The History of Mystery

Arthur Maling, the author of 1980’s winner, The Rheingold Route, is a difficult author for whom to collect biographical background. Various sources I consulted agreed in giving the following information: he was born into a famous shoe family, Maling Brothers, he went to Harvard, he served in the Navy during World War II, and went back to running Maling Brothers after (or at the same time as) writing his books. I finally found a source with more interesting inform...

Since I’ve stated that I consider Eye of the Needle to surpass most of the other Edgar winners, you can guess that the bar for another work to beat it is a very high bar. A very popular mystery work published the same year as Eye of the Needle (1978) is John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey. I have not read that one yet but I have read a different anthology with some of the same stories and one of the stand-alone novels. They are enjoyable but I did not fee...

So, the major twist in The Eye of the Needle is very well done. Faber, the Nazi assassin, is busy following his orders (the orders he received from the colleague he then murdered) to gather intelligence about an alarming Allied troop buildup in Kent and environs. What he discovers to his astonishment is that the military buildup is fake, mostly featuring plywood cutouts of planes designed to fool Nazi spy planes flying overhead. The region in question is convenient to the nearest pa...

I’ve mentioned that Dick Francis’ Forfeit is the earliest Edgar winner I am sure I had already read before the current exercise of reading them all in order. 1979’s The Eye of the Needle is the first Edgar Winner that I read when it was new. It was a bestseller and a phenomenon in 1978 and very quickly became a hit movie with Donald Sutherland as the title character, the enigmatic Nazi assassin nicknamed “The Needle.” (As mentioned previously, Su...

I previously recapped and ranked after reviewing the first dozen Edgar Winners, as of 1965, coming up with The Spy who Came in from the Cold as #1. It still is the best so far of the first 25. But we have a new #2, as far as I am concerned, with the classic translated from the Swedish, The Laughing Policeman. The year refers to the year of the award, not the year of publication. Tell me if you disagree.

#1. The Spy who Came in from the Cold – J...

I hereby pose a philosophical question about well-plotted mysteries. If on your first read you were bowled over by the fiendishness of the plotting, but thinking back can’t reconstruct the machinery of the plot, is it really fiendishly constructed? Nobody really knows their own memory, but it sure seems to me that I have a good memory for some plots. I never had to re-read Murder on the Orient Express or The Hound of the Baskervilles to remind myself what was going on, ...

Another entry in the increasingly trite category of spy novels that also make points about the corruption of the spy game, where there are no good guys, only sides. Ben Leary works for Immigration and becomes involved in the case of a Soviet poet kidnapped off the streets of New York, ostensibly by the KGB. While Leary tries to figure out why, his chapters alternate with ones featuring Charlie Brewer, a retired CIA agent living in a place akin to a YMCA and reduced to hustling pool with dru...

1976 was not as strong a year for mysteries as 1975, but it wasn’t weak enough for me to endorse the award to the disappointing and overrated Promised Land. Other notable mysteries of 1975 include one of Agatha Christie’s very last novels, Sleeping Murder, and Dick Francis’ In the Frame. I read both and about all that I can remember is that Miss Marple was in one and a guy who painted horses was in the other. Neither would go in my Top 10 for that aut...

Promised Land, the 1977 Edgar winner, is one of the most baffling mysteries I have ever encountered. I don’t mean the events of the book itself, which almost entirely lacked mystery, suspense, or even interest. A man contacts a Boston detective who is so preoccupied with what he is going to eat and drink and what machines he is going to use on his next workout that he can barely pay attention to the case. When the detective follows up with the client at his house, he recognize...

So, I basically consider Hopscotch to be a fun and skillful read, but is it a worthy entry in the same gallery of masterpieces as The Light of Day and The Spy who came in from the Cold? I have never once recommended it to a friend, for example, as I do repetitively with An Instance of the Fingerpost and Polar Star. But a look at the field in its year of publication, 1975, shows a crowded field of solid mysteries with not quite a case to overturn the actual...