Mysteries, real and imagined

Though I used to call myself a mystery buff, I don't recognize the genre I used to like anymore. I enjoyed the "cozies" (usually set in a small town or village, without too much gore), the old-fashioned detective stories (similar to the cozies but with a bit more grit), and occasionally the hard-boiled works of Chandler and Hammett. Now the mystery shelves are full of serial killer adventures or grisly police procedurals that I just never took a shine to. So I tend to look to the past for my mystery fixes these days.

I discovered a wonderful author named Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, who wrote 18 mystery or suspense novels between 1929 and 1952. I'd never heard her name before (most of her books are out of print), though it turns out that I've seen a movie based on one her books, The Deep End, in which Tilda Swinton, assuming her son has committed a murder, tries to cover up for him--and the same book provided the basis for an acclaimed but little-seen film from 1949 called The Reckless Moment.

The volume I read, a recent reissue from Stark House, has two novels. The Strange Crime in Bermuda is a wonderful exercise in the literature of the unreliable narrator. Young Hamish is called to Bermuda to visit an older friend who seems to need his help in some important matter, but the friend disappears mysteriously and is assumed dead. Hamish sets out to solve the crime, but we quickly realize he is misinterpreting all the clues and trusting (mostly) the wrong people. The story and the telling seem quite modern, though the ending is perhaps more pat than it would be if written today. The second story, Too Many Bottles, is a novelette which also has misunderstandings at its root. A woman dies after a dinner party and her husband, through whom we see the mystery unfold, falls under suspicion. This one is brisker but a little sloppier, and the title is a giveaway to where the solution lies, though it doesn't give away the identity of the killer. These were both great fun, and I'll be hunting for more of her works.

Those are the imagined mysteries. The "real" mystery I refer to in the title of this post is that of Adolf Hitler. We keep looking for clues or keys to the mystery of what made this strange little man the overseer of the greatest crime against mankind of the 20th century. The book I read is called Hitler's Private Library by Timothy Ryback. Its subtitle, The Books That Shaped His Life, implies that Ryback, like many other authors and historians, thinks that Hitler is like a mystery novel villain, and all we need are the right clues to fall into place to figure him out. The book, after a slow start, is interesting; however, after a few stabs at trying to show some correspondence between what Hitler read and what he thought and did, it becomes essentially a librarian's guide to the books that Hitler seems to have found important or interesting, as the author only discusses volumes that have clear evidence of having been read by Hitler (worn pages, written marginalia, etc.). It's a unique perch for observation, but I don't think it yields much of solid interest. Still, librarians and WWII buffs will want to read this one.