Percy Montgomery "Monte" Barrett was an American author, newspaperman and cartoon writer from Mitchell, Indiana, who co-created with artist Frank Ellis the original "spunky girl reporter" character, Jane Arden – cited as the prototype for similar characters like Lois Lane. More importantly than having co-created an internationally syndicated daily comic strip, Barrett had a brief stint as a mystery novelist during the early 1930s.
The Pelham Murder Case finds Peter Cardigan as a guest at a house party at Pelham Manor. There's the host, John Pelhem, his brother, Renny Pelham, and their niece Barbara, who's engaged to a man twenty years her senior, Hillary Astair – which has lead to a big problem. Barbara has fallen in love with a handsome, boyish and rising New York architect, Gordon Smith, who's also present. Furthermore, there's the sister of John and Renny, Aunt Agatha, Dr. and Mrs. Fisk. Last, but not least, the Countess of Desborough ("a woman of undoubted attraction") who fascinates Cardigan. So your ordinary, everyday problems rarely resulting in murder most ingenious outside the pages of a detective novel.
Fortunately, The Pelham Murder Case is a detective novel and that very night Cardigan is discussing detective fiction and murder with Renny. Surprisingly, Cardigan is not a fan of detective stories relying subtle poisons and guns concealed in chimneys, because those methods are very rare in real murder cases ("...unfair competition"). Cardigan explains that "the baffling point of a mystery is not the method by which the victim is killed," but "the method by which the slayer cloaks his identity" and "you have a first-class mystery story." Their discussion is interrupted by a gunshot. A gunshot coming from behind the locked door of the library. The door is opened with a spare key and inside they find John Pelham's body, sprawled beside the desk, holding a revolver. So it obviously looks like suicide, but many small details don't add up like the main key not being found inside the library. Cardigan calls in his old friend, Lieutenant Murphy, who gives the amateur detective a free hand to do as he sees fit.
It's very obvious from the book title, publication date and basic premise Barrett aligned himself with S.S. van Dine and his followers, but The Pelham Murder Case also belongs to a specific type of mystery novel that appeared from the late 1930s to the early-mid 1930s. A period when the Golden Age detective started to take definite form and things could get a little meta at times. Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936) and "The Locked Room Lecture" from John Dickson Carr's The Three Coffins (1935) are the two best-known examples, but there earlier, lesser-known examples like Walter S. Masterman's The Wrong Letter (1926), Alan Thomas' The Death of Laurence Vining (1928) and Lewis George Robinson's The Manuscript Murder (1933). Something that came up earlier this year in John Norris' review of Norman Forrest's Death Took a Publisher (1936).
The Pelham Murder Case falls in that category and not only for starring a clever, mystery writing snoop, but the discussion in the second chapter on realism in detective fiction, murder methods and plot by a gunshot – which can be read as a pre-Challenge to the Reader. Barrett wrote and plotted The Pelham Murder Case in the spirit of, what would come to known, as the Grandest Game in the World. However, this spirit and attitude, dismissing the cliches and tropes of the past from the start, obliges the writer at the very least to do something fresh or novel. In this case, the old-fashioned weekend party mystery with a murder in a locked library. Well, that proved to be a mixed bag.
When I finished The Pelham Murder Case, I picked up Locked Room Murders and flipped to the section with solutions to see if Adey had anything to say about it. He did and called it "a very muddled affair." I disagree... kind of. It's true that the impossibility of the first murder is not clearly stated and that has all to do with the murderer inexplicably taking the key, which destroys the locked room situation needed to pass the murder off as a suicide. The crime scene is also raided of all its potential clues and red herrings, adding to its muddled appearance, but new information is received returning the status of locked room mystery to the first murder. But by this time, I think most modern readers have caught on to who-and how. I suppose the solution was fresh enough in 1930, but not something that's going to hoodwink the genre savvy, cynical readers and armchair genre scholars of today. So a good try regardless.
There is, however, a second impossible murder, complete with a floor plan, towards the end showing a great deal more complexity and ingenuity in setup and solution. This second impossibility, a late and welcome surprise, allowed Barrett to come through on some of the expectations/promises raised by the first couple of chapters. So no idea why Adey ignored that second impossibility in Locked Room Murders.
On a whole, The Pelham Murder Case is far from a flawless locked room mystery and the passage of time blunted some of its strong points, but at least Barrett played the Grandest Game in the World with gusto and enthusiasm. There were moments when Barrett could be as cavalier as the man who coined the phrase making The Pelham Murder Case a fun, fast-paced read that knew when it was time to wrap everything up. So not an unhesitatingly recommendation, if you simply want a baffling whodunit, but well worth if you're interested in obscure, long out-of-print locked room mysteries or seeing how the Golden Age took shape.
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