Murder at Bayside (1933) by Raymond Robins

Raymond Rodney Robins was an American soldier with a distinguished military career and there were few officers, if any, who knew as much about the capabilities and limitations of tanks, but he didn't earn his stripes on the battlefields of that small, European skirmish – known in the annals of history as the Second World War. Robins was one of the dedicated and competent professionals who prepared his nations for "the challenge of a global war." You can read a memorial to Robins here.

The memorial also highlighted "an intensely cultivated and literary side" to Robins, which manifested in a book written together with his wife, Ruth. A detective novel in which "the inner workings of the Colt .45 Service Revolver" supplied "the intricacies of the plot" and "the key of the mystery."

Robins' Murder at Bayside (1933) is not particularly well remembered today and too obscure to be even listed on the Golden Age of Detection Wiki. A veritable who's who of who the hell are these guys, but a (digital) copy of Murder at Bayside is surprisingly easy to obtain. You can download a free copy from the Internet Archive or buy a properly edited, dirt cheap ebook edition published by Phocion in 2019. I believe the reason why Murder at Bayside had slipped through the cracks of public consciousness is that the book is somewhat of an anomaly within the American detective story of the 1930s, because it squarely falls within the thoroughly British "humdrum" school of Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode – focusing more on the how than the who-and why. I was particularly reminded of Victor MacClure's Death Behind the Door (1933).

This is, perhaps, not very surprising considering the engineering background and technical expertise of Robins, but an American "humdrum" mystery is not something I had read before. So let's dig in!

Robert Williams is a young, Baltimore lawyer and narrator who receives an invitation from a client, Charles Evans, to "go down to Bayside for some duck-shooting." Charles and his brother, Edwin, were born out of their time and have "the temper which would have written fresh pages in the history of the old West," but they're kept in check by their uncle, Cyrus Evans. A self-made man who made his pile in "the swashbuckling days of the turbulent nineties" and kept "an inquiring finger on the business of the South" during his retirement years. Strangely enough, his adopted son, Tom, is "a chip off the old block with a vengeance." And he made a name for himself as a criminal lawyer. They lived together at Bayside with Charles and Edwin subsisting on their uncle's charity.

When he arrives at Bayside, Williams learns from Tom that someone has been lying low around the premise and suspects this is not an ordinary hobo, but a former client he defended in court, Jim Hirstein – a convicted murderer whose day of execution had been set when he broke jail. Hirstein becomes the first suspect when Cyrus is found down by the boat landing with a bullet in his back.

However, the police quickly receives confirmation that Hirstein has an unassailable alibi for the time of the murder and they shift their attention to the people who were present at Bayside when that mysterious, fatal bullet was fired. Williams statement that he heard only one shot, where others have heard two, places one of the family members in the dock. And what follows is a trial that ended (melodramatically) as quick as it started without resolving the murder. This is the point where the detective of the story, John Patrick, enters the picture.

John Patrick is Williams' senior partner, a southern Dr. Lancelot Priestley, who looked like "the living prototype of the traditional Southern Colonel" and he had developed "a belated interest in the field of criminology," but was "more fit for arm-chair detection" than good, old-fashioned legwork. Patrick and Williams decide to ferret out the murderer, but, regrettably, the second half of the story was a bit dull compared to the opening chapters that concluded with the hasty trial. You can blame this on the second half continued the play story as a whodunit, instead of an inverted detective story, because the murderer and overarching scheme have become blindingly obvious at this point – which made clearing all the extraneous matter dull, unexciting detective work to read. Not even a second, somewhat late, murder could liven up the story.

All of that being said, the gun-trick was not bad and can be viewed as a borderline impossible crime, in line with Ellery Queen's The American Gun Mystery (1933) and John Dickson Carr's "Inspector Silence Takes the Air" (collected in Thirteen to the Gallows, 2008), which is why the second half should have concentrated on figuring out how it was done. It would have probably made for a much more interesting and engaging read.

So, on a whole, Murder at Bayside is not an unheralded, long-lost classic of the detective story, but, as an American take on the British humdrum school of detection, it's a fascinating curiosity that comes recommended to fans of Crofts, Rhode and MacClure.

A note for the curious: Murder at Bayside was published under Raymond Robins' own name and Ruth Robins is not credited as co-author, but the novel is dedicated to "the girl who really wrote this book."