The Toledo Dagger (1927) by Robert Brennan

Robert Brennan was an Irish writer, journalist and a founder of The Irish Press newspaper who was not only active in the republican movement, but, during the 1916 Easter Rising, acted as a Commandant of the Volunteers – which got him imprisoned and sentenced to death. The death sentence "was reduced to a sentence of penal servitude" and released a year later. Brennan was eventually appointed the Irish Free State's first minister to the United States and "he wrote mystery stories as a hobby."

A 2012 guest-post by Monte Herridge on MysteryFile, "The Series Characters from Detective Fiction Weekly #10: Oscar van Duyven & Pierre Lemasse," discusses a short-lived series Brennan wrote for Flynn's Weekly Detective Fiction. A series starring a New York millionaire, Oscar van Duyven, who's the owner of an electric fan corporation and his boyish companion, Pierre Lemasse. Van Duyven and Lemasse appeared in ten short stories, published in the magazine from July 1926 to January 1927, but Monte Herridge was not overly impressed with the short stories. A "mostly average" series with "very little complexity." Herridge's capsule reviews of the short stories suggests Brennan was hopelessly stuck in a previous era of the genre that was quickly fading away in the 1920s.

So the short stories are of no interest to me at all, but Van Duyven and Lemasse had one last appearance in a novel-length detective story, The Toledo Dagger (1927). A novel Robert Adey jotted down in Locked Room Murders (1991). It was only a matter of time before a copy ended up in my hands.

Honestly, I wish I had saved myself the effort, time and money, because The Toledo Dagger turned out to be a strong contender for worst detective novel from the twenties. S.S. van Dine's "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories" (1928) and Ronald A. Knox's "The Ten Commandments for Detective Fiction" (1929) tend to get dismissed these days, but often overlook, or outright ignored, is why they were compelled to establish a set of rules for writing detective fiction – namely an attempt to prevent or mitigate future abortions like The Toledo Dagger. You know, the kind of detective story fans try to hide from outsiders, while praying for it to be wiped out of existence. Yes, I'm going to ROT13 the hell out of that mentally defective, hackneyed ending in a moment. First, the groundwork! 

The Toledo Dagger finds Van Duyven and Lemasse in France where they've rented a villa from a rich diamond merchant, Anatole Rodin, who lives with his daughter at his own villa, the Pavilion de la Reine. Lemasse asks Van Duyven to extend their stay, because he very much like to know what Rodin is afraid of as Lemasse is "convinced that there is a great fear at his heart." An answer to the question arrives in the form of a mysterious and dodgy character, Leon Darracq, who stays the night in the Queen's Room. A room supposedly haunted by the ghost of "the fascinating Queen Jeanne of Naples," but, come the next morning, Darracq has not emerged from the room and neither does he answer the knocking. So the door is broken open and inside they find Darracq's undressed body with a "thin, elongated dagger-wound in the naked breast." Admittedly, this the only point in the entire story with any semblance of intelligence and humor.

Rodin pokes his head inside the room and notes "the large window is closed on the inside" and "a cat could not leave through the Gothic windows," which he takes to mean that the murderer is hiding somewhere in the bedroom – a perfectly logical and sound conclusion given the circumstances. So he orders his servants to get the guns, guard the room and windows until the police arrives. The arriving policemen receive orders from their inspector to fire at "the slightest movement at the window." An order that is taken very literally. When the room is finally entered, the only occupant is a dead man with a dagger-wound and a thorough search eliminated one possibility ("n frperg bhgyrg sebz gur ebbz"). Please keep that point in mind. But it briefly rekindled my hope there might be more to the story than the first two, three chapters suggested. Up to that point, everything pointed straight to Rodin as the culprit who was setting up the locked room and fabricating an alibi. Something that would have made The Toledo Dagger even more transparent than the ghost who supposedly haunts the Queen's Room. However, it would have been an infinitely better solution than the one we got, but, once again, I'll get to that in a minute.

Van Duyven and Lemasse "had some success in solving mysteries which baffled the police," but the story dissolves from there into a cliched, third-rate thriller common of the era. They tussle with some unsavory character, connected to the victim, which involves a coded telegram, a black bag, duplicate daggers, a spot of blackmail and "tattoo marks of the star and crescent." There's also some gun pointing and switcharooing, which became so tiresome and predictable that it ruined what could have been the only quasi-exciting point in the story. Pierre Lemasse apparently gets shot point blank, "lying as still as death," suggesting he actually got killed. What a way to end your series by killing off one of your series-characters and retire the other after catching his murderer. Somehow, miraculously, the shooter missed and Lemasse simply played dead ("...he had five more bullets in the revolver"). But it gets worse. Lemasse tells Van Duyven the shooter couldn't find a bullet wound, muttered "he wouldn't take any chances" and tied him in a grinning bundle for his friend to find. Not shooting him again or clubbing him over the head with the bud of the revolver. Even though mere seconds ago, the shooter swore he was going to put him "out of the way." By the way, the shooter and murderer are two different persons.

So what about that awful solution? I debated with whether to outright spoil it or ROT13 it, but decided on the latter because it should be up to you how you want to discover how truly awful it really is. If you want to know now, brace yourself (ROT13/SPOILERS AHEAD): gur zheqrere vf erirnyrq gb or Nyoreg, gur ohgyre, jub ragrerq naq yrsg gur Dhrra'f Ebbz guebhtu n frperg cnffntr gung pbaarpgrq gb uvf ebbz ol n iregvpny fgnvepnfr. Nyoreg xvyyrq Qneenpd orpnhfr “ur jnf gbb yblny” gb uvf znfgre naq qnhtugre, ohg jnvg, vg trgf jbefr. Gur zna ur xvyyrq jnf abg Qneenpd ng nyy, ohg uvf gjva oebgure! Qneenpd jnf xvyyrq, qhzcrq va n cbaq naq uvf gjva oebgure erghearq gb gur ubhfr nf Qneenpd jurer Nyoreg zvfgbbx uvz sbe gur erny Qneenpd naq fgnoorq uvz gb qrngu. I was actually angry after reading that.

I would not be surprised if The Toledo Dagger was one of the books Knox had in mind when he set down his rules. It's almost everything Knox condemned as bad detective fiction balled up into a pulpy lump of meh and mediocrity. You would think someone who lived a life like Brennan would bring more to the table than a wheelbarrow full of cliches that were already a quarter of a century out-of-date in 1927 or has met enough interesting people to give his characters a vague hint of possessing something approaching a personality. I've seen pulp illustrations and covers with more characters depth and believable emotions than the paper cutouts populating The Toledo Dagger. And that's coming from a plot guy!

So, purely taken as a detective novel, The Toledo Dagger represents the early, Golden Age detective story at its very worst and demonstrates why some guidelines and distinctions between various forms were sorely needed at the time, but neither succeeds it as a third-rate, pulp-style mystery thriller – which is an incredibly low bar to clear. Just being a third-rate, pulp-style mystery thriller is a handicap that can be overcome by simply being marginally entertaining, but The Toledo Dagger commits that unpardonable sin of being bad and dull. I should have used that meh and mediocrity line to end the review, but you get my point by now. 

A note for the curious: it would be a little unfair to end this review without mentioning that this series has a historical claim to fame. Anthony Boucher credited Curtiss T. Gardner's Bones Don't Lie (1946) with introducing the first big-business detective on record. Back in 2021, I found a contender to that claim in Bruce Sanders' Pink Silk Alibi (1946) and commented at the time that it was a funny coincidence that an American and British writer came up with the idea of a corporate detective at practically the same time. I was unable to find out which book got published first, but that hardly matters now because Brennan had them beat by two decades. So don't expect anymore Brennan to appear on this blog, but I can practically guarantee that the next one is going to be a classic. Stay tuned!