No Way Out

"Five people -- five frightened people. Five people who watched each other, who now hardly troubled to hide their state of nervous tension..."

- Agatha Christie (And Then There Were None, 1939)

Michael Carmichael was a man of great wealth and poor health, whose passing may proof to be very profitable for a handful of distant relatives, but the fine print has more in store for them than they originally bargained for – which does not even include the freak flood that cut them off from the outside world or the murderer prowling among them.

This is a preliminary sketch of Zelda Popkin's Dead Man's Gift (1941), in which her department store detective, Mary Carner, accompanies one of the sale girls, Veronica Carmichael, to the home of her late benefactor in Pennsylvania. A journalist from the Morning Globe, who wrote up her story, found an inconsistency and advised her to take someone along – putting all the pieces in place for an old-fashioned game of who-dun-it. But what a nice collection of grotesque game pieces.

The prospective legatees are a corpulent and gaudy "night-club derelict," Ruby, and a stammering farmer named Wallace. A former prizefighter who prefers to go by the name of "Joe Palooka" and a doctor of metaphysics, Cyril, who doesn't even have two pennies to rub together, but Carmichael left them each $250.000 (including Veronica). 

However, there's a catch (isn't there always?): during the reading of the will by Eli Yarrow, friend and lawyer to the late Carmichael, they have to hear how every slice of the pie is topped with jocundly accusations (ranging from loose morals to murder) and accepting their inheritance means accepting the charges and certain scandal. But even less fortunate are Carmichael's sister and nephew, Tessie and Peter Whipple, who are mentioned but have nothing to show for it.  Oh, and individual shares can swell if someone turns down or is unable to collect their quarter of a million of dollars, which Carner fears may be an incentive for murder when a flood ensures that they're at each others mercy for the next day or two.

The flood does not pose a direct threat to the characters trapped in the house, as oppose to the raging forest fire in Ellery Queen's The Siamese Twin Mystery (1933) or the fortress under siege in Robert van Gulik's The Monkey and the Tiger (1965), but Popkin did a meritorious job in depicting its effect on the region – conveying a feeling of helplessness and furnishing the plot with a number of memorable scenes. News bulletins on the wireless are accompanied with requests for information on missing persons and local school turned into an emergency center. Classrooms are crowded with mothers feeding their babies, while in the Principle's Office a woman mourns the lost of her husband (drowned) with the physics lab turned into a make-shift county jail.

As to be expected, one of them dies under very peculiar circumstances, hanged by the throat from the antlers of a stuffed wapiti, in a submerged staircase, but this murder is just a by-product of a far more ingenious murder – which, when it's finally revealed, turns out to be a cleverly disguised variation on the impossible crime story. One of the suspects blurts out that Carner's solution is "too fantastic," but it might work if the right circumstances align and Popkin did a bang-up job in making that situation sound completely plausible. All in all, an enormous improvement over the slapdash plotting in her previous outing, Murder in the Mist (1940), which I reviewed on here nearly two years ago.

Zelda Popkin may not have been a contemporary rival of Agatha Christie and Christianna Brand, adepts of the closed-circle of suspects, but Dead Man's Gift is an interesting and well-done example of what many now consider a clichéd situation of a group of people isolated from the outside world – and it's slightly skewed approach makes it interesting for seasoned and beginning mystery readers alike. It's something pleasantly different without wandering away too far from the detective story.

Bibiography:

Death Wears a White Gardenia (1938)

Murder in the Mist (1940)

Time Off for Murder (1940)

Dead Man's Gift (1941)

No Crime for a Lady (1942)

So Much Blood (1944)

A Death of Innocence (1971)

Which Witch is Which?

Journalist and author, Zelda Popkin, is today better remembered, if she's remembered at all, for her novel The Journey Home (1945), selling close to a million copies, in which she sets forth the story of a chance meeting between a homeward soldier and a career woman against the backdrop of a catastrophic train crash.

But she also wrote a series of detective novels featuring one of the first professional female detectives, the independent-minded Mary Carner, who works for a large department store as a security detective – looking out for their merchandise and tackling shoplifters. In Murder in the Mist (1940), her second recorded case, she also demonstrates a very feminine mindset, that was definitely ahead of her time, by humiliating and verbally burning an incompetent police chief to a crisp and leaving her newly acquired spouse at the hotel, to take care of a child, while she goes on the hunt for a murderer.

A touch gal who should go over very well with a contemporary reading audience and scholars.

The Wicked Witch of Laneport

When Mary Carner and Christopher Whittaker, New York City's most credible department store detectives, take a wrong turn on their honeymoon, they end up in the picturesque New England coastal town of Laneport – a flocking place for two-bit artists and gossipy old coffin dodgers.

The newlywed couple decides to check into the local hotel, The Rockledge, for the night, but after snugly turning in, Mary is awakened by a little girl tugging at her arm – whispering complainingly that it's chilly and how she's unable to rouse her mommy. What follows is a powerful scene, in which Mary discovers the marble-white, stone-cold body of the girls' mother in the next room. A black metal spike is projecting from her bare chest.

The child is inconsolable with grief when she learns why her mother didn't respond to her calling and tugging, but after they managed to calm her down a bit they learn that she actually saw the assailant who killed her mother, however, how tenable is her statement when the only description she's able to give is that of a cloaked witch with a broom. These moments, in which reality and fantasy seem to merge for a brief moment, are the best aspects of the plot.

Crime Map of Laneport

Zelda Popkin shows plenty of imagination and has a flair for telling a fascinating story, in which she smoothly blends fantastic plot elements, such as murderous witches, cloven hoof-prints and a deserted village, with a sincere, down-to-earth effect of murder (the orphaned kid of the murdered woman) while also going through the motions of a proper detective story – lining up, some usual and unusual suspects, ranging from a sculptor and his jealous wife, an ex-murderer in hiding, a fleeing millionaires son and an elfish old codger, who, at times, gets wrapped-up too much in his daydreams.

However, the professed solution, and the events leading up to the unmasking of the murdering witch, leaves a lot to be desired for the self-proclaimed armchair detectives whose only desire is a fair shot at cracking the case before the detective does – and the fact that Mary doesn't work out the solution by logical reasoning from clues, or even a single flash of intuition, either, but by pure happenstance, as she witnesses the murderer accidentally recreating the tell-tale hoof-prints, doesn't do much to uplift the disappointing feeling.

In many ways, Murder in the Mist, reminded me of a Gladys Mitchell novel, in which she interestingly underplayed her wildly effective imagination, but with her greatest weakness, a penchant for weak, ineffective and muddled endings, in full-swing.

That's why I can only recommend this book to mystery readers who don't care about the puzzle element or fans of Gladys Mitchell, who want to contrast her work with this book.