From This Dark Stairway (1931) by Mignon G. Eberhart

Mignon G. Eberhart was an American mystery writer whose life and career covered the better part of the previous century, publishing her first novel in 1929 and last one in 1988, before retiring and passing away in 1996 – aged 97. So she can be counted with Michael Innes and Aster Berkhof as the last and longest lived of the Golden Age mystery writers.

During her long, lucrative career, Eberhart became one of the top selling American crime writers and reportedly the first to be labeled "America's Agatha Christie." However, Eberhart was a very different kind of novelist closely linked to Mary Roberts Rinehart and the often dismissed "Had-I-But-Known" School of romantic mystery, domestic suspense and creepily atmospheric backdrops. Rinehart and her followers don't particularly interest me, but also think they're too easily dismissed as they've produced some first-rate detective fiction. For example, Mabel Seeley's The Listening House (1938), Anita Blackmon's Murder à la Richelieu (1938) and the works of Dorothy Cameron Disney and Lenore Glen Offord. Fine specimens of the American detective story.

Eberhart mostly wrote standalone mysteries and suspense novels, but she started her career with two series-characters, Nurse Sarah Keate and policeman Lance O'Leary – who appeared together in seven novels. These earlier works reportedly are true detective novels with their characters, plots and storytelling enhanced by an eerie mood and creeping atmosphere of doom. And the occasional impossible crime also helped putting the series on my radar.

The Mystery of Hunting's End (1930), listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), is an obvious choice, but it's From This Dark Stairway (1931) that has been on my wishlist for ages. John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, reviewed it years ago and identified it as "one of the uncommon examples of a Golden Age detective novel in the murderer's name is not revealed until the final sentence," which "is well worth seeking out for that tour de force bit of mystery writing alone." From This Dark Stairway somehow never got further than being jotted down on that big, messy pile on known as my wishlist, until last year, when it got reprinted by MysteriousPress/Open Road. So on the big pile it went!

The backdrop of From This Dark Stairway is Melady Memorial Hospital during "the worst of a few days of extreme heat in July" and begins following a day of stifling humidity, which filled the beds with heat stroke and putting nurses on edge – only things are about to get worse. And a lot stranger. Peter Melady, head of the Melady Drug Company, grandson of the hospital's founder and chairman of its board, is currently a patient of Dr. Leo Harrigan. Melady is scheduled for surgery and they've been trying to get his weak heart in shape for the operation, but, after years of friendship, Melady and Dr. Harrigan unaccountably became "the most determined of enemies." So why would Melady allow Dr. Harrigan to operate on him? That's the situation when Dr. Harrigan decides to go ahead with the surgery earlier than intended and wheels Melady on a gurney into the elevator to the operating theater. Somewhere along the way, the elevator gets stuck. And when it gets back to work, Nurse Keate finds an empty gurney and the body of Dr. Harrigan with an amputation knife in his chest!

So, apparently, Melady had killed Dr. Harrigan and made himself scarce, however, it was "physically impossible" for the frail, sickly Melady to have stabbed the bigger, heavier and more powerful Dr. Harrigan. But his disappearance also presents something of an impossibility. The hospital is locked for the night, "not much chance of an outsider getting into the hospital," but also keeps everyone inside. When the place is searched, Melady is not found anywhere. That's not the only puzzling aspect of, what the newspapers would call, the "Mad Mystery at Melady Memorial."

Melady was a collector of objects of art and had ask for a Chinese snuff bottle from his collection to be brought to his bedside ("something pretty to look at"), but the antique bottle is stolen following the murderer. Another puzzling aspect is the whereabouts of the formula for a new anesthetic, Slæpan, which Melady was about to market. Than there's the lump of chewing gum found on Dr. Harrigan's sleeve, possible fingerprints wiped from the knife handle and a surprising set of fingerprints found on the light bulb inside the elevator. Not to mention a surprising number of viable suspects wandering around the night-locked hospital. Melady and Dr. Harrigan have respectively their daughter, Dione, and wife, Ina, as fellow patients in the same hospital wing with Dione's husband, Court, wandering between rooms. And so much more!

From This Dark Stairway has a plot and setup that would been perfect for a Dell mapback edition. From the hospital setting that would have made for a splendid map on the back cover to the "What this MYSTERY is about" (an impossible disappearance, a stolen snuff bottle, a missing formula...) and "Wouldn't You Like to Know..." (why there wouldn't have been a murder if the patient in the charity ward hadn't died or why O'Leary thought the solution is "a plain as the nose on your face"). So despite its Had-I-But-Known trappings, Eberhart delivered a detective novel very much in the tradition of her then emerging contemporaries of the American Golden Age mystery, especially close to Ellery Queen's The French Powder Mystery (1930) and The Dutch Shoe Mystery (1931). The French Powder Mystery is one of the first detective stories to not reveal the murderer's name until the final sentence of the book and The Dutch Shoe Mystery takes place in a hospital, but there's also the thorough search of the crime scene and, when O'Leary makes his belated entry, rapidly leads the hapless Sergeant Lamb and Nurse Keate to the only correct solution and a very well hidden murderer.

So not necessarily a detective story pulling a grand surprise or a mind blowing trick, like Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, but bringing order and logic to a complicated tangle of apparently illogical incidents – revealing the only person who could have done it. And it does it very well. Well, mostly. If there's anything to complain about, plot-wise, it's that the motive is a bit impenetrable and next to impossible to arrive at the murderer's identity from the direction of motive, but other than that, it stands as a fine example of the American detective story from the early 1930s.

However, I would be amiss if I were only to highlight the plot and ignored Eberhart's excellently handling of the hospital setting and atmosphere. From This Dark Stairway takes place during Nurse Keate's various night shifts during an oppressive, sweltering heat wave with flies buzzing around desk lamps, thuds of late June bugs against the windows screens and the police ransacking the place for clues, while "the routine of caring for the sick" continued as usual. Even better is how the conclusion to case comes as a big storm is about to break to chase away the oppressive heat. It created a true moment of relief for the characters followed by O'Leary unraveling of the whole knotted, tangled affair with the name of the murderer being the final punctuation to the book. Bravo! Very much worth a look for fans of Golden Age detective fiction.