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Monday, May 31, 2021

NEGLECTED DETECTIVES: Morrison Sharpe in Death Goes by Bus

Fictional sleuths are known for their idiosyncratic behavior, unusual occupations and sometimes arcane hobbies and pastimes. From the cultivation and care of Nero Wolfe’s orchids to Hercule Poirot’s addiction to sweet liqueurs, from the book collecting of Ellery Queen (among many other detectives) to hot air ballooning of Lyon Wentworth created by Richard Forrest the list of hobbies is teeming with eccentricity, finely honed skill and hidden talents. The long list can provide fodder for a post all its own but today I’d like to talk about the forgotten detective Morrison Sharpe, one of the many amateur sleuths who is a puzzle addict, specifically competitive crossword puzzles and chess problems published in newspapers as contests. Any puzzle will do — even the plot of a detective story, novel or movie — if it isn’t too easy to figure out. Sharpe makes his debut in Death Goes by Bus (1936) by mystery novelist Leslie Cargill, a former newspaper reporter who briefly makes use of that skill in this first of a brief series featuring Sharpe.

Morrison Sharpe never intended to become a detective, but a murder takes place on a bus ride and its strange circumstances arouse his fascination with puzzles. He finds himself hovering around the police while they try to find the murder weapon and determine how the victim was shot on board the bus without anyone noticing. Sharpe cannot help but comment on what to him appears to be clearly obvious but goes unnoticed by befuddled Sgt. Matthews. Astonishingly, Matthews allows himself to be tutored in his own profession by this crossword puzzle expert. Sharpe is rather proud of himself and a not a little egotistic, but his lectures on “logic” and detection” are often specious. For instance, there is a man in an overcoat who the police are trying to track down. This man was seated near the victim and is now nowhere to be found. Matthews is sure he got off when the driver pulled the bus over after the body was discovered. Sharpe offers up ideas that it could be one of the passengers who remained on board and wore the overcoat to disguise themselves but never addresses what happened to the coat after the crime.

As the story progresses Sharpe’s approach to police work relies on this so-called logic and he is constantly advising Matthews and his inspector superior of possibilities neither of them have entertained. However, he tends to go for the fanciful rather than the obvious. And he is so seduced by his logical approach drawing analogies to the cool processes he employs in working out chess problems or solving tricky wordplay in crosswords that he often comes across not exciting but colorless. When he suggests that the killer took advantage of the faulty mechanics of the bus that is always backfiring and timed the firing of the gun so that it was mistaken for another backfire the police ask him then what happened to the gun. Sharpe dismisses this as unnecessary and tells them it will turn up eventually.

Another of his tactics has nothing to do with logic but everything to do with manipulation. He allows the witnesses to talk endlessly hoping that they will reveal themselves in an unprovoked aside or passing tangential comment. Sharpe is good at catching people in lies not because he’s particularly clever or knowledgeable, but because the police are lazy and shortsighted. When someone mentions being served by a waiter at the Golden Lion Hotel Sharpe goes there and learns that the hotel does not employ any waiters but only waitresses. The police never bothered to follow up on that fact. This kind of contrast between professional police carelessness and amateur sleuth genius is contrived.

Death Goes by Bus aspires to be an impossible crime murder mystery, but never really achieves the level of complexity that Cargill hopes for. Sharpe spends much of the book criticizing the police and bragging he knows who killed Caleb Wainwright on the bus, but of course never really shares any of his theories until Cargill sees fit to reveal it to us as readers in the final chapter. The suspects are far more interesting than the detective. When the story turns into one of a massive criminal conspiracy it almost seems as if Cargill has created a version of Murder on the Orient Express on a passenger bus. Nearly everyone on board knew the victim, it will turn out, and many of the passengers have crime in their past. There are cover-ups and betrayals and a plethora of lies to hide the murder motive and the relationships among the passengers and to the victim.

Paperback reprint in Italian translation
(RCS-Corriere della Sera, 2016)

 
It’s really hard to care about anyone, however,  especially Sharpe whose vanity and ego become increasingly annoying. Even when faced with his own demise in the final chapter he is cold, coolly logical, almost inhuman. Only in the cruelly violent and nasty fight with the murderer does the book become remotely exciting. There is the typical villain monologue, after Sharpe confronts the killer and with a gun pointed at him Sharpe is forced into a fight to save himself. The murderer is wounded in the arm, falls to the ground and Sharpe kicks the culprit repeatedly in the head until unconscious. But it’s described so cruelly that our amateur sleuth seems like a closet sadist more than a hero.

Ultimately, the book and its protagonist are a failure. For in the end the impossibility is never fully explained. Sharpe may have uncovered the preposterous conspiracy, unmasked all the crooks and thieves, explained why Caleb Wainwright was shot but never how it all happened. In presenting an impossibility in a murder mystery the author is bound to a tacit pact with the reader to explain everything, not gloss over it out of indifference or laziness. This one very long thread left hanging is infuriating.

Cargill’s books are rather hard to find and I know of only one other Morrison Sharpe book as identified in my edition Hubin’s Crime Fiction which is Heads You Lose (1938). Hardly anything is written about Cargill or his books anywhere. And based on this one book I’m not surprised. There is only one somewhat praiseworthy snippet for Morrison Sharpe and that comes from A Catalogue of Crime (rev., 1989). Of Death Goes by Bus Jacques Barzun wrote: "As routine crime-and detection of its period, this is not a bad work. But it is overlong and the reader becomes skeptical as more and more of the strangers on the bus are found to have dire connections, criminal and passionate. The best part of the tale is the thought and behavior of Mr. Morrison Sharpe, the chess and puzzle expert, who can think one move ahead of both crooks and police. He is quaint and eccentric in just the right way, though short of memorable."  Typical of Barzun, sort of damning with faint praise. Here’s one forgotten and neglected detective who just doesn’t excite me at all.

10 comments:

  1. "Astonishingly, Matthews allows himself to be tutored in his own profession by this crossword puzzle expert."

    To be honest, if the police allowed me to meddle in murder cases, I would lecture them nonstop on the importance of storybook logic and arcane knowledge. Give me a day with a homicide cop and he'll be stroking his gun, while weighing prison time against the satisfaction of shooting me.

    Sorry to read this one turned out to be a dud. I've never heard of Leslie Cargill, or Morrison Sharpe, before and Murder Goes by Bus isn't mentioned in any of the Locked Room Murder editions. The premise surely is interesting enough, a cross between Christie's Murder on the Orient Express and Flynn's Murder en Route, but you really need some skill to pull something like that off.

    "In presenting an impossibility in a murder mystery the author is bound to a tacit pact with the reader to explain everything, not gloss over it out of indifference or laziness."

    Truer words have seldom been spoken!

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  2. A polite quibble: Is it fair to call Hercule Poirot and Nero Wolfe "amateur detectives?" (Eccentric, yes.) Both perform services for clients, and the question of money is explicitly addressed in Archie Goodwin's reports though treated more genteelly by Christie.

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    1. I really need a proofreader and editor. They are indeed professional detectives. Horrible use of wrong adjective. Also I was wrong about Pettigrrew. I’m fixing that paragraph immediately. Thanks for pointing out the error.

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  3. John, you've done absolutely capital work in making this discussion of a book's flaws far, far more interesting than I suspect the experience of reading the book would be, so thank-you for that. And:

    There is the typical villain monologue, after Sharpe confronts the killer and with a gun pointed at him Sharpe is forced into a fight to save himself. The murderer is wounded in the arm, falls to the ground and Sharpe kicks the culprit repeatedly in the head until unconscious.

    Yeesh! My...hero?

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    1. I bought this book several years ago when I planned on reviewing a handful of books that have been translated into Italian and reprinted by Pollilo Editore’s mystery imprint “I Bassoti.” There are 177 titles, many of which are nearly impossible to find in the original English, and over half of the books are locked room or impossible crime novels. I did one review for I Met Murder by Selwyn Jepson in 2018. This was supposed to be the second of four in that series. But when I started reading Cargill’s book I quickly lost interest. Then I forced my self to start again and plow through to the end. Don’t understand why anyone would bother reprinting it in any language. It’s below mediocre solely because of the unexplained method.

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    2. Well, it's good to be reminded that not everything coming out of a particular time or genre was good, right? Makes us cherish the good ones more when we find them...

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  4. Hi, I'm Italian and I think that "Polillo editore" did, and still does, an incredible work in publishing such wonderful forgotten gems such as the novels by Wynne, Alan Thomas, Lee Thayer... I read the Cargill and I agree with you about the disappointing solution, that is not as good as the main character and the central part about the investigation, which I really liked a lot. It's a pity, because it could be a pretty mystery with a different (and explained) solution.

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    1. I never meant to imply that *all* the books reprinted in the "I Bassoti" series were unworthy of being reprinted. The publisher did an admirable job of collecting and getting translated into Italian many of the outright classics of GAD fiction. I will admit that many books and some writers reprinted in this series were new to me. As a result of this education I've been looking for some of the more elusive titles for several years now. Case in point -- Frozen Death by Anthony Weymouth. A few copies came up in athe Otto Penzler auction recently but I'm far too poor to ever compete with these wealthy collectors and booksellers who spend outrageous amounts on scarce books. Finding one in the original English that I can afford is proving to be beyond frustrating. I may have to learn Italian just to read that book!

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    2. Yes, you're right, not all the books are great, I'm the first to admit it (I'm talking about some Walling's books, McGuire and others, that has been forgotten for reasonable motives). But in Italy, where we have a poor mystery tradiction, it's great to have a publishing house that reprints unknown authors.
      I read "Frozen Death" by Weymouth and, even if is a little static and you can quite see who is the culprit, it has an ingenious solution, very simple yet effective. Hope you'll find a copy!

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  5. I thought I knew the name Leslie Cargill but not from crime fiction. Happily the Classic Crime Fiction site had a nice bio of him from his Grandson and by Sue Porter. It turns out he wrote film reviews as a member of the Film Society in the UK and ended up writing for several publications, he even did film talk on the Home Service in the 40's for the Midlands area for the BBC. I have a love of old British films especially horror and a number of friends over the years have posted old reviews. This is where I new his name. Sad to hear his novel doesn't quite work. Wayne.

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