Glittering Prizes (1942) by Brian Flynn

Brian Flynn wrote in the Crime Book Magazine, in 1948, that he believes "the primary function of the mystery story is to entertain" and "to stimulate the imagination," but "it pleases the connoisseur most" when it presents "genuine mystery" – an "intellectual problem for the reader to consider, measure and solve." Flynn himself had an incredibly varied approach to ensure his detective fiction presented a stimulating and entertaining mysteries that took on many different shapes and designs. Covering everything from your standard whodunit and impossible crimes to courtroom dramas and pulp thrillers. And everything that can be fitted in between or stacked on top of it. Not all of his mysteries are so easily pigeonholed. 

Glittering Prizes (1942) is the twenty-eighth title in the Anthony Bathurst series and, according to the introduction by Steve Barge, the only time Flynn used the war as a backdrop. Typically, Flynn grabbed the opportunity to experiment with the wartime spy-thriller, but the reader has to figure out whether there's a private motive or a Nazi conspiracy behind "a peculiarly horrible double murder." Something you can never be quite sure of with the man wrote wildly different crime, detective and thriller novels like The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928), Invisible Death (1929), Murder en Route (1930) and The Edge of Terror (1932). 

Glittering Prizes opens with Anne Assheton, a famous Hollywood film star, docking in England, where she's swarmed by reporters and photographers, but she tells the gathered pressmen that one of the richest woman in the world crossed with her on the Myrobella, Mrs. Warren Clinton – a Nebraskan widow whose husband left her an immense fortune ("worth x million dollars"). Mrs. Clinton is an American "who had the honour to be born in England" and returned with the purpose of placing her "entire fortune at the disposal of the British Empire" to fight the menace that's threatening their freedoms and way of life. Mrs. Clinton tells in an interview she has plenty of ideas on how to put her fortune to good use, but nothing definite and a fortnight would pass before her name was plastered across newspaper headlines. So what happened during those weeks?

Mrs. Clinton booked a particular suite of rooms at the Royal Sceptre Hotel, Remington, which the habitual patrons knew as the 'Nonpareil' far beyond the financial resources of most. There she gathered a group of handpicked nine talented men and women with outstanding public records and personal qualities.

Admittedly, the introduction of all these characters slows down the opening chapter considerably, but absolutely necessary to setup one of Flynn's most audacious plots. Something to rival the barefaced cheek of The Padded Door (1932)!

So here they are, more or less, in order of appearance: Mr. and Mrs. John and Angela Ramage who are respectively a barrister with "an absolutely outstanding reputation" and a doctor as well as an M.P. for West Markham. A famous Shakespearean actor, Wilfred Denver, who's "exceedingly well read" with "a perfectly marvelous memory." Captain Ronald Playfair is an ex-Secret Service agent whose "exploits during the War of 1914-1918" won him a Victorian Cross and "was in Berlin in the February of 1933 when the Reichstag went up in flames." Sir Edward Angus, Conservative Member of Parliament for the Rigby Division of Holme, is "the coming man in British politics" whose "fighting speeches in the House" caught the attention of Mrs. Clinton. The Very Reverend Dean Theodore Langton, of St. Sepulchre's Cathedral, is a silver tongued preacher whom modern critics ranked as one of "the greatest preachers of all time." Lord Esmond Curte is both "an isolated, aloof figure" and a strongly opinionated orator whose views usually gets him labeled a reactionary or a ruddy Fascist. Rosamund Kingsley is a well-known explorer and Mrs. Clinton regards her as "the foremost woman of our times," which is why she was selected as one of the people whom Britain sorely needed at this "most critical moment in her history." Cedric Garnett is "a superb physical specimen" who shined in rugger, rowing and cricket who reminded Mrs. Clinton of the "thousands of robust young men" marching through Germany with "unflagging energy and boundless enthusiasm."

So this group of carefully selected, outstanding individuals were royally wined and dined upon arrival, but the after dinner conversation turned serious as their host explained she was going to subject them all to a test to rank their intelligence, initiative and quick-thinking – in order to pick the best two of the litter. Firstly, they have to find the counterpart or associate word to a list of mostly obscure words: Orpheus, Edyrn, Ulema, Roup, Iphicles, Reldresal, Eagle (two headed), Mazikeen and Premonstratensian. Secondly, Mrs. Clinton privately interviewed everyone and asked them seemingly irrelevant questions like if they had any knowledge of jiu-jitsu or bred canaries. When the results were tallied, Mrs. Clinton picked two names and the others were left wondering whether they had been the victim of an elaborate practical joke or had simply wasted their time. So they slowly retired to their rooms only to awaken the next morning to a sensational horror show!

Mrs. Clinton and her two handpicked defenders of the British Empire are nowhere to be found. So the hotel manager was fetched to open the door of the suite of rooms and discovered the nude bodies of the two winners, each had been shot through the left eye, but not a trace of the American widow! The local police immediately recognized they were out of their league and a call went out to Sir Austin Kemble, the Commissioner of Police, who dispatched Chief Inspector Andrew MacMorran and Anthony Bathurst to the scene of the crime. After questioning everyone involved, the story returns to the surviving members of the party as they begin receive threatening warning letters, mockingly signed "Auf wiedersehen! Heil Hitler!," promising to give a demonstration of their far-reaching powers. Like sending ticking packages with an alarm-clock inside or tempering with cigars. I loved the universal, unmistakably British response of the characters to these threats.

There are additional problems like the discovery of a third body and the "appallingly trivial" incident of "a big red china dachshund" in a basement flat window that keeps changing color. So it takes a while before Bathurst can sit down "to marshal on paper all the facts which he had so far been able to amass." A great and fun piece of armchair detective work as he reconstructs and cracks the code of the word association test, weighs the relevance of the questions and eventually retracing Mrs. Clinton's footsteps in England. All of this is beautifully complemented by a bit of cheeky, in-your-face clueing, but misdirection is where the plot truly excelled as a detective story. Glittering Prizes perfectly muddled the waters without mucking up the whole plot or dulling the clues. I spotted the clues and correctly identified the murderer, but Flynn kept me second guessing and a particularly slippery, carefully placed red herring briefly convinced me I had been on the wrong track the entire time. 

Some readers will probably accuse Flynn of stretching things again, but my only complaint about the plot (HUGE SPOILERS, SWITCH TO ROT13!) vf gung guerr zheqref vf dhvgr na rfpnyngvba sbe jung'f ernyyl abguvat zber guna n fuvcobneq ebznapr. Other than that minor quibble, I enjoyed Glittering Prizes tremendously as Flynn kept me second guessing about the solution and what, exactly, I was reading, but delivered with a clear and perhaps a little overly ambitious solution that lived up to its fantastically bizarre premise. A pure, unapologetic and delightful flight of fancy.