The History of Mystery

I did find Billingsgate Shoal to be propulsive, and once it got going, difficult to put down. From an outset where Doc Adams is simply being curious about why a mysterious boat crew is hiding their actions, he ultimately turns up a conspiracy that involves treasure, assumed identity, boats with secret compartments (and with bodies inside) and multiple previous murders. As mentioned in the first installment, Doc’s (and Rick Boyer’s) unusually high knowledge of boats leads ...

While the cliché about the ordinary joe who stumbles onto a murder is very familiar, it is surprisingly underrepresented among Edgar winners. We need to go backward through 13 years of international assassins, reformed terrorists, smugglers with hearts of gold, and professional detectives, soldiers and spycatchers to get to Forfeit in 1970, whose protagonist was a reporter. Even a reporter is professional obliged to investigate. 1969’s A Case of Need features a pathologist, so h...

That question has an easy answer: no. But what novel should have been chosen by the Edgar award voters to represent 1981 is a harder question.

In terms of actual great novels of 1981, there are two clear contenders, Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon and Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park. Both have been celebrated all over, and Red Dragon was 27th all-time on the Mystery Writer’s of America list, with Gorky Park ranked 35th. The challenge is, each ...

In the first installment of my review of William Bayer’s Peregrine, I have noted some of its bonkers elements, some of which are so ridiculous (the protagonist, Detective Frank Janek, releases tension by repairing accordions) that I wondered if the book was meant as a spoof. The villain, who is our POV for about half the time, also appears to have no motive, though he eventually acquires one. His motive seems to be chaos, or perhaps to feed into and thus reveal the toxicity of ...

You might assume as you start the book they did award in 1981 that the title is symbolic, and refers to a detective, or perhaps a victim or another character who drives the plot, who is restless and driven to move constantly. But in fact the title is literal, and refers to a peregrine falcon, which a villain has trained to swoop down on command and kill passersby on the streets on early 80s New York City. The author acknowledges that this is almost impossible biologically, so there is much ...

Whip Hand won the 1981 Edgar for best novel of 1980. I have already stated that I don’t consider it to be one of Dick Francis’ top books, and I think I can go on to say that I don’t think it is a particularly good book standing on its own.

Nonetheless, competition in 1980 was weak, and whether considering the mystery reading public or just yours truly, Whip Hand escaped a lot of perils. The biggest was a matter of translation. I have previously designated U...

As implied in my spoilerless introduction to Whip Hand, Dick Francis’ second Edgar-winning novel is a little light on mystery. We meet the main villain by chapter eight. There is some mild residual suspense in the secondary plots, and there is one big reveal where we learn that the Chief Steward, who had hired Sid to look into one of the mysteries, is himself the guilty party and responsible for a second set of thugs who beat Sid up. I had to reread several chapters in depth t...

Whip Hand, winner of the 1980 Edgar Award for Best Novel, was the middle of three novels by Dick Francis to win the prize; Forfeit won in 1970, and Come to Grief in 1996. This is three decades, which is pretty impressive for an amazing career. I have read all of them (and at least two by Felix Francis), like hundreds of people, yet I wonder if anyone would ever have identified these three as Francis’ best. Myself, I consider his first three, Nerve, Dead...

Bottom line first – much as I would like to find a better candidate for best mystery novel of 1979 than The Rheingold Route, 1979 doesn’t appear to have given me the material. Many fine authors had an entry in 1979, but none in my judgment had their best stuff or even their above average stuff that year. Among the contenders I have read are John D MacDonald’s The Green Ripper, and Stephen King’s The Dead Zone. Among those that I can’t reme...

I mentioned in the previous posting that there is another blog covering the Edgars, at criminalelement.com. These are published weekly with a changing series of authors, and so far are spoiler-free. As noted, the authors have sometimes been able to dig up some facts about the authors and books that I did not succeed at finding. I was curious if we tended to agree on our judgment of the winners, so I read three of the reviews of books I have already covered, two that I judged great (Beat...