Murder Behind Closed Doors (1980) by Phillips Lore

Terrence Lore Smith was an American crime-and mystery writer probably best remembered today, if he's remembered at all, for his bestselling novel The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1969) about a computer programmer turned jewel thief – which was turned into a popular movie in 1973 starring Ryan O'Neal and Jacqueline Bisset. Something ran in the family as Smith was the son of a Methodist minister, Charles Merrill Smith, who wrote the Reverend Randollph series comprising of six or seven novels. I'm not entirely sure if the last title in the series, Reverend Randollph and Modern Miracles (1988), ended up being published or only announced as forthcoming.

Charles Merrill Smith died in 1985 and the few listings that can be found online credits his son as the co-author, suggesting Terrence Smith was either completing an unfinished manuscript or intended to restart the series, but died tragically that same year. Terrence Smith worked part-time as a courier for the Pikes Peak Library District in El Paso County, Colorado, while driving the library van on an icy road lost control and got hit by another car. Smith died from his injuries on December 7, 1988, aged 46.

So perhaps Smith's untimely death got the book canned, whether it be legal issues or simply an unpolished manuscript, but Reverend Randollph and Modern Miracles has a brief plot synopsis ("...miraculous, paranormal murders are occurring and the minister-sleuth must find an earthly explanation...") and someone rated it four-stars on Goodreads – implying it got published and copies still exist. But only in hardback. And the lack of paperback reprints made the hardback edition ridiculously rare. So rare you can't even find exorbitantly prized copies online! I'm not sure if it should be added to the list of lost mysteries or the one with all the extremely scarce titles, but fortunately, father and son collaborated on three detective novels during their lifetime. Writing under their shared pseudonym of "Phillips Lore," Charles and Terrence Smith penned Who Killed the Pie Man? (1975), Murder Behind Closed Doors (1980) and The Looking Glass Murders (1980). All three novels were published by Playboy Press and starred a multi-millionaire attorney, Leo Roi, who inherited the fortune his father raked together with his Prohibition-era shenanigans.

This short-lived series would not have caught my attention, or interest, had Murder Behind Closed Doors not been listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). An enticing entry describing four distinctly different (attempted) locked room murders. However, I got my copy of Locked Room Murders when I was still skeptical and hesitant when it came to detective fiction published after the 1950s. Everything about Murder Behind Closed Doors impressed me as one of those locked room curiosities that occasionally popped up during the second-half of the previous century. I reviewed a few on this blog like John B. Ethan's The Black Gold Murders (1959), Robert Colby's In a Vanishing Room (1961), Stephen Frances' The Illusionist (1970) and Tony Kenrick's A Tough One to Lose (1972).

What earned Lore's Murder Behind Closed Doors a special notation on my wishlist was a comment from John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, praising it as "a much better book with an unusual locked room plot" in his review of the first novel in the series, Who Killed the Pie Man? – calling Lore "one of the better locked room mystery writers of the 1970s-1980s" elsewhere. A copy finally landed in my lap last December and I can say right off the bat that Murder Behind Closed Doors is not a curiosity. It's actually quite interesting for two reasons: how it resettled a more or less traditional detective story of yore in then modern-day America and how the concept of a locked room murder is treated and received by the characters. So it proved to be an unexpectedly fascinating read considering the '80s presented something of a small revival for the traditional detective story and locked room mystery. Let's take a closer look at the story.

Phillips Lore's Murder Behind Closed Doors is dedicated to Raymond Chandler, "for his unparalleled Philip Marlowe—the great American detective," but reads like a mash of John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen. Funnily enough, every chapter begins with a quote from A.A. Milne's work. Chandler dragged Milne's The Red House Mystery (1922) behind the shed in his 1944 essay "The Simple Art of Murder" ("if the logic is an illusion, there is nothing to deduce"). Just one of the clues Lore had his tongue placed firmly in his cheek when he wrote the book. Anyway...

Leo Roi is a multi-millionaire lawyer, or to be more precise, an investigative attorney whose partner, Jack Pine, handles the courtroom end of business ("I build briefs and Jack tries the cases. It works pretty well"). Since he has more than enough money, Roi can afford to dabble in ethics, "lawyers' ethics are generally no better than those of the ordinary run of humanity, but I keep thinking they should be," who's not opposed to somewhat bending the rules. But never breaking them. A much needed quality when an old friend, Smith "Soldier" Jones, comes knocking to represent and possible defend one of his friends, Robert A. Garrison. A sculptor of some local fame wanted for questioning regarding the strangling of a Chicago advertiser, William Helld.

The Chicago advertising agency of Fruin, Helld, Forbes & Bascom threw a party for the cast and crew of the Black Ram Players to celebrate the opening of their play, Black, White and Blond, which was held at the home of the victim – whose body was discovered in the coach house studio of Garrison. That makes the case potentially explosive in 1980s America, because Garrison was Helld's "longtime companion." Roi assures his friend that fact does not bother him, personally or professionally ("as a man I'm more interested in my own sex life and love life than other people's"). Agrees to accompany Garrison to the police station, expecting him to be at least held as a material witness, but surprisingly get brushed off and send home. Why? Roi gets the answer from the Sun-Times crime reporter, Art Hough. The murder of William Heldd is a "puzzle mystery, locked room murder" as the door, windows and even the skylight were all found securely locked from the inside. They have a good laugh about it. Roi and Hough explain to Garrison that locked room murders only happen in fiction and "they never occur in reality." This locked room murder is no different as it's not really a locked room murder at all.

Hank Davis, "international film star who is appearing in the production," discovered the body when he missed Helld at the party, went looking for him and saw him lying on the floor of the coach house. And broke one of the windows to get inside. So he's the only one who logically could have staged an impossible crime by pretending he broke into a tightly locked coach house and the police is simply waiting with an arrest until they can pin a motive on him. Davis and Helld were ex-lovers before Garrison entered the picture. Either way, Roi's client is off the hooks for murder. Or so they believe.

A week later, they have "a real, live, genuine, double-dyed, locked-room, puzzle-mystery murder" on their hands when an anonymous tip leads the police to a second body, shot to death, inside the locked and bolted den of the coach house. A second locked room murder that places an entirely different complexion on the first. So now they have two impossible crimes. Hough points out to Roi that "most of the methods used in locked-room murders are absurd or unworkable and not the sort of thing anyone would really do" ("that's what makes this case so fascinating"), but admires "someone wild and crazy enough to kill with a flair" as most killings tend to be routine and boring ("...except to the participants"). Roi figures the seemingly impossibilities is a signature as easy to identify as a fingerprint, because "there just can't be that many people who could conceive of and execute two locked-room murders." But to find that person, Roi has to look beyond the private life of the victims and suspect.

That brings him to the theatrical company and advertising agency, which is when the story begins to taste a little pulpy. The play is produced by the son of a mob boss, Giovanni Palese, who tries to go legit and is busy cleaning up his public image doing charity or funding "art crap," but getting publicly involved in a double murder case could undo all of that – which gets the sympathy of the attorney. And even promises to look out for his interest, if the case allows it. Only for a third victim to get run through with a rapier inside the locked theater. The two characters Roi encounters at the advertising agency, Anson Forbes and Bonita Bascom, would have been completely at home in a 1940s pulp magazine or Clayton Rawson novel. Yes, there's a fourth locked room, of sorts, involving an elevator, but Lore saves that one for the very end of the story.

So how does Murder Behind Closed Doors stack up as a modern-day locked room mystery? Better than expected, but not for the reasons some might assume.

Firstly, the quality of the locked room-tricks with the first one being the best of the four. Theoretically, the trick is kind of brilliant, original even, but, as the crime reported predicted, somewhat absurd and perhaps impractical. Nonetheless, it's the kind of creative solution you hope to find in a locked room mystery. The second locked room-trick has been done before and since, while the third one is merely a filler impossibility (ROT13: n frys-ybpxvat qbbe) and even the murderer admits to that fact. So, on that account, it's more or less what you can expect from a most detective stories trying to string together more than two impossible crimes. What makes Murder Behind Closed Doors noteworthy, beside the first locked room, is how the impossibilities are treated and received. Going from bemused disbelief someone actually was stupid enough to try rigging up a storybook murder to almost surprised admiration a murderer is actually going around leaving bodies in locked rooms. A reader unaware of the history or status of the genre in 1980 might get the impression from Murder Behind Closed Doors the Golden Age-style (locked room) mystery never went away and Lore took the old warhorse for a little joyride. Instead of going through a two decade dark age. Lore unwittingly produced a very fitting novel to kickoff that first, short-lived revival and makes want to do another historical retrospective taking a closer look at the '80s. That's something for later this year.

Secondly, Murder Behind Closed Doors is not only about four impossible crimes. There's also the who-and why to be considered, which proved to be as unusual as the how with a memorable murderer and motive for creating a series of locked room murders – all “clued” in a somewhat unorthodox manner. I liked how the full solution punishes readers who (ROT13) whqtrq n obbx ol vgf pbire naq qernqrq n pregnva glcr bs fbyhgvba gb gur ybpxrq ebbzf jura n pregnva punenpgre vf vagebqhprq. I feared that possibility and even considered that character working cahoots with another character to get the job done (nsgre nyy, gur svefg ivpgvz jnf fgenatyrq). So the eventual solution came as a nice surprise. Even the routine solution to the second locked room murder and the attempt at a fourth was put to good use at the end. There is, however, an overall drawback to the story.

Lore tried to pack a lot in a very short novel counting a little more than a 180 pages with a lot of blank pages between chapters, whittling the page-count down to under a 170. In those pages, Lore introduced three locked room murders, separate casts of characters (theater and agency), plant clues, sprinkle around some red herrings and even introduce a personal sub-plot for Leo Roi involving his wife, Christina. Not to mention the delayed investigation until the second murder is committed. So Murder Behind Closed Doors was not bad at all, but obviously could have been better had it been given more room to develop. In that regard, Murder Behind Closed Doors reminded me of the work of Ton Vervoort, e.g. Moord onder de mantel der liefde (Murder Under the Mantle of Love, 1964), whose novels were written in a loose, light style with a small page-count, but always pleasantly full of clever ideas and unexpected surprises. Although you can't escape the feeling it could have been even better had it been properly worked out. Judging by Murder Behind Closed Doors, I suppose the same can be said about this series.

Nevertheless, as you can probably gauge from this unnecessarily long, rambling review, I enjoyed this unusual locked room mystery and the reason why you can almost certainly look forward to a retrospective of the 1980s impossible crime revival sometime in the near future. In the intervening time, I'm going to hunt down a few additional titles from that decade and this series. Probably The Looking Glass Murders. Next up... a return to the Japanese shin honkaku mysteries!