One Way Out (2012) by John Russell Fearn and Philip Harbottle

John Russell Fearn is my favorite second-stringer who tragically passed away in 1960 at age 52 and left behind an unfinished manuscript of a detective novel, entitled One Way Out (2012), which had "a very brief cryptic scribble" on the final page "setting out his thoughts on how it finished" – except that the scribble was too obscure to envision his intended ending. Philip Harbottle was unable to make heads nor tails of it and the manuscript was shelved for decades.

One day, Harbottle woke up with "an interpretation of what the notes could have meant" and completed the novel within days, which has since been published by Thorpe and Wildside Press.

What surprised me the most about One Way Out is that it read like an unpolished, first or second draft of a Richard Hull novel. The plot had been largely worked out and it toyed with the inverted detective, which is what reminded me of Hull, but One Way Out lacked the satirical touch of The Murder of My Aunt (1934) and Murder Isn't Easy (1936). And sorely missed a clever twist or gut-punch at the end of the story.

One Way Out begins with three passengers aboard the Scots Express bound for Glasgow: a well-known London financier, Morgan Dale, who's accompanied by his chief clerk of twenty years, Martin Lee. The third person is Dale's "no-good ex-secretary," Janice Elton. Dale had dismissed Elton a fortnight ago on account of her "misplaced romanticism" and having "made love to him on several occasions," which had become "the talk of the staff" – something that could tarnish his reputation. And he has a wife and children to think about. However, Elton refuses to let it go.

Elton confronts Dale in his train compartment and tells him she has been diagnosed with leukemia. She only has a little more than a year left to live, but is determined to leave Dale something remember her by. Something that will knock him from that high perch he's sitting on. 

When Lee returned, Dale bundled him into the compartment and told him Elton had committed suicide by emptying a whole bottle of strychnine. Dale wants to pull the communication cord to immediately warn the proper authorities, but Lee urges him to think their next move through, because her death could be interpreted by the police as murder. Lee finds an incriminating letter in her purse accusing her former employer of murder. So they decide to dispose of the body and destroy all of the potential evidence.

However, Lee is "a deep schemer" who has "an insatiable longing" to turn the tables on his employer and the death of Elton handed him that opportunity, because he didn't destroy the purse or its contents – using it as a lever to begin extracting money from Dale. The first four or five chapters are good and somewhat original treatment of the phrase, "what tangled webs we weave." Unfortunately, the story is derailed when one of these two characters is killed in random, unconnected traffic accident. This effectively deflated the strong opening and intriguing premise of the story.

The place of this character was taken by a tireless policeman, Chief-Inspector Royden of Scotland Yard, who's a police-detective in the tradition of Freeman Wills Croft's Inspector French.

A competent, hardworking policeman who diligently collects fingerprints, assiduously pokes around in ash-heaps and toys with his primary suspect like a cat with a captured mouse. However, I think it would have been more beneficial, in terms of story-telling, had this been a three-way between Dale, Lee and Royden – building counterplot upon counterplot. This was now missing and killed any possible excitement the plot could have generated. It didn't help either that the character who was left behind was completely out of his league against the experienced Chief-Inspector Royden.

One Way Out has a solid premise with an interesting take on the inverted detective story format: the unsurprising consequences of turning a suicide into a suspicious-looking death, but these ideas were never fully developed and you can blame part of that on the premature death of one of the main-characters – who should not have died. At least, not that early in the story. Secondly, there's the bland, all's well that ends well ending bare of any twist or surprise, which made the plot feel even more thread-bare than it already did. As said above, Hull came to mind when I read the opening chapters and kept expecting a similar kind of ending, which made me even suspect the suspiciously innocent-looking Mrs. Dale. But the plot was really as simple as it was presented to the reader.

So this was a very short and very minor crime novel that I can only really recommended to loyal readers of John Russell Fearn. Others might be a little more than underwhelmed by it.