Shoot, Duck and Cover

"Geez awfully quiet, dang, I wonder if there anymore hunters out here this mornin'"

- Elmer Fudd

In the final days of 2014, I wrote a blog-post, "The Renaissance Era of Detective Fiction," proclaiming that the dawn of a new era peeked over the horizon and the subsequent twelve months has shown an invigorated interest for the Golden Age detective novel – an interest shared by both readers and publishers.

A whole slew of obscure and long-forgotten mystery writers were unearthed in 2015: John Bude, J. Jefferson Farjeon, Annie Haynes, Ianthe Jerrold, Lenore Glen Offord, E.R. Punshon, Harriet Rutland and HarperCollins' re-launch of The Detective Club. One of the lesser-known, unfairly forgotten names in this deluge was that of an Australian mystery writer, named June Wright, who finally had one of "lost" novels published last year: Duck Season Death (c. 1955). 

June Wright was a mother of six children and combined a career as a spouse with that of a mystery novelist, which is an occupation she crammed in the two or three hours that were left to her in the evening. The results were six books, published during the tail-end of the Golden Age, which began with Murder in the Telephone Exchange (1948) and ended with Make-Up to Murder (1966). But there were two more mystery novels that were never published in Wright's lifetime: Duck Season Death and The Law Courts Mystery.

Unfortunately, The Law Courts Mystery was never published and the manuscript is now considered to be the lost, but Duck Season Death was saved from a similar fate and appeared in print for the first time 2015 – courtesy of Verse Chorus Press. 

Duck Season Death, alternatively titled The Textbook Detective Story, was rejected on the basis over several critical reports from so-called test readers, who labeled a purposely classically-styled, somewhat tongue-in-cheek detective story as a "stock-box novel of the whodunit house party variety" with "mechanics" that "follow the old lines of the country house murder." Well, it's this kind of utter nonsense that led to irrevocable lost of a number of unpublished manuscripts by the likes of Joseph Commings, Glyn Carr, C. Daly King and Hake Talbot, which can not be tolerated in this new Golden Era. I suggest we find these court jesters, whether they are dead or alive now, coat them with tar and toss them into a gibbet cage. Anyhow, on to the story at hand!

The tragic hero of Duck Season Death is Charles Carmichael, the crime-fiction reviewer for Culture and Critic, which is a small, but influential, literary quarterly owned by his uncle – the detestable and hateful Athol Sefton. Lamentably, Carmichael finds himself shackled to his uncle's company for a spot of duck shooting at the Duck and Dog Inn, but Sefton has made himself a target of the scorn of every guest at the hotel. As the readers knows from the introductory chapters, some of them had a motive to take a shot at him before they bumped into him at the place. 

So is at any surprise when a stray bullet puts an end to Sefton? Carmichael is convinced that his uncle was "deliberately and cleverly murdered," but here is where the plot begins to diverge from your dime-a-dozen country house murder mysteries with a closed-circle of suspects: nobody believes Carmichael. The authorities and locals assume Sefton came to his end as a result of a shooting accident, because "every season there is some fatality or other like this" and is often reprimanded for insisting a murder has taken place – even publicly by the corner during the inquest.

Of course, it's suggested that Carmichael has read too many detective stories. As if there’s such a thing as reading too many detective stories.

Well, as you can see, I enjoyed reading Duck Season Death, but I have to fulfill my duties as a dreary, disgusting armchair critic by pointing out that the fair play factor is a bit dodgy. The motive is foreshadowed, but not revealed until the final part of the story and this makes it very difficult to settle on a murderer. However, when it's revealed and you keep some of the clues in mind, you should be able to foresee the final twist. So technically it's a completely fair play mystery, but it took some time in getting there. 

Stylistically, I also have to note that the book differed in one aspect from other Australian mystery writers I've read, namely Arthur W. Upfield and S.H. Courtier, which strongly evoked the backcloth of their stories and made you believe the sort of crimes they wrote about were indigenes to Australia – and could have only taken place down under. I did not have that feeling with Duck Season Death, which could have just easily been set in England or America, but that's a minor and personal quibble. 

Finally, in spite of having reissued this forgotten, nearly lost detective novel, I have to castigate Verse Chorus Press for not re-titling the book as A Rejection of Murder, because it would've perfectly fitted both the back story of the book's publication and the plot.
 

However, you should not allow the probing and nitpicking from dismal critics, from past or present, to spoil the fun of this book, because I'm sure seasoned mystery readers will enjoy this unusual ripple in the traditional closed-circle of suspects story. But judge for yourself. I'll certainly be returning to Wright's work in the near future to see what she was capable off in her debut novel.

A Gaggle of Galloping Ghosts

"There is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out."

- James Randi

Only a few days ago, I reviewed The Pleasure Cruise Mystery (1933) by Robin Forsythe, which was recently summoned from its perennial slumber in the dark abyss, commonly referred to around these parts as "biblioblivion," by publisher Rupert Heath and genre-historian Curt Evans – who furnished all of the Dean Street Press editions with insightful introductions. I was sufficiently pleased with my introduction to Forsythe's work that I wanted to read another one of his mysteries as soon as possible.

I was torn between The Ginger Cat Mystery (1935) and The Spirit Murder Mystery (1936), but settled in the end on the latter because I found the synopsis to be enticing. Surprisingly, the plot turned out to contain an impossible situation or two that were overlooked by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991).

These seemingly impossible situations are presented as supernatural phenomenon and occur at Old Hall Farm, situated in the village of Yarham, where John Thurlow lives in the company of his niece, Eileen – an ardent devotee and practitioner of spiritualism.

John is naturally "skeptical and cautious," preferring a scientific approach, but has become a tentative believer after "quite a lot of persuasion and study." He would love to experience the "spirit music," which was heard by Eileen in the old house that was "impregnated with the spirit of the bygone" and "bore the indelible imprint of the activities and designs of people since dead and forgotten" – leading to an experimental séance during which the eerie sounds of organ music are heard. A sensible and natural explanation for the spectral music proved to be as elusive as the ghosts themselves.

Old Hall Farm was not equipped with a wireless or a gramophone, which were both deemed by John as a "damned annoying contraption," and the church is a mile away. So where did the ghostly bars of music emanated from?

However, there a more pressing, Earth-bound questions raised directly after the séance. John Thurlow appears to have stepped out of the window of his study and simply vanished, but a more baffling problem presents itself the following day: the remains of Thurlow and Mr. Clarry Martin were found on a piece of wasteland called "Cobbler's Corner." Thurlow had his skull bashed in and Martin had been shot, but physical evidence precluded the possibility that they had murdered each other.

A gentleman-painter and amateur detective of some repute, named Anthony "Algernon" Vereker, happened to be in the neighborhood to sketch and paint, but a double-murder is as good an excuse as any to take a break from the artistic process.

Vereker's private enquiry looks into every person who orbited the lives of Eileen and the John Thurlow, which included a twenty-six-year old widow, Mrs. Button, who was still known locally as Miss Dawn Garford and the dead men were both vying for her affection. Arthur Orton rented the next-door property from Thurlow, called Church Farm, and he showed a great interest in both Eileen and the property, which might have given a double motive. Ephraim Noy is a mysterious individual who lives alone in a new bungalow and "about as communicative as a brick wall," but may have shared a "youthful indiscretion" with Thurlow in British India – which involved an Indian dancing girl and her murdered husband. And then there is the local amateur archaeologist, Rev. William Sturgeon, who's exploring a crypt and underground vault for King John's treasure. 

On an unrelated side-note, King John's treasure was a major plot-thread in a historical mystery novel I read last year: The Song of a Dark Angel (1994) by Paul Doherty. Just so you know.

Anyway, Vereker alternates his role as an amateur detective with that of a ghost-hunter and personally experiences some of the ghostly events at Old Hall Farm, but the most interesting occurrence is the poltergeist activity in the late Thurlow's study: Eileen "heard the sound of footsteps" in the study and discovered upon inspection that "chairs, ornaments, clocks and the little table had all been moved," but all the doors and windows were securely locked and fastened!

Unfortunately, the explanation for all of these apparently supernatural and impossible situations was even in the mid-1930s very dated and "rather moth-eaten," which makes it advisable to not read The Spirit Murder Mystery as an impossible crime novel. You might end up disappointed if you do. However, in spite of that, Forsythe wrings an unusual and still fresh explanation from this extremely dated and moth-eaten plot device, which showed the same streaks of originality that was so prevalent in The Pleasure Cruise Mystery. The explanation for the gunshot wound was perhaps one coincidence too much and more consideration (and time) could've been given to the circumstances in which the bodies were found (i.e. cause of death), but I found them minor drawbacks in what was a wholly enjoyable detective story.

So, in the end, I think I preferred The Pleasure Cruise Mystery to The Spirit Murder Mystery, but, regardless of some flaws in the latter, I begin to become very fond of Forsythe. I don't think I'll allow his other books to linger much longer on my TBR-pile. There are only three of them left and then I still have three non-series to look forward to, which I'm sure will be reprinted sooner or later by the Dean Street Press.

Anthony "Algernon" Vereker series:

Missing or Murdered (1929)

The Polo Ground Mystery (1932)

The Pleasure Cruise Mystery (1933)

The Ginger Cat Mystery (1935)

The Spirit Murder Mystery (1936)

The standalone series:

The Hounds of Justice (1930)

The Poison Duel (1934)

Murder on Paradise Island (1937)

The Astronomical Body

"Impossible is a hell of a strong word, Doctor."

- Elijah Baley (Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel, 1954)

John Russell Fearn was an incredible prolific British (pulp) author who dabbled in an array of genres, which encompassed science-fiction, westerns and detective stories, under a multitude of pennames – including "John Slate," "Thornton Ayre" and "Hugo Blayn." A large number of Fearn's work, under as many pseudonyms, were catalogued by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991). So it was only a matter of time before I got around to sampling some of his work.

In the early 1950s, Fearn wrote a brace of science-fiction mysteries, as by "Volsted Gridban," which are both listed as impossible crime novels. The Master Must Die (1953) and The Lonely Astronomer (1954) record the investigations of a scientific detective from the later part of the 22nd century. For some inexplicable reasons, I decided to go with the second and last novel in this short-lived series.

The Lonely Astronomer is set at the Metropolitan Observatory in London, England, which is the pride of British engineers from the year 2190: the site occupied by the observatory "was over five square miles in area" and in the center of the "park-like space" there's a base of a mighty, two-mile high column – "upon the top of which the Observatory was poised." It's a marvel of futuristic design, but the person presiding over this astronomical "crow's nest" is the detestable Dr. Henry Brunner.

Dr. Brunner is as talented as an astronomer as he's at making enemies and supplied everyone around him with ample ammunition to justify their dislike for him.

He "courted" his twenty-five-year old spectrographic assistant, Monica Adley, with all the charm of a medieval robber baron, which did not go over well with her love-interest, David Calhoun, who's an assistant astronomer. There's an actual alien working for the Observatory, Sasmo of Procyon, who arrived on Earth after an "awful voyage across the endless endlessness of space" that lasted twenty-seven generations, but Brunner disrespectfully scoffed at the knowledge and skill being brought to the table by this being from the stars. Finally, there's the janitor and general factotum of the place, simply known as Joe, who owns a peculiar kind of pet: Loony, the Martian gossamer-spider.

The rainbow-hued spiders were created by settler scientists "in a specially cultivated forest environment under colossal pressurized domes" on the Martian surface. They're large, extremely intelligent creatures that are "as frail as a puffball" and "completely non-poisonous," who spend most of their time spinning intricately woven webs that "glitter and flowed like phantasmal rainbows," but Brunner had ordered its destruction – because it roamed around.

So it hardly comes as a shock when Joe finds Brunner inside the Observatory with an ugly gash across his forehead and strangulation marks on his throat.

The first Adam Quirke SF-mystery

The police have a special interest in Calhoun and Sasmo as potential suspects, but the problem is that nobody appears to have had an opportunity to commit the murder and "got away without being seen by the janitor." Joe has been ruled out as a suspect "by his age and general feebleness compared to the strength of Brunner."

Enter Adam Quirke: a heavyset, six-feet-nine giant of a man with a round face and a white mane, but this physically overawing man is prone to constant fits of violent and prolonged laughter, which became really annoying after only a short period. Just as annoying as referring to his secretary as "light of my life," which only served to pad out this already very short novel. Quirke is easily one of the most annoying detectives I've ever come across.

Thankfully, those quirks began to subside as soon as Quirke decided to act as a proper detective and the double-pronged solution he proffered to the death of Dr. Brunner was vivid and original – even though it was deeply engrained in the science-fiction genre.

I figured out the direct cause of the injuries, but the indirect cause was something different altogether. It's what made me close the book without the feeling of having wasted my time, which is a fear I had several times while reading the book, because The Lonely Astronomer has its fair share of flaws: one aspect of the solution, concerning the victim, was not properly hinted at, spiders are referred to as insects and than there is Quirke's annoying mannerisms.

It's interesting to note that our time is more advanced in some aspects than Fearn's imagination of the far-flung future of 2191: they have colonized Mars and dabbled in genetic manipulation, but the only information that can be drawn from blood is to which group it belongs and a device similar to our CAT-scan has only recently been invented – which is called (no joke) "The Penetrator." Somehow, that did not throw Quirke in a fit of laughter.

So, The Lonely Astronomer is not a classic of its kind, but it’s an interesting specimen and another example showing The Caves of Steel (1954) by Isaac Asimov was not the first of its kind. Something I discovered when I read Manly Wade Wellman's Devil's Planet (1942). By the way, I was inspired to bump this up my to-be-read list by a review of The Naked Sun (1957) on Ho-Ling's blog. You might find it a reason to read it, if you haven't done so already.

Finally, allow me to draw your attention to my review of Robin Forsythe's The Pleasure Cruise Mystery (1933), which I posted yesterday. I might return to Forsythe for my next review, because I really enjoyed my introduction to his work. So, once again, stay glued to that screen!

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

"I'm here on Mars for a specific purpose... there's the job of bringing you to justice."

- Dillon Stover (Manly Wade Wellman's Devil's Planet, 1942) 

"Robin Forsythe" was born Robert Forsythe in 1879 in Sialkot, British India (present-day Pakistan), as the eldest son of a distinguished cavalryman and seemed to be destined for an uneventful, but respectable, existence – while a nurturing his childhood dream of living by his pen as a fiction writer. A normally disastrous, life ruining encounter with the long-arm of the law inadvertently placed Forsythe in a position that turned that dream into reality.

In 1927, Scotland Yard conducted an undercover operation at Somerset House and carried out "intensive police laboratory examination of hundreds of suspect documents," which resulted in the arrest of Forsythe and several co-conspirators. Over a year-and-a-half period, they earned 50,000 pounds from the illicit sales of high value judicature stamps. Stamps that were removed from documents that had their cancellation marks obliterated with acid. 

It was a clever scheme that at the time evoked comparisons with the tales of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and our very own genre historian, Curt Evans, likened "the fraudulent enterprise" to "something out of the imaginative crime fiction" of the "post Golden Age lawyer-turned-author Michael Gilbert," but the lucrative venture ended with a fifteen-month prison sentence – during which Forsythe began to make serious work of his unfulfilled dream of being a writer. Forsythe's release from prison coincided with the publication of his first mystery novel: Missing or Murdered (1929). 

Between 1929 and 1937, Forsythe penned and published eight mystery novels: five of were part of the Algernon Vereker series and the remaining three were standalone novels. The books were well received upon publication and drew favorable comments from a number of Golden Age luminaries, but slowly drifted into obscurity after their author passed away in 1937, which is a mistake that's now being rectified by the indispensable Dean Street Press and Curt Evans – who're doing a stellar job at filling the void that the Rue Morgue Press left behind!

I initially wanted to read The Spirit Murder Mystery (1936), but that particular title was not yet available for purchase. So I settled for my second choice, The Pleasure Cruise Mystery (1933), because ocean-bound detective stories have the tendency to be pretty good. I was not wrong in this instance. 

The Pleasure Cruise Mystery begins with Manuel Ricardo, a high-spirited member of "the noble army of artists in prose fiction," convincing his friend, Anthony "Algernon" Vereker, to accompany him on a pleasure cruise aboard the Green Star Company’s luxury liner "Mars." Vereker is a gentleman-artist with a growing reputation as an amateur detective, but critics slated his "last atrocity" and suffered some "bad luck in the Armadale murder," which offers up a picture of an educated, but fallible, character. A picture that also begs to be compared with E.C. Bentley's Philip Trent and Anthony Berkeley's Roger Sheringham. 

Ricardo is convinced that immersion "in the joyous inanities of a charming social life," during a pleasure cruise, is the easiest and quickest way for Vereker to bounce back from his recent spade of bad performances, but the very epithet of pleasure makes him recoil and prefers the company of a good book and a cigar. Vereker ends up retreating to his cabin in the company of a copy of Professor Dorsey's Why We Behave Like Human Beings (1925) when voices begin to emanate from the next-door cabin, which utter such suspicious things as "you'll have to do the job as soon as possible" and "consider the awful risks" – suggesting that something unlawful might be afoot. A suggestion that seems to be confirmed when Ricardo stumbles over the body of Mrs. Mesado on D deck. 

Mrs. Mesado is the wife of an Argentinean meatpacking millionaire, Guillermo Mesado, but they had "a bit of a rumpus some weeks ago" and she "decided to console herself with a cruise." She brought along her sister, Constance, and her brother-in-law, Richard Colvin, who knew she was suffering from heart disease and knew "she might have a fatal seizure at any moment." There are, however, suspicious elements concerning the sudden death of Mrs. Mesado: the hands beneath "a pair of chamois leather gloves" were cut and bruised. A necklace, described as "a rope of alternate cinnamon and white diamonds," went missing and one with flashing blue and white stones turned up in an unexpected place. 

I'm afraid I can't reveal too much about the plot, because the story has a sparsely populated dramatis personae, which gave the book some restrictions, but Forsythe hammered a scintillating and original detective story from those limitations. It's a fresh, original and audacious treatment of a classic plot-device that offered a satisfying explanation for the cut and bruised hands of the victim, the cause of death and the exact time when life went extinct. 

However, the most admirable part of the plot is probably the nature of the crime that makes it truly comparable to Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile (1937): namely a scheme that’s perfect in theory, but fell apart when put into practice by the Merrivalean "blinkin' awful cussedness of things in general" – which is something I always appreciate. In my opinion, it's the best approach to make even most labyrinthine plots believable, because the complexities arise from a perfectly conceived plan going awry. 

I only have one point of criticism, namely the time Forsythe took in unveiling that explanation, which began to reek of padding after a while. Once he lifted a tip of the veil, revealing the true nature of the crime, he should have yanked off the whole sheet, but he continued to try to baffle his audience to the last possible moment. It's something to be appreciated, sure, but also cheapened the overall effect of the revelation. 

Anyhow, I think Forsythe made an excellent decision in exchanging real-life crime for fictional ones and I'll be sure to return to his work before long. I've read positive reactions about The Polo Ground Mystery (1932) and The Ginger Cat Mystery (1935) sounds enticing. So expect more Forsythe and Vereker in the near future, but for my next read I'll be dipping into a SF-mystery. Stay glued to that screen!

Far From Impossible

"You're always hearin' that things were better in the good ol' days... I'll tell you one thing that was better—the mysteries. The real honest-to-goodness mysteries that happened to ordinary folks like you an' me. I've read lots of mystery stories in my time, but there's never been anything to compare with some of the things I experienced personally."

- Dr. Sam Hawthorne (Edward D. Hoch's "The Problem of the Covered Bridge," from Diagnosis Impossible: The Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, 1996)

Edward D. Hoch was a giant in the field of short form mysteries, having written roughly nine hundred detective stories since his literary career began in 1955, which were published in such famous periodicals as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine – spawning a sundry cast of series-characters in the process. I know that I'm perhaps slightly biased, but my favorite of Hoch's creations is unquestionably Dr. Sam Hawthorne.

Dr. Sam Hawthorne was a physician in the fictitious New England town of Northmont, but stories are his reminiscences, as an older man, on a period that stretched across three decades. The first story in the series, "The Problem of the Covered Bridge," was published in 1974 and took place in March of 1922, while the final one, "The Problem of the Secret Patient," appeared in 2008 and was set in October, 1944. It's an unusual series in that the stories and characters are not frozen in time, which tends to happen with long-running series.

Time passes at a normal rate in the small town and the people who live there, such as the (semi-) regular characters, are not unaffected by the tick-tock of the clock, but there's one element that's constant and insists on returning with the same regularity as the seasons – namely the locked room murders and other seemingly impossible problems!

Northmont has an average homicide rate that dwarfs Jessica Fletcher's Cabot Cove, but crimes in the former insist on defying the laws of reality: a horse-and-buggy inexplicably vanishes from a covered bridge, a man is strangled by the branches of a haunted tree, a murder is committed in a locked, octagon-shaped room and a solo-pilot is stabbed in mid-air inside a locked cockpit. These are merely a handful of examples from the first two collections of excellent stories, Diagnoses Impossible: The Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (1996) and More Things Impossible: The Second Casebook of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2006), but this review will concern itself with the third volume of stories, which is titled Nothing is Impossible: Further Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2014).

However, before I take a look at the individual stories, I have to make a note here and say that the collection, as a whole, was not as strong as its predecessors. Somehow, the stories lacked that magical touch or failed to live up to their own premise, which really surprised me. Hoch was known for consistency in quality, but that was not on display in this collection. Don't get me wrong: there were a couple of good stories, but none of them as original ("The Problem of the Pink Post Office") or classical ("The Problem of the Octagon Room") as some of the tales gathered in the previous volumes – which really is a pity. Now that I have dampened your spirits and enthusiasm... lets take a look at the stories!

"The Problem of the Graveyard Picnic" was published in the pages of EQMM in June 1984 and takes place in the Spring of 1932. Dr. Sam Hawthorne is moving from his small office in the center of town to a remodeled wing of Pilgrim Memorial Hospital, which is being downsized after the eighty-bed facility had "proven far too large for the town's need." In between moving and seeing patients, Hawthorne pops outside to attend the funeral of a prominent citizen in the cemetery in front of the hospital and comes across a picnicking couple, but the woman gets up and runs away when she sees the doctor – witnesses how an invisible force pushes her over a stone-railing of a swollen creek. A nice, fun little story, but I figured how it was done while the crime was in progress.

The first collection of Dr. Hawthorne stories

"The Problem of the Crying Room" appeared in November 1984 issue of EQMM and the story happens in June of 1932. Northmont is in the midst of the centennial celebration and the high point of the festivities is the opening of the town's very first talking-picture palace. The Northmont Cinema is equipped with a glassed-in, soundproof room for families with babies or small children, called a "Crying Room," but the small room attracts the attention of Sheriff Lens and Dr. Hawthorne when the projectionist commits suicide – leaving a note behind confessing to the locked room murder of Mayor Trenton on opening night. However, the opening night is not until the following night!

Mayor Trenton insists on watching part of the movie from the soundproof room, because the would-be assassin is dead, but a single gunshot goes off and wounds the Mayor. Dr. Hawthorne was with him inside the room and Sheriff Lens was guarding the only door, but all of those precautions failed to stop an aspiring assassin from taking a shot at the prospective victim. I loved the premise and the ideas Hoch was working with, but the solution seemed to lack that magical touch of ingenuity and I'm afraid there might be some medical objections to the method – such as the tendency of blood to coagulate. I still tend to like this story though.

"The Problem of the Fatal Fireworks" was first published a May 1985 issue of EQMM and takes place on the 4th of July of the same year as the previous story. It's also the first really disappointing story from this collection. The elements that were carried over from the previous story were nice and the whodunit-aspect was decent, but the question regarding how "half a stick of dynamite" was inserted into a sealed package of harmless firecrackers was hardly worth the label of an impossible crime.

"The Problem of the Unfinished Painting" was published in EQMM in February 1986 and takes place in the Fall of 1932. A very rewarding story, because it showed a negative side effect to playing amateur detective. Dr. Hawthorne is asked by Sheriff Lens to assist in the locked room murder of Tess Wainwright. She was found slumped in a chair at her easel, strangled to death with a long paint-spattered cloth, but all of the windows were latched from the inside and the cleaning lady was in sight of the only door to the studio – which she claimed was closed the entire time she was there. The fun part of the plot is that the murderer was attempting to hammer out a ironclad alibi, but unforeseen circumstances transformed into a "closed-room situation" and that ruined everything. However, while he was out playing detective something happened at the hospital that makes Dr. Hawthorne decide to devote his full attention to his patients.

"The Problem of the Sealed Bottle" was published in EQMM in May 1986 and the story takes place on December 5, 1933, which was the period when Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected President of the United States and delivered on his promise to repeal Prohibition. Slowly, the US is being stocked, legally, with booze and Northmont is no exception, but the first bottle of spirits to be (legally) unsealed contained a potassium cyanide. I thought the background of the story, death of an era, was more interesting than the plot itself.

"The Problem of the Invisible Acrobat" first appeared in the December 1986 issue of EQMM and takes place before the events from the previous story, during the summer of 1933, when the circus came to Northmont. The story has one of the better impossible problems collected in this volume of stories. Dr. Hawthorne takes Sheriff Lens' nephew, Teddy, to the circus where the death-defying stunts of the five Lampizi Brothers are part of the main attraction, but one of the them vanishes in mid-air and only leaves behind an empty trapeze – "swinging back and forth" as if "supporting the weight of an invisible acrobat." The explanation for the vanished trapeze-artist is clever without being incomprehensible, a semi-sentient being should figure out the main gist of the trick, but the vanishing is tied-in with a second plot-thread involving the body of clown covered in stab wounds. I expected more of these type of stories from Hoch in this collection.

The second collection Dr. Hawthorne stories

"The Problem of the Curing Barn" originally appeared in EQMM in September 1987 and takes place in September 1934. A wealthy business tycoon, Jasper Jennings, who came to Northmont during the depths of the Depression to grow tobacco, but he soon was murdered after the first harvest – a straight-razor slashed across his throat in a dark barn where the plants are being air-cured. Sheriff Lens is glad that it's "not one of those locked-room murders," because barn has "more holes than a rusty sieve," but there was no opportunity to get rid of the murder weapon. I've seen the explanation for the vanishing murder weapon before in stories, but they post-date this one and wonder if the trick originated in this tale.

"The Problem of the Snowbound Cabin" was published in the December 1987 issue of EQMM and takes place in January 1935, which gave the town of Northmont a much needed break from death and crime. Dr. Hawthorne takes his nurse, April, for a weeklong winter holiday in Maine, but not long after his arrival a retired stockbroker is found murdered in his log cabin. Of course, the surrounding area is covered in a blanket of snow marked only with the paw prints of a roaming bobcat, but not of a human predator, which begs the question how the murderer managed to enter and leave the cabin without leaving footprints in the snow. I appreciated the fact that Hoch tried to be original here, but the explanation seems really impractical. It should also be noted that Dr. Hawthorne loses his nurse in this story to marriage here and the next two stories revolve around her replacements.

"The Problem of the Thunder Room" appeared in April 1988 in EQMM and takes place in March of 1935 and May Russo has replaced April (yes, the joke about their names is played up), but she is deadly afraid of thunderstorms and blacks-out when they happen. May has such an attack when a freak storm surprises the town and when consciousness returns tells Hawthorne she had a dream about "a hammer and people being killed," but the problem arises when a message reaches the doctor that someone was bludgeoned to death during the thunderstorm and a witness swear it was May – could she had been in two places at the same time? Unfortunately, the explanation borders on cheating and is a less successful treatment of the whodunit-aspect from "The Problem of the Invisible Acrobat."

"The Problem of the Black Roadster" was published in the November 1988 issue of EQMM and takes place in April of 1935. The story introduces April's final replacement, Mary Best, who came to town during a deadly bank robbery. I did not care for this story, I'm afraid.

"The Problem of the Two Birthmarks" appeared in the May 1989 issue of EQMM and is set in May of 1935, in which the attempted smothering of a food poisoning victim in Pilgrim Memorial Hospital is tied to the destruction of a ventriloquist’s dummy of a restaurant entertainer and a murder by strangulation in a locked and unused operating room – to which the only key was in possession of a doctor with a cast-iron alibi. However, the locked room turns out to not be a locked room at and is somewhat of a cheat. Hoch seems to have been plain out of ideas during this period, which is especially noticeable in the next story.

"The Problem of the Dying Patient" was published in December 1989 in EQMM and takes place in June of 1935. Dr. Hawthorne gives an elderly patient her medication and she washes the pill away with a swig of clean water, but immediately afterwards dies of what is later determined to be cyanide poisoning – which may cost Hawthorne his license to practice medicine and is even suspected of a mercy killing. What I found so immensely disappointing was how the poisoning was presented, as a genuine and baffling impossibility, but the explanation revealed she had something in her mouth prior to swallowing away her medication. It was explained that the item in her mouth was slowly dissolving during her medical examination and, "when it dissolved enough," the cyanide was released and killed her. However, there were no remnants of this item found in her mouth or stomach during the post-mortem? The only thing that makes the story worth a read is the situation Hawthorne finds himself in, but not for the plot, which is atrocious.

"The Problem of the Protected Farmhouse" originally appeared in the May 1990 issue of EQMM and takes place in the final quarter of 1935. A local and paranoid Nazi-sympathizer, Rudolph Frankfurt, fortified his farmhouse to protect himself from anti-Nazi elements – effectively living "behind an electrified fence and locked doors" that's "guarded by a dog." However, an axe-wielding murderer managed to bypass those security measures, but the explanation is simply practical and workman-like instead of original and inspired.

"The Problem of the Haunted Tepee" was published in the December 1990 issue of EQMM and takes place across two centuries, which stretches from the Old West of the late 1800s to New England of the mid-1930s. Because this is a crossover story! Ben Snow had "been a cowboy during the 1880s and '90s" and a selection of his adventures were gathered in a volume entitled The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Tales (1997), but there was one unexplained episode from his career that has always haunted him. Snow has heard of Hawthorne's "reputation for solving impossible crimes" and decided to tell him the story of a haunted tepee that either killed its occupants or made them sick. It's a nifty variation on the "Room That Kills" theme with lots of historical color that brought a two completely separate series-characters, which is something I love as much as a good locked room mysteries. There are simply not enough crossovers in our genre!

"The Problem of the Blue Bicycle” appeared in the April 1991 issue of EQMM and took place in September 1936, which centers on a girl who went missing as if something from the sky had plucked her from the bicycle. It's an OK story, but nothing special or particular interesting.

Well, that was the final entry in this collection, but I seem to have been slightly more positive when judging the stories on an individual basis. However, the collection as a whole remains the weakest of the three, which is a real shame. I also wish I could've begun this year on a somewhat more positive note, but I happen to pick some less than perfect work. Oh well, better luck with the next one!

Now, if you'll excuse me for a minute, I have to go into hiding, because I'm sure a certain Hoch-fanboy will appear any moment now to point and shriek at me like Donald Sutherland from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Die Like Thunder

"Detectives never guess... they draw exact deductions from given premises."

- Bobby Owen (E.R. Punshon's Ten Star Clues, 1941) 

Writing as "John Bude," an English theatrical producer and director by the name of Ernest C. Elmore penned and published thirty detective novels over the span of nearly twenty-five years – all of which are reputedly to be very rare and highly collectible.

Fortunately, the British Library has reissued a handful of books from Bude's impressive body of work: The Cornish Coast Murder (1935), The Lake District Murder (1935) and The Sussex Down Murder (1936). Death on the Riviera (1952) is scheduled for release in March of this year.

These brand new editions are introduced by Martin Edwards, an accomplished crime writer and genre historian, who observes that Bude's debut novel contains several clues that help to explain his growing popularity more than half a century after his death – which has partially to do with a "writing style" that is "relaxed and rather more polished than one would expect from a first-time novelist." I also believe Bude's poorly masked love for the detective story played a part in being embraced by a contemporary and appreciative reading audience, which is especially noticeable in the opening chapter of The Cornish Coast Murder.

Reverend Dodd, Vicar of St. Michael's-on-the-Cliff, Boscawen, has a tradition Monday evening ceremony with Doctor Pendrill. They smoke and have metaphysical arguments, but the true purpose of their weekly tradition is to indulge in their vicarious, but perfectly commonly, "lust for crime stories." Every week, they borrow and share pieces of crime fiction from the local library and Reverend Dodd compiled an interesting selection for their latest meeting: Edgar Wallace, "the new J.S. Fletcher," J.J. Farjeon, Dorothy L. Sayers and Freeman Wills Crofts – some of them I have yet to read myself. I guess that's why I've never been able to shake off the feeling that I have only scratched the surface of the genre.

Anyway, Reverend Dodd and Dr. Pendrill are provided with an opportunity to put all that accumulated knowledge from fiction into practice when a phone-call comes in for the doctor.

The local squire of the small, isolated village of some four-hundred souls, Julius Tregarthan, was found dead in his study: someone had fired several shots under the cover of a raging thunderstorm and one of the bullets "went clean through the brain." It's a strain on the brain of the local police force, Constable Grouch and Inspector Bigswell, because viable suspects, motives and evidence are thinly spread around.  

Firstly, there's a niece, Ruth, who was nurturing an intimate friendship with a local writer and World War I veteran, Ronald Hardy, but her uncle disapproved of the friendship. An admittedly weak motive, but one that has to be taken seriously by the police after both Hardy and his service revolver disappeared – coupled with the obvious prevaricate behavior of Ruth. Secondly, a local black sheep and village bad man, Ned Salter, who had been imprisoned by Tregarthan and evicted from his cottage was seen arguing with the victim on the day of the shooting and there's gambling servant who had a monetary motive.

However, it's the Reverend Dodd who figured out answers to several of the most nagging questions blocking the path to the entire solution, which include the "strange lack of footprints on the cliff-path" and a logical explanation for "the widely scattered shots" that "starred the glass" of the study-windows.

I can only praise this part of the story for being both original and logical, but the overall quality of the story was marred by a combination of two flaws: the murderer is a minor character that hovered in the background and the motivation of this person was never properly hinted at. That left me with very mixed feelings. On the one hand, I enjoyed the smooth writing, the characters and some of the ideas, which was somewhat reminiscent of E.R. Punshon, but the ending felt like an absolute cheat. I wish I could end this review on a far more positive note than this, but the ending was what it was.

So if you, like me, attach some importance to the Golden Age rules of fair play, you'll probably end up a little bit disappointed that The Cornish Coast Murder did not sustain itself as a proper, fair play Golden Age mystery right up till the ending. However, I agree with Edwards that, as a debut novel, it's an extremely well written and characterized novel. There have been A-list contemporaries of Bude who fared far worst in their first outing. So I'm still tempted to explore his later work as well.

Well, that's the first review for 2016 and I'll be dipping in some impossible crime material for the second one, which should come as a complete and utter surprise to you. Anyhow, I wish each and every one of you all the best for this year!