Death Against Venus (1946) by Dana Chambers

Albert Leffingwell was an American advertising executive who co-founded two ad agencies in the 1920s and embarked on a not unsuccessful, but short-lived, career as a writer of hard-and medium-boiled mysteries with some apparently having a hints of screwball comedy – somewhat reminiscent of Craig Rice. During an eight year period, Leffingwell wrote thirteen mysteries that appeared under his own name and two pseudonyms, "Giles Jackson" and "Dana Chambers." The first novel to appear under the Dana Chambers name was Some Day I'll Kill You (1939) and introduced his most successful series-detective, Jim Steele, who would go on to star in half a dozen additional titles. Steele likely would have continued solving murders had his creator not died in 1946 aged only 50 or 51. So the author along with his books began their slow, posthumous descent into relative obscurity ("you don't hear much about Dana Chambers these days"). And, from what I gather, it was not due to a lack of quality.

Curt Evans wrote in his review of Some Day I'll Kill You, "A Country House Mystery, Shaken and Stirred," Chambers was "praised in his day by no less than Anthony Boucher and Bill Pronzini has told me that he owns all the Leffingwell novels and has enjoyed his work." I checked The Anthony Boucher Chronicles: Review and Commentary, 1942-47 (2001/09) and Boucher generally holds Chamber's work in high regard. Chamber's The Last Secret (1943), "part spy story, part deductive mystery, part science-fiction, party anti-appeasement propaganda," got added to the wishlist based Boucher's glowing review ("breathless, bloody and beautiful in all departments"). Something curiously worth noting is Leffingwell's wikipedia page mentions that Jim Steele is referenced several times in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

So who knows if Leffingwell had sunken so deeply into obscurity had he not died so relatively young, added another twenty novels to his name and remained in print a decade or two longer. He might at least have gotten a page on the GADWiki out of it!

I very likely would never have even heard of given any particular attention to Leffingwell or Chambers, but, as you can probably guess, the name Dana Chambers is noted by Brian Skupin in Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) – who listed the book to be published during his lifetime. Death Against Venus (1946) was automatically added to the special and separate locked room wishlist without actively looking for it. But every now and then, serendipity throws you a bone. Or in this case, the original, unabridged edition of Death Against Venus.

Death Against Venus is a standalone mystery which begins in the Florida Keys with the introduction what could have been a series-character, Richard Vine, who's presented to the reader as a beach bum. Vine sleeps on the beach or under the life guard's stand, steals dimes and quarters from unattended newspaper stands and has been working on an alcohol dependency by drinking a lot. Until three years ago, Vine was "one of the most brilliant diagnosticians in the United States," but an affair with a married patient, Victoria "Vee" Garland, ended all of that. Vee gave birth to a stillborn baby and began to sank into a deep depression that made her resident patient of Dr. Andrew Woolcot at Rest Haven. Woolcot explained to Vine "that with a temperament like hers and a family full of neurotics in her immediate ancestry, you wouldn't gamble a plugged nickel on how long the depression would last." Vine exiled himself to Florida until three years later a telegram from Vee is delivered at his flophouse address ("...I need you... come quickly... tell no one underscore no one..."). So he returned homeward to visit Vee and Woolcot at Rest Haven to find out what's going on.

Vine learns from Woolcot that about a year ago, Vee began to show the most amazing signs of quick recovery and a complete recovery was in the cards. But she suffered a very bad relapse six months ago. The reason for the relapse is that Vee is "becoming more and more firmly and unshakeably convinced with every day that passes, that for the past few months someone has been trying to kill her." Firstly, there were the nightly, unintelligible whispers in her bedroom that kept her from sleeping. Secondly, so-called obscene signs ("inverted crosses, phallic symbols") began to manifest themselves all around her. Lastly, Vee is convinced someone gave her a nasty crack on the back of the head while out on a stroll. However, the doctor and nurse believe she tried to kill herself again. Is someone really out to get Vee or is she steadily losing her mind? Something that has to be seriously considered when one of her nurses is shot under circumstances making Vee the only person who could conceivably have pulled the trigger. Vee was taking a bath in her a little three-room apartment at Rest Haven and told her nurse to try on her canary yellow sweater, but, moments later, she leaps out of the bath when a bang came from the living room and finds the nurse sprawled face down in front of the mirror – shot in the back. The male nurse sitting in the corridor outside swears nobody had gone in or out of the room when the shot rang out.

So nobody could have slipped away unseen and you can't shoot yourself in the back ("...unless you're an acrobat"). Vine believes whoever is behind the nightly whispers and obscene symbols decided Vee is not going to be scared back into depression, which is why they're now taking actual shots at her. This is not the last detective story trope Vine encounters as he tries to save Vee by finding the person, or persons, persecuting her.

Vine tackles the case like a proper amateur detective and compiles a list of people he needs to interview, but one of these talks turns deadly when the interviewee, a silver dagger sticking between his shoulder-blades, stumbles back into the room – murmuring a dying message with his last breath. This second killing also has a locked room element. Vine notes that the front and back entrances where "guarded within seconds after the knife had been plunged" and, disregarding the "innocuous family retainers," it faces them with "an invisible killer who evaporates into thin air from the sixteenth floor." Naturally, one of those complicated, tangled wills comes to light that can be read as an invitation to murder.

But is it any good? That's extremely mixed bag of tricks, but lets start with the good first. I can see how Chambers garnered such well-known fans as Boucher and Pronzini as he appears to have been a better writer than most mid-list American writers from the era who hovered between medium-and hard-boiled tough guy fiction and the traditional detective story. Hampton Stone's Jeremiah X. Gibson series and the more cerebral of Brett Halliday's Mike Shayne novels (e.g Murder and the Married Virgin, 1944) spring to mind.

Regrettably, the plot became a bit of a tangled mess by the end. Boucher warned in his review that the diffusion of guilt is bound to annoy some readers, which is true, but the solution revealed that there were actually two different, concurrently running plots sharing the same cast of characters with the various complications arising from these threads crossing each other. Something that can absolutely be done, convincingly even, but requires the skilled, crafty hand of an expert plotter. Judging by Death Against Venus, Chambers appears to have been somewhat lacking in that department. I found the motive behind one of entangled plot-threads to be a trifle weak and the explanation for the pair of locked room murder and dying message extremely basic to the point where you have to wonder why they were presented like that in the first place. I would have settled for a gunshot through a knothole or the murderer making an unseen getaway by donning the uniform of a domestic servant or postman, but nothing labyrinthine like that in Death Against Venus.

Death Against Venus began promising enough with its introduction of Richard Vine and sketching a premise recalling Jonathan Latimer's Murder in the Madhouse (1935) or Patrick Quentin's Puzzle for Fools (1936), but the ending left me both unconvinced and very dissatisfied. Not one that should go on the shelf with the overlooked, long-forgotten classics.