Bones Don't Lie (1946) by Curtiss T. Gardner

Last year, I reviewed a little knock impossible crime story by Curtiss T. Gardner, entitled "Sorcery in the Death House" (1943), which is one of some thirty short stories he penned during the 1940s for such publications as Dime Mystery Magazine, G-Men Detective and Thrilling Detective – disappearing from the scene completely when the decade drew to a close. So the lion's share of Gardner's detective fiction comprises of short stories, but he wrote at least one mystery novel. Wildside Press reprinted that once obscure novel in The Second Mystery Novel Megapack (2015) and as a separate ebook in 2016.

Bones Don't Lie (1946), alternatively titled The Fatal Cast, was credited by Anthony Boucher with introducing "the first big-business detective on record" and called "the mechanical details" of the steel manufacturing background "endlessly fascinating."

A year before the story's opening, The Prairie Comet became "a mass of twisted wreckage" when one of the axles on the Comet's locomotive snapped, throwing it off the rails, which then fatally collided with an eastbound express – killing close to a hundred people! A disaster with political implications, because two of the old, wooden sleepers that had been "smashed to matchwood" were filled with troops. Metallurgical tests showed that the axle was "dangerously defective" and an incriminating letter places two men behind bars, Ray Locke and Glenn Cannon. However, they both claim they were framed.

So, when Locke is released from prison, he decides to return to Ironton plant of American-Consolidated Steel and beg for a job, but what he really plans on doing is clearing his name.

Leonard Tracy, czar of the Ironton Works, is an old friend of Locke and gives him his "entering wedge" with a position at the bottom of the company ladder. But his real job begins after the work shift has finished. This is where the strongest aspect of the story comes into the play, the backdrop.

Bones Don't Lie is a weird amalgamation the American Van Dine School, the British Realist School and the Pulps, but only the detailed, inside look of a massive steel plant, a feature of The Van Dine School, was fully utilized – giving an otherwise bland detective story a fascinating backdrop strewn with dangers. The story entirely takes place among the stacks of blast furnaces, smelters, testing rooms, hammer shops, laboratories and the various mills "peopled with grimy, sweating gnomes" working on "small glowing bits of iron." A place dangerous enough without a murderer prowling around.

On his first day back, Locke had a brush with the unlikable, highly punch-able assistant of the chemical laboratory, Walter Keene, who he threatened to split his head open. A threat that comes back to haunt him when Keene is found with his skull smashed into several pieces. What saved Locke from the chair is the intervention of the General, Ulysses G. Flint.

U.G. Flint is a "confidential investigator" for P.J. Gorman & Company, a big stockholder of American-Consolidated, who has to ensure "the company's dirty linen emerges in pristine whiteness." This is why some call him the head of "the Wall Street Gestapo." So this makes Flint a very unusual detective, not just for the time, but even today you don't see that many corporate sleuths. Only example I can think of is William L. DeAndrea's Matt Cobb, Vice-President of Special Projects, who has to wash the dirty laundry of a TV Network in the '80s and '90s.

Unfortunately, the setting, background details and Flint are the only good or interesting aspects of the story. The method of falsifying the steel tests, which lead to the train wreck, is something you would associate with Freeman Wills Crofts or John Rhode, but the answer is something you won't be able to piece together and thus the solution comes as an anti-climax – same can be said about the who-or why. Nothing outstanding or memorable. However, I appreciated the attempt to use the decapitation of the second victim as a red herring.

Bones Don't Lie undeniable broke some new ground with the introduction of the genre's first corporate detective-character and Gardner gave the reader a detailed tour of a 1940s steel plant, which he perfectly used for some exciting scenes, but the lackluster, uninspired plot only makes it a historical curiosity. So, purely as detective story, I can't recommend it.

A note for the curious: two years ago, I reviewed Bruce Campbell's The Mystery of the Invisible Enemy (1959), a juvenile mystery novel, which also takes place inside a steel plant, but the plot is so much better than Bones Don't Lie.