Half-Mast Murder (1930) by Milward Kennedy

Milward Kennedy was an English civil servant, journalist, literary critic, reviewer and mystery writer, who was a founding member of the Detection Club, but the bulk of his novels and short stories have been out-of-print and largely forgotten about for decades – even during the reprint renaissance of the past ten years. So my only exposure to Kennedy's work has been through his small, modest contributions to the Detection Club's round-robin novels The Floating Admiral (1931) and Ask a Policeman (1933).

I have been aware of Kennedy and two of his mystery novels, The Corpse on the Mat (1929) and Death to the Rescue (1931), have been longtime residents of my locked room mystery wishlist. Kennedy's detective fiction is still waiting to be swept up by that reprint wave. Only two novels, Half-Mast Murder (1930) and Murder in Black and White (1931), returned to print over the years. I decided to just give Half-Mast Murder a shot to see what this forgotten Detection Club member could do on his own with a novel-length mystery novel.

Half-Mast Murder is Kennedy's fourth mystery novel taking place at Cliff's End, "a house of some social standing," situated on the coast and property of "one of the Big Noises of the world," Professor Paley, who's an authority on international politics, economics and war – playing "a big part in the creation of the Succession States to the old Austro-Hungarian Empire." Professor Paley's books and strong opinions make him "very unpopular with some people." Currently, the professor is working on his next book supposedly to contain some remarkable revelations about the Great War ("moral dynamite") and has come down from London to Cliff's End to write the book. Professor Paley has brought along a nice, close-knit group of future suspects.

There's his widowed sister, Mrs. Arkwright, and his niece, Cynthia, who has a brother, Julian, who works for an armaments manufacturer and is not on speaking terms with his anti-war uncle. Julian is in the neighborhood. A longtime friend of the professor, Bertie Trent, who was nevertheless overheard saying Paley's "only fit for heaven." And the sooner the better. George Shipman, a man of leisure, is only there for Cynthia. Finally, a visitor from America, a Mr. Quick, who came to see the professor as a representative of the Association for World Harmony (Inc.). This first chapter ends with the party rushing down to the octagonal-shaped summerhouse, where the professor has been working, after the butler failed the get an answer. So they break down the door to discover the professor slumped in a chair with a knife-handle sticking out of his chest.

Superintendent Guest and his men arrive at Cliff's End to take charge, but the problem facing them is a multifaceted, messy tangle of clued, red herrings and uncooperative suspects. For one, there's the problem of the locked summerhouse and why the murderer created a locked room puzzle, because, even without the locked door, it looked too dodgy to be suicide. And there are other puzzling peculiarities to the case. Why was the flag on the roof of the summerhouse flying half-mast? Why was there a bloodstained bathing suite stuffed into the safe? What's the stain of the sliver wood Guest too from railing? What's the significance of the camera and a spool of fishing-line found at the crime scene? However, the plot and Guest's investigation primarily revolves around picking apart everyone's movements around the time of the murder and making time tables.

So, yes, Half-Mast Murder is firmly rooted in the much maligned, so-called “humdrum” school of Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode, but two chapters standout – Chapter XV ("EXAMINES EVIDENCE") and Chapter XXI ("AUGURS AN ARREST"). In Chapter XV, Guest tackles the problem of "how came the summer-house to be locked and the key inside?" Admittedly, the possibilities Guest considers and the actual locked room-trick could hardly be called original even in 1930, but have seen put to worse used than here. Chapter XXI ends with Guest giving the Chief Constable, what he then thinks is, the correct solution. Only for it to be reduced to a false-solution. I'm afraid Kennedy's Half-Mast Murder is a very bad case of the false-solution outshining the correct solution. More on that in a moment.

I should first mention Half-Mast Murder has a strange peculiarity that should have been a drawback, but ended up saving the book from becoming a total loss. Half-Mast Murder is still very much an early, 1920s drawing room mystery at heart as the crime scene resembled a busy thoroughfare with practically everyone popping in-and out at the time the professor was being murdered. So more than one person had a hand in creating the confusing crime scene, which is always a bit hard to swallow and takes some talent to pull-off convincingly. But here it safeguarded the story's best parts from the insultingly bad ending. Such as what happened to the missing material for the professor's next book and why the flag was half-mast. And I still enjoyed the (basic) locked room puzzle.

So I would have been perfectly happy with Guest's false-solution from Chapter XXI as it bundled those best ideas and plot-points in the best possible solution to the murder as it was presented – while using those last few chapters plugging the gaps. Sure, it would not have been a blistering original, rug-puller of a whodunit, but would have happily recommended it to fans of Crofts and Rhode. Kennedy thought the ending needed something more than mere competence and opted for pulling a "surprise twist" out of his ass. It stunk! I don't know what's the worse offense here: the flagrant lack of fair play (you can't even guess the who or why) or the solution to who and why. Something so cringe, you want to hide it from outsiders (SPOILER/ROT13: gur ohgyre qvq vg). I hope the Detection Club put Kennedy on trial for this faux pas and had to pay Rhode's bar tab as punishment.

Milward Kennedy has always been one of those notable gaps in my Golden Age detective reading and hoped more for Half-Mast Murder, but it ended up dampening my interest in Kennedy just a little bit. On the other hand, even the best of Kennedy's contemporaries had some terrible mystery novels to their name. Martin Edwards praised Kennedy in The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books (2017), "a leading exponent of the village mystery," highlighting The Murderer of Sleep (1932), Poison in the Parish (1935) and the previously mentioned Death to the Rescue. A mystery novel based on a real-life case that was withdrawn from circulation after a libel lawsuit. So I won't write Kennedy off completely, but the next one better be good.