A Worthwhile Trip to Mysteries Past

by Julia Buckley

Do you love watching an old movie now and then? Something in black and white, filled with a dancing Fred Astaire or a whimsical Doris Day? I love the occasional indulgence in an old film; in the same way, I love to revisit mysteries from another era.

Here are the beginnings of three of my favorites--see if they make you want to read on. If they do, you're guaranteed some great reading for the holiday weekend.

1. "Carmel Lacy is the silliest woman I know, which is saying a good deal. The only reason that I was having tea with her in Harrod's on that wet Thursday afternoon was that when she rang me up she had been so insistent that it had been impossible to get out of; and besides, I was so depressed anyway that even tea with Carmel Lacy was still preferable to sitting alone at home in a room that still seemed to be echoing with that last quarrel with Louis. That I had been entirely in the right, and that Louis had been insufferably, immovably, furiously in the wrong was no particular satisfaction, since he was now in Stockholm, and I was still here in London, when by rights we should have been lying on a beach together in the Italian sunshine, enjoying the first summer holiday we had been able to plan together since our honeymoon two years ago. The fact that it had rained almost without ceasing ever since he had gone hadn't done anything to mitigate his offense; and when looking up "other people's weather" in The Guardian each morning, I found Stockholm enjoying a permanent state of sunshine, and temperatures somewhere in the seventies, I was easily able to ignore the reports of a wet, thundery August in southern Italy and concentrate steadily on Louis's sins and my own grievances."


Mary Stewart
AIRS ABOVE THE GROUND (1965)


2. "The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open becuase Terry Lennox's left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and no other.

There was a girl beside him. Her hair was a lovely shade of dark red and she had a distant smile on her lips and over her shoulders she had a blue mink that almost made the Rolls Royce look like just another automobile. It didn't quite. Nothing can.

The attendant was the usual half-tough character in a white coat with the name of the restaurant stitched across the front of it in red. He was getting fed up.

"Look, mister," he said with an edge to his voice, "would you mind a whole lot pulling your leg in the car so I can kind of shut the door? Or should I open it all the way so you can fall out?"

The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back. It didn't bother him enough to give him the shakes. At The Dancers they get the sort of people that disillusion you about what a lot of golfing money can do for the personality.

A low-swung foreign speedster with no top drifted into the parking lot and a man got out of it and used the dash lighter on a long cigarette. He was wearing a pullover check shirt, yellow slacks, and riding boots. He strode off trailing clouds of incense, not even bothering to look toward the Rolls Royce. He probably thought it was corny. At the foot of the steps up to the terrace he paused to put a monocle in his eye.

The girl said with a nice burst of charm: "I have a wonderful idea, darling. Why don't we just take a cab to your place and get your convertible out? It's such a wonderful night for a run up the coast to Montecito. I know some people there who are throwing a dance around the pool.

The white-haired lad said politely: "Awfully sorry, but I don't have it any more. I was compelled to sell it." From his voice and articulation you wouldn't have known he had anything stronger than an orange juice to drink.

"Sold it, darling? How do you mean?" She slid away from him on the seat, but her voice slid away a lot farther than that.

"I mean I had to. For eating money."

"Oh, I see." A slice of spumoni wouldn't have melted on her now. . . . "
From THE LONG GOODBYE
Raymond Chandler (1953)


3. "The lake was cold, black, evil, nor more than five hundred yards in length, scarely two hundred in breadth, a crooked stretch of glassy calm shadowed by the mountainsides that slipped steeply into its dark waters and went plunging down. There were no roads, no marked paths around it; only a few tracks, narrow ribbons, wound crazily along its high sides, sometimes climbing up and around the rough crags, sometimes dropping to the sparse clumps of fir at its water line. The eastern tip of the lake was closed off by a ridge of precipices. The one approach was by its western end. Here, the land eased away into gentler folds, forming a stretch of fine alpine grass strewn with pitted boulders and groups of more firs. This was where the trail, branching up from the rough road that linked villages and farms on the lower hills, ended in a bang and a whimper: a view of the forbidding grandeur and a rough wooden table with two benches where the summer visitor could eat his hard-boiled eggs and caraway-sprinkled ham sandwiches."

And so begins Helen MacInnes' great thriller, The Salzburg Connection, which gives The Bourne Identity a run for its money.

Anyone who hasn't tried MacInnes might be pleasantly surprised to find she has many exciting books, and in fact the mid-twentieth century has an endless array of wonderful mysteries that are fun to return to. This was just a taste.

What's your favorite old mystery?

Why Helen MacInnes Should Be Ludlum's Movie Successor

by Julia Buckley
I saw The Bourne Ultimatum today, and it was great. I was contemplating the whole Bourne trilogy--a fantastic cinematic experience based on the exciting Robert Ludlum novels. While the movies are only loosely tied to the books, both the original Ludlum mysteries and the movies were huge successes, and made Jason Bourne a name to be remembered. (All twenty-one of Ludlum's novels were New York Times bestsellers).

I'm wondering, then, how long it can be before some young Hollywood babe--male or female--will be snatched up to star in a flick based on a novel by Helen MacInnes. As far as I'm concerned, MacInnes hasn't gotten the credit she deserves for her contributions to the world of literature in general and mystery in particular. Officially her genre is "suspense" or perhaps sometimes she falls into the category of "espionage," but wherever you slot her, MacInnes is a great read.

I should note that four of MacInnes' novels WERE made into films, but not since the sixties. Her books adapted for films were: Above Suspicion, Assignment in Brittany, The Venetian Affair, and The Salzburg Connection. They even sound a bit like Ludlum titles, don't they? But MacInnes, who began writing in 1939, pre-dates Ludlum, who only began publishing his books in 1971 with The Scarlatti Inheritance.

MacInnes was born in Glasgow in 1907 and educated there, but eventually moved to New York with her husband Gilbert Highet, and she died there in 1985. She had degrees in French and German, but was working as a librarian when she met Highet.

Like the Bourne stories, MacInnes' tales bring the reader along with a character who is smart, tough, but always in jeopardy. Also like Ludlum's books, MacInnes' take her reader all over the world at a sometimes dizzying pace, and it's a terrific ride.

I started reading MacInnes when I was a teenager, and I had soon moved through all of her titles, my favorites being The Salzburg Connection, Neither Five Nor Three, The Venetian Affair, Decision at Delphi, Double Image, Snare of the Hunter. You can't really go wrong when picking up a Helen MacInnes. She is required reading in this field, and were she writing today, she would be as much of a franchise as Ludlum's books have become.
As evidence of her great plots, here's some flyleaf copy for The Venetian Affair that I found on Italian-mysteries.com: "New York drama critic Bill Fenner arrives in Paris, only to discover that his coat has accidentally been switched with another---and that he is therefore now $100,000 richer. But when the American Embassy refers him to NATO and the CIA, what started as a simple mistake becomes something far more complicated and deadly. For when Fenner hears of a Communist plot to assassinate DeGaulle, he is also informed that the key to stopping it lies in his own past..."(© Fawcett Crest)

Isn't that great? Doesn't that sound very Bourne-like? It certainly makes me wonder if Ms. MacInnes at any point influenced the great Robert Ludlum.

I would just like to have my own moment of hubris here and say that when the inevitable MacInnes movie comes out, I predicted it here--Julia Buckley, 2007. And if anyone out there making the movie is looking for extras, sign me up. :)

P.S. Happy Birthday to my mother, who introduced me to Helen MacInnes and many other great writers.