Masterpieces Of Mystery: The Golden Age, Part I – Compiled by Ellery Queen, 1977 ★★

What Was So Golden about the Golden Age?

Detective fiction long ago moved from the whodunit to the whydunit; today it often employs a complicated, psychological approach. So what can be learned from this anthology of mystery writers from its simpler Golden Age?

Do any of them still stand up to modern scrutiny, apart from Agatha Christie, still the reigning Shakespeare of the form? After reading through these 350 pages, I’m still wondering.

Mystery fiction has been around in some form since Edgar Allen Poe; it reached an early commercial zenith in the first half of the 20^th Century. That was a Golden Age for rounding up the usual suspects: Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Charlie Chan, Ellery Queen, Lord Peter Wimsey, Nero Wolfe, and a host of other sly sleuths kept faithful readers on their toes even as highbrows sneered at their locked-room formulas and quaint aesthetics.

What this collection gives you is charm aplenty and a deal of head-scratching, too. Here’s the rundown:

Dead Man’s Mirror by Agatha Christie (1931) – Christie gets the leadoff position, as well as the longest story, of a dead man found in a locked dressing room during an opportune visit by Monsieur Poirot.

The Hunt Ball by Freeman Wills Crofts (1943) – A dastard named Skeffington kills a man who has discovered him to be a card cheat. Can the reader figure out how Inspector Joseph French catches him out?

The Yellow Slug by H. C. Bailey (1935) – A boy raving about Hell tries to drown his little sister. Can Dr. Reggie Fortune uncover the secret crime that sparked his mad act?

A Perfectly Ordinary Case Of Blackmail by A. A. Milne (1948) – Put onto resolving a blackmailing case, a fellow named Scroope lays some clever traps for the perpetrator.

A Lesson In Crime by G. D. H. Cole & M. I. Cole (1944) – In a lighter piece, we meet a successful mystery writer as he encounters his most devoted – and dangerous – fan.

The Haunted Policeman by Dorothy L. Sayers (1937) – After getting married, Peter Wimsey settles his nerves by helping a flustered bobby solve a mystery involving a vanishing murder scene.

The Wood-for-the-Trees by Philip MacDonald (1947) – In a sleepy English village, a crazed killer is on the loose. Can Colonel Anthony Gethryn unmask the fiend at a country-estate soiree?

The Man Who Sang In Church by Edgar Wallace (1927) – The Three Just Men are called upon to help a mysterious woman being blackmailed by a desperate fellow who knows his way around a hymnal.

The Dollar Cheaters by Earl Derr Biggers (1933) – Someone has made off with a tycoon’s lucky dollar during a pleasure cruise. Can a clever reporter who pines for the tycoon’s daughter recover the missing buck?

The Green Goods Man by Leslie Charteris (1932) – A confidence artist who claims to make undetectable fake money picks the wrong mark: Simon Templar, a. k. a. “The Saint.”

One Hour by Dashiell Hammett (1924) – When the Continental Op is called upon to look into a mysterious traffic fatality, his first hour of investigation may turn out to be his last hour alive.

The Death Of Don Juan by Ellery Queen (1962) – The complier himself steps forward in the final story to solve the fatal stabbing of an actor during an intermission of the title play.

You get here several known names, some working outside their usual territory. Earl Derr Biggers was the creator of Charlie Chan, here employing a cub reporter as protagonist; Dashiell Hammett is famous for Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles, less so the Continental Op encountered here. You even get A. A. Milne, best known for mysteries involving missing honey pots but who did stretch his writing confines beyond Pooh Corner.

Some of these mystery writers were complete mysteries to me. I never heard of the Three Just Men, for example. These are three men who live in a ritzy part of London and fight crime by appointment.

Utterly formulaic, Wallace’s “The Man Who Sang In Church” exposes a key weakness of Golden-Age mystery fiction as seen here; how people in them act like gimcrack constructs rather than human beings. When the woman being blackmailed first appears in the waiting room of the Three Just Men, she tells the specific Just Man given charge of her case, Leon Gonsalez, not to turn on the light, a la Lucie Mannheim.

“I do not wish to be recognized if you meet me again,” she says.

Gonsalez assures her he had no intention of turning the light on, explaining he already figured out her concern by the fact she called upon him so close to dusk. Later, he tells the other two Just Men: “I know so much about this lady that I could write a monograph on the subject.”

Edgar Wallace, creator of the Three Just Men, cast a shadow in his own time as a mystery writer; today he may be most notable for developing the original script for what became the 1933 film King Kong. Image from Wikipedia.

There’s a kind of smugness in the telling, not only here but in others in this collection, which in addition to thin storycraft and improbable resolutions makes for tedious reading in the main.

In “The Green Goods Man,” for example, The Saint is completely on to the criminal perpetrator from the start, and deftly avoids his feints and fakes in order to make the perp uncomfortable before clinching the case. In “The Death Of Don Juan,” the only story here written after the 1940s, Ellery Queen (in reality two guys from New York City, neither of whom was actually named that) shows himself glibly ahead of a sputtering police inspector at every turn, in a murder that plays like a farce with Queen cracking jokes all the way through to a ridiculous resolution.

Could it be the form is at fault? The Golden Age of Detective Fiction ran close to 30 years, between 1920 and the end of World War II. It had its rules, its “Ten Commandments” laid out by an Anglican priest who moonlighted as a mystery author, Ronald Knox. These rules cover everything from setting (“No more than one secret room or passage is allowable”) to ruling out the supernatural. No “Chinaman” is allowed to appear, for some reason; nor is the investigating detective to double as perpetrator of a crime.

The idea of story-as-puzzle crops up a few times here. Philip MacDonald, we are told in the introduction to “The Wood-for-the-Trees,” once said: “The ideal detective story is a sort of competition between the author and the reader.” In “The Hunt Ball,” Freeman Wills Crofts stops his story at a crucial point to ask the reader: “Where had Skeffington given himself away?”

I was disappointed to realize not that I didn’t know, but that I didn’t care. Having a story play out like a riddle gets reductively stale quick. As for MacDonald, if his story was a competition, it was a rigged and silly one. The murderer, we learn, gave himself away by saying too much about the hair color of one of the victims, which Col. Gethryn picked up on when he found a single, matching hair on the killer. Was I supposed to figure that out?

Even Dame Agatha left me flat. Her “Dead Man’s Mirror” showcases overly intricate plotting and atmospherics taken directly from a “Clue” game. How did the eccentric lord of a manor house end up shot in the head without anyone hearing a thing? Even after Poirot explains it for our benefit, the crime comes off as convoluted. Worse, it lacks for the sort of engagement Christie readers expect.

One problem may be that these are short pieces; mysteries do better with more time to breathe. Yet some enjoyable examples of the craft do show up here, like Sayers’ “The Haunted Policeman.” Sayers’ open-ended approach cuts against the grain of Golden Age fiction in many ways; we encounter investigator Wimsey not in Sherlock mode but listing after too much champagne. His interactions with the puzzled bobby of the title are thus pleasurably circuitous. Even though it presents a rather contrived solution, I found myself a happy passenger on this journey.

The best story for that and other reasons, and one of the longer pieces here, is “The Dollar Cheaters.” Other stories in this collection strain at humor, i. e. “A Lesson In Crime” a predictable sort of parody that gives away its ending in the first page. “The Dollar Cheaters” is just funny. Derr Biggers employs formula staples as a set of believable suspects and a locked-room device (here the tycoon’s yacht) but keeps our focus on its principal character, a plucky fellow out of a Harold Lloyd movie.

Earl Derr Biggers, creator of Charlie Chan and author of "The Dollar Cheaters," which was published in the same year as Biggers' death, 1933. Image from Wikipedia.

“The Dollar Cheaters” also offers slapstick, suspense, a very clever misdirection ploy, and a bit of romance that seems a deliberate send-up but coyly enjoyable for that. Even when I noticed the Golden Age formula revving into gear, it was for once a positive, not con or cheat but a waggish nod in the direction of convention which felt like inspired meta-fiction. I’ve never read one of Derr Biggers’ Charlie Chan novels, which “The Dollar Cheaters” revealed as a regrettable oversight.

If I had to pick a third story worth recommending, apart from “The Dollar Cheaters” and “The Haunted Policeman,” it would be “The Yellow Slug.” It has a creepy ambiance, an intriguing theological subtext, and a gripping investigator in Dr. Reggie Fortune.

“No use feelin’ feelings,” he tells another policeman who doesn’t understand Fortune’s “cool” approach to the case. “We have to go on. We want the truth, whatever it is.”

Fortune even employs psychology, not a common tool of Golden Age mystery fiction, to probe a boy’s sense of guilt and thus solve the crime. It wasn’t much of a crime, but Bailey did keep me reading.

With other stories here, it was more a matter of curiosity at what passed for good mystery fiction back in the day. An introduction to this book notes one unifying characteristic of Golden Age detective fiction is “an exhibition of mental gymnastics;” too often this came off as a kind of hollow preening for effect. It’s quite possible these represent the second-rate output of first-rate writers, as is the case here with Christie. Could another compilation with the same writers have produced something worthier of the “Golden Age” moniker?

Maybe Dr. Fortune put it best: “No use feelin’ feelings.”