Women of mystery – beyond the cozies!

My last post about cozy mysteries was an ode to books written by – and often featuring – women. But not all women mystery writers pen cozies. And even that queen of crime, Agatha Christie, often like to try their hand at other genres of the puzzling type. With that in mind, as I refresh my acquaintance with Christie’s oeuvre, I dug into some of her lesser-known works, as well as found traces of her influence even on writers of other schools.

 

I’d read some of Canadian author Louise Penny’s enjoyable mysteries without immediately connecting them to Christie. But when I found Penny’s double-village style book, Bury Your Dead, with its modern take on a locked room murder, I could resist pairing reviews of both women’s works, starting with:

 

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A tale of two villages, or the body in the library (basement)

 

Review of: Bury Your Dead

Author: Louise Penny

Publisher: Minotaur Books

Rating: 4 stars

 

All Chief Inspector Armand Gamache wants in Louise Penny’s 2010 Bury Your Dead is a place to heal physically and emotionally from an operation gone terribly wrong. And where could anyone expect to find more peace and quiet than in an obscure historical library within the walls of the old city of Quebec? Except that this library’s basement holds a murdered body whose discovery threatens to ignite a new round of antagonism between the city’s English-speaking minority and its francophone separatist elements. To top off Gamache’s troubles, harassing letters from Penny’s fictional village of Three Pines lead Gamache to reinvestigate a murder once believed to be closed.

 

Not content with three mysteries – Gamache continually replays the disastrous operation in his head – Penny adds a fourth: the mystery of the lost burial place of Canadian founding father, Samuel de Champlain, whose quest apparently lured the library victim to his doom.

 

Although it would be out of place to peg Penny as a writer of cozy mysteries – most of her books are, to some extent, police procedurals of the Quebec provincial law enforcement agency, the Sûreté du Québec, where Gamache heads the homicide division.

 

Image: Tom Staziker from Pixabay

Still, she often adds her Three Pines setting, a village not shown on any map, and as idyllic as anything Agatha Christie could envision. And as deadly a spot of petty jealousies turned murderous as any Christie’s sleuth Miss Marple reckoned with.

 

Despite the mayhem, Penny’s depictions of both the fictional setting and the village-like insularity of Quebec’s old city, will make readers long to go there. Or as least to Quebec, whose descriptions at the height of the winter carnival season are as enticingly lovely as a life-sized snow globe.

 

Penny’s ability to juggle all these elements is breathtaking. Until the balls start to fall, in endings whose twists some readers will relish and others – not so much. But read on, not forgetting the thrilling action scene near the novel’s end. Pull on your snow boots, marvel at the history, and snuggle in for a diverting read. Wine optional! 

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And just to show that Agatha Christie’s interest in mayhem wasn’t always satisfied with the productions of “the little grey cells,” here’s a selection of her tales of the paranormal as:

 

Queen of crime, empress of eeriness

 

Review of: The Last Séance: Tales of the Supernatural

Author: Agatha Christie

Publisher: William Morrow

Rating: 4 stars

 

The quality of the 20 short stories in this volume is considerably mixed, not surprisingly, considering they were published over a period of more than 40 years. But when they’re good, they’re very good. The title story, “The Last Séance,” is the collection’s gem, in spite of, or perhaps because of its telegraphed ending, which will have readers, like watchers of a horror flick, shouting to the characters, “Don’t go there!”

 

The volume is also notable for the breadth of range. Conventional ghosts are few, but Christie’s writing ranges over mediumistic methodology, prognostication, reincarnation, and religious cults and fanaticism – as in the earliest, 1922’s “The Wife of the Kenite,” billed as a story never before published in the United States, but whose obscure biblical references may puzzle modern readers.

 

Her star detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, even take a few turns. Some tales yield their secrets to investigative skills, others remain “Twilight Zone” bafflers, including one of the last – and best – “The Dressmaker’s Doll.”

 

Christie would employ supernatural aspects in a number of her novels as well as her series of short stories featuring the mysterious Mr. Harley Quin, whose exploits I was surprised not to find in The Last Séance volume. Still, its eerie tales are enough to give readers a Halloween shiver.

Adventure classics -- When the good guys are behaving badly

The Yellow Room

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

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It’s a week after the June 6, 1944, and the news everywhere is about the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Everywhere, that is, except in the tiny Maine resort town where the rich and beautiful “summer people” expect the arrival of Medal of Honor recipient and debonair bachelor, Gregory Spencer. But when Spencer’s sister arrives to ready the family mansion, Crestview, for her brother’s return, she finds the housekeeper hospitalized after a bizarre accident and the half-burned body of a murdered young woman stashed in a linen closet.

And that’s just the start of the happenings in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s 1945 mystery, The Yellow Room.

It’s enough make Spencer’s younger sister Carol give up the whole idea of a summer vacation. Except she’s under orders from the local police not to leave, and as she turns up more details, including the overnight stay of the murdered woman in the mansion’s guest room, the one hung with yellow wallpaper.

The yellow room is a very pretty room, with pastel furniture and curtains and its own bathroom. But why did the Spencer’s resident housekeeper let the young woman stay there? And once there, why did she walk out the door to meet her murderer?

Strangest of all, the chief—make that only—suspect in the death is Greg Spencer, who, it turns out is the murdered woman’s husband, married to her secretly following a night of drunken partying. Is that why the housekeeper won’t explain her actions? Oh, no, now the housekeeper is dead too, lying cold on the floor of her hospital room despite round the clock guards.

It’s no surprise that Mary Roberts Rinehart, the creator of all this mayhem and mystery, was dubbed the American Agatha Christie, except that title couldn’t be used for more than a decade after Rinehart started publishing in 1908. Christie’s first mystery wouldn’t appear until 1920. Perhaps it’s she who should be known as Britain’s Mary Rinehart.

As Rinehart writes it, Greg Spencer isn’t the only soldier behaving strangely. What’s up with Colonel Richardson, hero of an earlier war, who insists his pilot son is still alive more than a year after his plane was shot down in the South Pacific? And why hasn’t the airman grandson of old Mr. and Mrs. Ward visited them during his recent leave? And who is the mysterious man calling himself Major Dane, and who claims to be recuperating from wounds received in action, except that there’s no record of any Major Dane in Army records?

A story about war heroes gone wrong may have seemed like a tough sell in 1945, but Rinehart’s take struck home with the millions of Americans who found their brothers, sons, husbands and sweethearts returning from war strangely changed. Post-traumatic stress disorder hadn’t found its name yet, but Major Dane could plead with Carol understand and find compassion for soldiers driven to desperation by their wartime experiences.

But do understanding and compassion mean overlooking murder? Or can the year-round residents of the little resort town avoid feeling strangely gleeful at the fall of one of the summer people who’ve lorded it over them so long? Rinehart’s village isn’t the comfortable hierarchy of Christie’s stories.

So did Greg Spencer kill his wife? Was he in Washington, D.C., receiving his medal when his wife met her death? Or wasn’t he? It’s going to take more than one post to unravel the twists of The Yellow Room.