Murder in the Zoo (1932) by Babette Hughes

Babette Hughes was an American playwright and writer who published more than twenty one-act plays, semi-autobiographical novels, non-fiction books about her work in public relations and two largely forgotten detective novels, Murder in the Zoo (1932) and Murder in Church (1934) – out-of-print since their initial publication in the 1930s. That was until last March, when Coachwhip Publications reissued them together in a twofer volume. So let's find out if Murder in the Zoo has been criminally overlooked or justifiably forgotten for the past nine decades. 

Murder in the Zoo and Murder in Church form a short-lived, two-book series featuring Ian Craig, a professor of Oriental philosophy at Earl College, who's introduced in the prologue. A friend of him, Scott, wonders why Craig buried himself in Oriental philosophy without making a contribution to the field and putting up with a college professor wages, because he was neither lazy or someone who used the college as a refuge. Craig's personality is somewhat of an unacknowledged character-arc running through the story, but he soon diverts the attention to the time he solved the murder of a cynical colleague. Courtney Brown was a psychologist and behaviorist whose "enthusiasm for art, philosophy, literature and science" was "eaten away by sheer cynicism." The kind of cynicism that "aims at your appetites and capacities." Craig believes in the Confucian theory "that life can be reduced to a series of patterns" and incorporated this philosophy in a process of deductions that eventually exposed the murderer. Craig gives Scott a journal in which he wrote down his involvement in the Courtney Brown case.

The journal opens with the discovery of Brown's body in the animal laboratory maintained by the psychology department on the third-floor of Science Hall at Earl College. Yes, the title of the book is a little misleading. The animal room, or "zoo," is stacked with cages filled rats, guinea pigs and pigeons, wooden packing cases containing ants and devices all over the floor for testing animal intelligence – like mazes, problem boxes and ladders. Brown's body was found sprawled beside the largest animal maze with a bloody hammer next to him. At the time of the murder, there a little more than half a dozen in Science Hall or visited it.

There are two students, Grace Mullin and Jack Tobey, who were carrying out an experiment in another laboratory. Craig was working in the philosophy library and the animal-loving janitor, Axel Hulse, who found the body was cleaning the various rooms and mopping the stairway. But there were also a few visitors. Such as the victim's widow, Jennifer Brown, which is always a suspicious role to play in a murder mystery. Particularly when she doesn't appear to be grieve stricken and takes delight in shocking people. She accuses a colleague of her husband of murder. Professor Charles Frampton was seen at Science Hall around the time of the murder as was a newspaper reporter, Dick Sterling. Finally, the janitor saw an unindentified man who they simply refer to as "the unknown dago." So the two interchangeable homicide detectives, Thompson and Andrews, have more than enough suspects to pick on.

So a fairly standard premise premise in which a body, a weapon and a small, closed-circle of suspects with possible motives, but Murder in the Zoo has a few creative touches to the storytelling, characterization and detection.

Firstly, Craig is not welcomes with open arms by Thompson and Andrews as the brilliant amateur detective who's going to crack a tough nut for them. On the contrary, he has to con his way into the position claiming he has been asked by the Sun to be their on the scene special reporter. Even then they insist on his credentials. So he has to strike a deal with Sterling to get a press card and hold on to his front row seat to the investigation. Funnily enough, Thompson and Andrew's insisting on credentials contrasts nicely with then sharing a drink with Craig a year before Prohibition was repealed. Craig has bottles of liquor (like Spanish brandy) all over his room and bootlegging actually plays a minor part in the story, which was alluded to in the prologue. Secondly, while the story contains a timetable and the solution partially hinges on demolishing a Christopher Bush-style alibi, Hughes largely eschews physical evidence in favor of psychological detection. Murder in the Zoo leans towards the detective fiction of Helen McCloy. Only difference is that the psychological detection here is soaked in Buddhism and Eastern philosophy. However, Craig dabbles a little in Freudian psychology as one of the suspects has a mother complex.

That really helped to cover up the fact that neither the bare-bones plot nor the solution can be called ingenious or inspired, as a puzzle-driven detective story, which could have been fixed had a little more attention been directed towards (ROT13) gur zheqrere'f zbgvir naq nyvov – both were underplayed or ignored to be carted out as a last-minute surprise. A pity as they represented the most interesting aspects of the solution. Sure, there were some psychological hints, here and there, but hardly anything that can be called rigorous fair play. And that's hard to miss once you reached the ending.

So were Babette Hughes and Murder in the Zoo criminally overlooked or justifiably forgotten? Neither. Murder in the Zoo is serviceable enough, second-string mystery novel and have come across much worse of such obscurities (e.g. Ian Greig's The King's Club Murder, 1930), but there's an enormous gap between Hughes' Murder in the Zoo and the works of the more well-known American mystery writers of the early 1930s. Yeah, another example of a detective story that was better written than plotted.

I've not been lucky lately when it comes to picking titles from Coachwhip, but I keep hoping to find another Kirke Mechem, Clifford Orr, Roger Scarlett and Tyline Perry somewhere in their catalog.