by Earl Derr Biggers

The House Without a Key, published in 1925, was the first of the Charlie Chan mysteries by Earl Derr Biggers. The six Charlie Chan novels were immensely successful but the movies based (loosely) on them were even more so - in fact there were no less than 40 Charlie Chan movies!

The movies have been attacked for supposedly promoting racial stereotypes. I haven’t seen the movies but the intention behind the books was to overturn racial stereotypes by having a Chinese hero at a time when Chinese villains were far more common in popular fiction. The character was based on a real police officer, Chang Apana, who had a distinguished career as a detective with the Honolulu Police Department.

Apart from Charlie Chan himself the book gains added exoticism from its Hawaiian setting. This is the Hawaii of the 1920s, at a time when most Americans didn’t even know Hawaii was part of the US.

But how does it stack up as a mystery novel? In fact, pretty well. It follows the rules of the golden age of detective fiction with a host of suspects and with clues liberally scattered about.

John Quincy Winterslip, a rather strait-laced young Bostonian stockbroker from a very old New England family has been dispatched to Hawaii to bring his Aunt Minerva home. The Winterslips as a family are a strange mix of ultra-respectable Puritans and feckless adventurers. The fear is that Aunt Minerva may be about to desert the respectable side of the family.

Minerva is staying in Honolulu with her cousin Dan Winterslip, the least respectable Winterslip of them all. When Dan is murdered John Quincy finds himself in the middle of a murder investigation. That’s disturbing enough for this sheltered young man, but even more disconcertingly he finds himself rather liking the island lifestyle. Bond issues no longer seen quite so exciting. Going swimming on Waikiki Beach with Carlota Egan seems much more alluring. Carlota is not the sort of girl he could take home to meet Mother, but he’s starting to think that maybe she’s his kind of girl anyway.

There are plentiful sub-plots involving opium smuggling, blackmail, and dark family secrets. There’s romance and there’s some gentle humour.

There’s a great to deal to enjoy in The House Without a Key. It’s published in paperback by Wordsworth in the Charlie Chan Omnibus along with two other Charlie Chan mysteries. As with all Wordsworth’s titles in their Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural series it’s superb value for money. Warmly recommended.

John Buchan's The Watcher by the Threshold

The Watcher by the Threshold is a collection of five novellas by John Buchan, originally published in 1902.

Buchan is best known today for his spy fiction but his weird fiction is both interesting and original. Although it’s similar in some ways to the work of his contemporaries such as Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood it has its own unique flavour. These are very subtle stories, stories in which superficially not much happens. They’re entirely concerned with the internal psychology of the characters. The supernatural hardly exists, except insofar as it exists within the minds of his characters.

In Fountainblue a man who has achieved great success in business and politics returns to Scotland. He has never had any need of other people, until he meets Clara Etheridge. He has a rival in love though. A boating misadventure brings matters to a head, and he decides to change the course of his life.

The title story is a kind of possession story. A man suddenly becomes obsessed with late Roman history, and with the emperor Justinian, but is this sudden interest a sign of some strange occult influence?

No-Man’s-Land is a lost world story, a genre that I have a bit of a weakness for. A scholar finds evidence of the ancient Pictish culture of Scotland, but the evidence takes unexpectedly concrete form.

The best of the stories, I think, is The Far Islands. A young boy growing up in Scotland has a vision of a sea route to a mysterious land beyond the western sea, a vision that continues to haunt him throughout his life. It’s a wonderfully moody and evocative story.

Buchan is an almost forgotten author who is well worth the effort of rediscovery.

The Exploits of Arsène Lupin

If you’re the sort of person who enjoys crime stories but finds it a little difficult to sympathise with the forces of law and order, then Maurice Leblanc’s stories of Arsène Lupin, gentleman burglar, may be right up your alley.

Lupin is a thief, but he also has a highly developed if somewhat eccentric sense of justice. He’s a bit like the Saint, or Raffles – he only steals from people who can afford it, and he takes a special delight in stealing from less reputable criminals, or in foiling the plans of real evil-doers.

The Exploits of Arsène Lupin collects nine Lupin stories. These include The Queen’s Necklace, very important for the light it sheds on Lupin’s early life, and Holmlock Shears Arrives Too Late, in which the French master-thief crosses swords with a certain English master-detective. The name change was apparently necessitated by legal action by Conan Doyle, although in fact it was really a tribute by one master storyteller to another.

Arsène Lupin himself is charming and well-bred, the sort of person who can burgle your house without lowering the tone of the neighbourhood. In fact it’s almost an honour to be robbed by such a discerning thief. Lupin of course is hotly pursued buy the police, with little success.

The Lupin stories enjoyed immense popularity in France and have a devoted following to this day. There have been quite a few film adaptations, including several Japanese anime versions (Lupin apparently has a strong following in Japan as well).

These are delightful crime stories, inventive and highly entertaining.

The Saint Meets his Match

The Saint Meets his Match (originally published in 1931 as She Was a Lady) is fairly typical of Leslie Charteris’s early Saint novels. In other words it’s a great deal of fun.

Simon Templar gets mixed up with the Angels of Doom, a criminal gang whose activities are mostly concentrated on making the police look foolish. The gang is led by a beautiful, glamorous, ruthless and deadly young woman named Jill Trelawny. She has a major grudge against the police - her father as an Assistant Commissioner who was dismissed for corruption but she has always believed in his innocence.

This time Simon Templar, one-time notorious criminal, is not just working with the police, He’s actually joined the police force. At least on a temporary basis. His old nemesis Chief Inspector Teal is not entirely convinced that The Saint is not still playing some underhand game of his own. And in fact Templar is soon involved far more closely with the leader of the Angels of Doom than is perhaps quite proper for a member of the Metropolitan Police. Chief Inspector Teal is both right and wrong about his old enemy’s motives, but he is right in his assumption that The Saint is not going to fit comfortably into his new job.

Of course many things turn out not to have been what they seemed, and there are plenty of entertaining plot twists.

The Saint of Charteris’s books is more morally ambiguous and more interesting than the various TV and movie versions of the character. The charm and the endless succession of witticisms are still there though. Templar is so heroic and so clever that he’s in danger of becoming annoying but that never happen. There’s enough self-mockery in the character to avoid that anger, and Charteris’s touch is light enough that we don’t really mind. And there’s an edge of ruthlessness and opportunism to the character that is missing from the TV and movie incarnations that nicely counter-balances his virtues.

The tone of this novel is extremely playful, with Templar constantly drawing attention to his role as a story-book hero, and pointing out the ways in which his behaviour differs from what you’d expect from a hero of fiction.

A polished and sophisticated crime thriller with a nicely tongue-in-cheek approach, not to be taken seriously but perfect escapist entertainment.

The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers

The Riddle of the Sands, published in 1903, is one of the great classic spy stories and at the time it was written there was considerable overlap between crime fiction and spy fiction (with Sherlock Holmes himself crossing swords with agents of foreign powers on several occasions). You could call it a spy mystery.

It’s also a great adventure story and a very fine novel of the sea. It concerns two young English yachtsmen who become obsessed by the idea that Germany is up to something nefarious in the waters just off their North Sea coast, a region of constantly shifting sandbanks and treacherous and changeable channels. To say any more about their suspicions would spoil the story.

This is low-key spy fiction. There’s not a great deal of action. The emphasis is on a gradually building tension as the full significance of what at first appears to be fairly tenuous evidence is slowly revealed.

At the time it was written Britain and Germany were engaged in a frantic naval arms race. This was the first real threat to Britain’s naval supremacy for a century, resulting in rampant paranoia about the possibility of German plans for invasion in the event of war. And paranoia is the main ingredient here as our amateur spies realise they’ve uncovered something incredibly important but that it’s going to be very difficult to convince anyone in authority. They’re going to have to do the investigating themselves.

The author, Erskine Childers, was an interesting character in his own right. Although The Riddle of the Sands was very much a stirring story of English patriotism Childers himself was executed by the British during the Irish Civil War in 1922.

Bulldog Drummond

Bulldog Drummond was one of the most popular fictional characters of the 1920s and 1930s. Bulldog Drummond, published in 1920, was the book that launched the career of this gentleman crime-fighter and adventurer.

Herman Cyril McNeile wrote the Bulldog Drummond novels under the pseudonym Sapper. Or at least he wrote the first ten or so novels - after McNeile’s death in 1937 the series was continued up to the mid-1950s by Gerard Fairlie.

Drummond became an equally popular character on radio and in movies, being played by such notable actors as Ronald Colman, Sir Ralph Richardson and Ray Milland. In the 60s the character was revived for two highly entertaining James Bond-influenced spy spoof movies, Deadlier Than the Male and Some Girls Do. Which was only fitting since the Bulldog Drummond stories had been an early influence of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels.

In Bulldog Drummond we meet Captain Hugh Drummond, and he’s bored. Peacetime does not agree with him. He misses the excitement of the war. So he places an ad in the newspaper, offering his services in any kind of adventure regardless of its legality or of the danger involved. Most of the replies are unpromising but then he hits pay dirt - a genuine damsel in distress.

The damsel in question is Phyllis Benton and her story at first seems incredible - a tale of master criminals, sinister plots and daring robberies in which her father has become an unwilling accomplice. Drummond soon discovers that her story is not merely true, it’s actually much stranger than even she realises. In fact they have stumbled upon a conspiracy of almost unimaginably vast proportions in which the very fate of British civilisation is at stake. A gigantic communist conspiracy, funded by fabulously wealthy capitalists.

This was the first of the four novels featuring arch-villain Carl Petersen. Petersen is a master of disguise, and he’s a very cool customer. His chief henchman Henry Lakington is a very nasty pice of work indeed - his main amusements being devising sadistic means of murder and torture and pulling off spectacular jewel robberies. There’s also Petersen’s beautiful, amusing but evil daughter Irma. At least she claims to be his daughter, but may well be his mistress.

There’s plenty of action, and plenty of humour. Drummond is at this stage of his career very much an amateur. His main assets are his daring and his courage, his tendency to do the unexpected because he doesn’t know any better, and the fact that his opponents consistently under-estimate him, regarding him as a harmless buffoon. By the end of the adventure he has acquired a great deal of experience and a very definite taste for this type of exploit.

It’s all very politically incorrect but if that doesn’t bother you (and it certainly doesn’t bother me) then there’s a great deal of enjoyment to be had within the pages of Bulldog Drummond.

Spy Castle, Nick Carter

Nick Carter is one of the more long-lived characters in detective and espionage fiction. He first appeared in a story in 1886, was later the subject of a series of pulp novels in the 30s and then metamorphosed into a James Bond-style secret agent in the 60s.

The Killmaster series of spy novels eventually ran to some 260 novels with new titles still appearing as late as the 1990s. No author is ever credited for any of these books which were written by a variety of hands, and apparently quite a considerable number were written by women. Which is interesting since the Nick Carter spy character is very a macho action hero and a tireless womanizer.

I recently read one of these novels, a comparatively early entry in the series, published in 1966. Spy Castle is a classic mad scientist threatening to blow up the world tale, a plot that was used over and over again during the 60s in both books and movies. But Spy Castle does add an interesting twist. The mad scientist/diabolical criminal mastermind is also the head of a fascist paramilitary movement, called The Druids. At this point the book taps into the whole Scottish/Welsh nationalist thing which was attracting quite a lot of attention in Britain at this time. The Druids not only stand for Celtic nationalism, they also promise a return to the good old days of King Arthur!

It’s an outlandish plot, especially given that The Druids are also in league with the Red Chinese.

The violence and the sex are considerably more graphic than in the Bond novels. It goes without saying that Nick Carter’s bedroom skills prove just as useful as his spy skills in foiling the fiendish plot of The Druids and their unbalanced leader. The evil mastermind’s wife, Lady Hardesty, has slept with so many men that she’s lost count, but it takes Nick Carter to finally bring her sexual satisfaction. It’s all so outrageous and so over-the-top and so silly that it’s impossible to find it actually offensive although it would be fascinating to know if this was one of the novels with a female author.

Probably the most surprising thing about Spy Castle is that it’s a good deal of fun, in a very very pulpy sort of way.