W.L. Fieldhouse is billed online as a legendary and prolific author of action, adventure and western novels, but my interest went out to a series of short detective stories he wrote for Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine about Major Clifford Lansing – an American military investigator stationed in Europe. Major Lansing appeared in nineteen short stories, published between 1979 and 1982, which have yet to be collected. So you can only read the series with such tantalizingly-titled stories as "The Two-Star Corpse" (1980) and "The Nuremberg Ripper" (1982) in their original magazine publication. This is perhaps something Crippen & Landru can remedy in the future.
Christmas for USAEUR personnel, stationed in West Germany, "is at best bitter-sweet and at worst painfully lonely," but even the housing districts with the military built, clone-like apartments buildings, where the married officers with their families live, are not entirely free of heartache. One evening, the dinner party of Captain Robertson is rudely interrupted by shouting, "you bastard! I'll kill you," followed by the sound of shattering glass coming from the apartment above. Major Conglose and his wife, Beverley, have another fight, but they never heard either of them threaten to kill the other before. So they pop upstairs to have a look.
What the downstairs neighbors find is a dead man, lying face down under the Christmas tree, surrounded by fragments of a broken bottle and scarlet stain covering the back of his neck caused by a sliver of glass that severed his spinal cord, but it's not Major Conglose – which places Beverley in a precarious position. Beverley confesses to Major Clifford Lansing, "the best homicide investigator in USAEUR," she has been having an affair for the past two months with the dead man, Staff Sergeant Wayne Selby. However, she has no recollection of what, exactly, happened to Selby. Beverley remembers they had been drinking wine and dozing off, but got slapped in the face and woke up to find her lover dead beneath the Christmas tree. There was nobody else in the apartment!
The front door was closed and the bedroom window unlatched, but there was no fire escape or a ladder extending from the roof above and the window looked out over an empty parking lot two stories below. Major Lansing "found no scratches to indicate that a grappling hook had been used" or "any traces of rope strand." The roof is made of slate, sharply slanted and frozen solid, which practically made it inaccessible and impossible to traverse. So that only left the closed, but unlocked, front door were it not that "people were staring into the corridor after they heard the woman shouting and the glass break." So, if Beverley is innocent, the murderer was either invisible or sprouted wings.
Major Lansing's work is not made easier by the discovery the victim was a womanizer who turned his hobby into a lucrative, but criminal, side-occupation bagging him plenty of suspects and motives. But the key to the case is figuring out how a third person could have entered and left that apartment unseen.
I think Fieldhouse actually came up with not only a new and original solution to a murder in a watched room with no apparent escape, but nicely inverted the concept of a locked room mystery by revealing there was a different kind of impossibility at the heart of the plot. The real puzzle is (ROT13) abg ubj gur zheqrere pbhyq unir rkvgrq gur ncnegzrag jvgubhg orvat fcbggrq, ohg ubj vg jnf qbar jvgubhg oernxvat nal obarf orpnhfr gurer jnf na boivbhf, hathneqrq rkvg va gur ncnegzrag. My only complaint is that the short story format smothered the plot. There were a ton of leads, false trails and clues crammed together and they all needed more room to breath and space to move around in.
Nevertheless, if "Murder Under the Christmas Tree" is indicative of the overall quality of Fieldhouse's stories, the Major Lansing series definitely deserves to be collected. This is a series I want to return to in the future and will keep an eye out for the uncollected stories until a collection materializes.
On a final, related note: I've actually come across quite a few army-themed detective novels and short stories over the years. So here's a brief overview of those reviews.
Christopher Bush's The Case of the Murderer Major (1941), The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel (1942) and The Case of the Fighting Soldier (1942).
Laurence Clarke's "Flashlights" (1918).
Paul Doherty's A Murder in Thebes (1998).
Michael Gilbert's The Danger Within (1952).
George Limnelius' The Medbury Fort Murder (1929).
Van Wyck Mason's The Fort Terror Murders (1931) and The Sulu Sea Murders (1933).
Bob van Oyen's Na afloop moord (Afterwards, Murder, 1953).
Franklyn Pell's Hangman's Hill (1946).
Theodore Roscoe's I'll Grind Their Bones (1936).
Edgar D. Smith's "Killer in Khaki" (1941).
Rex Stout's Not Quite Dead Enough (1944).
Mason Wright's The Army Post Murders (1931).
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