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?

Falling in love with Raymond Chandler . . . wait, isn't he, um, dead?

By Lonnie Cruse

As a reader, I love mysteries best of all, followed loosely by science fiction, followed slowly by romance, depending on the romance. And I read a lot of non-fic, but this is about fiction.

There are authors I only buy in hardback, regardless of the room they take up on my book shelves. There are authors I buy only in paperback, and I'm willing to part with some of them when I'm done. Others I keep. Sadly, sometimes my fave author's latest work only come in paperback, sigh. Hardbacks are so nice to hold. But I digress.

I buy mostly new mysteries, but I'll by vintage versions if I come across an interesting looking one at an antique shop or hear about it online. (Tip: IF you are looking for an old book you read years ago or heard about, try an Internet search. Much quicker than antique stores.)

The biggest problem with vintage mysteries is how much tastes have changed over the decades, so some are difficult to read, for several reasons. Political correctness is probably the biggest change. Things that could be said or terms that could be used in the thirties and forties certainly can not be said/used in modern-day writing. And often the talent is lacking, except for the legends like Chandler, Hammett, and Agatha Christie. Well, okay, that's still true today, sometimes talent is lacking, sometimes it's so powerful it blows the reader away. Still buying/reading a vintage book can be chancy. Which brings me back to Raymond Chandler.

I've loved the movie THE BIG SLEEP since I first watched it, and I pull it out at least once a year. Bogart/Bacall. Who can beat that combo? Add to the mix one Peggy Knudsen who plays the part of Eddie Mars' blonde wife and who gives me four degrees of separation from Bogart/Bacall. Stick with me here. Bogart/Bacall play the leads, Knudsen plays a minor part, her mother, Mrs. Knudsen (mercifully I can't remember her first name, IF I was every allowed to know it) taught seventh grade at Fifth Street Elementary School in Las Vegas, Nevada in the 1950's, and I, sadly was not her favorite student. Not even close. Still, four degrees of separation, no? And I think we heard about "my daughter, the movie actress" at least once a day either before math or after spelling. But again, I digress. I'm good at that.

Recently I read a discussion of Raymond Chandler's works on the DorothyL mystery discussion list. Intrigued, I broke down and searched the Net for his books. Lucked onto THE RAYMOND CHANDLER OMNIBUS, published in 1964. It includes The Big Sleep, (1939) Farewell, My Lovely, ( 1940) The High Window, (1942) The Lady In The Lake (1943.)

I started reading with Lady In The Lake, at the back of the book, because it's been made into a rather a silly movie with Robert Young and Audrey Totter, but it's set at Christmas. I'd been warned that the actual book was set in warm weather and the movie very loosely followed it. Chandler's writing immediately engrossed me. And, yes, the book was far better than the movie.

From there I moved to reading The Big Sleep. Ahhh, how the man can turn a phrase. I particularly love Chandler's descriptions. Rarely does he simply describe a character's clothing. Generally he says what it is, then compares it to something surprising, creating a wonderful word picture not only of the clothing but of the character who wore it. Below are two of my favorites:

After describing his own wardrobe choice for the morning, powder-blue suit, blue shirt, blue tie, etc. Marlow says: I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. (Chapter 1 para 1) That got a laugh out of me.

In chapter 11 para 1 Marlow describes the clothing of Vivian Regan. The last sentence of the paragraph reads: Her black hair was glossy under a brown Robin Hood hat that might have cost fifty dollars and looked as if you could have made it with one hand out of a desk blotter. One hand? A desk blotter? Wahahahah!

Okay, maybe I'm easy to please, but the descriptions the man used blow me away. Often better than in books written this decade.

I don't know about Chandler's day but in this day and time, newbie authors are taught pretty quickly the do's and don'ts of writing. Don't use words ending in "ly", don't start a sentence like this: Crossing the room, she saw . . . . Punctuation rules, argh, some have changed over time, and what hasn't changed I forgot before Mrs. Knudson ever turned me loose on the unsuspecting reading world. Vintage mysteries often break these rules, mostly because the rules didn't exist back then. Writers like Chandler do it, get away with it, and make you like it. Their writing is timeless, wonderful in the thirties and forties, still wonderful seven decades or so later.

IF you've not read anything by Raymond Chandler, or IF you think you know his writing from the movies, don't kid yourself and don't cheat yourself out of a wonderful read. Get a copy of one of his books (or luck onto an omnibus, ABE books online carries them and they are nice ones) and start reading. You won't be sorry.

Thankfully, I still have two more in the omnibus to read, along with THE PENGUIN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH by Donna Andrews, among other reads. Sigh, so much time, so many books.

And I hope you, dear reader, are not one of those people who was taught to clean your plate and read every page in a book, whether you like the book or not. Life is too short. If you hate the book, skip to the end, IF you have to know the end, then put it down and pick up something you know you'll enjoy. IF your to-be-read (TBR) pile begins to shrink, there is bound to be a new book somewhere by one of your favorite authors to read. Personally, I'm three and a half books behind on reading Donna Andrews, at least one by Bill Crider, and I daren't even look at my Anne Perry or Dorothy Cannell list. Sigh.