"Nigel Brent," a pseudonym of Cecil Gordon Eugene Wimhurst, is one of those obscure, practically forgotten writers who published a dozen medium boiled mysteries between 1953 and 1960 – all starring his private investigator, Barney Hyde. Not much else known except that he wrote a slew of dog books under his own name and penned the odd short story over the decades. "Commando Weekend" appeared in the September, 1948, issue of Scramble, "The Stolen Landscape" was published in Boys' Fun #3 (1953) and finally "Murder in Jail" from Detective Thriller Library #1 (1960). But that's where the trail turns stone cold.
Barney Hyde, head of the British end of the trans-Atlantic Global Investigations, is hired by Mrs. Nicola Curlew to find the person who has been sending her husband, Dan Curlew, threatening letters.
Dan Curlew is a well-known, successful producer of animal films, "a queer kind of fella but he knows how to throw a nature film together," who has a private zoo and circus on his estate – called Witch Wood. Recently, Curlew has been receiving death threats with the last one promising "one more letter and then I shall execute you." Hyde accepts the case and travels to Witch Wood alongside his beautiful secretary Miss Emerald Dikes and his Alsatian police dog, Kurt. Finds what you would expect from a pulp-style mystery with a circus and zoo background. Curlew has hired Jag Macklon, a South African, to run his importing department supplying wild animals, but Jag and Nicola are obviously in love. Kara Jaeger is the animal trainer/lion tamer of the circus and daughter of the once famous Max Jaeger. Only animal trainer who did an act inside a mixed cage of lions, tigers, jackals and wolves, but now he's a drunk long since pass his prime. Osakombi, a West African of the Nankhanse tribe, who breeds N'gwa caterpillars for Curlew in the insect house, but is treated appallingly. Holloman Traves, a steel tycoon, is one of Curlew's oldest friends, but not really. Hyde even tells Curlew shortly after arriving that he's "surprised that you don't get your threatening letters delivered in a sack."
A striking scene of this first part leading up to the murder is Kurt, the Alsatian dog, nearly dying fighting an escaped leopard that launched itself at Emerald. Good boy!
When the last letter arrives, Hyde gets serious and decides to place Curlew inside a practically hermetically, sealed concrete room used to edit his films and has a special lock on the door – while every other door is also locked and guarded. Curlew is locked inside the room with his pet leopard, Aisha, but, when the time arrives, Hyde hears a scream from the outside. When they finally manage to break into the room, they find Curlew and Aisha dead. Apparently, they died from poison, but how? No container or syringe is found and how do you inject a leopard with poison in small, locked room without getting shredded? A problem that gets even worse if capsules were used. However, Hyde believes it was murder, not suicide, but how did the murderer poisoned them when the room was locked and guarded on every side? And not a trace of poison to be found anywhere!
I'll address the locked room element first as it constitutes the meat of the plot. The Leopard Died Too is, what I have come to call, Tough Nuts (...hard to crack). A hard-or medium boiled, often pulpy private eye mystery containing a locked room puzzle or other kind of impossible crime, which in a P.I. novel is either relatively simple or surprisingly tricky. Either way, the locked room element tends to what gives weight to these classic P.I. novel trying their hands at the impossible crime. The Leopard Die Too is no exception, but Brent did more with the locked room poisoning than the story and plot required of it. How the locked room was setup and presented suggested only two possible solutions to me: either the editing console or a strip of film had poison smeared on it or the leopard's fur had been coated with poison, which in turn would explain how the leopard died too. If the poison had been on the console/film strip, the poison was transferred from Curlew's hand onto the leopard when stroking the animal. What does any feline do after getting touched by a smelly, bipedal slug monkey? They begin to clean themselves. So both methods explain how the leopard died alongside with Curlew, but Brent came up with a third, slightly pulpy, but fairly clued, solution to explain the locked room poisoning. It should be noted that you can't really start putting those clues together properly, until Hyde receives the autopsy results. But I liked this third, somewhat hokey, solution as it fitted the story very well.
Not something I expected considering the second-half of The Leopard Died Too moved away from this intriguing impossible murder at a private zoo and circus to become a muddled, convoluted pulp thriller – employing the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink method. Safe crackers, communists agitators and spies, Secret Service agents, tribal rituals, exotic poisons, kidnapping, complimentary bombs etc. So basically everything Brent could think of got tossed into the plot and you almost have to praise Brent for holding it all together in the end, but it obviously took away from the good work done in the first-half and solution to Curlew's inexplicable murder. So, in the end, The Leopard Died Too is best summed up as one of those 1950s transitional mysteries that fell between the cracks of two eras when attempting to get footing on both sides. I suppose that holds true for Brent and the Hyde series as a whole.
I still enjoyed this "toughy," but, unless you collect hardcover mysteries or locked room mysteries, you shouldn't sell an arm or leg to get hold of a copy.
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