Only Detect

Suspects are few, but intrigue and complication are plentiful in this tight, slim package of a novel. (It weighs in at 167 pages in one modern paperback edition.) Most of the intrigue and much of the complication draw from the storytelling mode perfected by Mary Roberts Rinehart. Defining elements of that mode are all in place: a genteel setting with upper-middle-class protagonists, an old house with strange architectural details that lend themselves to strange goings-on, peculiar incidents that spook female residents of the house, an elaborately textured family backstory that features financial shenanigans and mysterious inheritances—and, finally, a resolution that expels presumed ghosts and dispels violent threats to orderly bourgeois life. In the early going, somewhat cloying traces of the “Had I But Known”(HIBK) tradition control the narrative. Clara Gamadge has rented a summer place in Connecticut. As she readies the house for guests, she and her housekeeper catch spectral glimpses of a woman on the edge of the property. The figure wears an old-fashioned purple dress and a matching bonnet, and Clara soon discovers eerily similar garments in the attic of the house. Those items had belonged to a woman who died a year ago, and in a baroque sequence of events that includes another ghost sighting and a horse-and-buggy accident, that woman’s sister falls victim to a murderer while the sister is under Clara’s watch. The narrative register then shifts with the arrival of Clara’s husband, Henry, who conducts an even-keeled investigation that effectively exorcises the book’s HIBK atmospherics.

Henry Gamadge, the competent and colorless hero of Daly’s string of 16 detective novels, has an identity that extends nary an inch beyond his ability to embody a certain class ideal. He’s a rare-book dealer of ample and independent means, and he operates with ease and detachment in any social environment where his detection happens to take him. Class differences and class resentments, in fact, exert a pivotal force in this sharply observed tale. (Relative honesty about the American social hierarchy tends to be a strength of the Rinehart school of fiction.) Another noteworthy aspect of the book is the war that, as of mid-1942—when the book was written and when it takes place—remained a matter of breaking news. To come to Clara’s aid, Henry must fly to Connecticut from overseas, where he was serving as an intelligence officer in an unspecified role. Disruptions caused by U.S. entry in the war also factor into the murder case that Henry must solve. Henry, following the classic formula, works from “things seen” to divine an unseen plot. The case ultimately hinges on a secret relationship between the killer and the victim, and Daly does a neat job of wrapping a veil around the small set of characters who could have pursued that sort of relationship to its homicidal conclusion.

Grade: B

Other notable reviews: Cross-Examining Crime, Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, My Reader’s Block, StoryGraph

This short, crisp tale of murder disguised as suicide packs in a wealth of well-engineered complexity. Clues, mundane yet wonderfully evocative, abound. As the story teeters on the verge of its climax, an omniscient narrator peers into the machine-swift mind of Captain Duncan Maclain and offers an inventory of the raw factual material that Maclain is processing:

Out of a welter of innocuous objects he had formed a mental picture. It had a lot of parts—Hadfield’s missing fountain pen and change, a lowered Venetian blind, an onyx-based paperweight surmounted by a crystal ball, a broken bottle of Scotch, Julia Hadfield’s hallucination that her husband had fallen down the elevator shaft, the heavy round watchman’s clock carried on his rounds by Dan O’Hare.

From these indicators, along with other data points related to a quartet of killings, Maclain deduces the identity of a culprit as well as the method by which the perpetrator transformed brute homicidal intent into a series of apparent miracle crimes. A violent death at the beginning of the novel marks the pattern: Blake Hadfield, a cold-hearted banker who had alienated business associates and family members alike over many years, tumbles from an eighth-floor interior balcony at the Miners Title and Trust Building in Lower Manhattan. Ostensibly, only Seth Hadfield, Blake’s estranged son, had the opportunity to pitch the victim into the building’s atrium; otherwise, the floor was empty, and the building nearly so. Seth proclaims his innocence, and Maclain believes him. But Maclain, a genius amateur sleuth of the classic variety, also rejects the suicide theory put forth (at least initially) by his sparring partner in detection, Inspector Davis of the NYPD Homicide Squad. Two similar deaths follow—in each case, a man falls from a great height with no one in the vicinity who could have provided a helpful heave-ho—and another suspicious death, from six years earlier, looms over the whole affair. The book has just eight chapters, but Kendrick necessarily devotes the last of them to a long disquisition by Maclain on the killer’s bravura scheme and his own bravura effort to unravel it.

A major strength of Blind Man’s Bluff involves Kendrick’s exacting rendition of the financial and social particulars of mid-century metropolitan life. While the setting here is the period soon after American entry into the Second World War (Seth sports a freshly issued Army uniform), the weighty overhang of the Great Depression exerts its force on the book’s plot. Even a decade later, the effects of the 1932 bank crash reverberate in the lives of Blake Hadfield and those who had either loved or hated him. Beneath the calm surface of modern commerce, the thin line between wealth and ruin lies clearly visible. Kendrick, much like his contemporaries Helen McCloy and Rex Stout, peoples his world with members of New York City’s professional and business upper classes: bankers, accountants, lawyers, merchants—figures, in short, who plausibly possess the level of cunning and drive needed to concoct elaborate strategies of murder. In an echo of what a generation of British authors did for the English countryside, American writers like Kendrick conjure an alternate-reality Manhattan where violent urges roil beneath social graces.

Like any proper fictional detective, Maclain has a distinguishing feature that sets him apart from the common herd, and from most other fictional detectives: He is completely blind. Yet his blindness is no mere gimmick. Kendrick rhapsodizes at length and with real subtlety about the compensatory talents that allow his hero to glean truths that other people are too jaded by sight to see: “Maclain was subject to no distractions that afflict the normal person in a world of light. … Many normal people intent on concentration have to close their eyes. Maclain’s were always closed.” Before the case reaches an end—it’s a satisfying conclusion, albeit one with more tendrils of complication than it probably needs—Maclain will test not only his powers of perception and intuition, but his physical and moral courage as well. Blindness, we come to understand, is at least as much a gift as it is a handicap.

In Kendrick’s hands, the detective story thus becomes a vehicle for widening and deepening our sense of empathy. The genre, at its best, highlights the many ways that things are not as they seem. It shows how human reason, along with working to crack criminal mysteries, can help break down common prejudices.

Grade: A-

Notable posts about this book: Ah, Sweet Mystery, Beneath the Stains of Time, Cross-Examining Crime, Invisible Event, My Reader’s Block

A defining quality of good fiction, and especially good science fiction, is that it makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Detective fiction goes a bit further by seeking to make significant that which is (seemingly) ordinary and to make clear that which is (temporarily) opaque. Asimov, in this sequel to another futuristic detective novel (Caves of Steel), expertly combines those feats of literary alchemy into a lively, thought-provoking entertainment.

Many centuries hence, a murder occurs on the Outer Worlds planet of Solaria, where crime is practically nonexistent—and so is any kind of police force. Peculiar facts about the killing raise the need for a serious inquiry. Whoever killed Rikaine Delmarre bludgeoned him at close range, but no weapon turned up in the initial search of the crime scene. Evidence supplied by robots establishes that the only other human near that scene was the victim’s wife, Gladia, yet she fell unconscious around the time of the murder and had no chance to dispose of a weapon. Faced with this quandary, the Solarian powers-that-be deign to invite a mere Earthman to work the case on their behalf. Elijah Baley, a “plainclothesman” from New York City, thus finds himself traveling millions of miles to a planet known for its “naked sun.” (In the Earth of this imagined future, people live in subterranean “caves of steel” and have no direct experience of the star that lights their galaxy.) There, Baley reunites with Daneel Olivaw, a “positronic” robot who served as his sidekick in the previous adventure. Soon after Baley and Olivaw begin their probe, someone attempts a second murder. As the two detectives communicate via holographic projection with Hannis Gruer, the planet’s head of security, they watch him suddenly lurch into convulsions after sipping from a glass of water. Clearly, the glass contains poison. But who could have administered it, and how? Like other Solarians, Gruer lives alone on a vast estate; only his robots are able to come anywhere near him, and robots are hard-wired to avoid causing harm to their human masters.

To read this book during the 2020–2021 pandemic is to experience a shock of recognition—a glimpse of the present as foreshadowed by a decades-old vision of the future. The people of Solaria, like those of plague-scarred Earth in the time of Covid-19, interact with other humans almost entirely by remote means. Asimov posits a technology that enables what Solarians call “viewing,” and his descriptions of that practice suggest a three-dimensional version of the screen-mediated forms of engagement (Zoom meetings and the like) on which people today increasingly depend. Solarians, who descend from human Earthlings, differ from present-day humans in that they prefer viewing to its in-person alternative, which they call “seeing.” In effect, Solarians have replaced the need for human contact with a reliance on legions of supremely advanced robots. That feature rings a contemporary bell, too. Denizens of Earth do not have high-functioning anthropomorphic machines to assist them during long months of pandemic isolation. But, like their counterparts on Solaria, they struggle to understand and manage the devices (smart and not-so-smart) that they have made.

The peculiar conditions of Solaria are a critical factor in the crimes of apparent impossibility that Baley must solve. These puzzles, in fact, are keenly satisfying because they arise from—and hinge on—those very conditions. Each actual or attempted murder appears to lie outside the realm of the possible because (and only because) it takes place amid a cluster of social customs and logistical circumstances that are unique to the world that Asimov has constructed. For example, the visceral aversion that Solarians (most of them, anyway) have to sharing physical space with other humans creates a situation in which the killing of Delmarre and the attack on Gruer seem to defy explanation. Likewise, the Three Laws of Robotics, which are part of a system that Asimov has built into this world, set precise limits on the kinds of violence that robots can either perpetrate or allow to happen in their vicinity. To crack the mysteries at hand, Baley must tease apart the implications of these and other features of Solarian civilization.

Asimov manages the mystery plot with high professionalism, and he deals competently with adult themes that involve matters of human intimacy and human destiny. Even so, Naked Sun displays traces of a juvenile sensibility that was fairly common in mid-20th-century science-fiction writing. Too often, a gee-whiz tone overtakes Asimov’s otherwise serviceable prose, and his lead character, Baley, comes across as an earnest, boringly upright fellow—less as an heir to Philip Marlowe than as a law-enforcement version of Buck Rogers. In addition, there is a subplot that concerns the threat of intergalactic war, and although Asimov handles that story line with some complexity, its presence here brings a pulpy space-opera element into what should be (and mostly is) a tightly focused tale of investigation and discovery.

Like the best science fiction of its era, the novel also explores big ideas in a big, none-too subtle way. As the tale unfolds, Asimov presents a series of conversations between the Earthman sleuth and several of the Solarian suspects, including a sociologist, a roboticist, and the erstwhile assistant of the first victim, who had been the planet’s foremost “fetal engineer.” These conversations teem with anxious speculations about parenthood and family life, about population growth and the fate of nations (or, indeed, of entire planets), about humanoid machines and the humans who create them—preoccupations that were bubbling just under the surface of American culture during the 1950s. To reach Solaria, Baley spans many lightyears in a space capsule. Asimov, meanwhile, brings something else back from his fictive journey: a time capsule.

[ADDENDUM: A recent column in The New York Times by Paul Krugman spurred me to read this book at this time. Krugman flags the somewhat uncanny way that Asimov prefigured life under semi-lockdown. Naked Sun features “a society in which people live on isolated estates, their needs provided by robots and they interact only by video,” the columnist writes. “The plot hinges on the way this lack of face-to-face contact stunts and warps their personalities.”

So my review here steals just a bit from Krugman. It also steals a bit from myself. Looking back at my piece on the prequel book, Caves of Steel, I see that that I’ve touched on some of the same themes again—the science-fiction-as-time-capsule idea, the motif of using futuristic conditions (such as “laws” that govern robot behavior) to drive an impossible-crime plot. So I’m less original in this instance than I could be. Then again, the same is true of Asimov.]

A case of imposture swiftly becomes a case of murder for the eponymous hero of this mid-career novel of not-quite-middling quality. Early one evening, Dr. Basil Willing overhears his name being used by a nondescript little man who is hiring a taxi near Willing’s home on the East Side of Manhattan. Willing hires his own taxi and follows the man to a house on West 11th Street where a dinner party is under way. Playing host is one Dr. Zimmer, a psychiatrist, and the guests includes several of his patients. One odd circumstance leads to another, and before the night is out Willing has a new murder to solve. Another killing occurs soon afterward, and in both cases the victim had attended the Zimmer party and had died of a codeine overdose. As is typical of McCloy’s work, the list of suspects draws heavily from the cultured and monied ranks of New York society, and Willing’s investigation consists largely of observing and interviewing these characters in their native habitats.

In broad outline, the Willing series appears to fall in the same tradition of American crime writing that includes the work of S.S. Van Dine and Ellery Queen. Stories in this British-inflected tradition feature a genteel sleuth who functions as an amateur, even if (as in Willing’s case) he enjoys an official connection to the police; a murder, or maybe a pair of murders, that seem essentially bloodless; and a closed circle of suspects who mostly hail from the upper reaches of a class hierarchy. Yet McCloy’s attitude toward her material echoes the sensibility of a different American tradition: Like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and others who write in a hardboiled vein, McCloy casts an icy-cold eye on the mid-century American scene. (Perhaps not coincidentally, McCloy at the time of writing this tale was married to Davis Dresser, who spun yarns about the hard-driving private eye Michael Shayne under the name Brett Halliday.) A highlight of this book is a suite of corrosive pen portraits that introduce readers to Dr. Zimmer’s guests. There is Rosamund Yorke, a vain socialite married to an aging nightclub owner. There is Brinsley Shaw, the cowardly and craven nephew of a wealthy widow. And so on. Similarly, the plot here is replete with signs of social and spiritual corruption—from Zimmer’s practice of gestalt psychotherapy, which McCloy presents as a vaguely fraudulent operation, to the booze-drenched milieu of a suburban country club.

The resolution of this plot combines conventional fair-play aspects—aspects that a reader might divine from clues honestly presented and cleverly concealed—with elements that no reader could deduce from the events that McCloy narrates. (One such element hinges on an obscure literary reference that Willing happens to know. He mentions the work in question, but no ordinary reader will recognize its significance.) When the final twist arrives, it has a freakish quality that renders it mildly shocking, rather than genuinely surprising, and the novel ends up resembling a pulpy thriller more than it does a drawing-room puzzler. As a consequence, Alias Basil Willing fails to meet the high standard of fictional detection that its namesake established in his previous adventures.