So, after finishing Colin Robertson's
Demons'
Moon (1951), I intended to take a short break from the
impossible crime story and was off to a good start with Moray
Dalton's The
Art School Murders (1943), but Hampton Stone's The
Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends (1953) soiled my promise with
the inclusion of a (minor) locked room problem – giving me a paper
thin excuse to dip into one more impossible crime novel. A cross
between Agatha
Christie's Murder is Easy (1939) and Herbert
Brean's Wilders Walks Away (1948) with no less than four
impossibilities listed in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders:
Supplement (2019). How can you see no to that?
John Holbrook Vance is better known as
Jack Vance, a well-known, celebrated fantasy and science-fiction
author, who occasionally turned to the detective and thriller story.
Vance even ghosted three of the late period Ellery
Queen novels, The Four Johns (1964), A Room to Die In
(1965) and The Madman Theory (1966).
During the same period, Vance wrote
two mystery novels about Sheriff Joe Bain, The Fox Valley Murders
(1966) and The Pleasant Grove Murders (1967), which take place
in the old-world surroundings of San Rodrigo County, California.
Vance had been working on a third novel, The Genesee Slough
Murders, but left the book unfinished and photocopies of a
typescript draft have "circulated
among collectors for years" that outlined the entire story
with some near complete chapters – lacking only "a final
polish." The manuscript outline was published in The Joe
Bain Mysteries (2013).
Joe Bain used to be "the tall
hell-raising lad from Castle Mountain," a run-a-way kid who
came to San Rodrigo County, "where he consorted with Mexicans
and fruit tramps." An unlikely boy to eventually become
sheriff, but a broken marriage left him with a daughter to support
and used his G.I. benefits to attend classics at the Chapman
Institute of Criminology, which landed him a job as deputy-sheriff
under Sheriff Ernest Cucchinello.
The Fox Valley Murders opens
two days after the untimely passing of Sheriff Cucchinello and Bain
was appointed to serve out the last months of his term as
Acting-Sheriff. Bain is planning to the challenge the odds-on
favorite, Lee Gervase, who's "a vigorous and progressive young
lawyer" predicted to "sweep unopposed into office"
in the next election. This election is one of three, closely
intertwined, plot-threads that run through the story. A plot-thread
that sees Bain trying to drum up support in the community and
cleaning out the office of any petty, small-town corruption.
The second plot-thread is the hostile
response of the community to the return of one of its most notorious
and hated inhabitants, Ausley Wyett. Sixteen years ago, Wyett had
been found digging a hole "with close at hand the body of Tissie
McAllister." A young schoolgirl who had been brutally abused
and murdered. Wyett protested his innocence, but there were five
witnesses whose testimonies showed only he could have killed the girl
and was sentenced to life imprisonment – narrowly avoiding the
death penalty. A month ago, Wyett was paroled out of San Quentin and
returned to the home farm, which already unsettled the locals, but
then he begins sending letters around.
All of the witnesses receive a
letter with the question, "how do you plan to make this up to
me?" When the witnesses begin to die, one by one, Bain begins
to fear he might soon find Wyett "swinging from a tree."
Finally, we come to the meat of the
plot! A series of suspiciously-looking accidents and natural causes
that befall the witnesses who testified against Wyett.
A former school bus driver, Bus
Hacker, died in front of Bain when he had a heart attack on his front
porch. Charly Blankenship, "a well-known mushroom fancier,"
inexplicably picked, cooked and consumed an easily recognizable,
poisonous mushrooms. Willis Neff apparently died in a hunting
accident in an open glade high in the Santa Lucia Mountains, of
Monterey County, where a witness would turn the shooting accident in
an open-air locked room mystery in case of murder. Oliver Viera was
all alone when he fell sixty feet to his death from a ladder perched
too close to a ravine. A bizarre string of suspicious accidents and
deaths, but, as Bain remarked, "you feel a fool saying accident"
and "you feel a fool claiming foul play."
I think the poisoning-trick and the
hunting accident are more accurately described as borderline
impossible crimes, but appreciated the variety and two of the murders
showed some ingenuity.
The murder of Bus Hacker is a genuine
impossible crime with a good solution, but you should be able to
(roughly) work out how it was done and the explanation for the dish
of poisoned mushrooms, while not strictly an impossibility, was
something completely new – furnished the plot with an important
clue. Technically, you can call the hunting accident an open-air
locked room murder, but the trick should have been used in another
story to give a murderer one of those hard-to-break alibis. The
deadly fall from the ladder has, sadly, the most simplistic solution
imaginable. But when you pull them together, you have a very
satisfying and original take on the impossible crime and perfect
murder tropes with a memorable, vividly-drawn backdrop and
characters.
I've already compared The Fox
Valley Murders to Christie's Murder is Easy and Brean's
Wilders Walk Away, which is an accurate comparison when
describing the bare bones of the plot, but the story is dressed in
thick slices of small-town Americana. You have the small-town
politics of Erle Stanley Gardner's Doug Selby series (c.f. The
D.A. Draws a Circle, 1939), the hum of every day, small-town
life that filled Theodore
Roscoe's crime novelettes in The
Argosy Library: Four Corner, vol. 1 (2015) and a populace
that begins to feel deprived of justice. Although the threat of an
old-fashioned lynching is not as imminent here as it was in Queen's
The
Glass Village (1954). A skillful, wonderfully done
combination of characters, plot and setting that made The Fox
Valley Murders a beautifully written and constructed detective
story. And one of the better locked room mysteries from the 1960s
era.
There is, however, a flaw in this
little gem. A big, important chunk of the plot is driven by Wyett's
illogical, mule-headed stubbornness and actions, which began when he
found McAllister's body in his barn and tried to bury it. Something
that is never satisfactory explained beyond that he lost his head
when he found the body. What he did when he was paroled became
convenient smokescreen for the murderer. Wyett acts as a plot-device
to drive certain parts of the story and it stands out here, because
everything else feels so natural. A second thing that kept nagging at
me is Wyett continuously saying he was completely innocent when he
didn't report a murder, destroyed the crime scene and tried to bury
the body – three counts that, knowing Americans, probably adds up
to a pretty stiff prison sentence. A small blemish on an otherwise
excellent detective novel, but more of an annoyance than a serious
drawback.
So, all in all, The Fox Valley
Murders stands as a fascinating, well-written detective novel
with a slightly unusual plot and beautifully evoked, pleasantly busy
setting that brought the place alive in all its facets and
complexities. Not everything is absolutely perfect, but, reading the
book, you wouldn't think the genre's Golden Age had ended. You can
expect one of my ramblings on The Pleasant Grove Murders and
The Genesee Slough Murders before too long!
The murders remind me of a series of inexplicable murders in Anthony Abbot's THE SHUDDERS where people who witnessed a man being electrocuted start dying one by one. And I love the second cover with the figures in all those poses.
ReplyDeleteIf you love the second cover, you'll certainly like the similarly styled cover-art of The Pleasants Grove Murders, but you'll get to see that one in a few days. Anthony Abbot is one of those writers who needs to be reprinted.
DeleteOkay. I'll wait for it.
DeleteEven if Anthony Abbot gets reprinted, THE SHUDDERS should never be:)
What a pity! I assumed your previous comment was a recommendation for The Shudders. Oh, well, The Creeps wasn't that great either, but still hope the "About the Murder Of" titles get reprinted in the hopefully not so distant future.
DeleteThis is a good one! I read it several years ago and also have the follow-up (Pleasant Grove Murders) about the murder of a mailman as well. I was planing to write up both in one past. Never happened. I didn't know there was a third one with Joe Bain!
ReplyDeleteYou've done a very thorough job highlighting all the admirable features in this mystery novel. I liked the summing up that was done in the town square in lieu of the Bain's political speech everyone was expecting. That was a very novel way to present the solution in a murder mystery.
Don't expect too much of The Genesee Slough Murders, because it's little more than a plot outline with some fleshed out parts. But had it been finished, the book would have been as great as The Fox Valley Murders and The Pleasant Grove Murders. I might as well reveal here that reviews of those two titles will fill out next week of blog-posts. So stay tuned!
DeleteYes, that was a great scene and made for a fitting ending to the story. Everything about this series is delightfully American. I wish more of these kind of detective novels had been written at that time.