Editor’s note, August 18, 2026: An acquaintance saw our Sci-Fi roundup from a couple of weeks ago and wanted to know more about the “Whodunit” section we mentioned, which had run in that same Summer of 1984 issue. She was heading for a two-week vacation and thought she’d stop in the Strand beforehand to search out some of the then new, now perhaps classic mysteries from that wrap-up, to read as she lounged in a rickety camp on a Vermont lake.
So here it is. Four decades ago, the wide-ranging culture critic Geoffrey O’Brien, surveying a flood of current or reissued paperbacks, at one point zeroed in on English purveyors of the genre: “The trick is not to startle with original thought or surreal imagery, but to persuade us that all the absurdly coincidental and overelaborate doings of the typical mystery are somehow actually happening.” Maybe, as the dog days of 2026 stretch out, you’ll find below some worthy paperback from last century in an out-of-the-way used bookshop, then go lie on a towel and forget for a few hours that it is, in fact, still 2026.
∞ ∞ ∞
→ This article from the archives is part of an ongoing series celebrating the Voice’s Platinum Anniversary — 70 years! The first issue appeared on the streets of NYC on October 26, 1955. ←
Beach Blanket Genrefication
1. Whodunits
By Geoffrey O’Brien
Originally published:
Beach weather stimulates the escapist region of the cortex — while the sun-stunned body lies immobile, the mind loses itself in cool, high-speed narratives. On such days crime novels give us the illusion of bustling activity. The real activity, meanwhile, is at the paperback houses, where mysteries — old, new, imported, translated — are pouring out in record numbers. The large-scale exhumation of titles unseen for decades allows you to choose not only your crime — murder, blackmail, treason — but also the precise year, location, and milieu in which you like it committed.
Robert van Gulik‘s Judge Dee novels (reprinted by Scribner’s, University of Chicago, and Dover) go back to the T’ang dynasty for their convincing pastiche of traditional Chinese detective stories. The Red Pavilion (Scribner’s, $3.50 paper), like most of the series, impresses more by the density of its trappings and the hypnotically ceremonial quality of Dee’s detection than by its fairly commonplace tale of courtesans, magistrates, and literary students. A contemporary piece of exotica, Delacorta‘s Diva (Ballantine, $2.75 paper), suggests why French readers prefer American-imported crime novels to homegrown stuff. Diva is crammed with incident and moves without letup (I clocked in at around 70 minutes), but there’s no sense of necessity: anything can happen, and does, and not even the author seems to care much. (I’m still wondering what happened to the woman who was locked in a cellar on page 68 and then apparently forgotten.) The style — painlessly perfunctory — offers no literary equivalent of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s edgy visuals.
Unlike the French, the British know how to impart an air of solidity to the flimsiest contrivance. “The English,” as Raymond Chandler wrote, “may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.” Hence their undisputed mastery of the plodding-but-capable whodunit, a genre more satisfying than exciting. The trick is not to startle with original thought or surreal imagery, but to persuade us that all the absurdly coincidental and overelaborate doings of the typical mystery are somehow actually happening. In Reginald Hill‘s A Pinch of Snuff (Dell, $2.95 paper), the drab minutiae of Inspector Peter Pascoe’s life — the pints of bitter, the office back-biting, the minor lusts — anchor an extravagantly eventful intrigue involving child pornography, police corruption, sleazy nightclubs, a lecherous dentist, and a schoolmaster with a very English appetite for caning. The firm plotting and understated style give it the feel of a typical day’s work in the Midlands.
Hare’s characters — mostly repressed suburban types seething with warped emotions — are almost too painfully real for the genre.
Like many of his contemporaries (Ruth Rendell, P. D. James), Hill injects the regulation detective form with up-to-the-minute sordidness. It’s enough to make one long for the gentler world of Margery Allingham, whose oeuvre — ranging unpredictably from the farcical to the melancholy — is being revived by Penguin and Bantam. Allingham was a quirkier writer than Sayers, Christie, or Marsh, and the whimsical gallows humor of More Work for the Undertaker (Penguin, $3.50 paper) is definitely an acquired taste. The unwary should note that Allingham focuses less on the poisonings which provide the obligatory puzzle than on the characters to whom they happen: a family of overeducated eccentrics living in decayed splendor, surrounded by exuberant Cockneys who serve as a kind of Greek chorus.
If Allingham’s mode proves too leisurely, there’s always Cyril Hare‘s Death Among Friends (Harpers, $3.50 paper), a collection of quickies perfect for slow elevators or brief subway rides. Hare’s novels (An English Murder, Tragedy at Law) are notable for their delicacy and muted seriousness; his short stories strike a crueler tone. Each resembles an elegant trap, closing neatly in the final paragraph, much like the better episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The stories in Julian Symons‘s The Tigers of Subtopia (Penguin, $3.50 paper) are nearly as ingenious as Hare’s, but the characters — mostly repressed suburban types seething with warped emotions — are almost too painfully real for the genre. When Hare’s protagonists meet their doom, we look on with detached amusement, but Symons introduces a problematic element of pity. The neatly carpentered plot reversals leave a residue of free-floating anxiety.
These days, American crime writers tend toward longer forms, in search of the crossover from genre title to blockbuster. Charles McCarry‘s The Last Supper (Signet, $3.50 paper) mixes spy thriller with family saga to replay the history of the CIA as WASP tragedy. McCarry, himself an ex-spook, persuasively portrays the intelligence community as a band of elitist Ivy Leaguers sealed off from ordinary experience, a postgraduate fraternity with insular loyalties. The author’s own sympathies remain appropriately ambiguous; in the meantime he supplies the requisite dosage of passion and betrayal, as well as an exciting (if unbelievable) revelation at the end.
In Donald E. Westlake‘s Kahawa (Tor, $3.95 paper), the excitement is nearly continuous. Westlake, best known as a farceur (The Hot Rock, A Travesty), has beaten Frederick Forsyth and Jack Higgins at their own adventuresome game. Kahawa is pure hammock reading, even if a plot to steal a trainload of coffee out of Idi Amin’s Uganda doesn’t sound enthralling. Westlake has a tremendous flair for logistics: we end up intimately acquainted with the northern shore of Lake Victoria and the rail line from Jinja to Tororo. The same strategic point of view informs Westlake’s Parker novels (originally published under the alias Richard Stark), of which the first two (The Hunter and The Man with the Getaway Face) are just out from Avon ($2.50 each). Parker was conceived as the ultimate antihero, a professional criminal devoid of humor or compassion, affectless and supremely competent — in other words, a perfect psychopath. The books, written in a snubnosed version of Basic English, are military fantasies in which the reader as heist artist penetrates vaults and armored cars and Mafia strongholds; the violence and marginal misogyny are secondary to a small boy’s fascination with maps and toy soldiers. These compulsively readable chronicles of action in a moral vacuum, rendered with formalist precision, carry an unavoidable (though perhaps unintended) political resonance.
A large-scale rediscovery of American crime novels seems to be in progress, judging by the reissue lists. Some, like Harold Q. Masur‘s Bury Me Deep (Quill, $3.95 paper), offer mainly the nostalgic charm of lines like: “A hop-head on the prowl with a hot pistol can raise hell.” Swag, Elmore Leonard‘s idiomatic account of small-time thieves in Detroit, is more substantial; so are Frederic Brown‘s Night of the Jabberwock (Quill, $3.95), a dreamlike blend of gangsters and Lewis Carroll, filtered through the perceptions of a philosophical drunk, and above all Margaret Millar‘s Beast in View (IPL, $5 paper), a structurally brilliant horror story about a woman who gets her kicks by driving people to suicide. The twist ending is both a wonderful piece of invention and a devastating analogy of personality disintegration. Here as elsewhere, Millar demonstrates that for some kinds of experience, the crime novel is the only adequate form.
❖ ❖ ❖
