Sailor, Take Warning! (1944) by Kelley Roos

Last time, I reviewed the splendid novella "Death is a Trouper" (1946) by "Kelley Roos," a shared penname of William and Audrey Roos, which finds their normally bantering, wisecracking mystery solving couple of Jeff and Haila Troy during a messy breakup – only for a murder to bring them back together. A humorously written, deftly-plotted and clued novella. Its only negative is its short length that left me wanting a novel-length Jeff and Haila Troy outing, but have already reread The Frightened Stiff (1942) and There Was a Crooked Man (1945) is (as of this writing) still out-of-print. So decided to reread that other favorite from the series.

Sailor, Take Warning! (1944), fourth in the series, starts on a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon in
September. Jeff and Haila promised their housekeeper to take her 7-year-old son, Chuckie, off her hands by taking him to Central Park to sail his model boat on the lake. Building and sailing model boats on a small lake or pond is not merely a pass time for children like Chuckie. When they get to the park, Jeff and Haila are introduced to several members of the Knickerbocker Model Yachting Club, which "sails the sea" on "Saturday, Sunday and holiday afternoons."

Knickerbocker Model Yachting Club is headed by the Commodore, Austin Marshall, who's a wealthy man with many, many hobbies and interests. Bernard Marshall is his lazy, younger brother and fellow Knickerbocker as is their young nephew, Carl Marshall, currently on leave from the army. George Penny, a crusty, old and wheelchair bound man, who's accompanied by his daughter, Penny – who's sort of engaged to Carl. Tony Gilbert, a charming, well-known stage actor, who's currently appearing in another Broadway smash hit. Finally, William Philips, another wealthy model ship enthusiast and their cabin boy, Chuckie. So the scenery is near idyllic, "only the silhouette of the towering apartments and hotels" kept "you from forgetting that this was New York," but then the inevitable murder happens. A seemingly impossible murder!

Austin Marshall is seen climbing the stairs to a lonely bench, on promontory, overlooking the park, sat down and enjoyed the scenery. Only person who came to have a chat was Philips, but left him and, ten minutes later, Marshall was found dead with "a thin, nail-like piece of steel" sticking out of his neck. Somebody, within that ten minute window, sneaked up to Marshall and stabbed him. However, that appears to be patently impossible as "there's no dobt that no one went within fifty feet of the victim between the time he talked to Philips and his death." The police points out the stabbing was such "a precision job" that it could not have been projected from a distance.

Now, this is where the story becomes extra hilarious if you have just read "Death is a Trouper." Jeff refuses to have anything to do with the case and not only turns down Lieutenant Hankins, but even intends to return an anonymous delivered, one-thousand dollar fee to find the Marshall's murderer. This horrifies Haila ("...not wanting to witness the Troys' return to poverty...") who takes desperate measures to secure (i.e. steal) the fee and basically forces Jeff to solve the murder. Jeff and Haila's lighthearted banter and bright dialogue are the highlight of the story, which is unquestionable where Sailor, Take Warning! can match wits with The Frightened Stiff. Not that the Rooses neglected to pack the plot with incidents, twists and turns.

For example, I had entirely forgotten Sailor, Take Warning! has not one, but two, impossible crimes: Philips' wife, Diane, is knocked unconscious and her attacked escaped from a locked, observed house. Another trail leads the Troys to Walter Davisson, a radio psychologist known as The Marriage Doctor, whose wife, Marjorie, has a flirtatious affair with Tony Gilbert. A man, by the name of Robert Nichols, pops up out of nowhere pleading with Jeff to find his missing daughter leading to a wild goose chase from New York to Hoboken. Not to mention the Troys get burglarized and Haila finds to her horror that the thousand dollars she stole from Jeff was stolen. So the Troys are busy enough between talking and poking around the members of the Knickerbocker Model Yachting Club.

As noted in the previous review, when the Rooses and Troys are at their best, they were a good deal better than the more famous mystery writing, husband-and-wife teams or snooping couples of their day. There's a reason, both good and bad, why Sailor, Take Warning! is considered to be the Rooses second best detective novel.

Firstly, the humor and dialogue can match themselves with The Frightened Stiff, but the plot turned out to be more of a mixed bag than I remembered. The holds together for the most part, despite the various, seemingly irrelevant sub-plots and the Troys tramping around the city, especially liked the solution to the impossible stabbing in Central Park – even though it reworks a very old dodge. Nevertheless, I liked how it was put to work here. It just worked for me in this setting. And, yes, one point makes its status as an impossible crime somewhat dubious. I'll take even as a borderline impossible crime. The problem of the attacker getting out of a locked house is nothing special and only a very minor plot-thread/distraction. So don't expect too much from that locked room problem. Nor do I have a problem with the choice of murderer as it nicely fitted the method. Where the Rooses tripped up and robbed themselves of another The Frightened Stiff is the motive.

I'm always annoyed when a writer tacks on the motive at the end as an afterthought. It's not always story-ruining bad, mostly just lazy, something you can even get away when a story's focus is on picking apart alibis, locked rooms or deciphering dying messages and code messages. Or when it's a really basic motive like the victim turning out to have been blackmailer or something. The not at all unimportant and far from basic motive was here not merely tacked on as an afterthought, but dropped on the reader like an ACME anvil. That's why I remembered it and was on the lookout for any kind of clue, hint or trace of foreshadowing. A slight, shaky case can be made it was, sort of, alluded to when (ROT13) Wrss wbxvat fnlf gb Puhpxvr “gurer zvtug or n Anmv ntrag nebhaq,” ohg gung bss-unaqrq, nccneragyl haeryngrq dhvc gb n puvyq pnzr sbhe cntrf vagb gur fgbel. So you can hardly be blamed for having forgotten about that fleeting remark and connected it to that in order to anticipate such a twist and turn of events. Hell, even with remembering it, and knowing it was coming, it still was a jarring turn of events. And genuinely damaged it as a fairly mystery. Why it came up short compared to The Frightened Stiff and had to take second place.

I really hate to nitpick about the motive, because Sailor, Take Warning! is nearly as good as The Frightened Stiff in every other way, but the motive turned out to be rather important. It's just dropped out of nowhere to reveal (ROT13) lbh unir orra ernqvat n dhnfv-fcl zlfgrel gur jubyr gvzr. Not that it couldn't have worked, but not how it was handled here. I think writers of the caliber of William and Audrey Roos should have known better. That being said, Sailor, Take Warning! is still an incredibly fun read for fans of the characters and screwball mysteries in general.

Hopefully, there's some kindly publisher out there who decides to finally reprint There Was a Crooked Man or publish a volume with the Rooses uncollected novellas. Just one for the suggestion box. :)

Every Roos Has Its Thorn: "Death is a Trouper" (1946) by Kelley Roos

Writing under the shared pseudonym "Kelley Roos," William and Audrey Roos formed one of the best, cleverest and funniest writing duos of genuinely funny, cleverly-plotted detective novels starring their bantering, mystery solving couple of Jeff and Haila Troy – who appeared in eight novels and a dozen, mostly uncollected, novellas. The first seven novels were published between 1940 and 1949 with a surprising, final entry being published in 1966. And of the dozen, or so, novellas only three were gathered under the title Triple Threat (1949).

Kelley Roos and the Troys may not be as well remembered today as the Norths, the Abbotts or the Duluths, but often they were "a good deal better than their more famous contemporaries." I consider The Frightened Stiff (1942), a personal favorite, to be one of the Great American Detective Novels that even today can still make readers laugh. So wanted to return to Troys for some time now, but the only title left on my wishlist is the frustratingly out-of-print, over priced There Was a Crooked Man (1945). No apparent plans to collect their novellas in a single volume. I decided to hunt down one of their novellas before sampling one of the standalone suspense-mysteries the Rooses collaborated on during the 1960s and '70s.

"Death of a Trouper" originally appeared in the December, 1946, issue of The American Magazine and reprinted in the May, 1980, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, but something has to be explained first. Jeff and Haila's marriage has not been a perfect one and their last novel, One False Move (1966), begins in the aftermath of their divorce as Haila packed her backs and moved to Texas – only to stumble across another murder. They get back together, of course, but "Death of a Trouper" tells the story of the first crack in their marriage leading to their temporary divorce two decades later.

Similar to the opening in One False Move, this novella begins with the aftermath of a marriage ending fight ("I slapped him... he hit me back"). You have to read the story for yourself to find out what they were fighting and throwing hands over, but it firmly falls in the you-deserve-each-other category. Haila packed her bags and traveled to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to take up acting again. She joins "a real, honest-to-goodness showboat," named The New Sensation, anchored on the bank of the Allegheny River. Haila discovers an old friend among the cast members, Greta Cole, who looks terrible, but things get worse for Greta when Russell Hogan, the leading man, is found stabbed to death in his cabin. Greta becomes the primary suspect, because it turns out she's the only one with a motive.

One of the reasons why Haila had enough of Jeff is "instead of settling down and becoming the fine photographer he could have been, had insisted on chasing about solving murders," but she picks up the telephone to ask him to help clear Greta from suspicion. This reunion between these two stubborn mules, who both refuse to give an inch, goes about as well as expected not helped by Jeff insisting on being funny when Haila wants to have a serious conversation. "Death is a Trouper" is not a lighthearted, thinly-plotted comedy mystery as the plot is absolutely packed!

There's not only the murder of Russell Hogan, but Greta goes missing under very unusual circumstances, Haila is knocked unconscious, a mysterious woman named Vivien somehow figures in the case and the inevitable second murder aboard The New Sensation. I'm delighted to report back the Rooses delivered on all of them!

Firstly, the solution to the murders turns on a tell-tale clue exonerating everyone, except the murderer, when understood of pointed out without needing much further explaining – only that person could have done it. Better yet is the motive for the first murder and how it relates to the second murder or ingeniously simple answer to the Vivien plot-thread. Or why Greta disappeared and the strange things that happened to her preceding the murder. Like I said, the Rooses packed the plot "Death is a Trouper" demonstrating they belonged as much to the Van Dine-Queen School as the screwball, murder-can-be-fun school. Only thing that can really be said against it, is that "Death is a Trouper" is not a novel-length Jeff and Haila Troy mystery. So much more could have been done with the showboat backdrop, the characters who work and live there and, yes, the troubles of the Troys. Other than not being a novel-length Jeff and Haila Troy mystery, "Death is a Trouper" is an excellent Jeff and Haila Troy novella with all the customary quality of the Rooses writing and plotting. Recommended!

If somebody, anybody, from Crippen & Landru stumbles across this review, the Kelley Roos novellas from The American Magazine would make a great collection like Philip Wylie's Ten Thousand Blunt Instruments and Other Tales of Mystery (2010). Just an idea for the suggestion box.

Puzzle in Porcelain (1945) by Elizabeth Gresham (writing as "Robin Grey")

"Robin Grey" was the pseudonym of Elizabeth Fenner Gresham, of whom not much is known today, except that she was involved with the Virginia theater scene and wrote both stage plays, novels, short stories and non-fiction – notably the Jenny Gilette and Hunter Lewis series. This series began with Puzzle in Porcelain (1945) and Puzzle in Pewter (1947), but it took a quarter of a century before Puzzle in Paisley (1972), Puzzle in Parchment (1973), Puzzle in Parquet (1973) and Puzzle in Patchwork (1973) to be published. Steve, of Mystery File, hypothesized in a 2013 comment Gresham "had the book written but no publisher for them until Curtis, a small and all but obscure paperback publisher in the 1970s came along and made her a deal." Adding "same thing happened with Mike Avallone and several of his Ed Noon PI novels in pretty much the same time period." So thank you Curtis for preventing four more novel from entering the Phantom Library forever.

The first two novels from the 1940s were published as by "Robin Grey," while the 1970s
paperbacks appeared under her own name, but there never was much of a mystery about the authorship.

I found a short write up from Times-Register, "Mrs. Greshham Will Publish Mystery Novel," which announces Gresham's forthcoming debut and introduces her two series-character, Jenny and Hunter. A second, 1947 write up from Times-Register informs Mrs. Thomas B. Gresham, of Salem, has published her second mystery novel, Puzzle in Pewter, full of local color. Interestingly, it mentions the book is dedicated to Roger Boyle, director of the Virginia Players at the University of Virginia, who "was instrumental in the formulation of the chief character in the stories." The piece optimistically ends with the news "Mrs. Gresham is currently at work on a third mystery novel" and "she has indicated that the Hunter Lewis series will be continued." That, as we know now, took another 25 years when Puzzle in Paisley finally made it to print.

I believe I first read about Gresham in The Anthony Boucher Chronicles: Reviews and Commentary, 1942-45 (2009) praising Puzzle in Porcelain as "a pleasing debut" with "some agreeable fresh angles." Looking a bit further into the series, the Jenny and Hunter mysteries sounded like a series the Rue Morgue Press overlooked to reprint. Well, I was not wrong! Puzzle in Porcelain would have been right at home in the reprint catalog of the Rue Morgue Press alongside Delano Ames, Kelley Roos and Margaret Scherf.

Puzzle in Porcelain introduces Hunter Lewis, a tinker/handyman, who makes a modest living mending valuable, or mechanical, things and drives a homemade, Frankenstein-like car ("ugly and noisy") which he built from the chassis up – affectionately called the Mongrel ("...no alley pup ever represented more breeds than Hunter's masterpiece"). Jenny Gilette, the narrator, is Hunter's next door neighbor and she been pursuing him for years to the point where everyone half-jokingly sees it has her job. So they make for a fun, lively pair of lead characters and Jenny makes for an engaging narrator and Watson. Or, as she's called towards the end, "Amanuensis Extraordinary to that stubborn sleuth."

The scenery of Puzzle in Porcelain is Albemarle County in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Yankee transplant and local humbug, Thomas Pottle, drops by Hunter's workshop to ask to have a garden statue of Psyche mended, which had been reduced to “a basket of china chips” – deliberately destroyed when a stone hit it. Pottle tells Hunter he had been out in the garden that morning and, when bending down to pick a flower for his buttonhole, heard a hiss and the statue shattered. When he stood up to look saw Jake, "bpoor-white boy who lived in the strip of woods between Pottle's place and Scottswood," twenty foot away with a silly grin on his face. Hunter finds it hard to believe Jake had thrown the rock ("that boy wouldn't touch a rabbit"), but promises to come over to collect all the pieces. That evening, Jenny goes to a dinner party at Scottswood where the reader gets a brief demonstration why Pottle is not particular popular in the community, as well as introducing the tight-knit group of suspects.

Firstly, there are Dan and Virginia Scott, of Scottswood, who are the neighbors of Thomas and Edna Pottle. They have Dan's 92-year-old grandfather, Colonel Bedford Scott, living with them who still has it out for those Yankees ("...blood hasn't had time to cool since sixty-five"). Gordon Claibourne, Virginia's cousin and Pottle's lawyer, Dr. Keith and a newcomer from Norway on the University faculty, Erik Salten. And, of course, Jenny.

Next morning, Pottle's body is found on his own doorstep, dead as a door nail, who appears to have succumbed from the poisonous effects of a rattle snake bite. Sheriff Dick Cox, Jenny's cousin, remarks that it's "very unusual for rattlers to come so far into the lowlands," but retracing Pottle's steps reveals evidence he had been attacked by a rattle snake, ran all the way home and the exertion hastened the action of the poison. So a clear, cut and dried case without a hint of mystery, until Hunter begins to notice inconsistencies and convinced the sheriff his idea of a human hand rather than a wayward snake being responsible was not "altogether mad." Hunter and Jenny embark on their first case.

A case that's more like a Herculean task and not merely because they have to get around in the clunky, noisy Mongrel. They have to prove it was murder, before they can go on to the who and why. And how do you fake, what looks like, a completely explainable death by snake bite? While they begin their sleuthing, the parade of clues and red herrings, ranging from a broken statue and brown beans to dead fish and the sounds of hissing and rattling, keeps growing – seemingly never getting closer to the truth. Not even a second death, presented as a suicide, nor another snake attack brings Hunter closer to cracking the case. On the contrary, the sheriff is ready to close the case after the latest snake attack resulting in something I have never seen before in a detective story, past or present. Hunter is far from satisfied and continues to poke around, which is when the suspects band together to legally prevent him "from further private ferreting into our affairs." Something that should have been explored and exploited better, but it's one of those fresh angles that makes Puzzle in Porcelain a smidgen more than just a pleasing debut!

There are no obviously nods or references to other mystery writers, or characters, but Gresham evidently must have been an enthusiastic consumer of detective stories. She shows throughout the story a good understanding of what makes a detective story tick and, perhaps more importantly, what came before her. That allowed her to find and work those fresh angles Boucher praised. It's only in the finer details of the solution, primarily method and motive, you notice the still inexperienced hand of the first-time (but promising) mystery writer still needing some time and a touch of polish. Other than that, I greatly enjoyed Puzzle in Porcelain and liked how the story kept making me second guess my brilliant armchair solution. I was sure I had figured it all out when deducing the method, which I did, but not fully. So well worth picking up, if you come across a copy. Meanwhile, I'm going to keep an eye out for a copy of Puzzle in Pewter.

The Golden Box (1942) by Frances Crane

Frances Crane, "a small town girl who became a sophisticated world traveler," was an American mystery novelist who wrote thirty detective novels, published between 1941 and 1968, all but four featuring the lighthearted, globetrotting crime solving couple, Pat and Jean Abbott – contemporaries of the Troys and the Norths. The Abbotts appeared in twenty-six novels, no short stories, often taking place in localities as colorful as the varicolored book titles that earned Crane the label "the travelog mystery writer." So they were a perfect fit for Tom and Enid Schantz's Rue Morgue Press.

In 2004, RMP reprinted the first title in the Pat and Jean Abbott series, The Turquoise Shop (1941), which was followed by a half dozen more reissues before closing down around 2015. Enid passed away in 2011 and Tom suffered a combination of flood problems, health issues and financial difficulties forcing him to permanently shutter RMP. One of their last reprints to be published was, in fact, Crane's The Cinnamon Murder (1946). Crane and the Abbotts enjoyed a small revival of their popularity during those years, but retreated somewhat back into obscurity following the closure of RMP. Something that happened to a lot of once obscure mystery writers who make up RMP's catalog like Delano Ames, Glyn Carr, Clyde B. Clason and Kelley Roos. Crane recently came back to my attention, but in a good news-bad news way.

The good news is that Crane is returning to print once again courtesy of the MysteriousPress/OpenRoad combination (ebooks) and Otto Penzler's American Mystery Classics (print). The bad news is that The Rap Sheet reported last July that Tom Schantz had "died on June 6 at 79 years of age." The story of the Rue Morgue Press has a special place in the history of the genre as Tom and Enid Schantz were among the first to setup shop on the internet, which not only helped pave the way for today's reprint renaissance, but opened the door to a possible Second Golden Age – sometime in the hopefully not so distant future. A reprint renaissance would likely have happened regardless, but it would developed a lot slower rate without the Rue Morgue Press pushing it ahead a good 10-15 years. Without them, I think we would be today where we roughly were around the late 2000s. And who knows how that would have affected our beloved translation wave. So if you feel spoiled for choice or overwhelmed by the relentless, unceasing stream of reprints and translations, you can thank the Schantz for your luxurious little problem.

When I learned of Tom Schantz's passing, I dug the Rue Morgue Press edition of Frances Crane's The Golden Box (1942) from the bottom of the to-be-read pile and moved it near the top. After all, Crane wrote the type of mysteries Tom and Enid enjoyed. The type of mystery novel showing the only acceptable place in a civilized world to commit murder is the printed page.

The Golden Box is the second novel in the series and takes place mere weeks after The Turquoise Shop, which introduced mystery readers to the San Francisco private eye Patrick "Pat" Abbott and his future wife, Jean Holly. At the time, the last days of November, 1941, the United States populace was occupied with Roosevelt's presidential proclamation to move Thanksgiving ("...cash registers play jingle bells an extra week") or listening to radio broadcasts on developing tension with Japan ("the Japanese emissaries were in Washington"). Just a little over a week before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Jean, only 26-years-old, is wondering whether Pat is the man for her and what to do with her shop in Santa Maria shop ("...a pain in the neck because I couldn't make it pay...") when she receives a telegram from her cousin. Peg McCrea invites Jean to come back and visit her old hometown, Elm Hill, which she left behind eight years ago when her parents died in a car crash, but very little has changed in the small, old-world town – lorded over by the matriarchal tyrant of Fabian House. Mrs. Claribel Fabian Lake is a domineering, mean-spirited old woman who leverages her wealth to control everyone and everything from her own relatives to the church committee. Woe onto those who dare cross or defy her wishes.

Mrs. Claribel Fabian Lake has three daughters, Emma, Claire and Valerie, one of whom she wishes to see married to her dear cousin, Ernest Fabian. Ernest is "the very last Fabian" and Mrs. Lake "was going to endow him heavily when he married Emma," but she eloped with a high school chemistry teacher, Carl Green. They had several children one of whom got hit by a car and needs expensive medical care or risks losing a leg, but Mrs. Lake refuses to give as much as a penny for treatment ("bitchy Mrs. Lake reminded Emma that if she had married Ernest Fabian things might have been nicer, meaning they'd've had money"). So the next in line to marry Ernest is the second, distantly-minded daughter, Claire, who agreed to become engaged to Ernest ("...just a sort of business arrangement, you see"). However, this does not mean the third and youngest daughter can marry whomever she wants. Valerie has fallen in love with a young pilot, Tommy Ross, but Mrs. Lake is "fighting the match" and "Val spends most of her time in hysterics." That's not all. Mrs. Lake is furious at the whole church as the congregation voted against her sappy candidate preacher and gets back at them by canceling the annual Christmas party. If the committee insists on having a Christmas party regardless, she'll stop her yearly three-thousand dollar donation. A donation that practically pays for everything the church does for the community.

This is going down as Jean returned to her hometown and writes a letter to Pat that there are some "funny doings next door" which "might interest a good detective." Pat wired back three days later, but, by that time, Mrs. Lake "had been stowed in the Fabian vault in the Elm Hill cemetery." The circumstances surrounding her death got the town talking. For a while anyway.

Ernest had the body taken to St. Louis for embalming and the coffin returned to Fabian House, "under a blanket of orchids and gardenias," but was not opened and the funeral was to be private, which is considered a snub in the community – "funerals are rather communal in Elm Hill." There's another story doing the rounds about her supposed death. Mrs. Lake's young black maid, Ida Raymonds, told her sister she found her mistress "lying on the bed with a bashed-in face" and "a golden box clutched in one dead hand." Is that why Ernest wanted the body cremated? But then her body is discovered hanging from a length of clothesline in the so-called bird room crammed with stuffed animals. So, when Pat comes to Elm Hill, there's plenty of suspicion and motives to go around, but the imminent treat of war has doused any interest in a potential double murder in Elm Hill ("I suppose murder on a mass scale rubs out little double murders like that"). And nobody wants "to bother seriously because it's only Ida Raymond." Which is not necessarily a handicap for a detective like Pat Abbott. Or, as Jean described it, "you size up your case and set your little trap and they talk themselves into it."

The Thrilling Detective Website described the Pat and Jean Abbott novels as "definitely on the cozier side of the P.I. genre." Frances Crane can be called the female counterpart to Rex Stout as both wrote mysteries most read for the main characters rather than trying to pick apart a tricky, intricately-constructed puzzle plot. That is very much true for The Golden Box. Crane does put in some work to make the obvious murderer somewhat less obvious and not always in the fairest of ways, but the only way you can miss the murderer is (SPOILER/ROT13: vs lbh nffhzr gur zbfg-yvxryl-fhfcrpg vf gbb boivbhf n pubvpr sbe zheqrere) and expect a bit of ingenuity or cleverness waiting for you in the last couple of chapters. Crane simply was not an Agatha Christie or Helen McCloy. Funnily enough, Tom and Enid Schantz tried to help on this occasion to make the murderer less obvious by editing out a racial slur. Not "because of concerns about political correctness but because it might actually give away the killer's identity" as "in 1942, readers might not have assigned guilt at its mere utterance," but "but in 2005 we could easily see a reader exclaiming, 'Aha, here's our killer'." Stressing that Crane was "a champion of the underdog who abhorred prejudice" and "was expelled from Nazi Germany as a journalist for defending Jews." It barely helped.

However, The Golden Box is a highly readable, but not particular challenging, detective novel giving a snapshot of a period when the United States held it breaths in anticipation war while trying to fuss over little things like Thanksgiving getting moved a week. So if you like these comfy, more character-oriented mysteries with a dash of romance and a pinch of Had-I-But-Known, Frances Crane and The Golden Box comes highly recommended. But if you want something a little more challenging, you should look somewhere else.

A note for the curious: I nostalgically poked around the now sadly long gone Rue Morgue Press website on the Wayback Machine and came across the following on the about section what collecting vintage mysteries in the 1970s was like: "in those days, used mystery books from the Golden Age were plentiful and cheap and not in wide demand, except by thrifty readers. Booksellers kept first editions in dusty back rooms and rejoiced when we came to town looking for them. Book sales had tables full of them, priced at a quarter apiece regardless of edition or condition. We would come back from buying trips with our Volvo station wagon crammed with boxes of old mysteries... remember, a book from 1935 had been out of print for only 35 years at that time, about the same length of time that books being published in 1970 have been out of print today. And there were very few real mystery fiction collectors back then." One of those early collectors was Bill Pronzini. No wonder he got his hands on all those rare, long out-of-print locked room mysteries! But it's interesting to note how the fandom has grown and expanded since the late 1990s and early 2000s. Almost like RMP actually had a hand in it! ;)

The Paradise Affair (2021) by Bill Pronzini

In 2005, Bill Pronzini revived his two historical gumshoes, John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, who sold their professional detective services in San Francisco at the turn-of-the-century – when the Old West was coming to an end. This new run of short stories appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine starting with "Quincannon in Paradise" (collected in Quincannon's Game: A Western Quartet, 2005) and seems to have ended with "Pick Up Sticks" (2021). During the 2010s, Pronzini started to rework the Quincannon and Carpenter short stories into novel-length mysteries with his wife, Marcia Muller. The series began with the delightful The Bughouse Affair (2013) and some have called it the novel that rebooted the series, but it's more of a continuation of Quincannon (1985) and Beyond the Grave (1986) merging and streamlining the short stories with the original 1980s novels.

The Paradise Affair (2021) is the ninth and, as of this writing, seemingly last entry in the series based on the short stories "Quincannon in Paradise" and "Pick Up Sticks." A whole lot has changed since the days of The Bughouse Affair.

John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter finally tied the marital knot, "their future together was bright," but Quincannon, "the most accomplished detective in the western United States," suffered an affront to his pride and skills – allowing two slippery criminals to escape his clutches. Jackson "Lonesome Jack" Vereen ("an ironical moniker, for he was a libertine of gargantuan appetites") and E.B. "Nevada Ned" Nagle ("whose primary vice was the opium derivative morphine") are con artists who graduated over their lengthy career from bait-and-switch trickery to swindling people with phony stocks. Their latest mark and Quincannon's current client, R.W. Anderson, not only bought two-thousand dollars of bogus stock in a nonexistent silver mine, but the two swindlers seized upon an opportune to make off with his portfolio of stock certificates and bearer bonds. Anderson hired Quincannon to bring the two to justice and hopefully recover the stolen portfolio. However, two weeks of exhaustive detective work gets thrown out of the window when Quincannon learns his quarries booked a passage for for Honolulu, Hawaii.

Sabina spots an opportunity for a second, busman's honeymoon ("we deserve a vacation, even if it is a working one") and convinces both her husband and their client to follow Lonesome Jack and Nevada Ned to Honolulu.

The Paradise Affair takes place during the first-half of 1898, "the Sandwich Islands Kingdom was overthrown and Queen Lili'uokalani's reign ended in January of '93, five years ago," but before the United States annexed the then independent Republic of Hawaii – which happened later that year on August 12, 1898. So the story is drenched in local and historical color. The impending annexation is a popular conversational topic ("...if Japan doesn't invade and annex it first, as they have threatened to do"), while the Spanish-American war and increased U.S. military presence hover in the background (Admiral Dewey's Asiatic Squadron swarm Honolulu Harbor). However, the best and most evocative part is Quincannon riding a donkey pass the rugged coastline, fishing villages, lava tubes and spouting blowholes as he tracks down his elusive quarries. It takes Quincannon's resigned Scottish pessimism ("no boats, no horses, naught but wagons and asses! What other handicaps did these island gardens of delight hold in store?") a while to acclimate, before his feelings towards the islands begin to mellow. And while her husband is hunting down a pair of swindlers, Sabina gets a case of her own practically thrown in her lap.

During their voyage, the Quincannon's befriended the Prichards, Lyman and Margaret, who are traveling homeward and invited them to stay at their Waikiki home. So stays with their new friends when her husband is roaming the islands for Lonesome Jack and Nevada Ned, but one particular hot, stuffy night, Sabina ventures out into garden when "an explosive report broke the quiet" – a gunshot coming from the house next door. Gordon Pettibone, owner of the neighboring property, had apparently had locked himself in the study with a loaded gun and opinions differ on how he got shot. The local police believes it was suicide, but Philip Oakes insists his uncle had been fiddling with the gun and accidentally shot himself. A twenty thousand dollar insurance policy with a nonpayment clause in case of suicide depends on it. Oakes heard Sabina is a detective and asks her to prove his uncle's death was due to an accidental misfire, but she has the sneaking suspicion Pettibone might have been cleverly murdered. Sabina thought she a shadowy shape close to the back wall shortly after hearing the gunshot and than there's those three, strange words Pettibone spoke before he died, "pick up sticks." Like the old nursery rhyme ("One, two, buckle my shoe. Three, four, knock on the door. Five, six, pick up sticks").

Ah, yes, an Ellery Queen-style dying message inside a John Dickson Carr-like locked room mystery. The detective story's take on the riddle wrapped inside an enigma and Sabina's knows dying messages and impossible murders is Quincannon's bread and butter ("conundrums of this sort intrigued him"), but "she had, after all, been instrumental in solving a few conundrums herself." Sabina makes short work of the locked room and dying message puzzles with the latter having a clever answer to the criticism often leveled at the dying message. Why would a mortally injured and dying person come up with a cryptic clue on the spot instead of outright naming the murderer? This dying message is even more damning than simply naming the murderer. The locked room-trick is a nicely-done variation on an impossible crime technique that always fascinated me (ROT13: haybpxrq qbbef naq jvaqbjf gung nccrne gb or ybpxrq naq obygrq sebz gur vafvqr). So both quickly, and neatly, wrap up their respective investigations with days left to spare to enjoy that second, well deserved honeymoon.

The Paradise Affair is a relatively short, but tightly written and plotted locked room mystery full of local and historical color, which certainly makes it a standout of the series. More importantly, it provided a satisfying closure to the character-arcs of John and Sabina Quincannon. John Quincannon was introduced as a broken ex-Secret Service operative haunted by the gun battle in which his ricocheting bullet killed a pregnant woman ("the burden of responsibility for the loss of two innocent lives had been unbearable"). Everything changed when he met Sabina, then a "Pink Rose" of the Pinkerton Agency, who had lost her husband in the line of duty. Their first collaboration allowed both of them to move on and create Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services. So, if The Paradise Affair really is their last outing, they got a happy sendoff that retrospectively brightened Beyond the Grave. A crossover across time between this series and Muller's short-lived series-character Elena Oliverez, which takes place in 1894 and 1986. The 1986 portion of the story makes it very clear Carpenter and Quincannon are long gone. Either way, this is not the last you have seen of them on this blog. I still have The Bags of Tricks Affair (2018), which I overlooked and forgot about. The stories collected in Quincannon's Game warrant a second look as three of the four stories are locked room mysteries. Why not end where the series began, Quincannon, because that would be on theme for this blog.

Death of a Tall Man (1946) by Frances and Richard Lockridge

Richard and Frances Lockridge were a mystery writing couple who, more or less, accidentally created one of the most endearing American detective series when Richard decided to combine his comedic characters from his short stories with the detective plot Frances had cooked up – mixing them together as The Norths Meet Murder (1940). Pam and Jerry North originally appeared in a series of vignettes in the New York Sun and were later revived for The New Yorker (collected in Mr. and Mrs. North, 1936), but the characters achieved as the bantering, martini sipping New York society sleuths in twenty-six mystery novels. A series that ended with the passing of Frances Lockridge in 1963.

I wanted to return to the series for a while and there were two titles on the shortlist, Death of a Tall Man (1946) and Murder Within Murder (1946). Someone particularly recommended Murder Within Murder to me a long time ago, but can't remember who or why. Synopsis of the Mysterious Press promised an impossible murder in a watched room. So guess which one I picked? 

Death of a Tall Man opens in the offices of a well-known, well regarded oculist, Dr. Andrew Gordon, in the Medical Chambers, East Fifty-Third Street, on compensation day. Two days a week, mornings and afternoons, groups of five or six men who were referred to Dr. Gordon by insurance company physicians came to the offices, which resembles a rabbit warren of doors and examination rooms – easily confusing everyone unfamiliar with the building. Fortunately, the story includes a floor plan as the movement of the various characters through the building is relevant to the plot.

Dr. Gordon is found slumped over his desk with "a deep depression" in the back of his head following the examination of Monday's last group of compensation cases. Lieutenant William Weigand, of the New York Homicide Squad, has no shortages of suspects to pick from. Daniel "Dan" Gordon is Dr. Gordon's stepson who learned from his uncle, Nickerson Smith, that his stepfather squandered the lion's share of his mother's inheritance, but is it an explanation for his unusual behavior? Behavior that everyone around him try to excuse to the police. Debbie Brooks used to be the "female nuisance" who lived next door to the Gordons when she was child, but, when her parents passed away, she was welcomed into the family. She's now engaged to Dan and works for Dr. Gordon as his receptionist. Miss Grace Spencer is Dr. Gordon's nurse and has her desk in the corridor with the six examination rooms at her left and Dr. Gordon's office at the end, which means she could have possible seen something without realizing. She might have been in love with her employer. Mrs. Evelyn Gordon is Dr. Gordon's second, much younger wife and people are talking about her spending "a good deal" of time with a neighbor, Lawrence Westcott. A classic case of a wife and lover getting rid of a pesky husband? Not to mention the six compensation cases.

Understandably, Lieutenant Weigand is happy when Pam North turns up out of nowhere. She was out and about when she spotted a growing crowd of disaster tourists and the Homicide Squad car from Centre Street, which she knew spelled "a certain kind of trouble." Pam North really is the shining star of this novel as both a detective and comedic character. She has the best scenes and lines of the story. Such as her describing the nature of New York taxicabs and drivers as if they're the subject of a wildlife documentary or her telephone call to Jerry to explain she got caught up ("it isn't fair to say I look for them") in another murder ("it would be silly to tell a taxicab man to drive straight to the nearest murder"). I thought this was very reminiscent of the best by Kelley Roos, but, unfortunately, the same can't be said about the plot. 

Death of a Tall Man has a plot riddled with botched and missed opportunities or good, but poorly, executed ideas. I hardly know where to begin!

Firstly, the plot-threads not directly tied to the solution were only there to pad out an already very short novel, like the "combat fatigue" (PTSD) thread, which felt out-of-place and only served to make an obvious innocent person look guilty. You have a murder of an eye doctor in a practice full of people with damaged or failing eyesight. So why not play around with unreliable eyewitness trope instead of this side distraction? The circumstances of the murder and solution would certainly have allowed for a damaged, unreliable eyewitnesses to be a focal point of the investigation. The tall man of the title is not Dr. Gordon, but who and why that dead man is relevant to the solution is the cleverest idea of the whole story and there was some satisfaction in the murderer crying "that god-damned freak," but comes not into play until the last stretch of the story and, by then, it has lost most of its effect – because the solution is so painfully obvious. Lockridges made the murderer very conspicuous and left very little to the imagination as to the possible motive, which also distracted heavily from the how-was-it-done aspect. When you know who, you can make a pretty educated guess how it was done. So the rabbit warren of watched corridors, examination rooms and doors became less of an obstacle than if the murderer had been better hidden from the reader. Oh, and no, this is not an impossible crime in any shape or form. No idea why it has been advertised as one.

So, on a whole, I'm sure loyal, long-time fans of the series will love Death of a Tall Man from start to finish, but, purely as a detective story, it's nothing more than goodnatured, lighthearted fluff with a paper thin plot. Well, it was worth a shot.

A Tough One to Lose (1972) by Tony Kenrick

Tony Kenrick is an Australian author who started out in advertising and worked as a copywriter in America, Britain and Canada, but abandoned his career in advertising in 1972 to become a full-time writer specialized in comedic capers and heist thrillers – which earned him a favorable comparison to the work of Donald E. Westlake. A number of his novels were optioned or bought by Hollywood with only Faraday's Flower (1985) making it to the big screen as Shanghai Surprise (1986). 

So not a likely writer to wash up on this blog, but Kenrick's A Tough One to Lose (1972) is listed and highlighted in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). Praising it as "a pacey, often humorous novel in which the author successfully de-and re-materialized a Jumbo Jet full of passengers." If memory serves me correctly, I have come across a vanishing aircraft only once before in Richard Forrest's Death Through the Looking Glass (1978). When a copy came my way, I snapped it up to see what it's all about.

First of all, Kenrick completely subverted my expectation of how the story would play out. I expected an all out, blockbuster-like heist thriller with the lives of 360 missing passengers and a multi-million dollar ransom at stake, but the story turned out to be surprisingly small scale, almost a traditional detective story, reminiscent of the comedic mysteries by Kelley Roos – like you're following around two side-characters away from the action. There's also this weird balance between the darker, thriller-ish aspects mixed in with the shenanigans of the two protagonists. Somehow, it worked better than it should have done.

William Verecker is a down on his luck lawyer who had been a junior partner in an old, conservative established firm until an embarrassing incident with a society hostess ended up in the paper. The "firm hadn't accepted the explanation and neither had his wife," Annie, who thought Verecker was a better boss than husband. So she came back to work as his secretary in his newly established law firm and mostly spend her working day "being sweet to the many people they owed money to and tough with the handful who owed them." This all changed when Verecker is contacted by an old Air Force buddy, Phil Rinlaub, who now works as a troubleshooter for one of the domestic airline giants, Calair. Rinlaub wants him to identity a pair cuff links belonging to a client of his. A client who's one of more than three hundred passengers caught up in the crime of the century, which is kept under tight wrap by the authorities.

Rinlaud tells Verecker in confidence that "Friday night somebody pulled a stunt that makes the Brink's job look like kid stuff" and called it "the Great Plane Robbery." A 747 Jumbo Jet going from San Francisco to New York vanished from radar about thirty minutes after the flight took off and the authorities quick began to suspect something was up. They couldn't get the passenger list out of the computer, duplicates of the tickets were missing and all the copies of the flight manifest had disappeared, which meant there's "a missing airplane full of people" they "had no record of" – a situation that went from bad to worse. Calair receives a package with items belonging to some of the passengers and a ransom demand of $25 million in uncut diamonds! How do you hide something the size of a Jumbo Jet and where do you store over three hundred hostages? The disappearance of the plane seems like an insoluble problem, but Verecker sees an opportunity to net a huge reward from the insurance company that would solve all their money problem. Verecker unwittingly has a clue in possession that the authorities are unaware of.

On the morning of Rinlaud's visit, Verecker played golf with a client and there was a row of holes on the fairway with burnt-out fireworks at the bottom, but, going back to the golf course to have a second look, he discovers a dozen holes set at ten-yard intervals. Like a makeshift landing strip with flares for a small airplane. A suspicion confirmed by the discovery of twin ruts and an oil slick. Excitedly, Verecker returns to Annie with a branch ("Wonderful. We can use it to beat off creditors") which he uses to make a clever deduction how they can figure out who landed there. So they have an inside track the authorities are unaware of. But don't expect a serious thriller.

William and Annie Verecker begin to follow up on their lead and get caught up absurd, sometimes hilarious situations throughout their investigation. Verecker's discovery at a supposedly empty school would not have been out of place in an episode of Jonathan Creek, while Annie's attempt at an undercover operation would have made Haila Troy proud. Their shenanigans are interspersed with the introductions of the hijackers who are referred to as "The Skycap," "The Bookie," "The Pilot," "The Stewardess" and two baggage men, but there's also a dark horse lurking in the background, "The Bomber." A character who deserved his own novel, because he has a very novel motive. Whenever they appear, together or alone, the story becomes more serious in tone. Such as some of their background stories or when they feel drastic action have to be taken against that meddling lawyer and his ex-wife/secretary, which should have struck a jarring note with the comedic stylings of the Vereckers. But didn't.

So what about the plot? That's a mixed bag of nuts and bolts. Firstly, Kenrick came up with a good solution how (theoretically) a giant airplane with more than three hundred people aboard can disappear and stay hidden, while everyone from the FBI to the insurance investigators are combing the state with a fine tooth-comb, but a few details of the plan were a little hard to swallow – mostly to do with numbers. However, it was something different from what you might expect, because there's only so much you can do to explain away vanishing rooms, houses, streets, trains and airplanes. I appreciate the Vereckers were bouncing false-solutions back and forth throughout the story. Some were more seriously than others ("a 747 was too big to disguise as a diner"), but I thought the half-serious suggestion the hijackers "dug a hole in the desert big enough to take a 747" was as interesting as it was impractical. And the one with a foreign hijacker being flown in to disguise a mass murder as a skyjacking/kidnapping was as practical as it was dark. That trick would probably have worked better (especially in 1972) than the one they settled on.

So that's something the more traditionally-minded mystery reader can enjoy, but don't expect too much from everything surrounding the mystery of the vanishing airplane. Not every detail is fully explained, one plot-thread is left unresolved and the fascinating clues that were introduced during the second-half turned out to be of little relevance to the solution. But, then again, A Tough One to Lose was not written and plotted like a full-blown, traditional detective novel. Kenrick wrote a crime caper that went for both laughs and thrills. In addition to the impossible crime at the center of the plot with all its false-solutions certainly makes it an item of interest to obsessed fans of locked room and impossible crime fiction.

Stone Cold Dead (1995) by Roger Ormerod

My previous reviews took a closer look at two of Roger Ormerod's detective novels, One Deathless Hour (1981) and When the Old Man Died (1991), which were published a decade apart and represented two distinctly different periods in his writing career – respectively his private eye and neo-traditional periods. Only thing that both novels have in common is Ormerod's creative and often original bend of mind when it comes to plot-construction. So I decided to go for the hat-trick and pick another one of his nineties mystery novels, but don't worry. I'll return to the Golden Age in my post. 

Stone Cold Dead (1995) is listed online as the final entry in the Richard and Amelia Patton series, but The Night She Died (1997) is the title that closes out the series. This is almost a pity as Stone Cold Dead is Ormerod's most traditionally-styled mystery from this period with a surprisingly uncomplicated plot.

There are no shattered clocks, fabricated alibis, apparent impossibilities or messing around with cars and target pistols. Just a deceivingly simple murder in a small, tightly-knit community "firmly and delightfully living in the past" in a (socially) isolated location. A place that resisted and shown the modern world the door for two centuries. 

Stone Cold Dead begins with the Pattons traveling to Flight House to visit Amelia's goddaughter, Amelia "Mellie" Ruby Fulton, who's celebrating both her eighteenth birthday and her engagement to a young police constable, Raymond "Ray" Torrance – who spend £800 pounds on an engagement ring. Mellie is the daughter of Amelia's old school friend, Ruby Fulton, who's married to an old-fashioned, old-world country lawyer, Gerald Fulton. But his household situation is a little out of the ordinary. Gerald Fulton pays his son, Colin Fulton, a nominal rent to live there. Flight House looks down on a canal basin with locks, pounds and an old toll booth with people living "all the year round in their houseboats" on the canals. So there has to be a permanent lock-keeper, Colin, who was preceded by his uncle and grandfather.

The canal is privately owned by "three old dears," Adolphus, Alexandra and Victoria, who buried themselves even deeper into the past than the people populating their farms, villages and canals. Nowadays, Flight House is presented rent free to the lock-keeper with no salary, but the tradition is to tip the lock-keeper for helping the boats through. So they lived and worked in "an environment established over 200 years before" with "the physical isolation" cutting "them off from the present pace of life." There's "no radio, no TV set, no CD player" at Flight House, which are deemed to modern, but the outside world sometimes seeps into this isolated community. And having values, modern or old-fashioned, doesn't automatically mean you always live up to them. Something the Pattons begin to find out before they even arrived at the house.

Richard and Amalia drive to Flight House during snowy weather and come across an abandoned, unlocked car with the engine still warm and the keys hanging from the ignition lock – fuel gauge indicated half a tankful. What happened to the driver? A question that will be answered later that night.

They receive a warm welcome when they arrive, but there are some undercurrents during the birthday/engagement party. Gerald is not exactly charmed by his future son-in-law as "the young foul" thinks it's humorous to take constant digs at Gerald with his "really very immature authority." Ray comes to the party in his uniform and a joke ready ("is this bar licensed, may I ask?"), but Richard notices he has been "drinking as one who sought oblivion." And he refused to show Mellie the ring. So the stage is set.

Later that evening, while taking a stroll around the promise to smoke his pipe, Richard sees a human hand sticking out of the water of the pound. However, I can't reveal anything about the victim, because the victim's identity is a genuine "Ooh, the plot thickens" moment. A very well done effect considering the victim is somewhat of an outsider who has not been mentioned, or named, until the body was discovered. Ormerod tried to repeat this trick when Richard finds someone in very poor condition on one of the houseboats along the canal, but not quite to the same effect as the murder. Although it definitely thickened the plot even further and it made me look in a completely different direction for an answer.

So, while the case appears to be relatively simple and straightforward on the surface, the local policeman in charge, Inspector Ted Slater, had "nothing of a routine nature that he could pursue" with means and opportunity being the same very everyone involved – numerous motives were "jealously guarded." Richard Patton is more than a little guilty of guarding all the motives and keeping evidence from the local authorities. This is both a strength and a weakness of the plot. As noted above, Stone Cold Dead has a very simple, uncomplicated crime without the problems of broken windows, smashed clocks, faked alibis, impossible crimes and toying around with firearms. So there's less physical evidence and clues to betray the murderer or obscure the trail, which is probably why Ormerod didn't dare to go all-in with the puzzle surrounding the missing murder weapon. A very clever idea that could have been on par with the brilliant, double-edged central clue from The Key to the Case (1992) had been properly clued. Now you can only make an educated guess, if you can spot the murderer, that is.

Technically, the plot is sound enough and Ormerod told a fascinating story with a very well realized setting, memorable set-pieces and some good pieces of reasoning, but, purely as fair play mystery, Stone Cold Dead lagged behind his other novels from the same period. The Key to the Case, A Shot at Nothing (1993) and even And Hope to Die (1995) are shimmering examples of what could have been had the Golden Age never ended in the 1960s and continued to develop. Stone Cold Dead started out as something resembling a throwback to the old-fashioned, traditional detective story, but rapidly began to change into a more character-driven, modern crime novel. And not a bad crime novel at all. But hoped to find another one of his sublimely plotted, neo-Golden Age mysteries in Stone Cold Dead. So only recommended to readers who are already a fan of Ormerod and the series. 

A note for the curious: there's a very small, unsolved slice-of-life mystery in Stone Cold Dead. During the second-half of the story, the police begin to drag the locks in the hope of finding the elusive murder weapon. The locks had not been pumped dry in one, or two, centuries and the police collected "piles of sundry junk," which included everything from pram wheels to "a complete chandelier." There were also two shopping trolleys. Patton wonders how they got there, because "no canal user would load a trolley on to his boat" as it would be a devil of a nuisance and no shopper too idle to return the trolley to the store "would have walked it at least two miles to reach these locks." I know this is not as big of a mystery as who killed the chauffeur in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939), but I'm Dutch. And this little waterway mystery fascinates me. My solution is that some holidaymakers or canal boat residents went to the village to stock up on supplies, but their car broke down on the way back. So they fetched two trolleys to get their supplies to the boat and then dumped the trolleys into the lock.

When the Old Man Died (1991) by Roger Ormerod

Previously, I reviewed Roger Ormerod's last novel in the David Mallin and George Coe series, One Deathless Hour (1981), which ended his run as an author of British private eye novels and ushered in a more traditional period – during which he refined and polished his plots to almost perfection. More importantly, Ormerod succeeded in updating the traditional, plot-oriented detective novel and finding a balance between the classic and modern style. The Key to the Case (1992) is a great example of combining a good, old-fashioned locked room mystery with the grit of today's crime novels. 

So thought it would be a nice idea to skip a decade ahead and read one of his novels from the early nineties, which gave me about five titles to pick from. I randomly settled on When the Old Man Died (1991) and couldn't have picked a better title. John Dickson Carr would have found much to enjoy about this curious, almost out-of-time detective story! It has everything from antique clocks and quasi-impossible situations to a traveling fair. Step right up, step right up! 

When the Old Man Died is listed online as the eighth title in the Richard and Amelia Patton series, but several of Ormerod's series novels, like the previously mentioned The Key to the Case, are listed as standalone mysteries. So don't pin me down on the exact chronology of his books. 

When the Old Man Died begins with ex-Detective Inspector Richard Patton getting a visit from a former colleague, Chief Inspector Wainwright, who wants to speak with him about a ten year old murder case – which represented Patton's "first big case as an inspector." A decade ago, Patton was called to the town of Markham Prior where an old, dreary and unkempt farmhouse surrounded untended fences and outbuildings became the scene of a very peculiar murder. The owner of the home is the grouchy, anti-social Eric Prost, "suspected of writing scurrilous letters to all and sundry," but poison pen letters lost their power to "to bring about any shivers of apprehension" in modern times. Nonetheless, this didn't prevent Prost from writing abusive letters and had been writing one at the time of his death.

A milkman on his early morning rounds arrived at Winter Haven, as Prost called his house, to find no empty bottles on the steps. So he walked around the house to peek through to the windows and discovered Prost's body, head down on his desk, in his study, but the doors were locked and the windows, upstairs and downstairs, were latched. Some of the latches were "rusted solid." But was the house really locked up as tightly as it appeared? The "side door was so floppy in its frame" that Patton "could slip the latch easily" and two shots were fired through a small, but "critically important," hole in the corner of the pane of the study window – clearly done years before and never replaced. One bullet struck a small, vulnerable spot in the nape of Prost's neck. The second bullet had struck the face of an old, valuable grandfather clock, or long-case clock, standing by the side of the door. Apparently, the bullet stopped the clock at eight-ten and "the shattered glass from its face had been all over the floor" where the door opened. So "nobody could have entered or left the room" without disturbing the carpet of glass. The door had swept a wide arc in it when Patton entered the room.

Patton was hardly fooled by the smashed clock ("who's going to fall for that, these days?") and suspected a faked alibi, but the shots were precise and exact that required the practiced hand of a marksman. Enter the antique dealer and gun enthusiast, Mr. Julian Caine, who's name was on the license of the murder weapon. He had a motive of sorts and a laughable alibi. So he was arrested and received a life sentence on his day in court.

Chief Inspector Wainwright informs Patton one of his then underlings, Detective Constable Arthur Pierce, died last month following a car accident, but he made a statement before passing away. A statement that opened an old, timeworn can of worms. Arthur Pierce climbed to the rank of Chief Superintendent, but "one tiny error in his whole career" had haunted him. He had mishandled the murder weapon and, as a consequence, "the evidence, as presented to the court, wasn't safe." So the conviction was quashed and Julian Caine was released from prison. Four months later, Caine appears on the Pattons doorstep to ask the man responsible for putting him behind bars to now prove his innocence.

While the courts quashed the conviction, Caine is still guilty in the eyes of the town and he already had threats stuck through his letterbox and a brick through the window. Caine admits he was angry enough with Prost to have shot him, but not that precious, nearly 300-year-old Tompion long-case clock. And he could never have brought himself to harm it.

This is easier said than done, because ten years have passed and, every time Patton searched for a way out for him, Caine became "almost frantic to prove that nobody else but himself could have done it" – covering everything from his alibi and motive to access to his pistols. There are many more curious, almost impossible, aspects of the case revealed during this part of the story. Firstly, the pistols were kept in "a room almost as secure as a bank vault" with a cleverly hidden key, but Patton discovers the hiding place was to deceive burglars and crooks. Not friends or anyone else who came over to his home. Secondly, there was something weird and explainable that Patton didn't put into his report. Every clock in the house, "the whole collection," had stopped at eight-ten! This brings to mind old stories of "clocks stopping at the time of their owner's death," but even stranger is that the clocks were started up again after the house had been locked and sealed by the police. A particular bizarre aspect when you consider the bullet made "no more than a dent" in the brass face of the clock. Just a shame Ormerod didn't delve deeper into the lore surrounding old clocks.

Naturally, there are many more problems and side issues complicating Patton's investigation even further. Eric Prost lost his wife in a terrible car accident and the woman who caused the crash was seen fleeing the scene, but remained elusive unidentified. Arthur Pierce car crash very likely was murder and his deathbed statement resulted in an internal investigation, which is going to leave a reputation in tatters and Wainwright can only imagine what the media is going to do when the story gets out. So this means Patton has to lock horns with another ex-colleague, which is one of Ormerod's personalized tropes. Another one is his interest in cars and how they can be used by criminals and murderers in all kinds of different ways. Yes, there's a third victim of the four-wheeled menace when one of the characters is seriously wounded when he/she is rundown in the street. You can already see his interests and pet ideas being turned into personalized tropes in One Deathless Hour and An Alibi Too Soon (1987). Lastly, Eric Prost was related to the people of a traveling fair and Winter Haven was the nerve center where everything's organized and doubled as their winter quarters. When Patton returned, the fair had returned to their winter quarters to refurbish and repair their attractions and sideshows.

Admittedly, the story sags a little in the second-half, which is why think the clock-lore was underutilized, but the story and plot picked up again during the final quarter. A sudden change of pace that begins with one of the most unusual, but original, "courtroom" scene on the books. Patton has a stubborn, unbending sense of right and wrong, which forces him to interfere in "a kangaroo court" that took place in complete secrecy. Even though the accused was guilty of what he had been accused of (not murder), but without being able to defend himself. Patton elbows his way to the stage to do an improve impression of Perry Mason, but, during his improvised defense, he finally saw the complete truth that had eluded him for so long.

I pieced together most of the pieces except for two, not wholly unimportant, key-pieces of the puzzle. I had a pretty solid idea who had a hand in the (attempted) murders, but not quite as I imagined and therefore technically incorrect. Neither did I appreciate, or understand, how craftily and ingenious Ormerod combined the strands of the locked room mystery with old-fashioned alibi-trickery, which strongly reminded me of the short stories in Tetsuya Ayukawa's The Red Locked Room (2020) – which also used the tricks and techniques of one trope to create the other. Ormerod created a hybrid of the locked room and alibi with the murder in that puzzle box house with clocks that stop and start on their own volition. This is another personalized trope as Ormerod doesn't appear to have been interested in conventional alibis. My impression is that Ormerod was more interested in the difficulties of fabricating alibis and the problems that can arise from them, because they had unforeseen consequences or were misinterpreted.

So, while Ormerod had some favorite tropes and hobbyhorses, he also possessed a creative and imaginative mind capable of producing some original ideas, which prevented him from repeating himself. He simply found new ways to use or look at them. When the Old Man Died is no different with only a slower, less imaginative middle part of the story preventing me from ranking it alongside The Key to the Case and A Shot at Nothing (1993) as one of Ormerod's best retro Golden Age detective novels. But its not all that far behind. Just remember that the strength of the book is in its first-half and an ending as solid as it's satisfying.

A note for the curious: I only noticed this while working on my review and reading back what I wrote about One Deathless Hour, which made me realize how much synergy there really is between One Deathless Hour and When the Old Man Died. While Malling and Coe were on their last recorded case, Patton was solving his first unrecorded case around the same time. Both stories involve murders with a twenty-two target pistol, smashed clocks, apparent impossibilities and a flimsy alibi involving a shooting club. Yet, they're two very different detective stories. Ormerod was criminally forgotten and deserves to be rediscovered as showed what could have been, if the Golden Age never ended.