“The Auschwitz Violinist” by Jonathan Dunsky

It’s a chance meeting. Private investigator Adam Lapid bumps into a man he knew at Auschwitz, a violinist who played in the orchestra the Nazis had at the death camp. It’s Tel Aviv, 1950, and it’s not unusual to see people you once assumed had been murdered in the camps. 

The violinist invites Adam to hear a performance he’s given at a bar, and Adam goes. The music is haunting, not only for Adam but for the other patrons as well. Afterward, they part, with a promise to getting together again. 

And then Adam finds out that, when he arrived home, the violinist committed suicide. The bar owner asks Adam to look into it, because the idea of suicide makes no sense in this case. As Adam starts, everything points to suicide. Only it points two well to suicide. Adam finds a letter in the man’s mailbox from a friend in Jerusalem. He visits there, only to learn that the friend had also committed suicide. And the friend had also been a musician in the Auschwitz orchestra. 

It turns out to be murder. Two, in fact. And then Adam finds a third.

Jonathan Dunsky

The Auschwitz Violinist by Israeli writer Jonathan Dunsky is the third in the Adam Lipid detective series, and it’s a dandy story. Dunsky combines Israeli modern history, the horrors of the Holocaust, and a hardboiled cynical detective hero to create a story and a series that are riveting and difficult to put down (I failed to put it down, reading it straight through). 

The four Adam Lapid mysteries are Ten Years Gone; The Dead Sister; The Auschwitz Violinist; and A Debt of Death. He’s also published The Favor: A Tale of Friendship and Murder; Grandma Rachel’s Ghosts; Family Ties; Tommy’s Touch: A Fantasy Love Story; and other works. He was born in Israel, served four years in the Israeli Army, lived in Europe for several years, and currently lives in Israel with his family. He has worked in various high-tech firms and operated his own search optimization business.

Reading The Auschwitz Violinist has further confirmed me as an Adam Lapid fan. My problem is that I read them faster than Dunsky can write them.

Related:

My review of Ten Years Gone by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of The Unlucky Woman by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of The Dead Sisterby Jonathan Dunsky.

“Hunted Down: The Detective Stories of Charles Dickens”

In the introduction to Hunted Down: The Detective Stories of Charles Dickens, British author and Journalist Peter Haining (1940-2007) argues that Charles Dickens (1812-1870) deserves more credit than he gets as one of the fathers, if not the father, of the literary genre we know today as detective stories. He makes a convincing case.

In the middle decades of the 19^th century, at least three authors – Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849), Dickens, and Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), who was a great friend of Dickens – were all writing stories that included elements of detective fiction. Dickens also wrote and published a number of articles about police detectives and how they operated in London, and these were the early days of organized police forces. And Dickens last work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which was unfinished at his death, was as close to being a detective novel as anything else being published at the time.

Hunted Down, first published in 1996 (I read the 2013 reprint), assembles 12 fiction and no-fiction stories by Dickens, which not only support Haining’s thesis but also demonstrate that Dickens was almost intimately familiar with the workings of the police. Roughly half of the stories are non-fiction reports, including detectives talking with Dickens about some of their well-known cases and Dickens actually shadowing detectives as they investigated various crimes. Not all of the crimes involved serious charges like murder; far more numerous were the relatively minor crimes of burglary, fraud, theft, and drunkenness.

Charles Dickens

One of Dickens’s better-known police characters is Inspector Bucket, who plays a role in the novel Bleak House. The story is about the long churning of a court case, and is based on actual events. In “Inspector Bucket’s Job,” an excerpt from Bleak House, the policeman solves a murder case with a little help from his wife, and the excerpt is fully recognizable as a classic detective story.

The title story, “Hunted Down,” has a rather unorthodox detective – the manager of a life insurance company who believes a client is arranging for insurance policies on people he intends to kill. A plan is put into motion and a trap is set, to see if the suspected villain will fall into it. (I reviewed this story by itself here.)

Hunted Down makes its case for recognizing Dickens’s contribution to creating detective fiction. Its stories are also a window into the reading entertainment and crime journalism of the 1840s to the 1860s, which would eventually lead to Sherlock Holmes and the Gaslight Era of crime fiction.

Top illustration: "Friendly behaviour of Mr Bucket," by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne), Bleak House, 1853. Bucket is holding two of the Bagnet children.

“The China Governess” by Margery Allingham

Timothy Kinnit has just about everything going for him. Adopted as a baby into a wealthy family, he’s just finished Oxford. He’s in love with Julia Laurell, a beautiful young woman whose father is a major manufacturer (and wealthy). Tim and Julia are right on the verge of eloping.

And then the world turns upside down. Tim had always believed he was the illegitimate son of a Kinnit, and that turns out not to be the case. He goes looking for where he came from, and gets beaten up by a private detective. There appears to be a connection to the trashing of an apartment in the area of east London where Tim was likely born. And then the detective agency finds itself the victim of arson, and Tim is the prime suspect.

Enter Superintendent Charles Luke of Scotland Yard. And enter amateur detective Albert Campion.

In The China Governess, Golden Age mystery writer Margery Allingham (1904-1966) mixes an eccentric family, secrets buried in the past, disguised identities, a murder or two, and romance (it’s not an Allingham mystery novel without romance). The result is a fast-paced, entertaining mystery.

Margery Allingham

First published in 1963, three years before Allingham’s death, and set in the early 1960s, The China Governess isn’t the kind of English country manor murder mystery so popular during the Golden Age (1920s-1940s). There’s only one short scene that actually occurs in the country, and that happens early in the book. Most of the action is centered in London, which is still rebuilding after the blitz of 1940-1941. There are still relics of earlier houses, however, and the Kinnits’ Well House is one of them.

It’s an Albert Campion mystery, and Campion is the sleuth that helped make Allingham famous in her own lifetime. But the character who steals the show is Mrs. Broome, something of the housekeeper for the Kinnits’ country home who comes to London to help out at Well House. Almost Dickensian in character, Mrs. Broome is alternately funny, insightful, forgetful, and always highly protective. She is one of Allingham’s great characters.

The China Governess is a great treat, demonstrating that Allingham lost none of her detective writing abilities in her later books.

Related:

The Beckoning Lady by Margery Allingham

The Allingham Casebook by Margery Allingham.

Margery Allingham’s The Case of the Late Pig.

Margery Allingham’s Flowers for the Judge.

Margery Allingham’s Death of a Ghost.

Margery Allingham’s Black Plumes.

Margery Allingham’s Look to the Lady.

Margery Allingham’s Police at the Funeral.

The Essential Margery Allingham Collection.

Margery Allingham Box Set #2.

Margery Allingham’s The Fashion in Shrouds.

The Margery Allingham Society.

Top photograph: a London cul-de-sac much like the setting of Well House in The China Governess.