Key Without a Door (1988) by Anthony Lejeune

Last February, I reviewed Mr. Diabolo (1960) by "Anthony Lejeune," a pseudonym of Edward Anthony Thompson, who aspired to write a genuine, Golden Age-style locked room mystery – paying homage to John Dickson Carr and Clayton Rawson. There is, however, a considerable gap between Lejeune's aspirations and his delivery. The opening chapters of Mr. Diabolo reads like the genuine article, but the plot never went beyond the basics and utterly failed to deliver on its promise. I noted in the review, the plot would have been somewhat impressive had it been written for a younger audience. Mr. Diabolo fits in better with Enid Blyton's The Mystery of the Invisible Thief (1950) and Bruce Campbell's The Clue of the Phantom Car (1953) than The Three Coffins (1935) or Death from a Top Hat (1938). The plot is that basic.

Nevertheless, Mr. Diabolo is not a trudge to read and actually made curious about the second, intriguing-sounding impossible crime novel listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) written nearly thirty years later.

During the late 1980s, Lejeune started a short-lived series starring an Oxford professor, James Glowrey, whose tranquil life in academia gets uprooted in two genteel thrillers, Professor in Peril (1987) and Key Without a Door (1988). The latter is listed in Locked Room Murders as a "disappearance of a man in pajamas from outside his front door," but is it better than the impossible vanishing from his 1960 locked room mystery? Let's find out!

The first chapter recounts how James and Cressida Glowrey met and befriended their neighbors, Norman and Eve Prestwick, while walking their dogs and getting the dog leads entangled and struck up a friendship – it helped that both Cressida and Eve are Americans ("...strangers in a strange land"). Norman Prestwick is the director of Compuparts, a manufacturer of "miniaturised computers," who has political aspirations "nursing what was considered a safe seat." One early morning, the Glowreys find Eve on their doorstep with a startling news that Norman is gone ("I mean he's gone. Disappeared. Vanished"). The circumstances under which he disappeared are downright mysterious. While Eve was preparing breakfast, Norman fetched the milk and newspapers from the doorstep, but never came back inside. A minute, or two, pass before Eve goes outside to have a look and only finds Norman's bedroom slippers ("one was just outside the door, the other was halfway up the steps") and his dressing gown draped across a trashcan. So how could Norman have possibly vanished from his own doorstep as "he could hardly have walked through the streets barefoot and in pyjamas, unnoticed, even at that time in the morning." Nor had he enough time to reach the end of the street, before Eve poked her head out of the front door.

Yes, the disappearance of Norman Prestwick is not exactly, technically-speaking anyway, an impossible disappearance, but more a mysterious vanishing without an apparent reason. It reminded me of the disappearance of Dr. James Earle from The Hog's Back Mystery (1933) by Freeman Wills Crofts. One moment he was sitting by the fire in his bedroom slippers reading a newspaper and the next moment he was gone. So only a quasi-impossible vanishing, but those first couple of chapters really do capture the spirit of John Dickson Carr and reads like a impossible crime story.

James and Cressida go out to investigate, but the pleasant, sunny weather and the London sounds of mid-morning bustle makes "Eve's tale of a man vanished in the shadowy quiet of that day's dawn" seem "more incongruous than ever" – like "being rapt away by the fairies." That's not the only mystery that has James enthralled. Eve discovered an extra key, a front door key, on Norman's key ring that does not fit their own front door. Doors without keys are ten a penny, but a key without a door is something very different, "there is something inherently mysterious about an unknown key," but regrettably does not heed his own warning that "one should never gratuitously open doors without knowing what's behind them." James finds the door fitting the key, opens it and discovers a body. And, from there on out, the whole story simply collapses into itself.

Key Without a Door goes in a handful of chapters from a fascinatingly-posed and presented mystery of a man in pajamas being spirited away from his doorstep to a boring, uninspired thriller. The underhanded business dealings, government contracts, emerging technologies, kidnappings, attempted murders, successful assassinations and even a Great Villain (known only as Shaman) are enough to distract the book away from the tantalizing disappearance of Norman. Only thing really worth mentioning from the second-half is the open ending ("I have a fancy, a fantasy, that one day I shall meet him again myself") suggesting a continuation of the series, but, for whatever reason, it never materialized.

So the puzzling vanishing is not brought up, until James has an inspirational moment showing how it could have been done and it certainly is an interesting take on this type of solution. Very different from how I imagined it was done (more on that in a minute). But nothing more than that. And nothing special or good enough to save the book as a whole. On the contrary, it made the second-half even worse as you feel the first three chapters lured you into an old, dirty van with the words "FREE CANDY" crudely scrawled on the side under false pretenses. I had hoped the twenty-eight year gap between Lejeune's impossible crime novels would have given his second stab at the form some weight and more substance, but Mr. Diabolo is definitely the better of the two. Mr. Diabolo might have unwarranted bluffed and bragged its way through the story without anything to show for it at the end, but at least remained consistent throughout. More importantly, it tried to do something with its alluring premise for longer than three chapters.

I can't recommend Key Without a Door. Not even to locked room and impossible crime fanatics.

A note for the curious: the last time I tacked one of my alternative, armchair solutions to a review was back in June when reviewing Norman Berrow's The Spaniard's Thumb (1949). What put this idea into my head is the suspicious description of the front door setting of the Prestwick home, which is not at street level, but half-basement height forming a small area with trashcans and several steps up to street level – surrounded by iron railings. A nice little place, obscured from view, to pull some shenanigans. In roughly two out of three of these vanishing mysteries, the victim, one way or another, had a hand in their own disappearance. I reasoned Norman could have left a parcel of clothes and shoes in one of the trashcans. So when Norman goes outside to get the milk and papers, he puts the clothes over his pajamas, puts on the shoes and maybe a hat or cap with a wig attached to it and walks away. One minute to throw on the clothes and one minute to get as far away from the front door as possible. Eve looked down the street looking for a barefoot Norman in pajamas. Not a normally dressed stranger. There was no danger in Eve calling to him to ask if he had seen a man in pajamas going down the street, because the milkman was doing his morning round. Who would you ask if they had seen Norman in that situation... a complete stranger of the milkman? Makes sense, right? But, of course, nothing at all was done with it and gave too much importance to the setting. So another marvelous misfire of a false-solution from the Roger Sheringham of the Netherlands!