#criminous

[criminous]

Vintage Mystery Mini-Review: The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett (1934).

Plot: Hammett's husband-and-wife team of Nick and Nora Charles team up to investigate murder, mysterious disappearances, and money. While partying and drinking.  A lot.  Pretty much non-stop, in fact.

Review: This was the only novel of Hammett's which features the convivial and thoroughly saturated Charles'.  In fact, the Charles' drink so much you have to remind yourself that the novel takes place during Prohibition.  It's light in tone, with witty dialogue and generally harmless situations, even when violence comes into play; one can see why it was the starting point to the successful series of movies that borrowed its title.  It's not his best work, but it would have been interesting to see where he might have taken the couple in subsequent adventures.

Availability: Paperback, everywhere

Score: 3.5 blood-encrusted daggers out of five

[criminous]

Vintage Mystery Mini-Review: The Mad Hatter Mystery, by John Dickson Carr (1933).

Plot: Carr's rotund detective Gideon Fell must wrestle with two strange crimes: the theft of notable citizens' hats and their re-appearances on notable London landmarks, and the death of a young newspaperman at the Tower of London itself.  What's the connection between these two odd cases?  How can someone be murdered at London's most famous attraction without anyone noticing?  And what does any of this have to do with a recently discovered manuscript by one Edgar Allan Poe?

Review: Carr's mystery works well in the buildup, but less successfully in the delivery.  Carr's work (at least to me) often seems to use the mystery genre almost as an academic exercise, and his occasionally laborious and technical explanations of the crime distract from the flow and suspense of the narrative.  I liked a lot of the pieces of this puzzle, and much of the ending, but there's something about his writing I find strangely...bloodless. 

Availability: Paperbacks, in used bookstores

Score: 3.0 blood-encrusted daggers out of five

[criminous]

True Crime Panoply.

[criminous]

Vintage Mystery Mini-Review: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie (1926).

Plot: Who murdered the widower Roger Ackroyd? Was the fantastic tale he told about poison & murder before his own death true?  In the small English hamlet of King's Abbott, who among the many suspects stood most to gain from the mysterious deaths?  And can Hercule Poirot solve the mystery before more people die?

Review: One of the most well-known and most controversial books in Christie's incredible body of work, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd changed the mystery genre forever. If you don't know why (and really, where have you been) you MUST get your hands on this and read it immediately.

Howard Haycraft, whose 1941 reference work Murder for Pleasure is one of the cornerstones of mystery genre history/analysis, calls Ackroyd "a tour de force in every sense of the word and one of the true classics of literature" while at the same time acknowledging that it "provoked the most violent debate in detective story history."

Availability: Everywhere, in multiple formats

Score: 5.0 blood-encrusted daggers out of five

[criminous]

Homicide by icepick to the brain. Taken at the National Museum of Health & Medicine, Silver Spring, MD.

[criminous]

Today's True Crime Tuesday is a 2 for 1 mini-review special, thanks to true crime expert Harold Schecter!

Schecter, whose day job is Professor of American Literature, has created/edited two of the best American true crime anthologies in recent years. Psycho USA is Schecter's own compilation of notorious American criminals long forgotten; True Crime is a Library of America anthology he edited featuring the best American true crime writing/writers in our nation's history.  Both volumes are well-researched and presented, and are full of masterly depictions of some of our country's darkest deeds.

Each is a wonderful volume (if you're into this sort of thing, which if you're reading this, is safe to assume--sick bastards). True Crime features famous writers like Mark Twain, Truman Capote, H.L. Mencken alongside true crime pioneers like Edmund Pearson, Ann Rule, and Dominick Dunne. Psycho USA features notorious criminals like Smutty Nose axe murderer Louis Wagner and 'The Man of Two Lives' Edward Ruloff, and tells why 1927 might have been the apex (or nadir, depending on preference) of true crime in America.

Both of these volumes are available in bookstores, and quite affordable. I wish that Psycho USA had a hardcover option, but that's just me.  Both are must-haves for the library of the true-crime aficionado.