Case for Three Detectives (1936) by Leo Bruce

Last month, I half-excitedly alluded in a short story compilation post, "Locked and Loaded, Part 3: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mysteries Stories," to a number of planned review of some obscure, out-of-print detective novels – carefully picked from Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). Scavenger along the muddy banks of obscurity never guarantees you'll find something good or even moderately interesting, but my recent scavenger hunt resulted in the slimmest pickings to date.

Robert Brennan's The Toledo Dagger (1927) represents a breathtaking low in the genre's history and a textbook example why S.S. van Dine and Ronald A. Knox decided to put down some rules. E.G. Cousin's Death by Marriage (1959) attempted to bridge the gap between the traditional and modern schools with an inverted how-did-he-do-it plot, but a lack of clueing regarding the locked room-trick entirely undermined what Cousin tried to do. Anthony Lejeune's Mr. Diabolo (1960) gave it the good old college try, but over promised and massively under delivered. Surprisingly, the best one of the lot came from a mid-tier writer, Hampton Stone, whose The Girl with the Hole in Her Head (1949) ended up being a better whodunit than a locked room mystery. Yes, there was also August Blanche's prescient "Lars Blom" ("Lars Blom and His Disappearing Gun," 1857/63) and Masahiro Imamura's genre-bending Magan no hako no satsujin (Death Within the Evil Eye, 2019), but neither are listed in Locked Room Murders. So they don't count. But what to do when you run into a parade of mediocre or downright bad locked room mysteries? You simply return to an old favorite and hope it stands up to a second, usually more critical, examination.

I fortunately had a bit of luck last year when returning to some old favorites from the likes of John Sladek and Hake Talbot. So, following the aforementioned letdowns, decided to finally take a second look at one of my all-time favorite (locked room) mystery novels from the 1930s. But did a second postmortem yield different results? Let's find out! 

Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936) introduced the world to the best comedic detective of the period, Sergeant Beef, whose bull-in-a-china-shop methods and "a look of rather beery benevolence" belies a startlingly rational mind with a capacity for common sense – played to great effect in his first of eight novel-length appearances. Something of an accomplishment considering Sgt. Beef is more or less a background character as he cedes most of the pages to the titular detectives and his perpetually embarrassed (future) chronicler, Lionel Townsend.

Lionel Townsend becomes involved in a murder case as a guest of Dr. Alexander and Mary Thurston during one of their weekend parties at their Georgian manor house. The other guests include Alec Norris ("an unsuccessful writer of novels very different from murder mysteries"), David Strickland ("some sort of protege of the Thurstons"), Sam Williams ("the family lawyer") and the Vicar, Mr. Rider, who "really does the most unbalanced things when purity's called into question." At the Thurstons' weekend parties, everyone talked a great deal and every topic under the sun is discussed. So, naturally, the dinner conversation turns to the topic of crime and detective with Norris doing most of the talking ("...he pretended to be contemptuous of the topic"). Norris posited that "literary crime is all baffling mystery and startling clues" whereas "in real life, murder, for instance, nearly always turns out to be some sordid business of a strangled servant girl." So "no premeditated murder could puzzle the police for very long," because "where there's a motive and the victim's identified, there's an arrest." That opinion is going to be tested that very night when a cry of terror is heard coming from Mary Thurston's bedroom.

They find the closed door to her bedroom double bolted, top and bottom, from the inside and, when smashing through the upper panel, they observe Mary Thurston's face ("more crimson than white") on a pillow – a clear cut across her throat. But when the door is broken down, nobody except the Mary Thurston's body is found in the bedroom. There's an unlocked window that can be opened, however, it overlooks a twenty-foot drop and an undisturbed flowerbed below. And ten feet to the window above. So how the murderer entered and left the room is a complete mystery. A locked room mystery! Just like that, the members of the house party find themselves in the middle of one of those blasted drawing room mysteries they had been discussing over dinner. But things get even better the next day. 

Early in the morning, those "indefatigably brilliant private investigators who seem to be always handy when a murder has been committed began to arrive." The first to arrive in his Rolls Royce is Lord Simon Plimsoll and his manservant, Butterfield, who brought along a small laboratory worth of photographic equipment. The second detective to arrive on the scene is M. Amer Picon, "a very curious little man," whose frail physique is topped a large egg-shaped head and speaks to Townsend with "more command of French" than he "had previously credited him with." The third and final detective is little round-faced priest, Monsignor Smith, who "a knack of saying the most disturbing things" or "whispering mystically." I think most seasoned mystery readers immediately recognize Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown in Lord Simon, Amer Picon and Monsignor Smith. Bruce created a trio of genuinely striking and splendid caricatures of the three most recognizable fictional detective of the era who contrast wonderfully with the "deplorable crudeness" of Sgt. Beef ("'Ere... 'ave you been blackmailing Mrs. Thurston?").

So the sergeant's future chronicler prefers to tag along with the three celebrated amateur reasoners of some repute as they unearth a treasure trove of clues, motives, faked alibis and hidden connections. They all apply their own characteristics, easily recognizable methods to uncovering those clues and questioning everyone involved. All the while, Sgt. Beef is in the background saying, "I know 'oo done it." Sgt. Beef tells Townsend he has already reported his findings to his superiors, but he was told to wait till they've had their say. I've never been able to forget his next few lines, "Well, I'm waiting. Only I wish they'd 'urry up about it. With their stepsons, and their bells, and their where-did-the-screams-come-from. Why, they try to make it complicated." I've heard echoes of those lines in my head every time a detective is playing up their part.

Now if this had been nothing more than a tongue-in-cheek treatment of the 1930s detective story and some of it's celebrated characters, Case for Three Detectives would have been the model for how to parody the detective story. Case for Three Detectives is not only a spot-on parody of Lord Peter, Hercule Poirot and Father Brown, but an accurate and very shrewd pastiche of Sayers, Christie and Chesterton.

Lord Simon, Amer Picon and Monsignor Smith all arrive at different conclusions and present their solutions, which are quite good and ingenious on the surface, but, if you're familiar with the originals, you'll notice how perfectly their false-solutions mirror those originals – incorporating favored plotting-technique, tropes and themes. Sayers believed "it was much more interesting to try to figure out how the crime was committed than who done it," which is reflected in Lord Simon's technical and clever explanation to the locked room problem. Amer Picon constructs his solution around, what else, the eternal triangle ("...beware of that little triangle. He is dangerous"). Monsignor Smith's solution is perhaps together with Knox's "Solved by Inspection" (1931) the best Chestertonian detective story not actually written by Chesterton. Nick Fuller rightly called the three false-solutions "very perceptive" and ended up making the story so much than some lighthearted ribbing of the detective story. What impressed me as much this time around is how he it makes sense here that the false-solutions outshine the correct one at the end.

Everyone loves a good false-solution, but, more often than not, the false-solution turns out to be a better, much more satisfying explanation than the correct solution (e.g. John Rhode & Carter Dickson's Fatal Descent, 1939). I've seen people complain that Sgt. Beef's correct solution is boring and lacks the radiant brilliance of the three false-solutions, but that always struck me as missing the point. Sgt. Beef is introduced as one of those uncouth, flatfooted and hopelessly out of his depth village policeman who prefers to be spending time at the pub drinking beer and playing darts. The story and particularly the ending would not have worked had he come up with a dazzling ingenious and original solution to the murder. Sgt. Beef is supposed to come to the right, uncomplicated solution through routine policework while the three detectives are "crawling about on floors, applying lenses to the paint-work, and asking the servants the most unexpected questions." That's the joke!

So, to cut a long, rambling review short, Case for Three Detectives has only gone up in my estimation and more than stood up to a second, critical examination. Bruce artfully intertwined a ribbing parody with a perceptive pastiche that both take aim at three of his already well established contemporaries and their creations. Bruce demonstrated great insight in his debut as he used all the funny characters, comedic bits and genre tropes to craft a clever and thoroughly entertaining detective story. A highlight of the 1930s detective novel full with rivaling detectives, false-solutions, faked alibis and an impossible murder that comes highly recommended. 

A note for the curious: if you loved Bruce's Case for Three Detectives, I highly recommend you also take a look at Knox's The Three Taps (1927) and Michel Herbert & Eugène Wyl's La maison interdite (The Forbidden House, 1932). They can be read as proto-types of Case for Three Detectives with rivaling detectives and multiple solutions. The Forbidden House even has a line echoing Sgt. Beef complaining about so-called detectives making things needlessly complicated.