Exit for a Dame (1951) by Richard Ellington

Richard Ellington was an American radio actor, announcer and scenarist, who was the main writer on Dashiell Hammett's The Fat Man, but between 1948 and 1953, he also penned a handful of "deftly plotted, satisfyingly complex mysteries" with "an appealing medium-boiled hero" – an actor turned private investigator, Steve Drake. Ellington abandoned his writing career to run a small hotel, Gallows Point, on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. You can read more about Ellington's fondly remembered hotel in the comments of a 2008 review of It's a Crime (1948) posted on the MysteryFile blog.

The Thrilling Detective described the Steve Drake novels as "one of the unfairly forgotten P.I. series" of the period that at times "seemed to be almost wandering into amateur sleuth territory" with one of them "recalling an Ellery Queen impossible crime story."

Exit for a Dame (1951) is the fourth entry in this short-lived series and is listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) with no less than three, distinctly different impossibilities, but there are five in total – although the additional two are variations on the other impossibilities. So why is a detective novel littered with impossible crime material hardly remembered today? Well, the book has somewhat of a poor reputation. Barry Ergang told me to avoid it, because the impossibilities were "not fairly clued" or easily guessed at. And responded to my question on whether, or not, the impossibilities were at least somewhat original with a short, "no, not at all." A double negative!

So you can hardly call that encouraging, but, as a hopeless detective addict with an insatiable craving for locked room mysteries and impossible crimes, the prospect of a mediumboiled detective novel with a string of impossible situations still had its appeal. Since my expectations had already been blown to pieces, I decided to take the plunge without any expectations and turned out to be much better than expected! Not anywhere near an unrecognized masterpiece of the impossible crime story, but neither is it to be avoided. And now having read it myself, I understand why the story has left so many locked room readers crestfallen.

Exit for a Dame begins strongly with an excellently written, detailed account of the multi-impossibilities, covering the first seven chapters, which have the potential to deceive the unsuspecting reader into believing he's reading something on par with Norman Berrow's The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947), Herbert Brean's Wilders Walks Away (1948) and Hilary St. George Saunders' The Sleeping Bacchus (1951) – topped with a slight hint of Theodore Roscoe and Hake Talbot. Sadly, this side of the story was pushed aside in Chapter 8 to make room for a much more mundane, sordid and run-of-the-mill crime story. However, it did regain some of its earlier magic in the chapters explaining the various miraculous disappearances and ghostly occurrences.

Exit for a Dame has a great opening that begins on "one of those windy, screwball days in late March" when "spring decided to open the door on winter and gets kicked in the teeth for trying" on streets of Greenwich Village, New York.

Steve Drake is on an early morning stroll through Greenwhich Village when his hat is knocked off by a piece of heavy brown cardboard with "HELP" crudely scrawled on it with crayon. Drake noticed an elderly lady sitting in the open, second-floor window of one of the apartment buildings and her eyes are staring straight down at him. She kept staring at him in silence and unnervingly began to nod when he pointed to the piece of cardboard, but she remained silent and kept nodding her head. When the building's superintendent opened the door, they discovered that the old lady has been dead for over a week!

So how did the very dead corpse of Old Mrs. Vogelmeir nod her head? Who moved the curtains? How did this person, if there was somebody else in there, managed to get out of the apartment without being seen? And it was out of the question that anyone could have left through the windows. Drake witnesses a second impossibility when he returns there and is confronted with old Mrs. Vogelmeir's empty rocking chair creaking "gently back and forth against the bare floor" of the locked apartment. One of the two impossibilities not mentioned in Adey's Locked Room Murders.

I think the problem of the nodding corpse and her supposedly haunted apartment is one of the two highlights of the story, which is given a wonderfully simplistic, but entirely acceptable and believable, explanation – imaginatively used to create two very different impossibilities. Ellington would have done his idea and legacy a service had he condensed it into a short story, or novella, as it's too good to be stuck in this mostly mediocre novel.

Another impossibility comes to light with the introduction of Drake's ex-girlfriend, Marge Lewis, who walked into the apartment building minutes after the body of the old lady was found, but immediately walked out when she heard the police were on their way. She later explains that one of the residents of the apartment is Virginia May Roundtree, a female Uriah Heep, who had played a very dirty trick that had cost Marge a very good and cushy job. So he has a good reason to hate her, but now she fears the police will think she had motive to get rid of her, because Virginia Roundtree "literally vanished" in front of her eyes. One second Marge saw Virginia walking along the sidewalk towards her and the next she was gone. She had simply vanished in the blink of an eye!

An excellently posed and presented miraculous vanishing with several references to the unsolved disappearance of New York State Supreme Court Justice Joseph F. Crater, in 1930, but the practical solution is both disappointing and uninspired. Comparable to the strange, but disappointingly explained, vanishings from Brean's Wilders Walk Away.

The second highlight of the story comes when Drake is inspecting Virginia's "well-filled bookcase" crammed with book-of-the-month club novels, some of the obvious classics, bibles and "a sprinkling of mysteries," but there are also several hidden books of a more mature nature that leads him to a secondhand book dealer, Sydney Scales – who sells under the counter smut. Virginia's reading taste also included the occult with a special interest in demonology, witchcraft and voodoo. Drake found a copy on her shelves of Tom Toms in Top Hat and Tails written by a well-known paranormal investigator, Carol Sleet. One of the chapters detailed a series of experiments with the Yi King, an ancient Chinese book dealing with divination and magic, which "had been written long before the time of Confucius." An experiment with a set of so-called magic wands that could open a doorway to another world, but it ended with the strange, inexplicable disappearance of the woman who had attempted to open that phantom door. A trick that would later be repeated with Sleet's maid vanishing from a closely watched room.

Regrettably, the disappearance mentioned in the book is left unexplained, but you have to assume Sleet made it up in order to "fluff up" his material and the solution to the last vanishing is almost an insult to the reader's intelligence! Just mindbogglingly stupid.

There's not much that can be said about the seedier, mediumboiled side of the story. A murder in a secondhand bookshop is, or could possibly, be linked to the large sum of money that had been taken from Mrs. Vogelmeir's apartment, Virginia's mysterious disappearance and a couple who cheat on each other, but it was all done halfheartedly. And there were some missed opportunities. Such as the suggestion of a name-based alibi or the underwhelming identity of the murderer, because the relationship between the murderer and victims had an interesting aspect that should have been used as a red herring earlier on in the story. It could have made the reveal a genuine surprise.

Exit for a Dame was published around the time Ellington was winding down his writing career to move to the Virgin Islands (having already purchased the land in 1948) and strongly suspect he wanted to use as many of his best ideas before bowing out. So what he did is smash together two, or even three, different stories together to create Exit for a Dame. You can even see the seams where he stitched the plots together! For example, the parade of impossibilities in the opening chapters turn out to be incidental to the culprit. You'll know what I mean when you read it.

I can see why some people would end up hating it, but with your expectations dialed back to zero, Exit for a Dame can be an entertaining, pulp-style detective novel with the various impossibilities and linked plot-threads giving the plot a pleasant, maze-like quality – even if it failed to do something really good with it. So, year, it's mostly a mediocre novel, but I didn't hate it. And should not be avoided by rabid locked room readers. Just don't expect too much from it.