Margery Allingham | Thornfield Hall

Mysteries are practically proscribed at our house. An invisible banner above our mystery shelves reads: “If it is not Simenon, it is not worth reading.” I cannot coax my husband to read Dorothy Sayers, James M. Cain, Ellery Queen, or even Agatha Christie. He simply is not interested.

I became a mystery fan after I saw the Peter Wimsey series on Masterpiece Theater years ago: I enjoy Golden Age detective fiction, police procedurals, some thrillers, and historical mysteries.

This weekend I lost myself in genre fiction. I read three mysteries in three days. The first two were Golden Age mysteries: Margery Allingham’s Black Plumes (1940), which is set in an art gallery where a slashed painting is one of many senseless, malicious acts that end in murder; and Anthony Boucher’s Rocket to the Morgue (1942), a locked-room mystery in which a detective and a nun strive to prevent the murder of of a greedy literary executor who has been attacked. I thoroughly enjoyed these, and may write more about them later.

But the third one is the knock-out: Julian Symons’s The Man Who Lost His Wife (1970), a psychological thriller about a publisher’s psychotic, violent breakdown.

Mild-mannered Gilbert Welton is a bit of a bore. He likes a quiet life and has a strict routine. When his charming wife, Virginia, announces that she plans to go on vacation alone to consider the state of their marriage, Gilbert is convinced that she got the idea from a women’s magazine. He envisions the headlines: “Do You Need a Holiday from Your Husband? … The Strain of Being Happily Married… Are You a Robot Wife?’

Gilbert does not have a high opinion of Virginia’s intelligence. But he becomes madly jealous at a dinner party when he notices that other men find her attractive. He is furious at his pushy, flirtatious partner, Max, who poaches best-selling writers and is saving the company from ruin with dicey practices. Gilbert wonders if Virginia is having an affair with Max. (It is possible.) When Virginia and Max, too, incidentally, are out of the country, Gilbert settles down to his routine again.

The first part of the novel is delightful, set mostly in Gilbert’s publishing office, and reminds me a bit of a novel by Angus Wilson or perhaps Barbara Pym. There are lost manuscripts, arguments about whether to publish an art book about the new Spatial Realists (conservative Gilbert nixes it), lunches at the club, and conversations with an unconventional, emotional American writer who has been recruited by Max.

But we do get the feeling that something is wrong with Gilbert. He goes to a Spatial Realists art show and is convinced that his wife is the subject of one of the paintings.. And then his obsession takes a more disturbing turn. He is indirectly responsible for his drunken ex-wife’s s suicide, and one aggressive incident leads to to another. He travels to Yugoslavia to find Virginia when he cannot contact her at the hotel, has a violent encounter on the road , and eventually there is a murder.

And after that, I am not at all sure about Gilbert’s perceptions. Needless to say, this violence does not go undetected. Does he actually go home to a docile wife, who says, “A woman’s place is with her husband. I mean, she should live his life, not the other way around.” Or is that his imagination? It doesn’t sound at all like Virginia. There are a few other scenes that seem off.

Is this meant to be realism, or psychosis?

At any rate, I raced through this brilliant, suspenseful novel.

Do you ever stay in bed (or on the couch) and read a book cover-to-cover after an exhausting week? This is especially enjoyable if your housemate, husband, or other relative agrees to bring you cups of tea at intervals. (“I’ll make moussaka tonight,” you promise.)

Here is a month’s worth of short weekend binge reads for the Weary and Worthy.

1. Margery Allingham’s The Case of the Late Pig. Allingham is one of the four Queens of Crime of ’30s Golden Age Detective Fiction, along with Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Ngaio Marsh. In The Case of the Late Pig, published in 1937, Private Inspector Albert Campion investigates the murder of Pig Peters, an obnoxious, unscrupulous man who turns up newly dead five months after his own funeral. Pig had many enemies, including Albert, who remembers him as a bully at school. But who was the corpse buried five months ago? Allingham is a good if not brilliant writer, able to spin an unputdownable plot. I am a fan of Albert Campion, a wealthy, superficially silly, shrewd detective, not unlike Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey.

2. Stanley Middleton’s The Golden Evening. There has been a revival of the work of Stanley Middleton, a prolific writer who won the Booker Prize in 1974, as Windmill reissues his out-of-print novels.

In The Golden Evening, the Allsop family is grieving because Ivy Allsop is dying of cancer in the hospital. Her husband, Ernest, and their two children, Bernard and Mary, feel guilty as she lies in pain in the hospital, but life goes on for them. Bernard, a graduate student in history, is engaged to a rich, slightly older widow, Jacqueline, who draws him into helping with the foundation of a cultural society. (Middleton expounds on Bernard’s introduction to modern atonal music.) Jacqueline insists on being introduced to his mother in the hospital; Bernard agonizes over the decision. His younger sister Mary , who begins dating an older boy at school, is not sure if he likes her or if she is being used. At one point Mr. Allsop seems to be cracking up, but somehow they cope. A quiet, beautifully-written novel about sadness, gradual acceptance of death, and the joys of life.

3. Domenico Starnone’s Trick. This Italian novel, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri and illustrated by Dario Maglionico, reminds me of Elena Ferrante’s early work (which I prefer to the Neapolitan quartet). The narrator, Daniele Mallarico, a successful artist, spends a couple of frazzled days in Naples babysitting for his four-year-old grandson, Mario, while his daughter and son-in-law go to a conference. We feel Daniele’s boredom and exhaustion, and his desperation to work on illustrations for a Henry James story (his publisher dislikes the ones he has submitted). Mario demands all his attention. And Daniele feels competitive with his grandson after Mario proves capable of copying one of Daniele’s illustrations. Things spin out of control in a manner that is almost Jamesian Gothic when the boy plays a trick.

4. Meghan Daum’s The Problem with Everything: My Journey through the New Culture Wars. I hesitate to write about this short, snappy book about the generational divide, because it is bound to make people angry. According to Daum, the Baby Boomers were idealistic, Gen X is tough and ironic, and the Millennials and Generation Z are rigid, fragile, and humorless. The younger generations have been raised on phones and social media, where short messages without documentation are passed on and believed as “truth” by the “woke.” Technology has limited their imagination and ability to argue. Some of Daum’s hypotheses are wild: at one point, she surmises that knowing the baby’s sex before birth has led parents away from the relatively gender-free roles of her own Gen X childhood to a revival of pink and blue, and a pink princess culture for girls which leaves them feeling like victims in need of rescue. I was appalled ot read that Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock no longer play the college circuit because of students’ dislike of edgy humor, while other comedians admit they simplify their jokes for the new audience. Daum writes brilliantly, and her theories are fascinating, even though I don’t always buy them. But the book is exhausting, like watching a car wreck.