A Flight of Fancy

"You always forget... that the reliable machine always has to be worked by an unreliable machine."

- Father Brown (G.K. Chesterton's "The Mistake of the Machine," from The Wisdom of Father Brown, 1914)

Last week, I reviewed Death Through the Looking Glass (1978) by Richard Forrest, which concerned itself with the shenanigans surrounding the discovery of a murder victim inside the wreck of a crashed airplane and the premise was reminder that there were a number of aircraft mysteries languishing on my TBR-pile – one of the more prominent ones being Christopher St. John Sprigg's Death of an Airman (1935).

During his (short-lived) life, Sprigg earned his stripes as a versatile author and signed his name to poems, ghost stories and aeronautical textbooks. But where really garnered praise as a writer was during his brief stint as a mystery novelist. A short period of success that began with the publication of Crime in Kensington (1933) and ended five novels later with The Six Queer Things (1937), which were, incidentally, both listed by Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991). 

They were well received and garnered praise from the likes of Dorothy L. Sayers, who said his work "bubbles with zest and vitality" and stuffed with "good puzzles and discoveries," but his premature death threw them into obscurity – where they became scarce and expensive collector items. Thankfully, one of them has, once again, become available to us poor mortals!

Last year, the Poisoned Pen Press, under the banner of the British Library Crime Classics, reintroduced Sprigg to the present-day horde of mystery readers with a brand-new edition of Death of an Airman. The first one to roll off a printing press in eight decades!

Death of an Airman largely takes place on the tarmac of the Baston Aero Club and the opening has them welcoming a fresh pupil: Dr. Edwin Merriott, the Bishop in Cootamundra, Australia, who wants to take flying lesson to travel from one end of his diocese to the other – which takes several weeks with then conventional ground-based travel. Upon his arrival, the Bishop immediately meets with some of the club notable members, which include the manager and secretary of the club, Sarah "Sally" Sackbut and Lady Laura.

However, one of the most notable characters on the airfield is the scar-faced flight instructor, Major George Furnace, who's first seen when takes a young, inexperienced student, Thomas Vane, for a tailspin. He also creates a scene with another member, Mrs. Angevin, who is told by WWI fighter-pilot to stop "making every decent person's gorge rise" by turning herself into "a cheap circus."

So this sets the stage for, what appears to be, a tragic accident: Furnace's aeroplane is seen doing air spins, when it suddenly loses height, as "the flickering toy vanished behind the trees." Furnace has crashed his plane and his body is found in the wreckage with a deadly head wound, however, not all is what it seems and here's where the medically trained Bishop makes his biggest contribution to the case – perceptively noting the lack of rigor mortis. A fact that's confirmed by the doctor some time later, but the whole affair truly begins to resemble an impossible crime when the pathologist extracts a bullet from Furnace's skull!

The murder can be aptly described as a borderline impossible crime and the circumstances, in which Furnace perished, are genuinely baffling, but it's far from the only component providing a problem for the police.

Inspector Creighton of the Thameshire Constabulary uncovers a potential blackmail angle with direct ties to a dope-smuggling organization, which peddles cocaine across the Channel from Continental Europe. So this leads Creighton to the desk of Inspector Bernard Bray of New Scotland Yard, who has been investigating "the white-drug traffic in Britain for the Home Office," which, in turn, leads to such places as Glasgow and Paris – where Bray receives assistance from M. Jules Durand of the Sûreté (a name closely associated with "the most wildly romantic trials of French criminology").

This warm, friendly collaboration between the English and French police, in a dope-peddling case, recalled Basil Thomson's The Milliner's Hat Mystery (1937). As an additional coincidence, in both cases the police were on the lookout for one or two "Americans" who appeared to be involved in the drug trafficking business. One has to wonder if Thomson was aware of this book and decided to flesh out the smuggling angle into a full-fledged crime-novel. Anyway...

Well, there a lot of people working on the case or giving their two-cents, which provided the plot with a couple of false solutions, which are always fun, but the final explanation as to how the murder was accomplished was devilish cheeky. A piece of trickery that almost seems as impossible to pull off as the effect it ended up creating, but then again, the guilty party in this book always seem take the long way round in order to achieve their goals – whether it's the disposal of a potential dangerous person or smuggling illegal substances. It always has to be done as difficult as humanly possible.

Not that I am complaining about plot complexity, mind you. But I can imagine some readers would be annoyed to learn Sprigg was being difficult for the sake of being difficult, because these crimes certainly did not came about organically. However, I don't want to complain about a complex and juicy plot. I've a reputation to think of!

So, that being said, Death of an Airman is still a very well-written and plotted mystery novel, which also brings the author's insight and personal experience in aviation to the table. A field that has rarely, if ever, been explored by other Golden Age writers and this gives the book somewhat of a unique feeling. I genuine hope the British Library decides to republish his other mystery novels as well, because Crime in Kensington sounds like a must read for any self-respecting locked room fanboy.

On a final note, I cranked out this review on a short time-limit. So that saved you (at least) a page-worth of vague, semi-coherent rambling and arguing with myself on whether or not the book qualified as an impossible crime. As you probably noticed, I decided to go with a borderline impossible crime and have not labeled this blog-post as a locked room mystery.

However, the next blog-post may or may not be a review of a locked room novel. Who knows? Wait and see!

Crash Dive

"Yes... it's a puzzle to know just where to begin."

- Major Williams (Lynton Blow's The "Moth" Murder, 1931)

Originally, the plan for this blog-post was to be a cross-blog tag team review with "JJ," who blogs over at The Invisible Event, but he emailed me last Saturday saying he was bowing out, because he had never "hated every single aspect of a book" before - including the author. He simply refused to waste anymore time on the book.

So what was he reading, you ask? Death on the Mississippi (1989) by the late Richard Forrest, which is an impossible crime novel about a houseboat that vanishes from a closely watched stretch of river. And, as a contrast, I was going to review Death Through the Looking Glass (1978), which concerns the brief and inexplicable disappearance of the wreck of a crashed airplane.

Luckily, I fared better with my pick than the one JJ tried to battle through and it turned out to be surprisingly consistent. That's not something I can say about all of Forrest's locked room novels.

Death Through the Looking Glass is the third entry in a series of ten books about Lyon and Bea Wentworth, who first appeared in A Child's Garden of Death (1975) and were last seen in Death at King Arthur's Court (2005), but it was also the author's second impossible crime novel – even though that aspect of the plot was barely brought up. Surprising, I know. But the angle of the vanishing plane-wreck was barely given any consideration.

The story opens on Lyon's birthday, who's now in his mid-thirties and approaching an early midlife crisis, but at least he got some nifty birthday presents: the complete works of Dashiell Hammett, a six-foot doll based on one of the characters from his children's stories and a new wicker basket for his hot-air balloon. He got the last one from his wife and she also insisted he stopped getting them involved in dangerous murder cases, but during the first flight in the new balloon he personally witnesses the beginning of another one.

A low-flying aircraft, "a garishly painted Piper," approached from the east, "directly out of the sun," which Lyon recognizes as the plane of Tom Giles, a long-ago classmate and real-estate lawyer, but the rush of childhood memories are disturbed when he sees "a plume of black smoke curling" from the craft – after which it plunges in the waters below. However, a search of the supposed crash site, pointed out by Lyon, failed to find any sign of wreckage. Or even a simple oil slick.

The wreck of the airplane has simply disappeared, but the situation becomes even more inexplicable when Lyon receives a phone-call from Giles!

Giles tells Lyon he has good reasons to believe someone is attempting to kill him and asks his old friend to come and see him at his lakeside cottage, but when he arrives the place is completely deserted and there a signs of foul play: the phone line has been cut and there's a suspicious stain next to an overturned chair. On the following morning, Lyon awakes to the news that the plane-wreck has been found with Giles inside it! A bullet in the head and the purse of woman by his side, which belongs to a certain Carol Dodgson.

After this, the story "normalizes" and turns into a regular whodunit: the official police, Captain Norbert of the State Police, favor the wife of the victim, Karen, and her pilot-lover, Garry Middleton. Lyon sees more in the Giles' membership in a tontine, in which the last surviving member makes five million on a hundred thousand dollar investment. There are some colorful characters part of this tontine scheme such as Sal Esposito, an Italian-American, who owns a string of adult-movie shops and massage parlors but, privately, he's a complete weeb. He even has a Japanese houseman. An equally colorful personality is Reverend Dr. Toranga Blossom, leader of a doomsday cult, who believe "the world will die in 1982" in "a multitude of brilliant blossoms" - i.e. atomic warfare. So they can use every penny they can get to prepare by buying abandoned mines and provisions.

Luckily, any person storylines from the regular characters were kept at a bare minimum, because there was red flag in the first chapters of the book. Lyon was silently approaching his early midlife crisis when the eighteen-year-old daughter of a friend began to show interest in him, but that plot-thread mercifully fizzled out. It had the potential to become a total cringe-fest. So the characterization could have been far worse.

As far as the plot is concerned, it is (as I said before) the most consistent detective novel I've read by Forrest. Usually, he has a good (locked room) ideas buried in an uneven, sometimes padded narratives and this has me convinced he should've written his impossible crimes as short stories. It might not have made the same kind of money as a series of full-length novels, but a short story collection of locked room mysteries might have been better for his reputation within in genre in the long run.

How good was the impossible situation in this one? Well, I think the best aspect of this plot-thread was how well it tied-in with Lyon's hobby as a balloonist. His eye-witness account of the crash was a key element of the trick, but the problem is that the nature of the trick gives the entire game away. Once you know how it was done, you know by who it was done. Because the trick fits one of the characters like a glove. I guess that's why the clues were thinly spread around in this surprisingly short novel, but the method for the vanishing plane-wreck is very guessable and from that point out you can figure out everything else.

Yes, Death Through the Looking Glass is one of Forrest's most consistent detective novels, but also one that's very easily solved. Even without any significant clueing.

So, while my overall experience was somewhat better than JJ, I fully acknowledge Forrest was not one of the top-tier mystery novelists from the post-GAD era and some of his better (locked room) ideas were probably better served had they been written down as short stories or novellas. And this relatively short novel shows that in his case less was more and improved the overall quality of the story and plot.

Well, thus far this lukewarm blog-post.

The Saint in the Clouds

"My first rockets went up like iron balloons. Somehow, most people were slow to perceive a genius had been launched, except me."

- Leslie Charteris 

The Hindenburg Murders (2000) is the second in a string of six standalone novels, known collectively as the "Disaster Series," in which Max Allan Collins slyly blended historical facts with pure fiction by positioning past masters of the written word in the role of detective on the eve of a tragic event – only the reader is aware of the impending doom. 

It's an unusual approach to a series of historical mysteries about disasters, but I derived great pleasure from the gradual thickening of suspense as history slowly takes over the reigns of a story. You know what's going to happen, and yet, you can't find yourself on the next page soon enough!

Over the past several years, I reviewed The Titanic Murders (1999), The Pearl Harbor Murders (2001) and The Lusitania Murders (2002). During my pre-blogging days, I read the dark, grimly The London Blitz Murders (2004) and the splendid The War of the Worlds Murder (2005) – which remains my personal favorite and the crown jewel of this series. So that makes The Hindenburg Murders the last one of the lot. Luckily, Collins is a prolific author and has an extensive bibliography of crime-fiction to explore, but first I have to get this review out of the way.

The protagonist of The Hindenburg Murders is Leslie Charteris, creator of "The Saint," a Robin Hood-type of character who first appeared in Enter the Tiger (1928) and was played by Roger Moore in a 1960s TV-series – before he would lend his face to James Bond. However, my exposure to Charteris has been limited to one or two short stories and the Val Kilmer movie from the mid-1990s, which probably does not count for much.

So I'll refrain from making any uninformed, potentially cringe inducing comments about The Saint to spare the enamel on the teeth of genuine fans of the series, because there still seem to be plenty of them around.

Lets move on to the book itself. Or, rather, the after word, entitled "A Tip of the Halo," in which Collins lists of all the sources he consulted and gives an answer to the question if Charteris was actually a passenger on the Hindenburg – which is answered with "a resounding, absolute yes," well, "sort of." Charteris was one of the "well-publicized passengers aboard the airship's maiden voyage," but the account of his presence on its final journey is wholly made-up by Collins. The reason for bringing this up is a 38 second video-clip I found of Charteris reporting on that voyage, which I recommend watching before reading the book. It's like a short teaser for the book. 

Japanese edition of The Hindenburg Murders

The Hindenburg Murders begins on May 3, 1937, as the Titanic-sized zeppelin is being prepared in Frankfurt, Germany for its trans-Atlantic crossing to the United States. As to be expected, they were real Nazis about airport security in those days: bulky X-ray machines probed the content of baggage, suitcase lining was regularly knifed loose, gifts rudely unwrapped, shaving kits disassembled and even children's toys confiscated. All of this added to annoyance of the dapper-clad gentleman with the monocle, named Leslie Charteris, who begins here to bounce witticisms off the humorless Nazis and later on in conversations with his fellow passengers – which gave me the impression of him having been a real-life counterpart of Archie Goodwin.

Nevertheless, the pesky, but efficient, gründlichkeit of German customs seems not to have been entirely without reason, because the presence of Nazi officials aboard seems to confirm there’s a genuine fear of saboteurs and bombs. After all, the Hindenburg is filled with hydrogen, one of "the most flammable, hottest-burning gas in the world," and even a small spark could light the entire ship up like a Christmas tree. Something is going on becomes very clear when Charteris' roommate, an SS-informer named Eric Knoecher, vanishes in the night, but evidence left behind suggest he was flung out of a port window – plunging 2,100 feet into the freezing waters below. The question is whether this has anything to do with a possible plot by saboteurs or that he posed a danger to one of the passengers, because there were Jews and Jewish sympathizers among them.

Charteris is asked to carry out a discreet investigation by lying through his teeth: he tells everyone that his roommate has come down with a severe case of the cold and will be staying in their cabin. Only the murderer would be aware of this lie, but this potential interesting way of making a killer, subtly, betray himself turns out to be nothing more than a wild goose chase and the guilty party revealed by bungling part of the job than by ratiocination on Charteris parts – which makes this series entry slightly disappointing in the detection department.

The Hindenburg Murders is mostly rewarding for its use of the historical content and its depiction of life about a gigantic airship: from the sumptuous dinners and the lavish passenger accommodation to the hermetically sealed smoking room and water rationing in the shower cabins. It makes you wonder why, as far as I'm aware, there aren't any Golden Age-era mysteries that employed one of these floating ships as a backdrop for a classic whodunit. I should also mention the ending of the book, which gives a harrowing depiction of the aftermath of the disaster and that made for great, if gruesome, ending during which a final surprise was sprang on the reader. That's something I can always appreciate.

So, while The Hindenburg Murders was not the best or my favorite entry in this series, I still found it to be an excellently written, well-researched piece of historical/speculative (crime) fiction. Of course, it has something to offer to the fans of Charteris and The Saint, because Collins is a fan and noted, in the previously mentioned after word, how there are numerous references that can "be found by the keen-eyed Charteris fan" – as well as the tongue-in-cheek chapter titles that were apparently firmly planted in the Charteris tradition of his "Immortal Works."

On a final note, I might not have been wildly enthusiastic about The Hindenburg Murders, but loved the series as a whole and have a particular fondness for The Titanic Murders and The War of the World Murder. I really hope this series, one day, will awaken from its slumber, because there are still a number of possible books that can be added to this series: R. Austin Freeman served in the First World War as a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corpse (The Great War Murders) and surely Edogawa Rampo's war effort for Japan can, for the sake of a good story, be tied to murder connected to Hiroshima or Nagasaki not long before the U.S. drops by.

Well, here's hoping!

The Wastelands of Heaven

"Flying may not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price."

- Emelia Earhart 

After my previous post embroiled deliberately on the recurrent image of railway mysteries, I intended to follow the theme. A plan as simple as it's perfect, if it were not for the fact that you can't always shape an accidental pattern further and that are perhaps too many words to say I forgot to check if there were any unread, train-bound detective stories on the big pile – which was not the case and didn't feel like re-reading any of the classic examples. The substitute book I picked was meant as a compromise, but the story turned out the be a pleasant surprise!

The "Moth" Murder (1931) is the first of two mystery novels by Lynton Blow, one more name for the list of writers who are conspicuous by their absence on the GADWiki, and the sole case for Inspector Hunt, from Criminal Investigation Department of New Scotland Yard, burdened with finding Sir Charles Stafford's killer – an aviation hero of the modern era.

One year before, Stafford had made a daring double crossing of the Atlantic in a light aero-plane, which raised Britain's prestige in a time when air supremacy was seen as the key to victory in future conflicts, but a coastguard in Bournemouth Bay is the lonely witness of Stafford's burning machine crashing down from the sky. Immediately, Hunt is confronted with the first of many problems: there's only one body retrieved from the burned out wreckage of the plane. Stafford's body is badly burned, but there weren't any remains found of his female passenger, Mrs. Evans. Even more puzzling is that Mrs. Evans husband, Dennis, who was flying solo, also appears to have dropped off the map – alongside with his airplane. However, the proverbial bombshell goes off during the inquest when the police surgeon reveals Stafford was shot in the back of the head before he crashed!

Meanwhile, down on the ground, Hunt is summoned to a ditch in Redstock Lane where a local cowman found the body of Constable James, also shot through the head, which is one of many complications resulting in some genuine (and fun) detective-and think work. The bits of theorizing, especially the part on what must've happened in the air, were engrossing on account of the multitude of methods you could use a two-seater, light airplane in a murder or body dump and I know of one mystery writer who reworked one of these rejected premises in a full-length detective novel – of course, I'm not going to spoil anything. Blow jam-packed the plot with twists and turns, seemingly complicating the case with every step Hunt takes forward, with Stafford's heir disappearing from the scene almost as fast as he appeared, a suitcase full of money, a dead tramp (Curt is OK) and a gang of dope peddlers hanging around in the background. Not to mention unsnarling a knot of footprints and tire tracks. There are even allusions to the problem of a single set of footprints and the disappearance of a car from a locked garage, but they didn't materialize into actual impossible crimes of the Carrian kind (ah boo!).

The "Moth" Murder weaves a fine, complex mesh from multiple plot threads and Blow understands these kind of plots work best when they play out according to Murphy's Law, instead of allowing the murderer smooth sailing on the winds of good luck like a demigod, but what holds the book back is that there's a very dated trick at the heart of the plot. This makes the solution as plain as day to any seasoned mystery reader. And that's somewhat funny, because it's a trick I used to fall for all the time. Once, I fell for it twice, back-to-back, while reading the same author! That's how easily fooled I was and every time I was just as surprised as the time before that I had fallen for it. Who knew mystery writers could lie through the teeth by stating factual truths. 

Finally, there's a shimmer of continuation on the railway theme as one of the characters crashes with a car into a London-bound express train, but hardly enough to tag it as such. Still nice to see it popping-up though!

Steve from the MysteryFile website/blog has more on Lynton Blow's second novel, The Bournewick Murders (1935), and link to read The "Moth" Murder yourselves, if this review has piqued your interest.