A Swarm of Villainy

"Rouse yourself, my friend, rouse yourself. And look – look where I am pointing. There on the bank, close by that tree root. See you, the wasps returning home, placid at the end of the day? In a little hour, there will be destruction, and they know it not."

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's "Wasps' Nest," from Poirot's Early Cases, 1974)

One of my first blog-posts was a review of a once rare and coveted locked room mystery, Death of Jezebel (1948), which came from the hands of a criminally underrated mystery novelist who deserves a place among the "Crime Queen" – namely the very talented Christianna Brand.

Brand was a late arrival on the scene, debuting with Death in High Heels (1941) during the Second World War, but I consider her to be on equal footing with Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr. She had a similar fondness for seemingly impossible situations as the latter and was as apt with the closed-circle of suspects as the former, e.g. Green for Danger (1944) and London Particular (1952).

However, in spite of my opinion of Brand, I seem to have grossly neglected her after that initial review, but began to crave good writing, interesting characterization and solid plotting after struggling through Mavis Doriel Hay's mind-numbingly boring The Santa Klaus Murder (1936) – which led me back to Brand. So I decided to treat myself to one of her collections of short stories: What Dread Hand? (1968). Because a single, novel-length detective story simply wasn't enough to wash away the bad taste the previous one had left behind. 

The first story from the collection is "The Hornets' Nest," perhaps better known under its original title, "Twist for Twist," which is a promise that’s delivered on in spades and shows Brand was in the same league as Christie!

It's an ingeniously complex story centering on the poisoning of Cyrus Caxton: a "horrid old man" who "had been horrid to his first wife" and "was quite evidently going to be horrid to his second" – who had been the late Mrs. Caxton's nurse. There were a number of men in her life willing to protect her, but were they willing enough to fool around with a tin of cyanide? Inspector Cockrill is at hand to straighten out the tangled, twisted mess and even constructs a false solution reminiscent of The Murder on the Orient Express (1934). One of the best stories from the collection!

"Aren't Our Police Wonderful?" is what's known in the genre as a "Hoist-On-Their-Own-Petard," in which a brother tries secure his inheritance by bumping off his brother and was inspired by "a case that happened a hundred years ago or more." However, as Mark Twain observed: history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes and that becomes the murderers undoing. A quick, fun story.

The third story from this collection, "The Merry-Go-Round," has something to offer to both readers of classical detective stories and modern crime stories: a recently widowed woman is being blackmailed with a collection of lurid photographs found in a private drawer at the office of her late husband. A revolver stashed away in his bedside drawer provides relief for his widow. However, the blackmail angle does not stop there, but simply continues from a different angle. I loved the wonderfully sardonic ending and wished more modern crime fiction were in this mold.

The titular "Blood Brothers" from the fourth story are named David and Jonathan, who are actually twins from a small village, but even the locals are unable to tell them apart, which is cleverly exploited when they in a hit-and-run that killed a child – setting the stage for a premeditated murder. Inspector Cockrill tries to piece everything together, but whether or not he was successful is debatable. A splendid demonstration how twins can be properly used in a fair-play detective story. Even when said story is structured as an inverted mystery.

"Dear Mr. Editor..." begins with a short letter from Christianna Brand to her editor, in which she apologizes for having been unable to provide him with a freshly written story for his anthology. However, Brand did include a copy of a document written by "a poor creature," who "was quite mad," and was addressed to her editor. It's a thriller-ish suspense story with a twist, but one most readers will probably spot well before the ending.

"The Rose" is a short-short story and a postscript reveals it as an early endeavor of the author, which kind of shows. A loving husband is planning to dispose of his wife by hoisting and shoving her from the balcony, but these seemingly perfect schemes seldom pan out as planned. You’ll probably guess it as well.

The following story, "Akin to Love," is an odd inclusion, because it combines the romance story with the ghost yarn, in which a young woman spends the night in a room haunted by the ghost of a young man – who had "joined one of the Hell Fire Clubs" and "sold his soul to the devil." The man had sinned against "womankind" and can only be set free if a woman forgave and loved him. Sort of like Beauty and The Beast, but not really my kind of stuff.

I wanted to enjoy "The Death of Don Juan," but ended up not caring for it: Vicomte Coqauvin, "Don Juan," is going to settle down and breaks up a pendant, known as the "Collar of Tears," to give all of his mistresses a diamond drop as a memento. The entire undertaking had "been a nightmare of threatened suicides," but the final woman on his list was angry enough to empty a pistol on him. A Duchess sets out to reassemble the pendant and by the end it's revealed she had an unexpected role in the murder. It's not a bad story and some will like it, but I'm not one of them.

The quality picks up again with "Double Cross," which is a story fans of classic Ellery Queen will appreciate: Sir Thomas Cross had been "an unaccommodating relative to his heirs" by living too long, spending too much money and extracting revenge for his murder with an "equally unaccommodating will" – condemning his three cousins and potential murderers to live together in the "gloomy glories of Halberd Hall." A failure to comply excluded the absentee from further interest in the estate and basically amounted to a Tontine scheme, which is at the heart of several short EQ stories and radio plays. The solution is a good play on the least-likely-suspect and most-likely-suspect gambit. I liked it.

"The Sins of the Father" is a pure horror story and is about sin-eaters, who "flourished in Wales" up "to the end of the seventeenth century," but might have been around as recent as a hundred years ago. They eat the sins of men and send the dead with a clean slate into the afterworld, but are treated abominably for taking "sins upon them" – being cast out for being "doomed for all eternity" and "heavy with the load of other men's transgressions." In this story a young sin-eater is called upon to relief a dead man of his sins and "eat from the breast of a corpse." It's not a mystery, but very intriguing nonetheless.

"After the Event" is one of the longer stories from the collection, in which the "Grand Old Man of Detection" gives an expose of the Othello case. A case in which he collared the murderer by building up "a water-tight case against him" and "triumphantly brought to trial," but the jury failed to convict. However, Inspector Cockrill is present as well and found himself in "the position of the small boy at a party who knows how the conjurer does his tricks," which the observant and seasoned armchair detective can largely follow. And that's the most attractive part of this elaborate and theatrical story: rival detectives butting heads.

Note: I'm refraining from giving any details about the Othello case, because it really is an elaborate story. Read if for yourself.

"Death of a Ghost" is a story-within-story: a family secret is being divulged about a cousin who took deadly tumble down a flight of stairs and the ghost of a "Wicked Earl" from the eighteenth-century, which are closely tied-together. I kind of liked the story except for the feeling more could've been done with it.

"The Kite" is another minor, stand-alone story, but one I did not care about or remember anything about it. Skippable at best.

"Hic Jacet..." is another inverted mystery playing on the "Hoist-On-Their-Own-Petard," in which Mr. Fletcher-Store is plotting the murder of his wife by drowning, but his plan horrendously backfired and the R.A.F. jacket he purchased in the pub is part to blame. I really enjoy these type of stories, but I rare come across them and only found a small selection of them in two collection of short stories: Murderous Schemes: An Anthology of Classic Detective Stories (1998), which has a selection of such stories containing the brilliant "The Possibility of Evil" by Shirley Jackson, and Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (2008), which has the amusing "You Have a Friend at Fengrove National."

Finally, there's "Murder Game," which is better known among locked room enthusiasts as "The Gemminy Cricket Case," and has an impossible crime plot as complicated as it's classical.

It's another one of those story-within-a-story structured story, in which Giles Carberry tells "the old man" about the Gemminy case. Thomas Gemminy is a London-based solicitor "dealing largely in criminal cases," but was "kind and compassionate" with a trust fund for those "who had passed through his hand" and "might turn for help in time of need." His home had also been open to the pitiful children who usually had no idea what their parents had been up to. So not really your typical story-book victim, but Gemminy is brutally murdered inside his office: tied to a chair with a cord and handkerchief knotted tightly around his neck, but the finishing blow came from knife-thrust between the shoulder blades – and the wound was still bleeding when the door was broken down. A door that was locked and bolted from the inside. On top of that, the office was set on fire and the victim was heard screaming something "vanishing into thin air" and "the long arms."

It's an extremely knotty, twisted affair and the solution is clever, but, it has to be said, a composite of some time-honored tricks. However, Brand found a way to twist it in a new direction and came up with a logical and clever answer why the second victim suffered a similar fate as the bleeding heart lawyer. But the best part is the final revelation, which makes this a very, very dark story and explained where the murderer found the guts for such to pull off such a locked room trick.

Well, that were the tales murder and horror collected in What Dread Hand? and, hopefully, I have done them some measure justice, because I enjoyed the vast majority of them and were exactly what I needed after the previous disappointment.

So, if you've never read Christianna Brand before, I have only thing to say to you: stop being a filthy heretic and find a copy of Green for Danger!

No Mourning in the Family

"There we were, all gathered together for a Christmas party, and plunged suddenly into the gloom and menace of official enquiry."

- Malcolm Warren (C.H.B. Kitchin's Crime at Christmas, 1934)

In my previous blog-post, I hinted that a review of a Christmas-themed country house mystery was in the pipeline, but before taking the plunge I want to direct your attention to a compilation post from several years ago – titled The Naughty List: A Modest Selection of Lesser-Known Holiday Mysteries.

As the title says, it's a very modest selection of Christmas mysteries offering a handful of alternatives to Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938) and Ngaio Marsh's Tied Up in Tinsel (1972).

It's a list that includes Pierre Véry's L'Assassinat du père Noël (The Murder of Father Christmas, 1934) and Gladys Mitchell's Dead Men's Morris (1936), but currently misses the recently reviewed C.H.B. Kitchin's Crime at Christmas (1934) and Georgette Heyer's Envious Casca (1941). I'll probably amend the list at a later date, but one title that'll certainly be absent from it is The Santa Klaus Murder (1936) by Mavis Doriel Hay, which I found to be mind-numbingly boring.

I became so bogged down in the book that I needed a breather and read the stories by Max Afford reviewed in the previous blog-post. So don't expect too much from this review.

Mavis Doriel Hay was a British novelist and an expert in rural handicraft, on which she wrote several books, but she also has three Golden Age mysteries to her name: Murder Underground (1935), Death on the Cherwell (1935) and The Santa Klaus Murder. Last year, award-winning crime-writer Martin Edwards noted on his blog how "Hay’s detective fiction seems to be making more of an impact now than it did on its first appearance in the 1930s" and that's "thanks to the British Library's very welcome decision to reprint her three long-neglected novels," which makes me wish I could be more positive about my first encounter with Hay. But it turned out to be closer to Curt Evans' experience with Murder Underground than to the more positive encounter John Norris had with The Santa Klaus Murder.

The Santa Klaus Murder has all the necessary ingredients for a traditional country house mystery, which includes a wealthy patriarch, a gathering of dependent family members and a will that might get some new beneficiaries – giving the large cast of children and in-laws ample motive for murder.

In his younger days, Sir Osmond Melbury scandalized his old-world family by going into business and "made a nice little fortune out of biscuits," which he carefully used to secure a desired baronetcy and fitted the "old house with electric light and sumptuous bathrooms." However, Sir Osmond wasn't simply content with refurbishing Flaxmere: he wanted to gentrify his own family and "made it known to his children that they should be liberally endowed if they married suitably." This approach already misfired with his eldest daughter, but this only made him more subtle and conniving when another daughter appeared with an undesirable partner on his doorstep.

On Christmas Day, while the children are playing with their new toys in the hall and pulling crackers, Santa Klaus discovers the body of Sir Osmond in his private-study: slumped in a chair with a bullet hole in the side of his head, but physical evidence quickly rules out suicide. It’s a case for the police.

I hoped interest would pick up after the characters were introduced and the body was discovered, but I rapidly began to lose interest with each passing chapter – until I either had to take a break or give up on it altogether.

Some of you will probably be of the opinion that I'm being unfair here, but I found reading The Santa Klaus Murder to be a draining experience.

The investigation was largely repetitive: going over who was where and when without adding much of importance to the overall plot. It was devoid of atmosphere and the solution was severely disappointing. The tabulation in the postscript showed there was some fair play, as far as guilty-knowledge and opportunity goes, but the motivation of the murderer can only be guessed – since the entire murder was nothing more than one big risky gamble based on the murderer's own assumptions! It's one of the shakiest motives I've came across in a long, long time!

I love rediscovering obscure, long-forgotten mystery writers and I wish I could've been more positive about Hay, but it's books like The Santa Klaus Murder that makes you understand and appreciate why mystery writers such as Agatha Christie are still being widely read today.

Well, this was the poorest and most negative reviews since I had the misfortune of stumbling across Eric Keith's Nine Men's Murder (2011), but between that one and this review I had pretty good run of good (if sometimes imperfect) to excellent mysteries. I'll try to pick up that thread with the next review and already picked a collection of short stories from a mystery writer whose name is synonymous with good writing, excellent characterization and solid plotting. So stay tuned!

Not as Impossible as You Might Think

"My curiosity is roused by your locked-room. If you can find a new way of doing it, many congratulations." 

- John Dickson Carr (excerpt from a letter to Anthony Boucher)

I had originally planned to post another review of a Christmas-themed country house mystery, supposedly written in the same vein as C.H.B. Kitchin's Crime at Christmas (1934) and Georgette Heyer's Envious Casca (1941), but the story proved to be surprisingly dull and lacking in spirit – which caused me to become bogged down around the halfway mark. Obviously, I needed a break.

Incidentally, a fellow mystery blogger and locked room aficionado, known as "Double J," posted a review of Owl of Darkness (1942) by Max Afford, which gave me an idea. I would take a brief detour and return to the pages of that Christmas mystery with renewed vigor and energy!

A slender volume containing several of pieces of Afford's shorter fiction, entitled Two Locked Room Mysteries and a Ripping Yarn (2008), seemed to lend itself perfectly for that purpose.

Max Afford was an Australian news reporter who turned to fiction in the late 1920s and edged out a name as an author of more than sixty radio-and stage plays, but readers appreciative of Golden Age mysteries will associate his name with the Jeffrey Blackburn novels – a handful of them are even listed in the late Robert Adey's Locked Room Mysteries and Other Impossible Crimes (1991). Somewhat surprisingly, however, is that Adey only listed the full-length locked room novels and not the short stories collected in the volume under review. Because they were (IMHO) excellent examples of the genre.

The first story is "Poison Can Be Puzzling" and was originally published in a 1944 issue of The Australian Women's Weekly, which has Jeffrey and Elizabeth Blackburn being plucked away from the cinema by Inspector Read. Some trouble is brewing and Read figured Blackburn "might like to be on any fun that's offering."

Ferdinand Cass is a "financier of sorts" and "so crooked he could hide behind a circular staircase," which made it advisable to turn his home in a fortified stronghold: a flat "eight floors from the ground" and "six from the ground" with covered windows and a steel floor-and ceiling. A single door, giving entrance to the apartment, is double locked and chained. There's only one problem: all of those securities offer protection against mortal beings, but not from a vengeful ghost from beyond the grave and the reason why he "demanded police protection until after midnight." 

The disgruntled ghost in question is that of Cass' late-wife, who got "mixed up in some black magic hocus-pocus" and threw herself out of a window, but her spirit appeared during a trip in the South American jungles and prophesized his death. Even her perfume can be smelled inside the home!

Unfortunately, all of the precautions and presence of a couple of detectives were in vain, because Cass is mysteriously poisoned "while dressing alone in a hermitically-sealed room" with "four witnesses standing not a dozen yards away." 

The choice of victim, the locked room set-up and a seemingly impossible poisoning was very reminiscent of Arthur Porges' "The Scientist and the Exterminator," collected in The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009), and The Adventure of Caesar's Last Sleep (1976) from the Ellery Queen TV-series, but with a completely different and original solution – one that is distantly related to a John Dickson Carr novel from the 1930s.

The next story is "The Vanishing Trick," first published in 1948 in Detective Fiction, which has Jeffrey and Elizabeth Blackburn visiting friends at their historical home.

Max Afford (c. 1930s)

Kettering Old Home is one of the oldest houses in England and has "a kinda haunted room." The room lacks a proper, old-fashioned English ghost, but people tend to "just vanish into thin air" when left alone in the room, which began in the 1700s: a local parson was accused of witchcraft and held prisoner in the haunted room, but when the room was opened the man had simply vanished. But it's not all ancient history.

Three years before, the previous owners asked one of the servants to clean out the room, but "the door slammed shut on the poor devil" and "when they opened it again" they made an unsettling discovery – the room had swallowed and digested another victim. However, the guests of Jim and Sally Rutland are skeptical, because they have a penchant for practical jokes.

A suspicion confirmed to the reader when Sally convinces Elizabeth to become complicit in a prank: Sally wants to be sealed inside the room, while dressed as a servant, in order to give the "doubting Thomases" a scare when they come down to investigate the supposedly haunted room. Sally is locked up in the room by Elizabeth, but as soon as the bolts were shot and walked down the passage there was a call for help ("Elizabeth... help! Come back!"). The room had lived up to its reputation and swallowed up another human being.

As Jeffrey Blackburn remarks, "the trouble with practical jokes is that they have damndest way of kicking back," which occurs when a second person vanishes from the room and Sally refuses to resurface.

I'm surprised "The Vanishing Trick" never founds its way into one of the many locked room anthologies, because it's a wonderfully charming example of the impossible disappearance and a wonderful clue is slipped in during Sally's disappearance. A clue that reveals the entire trick, if you're observant enough. In short: I loved this one.

The final story is "The Gland Men of the Island," originally published in 1931 in Wonder Stories, which is not a detective story. A small group of men make a momentous discovery on "one of the numerous islands that stud the Polynesia," which they made when following a well-worn path to a thick island-forest and discover a race of Asiatic giants. I initially assumed this was one of those lost civilization stories, but it soon revealed itself as one of those genre-bending, pulpy tales of Yellow Peril and featured a sinister Chinese scientist – who wanted to "restore China to rightful position as Mistress of the World."

I'm not really a fan of sensationalist pulp stories, but this one answered a question I never dreamed of asking: what would be the result if Sax Rohmer had written Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). So there's that.

Well, I enjoyed this collection as a whole and reminded me why I love locked room mysteries. I'm curious now to see what Afford is able to do when he writes full-length impossible crime novels. And, now, back to that dreadful Christmas mystery!

Murmurings from the Past

"Had I been, as you say, dead... it is more than probable that dead I should still be; for I perceive you are yet in the infancy of Galvanism, and cannot accomplish with it what was a common thing among us in the old days."

- Allamistakeo (Edgar Allan Poe's "Some Words With a Mummy," 1845)

Last month, I posted a review of The Secret of Skeleton Island (1966) by Robert Arthur, which is the sixth entry in a series of juvenile mysteries that ran from 1964 to 1987 and starred a group of meddling teenagers – who refer to themselves as The Three Investigators.

I enjoyed the book more than I anticipated and thought it merited a prompt follow-up, but felt insistent on picking another one of Arthur's contributions. Since his involvement kindled my initial interest in the series. The synopses of The Secret of Terror Castle (1964) and The Mystery of the Green Ghost (1965) piqued my interest, but eventually settled for The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy (1965).

The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy opens with a brief introduction by Alfred Hitchcock, who's a minor character in the series, in which he introduces the characters and gives some background information for "the benefit of those of you who have come in late." I already went over the introductions of Jupiter "Jupe" Jones, Peter Crenshaw and Bob Andrews in my previous review, but something that was completely omitted in The Secret of Skeleton Island was any mention of their headquarters – which consists of a converted mobile home trailer hidden in The Jones Salvage Yard. Guess that really wasn't pertinent information for an outdoors adventure story.

Anyway, the trailer has a small office space, a lab, a darkroom and a smattering of equipment, such a surveillance periscope, which the boys rebuilt from junk that came into the salvage yard.

It's at their headquarters where they receive two letters: one of them is from a wealthy, middle-aged lady who has heard about their success in one of their previous investigators (i.e. The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot, 1964) and wants to engage their services to help find her missing cat. Pete and Bob practice their deduction skills on the letter before reading it, which makes for a fun Holmesian scene.

However, it's the content of the second envelope that'll provide the trio of investigators with a bizarre problem that could've been plucked from the pages of a John Dickson Carr or Edward Hoch story. There's even a particular situation that arguably qualifies as a locked room problem and that comes on top of an apparently supernatural phenomena.

The name engraved on the top of the expensive-looking bond stationary is that of Alfred Hitchcock, celebrated film-director, who has a friend with a peculiar problem that they might find interesting: a 3000-year-old mummy has been heard whispering in a long-dead language!

Professor Robert Yarborough, "a noted Egyptologist," has converted a wing of his Spanish-style mansion into a private museum, strewn with "relics taken from the tombs of ancient Egypt," which has become the temporary home for the miraculous mummy – which the professor discovered twenty-five years before inside a well-hidden tomb in a rocky cliff. The professor is a man of science and is of the opinion that it's not natural "for a mummy dead for three thousand years to talk," or "even to whisper," but that's what appears to happen every time he’s alone with the remains of Ra-Orkon.

The problem is that Yarborough can't consult a professional colleague, because they would pity him or spread rumors about him getting old and senile. A private investigator would assume the professor had bats in the belfry, but "three imaginative boys" with "no preconceived notion" just might do the trick.

Jupe has a trick up his sleeve to make the mummy whisper in his presence, but finds himself confronted with somewhat of a locked room problem when the ruse succeeds: mummy begins to murmur when "he was totally alone" and "the door into the room where the professor and Bob waited was shut." Nobody was near the mummy case to "throw" his voice and the possibility of a radio transmitter had already been eliminated. I was a bit skeptical about the actual explanation for this locked room mystery, because it seemed out-of-time, but consulting the all-knowing Internet revealed this was technically possible since the early 1960s. So the trick was technically possible.

I think Arthur should be commended for thinking enough of his young readers to avoid the obvious (radio transmitter) and hackneyed (ventriloquism) and came up with something slightly more complex and original.  

Anyway, the points between the initial investigation and the final explanation is fraught with danger and side-distractions, which include a frightened butler who's deadly afraid of the mummy's curse. There's a colleague of the professor, an expert in Middle-Eastern languages, whose father was part of the original expedition, but "was murdered in a Cairo bazaar" a week after the mummy's discovery. A slender, foreign-looking boy is discovered lurking in the garden and he'll be in tight spot with one of the investigators when coming across a couple of burglars. Even Anubis, "the dreaded jackal god of Ancient Egypt," makes an appearance in our plain of existence.

This compound of danger and mystery makes The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy a very happening kind of adventure/mystery, but not entirely in the same league as The Secret of Skeleton Island – which I loved and adored. However, I still very much-appreciated Arthur's dedication here to create a solid plot with clues, mystification, Sherlockian references and something that amounts to a locked room mystery. Robert Arthur was basically mystery genre's version of the Paid Piper of Hamelin, who lured many children to our beloved detective stories.  

On a final note, allow me direct your attention to the review I posted only yesterday, which is Georgette Heyer's Envious Casca (1941) and has a locked room murder in an old-fashioned manor house during a Christmas holiday. What's not to like there? 

A Knife in the Back

"I've been a fool about this. Locked rooms, as you said, on the brain."

- Detective-Inspector Humbleby (Edmund Crispin's "The Name on the Window," collected in Beware of the Trains, 1953)

Georgette Heyer was a British novelist well-versed in several genres, consisting mainly of Regency romances, historical fiction and mystery novels, which were largely republished over the past fifteen years – including the books chronicling the cases of Superintendent Hannasyde and Inspector Hemingway.

Reportedly, Heyer garnered most of her literary fame in the field of historical romance novels. She wrote many novels that were set in the Regency period or the Georgian era, which made Heyer "legendary for her research" and "historical accuracy," but her mystery novels seem to have failed to scale the reputational heights of her historical fiction.

However, I've read some interesting, if varying, opinions from my fellow and highly respected connoisseurs in murder about her work.

The opinions seem to be divided where some of her most recognizable mystery novels are concerned, such as Why Shoot a Butler? (1933), Death in the Stocks (1935) and The Blunt Instrument (1938), but are overall consistent and positive about Envious Casca (1941), which is a conventional country-house mystery in the spirit of Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938) by Agatha Christie – and even has a locked room mystery at the heart of its plot. So, guess which Heyer mystery this predictable hack picked?

Envious Casca takes place at the manor house of a wealthy curmudgeon, Nathaniel Herriard, where his much more cheerful brother, Joseph, has taken charge of preparing a Christmas party and invited a small band of people. Unfortunately, it's a collection of highly incompatible personalities, which leads to irritation and murder!

There are, first of all, the Herriard brothers: Nathaniel is a rich, semi-retired businessman who became somewhat of an old humbug, who believed Christmas to be "a series of quarrels between inimical persons bound to one another only be the accident of relationship" and "thrown together by a worn-out convention which degreed that at Christmas families should forgather" – which is simply begging to have several spirits haunting up your bedroom a day before Christmas. Joseph is a much more pleasantly person, overly nice even, who spend most of years as a traveling actor and has since two years returned, but is financially completely depended upon his brother. Joseph brought along his wife, named Maud, who spend most of the story irritating the people around her by sharing tidbits of information from the biography she's reading about an Austrian-Hungarian empress.

A dead brother of Nathaniel and Joseph left two children behind: a "rough-tongued young man with no manners," named Stephan, who's the prospected heir of Nathaniel's fortune and a sister, Paula, who equals her brother in all his unpleasant characteristics.

Stephen has brought along Valerie Dean: his pretty, but childishly naïve, finance whose personal motives makes her a common gold-digger in the eyes of Nathaniel. Paula is a stage-actress and is accompanied by Willoughby Roydon, a postmodern playwright of "grimly realistic plays," which is why Nathaniel refuses to cough up several thousands of pounds to finance his play – much to the chagrin of Paula who wanted the main part in the play. The party is rounded out by Mathilda Clare, a cousin, and Nathaniel business partner, Edgar Mottisfont.

In such company, you can almost understand why an old grouch like Nathaniel refuses to answer the knocks on his bedroom door. As Inspector Hemingway remarked, he would in his place have locked himself in his room and "very likely shove a heavy piece of furniture" against the door, but there was a far more serious reason why no answer emanated from behind the locked bedroom door. A murderer had poked Nathaniel in the back with a knife and "then dematerialized himself like the spooks you read about."

The locked room aspect of the murder has Inspector Hemingway and Sergeant Ware pleasantly baffled, which leads to minor, but interesting, discussion how the murder could've escaped from the room – which includes "the old pencil-and-string trick" and the possibility that "the key was turned with a pair of eyebrow-pluckers."

Something of historical interest about the tool consisting of "a pair of forceps shaped a bit like eyebrow-pluckers to open locked doors," because it’s a burglary-tool called an "oustiti." I was unable to find a picture of those forceps, but I came across a reference describing it as "an essential item of a burglar’s tool kit" and it even quoted this book! The tool was also mentioned in Modern Police Work (1939), which you can find and read here.

Anyhow, the eventual explanation for the locked room is as simple as it's risky and the only weakness is the luck of the murderer that everything panned out the way it did, but loved how the solution took its cue from history – instead of being pulled from the burglar's tool kit. I also appreciated how the murderer and Hemingway basically stumbled to the idea for the locked room trick by discovering the same thing, which was the only part of the puzzle that had baffled Hemingway up to the near end. However, it's not a classic of the impossible crime genre. But it was nice enough.

Hemingway saw through the murderer's ruse and hardly believed anything that was thrown at his way, which included a cigarette case, a missing book, a bloodstained handkerchief, some rude behavior and even a link to the Sino-Japanese War. The good inspector knew how to separate the clues from the red herrings and did not belong to the "lot of half-baked people" that murderer banked on believing an apparent innocent person to be actually innocent. Only problem is that most of readers probably belong to the same category as Hemingway. I read a very apt comment how Heyer here obviously tried to out-Christie Christie in the least-likely-suspect department, which made the murderer stand-out more and more with each passing chapter – making the revelation of this person’s identity a couple of chapters before the ending a good move.

Regardless of these minor trivialities, I genuinely enjoyed Envious Casca as a whole. It's an extremely conventional mystery novel with a conservative plot-and cast of characters, which can hardly be labeled original, but the story moves around gracefully within the confines of the conventional manor house mystery. Like a swan elegantly paddling around in a fountain.

I guess Heyer is the kind of mystery writer you go for when you're in the mood for something classy and classic, which means I'll definitely return to her work in the not so-distant future.

Heir Presumptive

"...we are a truthful family, only the things that happen to us are so peculiar that nobody ever believes in them. Still, I expect you've got a sort of winnowing ear for people's testimonies and will know in a flash if we try any hanky-panky."

- Henry Lamprey (Ngaio Marsh's Death of a Peer, 1941)

Ten Star Clues (1941) is the fifteenth novel with the emblem "A Bobby Owen Mystery" plastered on its cover, but the writing and plot is as elaborate, darkly humorous and fantastical as E.R. Punshon's earlier work in this series – which consists here of one long riff on the Victorian-era case of the Tichborne claimant.

It's also one of the most scrupulously plotted stories from the series and has a carefully constructed, decidedly linear narrative.

In the first quarter of book, Punshon introduces a cast of old-fashioned characters populating the historical Castle Wych, which is situated near the village of Brimsbury Wych.

The elderly Earl and Countess Wych stand at the head of the old Hoyle dynasty, who "for some hundreds of years had lived and flourished at Castle Wych," and own most, but "less now than formerly," of the surrounding land. However, since the days of robber barons and lucrative placeholder, running a centuries-old estate has become an unprofitable occupation. Ralph Hoyle is the heir to his great-uncle and had decided to dispose of the estate once he inherits the title, but a problem presents itself when a long-lost grandson of the Earl turns up on their doorstep.

Bertram Hoyle was presumed to have passed away a decade ago in the United States, but Earl and Countess Wych recognize and accept him as their grandson – securely placing him in the position of heir apparent. However, the Earl and Countess seem to be only family members who buy the story. But nobody appears willing to challenge the claim. Well, nobody except Ralph, who blatantly opposes the claim and calls his so-called cousin a fraud, which makes for an increasingly tense situation.

It makes for an uncomfortable and tense situation. A situation that becomes tense enough for someone to unload several cartridges from an automatic pistol in the library (where else?), but the identity of the victim is not as obvious you might expect.

Enter Inspector Bobby Owen and Chief Constable Glynne: who conduct a series of laborious interviews with the family, servants and several interested parties from the outside – such as one of the family lawyers and the local vicar. I have to mention here that the structure of the plot reminded me of a Ngaio Marsh's method of plotting, which often had a lead-up to the murder followed by a series of interviews by Inspector Roderick Alleyn. That's pretty much where the relevant comparisons ends, but I always associated this particular sequence with Marsh's mystery novels.

Anyhow, the interviews of the "people concerned were themselves all so striking and unusual in their different ways" and uncovers "a complicated interplay of characters and interests" – which allows Owen to compile two very important lists.

The first is a tabulation of "the Possibles," which consists of a nice and ordered list of suspects, motives and several pertinent questions, but it's the second list that'll be of main interest to most readers. A list of ten clues that Owen dubbed "star" clues and should help the reader with identifying the murderer. However, I should mention here that seasoned, experienced mystery readers and addicts will probably identify the murderer early on and work out the main lines of the plot long before coming across the list of clues. I immediately thought "what's this person up to" and "did this person just..." when the shots were fired, but that's hardly something that can be held against Punshon and shouldn't take anything away from this beautifully plotted Golden Age mystery.

Well, I know this review has been rather summary, but it's a difficult book to review in depth. I did not want to give away too much about the lead-up to the murder investigation and the second half consisted of a series of interviews, which do not lend themselves to the writing of descriptive, enticing reviews. That's why this review is both poor in details and writing.

So, I'll end this review by pointing out one of the aspects that attracts me to Punshon's work, which is what some view as a weakness in his work: namely his verbiage. Punshon was a very wordy writer, but it never annoyed me because expertly constructed plots and well-rounded characters accompanied it. It also gave the stories a strong sense of time-and place that stretched across the centuries. I simply appreciate it when there's a short, throwaway sentence that explained that a certain room in the castle had not witnessed a high-strung scene "since the early eighteenth century when a duel had been fought in it by candlelight." Or a character noting how his "remote, skin-clad ancestors would have felt so much more at home" in the surrounding, out-stretched forest than "he could ever be." That comes on top of the references World War I and the coming World War, which is in this book in the stages known as the Phony War.

As I said before, it gives the book a strong sense of time-and place, which I appreciate as much as a well constructed plot or a clever locked room mystery. Punshon never seems to disappoint in combining the first two (no locked rooms though) and that's why is becoming a personal favorite mine. 

Well, I'll try to pick a mystery for my next read that'll allow me to drawl on with a bit more substance. 

Previous reviews of Punshon's mysteries:

Crossword Mystery (1934)
Death Comes to Cambers (1935)
Comes a Stranger (1938) 

Ten Star Clues (1941)