Up This Crooked Way (1946) by Hugh Holman

Hugh Holman was a Professor of English at the University of North Carolina and "a distinguished Southern US academic," who co-founded the Southern Literary Journal, but, more importantly, Holman authored six detective novels – three of which are listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) and Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). This is not very surprising since Holman expressed his "highest admiration" for constructors of complex, elaborate plots and impossible crimes. And he was "inordinately proud" that John Dickson Carr dedicated his last novel, The Hungry Goblin (1972), to him.

 

So here we have a long-forgotten mystery writer who wrote good, old-fashioned detective stories, full of southern local color and impossible crimes, but Holman's novels have been out-of-print for decades. It probably would have taken me a lot longer to get around to him had I not been gifted a copy of one of Holman's obscure locked room mysteries, Up This Crooked Way (1946).

Five of Holman's detective novels feature Sheriff John Ewell Macready, who represents the law in the fictitious Hart County, South Carolina, which were written during the 1940s and was followed by a standalone mystery, Small Town Corpse (1951) – published as by "Clarence Hunt." Apparently, the Sheriff Macready stories fused the American regional novel with the campus murder mystery. I suppose you can describe Up This Crooked Way as a mix of Timothy Fuller and Addison Simmons, but with an undeniable, erudite hint of Michael Innes.

Sheriff Macready has to share the stage in Up This Crooked Way with Philip Kent, associate professor of English at Abeton College, who has been living under a dark, secretive cloud of suspicion.

Kent used to teach at Axminster College, in the Mid West, where a public quarrel with a colleague provided him with a motive for murder, but a jury finally gave him "a clean slate." The trial had ruined him in the Mid West. Luckily, the president of Axminster believed him to be innocent and arranged a teaching position at Abeton College. Where he rents a room at the home of Walter G. Parkings, of the Abeton Greeting Card Company, who lets rooms exclusively to college folks, but it has come to his attention Kent had once been indicted for murder and doesn't want a possible murderer living under his roof – gives him his ten days' notice. Kent's anger is described as "a white-hot steel rod, tipped at each end with acid." Something that becomes a problem when, mere minutes later, Parkings is found slumped in his chair with a knife-handle sticking out of his chest.

A second problem is that the only, unlocked, way into that room is the door at the end of a hallway, which was under constant observation. Kent even looked into the room minutes before the body was discovered and saw a very lively leg, in green trousers, moving over the arm of the chair. Since nobody came in, or went out, the front door, "somebody in the house must be guilty."

This small circle of suspects comprises of Jacqueline "Jackie" Dean, a reference librarian at the college, who went in the room to pay her rent and found the body. Steele Carlile, a physics instructor, who had an argument with the victim over an unpaid bill after Kent had received his notices. Robert Herbert teaches history and was upstairs when the body was found. John R. Albert is a pressman in the Parkins printing shop and came to see his boss on "a little union business," but stopped on the way out to chat with the new widow, Mrs. Olga. A woman who turns out to have a very unpleasant personality. And the role of outsider is fulfilled by Jackie's older half-sister, Celia Dean.

He understands Macready

A good and promising opening with a murder in a locked and watched room, but it's Sheriff Macready who carries the story with his personality and the way in which he grappled with the case.

Sheriff Macready is a "big, quiet, uncouth man," honest and friendly, but "almost illiterate in speech and a lover of Chaucer." A man who "never had much schooling," but is often found in the college library reading classic literature, philosophy, history and science books. So not "a country hick who had been lucky on two murder cases" and "will grab up the first suspects he finds to keep his reputation," which is what previous experience had learned Kent, but Kent "hastily revised all former opinions of John Macready" when he attended one of his lectures as a special guest – surprising him when he begins to quote Chaucer. This reminded me of Lt. Columbo in the episode The Bye-Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case (1977) in which Columbo confessed he had always been surrounded by people who were smarter than him and had to work harder, put in more time and read all the books to make it, which worked as the ending of the episode showed. Macready can be viewed as a rural counterpart to Columbo.

Macready confesses to Kent he still has an "an inferiority complex where smart folks are concerned" and enlists him to help dig around the college town, which is highly irregular, but Macready has never "been famous for regularity." There's more than a seemingly impossible stabbing that comes their way.

There are mysterious letters, a blackmail plot, a second, very gruesome murder and a quasi-impossible disappearance from a guarded house, but the murder of Parkins is the strongest aspect of this relatively light plot. How the murderer got in, and out, of the room is a play on an old, shopworn piece of misdirection, but the bit with the leg lifted the locked room-trick above that of a routine job. However, it's not something that will fool any seasoned mystery reader or anyone who has read a copious amount of Case Closed. If you know how the trick was worked, you can spot the murderer by the end of the third chapter and clumsy handled clue didn't exactly helped either. Holman pretty much directed a bright spotlight on it to ensure the already suspicious-minded armchair detective didn't miss it.

Something else that baffled me is that the Axminster College murder eventually faded out of the story, unresolved, without even giving an explanation why the past and present murder were committed under practically identical circumstances. I've only Up This Crooked Way as an example, but I strongly suspect Holman was a better writer than plotter.

So, plot-wise, Up This Crooked Way is not a perfect example of the kind of complex and elaborate impossible crime stories Holman admired, but it's a spirited attempt at constructing one by someone who was described by Steve Lewis and Bill Pronzini “one of the classiest writers to be published by Phoenix Press” – with an appealing lead detective carrying the story. Sheriff Macready is a character you want to spend time with. So my intention is to return to this series by trying to get my hands on such promising-sounding titles as Slay the Murderer (1946) and Another Man's Poison (1947).