Murder Breaks Trail (1943) by Eunice Mays Boyd

In 2022, I compiled a post, "Curiosity is Killing the Cat: Detective Novels That Need to Be Reprinted," crammed with criminally obscure, out-of-print authors and novels that caught my attention over the years – all of which could use an infusion of fresh printer's ink. I hardly expected my list would have publishers rushing to prepare new editions of Reginald Davis' The Crowing Hen (1936) and Gardner Low's Invitation to Kill (1937), but hoped at least Anthony Berkeley's Top Storey Murder (1931) would have been available again and kept my fingers crossed for a reprint of Mignon G. Eberhart's From This Dark Stairway (1931). There are, however, two extremely obscure, then all but forgotten names on my list with reprint suggestions who have since made a remarkable return to print.

James Ronald is one of them and Eunice Mays Boyd is the other. During the 1940s, Boyd wrote three detective novels about a retired grocer and mystery reader turned amateur sleuth, F. Millard Smyth. All three novels take place in remote corners of the Alaskan wilderness with "its ghosttowns, its echoes of the rugged goldrush era and its eerie midnight sun." Anthony Boucher said of her work, "Mrs. Boyd has a pleasing detective and virgin territory" which are "full of Alaskan local color and as endless as a Northern night," but admitted she needed an editor with a blue pencil in order to "push her into the front rank." Nevertheless, the Alaskan setting of the series and book titles like Doom in the Midnight Sun (1944) and Murder Wears Mukluks (1945) intrigued me.

Regrettably, Boyd remained elusive and out-of-print, until recently, when her goddaughter, Elizabeth Reed Aden, not only began restoring her godmother's work back to print – she doubled the size of Boyd's original output. Aden discovered a number of previously unpublished manuscripts. Dune House (c. 1949), Slay Bells (c. 1957) and A Vacation to Kill For (c. 1968/70) were published between 2021 and 2023, but appear to be standalone mysteries. A fourth, previously unpublished F. Millard Smyth novel, One Paw Was Red (c. 1947), was found and currently being prepared for publication. Just no idea when it will be published as the website says the book is coming in either 2024 or 2027. You can read the backstory of these reprints and discoveries in the article "Publishing My Godmother's "Lost" Murder Mystery Manuscripts."

Murder Breaks Trail (1943) takes place in the fall of 1941 and is the first appearance of F. Millard Smyth, "a graying, insignificant grocer from Four Corners, Nebraska," who's on a small plane flying over Alaska. Smyth always wanted to see Alaska and had been invited along to, what was then still, the Alaska Territory on a work related trip with some important people.

The other passengers on the plane are a senator, Thomas Jefferson Lee, known in politics as 'Do-It-Now' Lee and accompanied by his daughter, Kilkenny Lee – who has the full attention Congressman Michael O'Hara. Tony Webber is the senator's secretary and Mayor Guy Fletcher, of Fairbluffs, rounds out the party. Lastly, there's the two-men crew comprising of Hope Mullen (radio operator) and Red Bailey (pilot). The reason behind this trip is an important mineral report ("who knows what treasure of essential minerals maybe hoarded in the vast, uncataloged store house of Alaska?") and get an idea how Alaskan prospectors live. Red announces an emergency landing to fix the radio, while the rest has lunch next to a lake. Then mysterious things begin to happen, before turning disastrous.

From his window, Smyth notices a thin, blue streak of smoke rising nearby the lake, but as the plane dipped towards the lake, it turned white and disappeared ("like someone put out the fire"). So who made and smothered the fire in the middle of nowhere of the Alaskan wilderness? When they land, they find an abandoned, turn-of-the-century ghost village of log cabins whose sod roofs rendered them invisible from the air ("...out of the sod grew dried weeds and tangled grass"). Why not do some urbexing the remnants of a long-forgotten, gold rush era settlement? As they poke around the cabins, they find everything from a dress dating back to the late 1800s ("it's all going to pieces in my hands") to "four hands of cards, lying every which way on the table" and the chairs pushed back – like a card game suddenly got interrupted. The discovery and first exploration of the abandoned settlement is the best and most memorable part of Murder Breaks Trail.

What made the original settlers abandon their village with all their possessions left behind like it was the Mary Celeste? More importantly, who's living there now? One of the cabins is tidy, comfortable with a still warm stove and an additional room stocked with enough supplies “to feed a man for a year.” But where is this mysterious occupant? Things get serious when the party returns to the plane and discovers the petrol has been drained, which effectively maroons them in Alaskan backwoods as King Winter approaches. Suddenly, Murder Breaks Trail becomes an entirely different type of detective story.

They assume, considering the important people aboard, they'll have every plane in the Territory out on a search and agree to wait it out until help arrives, but days turn into weeks with no plane in sight. So the party become the new residents of the abandoned village, living off on the supplies, foraging around the cabins to salvage whatever the original occupants left behind and dozen of little chores (shoveling snow, cutting wood etc.) to fill the days. Murder Breaks Trail turns into something of a Robinsonade-like detective story reminiscent at times of Robin Forsythe's Murder on Paradise Island (1937) and Herbert Brean's The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954). But in the snowy, frozen wilds of Alaska instead of a deserted island. The passage of time hardly improves their predicament as supplies need to be rationed, sickness strikes and someone ends up with a knife in their neck. Who wielded the knife? Was it someone from their own party or the unknown person prowling around the village on skis? Someone has to play detective to keep the situation and fraying nerves from entirely disintegrating.

F. Millard Smyth is a huge, life-long fan of detective stories, "I've been reading detective stories ever since I could read," carrying around a copy of a battered pulp magazine with a cover illustration and latest adventure of his favorite character, Flatfoot Flannagan – a character who's referenced constantly ("Flatfoot Flannagan had solved murders from nothing more than a smear of grease"). So as the only qualified person of the party, Smyth begins to investigate and takes great joy in finding such "time-tested clues" as "the stopped watch, the dropped handkerchief, the ravelings, and now the blotter" ("frowned upon lately by Flatfoot..."). Simply a sympathetic and likable amateur detective who at times appears to be out of his depth on his first outing. F. Millard Smyth is a detective character I can't help but see as a literary relative of Agatha Christie's Mr. Satterthwaite and Francis Duncan's Mordecai Tremaine. A romantic at heart who loves mysteries and never lost his boyhood hunger for adventure, which is what brought him to Alaska ("...the land he'd had to absorb from travel books and adventure magazines"). Sometimes shows he's not the cynical, hardbitten detective of popular fiction and warned by one of the party to take of his rose-tinted glasses and "get wise to what you're mixed up in." Sound advise, considering the circumstances.

So, as you can probably judge from the tone of this review, I didn't dislike Murder Breaks Trail, but the book has some undeniable, ruinous shortcomings and can see why Boucher wanted to let an editor loose on Boyd's work – even if it's only to improve the story's snail-like pacing. However, the snail-like pacing is not the most pressing problem of the book as for everything done right, two or three other things completely miss the mark.

Needless to say, the backdrop and historical mystery of the deserted village are the best part of Murder Breaks Trail. Very late in the story, they even uncover a dusty, forty-two year old "dying message," of sorts, which is always appreciated around here. Not to be forgotten, Boyd belongs to group of regionalist mystery writers that include S.H. Courtier, Todd Downing, Elspeth Huxley and Arthur W. Upfield whose best works feature crimes in foreign climes that feels native to that particular geographical/cultural location and period (e.g. Courtier's The Glass Spear, 1950). Boyd came close enough to writing exactly such a regional mystery, succeeding mostly with the historical plot-thread, but Boyd steadily diluted and cheapened her first detective story with an increasing amount of spy material. Even the historical plot-thread is not spared. Barely anything related to the espionage business is credible or convincing. I liked how the party had to lay a trap to capture the prowler and how that capture affected the second murder, but somewhat undermined when what they caught turns out to be caricature of a Nazi spy ("your own United States will come under our domination").

Worse of all, the plot is muddled, Smyth bluffs and guesses his way to the solution and the solution itself is nothing special or inspired. Murder Breaks Trail leans heavily on its snowy, evocatively presented setting, natural and historical, while the days shorten and "northern lights played a wild crack-the-whip in the sky." Not to mention an underdog detective you want to see prevail in the end (he's one of us, after all), but plot-wise, there's little to recommend outside of the historical mystery. Even the historical mystery comes with a caveat. So, after turning over the last page, I couldn't help but wonder what Murder Breaks Trail might have been in the hands of someone like Hake Talbot. Murder Breaks Trail has nearly everything to whip up a first-rate detective novel, but Boyd didn't succeed in extracting that first-rate mystery from her own ideas. And yet... I enjoyed Murder Breaks Trail and found it for the most part an engrossing read, especially the opening chapters. Not a great or even a good detective novel, in terms of plot, but neither terribly written or devoid of interest (as you can see from the length of this rambling review). Interesting enough to add Doom in the Midnight Sun to the big pile.