Louis Trimble was an American academic and, as noted elsewhere, "a forgotten writer of the post-World War II," who wrote science-fiction, westerns, detectives and penned two science-fiction mystery hybrid novels, Anthropol (1968) and The Noblest Experiment in the Galaxy (1970) – forming the short-lived Anthropol Detective Agency series. Trimble also has an impossible crime novel to his credit, Fit to Kill (1941), which "follows in the well-worn footsteps of Philo Vance and the early copy-cattish Ellery Queen." Believe it or not, Trimble's dalliance with the locked room mystery is not what attracted my attention.
Trimble definitely tried to go for the pulp aesthetics in Date for Murder, but by today's standard, the story's as tame as a neutered tomcat. For starters, "date ranch," is not a euphemism for a desert brothel, or something sleazy, but simply a date farm producing packages of the sweet fruit from the date palm ("Manders' finest") – which makes it still a seedy enough place for murder or two. Date for Murder stands closer to S.S. van Dine and Ellery Queen than the pulps. Or, to be more precise, the Van Dineans from outside New York like Anthony Boucher, Clyde B. Clason and Kirke Mechem. More on that in a moment.
Mark Warren is an ex-crime reporter on borrowed time, "six months, a year at most," whose health forced him to move to the date country of the Coachella Valley in the Californian desert. There he works as a part-time country correspondent and mans an out-of-the-way gas station, which is where the story begins. One morning, Idell Manders pulls into the station, filled her tank and went off again when a car came off the Palm Springs highway as she drove past it and shot at her – other car turned and started chasing her. Mark naturally followed and found her hiking half mile from Coachella. She managed to shake them off by driving the car over a cliff ("she set the throttle and jumped out"). I don't know if it's commendable or a missed opportunity that Trimble didn't title the story Fill Her Up. Anyway, Mark accompanies her back home, to the Manders' Range, where they find a drinking party in full swing. The car she was riding in belonged to one of the guests, James Link, who appears to be "frightened half out of his senses."
Next morning, Idell calls Mark to ask him to return to the ranch, because she found Link's body at the bottom of the swimming pool. And it wasn't an accident. A rope was "lashed around his waist, holding him against the ladder, tied to a rung." When the body is pulled from the pool, she notices "the apparent appearance of strangulation" and "that faint, bitter smell" associated with cyanide poisoning. There you first echo of the Van Dine-Queen School.
First of all, there's the bizarre situation of the crime scene itself ("why should he be poisoned and then drowned?") or why the murderer found it necessary to carry the victim to the pool and fix him to the bottom rung ("...a pretty big risk"). Mark Warren is only there on invitation and basically an outsider/amateur detective, but knows and closely works together with the policeman in charge, Sheriff Tom Rourke – who know each other from Mark's days as a crime reporter. Naturally, the movement of the characters around the crime scene plays a key role, patterned into that collection of bathroom-and-bed alibis, complemented by some modest, but bizarre and colorful, clues. Such as poisoned dates, a dead canary, a private pet cemetery, a stopped clock, a suicide buried as natural death and two additional murders. And, of course, there's a spot of blackmail hovering in the background.
Those additional murders deserve a brief comment. I picked Date for Murder with the express purpose to not have to tag another review with the "locked room mysteries" toe-tag, mix things up a little, which is why my heart sank when the second victim locked herself into a room where the murderer, somehow, appeared to polish her off. The door even had to be broken down like a proper locked room murder. Who would genuinely believe I had no idea the story had an impossible crime and only picked it for the collection of unusual alibis? Well, the locked room angle was quickly dispelled to return to the other, more pressing questions. Such as the alibis. The third murder happens late into the story and now almost everyone appears to have a perfectly good alibi. Starting the whole alibi game from scratch with less than a quarter left to go. The ending comes when Mark Warren and Sheriff Rourke gather all the suspect in the living room to expose whodunit, but does it all hold together? Yes... and no.
Date for Murder is a typical, so-called second stringer batting in the minor leagues of the American detective story and the ending betrays it. There are one, or two, things which "played into the murderer's hand" that are just second-rate (SPOILER/ROT13: Gurer ner gjb zheqreref jbexvat gbtrgure, ohg Yvax'f obql jnf erzbirq naq svkrq gb gur obggbz bs gur cbby ol n guveq crefba jbexvat vaqrcraqragyl sebz gur zheqreref). However, it's impressive how Trimble used everything from the date farm setting and the morally untethered characters ("seems they all roam around like a bunch of wild animals") to the odd clues and bedroom-and-bath alibis to punch up, what's ultimately, a simple and somewhat routine plot. However, while no Christopher Bush, Trimble's handling of those various alibis Boucher highlighted is not bush league. So everything appeared to work out better than it perhaps had any right to.
Louis Trimble obviously was not the most stylish mystery writer or best plotter of his day, but judging by Date for Murder, he tried to be the best mystery writer he could be and put more work into the plot than some other second-stringers encountered on this blog. I'm looking at you, Dana Chambers! Date for Murder can hardly be called perfect, however, I enjoyed it as a scrappy, mostly solid second-string detective story trying to punch above its weight.
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