6/25/20

Death for Madame (1946) by R.T. Campbell

Last year, I read Unholy Dying (1945) by Ruthven Todd, published as by "R.T. Campbell," who penned a flurry of lighthearted, satirical detective novels published during a two year period, 1945 and 1946, which feature a loud, portly and beer guzzling botanist-cum-detective, Professor John Stubbs – a literary relative of Sgt. Beef, Dr. Gideon Fell and Simon Gale. So a perfect series to read if you're in the mood for something bright and cheerful. I was definitely in the mood for a comedic mystery with a boorish, elephant-in-a-china-shop detective trampling through the case.

John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, nominated Campbell's Death for Madame (1946) as the "Best Vintage Mystery Reprint of 2018," released by Dover, but decided at the time to go with Unholy Dying instead. I now have to agree with John that Death for Madame is probably the best and funniest of these recent Dover reprints.

Death for Madame stands closer to the humorous, tongue-in-cheek mysteries of Leo Bruce than Unholy Dying, or Bodies in a Bookshop (1946), with the narrator, Max Boyle, playing the Lionel Townsend to Professor Stubbs' Sgt. Beef. A well done contrast between the quiet introvert and the overly social extrovert.

Max Boyle was looking forward to a quiet, peaceful life with "nothing moving any faster than a seed germinates" when he became the assistant of Professor Stubbs, but living with Professor Stubbs had been "one damned murder after another" – even in between murders he had no peace. Professor Stubbs is a large, mustachioed man, both in stature and personality, who smokes pipes filled with wickedly-smelling tobacco or black cigars that could fumigate "a ward of patients suffering from bubonic plague" and has all the tact of an air-raid siren. So what should have been a quiet, scholarly life went from "one crack-brained scheme" to another, interspersed by a murder or two, which prevented them from doing any serious work on The History of Botany.

A situation trying enough for the long-suffering Boyle, but a personal friend of Professor Stubbs, a Mr. Ben Carr, has an equally disruptive personality and is "in and out of the house at all hours of the day and night." Usually, Carr strings them along to replicate experiments he read about in eighteenth century books.

One day, out of nowhere, Carr asks Stubbs if he knows his aunt, Lottie Rattigan. A "most extraordinary old cuss" who used to keep a brothel in Brussels, but she found "the wear and tear too great" and now she runs a seedy residential hotel, The Boudoir, in Bayswater – as "hotels go it's pretty mad, too." And wonders if he liked to meet her. Naturally, Professor Stubbs is only too willing to go out and meet this eccentric relative of his friend, but this would come back to haunt him. Lottie Rattigan can meet the boorish, wheezing and overweight botanic detective pound for pound.

Lottie is an enormous woman, in her late nineties, who rarely leaves her rocking chair in the hallway of the hotel and runs the place from that chair in a way that would drive any sane bookkeeper to either mental breakdown or over a window ledge, whichever is more convenient at the time. She actually remembers Professor Stubbs' father, "dressed in lavender silk combinations," who used to dance the can-can in her rooms in Brussels. This embarrassed Stubbs and pleased Boyle to no end.

"R.T. Campbell"
On the following day, Stubbs is called by Carr with the news that Lottie had been killed during the night. She was found lolling in her rocking chair with a piece of electric flex tied around around her neck. The problem this murder poses has a deceptively simplistic appearance.

Firstly, there are only a handful of suspects. Carr is the principle legatee under his aunt's latest will and becomes the police's primary suspect, which infuriates Stubbs to no end. Roland Grimble is Lottie's second nephew and a good-for-nothing young man who becomes furious when he discovers his generous inheritance comes with strings attached. James and Sybil Baker used to visit country house parties, like Raffles and Bunny, but nowadays run a discreet gambling den. Lottie approved of gambling and rewarded them accordingly in her will. Miss Annie Aspinall was a long-time companion of Lottie and she left Annie the tidy sum of five thousand pounds. There's an aged, world-weary waiter, Arthur Niven, and a chambermaid, Janet Morgan, who both received a generous sum of money.

So everyone appears to have a money-backed motive and not an alibi between them worth, or desired, mentioning, but the motive is not as strong as it appeared on account of Lottie's habit of adding, or cutting, people out of her will on a weekly basis – nobody knew for sure whether, or not, they were in the will. This made Lottie more valuable alive than dead. Everyone appears to have had the opportunity to kill Lottie without having an alibi, but banking on an inheritance would have been a pure gamble. That makes it a slightly different kind of detective story. A detective story with a solution that took me by surprise, because I was suspecting something completely different.

Stubbs has a bookcases crammed with thrillers, muscling in on the shelf space of the Botanical Magazine, who reads "the latest detective story by John Dickson Carr" during his investigation and remarks that "the worst kinda thriller" has the killer enter the story at the very end, while in "the best thrillers the murderer is there all the time" – one of the minor side-characters happens to be an outsider on the inside. Mr. Hillary St. John Smellman is Lottie's lawyer and before reading her will, he noted that looking after her affairs was "no sinecure." Regularly, Smellman had to come down to the hotel to make (minor) alterations to the will and was there only a day before the murder to perform his usual duties. I took these bits and pieces as clues and hints that Lottie had finally driven Smellman to temporary insanity and had he killed her to put a stop to the song and dance with the will. It would have fitted the tone and circumstances of the story, but Campbell decided to end the story on more serious and tragic note. But it made for a strangely effective ending.

All in all, Campbell's Death for Madame is one of the funnier takes on the so-called hotel-mysteries with a good plot and great characters that will charm and entertain readers who count Leo Bruce, John Dickson Carr and Edmund Crispin among their favorite detective novelist. Very much worth your time.

13 comments:

  1. Hmm...sounds like an author I would enjoy. I'm definitely in need of some new authors so I'm on the hunt for a copy now. Thanks TC!

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    1. The new Dover editions should be very easy to get your hands on. And if you're looking for new authors to read, you can click on the The Muniment Room at the top of the page. You'll find an alphabetical listing of all my reviews and blog-posts there that you can peruse at your leisure as you fatten your wishlist.

      By the way, did you succeed in finding copies of your local Altoona mystery writer, Patrick Kelley?

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    2. The Muniment Room is very well know to me, I've perused it's shelves many times, much to the detriment of my PayPal balance.

      And yes (I can't believe you rememberer!) I did get a copy of Kelley's first book, Sleightly Murder. My luck with American authors hasn't been very good though, so I've been putting off reading it. I will though...promise!

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    3. Just for full disclosure, I intend to use your and John's promised reviews as "minesweepers" to see if this obscure series is worth pursuing further. So I look forward to your review. ;)

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  2. I bought a copy of this book a few months ago, got midway through it, started reading other books, and just kind of forgot about it. I'm not really sure why, as I liked the set up and thaught it was hilarious. You've definitely convinced me to finish it sooner rather than later. I can't say that I regret stopping though, as I finaly read The Emperor's Snuff-Box. Time spent reading Carr is never misspent. (The idea of the lawyer snapping after years of putting up with Lottie's madness cracked me up. It seems very plausible.)

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    1. If you're going to ditch one good detective story for another, it might as well be a detective story from the master himself and The Emperor's Snuff-Box is definitely one of Carr's better standalone mysteries. Although it was a missed opportunity to bring back Henri Bencolin (as he was in The Four False Weapons) or John Gaunt (The Bowstring Murders).

      Hope you enjoy Death for Madame all the way through the end on your second try! :)

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  3. I remember not getting on very well with Campbell's Bodies in the Bookshop -- checking my site, I see I didn't even review it, which isn't a good sign -- but on the other hand I have two of his on my theoretical-maybe-one-day wishlist (The Death Cap and Take Thee a Sharp Knife) and you have made this one sound like a bunch of fun. So, well, it seems churlish not to get this, since it's so readily available...much appreciated, thanks for the heads-up!

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    1. My memories of Bodies in the Bookshop have become very blurred over the years, but remember it was written/plotted in a more serious vein than Unholy Dying and Death for Madame with the absurdly eccentric Stubbs as the only comic relief. So that might have been the problem. But have to reread it to see how it measures up to the other two.

      Take Thee a Sharp Knife is supposed to be an impossible crime not listed in either Adey and Skupin's Locked Room Murders. Let's be honest. That's all the encouragement we need.

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    2. Ooooh, is that why TTaSN is on my wishlist? There are so many books I'm hopeful of finding, I honestly tend to forget what it was that brought a particular attention in the first place. I just have to trust that Past Jim did his research and decided it was a book Future Jim would enjoy :)

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    3. Don't trust Past Jim! I think he's plotting with Past Tom to get their hands on all those future releases by taking our places. They can't be trusted!

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  4. that will charm and entertain readers who count Leo Bruce, John Dickson Carr and Edmund Crispin among their favorite detective novelist.

    If you can mention a writer of humorous detective stories in the same breath as Edmund Crispin then you've definitely got my attention.

    And I suppose it's time I checked out Leo Bruce. Buying books in Australia is next to impossible at the moment but there are a couple of the Sergeant Beef books that are actually available and not too hideously expensive - would you recommend either Case with Four Clowns or Case with Ropes and Rings?

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    1. Case with Four Clowns is one of those rare who-will-be-done-in-and-by-whom, but not one of his best or funniest mysteries. Case with Ropes and Rings is a much better detective story, but not as brilliant as Case for Three Detectives and Case for Sergeant Beef. If you can find copies, Neck and Neck and Cold Blood also come highly recommended.

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