Written by Louis Weinert-Wilton (1875-1945), and published in 1936, this is a really quirky example of vintage crime writing.

I came across it via the German version of Gutenberg, which (as well as lots of texts) has a handy reading tips page (currently being reworked, so check back later).

I'll start with the author, whose own story is every bit as intriguing as anything he might have written. According to Radek Flekal, our man was born Alois Weinert in the West Bohemian town of Weseritz, which is located in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire (it's now in the Czech Republic, and this place is known as Bezdruzice in Czech). His parents had set their sights on a splendid military career for their eldest, but difficulties with his health brought his studies at the Pola Military Academy to a premature close (Pola is now Pula, and in Croatia). During WWI, however, he served in Brzezinka, and won a medal for bravery.

Meanwhile, Weinert-Wilton had embarked on a career in journalism. He worked in various places, but it was his move to Prague that catapulted him into a different orbit. He worked as a newspaper editor, and wrote journalistic texts; he also became involved in the theatre, as commercial director and playwright. And in 1929, under his pseudonym, he wrote his first two Krimis. Eleven novels appeared in 10 years, with a circulation of more than three million. Some of the books were serialized in the contemporary press, and seven came out in new editions with Goldmann-Verlag in Munich. They were translated into several languages (English not among them) soon after publication, testifying to their immense popularity, and Weinert-Wilton has a legitimate claim to fame as one of the most successful German-language crime-fiction authors.

What he had very expertly done was tap into the wave of enthusiasm for uber-prolific British writer Edgar Wallace. (I have never read any Edgar Wallace, and I find it interesting that I'd never even heard of him until I lived in Germany...)

Setting his plots in smoggy London, in locales ranging from upper-crust clubs to dockside taverns, "the German Wallace" (as the newspapers of the time referred to Weinert-Wilton) explicitly imitated his model's style. And this, Flekal suggests, is probably why he is now forgotten... If he had used Prague as his background, he might have set himself a little apart from his British contemporary.


The only bit of dockside I'm familiar with...

But he deserves at least a nod from history: "On the one hand, he's the author of socially critical and raw plays -- on the other, he's the writer of relaxing/exciting and adventurous crime stories; on the one hand, he's a personality who is valued in Prague's cultural circles -- on the other, he's the author of 'trivial', cookie-cutter novels for a mass audience. He's what you might call a 'paradoxical' author, who for that very reason should not be forgotten."

Even from my brief experience with The Chinese Carnation (which I promise I will get to soon), it's obvious there's a good author inside all the sensationalism. The story is quite atmospheric. The characters, while stereotypical, are engaging. And he's very funny in places. Josef Quack, explaining why his study of four key crime writers leaves Weinert-Wilton out ("he did nothing other than imitate Wallace's style of smoke and mirrors"), admits: "His prose exudes a certain morbid charm; written in old-style conventional German, it is characterized by a distinguished meticulousness that is rarely found today and hardly ever in translations."

And his memory lived on for a while at least. In the 1960s, riding on the coat-tails of a new series of Edgar Wallace flicks, several of Weinert-Wilton's works were also made into movies (including The Secret of the Chinese Carnation, although the plot of the film seems wildly different from the plot of the novel). His books remained in print at least until the 1980s (some of them making it to 10 editions), and you can still buy electronic versions.



But there's a rather horrible coda. Louis Weinert-Wilton was a Sudeten German, part of the second biggest ethnic group in what was then Czechoslovakia. The Sudetenland, famously, was annexed by Hitler in 1938, and the following year, Nazi troops marched into Prague. Their occupation was predictably grim. After the war, Sudeten Germans were personae non gratae, even though they had not necessarily been collaborators. Killing, incarceration, and expulsion became the order of the day

As Flekal explains, "The attitude of the Czechs towards the Germans in the country after the Second World War had fatal consequences for Weinert-Wilton: He was sent to a Czech camp for Germans in Prague, where his health gradually deteriorated. As a result of hard forced labor and mistreatment, he died, on 5 September 1945, shortly after the end of the war. Since Germans were not allowed to have a proper burial, the once respected and highly esteemed author and elegant theater director ended up in a mass grave... Hans Regina von Nack (1894-1976), who also published crime novels and was employed by the Prager Abendblatt, commented on Weinert-Wilton's death in his unpublished autobiography: 'Although Weinert was a committed anti-fascist, he was imprisoned by the Czechs in 1945 as an old man, [and] died miserably in captivity... It sounds like a macabre joke to hear that a few years later the Czechs co-produced a film based on a novel by the very man whom they had buried in a pit.'"

Sobering.



Anyway, the book... It's about espionage (but it's quite a while before this really becomes clear). Beautiful Maud Hogarth has unwittingly become involved because her uncle (now dead) came upon some secret documents, which he successfully decoded. Rather fatefully, he passed them on to Maud just before dying. Handsome Donald Ramsay works for the "Shadow House", aka the intelligence service. Again, it's quite a while before we can confidently say this, but these two are Goodies. Eventually, Ramsay sorts everything out, and the two comely folks, having fallen for each other in the course of their escapades, are slated to live happily ever after.

I won't explain the intricacies of the plot, partly because I don't want to give the game away, and partly because I probably can't...

It's a crazily complicated business, and the impenetrability is increased by Weinert-Wilton's mania for describing (rather than naming) people. "The bald-headed man", for example. Now, is he the same as "the pointy-headed bald man", or different? Then we have "the man in the long raincoat and the peaked cap"; and "the man with the bushy moustache" (very important, this one). Of course, the reason for all this jiggery-pokery is that one key person is impersonating someone else, and the other has adopted an alternative fake persona, and switches backwards and forwards between the two. So naming people would reveal too much too soon. But it's a bit frustrating... Obviously, mystery novels don't offer you everything on a plate. That wouldn't be very mysterious. But there's a limit to the information you can usefully withhold without unduly frustrating the reader, and I think that limit was exceeded here...

One of the things I liked about the book, though, was the women characters. There's Maud, who's very feisty, very brave, always determined not to be cowed. There's the wonderful Mrs Machennan, purportedly a housekeeper but actually an undercover secret service operative. You don't want to mess with Mrs Machennan... At one point she's kidnapped, but bests her opponent with some kind of gas pistol ("a very practical new invention"). She's magnificently understated. She can be describing an altercation with an annoying person, for example, and suddenly you realize she's skipped on to where he's "getting up again". What was he doing on the ground, Mrs Machennan...? Despite an unfortunate tendency to swoon over Ramsay, therefore, these are great characters. Then there's Pheny, Mrs Machennan's maid-of-all-work and trained rottweiler. Her speech impediment is made fun of in a not very politically correct way, but Pheny won't let you feel too sorry for her, since she definitely knows how to handle herself.

The Chinese Carnation of the title reflects the vaguely eastern backstory to the novel. It's the name of a tea house in Hong Kong that made the fortune of our key villain, and launched this person into a career as a political agent. When carnations start appearing left, right, and centre in the opening scenes, it's a sign that a new round in the campaign is beginning.

What else? Well, there's a really wacky building, the sort of thing you can only imagine existing in London. As well as housing a smart club, its strangely configured walls and mysterious arrangements of lifts and sliding doors conceal a short-wave transmitting station...

And there's a cat. Always a good thing.

So, I wasn't wholly enthusiastic, but there were enough points of interest to make me feel I'd try at least one more.


Not carnations