The Casefiles of Mr J G Reeder / Moondial
May. 3rd, 2015 11:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
john_amend_allHaving been introduced to Mr Reeder by thisbluespirit's
picspam
of a couple of years ago, my interest was piqued when I caught sight of this
book. It comprises three individual works:
- Room 13
- The Mind of Mr J G Reeder
- Terror Keep
(I've subsequently found that all the stories are out of copyright in
Australia, and hence
can be downloaded).
These are the first three Reeder books (in publication order, at least; trying to work out a consistent internal chronology isn't quite as easy).
In general, it was a fun read; Wallace has a clear, readable prose style, and I always set the book aside reluctantly when I'd reached the end of my lunch break without reaching the end of a story. There was one slight glitch with the reprint: "Flack" is sometimes rendered as "FIack". This leads me to suspect that it was set from the Project Gutenberg text, which contains the same error; I would diagnose OCR and a lack of copyediting.
We first meet Mr Reeder about halfway through Room 13, in which he plays a subsidiary role. He's a mild-mannered investigator with a government salary, head of an anti-forgery operation that's been running for the past three years with no visible success, and he drives hardened criminals to distraction by rambling on about chicken farming. The only aspect of his character which I don't recall seeing here is that he doesn't mention having a criminal mind.
Apart from Mr Reeder, the only other regular character in these books is his sidekick, Miss Margaret Belman, who first shows up partway through The Mind of.... Her role is familiar to anyone who's seen a Doctor Who companion in action: she asks questions, she gets into trouble, she furthers the plot by being a coincidence magnet, and she quickly dumps her dimwitted boyfriend in favour of having perilous adventures (and a 'ship tease) with Mr Reeder.
As the stories go on, Mr Reeder starts to take more of an active role in events. In the short stories, he mostly achieves his results by outthinking the villains (after all, he has a criminal mind). But quite early on, there are hints of physical prowess; he manages to scare the life out of one hapless thug with the sort of 'clumsiness' that takes more skill than straightforward accurate shooting, and in one of the stories he gains the upper hand over one crook by pulling a concealed knife from the umbrella he carries everywhere and never uses. I put some of this down to Miss Belman's influence; it's usually when she's in the story that Mr Reeder has to resort to physical feats, and it's in her company that he escapes from a flooding cellar minus his trousers.
Terror Keep starts out with the same sort of premise as one of the shorts: A convict escapes from prison, vowing revenge on Mr Reeder and all he holds dear. This time, the convict is one Flack, and the prison he escapes from is Broadmoor. Gradually, through the course of the book, it becomes clear that Mr Flack's criminal insanity takes the form of making him into a proto-Bond villain, complete with an elaborate underground base that collapses if you give it so much as a funny look. (The description of the base was the one place where I felt Wallace's prose fell short; it wasn't always easy to visualise how things were laid out. It didn't help that a lot of the sequence was written from Miss Belman's POV, and had to mirror her confusion about where she was and her lack of a light source).
Anyway, when Mr Reeder finds out that the villains have kidnapped Miss Belman, he turns into a full-on action hero. Seriously. By comparison, Ten's reaction to Rose losing her face is mild annoyance. This quiet, tongue-tied civil servant with side whiskers is suddenly rushing about, snapping at people to shut up, and lifting burly police officers with his bare hands. It's quite the metamorphosis.
Oh, and none of the villains disguises themself as a Chinese laundryman in order
to kidnap heiresses and sell them into slavery overseas. There's precisely
one heiress held against her will in all the stories, and the circumstances
aren't remotely comparable. Neither does Mr Reeder feel it necessary to wear the villains' shirts when the time comes for him to arrest them.
As it happens, Miss Belman does survive Terror Keep, and gets a relationship upgrade with Mr Reeder. Which makes it a bit odd that in the later books, she's is nowhere to be seen. Without her, Mr Reeder has to take more of an active part in getting into trouble. Chiefly, this involves being conked on the noggin so the villain of the week can monologue at him; Wallace obligingly gives him the thickest skull in London so he doesn't come to any permanent harm for this.
I suppose one possible explanation for Miss Belman's absence is that the stories published after Terror Keep are set before it.
There's an even worse continuity snarl in the series: On the last page of Room 13, it's revealed that actually, the mild-mannered civil servant with the chicken farm isn't J G Reeder at all. Rather, he was just posing as Reeder while the real Reeder (a much younger man) went undercover in a years-long infiltration. The later books completely ignore this. There are obviously ways to reconcile the details: the first one that springs to mind is to reorder the books even more so that Room 13 is the last book. Except that that doesn't really work, because it puts other bits of continuity up the spout, so the second obvious explanation is that Mr 'Reeder' continued to use that name for the rest of his career, even though it wasn't strictly speaking his.
(According to 'Past Masters: Edgar Wallace', J. T. Edson wrote a couple of authorised books in the universe, and tried to impose order on the continuity by making J G Reeder an identity shared by four people all with the same initials: the original elderly civil servant and his three more action-oriented nephews. This explains the two Reeders in Room 13 as the elderly Jeremiah Golden Reeder and his nephew John Gray Reeder, while the cosh-wielding version in Terror Keep is Jason Grant Reeder. It makes 'James Bond is a Time Lord' sound like Occam's Razor.)
On a different topic, and since I was pinching elements of Moondial for fic the other day: The BBC have finally got round to reissuing the DVD.
(It includes an excellent example of TemptingFate, when Minty muses that her aunt's new guest will "probably [be] the most harmless old duck in the world".
)
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Date: 2015-05-04 12:37 pm (UTC)Somehow I'm not as surprised as I should be.
And re. the last bit, LOL! And Minty is obviously more easily surprised than she should be.
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Date: 2015-05-04 04:30 pm (UTC)I think Minty knew what kind of story she was in, and was trying to convince herself Miss Raven couldn't possibly be that bad...
... Don't think it worked.
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Date: 2015-05-04 04:49 pm (UTC)And, sadly, you'd need to make an announcement if you had found something of that period free of any classism, racism, or sexism. And everyone else would drop dead in shock.
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Date: 2015-05-04 05:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-04 02:56 pm (UTC)Lol for the screengrab:)
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Date: 2015-05-04 04:34 pm (UTC)And you can have another screengrab while I'm here.
Minty: I think she's a witch.
Aunt Mary: Oh, Minty!
Cue Miss Raven:
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Date: 2015-05-05 02:36 pm (UTC)Ha, ha and a nice slice of cake, yum.
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Date: 2015-05-05 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-06 02:53 pm (UTC)