She Had to Have Gas (1939) by Rupert Penny

Rupert Penny's She Had to Have Gas (1939) is the sixth novel in the Chief Inspector Edward Beale series and has a premise as enticing and provocatively bizarre as its title, which kind of delivered on its promise, but Martin Edwards warned that its elaborate plot came "close to sinking under the weight of its own cleverness” – even JJ's four-star review came with a few caveats. Admitting that She Had to Have Gas presented Penny as a first-rate second-stringer and placed it last on his Chief Inspector Beale best-of list. So imagine my surprise when I turned over the last page and concluded I had read the most enjoyable Penny to date. 

I wouldn't rank She Had to Have Gas quite as highly as Policeman in Armour (1937) or Policeman's Evidence (1938), but found it to be much better than The Lucky Policeman (1938) and played in a completely different league than Sealed Room Murder (1941). Sorry, Jim. But you can take solace in knowing you helped rehabilitate Penny's reputation as a purveyor of puzzles in my eyes. I was wrong to write him off so quickly. 

She Had to Have Gas tells the story of two women, Alice Carter and Philippa Saunderson, whose stories become intertwined and provide the story with one of the most baffling and grisly crime scenes of the 1930s detective stories. This is likely the reason why Edwards picked it to tell The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books (2017).

Alice Carter is fair-haired, blue-eyed girl of about twenty-four, but her landlady, Mrs. Agatha Topley, had summed her up almost immediately "as no lady" and had "never seen cause to take back her judgement," but money was tight – as dreary Craybourne was not a popular seaside tourist attraction. Mrs. Topley accepted the silent, secretive girl and the first two weeks passed satisfactory until her cousin, Ellis, turned up. A gruff, suspicious-looking character habitually dressed in a long, tightly buttoned trench coat, check cap and spectacles with colored glasses. Alice and Ellis bottled themselves up in her room for hours on end, but where the situation becomes truly bothersome is that she owes more than three pounds in rent money.

One evening, Mrs. Topley returns from a family visiting to discover Alice had taken her late husband's battery wireless set and loudly blaring music in her room, but there's no response to the hammering on her locked door. So she takes a chair to peek through a glass partition covered with decaying, half peeled away frosted paper and sees the blanketed body of Alice in front of the gas fire. An "evil-looking curve of red rubber tubing" disappeared into the blanket by the head, which all pointed towards suicide. But when the police breaks down the door, nine minutes later, the body has "impossibly vanished." Sadly, no, it's not a locked room mystery. There are two situation in this story that were presented as impossible crimes, but you have to read the book to learn why they really aren't.

The second plot-strand concerns the niece of Charles Harrington, "a writer of murder mysteries," whose "productively imaginative pen" has produced more than twenty intricately-plotted detective novels, but now he finds himself in the middle of homegrown mystery problem – one that concerns his niece, Philippa Saunderson. Philippa had been deeply involved with the dandy, but disreputable, actor Robert Oakes, who now demands £5000 in return for a stack of embarrassing letters, compromising photographs and a nude painting. An astronomical sum that even her generous uncle can't or wants to cough up. So she has to bargain to get everything back or her new, much more respectable boyfriend, Colin Dennison, will find everything. But why did she disappear?

What gets the ball rolling, following fifty pages of setup, is the grisly discovery of a mutilated body in Oakes' bungalow. The body of a young woman, clad only in underclothes, whose head, hands and feet were cut off. Perplexingly, the stumps of the neck and wrists were "encased grotesquely in yellow oilskin tennis-racket covers." A situation you would expect to find in a Japanese (shin) honkaku mystery, but Penny gave the corpse-puzzle the good old college try in 1939! Obviously inspired by early period Ellery Queen.

At first glance, Penny's acrostic, diagram-and timetable riddled detective novels with their occasional excursions into locked room territory and policeman protagonist invites comparison with Freeman Wills Crofts and Christopher Bush. Penny has always openly aligned himself with the American writers of the Van Dine-Queen School and included an EQ-style "Challenge to the Reader" in each of his Chief Inspector Beale novels. Nowhere else is the influence of early period Queen as noticeable as in She Had to Have Gas, which really tried to imitate the elaborate, surrealistic flair of such EQ novels as The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) and The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932). Just like those novels, the bizarre circumstances in which the body was found and what happened at the crime scene being the key to the plot. Also note that one of the missing woman, fueling the plot, is named Alice. There's no way that's a coincidence with a mystery writer whose literary role model was Ellery Queen.

Penny managed to lit a fire and set my mind ablaze with all the questions and possibilities that arose from Chief Inspector Beale's investigation. Whose body was found in the bungalow, Alice or Philippa? What happened to Alice's body at the lodging house and, if the body belongs to her, how and why did she end in the bungalow? What happened to Philippa and, if it's her body, where was she originally murdered since the bungalow is not connected to gas, which comes with a mini-lecture on cheaply produced, household gas – why it's attractive to people considering suicide. Why did the murderer put tennis-racket covers on the neck and arms, but not the legs? What's the link between the two women and who really is Ellis? Where's he now? What part did the stolen delivery van and blackmail plot play a part in the murder and disappearances? This is just a small sampling of what to expect from this richly flavored, maze-like detective story that even slightly disoriented the author a few times.

Even though the story and plot tick and move with slow, mechanical precision, everything becomes somewhat mired and muddled at times, which required flipping back a few times to keep track of all the intricate details and moving parts. So it's not as smoothly written, or clearly plotted, as some of the others I've read. I suspect there will be many reader who'll find it all a little too mighty, too rich and too artificial for their taste, which here is underscored by the presence of a challenge to the reader and a clue-finder. There is, however, no denying it required some genuine craftsmanship and ingenuity to erect such a staggering, breathtaking edifice to the simon-pure jigsaw detective story. It's just that it did so very ungracefully.

For example, Beale points out in his explanation that they had "a strong lead to the solution" under their noses and they "did everything but recognize it." Due to a specialty of mine, I actually spotted the lead very early on, but what Penny did with it turned out to be much more contrived than I imagined. You see (ROT13), gur qvfnccrnenapr bs Nyvpr jnf cerfragrq nf n ybpxrq ebbz zlfgrel naq gung znqr zr fhfcrpg jung gur ynaqynql fnj jnf n cubgbtencu (bs Cuvyvccn?), juvpu vf jul Zef. Gbcyrl abgrq “gur pbzcyrgr nofrapr bs nal zbgvba fhpu n oernguvat.” N cubgbtencu, be crrc-obk, vf rnfvre gb erzbir va avar zvahgrf guna n obql. However, Penny had a much more contrived explanation as to what happened there.

So, yeah, I really appreciated what She Had to Have Gas tried to do and not entirely unsuccessfully, but it also represents the traditional, plot-oriented detective story at its most artificial with a cluttered plot, muddled direction and a sometime unsteady grip on the various plot-strands – preventing it from fully delivering on its promise. But, what it tried to do, made it Penny's most enjoyable endeavor to date. Not even the few loose nuts and bolts rattling around inside could spoil my enjoyment. One of the most delightfully bizarre, ambitiously plotted and convoluted curiosities of the genre's Golden Age. I think fans of early period Ellery Queen will probably get the most out of it.

Having now read four of Penny's Chief Inspector Beale novels since that first, disastrous encounter with Sealed Room Murders, I'm now ready to take on his Croftian dreadnought, The Talkative Policeman (1936).