The
Fort Terror Murders (1931) served as my introduction to both
the pulpy, spy-tinged crime fiction of Francis
van Wyck Mason and an exceedingly rare, well hidden subcategory
of the locked room and military mystery novel – set in lonely,
desolate army posts and fortresses. Since then, I've found two more
novels that belong to this very specific subcategory, George
Limnelius' The
Medbury Fort Murder (1929) and Mason Wright's The
Army Post Murders (1931).
Brian Skupin's Locked
Room Murders: Supplement (2019) appended that list with a fourth
novel, Van Wyck Mason's The Sulu Sea Murders (1933), which
described the locked room problem as the "shooting of a man
alone in a room at the guarded top of a tower on a military base."
The military base here is a godforsaken outpost on a small, sultry
island, Sanga Sanga, on the edge of the Sulu Sea in the southwestern
Philippines.
The Sulu Sea Murders
is the seventh title in the Captain Hugh North series and begins with
Captain North listening to the dying words of a pearl diver, George
Lee, who had been shot at a dive bar, but the only substantial thing
Lee can tell him is that the shooter had a butterfly tattooed on his
arm – mostly rambling and raving about a sunken ship, pearls and
the "blue dog's belly." So its up to Captain North, an
intelligence officer of the Department of Criminal Investigations, to
apprehend his murderer. A task bringing him to the gates of Fort
Winfield.
Fort Windfield is an old
Spanish fortress, nicknamed Killers' Castle, where the "withering,
nerve-blasting heat" made "killing easy" and the
natives say that the fort has been unlucky ever since "the
bleeding hands of Spanish slaves" had reared its solid walls. A
commander during Spanish times had gone on a killing spree and there
have always been "an unholy lot of suicides," which makes "a sinister Jolly Roger" more suitable to raise on the top
of the guard tower than the Stars and Stripes of the United States. A
bad reputation that scarcely improved under the iron rule of the
unpopular, much despised commanding officer, Major John Flood.
Captain North feels upon
his arrival that something is not quite right, because normally, men
tucked away in distant corners of the world welcomed strangers and
particularly an army legend, like North, but the "weary,
heat-tortured men" reminded him of card players "interrupted
by an intruder" – right before a game for high stakes. Why is
everyone so interested in the barometer dropping? These are the first
signs that the case is not going to be as easy as Captain North had
hoped.
The man who killed George
Lee is quickly identified as Private Paul Laval, of B Company, who's
placed under arrest and confesses to have shot the diver during an
argument. But what Captain North learns too late is Laval's past
circus career as an acrobat, escape artist and human-fly. When goes
to check on the prisoner, Laval had indeed found a way out and left
behind a dead guard. A second, practically identical, murder soon
follows with the victim dying with that strange phrase on his lips, "blue dog's belly."
The Sulu Sea Murders
actually comprises of two different, intertwined, story lines tied
together in the last few chapters, but the contrast between the first
and second half of the book showed how much this series occupied the
borderlands between the adventure, detective, espionage and pulp
fiction – colored with the palette of the regional mystery novel.
The first half is a mild adventure/thriller with an escaped murderer
running loose on "a postage-stamp island" and Captain
North eavesdropping military style or diving to the sunken ship
without any equipment, which gave the book one of its best and most
memorable scenes. Captain North is presented as someone who's as much
at home on the pages of an adventure story as he would be tangling
with villains in James Bond-style spy thriller, but the second half
revealed him to be somewhat of a Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John
Thorndyke!
After the second murder,
the primary suspect is kept in protective custody in one of the top
rooms of the tower, guards posted at the stairs, with the only other
way up being two hundred feet of unbroken masonry. A physically
demanding wall to climb and impossible to complete without being seen
by the sentries below, but the person who was held there was found
with his head blown to pieces. However, the description from Locked
Room Murders: Supplement wrongly described that the victim had
been all alone, which is incorrect, but a chemical experiment
eliminated this suspect when it showed his gun had not fired the
fatal shot. Captain North also relies on his scientific knowledge to
crack the locked room problem, but not before carefully constructing
and then having to discard a "once glittering theory." A
unexpected, but nicely done, false-solution.
The correct solution to
the shooting at the top of the guarded tower was and unexpectedly
good, and interesting, trick, but not for the usual reasons.
Van Wyck Mason shamelessly "borrowed" from two short impossible crime stories written by the
same, highly regarded, writer, but I detest those two stories and
finding out that their solutions were melted together here to create
a superior locked room-trick earned him my forgiveness – because he
showed how these tricks should have been used in the first place.
Although some will likely disagree with me on that point. But there's
more to the second half than the impossible shooting.
I already mentioned
Captain North conducting experiments and building theories, but
there's also a surprisingly amount of clueing and fair play that
almost makes you forget certain details were glossed over. The
Sulu Sea Murders has a busy plot and might have missed a thing,
or two, but don't believe it was ever explained how exactly Laval got
out of his prison cell. You can say he was an escape artist, but the
cells are inside a centuries old fortress with thick walls, arrow
slit windows and iron eyes where prisoners were shackled to back in
the days. So you have to show how exactly he was able to escape.
Another thing that remained unexplained is who bandaged the wounded
pearl diver.
Nevertheless, in spite of
these smudges on some of the finer details, the main plotlines were
clearly stated and resolves in a highly readable blend of the
traditional, Golden Age detective story and the pulp-style adventure
thriller. And these two different styles came together in a
spectacular way when Captain North tried to lay a trap for the
murderer. Sometimes things don't go exactly as planned! This all
helped make The Sulu Sea Murders the best I've read so far by
Mason and will be hard to beat as my personal favorite Captain Hugh
North title, but The Yellow Arrow Murders (1932), The Hong
Kong Airbase Murders (1937) and The Munitions Ship Murders
(1941) all look promising. There's always Mason's standalone locked
room mystery novel, Spider House (1932). So this blog hasn't
seen the last of Mason or Captain North.