A Star-Crossed Journey

"I doubt any men aboard could have foretold what lay ahead over those three-thousand miles of teeming sea."

- Marshall (Suspense, episode 232: Murder Aboard the Alphabet, 1947)

Late last month, I reviewed A Variety of Weapons (1943) by Rufus King and referred in that blog-posts to one of his most celebrated novels, Murder by Latitude (1930), which was praised in the comment-section by "D for Doom" and Curt Evans – whose respective reviews of the book can be read here and here. King wrote a triad of maritime mysteries, which also includes Murder on the Yacht (1932) and The Lesser Antilles Case (1934), but Murder by Latitude seems to be the centerpiece of this trilogy.

"D" called the book "one of the best examples of the shipboard mystery novel," while Evans went as far as placing it as "one of the major American works within the detective fiction genre from the period between the World Wars." However, I came away with a more tempered opinion on its overall merits. Murder by Latitude is a well-written, moody and atmospheric tale of crime, spattered with some original ideas, but it's not a classic among maritime detective stories.

So, I'm very sorry to be the proverbial wet blanket on everyone's enthusiasm for this novel, but my opinion simply did not align with pretty much everyone else who commented on it. Still, it was not a bad mystery and the plot definitely had some points of interest.

Murder by Latitude takes place aboard a small cargo ship, called SS Eastern Bay, which the Mercantile Transport Line had turned into "a cheap little passenger-carrying freighter" with the intention of building up a name in the passenger trade – which showed to be going well when glancing at the passenger list for their passage from Bermuda to Halifax. First of all, there's a fabulous wealthy woman, Mrs. Poole, who's accompanied by her fifth husband, Ted, and she turns out to be focal point of all the trouble aboard.

However, the rest of the cast consists of less distinguished characters: one pair of spinster sisters, the Misses Sidderby, with the elder sister making a gruesome discovery on deck. A middle-aged married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Sandford. A young, handsome man named Force and an ugly, forty-some bloke called Wright. A pasty-faced, middle-aged man named Mr. Stickney and a much younger, eccentric looking Mr. Dumarque. Finally, there's Lt. Valcour of the New York Police and his presence worries Captain Sohme, because the police-lieutenant is there on a mission.

Several weeks ago, two men were knifed in the washroom of a New York night club: one of them was deadly wounded, but the other man is recovering in the hospital and the police expects to get a full description of the assailant once the victim has regained consciousness – which does not mean the police has been twiddling their thumbs in the meantime. A letter that was found on the dead man suggests the murderer had a link to one of the passengers aboard and might be present among the small cast of characters. So once the victim in New York gives a description of his attacker "it will be wirelessed" to the lieutenant, but the murderer intervened in this plan.

The ship's wireless operator, Mr. Gans, is the only person aboard who knows how to operate the communication system and this makes him a prime target. Someone has "closed their fingers about his windpipe" and "kept them there until his lungs no longer functioned."

I want to take a moment here and point out a couple of nifty, stylistic touches to the overall story.

One of them is that each chapters begins with the latitude and longitude that shows the position of the ship at the moment the events in that specific chapter takes place. So, if you're a detective reader who's also into cartography and geography, you can probably have some fun with them. Secondly, there are the occasional cablegrams between Commissioner of the New York Police Department and several port authorities, which are curt and businesslike, but betray a slight panic that they're unable to establish contact with both the ship and Lt. Valcour – even frustration when the bad weather prevents a search from the air. It really benefited the moody, mournful atmosphere and that's the strong point of the book.

However, where King prevented Murder by Latitude from attaining a place among the classics of the genre was a lack of proper clues and showing the reader too much. Some would argue that a stolen pair of (sewing) scissors, a silver thimble and a lump of sailmaker's wax constitutes as clues, but the reader is shown that the murderer used these items to commit a second, semi-perfect murder. But they don't point in the direction of this person. There are, in fact, practically no clues that could help the reader identify the murderer. Well, there's one, however, you have to be an expert code cracker to get access to that clue.

In the aforementioned cablegrams, the Commissioner added a coded message for Valcour. A coded message that, when solved, gives you a short, but tell-tale, description of the murderer. So, technically, you can make a case that King played fair, but hardly enough to be considered a classic. I'm also kind of baffled how the murderer knew Valcour was expecting a wireless message from New York and had to kill the only wireless operator aboard to delay the inevitable. Or maybe I missed or misunderstood that part of the explanation.

So, plot-wise, Murder by Latitude suffers from almost the same faults as the previous shipboard mystery I reviewed, namely Elizabeth Gill's Crime de Luxe (1933), but they're both still very good and readable (crime) novels. But whereas Gill's effort was a bright, sophisticated novel of manners in the style of the British Crime Queens, King's novel is a somber, melancholic affair with a sustained atmosphere that makes for an excellent read.

Admittedly, the explanation is not without interest and can even be labeled original, which makes it a real pity that the solution did not adhere to the fair play standards of its time – because the result would have been a genuine classic of its kind.

Please, feel free to vehemently disagree with me in the comment-section, if you're one of the many mystery enthusiasts who had more than a lukewarm response to the book.

Tools of Death

"I am too old a crow to believe that a random deduction of mine is necessarily true... but I suggest it, my friend. I suggest it. And unless you can satisfy me that it is not the truth, I am going to make matters warm for you. Very well."

- M. Henri Bencolin (John Dickson Carr's The Four False Weapons, 1937)

Rufus King was an American mystery novelist who created a number of series-characters, such as Reginald de Puyster, Stuff Driscoll and Dr. Colin Starr, but his primary and most successful detective was a New York policeman, Lt. Valcour – who made his first appearance in the very unusual Murder by the Clock (1929). I only read one other of King's Lt. Valcour novels, The Case of the Constant God (1938), before, perhaps unfairly, shelving him away as a poor man's Ellery Queen.

Lately, I came across several reviews of King's detective novels, which tempted me in returning to his work for a second glance and there were two potential candidates on my TBR-pile: Murder by Latitude (1931) and A Variety of Weapons (1943). The former received glowing comments from both readers and critics, but settled down for the latter, because the premise and the book-title suggested the story fell into a rare, sparsely populated category of the genre – one that (so far) consists only of G.K. Chesterton's "The Three Tools of Death" (The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911), Ellery Queen's "The Hanging Acrobat" (The Adventures of Ellery Queen, 1934) and John Dickson Carr's The Four False Weapons (1937).

Well, this turned out not to be the case, however, the book was, as Anthony Boucher described it, deftly characterized with "sly shifting suspense" and "a puzzle of Kingly dexterity." It also oddly managed to be a very unconventional mystery that operated well within in the confines and conventions of the traditional detective story. If that makes any sense. Anyhow...

A Variety of Weapons is a standalone novel, originally serialized in Redbook as The Case of the Rich Recluse, which has a young woman as its main protagonist.

Ann Ledrick is slowly making a name for herself as a photographer of animals and already won an award for "a stunning shot of a Manx cat," which landed her job at the barely accessible estate of the titular recluse. Justin Marlow is fabulously wealthy and lives at a place called Black Tor, tucked away in the heart of the Adirondacks, where there are no roads, but the four thousand acres of private land has its own landing field – providing the safest way of reaching the isolated community. There are rumors, aimed at discouraging uninvited guests, that "entire safaris have perished from starvation while attempting to track to the house itself." So the place is really remote and practically inaccessible.

Marlow wants Ann to come down to Black Tor to snap a ton of pictures of the ocelots that belong to his cousin, Estelle, but it becomes apparent they've an ulterior motive for flying her down to the estate. A reason that's attached to a family tragedy and an ever increasing pile of bodies.

Twenty years ago, Marlow's only son was found standing over his pregnant and mortally wounded wife with a blood-stained knife in his hand. He was accused of having stabbed her while "she was playing Chopin on a spinet," put on trial, sentenced and executed on the electric chair, but his father never believed him to be guilty. Old Marlow "fought like a tiger to clear his son," right up to the execution, but rumors say he went cuckoo after failing to save his son. And this may have resulted in some additional deaths. Several of the men who were involved with his late daughter-in-law died before their time in hunting accidents or succumbed to food poisoning, which whispers say were murders with "a Machiavellian touch."

I do not think most readers will have too much trouble figuring out what role the twenty-something Ann played in this drama, because it's mentioned, very early on in the story, they "did a Caesarean" on the dying woman in order to save the baby. So Ann finds herself cast in the role of an unexpected and tragic heiress, but one who inherits more than just money from her newly found grandfather.

Marlow was already a dying man when Ann arrived. The victim of a slow, destructive poison and on his deathbed he handed her the torch of his private-investigation into the murders that have taken place on the estate – making it now her task to prove her father did not stab her mother. It's not a task that's entirely without danger. However, the second half of this novel is far more detection-orientated than the first one, which had a surprising amount of logical clues that instinctively make you glance in the direction of the killer. Such as the nature of the later murders of the men and "the white back" that was seen behind a rainy window of the music room on the night of the murder twenty years before. A clue that, by the end, recalled Agatha Christie's 4.50 from Paddington (1957).

There were also two interesting animal-related clues: why did the dog of Ann's mother, a Chow, not defend its master when she was being stabbed, but, instead, "trembled on her cushion" and made little noises? The second clue is the affection Sgt. Hurlstone, of the State Police, gives to a black cat, but animal-lovers will probably frown upon his reason for keeping the animal so close to him.

Of course, this positive review of a mystery novel, I genuinely enjoyed, would not be complete without me nitpicking about something small, because (minor) imperfections are there to be dragged out into the light of day. 

First of all, there's the poison that was slowly killing Marlow. It is, in fact, a slow-acting poison, but some of the details were questionable and sounded as if King got them from the pages of a lurid pulp-thriller. However, this is unquestionable one of the earliest examples of such poison being used in crime-fiction and "the grim result of the skeleton bones in silver on the films" was a nice touch. Secondly, the motive could not really be deduced based on the given evidence, but motive is of secondary importance to most readers. As long as the who (and how) can be deduced. So that won't spoil the book for most readers.

So, all in all, I found A Variety of Weapons to be a better mystery than either Murder by the Clock or The Case of the Constant God, which nicely balanced a fairly clever plot with elements of suspense – planted in a traditional, but unusual, setting with a strong cast of characters. King really redeemed himself here and Murder by Latitude has now crawled to the top of my TBR-pile.

Strategy Above the Depths

"I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge."

- Sherlock Holmes ("The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton")

I value the opinion of my fellow brethrens exploring the detective story more than any other and hang onto their recommendations, observations and conclusions like a pile of freshly mined, rough diamonds – before giving them a sharp appraising look myself. That's why you regularly see books emerge here that were mentioned or discuss elsewhere, but even with a positive impression from a fellow devotee and a personal self-control that only exists as a spark of perpetual enthusiasm you have no signed guarantee that the opaque pieces of drift-glass will actually yield a sparkling gem. But what to do when opinions differ?

The internet has not been kind in its appraisal of Rufus King's The Case of the Constant God (1938), not as a detective story anyway, noting that it was "unusual downbeat" and "moderately amusing" but also "not quite fair play" and "not much fun to read," while Robert Adey deigned the book worthy of extra praise in Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible crimes (1991) – saying that King appears here as "a writer of the first rank" and expresses his surprise "that he is so comparatively little known." Needless to say, this propelled the book to the upper echelons of my Most Wanted list and I have to admit that having identified the book as a locked room mystery helped in shelling out the bounty for its capture. Besides, would a book with the title Locked Room Murders tell a lie to me? (said he, with the conviction of a raving lunatic).

But enough of this palaver, let's get this show on the road and that's where this unusual case begins for King's series detective, Lieutenant Valcour, where a Mr. Blodgett witnesses a corpse being driven around the city by two men. A routine check on the vehicle, combined with the description of the suspects, identifies them as Artemus Todd and Jonathan Alder, crumbs of the upper crust of the Long Island society, which makes it also an unlikely story. After all, people like that are not in the habit of picking up hitchhikers, let alone ones that need to be dropped off at the morgue, and that's when King puts the plot in reverse and backs up into a flashback.

We learn that the name of the stiff in the backseat was Sigurd Repellen, a nasty blackmailer who dipped his pen in the same venomous inkwell as Charles Augustus Milverton and James Chigwell, morally responsible for the tragic suicide of Jenny Alder – Jonathan’s loving wife and Todd's darling daughter. They accidentally killed him when they threw him against a bust of Emperor Nero and slumped down to the floor. Justifiably homicide? Morally, perhaps, but the family had made plans, conspired and that gives a prosecutor an opening to argue that the outcome would’ve been the same. Ergo, a murder charge. They decide to expunge the evidence, dump the body and lay down until the trails grows cold, but, as we learned from the opening chapter, it's a bust from almost the get go. The first half of the story can be summed up as an inverted mystery, in which we follow both Valcour and the Alder-Todd household as each is taking their measures against one another, but this was the least interesting portion of the book.

The pace was picked up when Repellen's remains were discovered and the medical examiner extracted not only a bullet from the blackguard's heart but also a completely different story. As a final act in this drama we see Alder and Todd taking flight to sea aboard their yacht, while Valcour soared above them in a seaplane before coming down from the sky like a bird of prey. This is my favorite part of the book and offers a nifty, fairly clued impossible problem of a stowaway, whom Valcour believes to be the murderer, but is not found when the boat was turned inside out. As a matter of fact, it was this impossible disappearance from an ocean-bound yacht that saved me from having to put this book away with a lingering sense of disappointment. Plot wise, it was the only part that was done right. The murderer could've been a nice surprise, which, admittedly, was a clever play on the least-likely-suspect gambit, but not enough clues were stowawayed on its pages to pull it off in a satisfactory manner.

All in all, The Case of the Constant God is a readable, offbeat crime novel, but not one that's particular memorable, challenging or engaging.

This was only my second Lieutenant Valcour book, the first being the unconventional Murder by the Clock (1929), but from these I have gotten the impression that Rufus King was sort of a poor man's Ellery Queen – which may explain his neglect. I know there are mystery fans who have an high opinion of King, but I don't see in those two titles. 

Note: the post title is a reference to one of the Detective Conan movies, Strategy Above the Depths (2005).