The Affair of the 39 Cufflinks
by James Anderson
Poisoned Pen, 320 pp., $24.95
THE TRADITIONAL PUZZLE MYSTERY–the old-fashioned whodunit–has a long history in both the United States and Great Britain (and a less prominent but significant one in Europe and the rest of the world). The Sherlock Holmes stories are the earliest such tales that most people know about, but the first true mystery stories, those written by Poe in the 1840s, were in the puzzle style. The first important American mystery novelist, Anna Katharine Green, wrote in what is now the traditional puzzle form in books like The Leavenworth Case of 1878, as did Wilkie Collins in his justly renowned early mystery novel The Moonstone in 1868. Even Charles Dickens tried his hand at the form (very successfully) in his last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
But the golden age of the whodunit was the period between the two world wars in England and the United States. Authors such as Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, Dorothy L. Sayers, H.C. Bailey, Rex Stout, Ngaio Marsh, and many others of similar ability were in their prime then, and every year brought dozens of top-level puzzle mysteries. And yet, for some not entirely explicable reason, most new writers and their publishers decided after the war that murder was not a cheery business, and the puzzles faded from view, replaced by more hardboiled, explicitly violent and sexy fare.
Of course, the traditional mystery didn’t entirely disappear. The continuing popularity of the form is demonstrated by today’s countless, steady-selling–and typically ghastly–cozy novel series (featuring bed-and-breakfast owners, feisty grannies, or cats as the detectives). And something like a revival has been quietly happening in recent decades, with P.D. James, Reginald Hill, Elizabeth Peters, Peter Lovesey, and Tony Hillerman bringing new life to the form by creating real novels that happen to have a mystery at the center.
Unlike those more overtly ambitious writers, the British author James Anderson has gone traditional all the way, actually setting his three Inspector Wilkins mystery novels directly in the fictional past of the 1930s English countryside. Starting with The Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cosy in 1975 and continuing to his current release, The Affair of the 39 Cufflinks, Anderson’s traditional-style puzzle novels have updated the classic British country house mystery by the unusual strategy of being highly faithful to their source. Each volume includes, for example, that essential element of all great traditional mysteries: a map, in this case a floor plan of Alderley, Lord and Lady Burford’s beautiful rural English home built in the seventeenth century. Each of the books takes place on this elegant estate, which could be the setting for a frothy P.G. Wodehouse farce were it not for the occasional homicide.
Anderson continually shows a fondness for genre conventions while carefully creating new variations on the old traditions. Each book, for example, has a highly provocative opening, as when a woman hisses “You murdering fiend!” at the commencement of The Affair of the Mutilated Mink (1981), and the tension is promptly deflated to comic effect. The author then settles down to several chapters of real novel writing, exploring the various characters’ personal situations, which ultimately lead up to the murder a good way through the book.
Like Ngaio Marsh–and unlike most current-day crime writers–Anderson is in no hurry to get to the actual killing. That is all to the good, for the comedy of manners allows the reader to get to know the characters and situations well, while enjoying some genial, Wodehousian satire on human nature.
The characters are just the sorts one might expect to find in an Agatha Christie book: the movie star, the plutocrat, the journalist, the diplomat, the wealthy layabout, the politician, the lawyer, the secretary, the termagant, the spunky young female, and so on. The situations are likewise familiar: a surprising provision in a will, social snobbery, blackmail, espionage, burglary, adultery, abandonment, suicide, cocktail parties, impersonations, verbal quarrels, fistfights, and the like. The characters are locked in the house at night, with a well-designed burglar alarm eliminating outsiders as possible suspects. The murders are done through simple, conventional means such as shooting and strangling.
In each volume, Anderson uses at least one amateur detective in friendly competition with Inspector Wilkins, and both the nonprofessional and the policeman prove quite effective in solving the case. Wilkins is likable, humble, and shrewd. One gets the impression that Wilkins truly does believe that he is out of his depth in investigating these country-house killings, as he asserts. It is also clear, however, that his very ignorance of the customs of the rich works to his advantage by freeing him from assumptions that would tend to lead him in the wrong direction.
The author lays out clues and red herrings in the classical tradition–a pair of antique dueling pistols, a potted plant, a pair of wire-cutters, and of course the items mentioned in the books’ titles. The narrative tone is true to the time in which the stories are set: delight in the thrill of the chase, leavened by an awareness of the seriousness of the situation. In another bow to tradition, Anderson alludes directly to Christie and Sayers in the names of two important characters in The Affair of the 39 Cufflinks, and the solution to the mystery includes a morally sophisticated final twist involving a novel variation on Christie’s use of the “least likely suspect” gambit. The book also includes an explicit but tastefully brief assertion of the author’s Christian beliefs, through a conversation between two characters.
The best genre books walk a fine line between convention and innovation, and a good deal of Anderson’s appeal is in having achieved the right amount of each. He openly makes light of genre conventions, in fact, to very good effect. For example, in The Affair of the 39 Cufflinks he has Inspector Wilkins dismiss the household staff as suspects by saying, “I have never come across a country house case in which any of the servants was guilty.” Wilkins goes on to note that a spate of such cases had occurred in the United States some years ago, “but that trend is long past.” (He also refers to Christie’s fictional detective Hercule Poirot as a living contemporary.)
Anderson further makes The Affair of the 39 Cufflinks relevant to today’s readers by mocking current-day political correctness. A young man sheepishly admits to the girl he loves, “Fact is, that, well–I’m a conservative. . . . Oh, I don’t mean I’m a member of the party, or anything like that. But I do vote for them. Well, I did once. Well, last time. Well, the only time I’ve voted, actually.” Her response: “I think it’s very brave of you to tell me.” The slight anachronism is funny and pointed: Conservatism has replaced communism as the great political bugaboo.
The conclusion to The Affair of the 39 Cufflinks draws a highly interesting and useful observation about moral culpability, as Wilkins considers a further, final twist in the case. Greatly to his credit, the author does not present these innovations as necessary improvements on a fusty, decaying genre but instead as more openly self-conscious renderings of things that were implicit but perfectly visible in the originals, for those who chose to see them. Anderson does not present himself as in any way more sophisticated than Christie, Sayers, and Queen. He merely shows himself cognizant of the expectations of contemporary readers. That is what good genre fiction always does.
S.T. Karnick is an associate fellow of the Sagamore Institute.
