The Capital Murder (1932) by James Z. Alner

Dr. James A. Tobey was "a prominent public health official" from the United Stated, serving with "numerous public and private health organizations," who wrote such books as Riders of the Plague: The Story of the Conquest of Disease (1930) and Cancer: What Everyone Should Know About it (1932) – in addition to countless medical articles about cancer quacks, leprosy and venereal diseases in the army. So Dr. Tobey had a long, distinguished record as an authority on public health issues, but what has been forgotten today is that he once wrote a detective novel under the name of "James Z. Alner."

The Capital Murder (1932) was a truly obscure, virtually forgotten detective novel until Coachwhip reissued the book in 2018. A brand new paperback edition with an introduction and afterword by one of the Doyens of the Renaissance Age, Curt Evans.

The Capital Murder is more of a fascinating curiosity of the genre than one of its long-lost classic, but the detective-characters and structure of the plot were not without interest. The detectives are five distinguished members of the Serpentine Club, located in N Street, who were "directly interested" or "even involved in the science of criminology." These men are Commissioner Henry Selden, of the Public Service Commission of the District of Columbia, whose high-ranking position in Washington, DC, allowed his fellow club-members to play detective in an official police investigation.

An investigation primarily carried out by Trevor Stoke, an epidemiologist with the federal health service, assisted by "an utter nonentity," Jim, whose only purpose is to tell the story as Stoke's Dr. Watson – or, to be more precise, playing the S.S. van Dine to Stoke's Philo Vance. Other members are the Lieutenant Runy O'Mara of the United States Navy, Dr. Basil Ragland, an eminent psychiatrist, and a famous architect, Lance Starr-Smith. These men were gathered in the walled garden of the Serpentine Club on a warm June night, "six years ago," which fittingly places the story in the 1920s. Their discussion is cut short when they heard knocking against the garden door, "as if someone was knocking against it with a metallic instrument," followed by plaintive, agitated voice wailing "Madre de Dios." And what they find was a knife-handle protruding from the upper portion of the door.

A discovery followed by their attempts to deduce, what they came, from the dagger and wailing, but this is, again, cut short when an urgent message arrives summoning Selden to a house in Q Street.

An Argentinean woman, Beatrice Sigurda, was found dead "under conditions that are extremely suspicious" and murder is suspected. Sigurda was found by her servants, sitting upright, on a divan fully clothed with "a look of inexplicable horror" – two tiny puncture marks, a quarter of an inch apart, were found in the neck of the victim. A peculiar sort of poison appeared to have been employed here!

The Capital Murder was listed by the late Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991), which is where I learned of the book before it was republished, but this is not an impossible crime story. There are some locked room features to the murder, because the doors to the sitting room where either locked or blocked, but the window was open and a ladder was found in the garden. Someone used this ladder. More than once, but it was not the murderer. However, the trick the murderer used here was to create an alibi and not a locked room illusion. And the murder is never treated or even alluded to as an impossible crime. So, no, this is definitely not a locked room mystery.

Secondly, Curt noted in his introduction that the murder method in The Capital Murder somewhat anticipates "a celebrated slaying" in the debut novel by "a vastly better-known mystery writer from the 1930s," but this passing similitude is not as interesting as the semblance the basic plot has to a very well-known detective novel from the 1920s. No, it's not Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). This resemblance gave me an idea where to look for the murderer, but let's get back to the story.

Stoke and Jim become informal assistants to Detective Yates, of the D.C. Police, who looked the part of "the typical gum-shoe man" and chewed on the stump of a cigar, which brought Rex Stout's Inspector Cramer to mind, who never even lit his cigars – merely mangling them. Initially, Yakes is skeptical of Stokes and his methods, but slowly, he begins to warm to his schemes. And eventually even goes along with them. Stoke and Jim path to the solution to the murder is fraught with danger and excitement.

I would not go as far as the synopsis, saying the story has all "the rapid action" and "the breath-taking speed of the thriller," but the book can be summed up as darker, grimmer reimagining of A.A. Milne's The Red House Mystery (1922) with two friends getting into trouble while they attempt to track down a murderer. Just like The Red House Mystery, they only have a very swallow pool of suspects to work with. There are only three suspect: the gardener of the victim, Miguel San Remo, her neighbor, Professor Kent, and Dr. Roger Rollin. Naturally, these few suspects needlessly complicated the investigation by having been on, or around, the scene of the crime and they're all holding back why. This is what makes The Capital Murder a curiosity.

The Capital Murder is not only set in the 1920s, but really belongs to that era and particular the type of twenties detective novel that had not fully shaken the sensationalists elements of the Victorian era (c.f. the work of G.E. Locke). One of the very last chapters even has a Doylean flashback to an episode in Argentine, which finally revealed the motive for the murder. A motive you could never have deduced, or even guessed, from the investigation and this made the murderer all the more difficult to identity.

The murderer had a couple of clumsy slip-ups and there were some vague hints, here and there, but nothing constituting proper clueing or fair play. I really disliked how obliging the purportedly clever murderer was in helping drawing the noose tighter during the final confrontation with Stoke.

So, purely as a 1930s detective story, The Capital Murder came up a little short, but Alner deserves praise for how the murder weapon was handled. An "object of destruction" that could have dragged the whole book down to the level of a dime-store thriller, but I can accept how it was used here and it certainly helped the murder was not presented as a locked room mystery. Otherwise, the murder method would probably have struck me as a huge letdown.

Secondly, Curt Evans and Chad Arment, of Coachwhip Publications, deserve some praise for reprinting the book without scrubbing the "offensive renderings" or remarks of the non-white characters in the book – a tendency of the publishers when confronted with "the unfortunate temper of the times" in vintage crime fiction. Sanitizing these books only robs the reader of "a valuable and fascinating" record of "American and British literary and social history before World War II." So they reprinted the book, uncensored, with a fore-and afterword discussing the times and racial opinions aired by the characters in the book. I firmly believe this is how it should be done.

This makes me hopeful Coachwhip might take a look at W. Shepard Pleasants' The Stingaree Murders (1932). A wildly original, pulp-like locked room novel with no less than three impossible crimes and eerily foreshadowed the assassination of the then former Louisiana governor Huey “The Kingfish” Long, but remember it being worse than The Capital Murder when it comes down to racial opinions of the characters. So the book was never reprinted and most publishers today would never touch it. However, it has a genuinely good plot with a series of imaginative and original impossible crimes and solutions, which deserves some recognition. At the very least, it should be accessible to readers who want to weigh and judge the book for themselves.

Well, let's take this poor, rambling review behind the shed and end it already. The Capital Murder is merely a curio of the genre with an uneven plot, wire-walking between the detective and thriller story, full of unlikely coincidences and completely unnecessary deaths. Even by detective story standards! You can even say it's a poor specimen of detective story, especially when compared to the other titles in the Coachwhip catalog, but it would be a lie to say it was a boring story. Hardly a technical masterpiece or an engrossing character study, but it entertained me for an hour or two.

Finally, I have gotten my hands of a much-praised and recently reissued mystery novel for my next read. So stay tuned!