The Ebony Bed Murder (1932) by Rufus Gillmore

Previously, I reviewed "About the Disappearance of Agatha King" (1932) by Anthony Abbot, an often overlooked and forgotten member of the Van Dine-Queen School, which reminded me there's another obscure Van Dinean pupil languishing on the big pile, Rufus Gillmore – who wrote three detective novels in the early 1910s. After a gap of nearly two decades, The Ebony Bed Murder (1932) was published. Gillmore's fourth and last detective novel.

The Ebony Bed Murder is most definitely a Van Dinean detective novel with a certain Rufus Gillmore acting as a narrator and Watson figure to Griffin Scott, but, as pointed out elsewhere, Scott is not a social aristocrat. Scott is the owner and creative force behind an advertising agency who's on good terms with Detective Sergeant Mullens and D.A. Randolph Hutchinson. Why shouldn't they? Scott had began to apply his creative mind and imagination to detective work, which proved to be instrumental in saving Sergeant Mullens from "blundering badly on the Lopez case" and prevented the arrest of an innocent, shell-shocked man in the Cronk murder case. So, purely as a Van Dinean writer, I would place Gillmore alongside Clyde B. Clason and Kirke Mechem, but The Ebony Bed Murder has this curious, mediumboiled and pulpy edge to it.

Scott has a secretive, high-tech workshop with a library, a carpenter's bench, tool chests and a fully equipped chemical laboratory, which can be transformed into an office, study or laboratory by simply pulling a lever – electric juiced-wires move around the furniture. This recalls the high-tech, gadget studded "batcave" from Baynard Kendrick's Captain Duncan Maclain novels. There's also a lot of smart-alecky, tough guy talk and banter which some have likened to the dialogue from a 1930s gangster movie. So not entirely a typical example of the Van Dinean detective novel, but it certainly makes for an interesting take on that school.

The Ebony Bed Murder opens with Rufus Gillmore, a newspaper reporter, finally having tracked down Griffin Scott ("you've discovered my real name, haven't you?") to probe him for details on the Lopez case. But while he's playing chess with Scott, the news reaches them of "the suicide of a modern Cleopatra."

Helen Brill Kent came from a small Kentucky town, but the dazzling blonde became "a celebrity the world around" by marrying early and often. She had five ex-husbands and every divorce expanded either her wealth or social status, which made her eyes of the world a female Henry VIII or "the Cleopatra of today." Now she lying in her bedroom, shot through the mouth, but the supposed suicide is quickly proven to have been murder. And that's where the real trouble begins.

How could she have been shot through the mouth without seeing the revolver or showing any fear? Why had an apparently unimportant clue been stolen right after it was discovered and who knocked out Gillmore's light? More importantly, who pulled the trigger? They have a house full of suspects to pick from and they all look as suspicious as a magician playing poker. Jess Brill is Helen's tosh-talking father who's more interested in what his daughter leaves behind than who murdered her, which is a sentiment shared by his even more unlikable, rat-like son, Napoleon, who inherits everything under her will – father and son alibi each other. Ethel Cushing is Helen's surprisingly homely daughter and pretty much the complete opposite of her worldly mother. Mrs. Vroom was Helen's stage mother who learned her all the tricks of the trade and acted as her protector, but now her own daughter, Dorothy, has become the police's No. 1 suspect. And then there's the one truly innocent character of the household, Shah. A smoke Persian cat who glides through the story with "kingly hauteur" and, like a Haroun al Raschid, demanded through his orange eyes how much the humans "understood about what had happened here" and
what they "were going to do about it." Helen gave them all motives by kicking them all out of the house without a penny to their name.

There are also some other characters lurking in the background of the story. Such as the ex husbands, a son who was sold back to his father for half a million dollars and a potentially six husband discreetly waiting in the wings.

So there's more than enough to keep the plot going and Gillmore makes good use in moving all the characters around the crime scene, before, during and after the murder, which quickly results in a second murder with a truly unexpected victim. And this second murder is as hardboiled as the story gets. Very Dashiell Hammett! But does the book stack up as a proper, fair play detective novel? Well, yes and no, but firstly I've to clear up The Ebony Bed Murder status as a locked room mystery.

Robert Adey listed The Ebony Bed Murder in Locked Room Murders (1991), but the murder is never presented or treated as an impossible crime, because there were six keys to her bedroom in circulation and the window was standing open – although it's quickly eliminated that the bullet came through the window. You either have to wait until the solution, or figure it before then, to understand how it can be construed as a locked room mystery. But you have to be a little generous to go along with it. So don't read it just as an impossible crime novel.

Unfortunately, the ending is where The Ebony Bed Murder is at its weakest with the murderer's identity only coming as a kind of surprise because the interesting, much deeper, motive was insufficiently clued. A seasoned mystery reader will cast suspicious glances at this character on principle, but it's hard to pin an exact motive on this person. However, the less-than-perfect ending wasn't enough to sink the whole novel. The Ebony Bed Murder is a bit stiff and mechanical in its storytelling and plotting, betraying the writer came from an earlier era, but appreciated the good and sometimes solid detective work, which include some good, but hastily brushed away, false solutions (more like suggestions). Scott also has to lock horns with Mullens and Hutchinson and engage in a spirited test-of-wills with a particular stubborn suspect, which was preceded by the use of mustard-and tear gas and an thriller-ish encounter in Scott's private batcave (making the story a little pulpier).

So my time with Gillmore's The Ebony Bed Murder was more or less the same as with the previous two detective novels I've read: a good, easy to read and a mostly well told detective story with striking characters and sometimes interesting ideas, but marred and weakened by an uninspired, weakly clued solution. Only recommended, if you have nothing else on your to-be-read pile.

Well, I'll try to pick something really good for the next one. I still have that new Paul Halter novel lying around or could return to Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D.