NEW STUFF: A Talent for Murder - Andrew Wilson

A Talent for Murder by Andrew Wilson
Atria Books/Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 978-1-5001-4506-3
310 pp. $26
Publication date: July 11, 2017

Back in 1978 I remember reading (and later seeing the movie) Agatha by Kathleen Tynan. This was the first attempt by an novelist to concoct a reason for Agatha Christie’s mysterious two week disappearance in December 1926, following an argument with her husband about his affair with a young woman. Christie's strange relocation to a spa at Harrowgate (where she was registered under the same last name as her husband’s lover) was attributed to amnesia and depression. But before she was found the press dreamed up wild stories ranging from an elaborate publicity stunt to help sell her books to kidnapping to possible murder. Tynan’s story reduced the mystery to a preposterous revenge plot completely out of character for the real Agatha Christie. Now Andrew Wilson, biographer of Patricia Highsmith and many others, has tried his hand at spinning his own thriller to explain the same period when the Grand Dame of Mysterydom vanished for several days in A Talent for Murder (2017). Having completed extensive biographical and literary research Wilson’s story is more in keeping with Christie’s personality and temperament but it is nonetheless just as implausible. Knowing that he was first interested in the life and writing of Highsmith ought to prepare you for what is clearly a crime novel inspired by both women’s books.

Wilson has fashioned an odd story of grief, depression and murder by proxy. Like Highsmith’s first novel Strangers on a Train he has created his own version of Charles Bruno in the person of Patrick Kurs, a megalomaniac physician who is tired of his invalid wife and wants her gone. He manipulates Agatha into carrying out the murder of his wife by threatening her with exposure of her husband’s affair which he knows far too much about. Agatha is just beginning to enjoy success as a bestselling writer thanks to the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and any publicity of her philandering husband would be scandalous to her personal life and detrimental to her professional life.

Kurs has read …Ackroyd, of course, and commends Agatha for the tour de force novel. He cannot stop talking about it and how he greatly admires the character Dr. Sheppard, who he feels is one of Mrs. Christie’s greatest creations. In fact, he regards the fictional doctor “something of a hero” much to Agatha’s horror. Even more horrifying is Kurs' additional threat of doing harm to Agatha’s young daughter Rosamund if the novelist does not follow Dr. Kurs’ implicit instructions on how to do in his wife.

A parallel story follows when Agatha meets Una Crowe and her friend John Davison. Una aspires to become a reporter and will have ample opportunity to do so when Mrs. Christie suddenly goes missing. Sensational newspaper headlines spur on Una who is determined to beat the pros at their own game and reveal the truth herself. Her amateur sleuthing uncovers Archie Christie’s affair which leads her to Nancy Neele, the mistress, and eventually to the office of Nancy’s confidante, her private physician Dr. Patrick Kurs.

Wilson has done an admirable job of incorporating Christie’s biography into A Talent for Murder. However, there is an unfortunate avalanche of this information within the first two chapters that almost ruins the crime plot before it has a chance to even start. Wilson has chosen to emphasize the recent death of Christie’s mother and he allows Agatha to spend much of her time wallowing in nostalgia and reminiscing about her childhood. This is how she is coping with her grief, but coupled with the knowledge that her husband is cheating on her and planning to leave her Agatha’s emotional life and state of mind are always at the near breaking point.

In the parallel story of Una Crowe there is also the shadow of a recent family death. We learn just as much about Una’s interior life as we do Agatha’s. The idea that fragile women both dealing with overpowering grief are channeling their energies into writing and sleuthing is an interesting one. While Una is determined to solve the riddle of the missing mystery writer, Mrs. Christie is determined to outwit Dr. Kurs in his bizarre murder plot and expose him at his own game. Each woman is doing her best to live up to the memory of her lost relative as well as finding a way back to herself and the real world. The juxtaposition of these two stories and their eventual intersection and overlap are the most successful aspects of this often gripping book.

Unfortunately, the character work is often heavy handed and one gets the feeling that Wilson couldn’t decide between his two crime novelist influences. Several scenes with the stubborn Supt. Kenward who suspects Archie Christie of killing his wife become repetitious in how Christie continually denies all accusations levelled at him increasingly losing his patience and temper with the unimaginative policemen. There are also elements of Christie’s Westamacott novels that threaten to drown the story in domestic soap opera. But then Wilson will insert a delicious scene with ambiguous dialogue and hidden motives straight out of Highsmith that invigorates the narrative.

Andrew Wilson
(photo ©Johnny Ring)

The use of unusual poisons in the plot, however, remind us we are clearly in the world of Agatha Christie. There are several chapters devoted to Agatha’s research into choosing a unique poison with chemical properties that will allow her to thwart Dr. Kurs’ murder plot. The final third of the novel in which Agatha finally meets up with Flora Kurs, their joining forces against the amoral doctor coupled with the story of Una Crowe’s near coup de grace in uncovering the truth about Agatha’s disappearance make for the most exciting parts of this on-again-off-again thriller.

If in the end the novel is less of a whodunit honoring Christie and more homage to Highsmith’s fascination with criminal behavior and the dark recesses of human emotion that is no real fault. The reader unfamiliar with Agatha Christie’s personal life will benefit from Wilson’s intensive research with an ample amount of biographical background that renders her more lifelike and true than Kathleen Tynan’s Agatha. Wilson’s love of Christie’s work and respect for her storytelling and plotting skills are also on grand display. There are some well done Christie-like touches and requisite plot twists that may catch a few readers off guard and perhaps even elicit a gasp or two.

FFB: The Goddess: A Demon - Richard Marsh

THE STORY: John Ferguson witnesses the gruesome murder of his neighbor and gambling rival at the hands of a knife wielding cloaked figure. Moments later a woman appears at his bedroom window. He lets her in and sees she is drenched in blood. She cannot remember her name, where she lives, how she came to be at his window or why she is wearing a blood-soaked cloak. In fact, she can recall nothing not even whether John is the name of a man or woman. Ferguson is bewitched by her beauty, vaguely recalls having seen her somewhere and is certain she has nothing to do with his neighbor's death despite her gruesome state of her clothing and the coincidence of her sudden appearance so shortly after the murder. He sets out to discover who she is, why she came to the building and who really killed Edwin Lawrence and why.

CHARACTERS: The Goddess: A Demon (1900) is narrated by John Ferguson, a typical sensation novel protagonist of the early 20th century. He's ridiculously wealthy but we have no idea what he does for living. Extremely tall, with an intimidatingly athletic build and a volatile temper Ferguson is very much like the numerous musclebound playboys who will turn up in American hero pulps and comic books fighting criminals as a lark. He has a self-deprecating wit often calling himself an idiot and stupid for not seeing things clearly and acting on impulse. But his talent for quick put downs and emasculating language calls to mind the smart aleck private eyes of the 1930s and 1940s. There are several times when others comment on Ferguson's "persuasive manner" -- a euphemistic and ironic way to call attention to his penchant for talking with his fists and roughhousing disagreeable men. There's a lot to like about Ferguson even if he has a tendency (as do many of Marsh's characters) to drone on in an artificial manner of speech, even for an Edwardian man: "Mr Morley, be at ease, fear nothing. You are the sole proprietor of your own tongue, use it to preserve silence..." A gentlemanly, yet snide way to tell someone to shut up.

The woman is soon identified as a notable actress through some rudimentary detective work occasioned by formulaic clues: a letter signed B, a handkerchief with the initials E.M., and -- most convenient of all -- a photograph stamped on the reverse with the name of a well known professional studio. This last allows Ferguson not only to confirm the woman's identity but find out her home address. That's the extent of the detective work. There are a handful of police characters led by a generic inspector, but the investigation of the murder takes a backseat to the uncovering of the woman's identity and Ferguson's determination to clear her name. He goes to great lengths to protect even to manufacturing a patently false case for himself as the killer. Inspector Symonds sees through it almost immediately.

Supporting characters include a series of servants, various ruffians, and notably the unctuous Dr. Hume, a "mental pathologist" who serves as Ferguson's foil.  Hume is a quasi-villain just as determined to prove that Ferguson is not only obstructing justice but that he is most likely insane. He plays detective by breaking into Ferguson's room and finding the incriminating bloodstained cloak that Ferguson foolishly wadded up and shoved in the back of his wardrobe rather than destroying it. Dr. Hume actually believes nearly everyone he encounters is mad in one way or another. We get to listen to his theories about all sorts of mental illnesses from outright insanity to "brain fever."  He's an insufferable ass when he's interacting with Ferguson and Marsh clearly has some less than favorable ideas about the arrogance and overwrought egos of men of science.

Another foil to Ferguson is Miss Adair, actress and roommate to the amnesiac woman known as Bessie. The scenes between these two offer Marsh more opportunities to revel in his sarcastic sense of humor which enlivens a story that has a tendency to spill over into indulgently lurid melodrama. Miss Adair is amused by Ferguson's head over heels infatuation with her roommate and can't help but ridicule his beauty worship.

The criminal activity is not just confined to savage murder. A stereotyped Jewish moneylender named Isaac Bernstein plays an important part in the story. Money, debts, forgery and financial chicanery all rear their ugly heads by the midpoint. At the start Ferguson was seen gambling at cards with Lawrence who the reader knows has cheated him. Lawrence has a habit of keeping a "debt diary" which describes how Ferguson owes him a total £1880. No better motive could have been handed to the police. Couple this with Dr. Hume's discovery of the bloody cloak and things do not look good at all for our temperamental hero.

Richard Marsh,
in his later years, circa 1910s

QUOTES:  "It is possible for persons of even ripened years to feel surprised, as you will discover when you yourself attain to years of discretion."

With scant ceremony he endeavored, without a word of explanation, to force his way into the house. I am not a man with whom every one finds it easy to play that kind of game. When I am pushed, I push. Placing my hand against his chest, he went backwards across the pavement at a run.

"I don't fancy, Mr. Ferguson, that all women are built exactly on Bessie's lines."
"Would that they were. Miss Moore is the stuff of which our mothers should be made."
She looked at me a little sideways; I was conscious of it, though I myself looked straight ahead.
"Are you married, Mr. Ferguson?"
"No, I am not so fortunate."
"Ah! I shouldn't be surprised if you were so fortunate a little later on."

He was an out-size in policemen; all of five foot ten, well set up, with a carriage which denoted muscle. Fortunately for my purpose, his face did not point to a surplus of brains; he struck me as being stupid as I was.

Coroner at the inquest: "Witness, look at me."
Ferguson, who has previously been evading his questions with banter:  "If you desire it, with the greatest pleasure. Though there doesn't seem to be much to look at."

THINGS I LEARNED: The edition I read is a modern reprint and heavily annotated by Richard Marsh expert Minna Vuohelainen. There are over 100 footnotes on period vocabulary, literary allusions and London geography. Some of it interesting, but much of it unnecessary. Does a literary scholar really need to footnote well known literary figures like Hercules, Samson, Echo; basic Latin like non compos mentis, ipso facto, ergo; as well as defining words and terms like lasso, promissory note, and letting us know that "all the kings horses and all the king's men" refers to Humpty Dumpty?  This is patronizing scholarship at its most annoying. I kept flipping back to read all of the notes with increasing astonishment.  I did think the London geographical notes were vital and useful. But so many of the endnotes were insulting in their pedantry.

But there were also blatant oversights in these endnotes. Like the paragraph in which we learn that Miss Adair and Ferguson are seated while traveling up to the seventh floor in an electric lift. I had no idea early elevators in England were equipped with seats for the passengers. Vuohelainen makes sure to give us the dates of the invention of electricity, the phonograph, the typewriter, and the elevator each time they are mentioned but neglects to point out the fascinating detail of seats in the lift when mentioned. Twice in a single paragraph, no less.

Ferguson lives in what must have been the 1900 version of a state-of-the-art luxury apartment building. It is seven stories tall, has electric lights not gas, two electrically powered elevators (one for servants, another for residents), a full staff of valets and maids for each floor plus a housekeeper and cook who provided breakfast for residents. He mentions at one point in the book that he carries more money on him than most people: £100 in notes and £20 in sovereigns. This is the equivalent of £14,000 (US$11,471) in 2016 currency! At no point on the book do we ever learn what he does for a living, but it's obvious he's wealthy whatever his profession. His cavalier attitude and quick temper might have a lot to do with the entitlement of the rich.

Interestingly, though the book is very much about gambling, spendthrift lifestyle, usury and financial irresponsibility Vuohelainen does not discuss money, finance or wealth at all in her lengthy introduction. Rather she devotes much of her lecturing on a section entitled "Modernity and mental health" going so far as to cite specific usage of words like idiot, lunatic, maniac and all references to madness to drive home her point. But to my mind the use of the word idiot, almost always spoken by Ferguson about himself, as well as all the other synonyms are all used quite obviously in the vernacular.  Only when Dr. Hume is talking about madness are any of these terms directly related to mental health or lack of it. Throughout the novel it is Hume alone who is obsessed with mental illness and madness.

EASY TO FIND?  Thanks to Valancourt Books The Goddess: A Demon is available in their usual handsomely designed paperback books as well as a digital version. There are other POD reprints of many of Richard Marsh's books since they've all lapsed the copyright laws but I'd recommend any of the Valancourt editions. The biographical information in Vuohelainen's introduction I found to be the most interesting. The "literary analysis" I thought to be mostly misguided and spurious and ended up skipping over almost all of it.  There are also seven appendices on topics incidentally raised in the novel such as "Alcohol and personality" and "Women, nerves and sexuality".  Of these appendices the most compelling is the collection of contemporary newspaper reviews of Marsh's novel. It's always interesting to read what people of the time thought of what amounts to the precursor of pulp fiction.

FFB: Give Me Back Myself - L. P. Davies

Stephen Dusack has a bit of a problem. After suffering major injuries in a train derailment he is under the care of both doctors and psychiatrists. He has been interviewed multiple times about his life history and each time he tells his story about growing up in South Africa, working for a mining company, and recently leaving that country for England where he hoped to start life anew in the little village of Studdold all the medical staff tend to give the impression that they doubt his veracity. They all think he is David Orme and send Stephen home with Orme's secretary and business associate Howard Downey. Broke and without even having started his new job Dusack reluctantly agrees. At Orme's massive estate protected by electronic gates and a gun toting chauffeur Stephen's identity crisis plunges into a nightmare world of conspiracy, paranoia and murder attempts.

Davies spent most of his writing career riffing on themes of identity confusion and amnesia. He wrote in all genres often blending and hybridizing well known tropes of detective fiction (amnesia victims) and science fiction (mind altering drugs) into a kind of new subgenre of his own invention. Psychogeist (1966) tells of a young man who cannot remember who he is and alternates with his hallucinatory dreams of an alien world that parallel the story of his recovery from amnesia. Or is he actually an alien who crash landed on Earth? Probably his best known crime novel treatment of identity loss is his second novel Who Is Lewis Pinder? (1965), originally titled Man Out of Nowhere in the UK. Give Me Back Myself (1971) belongs with Davies' crime fiction novels. It presents the story of Stephen's search for his true identity as a tale of an unbelievable conspiracy with no introduction of either supernatural or science fiction elements.

In these amnesia novels we are always hoping for the hapless protagonist to find at least one ally who will believe his story, help him uncover the truth and bring the villainy to light. Stephen finds his allies quite by accident when he asks for directions of his next door neighbor Ambrose Kenny. Later Kenny's daughter Fran will stop by for her weekly visit and she will turn out to be both confidante and detective cohort. The manner in which Stephen and his two allies slowly uncover the plot is done with ingenuity and a few startling surprises. You have to credit Davies with a fertile imagination in continually finding new methods to essentially tell the same story repeatedly.

Though his books are out of print copies of nearly every one of Davies' fascinating books are easily found in the used book market at very affordable prices. I'm sure many of his books, not just Give Me Back Myself, can be find both in US and UK libraries as well.

I read this book for both Bev Hankins' Silver Age Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge and Rich Westwood's 1971 Mystery Reading Challenge. For more on L. P. Davies breathtaking displays of variation on the theme of amnesia and identity confusion see Sergio Angelini's reviews of Man Out of Nowhere and The Alien.

FFB: Alarum and Excursion - Virginia Perdue

The special code on the spine and front flap of this 1944 Doubleday Crime Club novel is an exclamation mark indicating that the editors thought it "Something New." The reader should expect a story that deviates from the traditional whodunit, one that offers more than just "A Chess Puzzle" or "Fast Action" or "Humor and Homicide" as the other categories on the rear of the jacket promise. Turning to the inside jacket blurb and reading that it is yet another in a long line of amnesia crime stories should not deter the reader from opening to the first page. Alarum and Excursion is indeed something new in crime fiction; apart from the unusual story it is one of the earliest noir novels from a woman writer of this period.

There are  number of features that make Perdue's book stand out from the rest of the amnesiac crowd. First, her protagonist Nicholas Methany is 62 years old and the CEO of his own oil company. You can probably guess the story is not going to include any action scenes of youthful derring-do. Plus, he has two grown children and a very young wife. Second, the manner in which Methany's memory returns is orchestrated with some of the most original and realistic scenes in a book of this type. He never completely loses his memory, as I expect would happen in a real amnesia situation. Methany can only recall vague moments and envision hazy glimpses of a specific event -- a lab explosion at his firm Seaboard Petroleum that left him injured.

In two of the most cleverly done parts Methany is given modeling clay and he finds himself unconsciously shaping and forming it into a serpent ready to strike. Later he will find an exact replica of that snake in a drawer in his home and it will have great significance to a plot that slowly is revealed to him. In another scene Hero, his wife, puts out her cigarette in an small earthenware container she uses as an ashtray and Methany is instantly taken back to a similar scene in his past. The smell of a perfume, the sound of a voice, the mention of a name -- all of these will jar his broken memory bank and send him into the past, remembering and piecing together his past life to help him explain his present predicament. It's all carefully orchestrated by Perdue and rings true in every instance.

As his memory of the accident gradually returns into full focus Methany learns that two people died and one was most likely murdered. He also learns that the accident was not an accident at all but a plot to undermine the development of a synthetic fuel his firm was about to release. With gasoline in short supply and the US entering the war, Methany is sure his non-petroleum based alternate fuel will be the saving grace for the war effort. He plans to give the formula to the military free of charge or licensing fees. But there are others in his company who disagree with Methany's altruism and see nicoline (the fuel's name) as the means to financial riches if the formula were offered up for sale.

There is a lot to recommend the book: the structure and plot details are imaginative and well thought out, Perdue's muscular prose that walks a fine line between being tough and sentimental, and a cast of unusual minor characters. I will single out Professor Wyndham, a kooky paleontologist locked up at the Crestview mental institution where Methany is recuperating, who walks three steps forward and one back, talks about life on Mars and Mercury and helps Methany in a daring escape.  Much later in the book we meet the crude saloon piano player, Beulah Westmore, who has some vital information about Methany's son's involvement in the lab explosion and why it happened.

As each characters' true nature is revealed the novel ventures further into the realm of noir. The strange relationship between Hero, her ex-con father Charley Van Norman, and Methany becomes one of seedy corruption , self-interest and base greed. The finale is as dark as any noir of the 1950s. And the last paragraph is one guaranteed to induce a gasp of awe in any reader. I know let loose with a "Wow!" before I closed the book.

SIDEBAR: In an attempt to learn more about Virginia Perdue I discovered that she had a special relationship with Robert Heinlein. According to The Heinlein Society website in the 1930s Perdue and Heinlein were friends. She was instrumental in giving the science fiction writer advice on submitting his manuscripts to mainstream magazines, not just the pulps, and encouraged him to write novels. Heinlein's second wife also believed that the relationship went a bit deeper than just writers helping each other out with their careers. A feature article on Perdue (rather than the two paragraphs I found) was supposed to appear in an issue of The Heinlein Journal, but I was unable to find it.