The Creeping Jenny Mystery (1929) by Brian Flynn

I took a break from Brian Flynn after a string of disappointing novels, ranging from the awful The Sharp Quillet (1947) to the middling Reverse the Charges (1943) and The Swinging Death (1948), but the untimely death of Rupert Heath didn't, exactly, put me in the mood either – resulting in the temporary shuttering of Dean Street Press. Yes, temporary, because DSP is back in a limited capacity. DSP send out an email, back in May, announcing they have "now officially transitioned into Dean Street Press Limited" to continue their "legacy of uncovering and revitalizing good books." Recently, they reprinted Eleanor Farjeon's Miss Granby's Secret (1940) under their "Furrowed Middlebrow" banner.

As of this writing, nothing new has been added to their series of vintage mystery reprints, but surely, they at least want to finish up reprinting Flynn and Moray Dalton. Just not in the same quantity as before. Either way, a good time to finally return to Flynn and others resurrected by DSP.

The Creeping Jenny Mystery (1929), published in the US as The Crime at the Crossways, is the seventh title in the Anthony Bathurst series and not one that appealed to me at first. Bathurst is largely absent from the story and the plot description didn't capture my imagination at the time, but The Creeping Jenny Mystery is apparently a first-rate, 1920s detective novel ("...lines up four surprises as neat as a row of dominoes, and topples them with skill"). Steve Barge, of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, who rediscovered Flynn called The Creeping Jenny Mystery as "a deeply satisfying mystery" with "no massive bells and whistles on it" ("no locked room, no unbreakable alibi"). So decided to store it away for my return to the series and having now read it, I have to disagree with Steve on The Creeping Jenny Mystery not having any massive bells or whistles.

If bells and whistles are defines as tropes like locked room murders, cast-iron alibis and dying messages, The Creeping Jenny Mystery plays on a trope not often explored in a Golden Age country house whodunit – namely the gentleman thief. Or perhaps, in this case, a gentlewoman cat burglar.

Over the course of six weeks, Creeping Jenny became a household name in the southern counties of England following a series of "daring robberies" from its stately homes. A calling card was left behind after each robbery reading, "With Creeping Jenny's compliments. She takes but one." Creeping Jenny pinched Sir Graeme Grantham's diamond tie-pin and Mrs. Stanley Medlicott's pearl necklace, but left "very much more valuable articles" untouched ("quite in accordance as it were with the terms of the visiting-card"). This places the character of Creeping Jenny firmly in the tradition of the gentle rogues from Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin and E.W. Hornung's A.J. Raffles to Edward D. Hoch's Nick Velvet and Gosho Aoyama's Kaitou KID. Henry Mordaunt, K.C., has read about the thefts in the newspaper and worryingly notices Creeping Jenny getting nearer to his own home, The Crossways. Not without reason. The local papers have reported extensively on the engagement of his youngest daughter, Margaret, to Captain Cyril Lorrimer. And she was to receive from her fiancé the famous "Lorrimer Sapphire" for her engagement ring. Mordaunt has a hunch that the famous is exactly the type of thing to attract the thief and upset the engagement party. Sure enough, Mordaunt receives a note from Creeping Jenny announcing the intention to visit the engagement party at The Crossways ("expect me some time after eleven o'clock to-night").

Nothing appears to have happened during or after the party, but, on the following morning, a body is found lying in "a huddled heap of horror" at the bottom of a disused well. By the way, bodies down the well is the DSP version of bodies in the library as they happen to have several vintage mysteries in their catalog in which a body is discovered at the bottom of an old, disused well. Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, bodies-in-wells is not an overly used crime scene or premise, even in classic mysteries, but keep finding them in the DSP reprints. Just from the top of my head, you have Flynn's The Creeping Jenny Mystery, Moray Dalton's The Strange Case of Harriet Hall (1936), E.R. Punshon's Murder Abroad (1939), Francis Vivian's The Singing Masons (1950) and one, or two, other titles that escape me at the moment – probably something by Christopher Bush. But that as a side observation. After the shocking and brutal murder, they discover the sapphire is gone after all despite certain precautions and security measures. So the game is very much afoot.

Anthony Bathurst is, as noted above, is largely absent from the story and his place is taken by two other characters. Inspector Baddeley, of Scotland Yard, whose previous appearance was in The Billiard-Room Mystery (1927), and the lawyer Peter Daventry from The Case of the Black Twenty-Two (1928) and Invisible Death (1929). Daventry wants to call in Bathurst, "Sir Austin Kemble, the Commissioner of Police, simply swears by him," but Mordaunt doesn't want an amateur detective meddling in the case ("certainly not at this juncture"). Bathurst appears in name only, until "Chapter XVI" to answer Daventry's letter about the case. Even then it takes a while before he finally appears, in person, to tidy up the whole mess. Until that moment arrives, tagging along with Baddeley and Daventry is not a chore at all. Baddeley and Daventry tackle the case with competence and zest.

A case comprising not only of a stabbed body at the bottom of a well, the theft of the famous sapphire, the mysterious identity of Creeping Jenny and the role she, or he, played in this country house drama, but other issues muddying the solution – ranging from a stolen dagger to an extraordinary bet made regarding the sapphire. Flynn weaves all the different, apparently crossed and knotted, plot-threads together, before pulling them apart again, with equal skill. Flynn understood his genre tropes and knew how to find his way around a plot. That allowed him to sometimes get away with certain things that would have died a death in the hands of a less talented writer. For example (SPOILER-ISH/ROT13) gur zheqrere'f vqragvgl naq zbgvir ner obgu pyrireyl uvqqra sebz gur ernqre, ohg gur zheqre boivbhfyl cynl frpbaq svqqyr gb gur inevbhf cybg-guernqf yvaxrq gb Perrcvat Wraal zlfgrel. Ubjrire, Sylaa cerfragf vg va fhpu n jnl vg qbrfa'g srry yvxr vg cynlf frpbaq svqqyr nf vg'f tbbq rabhtu gb unir pneevrq n pbhagel ubhfr zlfgrel jvgubhg fgbyra trzf be png ohetynef. V nyfb rawblrq ubj boivbhf gur nafjre vf gb gur Ehffryy Fgerngsrvyq cybg-guernq, hayrff lbh'er hanjner gur nhgube jnf n znffvir Fureybpx Ubyzrf snaobl. But adds to the overall enjoyment either way.

So, on a whole, I think The Creeping Jenny Mystery shows the detective story was ready to leave the 1920s behind and enter its golden age, plot-wise, because the story itself reads like it was written 8-10 years earlier. It reads like the Roaring Twenties had just begun, instead of being on its last leg, with its country house setting, stolen jewels and a cast of bantering Bright Young Things. Only difference is that the scene of the murder is a disused well rather the customary private study or library. A slightly tighter plot, detection and storytelling could have pushed to the first-ranks of such earlier titles like The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928) and The Orange Axe (1931). Other than that, The Creeping Jenny Mystery reads like a fond farewell to the 1920s detective story plotted with nearly all the ingenuity of the then coming golden decade. So more than a little recommended to fans of Flynn and Golden Age detective fiction.