Anthony Lee Collins

Well, to start, who is Thomas Carnacki?

Thomas Carnacki was a supernatural detective, in stories written by William Hope Hodgson in the early 20th century. Carnacki himself was not supernatural (or, as he would have said “ab-natural”) — he just investigated “hauntings” (or things which appeared to be hauntings), using very scientific tools (for 1910).

Six of the nine Thomas Carnacki stories were published in a volume called Carnacki, the Ghost Finder, which I have. Also, those six stories were adapted by Big Finish productions in a series of audio adaptations.

But what about the other three stories, which were written (or at least published) later? I think I found a book online once that appeared to have all nine of the stories, but it was somewhere around $40, and I’m not that enthusiastic.

But then I was checking out the TV Tropes* website and I found that it has a Thomas Carnacki page, and that page has this link.

An ebook, free, with all nine stories!

And so, with great excitement, I read the first of the three new (to me) stories, and it was really lousy! Definitely weaker than any of first six. So, I worried that in the time since “The Thing Invisible” Hodgson had lost the thread of the character.

But the last two were very much up to standard, and, in an especially nice touch, the final story was a straight detective story, with no supernatural elements at all. (The other Carnacki stories all involve apparent “hauntings,” though in some cases the causes turn out to be partially, or entirely, human.)

But then I had another Carnacki discovery — one of the stories, and one of the really good ones at that, was adapted for British TV as part of a series called “The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.” With Donald Pleasance as Thomas Carnacki. Plus, the series also adapted one of the Lady Molly of Scotland Yard stories.

So, as you probably guessed, I ordered that DVD set.

Later: Well, the DVDs arrived, and the Carnacki episode (“The Horse of the Invisible”) is really good. A couple of aspects don’t really work (it was written to work on the page, where the suspension of disbelief works differently), but the acting is good and Pleasance is wonderful. He adds a lot of personality to Carnacki (who is very dry and reserved in the stories, except when he’s in a panic), but I’m not someone who freaks out when the characters on the screen aren’t identical to the originals. (Hey, I like the Robert Downey Jr./Jude Law Sherlock Holmes movies.)

The Lady Molly of Scotland Yard episode is good, too. I liked the little detail that Lady Molly’s office at the Yard was obviously recently a storeroom (there’s a small, handwritten “Female Department” sign on the door, half-covering a sign that says “Stores”). Her superiors need her, but they’re not enthusiastic about it.

 
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* “Tropes,” in this sense, means standard elements used repeatedly in particular types of stories. For example, in a sitcom, “wacky next door neighbor” would be a trope. Or, in mysteries, the “least likely suspect,” or, for that matter, Dr. John Watson himself (the friend, assistant, and biographer).

Two of my favorite tropes are “the noodle incident,” and “lampshading.”

“The Noodle Incident is something from the past that is sometimes referred to but never explained, with the implication that it’s just too ludicrous for words—or perhaps too offensive for depiction—and the reality that any explanation would fall short of audience expectations.”

One example of this is Watson’s (Conan Doyle’s) habit of referring to other, untold, Sherlock Holmes adventures at the beginning of various Holmes stories, such as the case of “the Giant Rat of Sumatra, for which the world is not yet prepared.” Carnacki has some of those also.

I use this also (for example, we know that, when Jan Sleet was in college, she solved several mysteries, which are not reported, at least so far, except as “the surfer case” and “the biker case”).

The Marvel movies have these, too (the mission that Natasha and Clint were on in Budapest, for example).

 
“Lampshade Hanging (or, more informally, ‘Lampshading’) is the writers’ trick of dealing with any element of the story that threatens the audience’s Willing Suspension of Disbelief, whether a very implausible plot development, or a particularly blatant use of a trope, by calling attention to it and simply moving on.”

There’s a lot of that in the Marvel movies, too. Like when Spider-Man complains (correctly) that Captain America’s shield doesn’t obey the laws of physics, or this scene (one of two good scenes in an otherwise lousy movie), specifically when Clint points out that the movie doesn’t make a lot of sense at that moment.

I liked this, from the New Yorker:

“Clues that You Are the Unorthodox Detective in a Murder Mystery“

These caught my attention in particular:

“Your sidekick, if you have one, is a lovable doofus.”

Okay, Archie Goodwin was not a lovable doofus. Neither, for that matter, was Dr. John Watson (or Marshall).

I think the “lovable doofus sidekick” trope can largely be traced to the late Nigel Bruce, who played Dr. Watson in many Sherlock Holmes movies and radio shows. His Watson was definitely a doofus (“lovable” is a matter of taste), but it is not canonical.

“You often will let innocent people remain in prison, despite possessing exonerating evidence, until it serves your purposes to have them released.”

Jan Sleet has never done this, as far as we know, but she totally would.

“Everyone that you meet has at least one dark secret.”

It was a maxim of Nero Wolfe’s that everybody has secrets, and everybody lies. Finding out who committed a murder is not about figuring out who is lying or hiding secrets.

I don’t think Wolfe ever said this explicitly, but his general premise was, “If all that was needed to expose a murderer was to figure out which suspect is lying, then anybody could do it. You wouldn’t need a genius (like me).”

(Wolfe would have said it better, of course.)

“Stilted dialogue, a ludicrous plot: On the pleasures of the vintage whodunit“

When I read this I felt like pumping my fist in the air and yelling, “Yes!” (but, you know, I was at work, so I didn’t).

And the article is right, the first Ellery Queen novel, The Roman Hat Mystery, was pretty dismal. The authors admitted that themselves. But later ones were often really good, including The Chinese Orange Mystery, which is mentioned in the article. That was one of my father’s favorites, because the setup is so bizarre: an unknown man is killed in a locked room in a hotel, and all of his clothes are reversed — back-to-front — and every piece of furniture in the room is reversed (bookcases facing the wall and so on), and the reason, which I won’t reveal here, is so simple.

On the other hand, The Benson Murder Case (the first Philo Vance book) is quite good, though some of the later ones were better (and, yes, some were much, much worse).

In the mystery story I’m writing now, Jan Seet’s books start off the whole story, and I can say with some assurance that Ellery Queen, S. S. Van Dyne (the author of the Philo Vance books), John Dickson Carr, and Rex Stout (the creator of Nero Wolfe) are well represented in those cartons which have been stored in the Arkright family garage.

(Of course, now that I think of it, “stilted dialogue and a ludicrous plot” could also apply to quite a bit of Shakespeare.)

Part one of this post is here.

These days, Ellery Queen is probably known mostly for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, which I read all the time when I was young.

By the way, unlike some of the books I wrote about last time, this was not a case of EQ selling the Queen name. Frederic Dannay, one of the two men who comprised “Ellery Queen,” was the editor of the magazine from the beginning in 1941 until his death in 1982. His name was never mentioned within its pages, though — his editorials and other notes were always signed “EQ.”

(This is the funny bit, by the way. It all starts with two Jewish kids from Brooklyn, cousins, named Daniel Nathan and Emanuel Benjamin Lepofsky. Wanting to be writers, and not wanting to be perceived as two Jewish kids from Brooklyn, they changed their names to Fredric Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee. And then they proceeded to never use either of those new names, since everything they did professionally was under the name “Ellery Queen.”)

Anyway, when writing the first half of this post I started to think about Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and to my surprise, even in these difficult days for magazines, it continues to chug along. Still digest sized, and apparently pretty much the same as it ever was.

I’ll report in more detail after my first copy arrives (I subscribed immediately, natch). It comes in digital format now, too, but I want it, at least for now, the way it always was.

But I had another thought, beyond mere subscription.

1. They publish mystery stories.
2. I write mystery stories.
3. They accept submissions over the transom.
4. They are flexible about other genres mixing in with their mysteries (I remember reading a story way back when about how alibis could work in the future when people get places by teleporting).
5. A regular feature of the magazine has always been the Department of First Stories — publishing writers who have never published professionally before.

Okay, why have I never submitted a story to this magazine?

Hmm.

It’s a good time to be an Ellery Queen fan.

This is not always true, since EQ gets no big respect these days, or even much attention. As far as I know, television hasn’t adapted any Ellery Queen stories since the (excellent, but short-lived) series in the early 1970s. There has never been an EQ movie, and, until recently, most of the books were not available as e-books.

But now the ebooks are coming out, and it’s a pleasure to reread some of the novels and stories.

One thing that makes it difficult to be an EQ fan is that you can’t just pick up an book by “Ellery Queen” and have any idea what you’re getting. Some “Ellery Queen” books were actually written by Ellery Queen (who was really two men, cousins), some were ghostwritten (with plot and editorial work by the cousins), and in many cases “Ellery Queen” was used as a house name for other writers.

See, confusing.

In addition, the actual EQ books vary in style as well as quality. The early books (all of which have a country in the book title) are very complex and cerebral mysteries, similar to the Philo Vance books which were the cousins’ initial inspiration (and which were the biggest selling books into the U.S. during the 1920s).

But then, especially in the books and stories set it the small town of Wrightsville, the stories became much more human, and emotions and motivations came to the fore.

Ellery (the detective was named Ellery Queen, and he was obviously the writer of the books, but the books were not written in first person — see, confusing) was much more affected by the mysteries than he had been in the earlier books. He was also much more on his own (in New York, he lived with his police inspector father and had access to all sorts of official information and assistance — in Wrightsville, he was just a famous writer with no official standing at all).

And in the Wrightsville stories, he (EQ, the writer, the cousins) developed his great theme, which he applied in several different ways: that some mysteries are better not solved, or at least solved but the solution never revealed publicly.

Also, EQ did not create the idea of a serial killer who kills according to a pattern (the first of those was The Bishop Murder Case — which was one of the Philo Vance series), but he (EQ, they) used many variations on that theme over the years as well.

Anyway, thinking about Ellery Queen, and re-reading some of the books and stories in e-book form, led me to a couple of other things, which I’ll write about next time.

(I’ve written about EQ before, here and here.)

Following up on my last post, I have now read Anna Katharine Green’s stories about Violet Strange, the debutante detective.

See, right there it sounds funny, like something out of the “They Fight Crime” website that I talked about here. Going in with that expectation, though, I was surprised on a few different fronts.

For one thing, Miss Strange is not an upper-class amateur, like Philo Vance (who came along a few years later — Violet’s stories were published in 1915). She’s a professional private detective, working for a top agency. She works in secrecy, of course, because of her age and social position, and clients have to agree not to reveal her secret. If clients meet with her, though, it’s because everybody else has failed, so they’re willing to suspend their disbelief that this elegantly dressed teenage girl can help them.

The next surprise was that I had expected, given the setup I’ve just described, that the stories would be fairly light-hearted, maybe even goofy. The idea of a debutante detective reminded me of the movie DEBS (plaid-skirted teenage girl spies), and the spy stuff in that is pretty silly.

But no, the cases Violet solves are serious, some involving terrible family tragedy. A couple even move toward horror of the Edgar Allen Poe type. And Violet is much affected by all this, to the extent that a couple of times she is reluctant to take the next case because of how awful the last one was.

She does take the next case, of course, and it appears that the main factor is the money. Which is the overriding mystery which runs through the whole series: Why is Miss Violet Strange, daughter of the very wealthy Peter Strange, working for money, and at such a disreputable trade? Or is money not really the key after all?

Because she runs great risks to do this work — if her career were discovered it would mean not only the loss of social position and marriage prospects, but she would quite possibly be disowned by her father. There are places she cannot, with propriety, go, and people she cannot see without an escort (her brother, usually, who is clearly aware of her career and understands the reasons behind it).

So, in TV terms, that’s the arc, across all the stories, and there is an answer at the end, both to why she does it and to why she knew she’d be good at it. And, somewhat to her relief, that situation is resolved and she can retire.

Though it’s interesting to wonder about whether she ever needed those skills again, later on in her life…