I was rather looking forward to The Shadow of Doctor
Syn. This was the last of Russell Thorndike’s adventures about the Reverend Doctor
Christopher Syn, that fascinating fictional character who is a vicar by day, a
smuggler leader by night and a former pirate captain; sadly they have long been
out of print (my version is a paperback from the Sixties that originally sold
for two-and-six). Although it’s the last published Doctor Syn novel, the action
takes place shortly before the events of the original novel, Doctor Syn: A
Tale of the Romney Marsh (all of the follow-up ones were prequels). It’s
the time of the French Revolution, and the talk in fashionable London is of two
things – the Terror in France and the continuing exploits of the Scarecrow, that
smuggler extraordinary who is still able to bring bootleg brandy over the
Channel and whose reward has gone up to £1,000 (the reader is, of course, aware
from the start that this the Scarecrow is Doctor Syn’s alter ego). Captain
Foulkes, a bully of a man who cheats at cards but gets away with it because his
opponents are afraid to challenge him to a duel, makes a bet that he can bring
the Scarecrow to justice; when he makes his way down to Romney Marsh, he’s in
the same horse-drawn coach as a certain vicar…
What follows is all rather fun, up to a point. There’s
the usual hapless troop of dragoons down on the marsh trying and failing to
beat the smugglers. Jimmy Bone, the highwayman who’s in league with the
smugglers, is at one point obliged to don the Scarecrow costume so that
smuggler leader and vicar can be seen together. Doctor Syn goes across to
France and, as L’Épouvantail – the Scarecrow’s French
alias – he gets the better of Robespierre himself (as The Scarlet Pimpernel
was an inspiration for Doctor Syn, I presume Thorndike had been toying with
this one for a while). Lord Cullingford, a young nobleman impoverished by
Captain Foulkes to the point where he goes to Romney Marsh to try and capture
the Scarecrow himself (and thus claim the reward money), is talked out of this
course of action by Doctor Syn and ends up joining the dragoons before they get
posted abroad.
And yet. This is one of the later books and it shows, for
Thorndike is not just going through the motions but actually repeating himself.
The officer in charge of the dragoons is Major Faunce, a name that has been
encountered before although this one is actually the brother of the original.
Captain Foulkes’s nickname, ‘Bully’, has been used before (it was applied to a
character in an earlier novel whose fate was, as it happens, the same as this
one’s). Finally, a major plotline of The Shadow of Doctor Syn is the
story of the squire’s youngest daughter Cicely, who falls in love with the
vicar while becoming fascinated with the Scarecrow, a repeat of what happened
to another daughter of the same squire in an earlier adventure, Doctor Syn
Returns. Much though I like the Doctor Syn books, the fact that Thorndike ended up re-hashing old plots means that this was
ultimately not as enjoyable as I’d hoped.
Following that, I tackled an archaeological thriller from
the Seventies which has (also) long been out of print but which I was able to
find going cheap (on the £1 stand outside my local second-hand bookshop; back
in 1976, it went for £3.75 brand new). The Pontius Pilate Papers is a
novel by Warren Kiefer, an American film director who also wrote a few novels
but who is rather obscure given that he often used an alias. The main character
(and narrator) is Jay Marcus, a somewhat unlikable millionaire playboy who
trained as a doctor but is content to spend his time (and money) indulging in
his passion for archaeology. He’s endowed a museum in Jerusalem and the
adventure starts when an archaeologist who works for that museum gets murdered;
the dead man had previously discovered some Roman papyrus scrolls while
excavating a site at Caesarea and had been rather secretive about the content
of these, which shed new light on the actions of a Roman official stationed in
Jerusalem during the first century AD. There are no prizes for guessing who –
the clue’s in the title – but this new evidence will inevitably call in to
question the Biblical account of the events leading up to the Crucifixion. The
scrolls have of course been stolen, and by the end of the third chapter our
hero has managed to get lucky with Nicoletta, the dead archaeologist’s
beautiful Italian assistant. Everyone else – the museum director, another
benefactor who appears to be just as rich as Jay and a seemingly shifty museum
employee – is a suspect.
The action of The Pontius Pilate Papers flits from
Israel to Paris, Vienna, London and Oxford, during which Jay and Nicoletta have
to contend with an array of (mostly) two-dimensional characters. There are cops
from several countries who aren’t sure what’s going on (not helped by Jay and
his uncle Aaron choosing not to keep them fully in the picture), bitchy
academics, bitchy academics’ wives who like to start drinking early, a somewhat
ridiculous antiquarian book-dealer and private detectives who are either
reckless, incompetent or who moonlight as international film stuntmen and provide
Jay with an extra woman when he has to spend the night away from Nicoletta. One
of the British cops was called Sergeant Battle, which I presume to be a nod to
Agatha Christie who had a recurring police character in some of her books
called Superintendent Battle.
I had originally bought the book because I like thrillers which revolve around a potentially
very dangerous secret – and, given when this one was published, it would be not
so much sub-Da Vinci Code as pre-Da Vinci Code. But it never
quite takes off. Jay, the protagonist, is both unsympathetic and unconvincing.
There are a few sequences that rather jar, being either implausible or
long-winded. There are also parts – descriptive sequences as well as character
descriptions – that have not aged well at all. By the time the villain of the
piece was revealed I no longer cared (although the fact that I had guessed, and
guessed correctly, at said villain’s identity before I was half-way through may
have had something to do with this). Finally, the wrapping-up of the plot was
spoilt a bit by a final twist on the last page. Here, I think, is one to
forget.
There followed much better fare courtesy of Agatha
Christie. Sparkling Cyanide is an enjoyable murder mystery which
centred around the murder of an upper-class heiress by way of cyanide
administered in a glass of champagne at a dinner party (hence the title). This method of murdering someone, by the way, is identical to the murder in the Nero Wolfe mystery Champagne for One,
although a quick bit of research told me that Sparkling Cyanide was
first published in 1945 and Champagne for One in 1958. Thus, Rex Stout was
copying Agatha Christie, not the other way round.
Everyone initially assumes
it was suicide, the victim having been depressed for some time prior to her death. However, a few months later her husband starts to receive
anonymous letters hinting that it was murder. He therefore decides to repeat
the dinner party with the same guests at the same place on the anniversary of his wife’s death, only to meet the same end
as his wife. It falls to Colonel Race (a military intelligence officer who’d previously assisted Hercule Poirot
in Death on the Nile) and the original victim’s sister’s boyfriend to
work out what’s been going on and try to prevent a third murder. A good read, in
which all of the supporting characters are well fleshed out, each of them with
a convincing reason for wanting the original victim dead. Recommended.
