Above Suspicion (1922/23) by Robert Orr Chipperfield

Several years ago, I reviewed the "Otto Penzler's Locked Room Library" reprint edition of The Clue in the Air (1917) by Isabel Ostrander, a pre-Van Dinean pioneer of the American detective story, whose detective fiction can be described as premonitions of the coming Golden Age – lacking only in finesse. Nick Fuller said it perhaps best, "impressive because it is ahead of its time, disappointing because fair play is still in the future." A comment made in reference to Ostrander's second McCarty and Riordan novel, The 26 Clues (1919), but also perfectly describes and sums up The Clue in the Air. Ostrander could have easily become the mother of the American detective story, a good decade before the publication of S.S. van Dine's The Benson Murder Case (1926), had she been a bit clairvoyant on top being farsighted.

Ostrander died young, aged 40, in 1924 and only got to witness the early dawn of the Golden Age, but not the rise of Van Dine and his followers. That probably makes her one of those legitimate "what-if" case had her health not been so bad and had lived another twenty, thirty years. So, while being mostly a historical footnote and genre curiosity today, I was still incredibly curious about one of her last detective novels, Above Suspicion (1922/23), published only a few years before her death.

Above Suspicion was first serialized in Argosy All-Story Weekly, as by "Robert Orr Chipperfield," between November 11 and December 16, 1922 and published as a complete novel the next year. Above Suspicion is listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) with a no-footprints impossibility. A no-footprints mystery, let alone a good one, were less common in the pre-1930s impossible crime genre. So why take a gamble on it? Adey's description of the impossible situation in combination with the book title and another scrap of information suggested a possible solution, but didn't want to thumb to the back of Locked Room Murders and potentially spoil a good, early and rare 1920s impossible crime novel – figuring it would turn up, somewhere, eventually. That happened last November.

Serling Lake reprinted Above Suspicion, under the Chipperfield name, as part of their "Impossible Crime Classics" series. I wasn't impressed with their first half dozen titles of mostly second-and third-rate pulp, like Joseph Gollomb's The Girl in the Fog (1923), but the selection began to improve with reprints of Elsa Barker, Henry Leverage and Charles Chadwick's The Moving House of Foscaldo (1925/26). At least, the reprints begin to get more interesting and the Chadwick reissue reeled me back in. So let's find out if Above Suspicion is another one of Ostrander's anachronistic genre curios or succeeds as an early, Golden Age detective novel.

Above Suspicion wastes no time by first introducing most of the main characters, setting the stage or even the mood, but begins with the discovery of the murder. Joseph Benkard, a Wall Street financier, is found dead next to a stone bench on the terrace of his sister's new, partially finished country house in Sunny Beach. Someone had struck him down from behind without leaving either a weapon or footprints on the recently sanded floor. It's unlikely the murderer smoothed out the tracks, because "the smoothin' out would show same as footprints" ("how'd he go?"). How this impossibility is laid out eliminates most of the routine and hack tricks for the no-footprints problem, but I'll get back to the impossible crime.

The problem of the footprints is only one, of three, standouts making Above Suspicion a noteworthy detective novel from the early 1920s. Other two are the detective and victim. Ostrander created one of the first blind detectives, Damon Gaunt, but here she introduces, what could be, one of the first working class detective, Geoff Peters – a stone mason working on finishing the house. A simple, down-to-earth man clad in dirty overalls and always seen mixing cement or puttering around. Contrary to tradition, Peters is a detective who tries not to stick his nose where it has no business being, "tain't any o' my business," but someone who's acutely aware of everything happening around him. Peters is the one who takes the initiative when the body is discovered by having the crime scene roped off and calls for the medical examiner. Doc Hood rates Peters highly as an amateur detective as helped the local police out on several murky murders ("you gave me some good ideas that helped a lot when Jim Hicks was found dead in the swamp and again when old Mrs. Beckley was murdered in her barn"). No idea if they're references to previous stories or merely apocryphal. Note that a policeman refers to Peters later in the story as that "hick Sherlock" from Sunny Beach.

So you get an amateur detective, clad in dirty overalls, snooping and eavesdropping between "doin' odd jobs round concrete and stucco." And, every now and then, puts on his Sunday suit and straw hat when needing to talk to people in town or at the bank. Pretty much the exact opposite of the American detectives who would start appearing over the following years like Philo Vance, Ellery Queen, Thatcher Colt and Nero Wolfe.

Joseph Benkard is not your typical, 1920s victim either. I mentioned in the past how bankers, financiers and stockbrokers took the torch from blackmailers as popular murder victims after the stock market crash of 1929, but Above Suspicion was a good eight years ahead of the curb – certainly in attitude. Benkard was known, not always for the right reasons, as "one of the most daring, brilliant speculators" and his past Wall Street shenanigans drives part of the plot. Having ruined more than one man and driven some of them to suicide, which has resulted in receiving threatening letters, twice a year, on the same dates. But there's also his domestic roguery involving trying to marry his niece to a shady friend/business enemy. And a young man who's very much opposed to those plans. Peters and Benkard perfectly complimented each other, as detective and victim, who elevated and added interest to what would otherwise have been a fairly routine investigation. That brings us to the surprising conclusion of Above Suspicion.

I mainly read this to see what Ostrander could do with the no-footprints scenario in 1922 without expecting too much from the who or why. I didn't even expect all that much from the no-footprints trick, because it was written in the early twenties. It's not a period when the locked room mystery and impossible crime blossomed. Just scratching that curiosity itch and crossing another locked room title from the impossible crime list. When I got to the penultimate chapter, it seemed like Above Suspicion was going to follow the pattern of The Clue in the Air and The 26 Clues. A detective story that in many ways feels ahead of its time, until it falls apart as a detective stories in the last chapter or chapters. Well, that didn't happen here!

In that penultimate chapter, the supposed murderer obligingly commits suicide and leaves behind a written confession, but the last, short chapter, "Geoff Minds His Own Business," Peters turns the official explanation into a false-solution – reveals an entirely different solution. A solution that comes with an entirely new take on how the murderer pulled off the footprints-trick, which is a far more involved trick than most of us would expect from 1922 mystery novel. I also thought it was a nice touch Ostrander used a real cliché of the detective story (ROT13: gur cevingr frpergnel qvq vg) as the story's false-solution. By the way, Adey wrote down the false-solution in Locked Room Murder, not the correct one given in the last chapter. This surprise solution comes with two caveats. Firstly, it can be debated how fairly clued the surprise solution really is. Secondly, the footprints-trick showed what story needed even more than clues was a floor plan and crime scene diagrams.

Smudges aside, Above Suspicion ended up being a better, more consistent and well-rounded detective novel than The Clue in the Air, helped by a memorable detective and original impossible crime. Not a flawless, perfectly polished detective novel, but a clear case of the pros outweighing the cons. So not just for genre scholars and impossible crime fiends!