Read All About It: "The Late Edition" (1928) by Kelman Frost

Kelman Dalgety Frost was a prolific British writer of fiction who wrote his first published story in the trenches during the First World War, aged sixteen, which started a fifty-year career as a professional storyteller – estimated to have "written almost 70 million words of fiction." Frost contributed prolifically to the popular boys' papers and pulp magazines of the day in addition to penning numerous westerns for children like Terror at Nameless Creek (1965) and Hoofbeats on the Prairie (1966).

Despite his prolific output and reaching five million readers, when D.C. Thomson's boys' story papers were at their peak, Frost is barely remembered today. And most of his output is, sort of, lost. A lot of Frost's work was published anonymously and largely disappeared, uncredited, in the murky maze of early twentieth century magazine publications. And his novels didn't fare much better. Frost reportedly wrote over forty children's adventure books, but less than twenty have been identified. Nor has his brief dalliance with the detective genre weathered the passage of time gracefully.

Death Registers at the Eagle Arms (1947), a charming, uncomplicated mystery, is practically forgotten with copies having become scarce and ridiculous expensive, but Frost's second mystery novel, Something Scandalous at Lilac Cottage, apparently never made it to print – only announced by the Oberon Press as "in preparation." Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) lists one of Frost's many obscure short stories, however, the locked room-angle of Death Registers at the Eagle left me unimpressed. So the short story dropped on the locked room priority list, until recently. More on that in a moment.

Kelman Frost's "The Late Edition" was originally published in the March, 1928, issue of Clues, reprinted in Hutchinson's Adventure & Mystery Story Magazine and finally collected in The Best English Detective Stories of 1928 (1929).

"The Late Editions" begins with Sergeant Gosling, of the Swinwood Police, out on patrol when sees young Malcolm Lovibond coming down from London in his two-seater to see his father ("...the old skinflint"). Several minutes later, Lovibond is back to ask the Gosling to come back to the home, because something appears to have happened to his father. Lovibond arrived at the house to find no trace of his father, until he noticed a very strong smell of gas coming from under the kitched door. However, the door was locked from the inside.

So they go to the house together to break down the door and find the body of James Lovibond lying on the kitchen floor with his head stuck inside the oven. The kitchen door was locked from the inside and a thick mat was pushed up against the wide crack at the bottom of the door, while the backdoor is locked and bolted and the windows securely shuttered. Every other crack or opening of the backdoor and shuttered windows had been "crammed tightly with rolled newspapers in order to make it air-tight" and "a big ball of rolled up newspapers had been thrust into the chimney opening." A clear case of suicide until Dr. Francis Farrar, "a middle-aged practitioner who was comparatively new to Swinwood," arrived on the scene.

Dr. Farrar must have been aware he's playing the role of detective in a short story, because he makes a mad dash towards the ending the moment he arrived. From his preliminary investigation to apprehending the murderer, which is the most amusing part of the story. And finally explain the whole thing to the baffled Sergeant Gosling ("but it was a plain case of suicide, doctor"). So not much detection or fair play in this crime story with a locked room hook. However, "The Late Edition" has an admirably layered plot for a 1920s short story. The murderer and motive are obvious, of course, but the how also concerned a cleverly arranged alibi reinforced by locked room setup suggesting suicide. And pointing out the fatal mistakes the murderer made along the way (ROT13: "...gung cncre unf n ybg gb nafjre sbe... gung cncre'f tbvat gb unat lbh").

So about that locked room setup and trick. This short story came back to my attention following a comment on my review of Ooyama Seiichiro's short story "Kanojo ga Patience wo korosu hazu ga nai" ("She Wouldn't Kill Patience," 2002). Stephen M. Pierce commented that he was working on a "Top 5 Taped Room Mysteries." Being the incorrigible impossible crime fanboy that I'm, the list doubled in size in mere minutes and promised to keep an eye out for other “tape tomb” short stories and novels. I remembered "The Late Edition" centered on a gassing inside a locked room and decided to track it down to see if it qualifies, because it would have been the earliest known "taped tomb" on record, but doubt Stephen will accept a room only partially "sealed" with newspapers – nor would he rank it very highly. The locked room-trick is minor and routine. Something that gets rejected as soon as it's suggested in today's locked room mysteries. But, on a whole, not a bad crime story for 1928. Still perfectly readable today.