Last month, I reread Herbert Brean's Wilders Walk Away (1948), which disappointed the first time round, but turned out to be quite good when read on its terms without the unreasonable, highly stacked expectations build up over the decades – demanding a John Dickson Carr-like masterpiece. So wanted to return to Brean's work by sampling one of his obscure, rarely reprinted short stories.
The story opens with "Tick" Johnson and his partner/narrator, Fred Murphy, wake up in their one-room hotel apartment by "the devil's own door-pounding" coming from the hall outside their door. There they find a patrol man, a plainclothes detective and the hotel manager trying to break down the door to another apartment. When the door is broken down, they see the body of a man spread crosswise on the bed with a bullet wound in his heart and a .32 revolver lying on his chest. Sergeant McClelland is ready to call it a suicide, "door was locked and there's no other entrance," when Tick buds into the investigation and begins pointing out all the inconsistencies – which all tell him "that lad didn't kill himself." Tick introduces himself and his partner as a pair of private detectives, but Murphy confides to the reader they're not private detectives. They're disgraced newspaper reporters "hunting jobs on a new paper in a new town." Tick's decision to insert themselves into the investigation, to get an inside scoop, has consequences.
Not only was the hotel room locked from the inside, but the only other tenants on that floor when the murder was committed. The elevator boy swore nobody had come on or departed from that floor and "no killer escaped down those stairs," because they were being painted at the time. So now they have to find a solution in order to preserve their own necks.
That brings us to Mr. Sanda, murder victim and spiritualist, who on the previous night had conducted a séance on the floor above. Sanda had not been since he retreated to his room, until the door was broken down. So the potential suspects include Madam Vera Pool, consulting medium, who wanders around the hotel in a white garb and claims Sanda's ghost told her who killed him. But promised she would never tell. Ivan Karanovich, the Wire-Walker, who has a long-dragging feud with Sanda dating back to their days at the circus. William Holbrook, a young playboy and son of the late Senator Holbrook, had his own reasons to dislike Sanda. Who did it and how? Tick reveals all when he and Murphy crash a séance to hand the murderer over to Sergeant McClelland neatly wrapped in evidence. But how good is it?
First of all, the locked room-trick itself to get away from the crime scene is nothing special, or groundbreaking, but how it was employed under the given circumstances and allowed for a cleverly-hidden murderer was not half bad. I also liked how the locked room-trick ultimately proved to be the murderer's undoing. So, plot-wise, a decent enough short detective story, but it's the characters of "Tick" Johnson and Fred Murphy who steal the show. They recall Craig Rice's screwball mysteries about Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak, traveling photographers/conmen, who first appeared in The Sunday Pigeon Murders (1942). So if you like those American screwball mysteries of the murder-can-be-fun school, Brean's "The Man Who Talked with Spirits" is definitely worth a read.
