Dear Editor
Dear Editor Another Exception? As a long-time fan of the murder mystery / spy-cum-mystery / spy-cum-murder / police procedural, etc., I read Hope Hale Davis' "The Case of the Puzzled Mystery...
...The first...
...Boni discerns in her she might have saved her husband from the rash errors which, though obligatory in detective stories, this time get him (to the outraged shock of readers) just what he is asking for: a bullet in the back, sudden death...
...But could they ever have caught the criminals by the methods they used...
...Freeling gives us a real, participating woman, and it is on her warm, selfless support that the hero's survival depends...
...She certainly did express intelligent opinions about his cases and the Dutch, of whom her husband was one and she was not...
...If she had used the intelligence Mr...
...One small but firm protest: The article lists Nora Charles as "the one great exception" to the rule that no detective's wife is allowed to speak an intelligent word...
...I would like to offer Arlette, the wife of the now-deceased Inspector Van der Valk, creation of Nicolas Freeling...
...December 6) with interest...
...And he had a contented look...
...Unfortunately, during the first half of the book she utters only complaints about her trivial domestic discontents...
...As though he knew that, after all, it hadn't all been wasted...
...As a long-time fan of the murder mystery / spy-cum-mystery / spy-cum-murder / police procedural, etc., I read Hope Hale Davis' "The Case of the Puzzled Mystery Writer" (NL...
...The Dresden Green turned out lo be a spy story in which neither Van der Valk nor his wife appears...
...My man.' she said calmly, 'I saw him lying there on the ground in the rain...
...Carmel, New York William F. Boni Hope Hale Davis replies: Delighted to learn that my sweeping statements might have gone too far, I hurried to the library and took down three volumes at random from the lengthy Freeling shelf...
...So far so good...
...Freeling does his best to conceal this incongruity with endless disquisitions on the sorry state of Holland and the world...
...After a period of heartbreak, believably described, Arlette sets out to find her husband's murderer...
...But the book has important female characters: in fact, the solution of the murder consists of an attempted in-depth study of the suspect's long love affair with the woman now dead...
...And the great talent Freeling puts into his stories—the rich dialogue, the dense atmosphere, the human feeling, the literary experimentation—seems wildly disproportionate to the children's game it serves...
...However...
...But in the end who can possibly agree with Arlette's last assessment...
...The answer is...
...he j even goes so far as to equate Van der Valk's life with that of a famous martyred hero of a concentration camp...
...as usual, No...
...Love in Amsterdam, mentions Arlette only to say that she is uninterested in her husband's work...
...At last, in Aupres de ma Blonde, I found a fully sketched Arlette...
...In the course of the search she learns to welcome and value the caring help of friends...
Vol. 60 • January 1977 • No. 2
