The Case of the Curious Heel (1943/44) by Ken Crossen

Back in February, I reviewed Ken Crossen's The Case of the Phantom Fingerprints (1944), second and last novel in the Jason Jones and Necessary Smith series, which is an incredibly fun, pulpy impossible crime tale with Crossen fanboying all over his favorite mystery writers, characters and novels – complete with a locked room lecture ("...guess I can say a few words on impossible situations"). So pulp at its most entertaining. On the other hand, Crossen's The Laughing Buddha Murders (1944), starring the American-Tibetan detective Chin Kwang Kham, turned out to be a letdown. Disappointing since Crossen used The Case of the Phantom Fingerprints to promote The Laughing Buddha Murders and that raised certain expectations. Crossen's The Case of the Curious Heel (1943/44) and Murder Out of Mind (1945) fortunately still looked very promising.

In fact, Anthony Boucher praised Crossen's The Case of the Curious Heel as "a high-grade pulp yarn" about impossible murders piling up around an obnoxious ex-pulp writer "whose identity is fun to guess."

The Case of the Curious Heel was originally published in the May, 1943, issue of Baffling Detective Mysteries and opens with the introduction to that obnoxious ex-pulp writer, Johnny Bell, who got his start in pulp magazines like Detective Yarns Weekly – before getting moving on to the slicks and Hollywood ("writing pictures for Dorothy Lamour, Paulette Goddard, Rita Hayworth"). Bell is currently working on a mystery play written, directed and produced by himself. So every time Bell completed a scene, he gathers a group to act out the scene as a test run. The Case of the Curious Heel begins on the evening of one such rehearsal and it's a full house. There's his wife, Betty Bell, his private secretary, June Hayes, and his ghost writer, Bennett Barlay, who carries on the Johnny Bell magazine stories so his employer can concentrate on his movie scripts and stage play. Further more, there are Willard Duncan, a literary agent, Manny Ladd, press agent, Ray Martin, a Hollywood columnist, and the author of the Freddy Hack mysteries, Gregor Fain. Lastly, the actress Karen Russell and the man who coughed up ten grand to back the play, George Porter.

Before they play out the scene, the reader gets an example why some might consider their host to be a perfectly viable target for shooting practice. Bell calls everyone present leeches, parasites and sponges ("every one of you would starve to death if it weren't for me"). When everyone there knew Bell's "a real vampire" living "on the literary blood of others," among other charming personality traits and habits.

Surprisingly, it's not Johnny Bell who bites the dust during the rehearsal. The scene they rehearse has Karen Russell's character picking up a gun to shoot Manny Ladd's character, but, when she pulls the trigger, it actually goes off. Ladd getting fatally shot is the first (quasi) impossible situation of the story. The gun was not only supposed to be empty, but was proved to be empty when "Bell put the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger five times" to show it was a harmless prop. Bell "then he tossed the gun to the girl" and "she held it until she pulled the trigger." They all swore the gun was empty when it fired a very real bullet. Another peculiar aspect is that only Bell and June Hayes knew beforehand what the scene was about and that it involved a gun. Only two people knew beforehand what was going to happen in the scene, Bell and June Hayes. So only they knew it would involve the gun he had brought back from Hollywood. That looks bad for Bell.. or was there a mix-up with him being the intended victim? Bell hires a private investigator, Necessary Smith, to look after his interests and work alongside the "poor man's Nero Wolfe," First Grade Detective Jason Jones. They're two characters who deserved a longer run than they got.

Jason Jones, round, red and jovial, has "a working agreement" with his superiors to never get promoted in exchange for solving those pesky cases "that the captain said couldn't be solved." That way, Jones can attend to his wife's cooking and tending his geraniums in his rooftop hothouse instead of having to worry about work floor politics and rivalries. This arrangement also allows Jones to handle cases according to his own unhurried, armchair methods. Jones believes the right technique is simply waiting rather than wear himself out chasing around or thinking deeply about clues, "murderer feels pretty safe as long as he sees all that activity," but when the detective sits around, ignores the clues and ask a few routine questions the murderer gets nervous – which is when they make mistakes. Jones very much admires characters like Nero Wolfe and Mycroft Holmes. Necessary Smith is your average, 1940s American gumshoe who legally changed when his ex-boss, Bruce Elliott (the Bruce Elliott?), regularly interrupted his verbal reports with the question, "was that necessary, Smith?" His boss thought that was funny. So, when he retired, handed the business over to Smith.

Jones and Smith make for a fun detective duo who have their work cutout for them as it becomes ever clear they're dealing with a killer who has "the fiction mind." Not only the dubious shooting of Manny Ladd and it's various possibilities, but also second body turning up behind the locked door of a lavatory and "a fly couldn't get in that room without the door opening for him." Boucher wasn't wrong to call this a high-grade pulp yarn, but I'll get to the plot in a moment.

The Case of the Curious Heel is still a pulp mystery. Even the best pulp mysteries lacked the rigorous plotting and polish of their Golden Age counterparts, because they were written at piece rate with much shorter deadlines. Every now and then, a pulp writer would deliver a more polished detective novel, like James Ronald's Murder in the Family (1936) or John Russell Fearn's posthumously published Pattern of Murder (2006), but they're the exceptions and The Case of the Curious Heel is not. For example, Crossen lightly rewrote/copied passages between Jones and Smith from The Case of the Curious Heel for The Laughing Buddha Murders. Jones even launches into a locked room lecture. So the story more than once gave me a light sense of déjà vu, but there's also the occasional sloppiness in details. In the first chapter, Barlay is scolded for pointing out the locked room murder from Bell's stage play is practically the same as the impossible shooting from his short story "Thumbs Up for Death." This story is referred to again later on in the story as "Thumbs Up for Murder." Something you can't help but notice. By the way, as an aside, Bennett Barlay is one of Crossen's pseudonyms.

Anyway, the plot is definitely a cut, or two, above the average '40s pulp yarn. Not for the usual reasons either. Normally, the impossible crime in a pulp-style locked room mystery is the most substantial plot piece with the who and why usually being obvious from early on in the story – which here was the other way round. I suppose that's on theme as 2025 has not been a great year for finding an abundance of excellent impossible crime and locked room mysteries. Crossen handled the murderer's identity and motive with more skill than expected going by my previous two reads. Solution is only really hampered by the trick used to shoot the first victim, which is dodgy from start to finish. So much could have gone wrong, (SPOILER/ROT13: jung vs, nsgre chyyvat gur gevttre svir gvzrf, chyyrq vg n fvkgu gvzr gb naabl gur areibhf tngurevat rira zber? Jung vs gur tha jnf cbvagrq ng fbzrbar ryfr gung fvkgu gvzr? Jung vs Oryy unq chyyrq gur gevttre n fvkgu gvzr juvyr gur tha jnf cbvagrq ng Ynqq be gur zheqrere? Jung vs Oryy fvzcyl unqa'g chyyrq gung fghag? Which would not have been out-of-character and would have tossed a huge spanner into the murderer's plans. The locked room-trick used in the second murder is perfunctory, but neatly used for a false-solution and providing an even neater twist to Jones' explanation.

Crossen's The Case of the Curious Heel is indeed a quality piece of pulp fiction. Maybe not the very best locked room pulp, plotwise, but Necessary Smith and Jason Jones make up where the plot lacked. I would have like to have seen more of them or at least gotten a few short stories out of those apocryphal cases Jones mentioned. Jones' short teaser of "The Case of the Missing G-String" sounds like a trip!

Note for the curious: the locked room from the stage play is briefly described, but not in too great detail and no solution given. The gist of the locked room is that a man is found under circumstances giving "a perfect picture of suicide." A room with every door and window locked from the inside ("...impossible for anyone to get into the room without crawling through the keyhole"). Only real detail is the thumb print of one of the (innocent) suspects being discovered in the center of the ceiling. So not much to build an armchair solution around, except that the thumb print on the ceiling probably means a wire/pulley trick was involved to turn the key from the inside. A trick requiring a ladder to setup and that allowed for the artistic touch of the faked thumb print on the ceiling. Otherwise, it would be too inconvenient and risky to lug a ladder around the house just to put a thumb print on the ceiling. Why not simply put it on an untampered window catch to muddy the waters? But if a ladder was needed to setup a wire/pulley trick, the ceiling print would be even more incriminating for a frame job than a print on a window catch. There's no reason why people wouldn't leave prints on window catches. They were made to be handled, but the ceiling of a crime scene is a different. I'll shut up now. :)