My 10 favorite things about old murder mystery stories.

It's great to escape into a murder mystery book from the first half of the 20th century. The story will be about good people bravely serving justice in an ordered society. Yet it will meet my need for fantasy with its extraordinary plot lines, colorful characters, and bizarre settings.

Most of these old mysteries are clearly written and easy to read. I like to read unhurriedly, looking for potential clues. I notice that mystery writers don't waste words.

Unlike later crime novels, the old detective stories are puzzles without strong emotional flavor. I find their ‘deaths’ less shocking than a betrayal in a romance novel.

Nevertheless reading about fictional murders is an odd way to relax, now that I think about it. To help me explain here are my 10 favorite things:

1. Nice people and heroes combat very bad people.

There are some likable characters in these puzzle narratives. I hope these nice people will survive the crimes and the stress of the investigation. Some will not.

This goes for the cops and sleuths also--some of them must be heroes.

In an old mystery plot Justice is the hero's overriding principle. And in the end, Justice triumphs over fear, greed, and attraction. (I did say these were fantasies.)

The culprits must be interesting, but not in a psychological way. The characters in a crime novel all have dark secrets. But in an old detective story the murderer is shown to be quite unlike us readers. Each murderer has an obscure and powerful motive, is ruthless, and must be stopped. The heroes accept the challenge bravely and optimistically, with a sense that right is on their side.

2. A low emotional key.

Detective story characters are not fully developed as they are in a novel. This helps us to concentrate on the puzzle.

Weak stories have people who are two-dimensional, and may go down like bowling pins without anybody regretting them. Better writers balance their readers’ loyalties to the characters. They make some seem better, some worse, as the plot develops.

Many detective stories, including those by Edgar Allan Poe and some by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, incorporate horror--I don't enjoy that. And I don't like a sordid background, although there are authors such as Margery Allingham, Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Edgar Wallace, who invent criminal underworlds that are exotic and fascinating.

The fantasy element.

‘Nice people’, ‘low-key’, you might expect these stories to be dull, but far from it. These ingenious mystery authors provide an amazing variety of characters, settings, chases, and methods of death-dealing. This helps their books succeed as fantasies and ‘thrillers’.

3. Wonderful characters.

The people who solve the mysteries can be police, paid sleuths, or amateurs; rich, poor, or in between; large or small, young or old; men, women, or married couples; artists, servants, authors, academics, actors, or reformed criminals.

The heroes are lucky. And they have other wonderful gifts to guide them through the puzzle; such as the power of ready money, a network of friends and assistants, and extra helpings of courage, stamina, imagination and brains. It's fun to imagine having those gifts myself.

The guilty parties and the supporting cast can include nobility, celebrities, eccentrics, and even rustics. Their strangeness helps us remember them throughout the puzzle and often afterward.

Even a small cast of characters will show a wide variety. For example the ill-assorted house party in Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians . Sometimes rivals and ex-lovers are forced to spend time together as in Ngaio Marsh's Death and the Dancing Footman.

4. Fantasy settings.

These are described in detail, and sometimes accompanied by drawings. The settings must be memorable because they are so important to the plot. They are often very unfamiliar to readers--I have never met a butler in real life. Large expensive homes are great for complicated comings and goings. Often they are isolated by extreme weather.

Other strange settings include:

an island (Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Wall, 1938.)

a private Hawaiian beach (Earl Derr Biggers, The House Without a Key , 1925.)

a train (Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express , 1934.)

advertising company offices (Dorothy L Sayers, Murder Must Advertise , 1933.)

a theater (Ngaio Marsh, Vintage Murder, 1937.)

a classical music concert (Cyril Hare, The Wind Blows Death , 1949.)

a nightclub (Ngaio Marsh, Swing, Brother, Swing, 1949.)

Las Vegas (Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair, Spill the Jackpot , 1941.)

a college (T.H. White Darkness at Pemberley, 1932.)

San FranciscoChinatown (Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Backward Mule, 1946.)

an Australian mining town (Arthur W. Upfield, The Bachelors of Broken Hill , 1950.)

a remote EnglishVillage (Margery Allingham, Mystery Mile, 1930.)

a celebrity’s New York apartment (S.S. Van Dine, The “Canary” Murder Case, 1927.)

an ocean liner (John Dickson Carr, The Blind Barber, 1934.)

a prospector's shack outside a small mining town in the Nevada desert (Erle Stanley Gardner, The Valley of Little Fears , 1930, in Argosy magazine.)

and, of course, the often-used locked room.

There are marvelous chases across exotic terrain: by train across Europe (Freeman Wills Crofts), by fast expensive car (Margery Allingham), or by plane (Erle Stanley Gardner). And those tense, scary, foot chases through fog-bound pre-war London.

It seems there's as much variety in mystery settings are as there is in science-fiction.

5. Methods of murder

Guns; knives, and other blades; blunt objects wielded, thrown, or falling; pushing a victim over a height; making a horse throw them or a car crash; trapping and asphyxiating, strangling or drowning; explosions; electrocution; poison; fright; pressure to suicide; trained vicious animals—but seldom vicious beatings which lead to death. I’ll leave out the details, you’ll want to meet them afresh when you read these stories.

I love travel and I also love time-travel. The easiest way to time-travel is to read books that were written a generation or more ago. These include the mystery stories from the first half of the 20th century which contain snippets of real life.

6. Real history.

The ordered experience of train travel, either luxurious or ordinary.

The routines in old workplaces, offices with typewriters, secretaries, and file clerks; or very old offices whose ledgers were written by hand.

Unhurried people everywhere who notice things while they're going about their business; such as elevator operators, newspaper boys, and delivery men.

Reminders about wartime; such as the World War II food rationing and clothes rationing in Britain; and in World War II American drivers were urged to keep their speed down to save precious tire rubber.

Less reliable, but more poignant, are the stories about young people between the wars who were so hard up that they took dangerous jobs. I remember reading these when our economy was expanding. I didn't understand poverty then, but perhaps I do now.

In some ways the first half of the 20th century was a quieter, slower time. There were no cell phones, and in many of these stories it was unusual for people to have a regular phone. On the other hand snail mail worked. There were 12 mail deliveries a day to Sherlock Holmes. And a more beautiful time, Perry Mason sometimes takes a light plane trip over the stunningly beautiful, untouched California desert. Earl Derr Biggers describes old Honolulu with its small buildings, established residents and quiet sunsets.

Many things would be considered ‘politically incorrect’ today. It was all right to distrust foreigners such as Agatha Christie's Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Rex Stout’s Archie Goodwin sums up each female character with preposterous male-chauvinist wit. Most women were, or intended to be, stay-at-home moms. Other women lived on alimony, or as ‘party girls’. Career women were few and described as unusually brave, like Erle Stanley Gardner’s tough private eye Bertha Cool, or exceptionally perceptive. There were also strong female characters, like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, who turned their curiosity to the ends of jsutice..

7. An intriguing puzzle.

There are rules for a detective story. It must be clearly presented with all the necessary clues in plain sight. Anything less cheats the reader. But even a short story must be complicated, with sub plots and foreshadowing.

8. A great author.

Among the great mystery writers are people of strong character with interesting achievements to their credit.

For instance:

Rex Stout, the creator of Nero Wolfe, opposed Nazism as chairman of the War Writers Board, and on the radio program Speaking of Liberty . After the war he protested the use of nuclear weapons. His Nero Wolfe books include one in which he criticizes the FBI and another which takes on racism.

Lawyer Erle Stanley Gardner, whose heroes include Perry Mason, was a member of Argosy magazine’s ‘Court of Last Resort’. At the request of the prison governor, they investigated and proved the innocence of condemned prisoner Robert Ballard Bailey. Gardner explained the importance of forensic science in forewords to the many books he dedicated to outstanding American experts.

Dorothy L. Sayers translated Dante, as well as giving us Lord Peter Wimsey.

Ngaio Marsh was an actor and producer whose mysteries are set in England and New Zealand. She was honored by Queen Elizabeth for her work in the New Zealand theater.

9. Short discussions of significant ideas.

There are nuggets of serious writing. For instance, ways to achieve justice for the underprivileged; the vagaries of the court systems (wonderfully in Cyril Hare's Tragedy at Law); the morality of capital punishment and what it feels like to have sent someone to die; even the effects of slum living.

I enjoy the occasional pretentious aphorism: Ellery Queen tells us that patience “when too often outraged is converted into madness”. (The Spanish Cape Mystery, 1935.)

I also relish dilemmas. When Sayers’ sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey saves detective story writer Harriet Vane from the gallows she is too traumatized to fall into his arms. Several books later they marry. Her thought process was fascinating.

10. Books as artifacts.

For anyone who likes to collect stuff old books are ideal: inexpensive, plentiful, and easy to store. (Well, they do need more room than baseball cards, but they are cheaper and take a lot less space than paintings or motorcycles.)

I have several shelves full of detective stories. I enjoy the book designs which have varied over the years: the fonts, the bindings, and the cover illustrations which are often are wonderfully lurid.

If you haven’t already discovered old mystery stories, I hope my comments will encourage you to try them. Enjoy.