The Orphan Scrivener: August 2007

James Barrie remarked he wasn't certain whether the printing press was the greatest curse or the greatest blessing of his time. By contrast, Benjamin Disraeli had no doubt about the question, for he declared its invention had been the worst misfortune to befall humanity. Given both remarks were made long before the arrival of the Internet and this email-only newsletter, they might well have revised their opinions had they been our contemporaries and in an absentminded moment subscribed to Orphan Scrivener. But blessing, curse, or misfortune as it may be, this latest issue has arrived and if subscribers have perused it this far they may as well press on regardless.

ERIC'S BIT or BOARD WITH LIFE

Since the mystery board game Clue (Cluedo outside North America) was invented in the UK in the late 1940s there have been endless variations. Card games, DVDs, a junior edition, a movie, a computer game....

I played Clue when it was relatively new (long before the Simpsons version) and before I ever read a mystery. My friends and I were crazed on board games back in our grade school days. I was still reading Tom Swift Jr and science fiction juveniles by Lester del Rey, Andre Norton, and Robert Heinlein. The Hardy Boys never interested me. They were stuck on the surface of the planet and all the suspects they encountered were carbon-based life forms, or so I gathered. How boring!

My first mysteries were the Sherlock Holmes stories. Holmes had something of the mad scientist about him. If he hadn't been solving mysteries he might very well have been inventing time machines or invisibility potions, and maybe he did. His breathtaking, if often incomprehensible, intellectual leaps reminded me of those spaceship engineers who would figure out, at the last moment, how to rig the Aldebarean Framistan Device to take advantage of the rotational velocity of the doomed asteroid to escape the gravitational beams of the pursuing raiders from Ophiuchi.

Miss Marple, on the other hand, didn't remind me of any science fictional character. But I didn't get around to her until years after I'd discovered Sherlock. So when I first played Clue I knew nothing of mysteries, let alone the body-in-the-library genre on which the game was based.

What I liked about the game was how you could roam around the mansion in any direction you wanted, visiting whichever room took your fancy. The board games I first came in contact with, from Candy Land to Chutes and Ladders and Uncle Wiggly, all involved racing along a path to a finish line. Even The Game of Life, which had plastic mountains jutting up from the board, or the game about the conquest of Mount Everest, where the board was a triangular mountain (magnetized so the playing pieces could climb it) involved moving along a path to the end. The same was true of Monopoly where you went around and around tediously, one Pay Day following another until it all ended in happiness for the winner, and tears for all the bankrupts. Alas, I rarely ended up being the rich man.

When I played Clue I was vaguely aware that I was supposed to figure out that Colonel Mustard did it in the Conservatory with the Wrench. (And why is it, Colonel Mustard always seems to be the first suspect who springs to mind? Why does no one ever finger Mrs. White?) But I could barely handle the deduction even when there were only two of us playing. I just enjoyed wandering the halls and gawking, which is pretty much the way I read mystery novels, that is, with no hope of figuring out the killer and not much effort put into it.

Although one player wins Clue the ending isn't quite so simple as that of most board games. With 6 different characters, 6 possible murder weapons, and nine different rooms there are 324 possible solutions. That's a lot of possibilities, and maybe too many since I was never quite sure why, if the body had been discovered, there would be a question as to whether the crime had been committed with the rope, for example, as opposed to the gun. I would have thought it would be obvious.

One of the attractions of the mystery novel may be that there is more to the ending than winning or losing. At the conclusion of most books the protagonists either succeed or fail in reaching their goals, overcoming the obstacles they face, or resolving the conflicts that beset them. And for the most part we have to fool ourselves into believing the protagonist might lose because few books -- at least of the genre variety -- end in such a totally unsatisfactory fashion. We keep reading in large part to find out exactly how the successful outcome will be achieved and perhaps what it all means.

Classic mysteries offer a bit more suspense as to the outcome. Of course, the detective will find the murderer, no surprise there. But as in the game of Clue, we don't know who the murderer will turn out to be from amongst the cast of characters. That part of the end of a mystery novel is also satisfyingly concrete. We might not like the way an author wraps up a book, or how the author has the protagonist reach the end, or what the author makes of it all. But with a mystery, at the very least, we are left with a solution to a puzzle.

I have to confess, aside from my predilection for exploring mansions, I also liked Clue because of the lead pipe. Not to mention the candlestick, the dagger, the gun, the rope, and the wrench. I found those miniature accessories beguiling although I would have preferred that the rope wasn't plastic. Those objects are not actually required for game play. They could have been pictured on cards, or the players might have been instructed to simply allude to them verbally rather than placing them in the room where the crime was suspected to have occurred. But it was a stroke of genius to include them. Perhaps they served as an example of "show, don't tell.."

Then again, maybe I don't have a clue.

A few words about John's latest adventure:

The day after meeting a mysterious woman who claims to have been the model for the little girl in his study mosaic, John finds the woman's red-dyed corpse in a subterranean cistern. Who was she? Why had she sought John out? Who wanted her dead -- and why?

The answers seem to lie among the denizens of the smoky streets of that quarter of Constantinople known as the Copper Market, where artisans, beggars, prostitutes, pillar saints, and exiled aristocrats struggle to survive within sight of the Great Palace and yet worlds distant.

John encounters a faded actress, a patriotic sausage maker, a sundial maker who fears the sun, a religious visionary, a man who lives in a treasure trove, and a beggar who owes his life to a cartload of melons. Before long John suspects he is attempting to unravel not just a murder but a plot against the empire.

BACK TO BRETANIA or ONEFER MARCHES ON

Recently spotted: an August 2006 piece in the British paper The Guardian devoted to reads inspired by holiday destinations, http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2006/aug/11/restandrelaxation.onlocationfilminspiredtravel

or, as James Anthony and Sarah Crown put it, "classic literary accompaniments to your summer escapes". What authors would not be thrilled to find one of their books mentioned in such an article? And there was One For Sorrow, one of the titles representing Turkey, along with such notables as For Whom the Bell Tolls (Spain), Madame Bovary (France), A Room With a View (Italy), and Ulysses (Ireland)! We're still amazed.

FOURFER GOES FORTH FIRST or BRETANIA INVADED

Four For A Boy how now escaped in the UK. One For Sorrow, John's first appearance at novel length, will follow this autumn, with the rest of John's adventures released in due course. Info on these and other PPP novels can be found on the website of Poisoned Pen Press (UK), the publisher's British arm http://www.poisonedpenpressuk.com UK subscribers may be interested to hear that while the site features the publisher's catalogue, printed copies can also be requested.

THE TRIPOD CAT or MR PICKWICK'S KENTISH TRAVELS

Accompanied by Mr Tracy Tupman, that jolly fellow Mr Samuel Pickwick will shortly be off to Kent in an investigation overshadowed by The Three-legged Cat of Great Clatterden. We plead guilty to being the awful pair of scriveners who sent them there as our contribution to Mike Ashley's forthcoming anthology The Mammoth Book of Dickensian Whodunnits. Intended to celebrate Dickens' fascination with crime, it will be published towards the end of the year and includes stories by Edward Marston, Charles Todd, Peter Tremayne, Robert Barnard, and Kate Ellis among others.

A DEER MEMORY or OFF TO NARNIA

Mary contributed a nostalgic piece to the Lady Killers Blog in July. She opened her essay with the following words:

"My parents owned one of those enormous wardrobes made of dark wood -- perhaps mahogany -- and fitted with a mirror on the door taking up the middle third of its vast frontage. As a youngster, more than once I poked my head into the wardrobe's dark cavern of garments, leaned in, and groped past its mothball-scented hanging population. And once or twice it really felt, just before the tips of my fingers met smooth wood, they would go further than they should and I would be poking them into Narnia. Years later, when I lived in Oxford, I finally got there."

Subscribers can follow her footsteps by pointing their clickers at:

http://theladykillers.typepad.com/the_lady_killers/2007/07/mary-reed-goes-.html

A BRUSH WITH FAME or GET YOUR TEETH INTO A MYSTERY

We were surprised, to say the least, when we recently learnt John's adventures will soon reside in the National Museum of Dentistry in Baltimore. Lois Hirt, writer of a column dealing with dental matters in any media, particularly fiction and non-fiction books, is currently cataloguing her collection of archival material, which includes dental paraphernalia such as dolls, puzzles, toys, puzzles, etc., for donation to the museum, and Six For Gold is among items to be transferred there in due course. It's certainly the most unusual honour we have been awarded thus far, and we thank Lois for it.

GOLDEN DAYS or WEARING A NEW HAT

The Maywrite Library, our ongoing effort listing etexts for classic and Golden Age novels, now features over 250 links, a number of them to collections of short stories. It can be viewed at http://home.epix.net/~maywrite/golden.htm. In connection with this project, Mary has boldly put on her Apprentice Reviewer hat and scribbled a few thoughts about a number of these works for the Mystery File site run by Steve Lewis. These reviews are enhanced with biblios, book covers, and the like. Go to http://www.mysteryfile.com/blog/ and search for her moniker in the box on the right hand side, whereupon All Will Be Revealed.

MARY'S BIT or NEITHER POISONED NOR PURLOINED

Looking through my old files recently, I stumbled over notes made several years ago about a fascinating case involving an enterprising l9th century criminal with an inventive yet simple modus operandi.

The problem was he didn't think it all the way through.

Englishman Robert Spring was among what Emma Lazarus later described as the huddled masses yearning to be free. He followed their example and emigrated to America. Alas, he was not much of an ornament to this country.

Spring opened a bookshop in Philadelphia, but it did not flourish. Evidently he was also yearning to be free to break the law, for he then began forging historical documents using paper taken from old books, staining his work with coffee to give it an appropriately aged appearance. Shocking to relate, his speciality was imitating George Washington's handwriting. Spring did a roaring trade selling bogus military passes and orders issued from (appropriately enough) Valley Forge and similar locations, as well as letters supposedly written by the Father of His Country. Eventually rumbled, Spring was arrested in the late l850s, but jumped bail and sprang off to Canada.

While in residence over the border, Spring continued to produce faux documents, which he distributed by posing as a widow selling letters written by important persons to her deceased husband. A couple of years later, he returned to the US, initially taking up residence in Baltimore. Once again he wielded quill and ink in the furtherance of his facsimiles but being more cautious than hitherto sold most of these forgeries to British collectors, libraries, and institutions. This time he masqueraded as Stonewall Jackson's daughter, disposing of her father's papers for lack of cash.

However, it seems he was foolish enough to return to a too well trodden path, for in l869 he was arrested in Philadelphia, spent time in prison, and died in a city hospital in l876.

It strikes me this sorry business would make an interesting historical mystery. Edgar Allan Poe, who had resided in both Baltimore and Philadelphia and whose autographs have also been forged although not by Spring, would surely have been the author to pen it. He had already written about a real crime under the guise of fiction, The Mystery of Marie Roget being based on the murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers in New York with Poe's solution to the crime being presented in the novel.

Supposing when Spring was arrested Poe was still alive and decided to use the forgery case for a story in which his proto-detective C. Auguste Dupin is consulted. The time line is not too far-fetched, given the Spring affair happened within twenty years of publication of The Purloined Letter. In that novel Dupin observes to "Monsieur G", Prefect of the Parisian police, vis a vis fruitless efforts to recover the titular communication, that "...it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you at fault".

Dupin would surely have written the same to the American authorities from his Parisian lodgings at 33 Rue Dunôt, Faubourg Saint Germain, lambasting them for their delay in catching the forger -- though we may hope he would not be too unkind about Spring managing to escape justice the first time around.

Poe then might well have had Dupin, displaying a flash of the amateur detective's contempt for the intelligence of the police, immediately advise them to keep watch on the various addresses, usually post offices in nearby towns, to which payments to Spring were to be sent. While we can agree it was a remarkably stupid arrangement whether Spring picked up his ill-gotten gains personally or sent someone else to do so, it was the unavoidable weakest point in his plan.

As a number of sleuths have observed, it is this type of vital but overlooked detail that so often trips up criminals. Yet how else was Spring to get his hands on the money made from his (literal) handiwork, including forged letters neither poisonous nor purloined but equally criminous?

AND FINALLY

Being high summer, leaves are currently clustered so thickly in the surrounding landscape that it's hard to see a hundred yards in most directions. But the wheel of the year turns inexorably and it won't be long before there's less foliage on the trees, the light will be thinner, and the nights drawing in even more than they are at present. Melancholy days indeed, and to add to the more sorrowful aspects of the departing year, the next Orphan Scrivener will flap into subscribers' inboxes on October l5th.

See you then!

Best wishes
Mary R and Eric

who invite you to visit their home page, hanging out on the virtual washing line at http://home.epix.net/~maywrite/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, lists of author freebies and mystery-related newsletters, Doom Cat (an interactive game written by Eric), a jigsaw featuring the handsome cover of Five For Silver, and our growing page of links to free etexts of classic and Golden Age mysteries. There's also an Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Intrepid subscribers may also wish to pop over to Eric's blog at http://www.journalscape.com/ericmayer/

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER - ISSUE # FORTY-SIX - l5 AUGUST 2007

ERIC'S BIT or BOARD WITH LIFE

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

REED ALL ABOUT IT or MAYER WE TALK?

JOHN'S NEXT ADVENTURE or IT'S NO SECRET