If You Lie Down With Dogs...

"Sometimes... I think that the War has had a bad effect on some of our young men."

- Colonel Marchbanks (Dorothy L. Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, 1928) 

Annie Haynes' The Crow's Inn Tragedy (1927) is the third installment in a short-lived series of mystery novels, which marked the final appearance of Detective-Inspector Furnival, who previously helmed The Abbey Court Murder (1923) and The House in Charlton Crescent (1926), but he was given an early retirement in favor of Detective-Inspector William Stoddart – who burst on the scene in The Man with the Dark Beard (1928).

The Crow's Inn Tragedy can also be read as the end of the first phase of Haynes' career as a mystery novelist, which covered five standalones and the Furnival trilogy. After those seven detective stories, Haynes appended her bibliography with four additional titles about Detective-Inspector Stoddart and the last two were published posthumously. 

So the subject of today's blog-post is an overlooked, but important, milestone in the life and career of Haynes. Let's get started! 

One of the primary backdrops of the story is an old-fashioned, dingy and worn solicitor's office, located on the first floor of a corner house of Crow's Inn Square, which "evidently not had a coat of paint for years" and bare of any modern innovations or conveniences – making the place feel like a holdout from the late 19th century or early 1900s. It's in this "indescribable air of gloom" that the head of legal firm, Mr. Luke Bechcombe, receives his brother-in-law, Reverend James Collyer.

Occasionally, Mr. Bechcombe provides some of his clients with a special and discrete service: he disposes of their valuable stones and substitutes them with paste. As a rule, these clients consist of society women, who overdrawn on their allowance, but refuse to tell their affluent husbands that they raked up a debt that their pocket money can't cover. But now his brother-in-law wants to dispose of a valuable and precious family heirloom, the Collyer Cross. 

The emerald studded cross is a treasured and precious religious artifact, "gleaming with baleful, green fire," which the clergyman wants to convert in cash in order to payoff the debts incurred by his son, Tony. 

Tony Collyer served in the trenches of the First World War, but the war "played ruination with the young men just beginning life" and England, "the home of heroes," had "no use for her heroes now" – which is why his father does not want to be too hard on the boy. Rev. Collyer wants to give his son a clean start, because he has "an inducement now that he has never had before." Tony is, sort of, engaged to Mr. Bechcombe's secretary, Cecily Hoyle. 

However, Mr. Bechcombe has some bad news for his brother-in-law: the emeralds are a paste substitute and this is when an important plot-thread is introduced: Bechcombe tells there have been "as many jewels stolen in the past year in London" as "in twenty years previously." The suspected party in these thefts is a well-organized group of criminals, known as the Yellow Gang, who are headed by a figure referred to as the Yellow Dog. This plot-thread dangles inconspicuously in the background of the story and only takes the center-stage during the final chapters, but more on this gang-related plot-thread later. 

In the meantime, there's another problem requiring the attention of both the police and the reader: Mr. Bechcombe is strangled to death in his private office and his death is surrounded by questions. Why had his managing clerk, Mr. Amos Thompson, disappeared? Who was the lady who had left a white, expensive-looking glove at the scene of the crime? How is it possible that one of the witnesses, who eventually came forward, claimed to have spoken with the solicitor when the medical examiner said he was dead at that time? Detective-Inspector Furnival of the Yard, known in the force as "The Ferret," is placed on the case, but the inspector seems to be doomed to play second fiddle in every instance of his last recorded case. 

The questions surrounding the murder are easily answered, especially after the halfway mark of the book, but Furnival takes forever to catch up with the reader and Haynes' storytelling is far more memorable than the characterization of her policeman – a gray, colorless character who hardly stands out against the background of the plot. He's practically swallowed by it. Even his last opportunity to shine is stolen by Mr. John Steadman, a barrister and criminologist, who accompanies Furnival on his investigation as an amateur snoop, of sorts, and takes the lead in escaping from the Yellow Gang in the final chapters of the book. So the poor inspector is not given an opportunity to bow out as a hero. 

I suspect those final chapters, describing the showdown with the Yellow Gang, is not to everyone's taste, which tinges the story with Victorian-era sensationalism and have seen this sequence being compared to Agatha Christie's The Big Four (1927). However, I found these scenes to be far more reminiscent of Dorothy L. Sayers' "The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba," which can be found in Lord Peter Views the Body (1928).

Personally, I found these scenes to be mildly amusing, but they did turn a dark, moody whodunit (as easy as it may've been) into a gaudy thriller from an era that preceded the Golden Age. So not everyone might appreciate this last turn of events. 

On the whole, I feel somewhat divided about The Crow's Inn Tragedy: I liked Haynes storytelling and how the pall of the war hung over the story, but the plot hardly posed a challenge to the reader. And then there was the thriller-ish ending. The journey to the easily perceived and anticipated ending was much better than the eventual arrival there. So not exactly on the same level as the excellent The House in Charlton Crescent and The Crime at Tattenham Corner (1929), but it was a quick, fairly good read.

So far this lukewarm review. Hopefully, I'll have something really good again for the next one.

A Prevision of Evil

"...it was a dead face. There was a tap, tap, tap on the window. And then I saw a face, a dead face, ghastly and grinning against the pane. I screamed and screamed... and they said there wasn't anything there!"

- Mrs. Louise Leidner (Agatha Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia, 1936)

Last week, I read and reviewed The Crime at Tattenham Corner (1929), which impressed me favorable enough to warrant an early return to Annie Haynes' novels, but the problem lay in picking one from a hand of promising looking titles – such as The Abbey Court Murder (1923) and The Bungalow Mystery (1923). Fortunately, the comment-section came to the rescue and recommended one that, up until then, had only been hovering in my peripheral.

The House in Charlton Crescent (1926) was suggested by Kate, who can be found blogging over at Cross Examining Crime, calling it one of Haynes' stronger mysteries where the puzzle-plot element is concerned. Quality-wise, it can definitely stand up to The Crime at Tattenham Corner. So let's take a look at the second of three books about her first series character, Detective-Inspector Furnival of Scotland Yard, which began with The Abbey Court Murder and ended with The Crow's Inn Tragedy (1927).

Lady Anne Daventry is the main cog in the wheel of the plot of The House in Charlton Crescent and she's known as a difficult, cantankerous old woman, but "life had not been kind to Lady Anne." At a very young age, she lost both of her parents and was betrayed by her first fiancé, which lead to an uneasy marriage to Square Daventry and there were only two points of light in her life – the birth of her two sons. But then the First World War began to rage across Western Europe and they both perished "fighting for England and freedom."

On top of all that, Lady Anne's health began to deteriorate and chronic rheumatism made her home-bound, which turned her into "a distinctly cross and unpleasant old lady." However, the well drawn character-sketch of Lady Anne leaves room for some compassion and sympathy, because you can understand that someone with her back story would become "snappy and irritable" during the twilight years of her life.

If losing her only children and a permanent stiffness of the limbs was not enough to make her crabby and crotchety, she now has a good reason to believe someone has marked her down for extermination!

This unknown person doctored her pills, which her chemist found to contain enough hyoscine "to kill ten women," and poisoned her late-night milk, but Lady Anne wants to prevent a public scandal and engages the services of a private investigation firm – which brings Bruce Cardyn to her home. Cardyn is a junior partner in a respected firm and enters Lady Anne's household under the guise of her new secretary, but even he, as a complete outsider, appears to possess ulterior motives for being there.

On paper, there are more than enough suspects living or hovering about the place in Charlton Crescent: there are two nieces, Maureen and Dorothy Fyvert. The former is a mischievous, troublesome schoolgirl of twelve and the later is a young woman of twenty who was once dragged from a burning building by Cardyn. But now she is, sort of, engaged to John Daventry. He is the nephew of Lady Anne's late husband and succeeded to the estate when his two cousins died during the war. A recent addition to the household is Margaret Balmaine, the granddaughter from Lady Anne's husband’s first marriage, who recently turned up out of nowhere from Australia – which is a nice variation on the time-worn trope of the long-lost uncle from down under.

Well, this cast of potential suspects is further augmented by the servants: a loyal butler, named Soames, a pair of maids and the recently fired secretary, David Branksome, who still floats around in the background.

Cardyn took his place in Lady Anne's household, acting as her new secretary, while trying to figure out who tampered with the pill box and how to prevent this from happening again in the future, but he seems to be unable to keep the police out of the house – as a rope of pearls, worth several thousands of pounds, has disappeared from a hidden desk drawer. Detective-Inspector Furnival is called upon to investigate, but a crime of an entirely different nature requires his attention when he arrives at the place.

A large chunk of the household had gathered round the fire in the sitting-room for tea and hot cakes, but this cozy image is disturbed by two events: the first is that of an appearance of "a chalk-white face," outside of the window, "so close to the pane that it seemed to be pressing against it" with "a kind of vague, intangible mist round it." Secondly, one of the people who were present appears to have used this distraction to plunge a dagger in the chest of Lady Anne!

Detective-Inspector Furnival has his work cut-out for him and not only has he to figure out who used this very narrow window of opportunity to commit murder, but also who engineered the appearance of the ghostly face on the outside and this relates to a singular pair of footmarks – which were found in the flower border below the window. But there's also the theft of the pearls to consider and the witness testimony of a shopkeeper who swears it was Lady Anne who offered them up for sale. Or whether the person who wielded the dagger was the same as the person who attempted murder by poison. There are also additional complications when one of the family members goes missing, the secret of Cardyn and whispers of a mysterious Cat Burglar.

All of this makes The House in Charlton Crescent a busy, bubbling and brewing detective story, which has none of the pesky shortcomings that marred some of Hayes' other mystery novels. Such as loose, unexplained plot-threads (Who Killed Charmian Karslake, 1929), convenient, last minute confessions (The Crime at Tattenham Corner) or clues that were withheld or overlooked (The Crystal Beads Murder, 1930). It made for her most soundly plotted detective stories to date.

However, I have to nitpick about one thing: the ghostly face by the window and the manner in which the murder was committed has been compared to Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) and Cards on the Table (1936) by Agatha Christie, but Haynes did not deliver the Christie-like rug-puller of a revelation that the splendid premise deserved. As a matter of fact, the eventual revelation of the murderer's identity and motivation was actually pretty mundane and a bit of a let down, which is why I place The Crime at Tattenham Corner slightly above this (in spite of the convenient, last-minute confession), because it had an overall more original conclusion.

Otherwise, The House on Charlton Crescent is a well-written detective story with good characterization and a pleasantly busy plot, which only lacked that extra pinch of ingenuity that would have elevated the book to a different league.  

Place Your Bets!

"The tragedy has been so uncommon, so complete and of such personal importance to so many people, that we are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis. The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact—of absolute undeniable fact—from the embellishments of theorists and reporters. Then, having established ourselves upon this sound basis, it is our duty to see what inferences may be drawn and what are the special points upon which the whole mystery turns."

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Silver Blaze," from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1894)

Annie Haynes' The Crime at Tattenham Corner (1929) is the second of four books about one of her series characters, Detective-Inspector William Stoddart of Scotland Yard, who first appeared on the scene in The Man with the Dark Beard (1928) and bowed out in the posthumously published The Crystal Beads Murder (1930) – which was left behind as a partially-finished manuscript and completed with the assistance of an unknown writer.

The Crime at Tattenham Corner was recommended to me in the comment-section of one of my previous reviews of Haynes' work and was praised, alongside The Abbey Court Murder (1923), as one of her best mystery novels. And I have to concur with this opinion: The Crime at Tattenham Corner proved to be her most rewarding detective story to date.

The plot of the book hangs on the shocking murder of Sir John Burslem, a well-known financier and race-horse owner, who was found dead in Hughlin’s Wood, "face downwards in the stagnant water of a ditch," not far from Tattenham Corner – shot through the lower part of his face. Sir John had been shot and killed on the eve of the highly-anticipated Derby Day, which has immediate consequences for the race and the shoo-in winner of that event.

Sir John was the proud owner of a fine, well-bred race horse, named Peep o' Day, who was "a dead cert for the Derby," but, under Derby rules, the death of an owner "renders void all his horses' nominations and entries." This effectively means that Peep o' Day has been scratched from the Derby.

So was Sir John murdered to influence the outcome of the race? If that's the case, the obvious suspect seems to be his rival, Sir Charles Stanyard, who is called "the sporting baronet" and owns the number two favorite in the race, Perlyon, but there's also a personal connection between the race-horse enthusiasts – as the latter had once been engaged to the wife of the former. As the reader is made aware of, Lady Burslem, or simply Sophie, has something to hide that seems to be directly related to the shooting of her late husband. Something that looks as if it could very incriminating and very, very hard to explain to the police. Sir John also has a daughter from a previous marriage, named Pamela, who naturally wants her father to be avenged, but she has been completely omitted from an impromptu will that was drafted mere hours before the murder. Everything was left to his wife.

This gives rise to the question as to why Sir John felt compelled to hurriedly draw up a new will and why he completely left out his daughter, brother and sister-in-law, but that's not the only complication occupying the police's attention.

The valet and personal gentleman of the victim, Robert Ellerby, vanished without a trace and there's a spiritual element hovering in the background. Sir John's sister-in-law, Mrs. Kitty Burslem, is a huge proponent of séances and believes she has received messages from Sir John – which makes some wonder why he, who detested the woman in life, would communicate with her after death. But several people seem to be convinced she receives messages from the Great Beyond and some of them relate directly to potential investments.

Well, Detective-Inspector William Stoddart of Scotland Yard and his able-handed assistant, Sergeant Alfred Harbord, set out "to trace every clue" that may help "to elucidate the mystery of Sir John Burslem's death," which they accomplish with routine police work and some of the unorthodox tricks of a good looking, single amateur dilettante – i.e. using their male charm on some of women in the case. Not what you'd expect from a proper police-inspector.

But they, slowly but surely, stumble to the same conclusion as most of the seasoned mystery readers and my initial response was, "oh, this old gag again," but Haynes managed to wrangle an alternative explanation out of that moldy, time-worn trick. And not a bad one either. At the first, the false explanation is convincingly, and sensationally, presented as the correct one, which is very pleasing to the reader who was one step ahead of Stoddart the entire time. But then the court room scenes begin and it becomes very clear that this clever, classically-styled, explanation leaves several questions unanswered. Such very important question as to who rolled the body into the ditch after the shooting, because the person in the dock denies having done this.

So this one managed to pull a nice and logical surprise on the reader, but one that puts two (minor) smudges on the overall quality of the plot: the case is cleared up when a confession from the real criminal reaches the court room and this makes the police (i.e. Stoddart) look very foolish and somewhat incompetent. After all, he nearly delivered an innocent person to the hangman!

However, this may've been done intentionally, because Haynes was, reportedly, as big of a fan of true-crime as she was of horse-racing and this might have been an attempt on her part at giving the story a gleam of realism. 

In any case, The Crime at Tattenham Corner has one of Haynes' strongest, clearest and most intricate puzzle-plots, which turned a new page on a familiar trick and this provided the ending of the story with a nice little surprise. Something that's always welcome in a classic detective story. It also whetted my appetite for The Abbey Court Murder, but that’s a story for another time. 

A Window into the Past

"Elephants can remember... that was the idea I started on. And people can remember things that happened a long time ago just like elephants can. Not all people, of course, but they can usually remember something."

- Ariadne Oliver (Agatha Christie's Elephants Can Remember, 1972)

During the final quarter of 2015, the already indispensable Dean Street Press reissued half of Annie Haynes' neglected, long-forgotten and out-of-print body of work, which consisted of seven mystery novels starring either Inspector Stoddart or Inspector Furnival – all of them furnished with an insightful introduction by our very own genre historian, Curt Evans. Now they are going to complete their reissues of Annie Haynes' crime-fiction with the scheduled release of all five of her standalone novels.

Rupert Heath of the Dean Street Press offered a review copy and I requested The Witness on the Roof (1925), because I was fascinated by the book’s plot description.

The Witness on the Roof begins in early May, 1897, in Grove Street, "a precinct which had undoubtedly known better days," where the only "remnants of past greatness" are the lofty rooms and large windows. A young, impish child, called "Polly," has taken refuge between the chimneystacks on the rooftop to escape from the rough blows and verbal abuse leveled at her by her stepmother. At first, Polly is looking upon this rooftop world like "a conqueror exploring some unknown world," but she began to wonder what happened behind all those blinds and peeked into a window of a studio apartment – where she saw something that would come back to haunt her as an adult.

Polly observes a room stacked with unfinished canvases, an untidy litter of paint tubes and a big easel in the middle of the room, but what really attracts the child's attention is what looks like "a heap of white drapery" near the fireplace. There's also a man present in the room. A tall, broad shouldered man who's busy tearing up papers, photographs and books, which were then tossed into the bright, open fire that roared on the hearth.

As Polly witnesses this strange scene, she slowly comes to the realization that the "tangled mess of drapery heaped upon the rug" is the body of a young woman! She sees how the man places a gun near the dead woman's hand and gives herself away. However, the only thing the man sees is a child "scuttling over the roofs" until she's out of his sight. There would be many years before anyone else learns that there was a witness to, what the newspapers called, the Grove Street Mystery. 

It's not long thereafter that Polly is whisked away from the slums of Grove Street to live with the

well-born family of her late mother.

A decade came and went and the passing of the years turned the "small, grimy-looking child" with "ragged brown hair" into a proper lady. Living with her cold, uncaring grandmother was not a full improvement on her previous situation, but, recently, the world started looking favorably upon Polly – who's now known to everyone as Joan Davenant. Her grandmother's will named her beloved, long-lost sister, Evie, as the main beneficiary, which means people were finally going to look for her. On top of that, Joan has married a wealthy, titled gentleman and became Lady Warchester.

Everything appeared to have worked out for her in the end, but when she takes an innocent stroll down a garden path, snaking around her home, she sees something that awakened memories that have lain dormant for a decade. She glanced at one of the windows of her home and sees someone moving around that room that suddenly reminded her very much of the man she saw on the roof in Grove Street as a child. It’s someone very close to her!

I've already seen The Witness on the Roof being compared with Agatha Christie's Sleeping Murder (1976), which was originally penned during World War II, but it should be pointed out that the plot also has certain points of resemblance with 4:50 from Paddington (1957). The Witness on the Roof shares a child witness and a crime in the past with Sleeping Murder, but the window scenes described above were very reminiscent of how Mrs. McGillicuddy saw a murder being committed and identified the murderer by the end of 4:50 from Paddington. You can see Haynes' story as a combination of these two plots.

Stylistically, The Witness on the Roof seemed like Baroness Orczy expended one of her short stories into a full-length novel, because "The Grove Street Mystery" could easily have been the title of one of the stories from The Old Man in the Corner (1909). The plot also followed the pattern of the type of crime-fiction that was writing during the time the story was set in, i.e. the late-1800s and early 1900s.

There were a number of characters acting as detective, searching for answers to such pertinent questions as the identity of the murdered woman, while other answers were supplied by characters confessing to their part in the drama or showing their true colors. It makes for a nice, extremely old-fashioned detective story that's only marred by the cosmic coincidence that connected certain characters so long after the murder in Grove Street. You can argue it's the kind of singular coincidence that streaked sensationalist fiction from the Victorian-era and showed Haynes belonged to an earlier period in the genre's history, but if you love both crime-fiction from the days of Conan Doyle and Fergus Hume than you might want to give The Witness on the Roof a look.

I feel as if I have not done the book complete justice with this lousy review (distractions, distractions), but I definitely enjoyed the book, because I was in the mood for something genuinely old-fashioned and Haynes filled that order with a well-written, very satisfying book reflecting an earlier period of the genre that preceded the Golden Age. Considering it was published in the mid-1920s, you can say it still counts as a transitional mystery novel, albeit a late one, but still a transitional one.

I previously reviewed Who Killed Charmian Karslake? (1929) and The Crystal Beads Murder (1930) by Haynes.

Who Was She?

"There's the danger of making theory fact. And the full story wasn't told. When is it ever? Well, whatever the truth of that business, old man, from now on the open mind is going to be no mere figure of speech for you and me."

- Chief Inspector Dan Pardoe (Dorothy Bowers' Shadows Before, 1939)

Last year, I reviewed Annie Haynes' final and posthumously published mystery novel, The Crystal Beads Murder (1930), which was completed upon her untimely passing by an uncredited colleague and currently the assumption is that the finishing touch was done by "Anthony Gilbert" – who would became an accomplished mystery novelist herself in the succeeding decades. Shamefully, I began to neglect Haynes as soon as I discovered her and several months had to pass before I returned to her detective fiction.

Which brings me to the subject of this blog-post: Who Killed Charmian Karslake? (1929). The book was another posthumously published novel, but one Haynes was able to finish before passing away. I picked this particular book on the assumption that it was a detective story with a theatrical background, but it turned out to be an old-fashioned, village-type of mystery such as the one I previously reviewed.

Scenery of Who Killed Charmian Karslake? is a "quaint old spot," a tiny and quiet village named Hepton, where the Penn-Moreton family is perked on the top rung of the social ladder as "the little tin gods of the town."

Hepton Abbey is the ancestral seat of the Penn-Moreton’s and was bestowed by King Henry VIII "upon his reigning favorite," during a period known as the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which was turned in "something of a showplace" without too many sacrifices to its original ambience – high-up, diamond-paned windows, thick walls that are "un-desecrated by modern prints" and rooms that had once served as monks' cells. It's a place that lends itself perfectly to guided tours whenever guests are being entertained, but the showpiece of the latest house party at Hepton Abbey is one of the visitors.

The great American actress, Charmian Karslake, who had taken London by storm had surprisingly accepted an invitation from Lady Moreton to attend the party. She had "refused all others since coming to England," but apparently accepted this one on account of her enormous interest in "antiquities of all kinds" and the "Abbey is distinctly unique." After all, Karslake wears an old and valuable necklace, often spoken of as her "sapphire mascot," which was once in the possession of the "ill-fated Paul of Russia" and "the murdered Queen Draga of Serbia." Karslake had been warned that misfortune stalked the owners of the sapphire ball and could potentially attract the "cupidity of some of the criminal classes," but she laughed at the very notion of her mascot bringing her bad luck – which is exactly what it seems to have to done.

Charmian Karslake fails to make an appearance at the breakfast table the following morning and the door to her bedroom has to be broken down, which reveals a room in confusion and the body of the famous actress laying on the bed. She had been shot while struggling for her life. The local police appealed to Scotland Yard and they dispatched one of their best minds, Inspector Stoddart, to the scene of the crime.

Inspector Stoddart is confronted with a very respectable cast of potential murderers: Sir Arthur Penn-Moreton and Lady Moreton. The younger brother of the Lord of the Manor: Richard "Dicky" Penn-Moreton and his wife Sadie, daughter of Silas P. Jugg, the "canned soup magnate" from America who observes that "British sleuths seem to be a bit backward" and cabled one of the "sharpest sleuths in the States" to make the crossing, but J.B. Harker sadly never makes an appearance. I would've loved a race to the solution between two detectives. Anyhow, a friend and barrister of the family, John Larpent, his fiancée, Paula Galbraith, and Karslake’s French maid, Celeste, further round out the cast of suspects.

However, Stoddart realizes that, in order to answer the titular question, he has to discover who Charmian Karslake was in a prior life, because she seemed to very familiar with the village for a stranger. She also spoke with a man during the party whom she called Peter Hailsham, which was the name of a "rag-and-bone picker" who sold mixed sweets and bottles of ginger-pop, but has been dead and buried for decades. And the man Karslake spoke with vanished after the party.

I think Stoddart's excursion into the past and reconstruction of Karslake's true identity makes up the best parts of the book, which deserved a better and stronger conclusion.

Haynes was rather vague or even contradictory about certain plot-details: when the body was discovered it was pointed out there were "two tiny burnt holes in the midst of the red stain," but the ending mentioned only one "sharp pop." Than there is the question of the locked bedroom door: did the murderer lock the door after the deed was done or was the key "knocked out of the way when the door was broken open," but, if the key was still on the inside of the door, then how did the murderer manage to escape from the bedroom? A police microscope confirmed that nobody left the room through the window. And, no, the scientific principle behind that conclusion was never explained either.

I wonder if Who Killed Charmian Karslake? was not entirely completed upon Haynes' passing and someone else had to come in to dot the I's and cross the T's, but overlooked these small, unanswered plot-details in what appeared as a nearly finished manuscript.

What really finished the book for me was the person who was picked to fulfill the role of murderer. It felt as a rather arbitrary choice and the moment I realized this person was the murderer I cringed. Cringed really, really hard.

So, in summation, I enjoyed a large swath of the story, but the plot collapsed in the final chapters, which is a shame, because it started out as a really good detective story.

The Devil in the Summer-House

"Oh dear, I never realized what a terrible lot of explaining one has to do in a murder."

- Clarissa Hailsham-Brown (Agatha Christie's Spider's Web, 1954)

The collaboration between Dean Street Press, an independent publisher "devoted to revitalizing good books," and Curt Evans, genre historian and author of Masters of the "Hundrum" Mystery (2012), is arguably the best thing that happened to the forgotten detective story since the Rue Morgue Press and Crippen & Landru opened for business.

It's a collaborative effort that's slowly bringing E.R. Punshon's work back into circulation and republished, after close to a century of neglect, two mystery novels by Ianthe Jerrold – of which one, Dead Man's Quarry (1930), is a textbook example of a forgotten classic. And that's not just me saying that.

Annie Haynes is a mystery writer Evans first wrote about in 2013 and at the time he "knew of only two living persons," besides himself, "who had read any of her books." Thankfully, Dean Street Press will be adding her work to their expanding catalogue and Rupert Heath was kind enough to supply me with a review copy of The Crystal Beads Murder (1930), which was probably completed by "Anthony Gilbert" after Haynes untimely passing.

There are other persons of interest who could've completed the manuscript, but Evans made a compelling case as to why it might have been Gilbert.

I'll refrain from retracing parts of the introduction Evans wrote, but, if you want an idea of what kind of person Haynes was, there's a short, interesting foreword by one of her close friends, Ada Heather-Biggs – who mentioned Haynes once cycled "miles to visit the scene of the Luard Murder" and pushed "her way into the cellar of 39 Hilldrop Crescent, where the remains of Belle Elmore were discovered."

Unfortunately, "the last fifteen years of her life" Haynes "was in constant pain and writing itself was a considerable effort" with "her only journeys being from her bedroom to her study," but "this struggle with cruel circumstances" was "lightened by the warmth of friendship existing between Miss Haynes and her fellow authors."

Well, that dark cloud has long since passed and I'll be doing my part now in lifting Haynes from the memory hole of history by taking a look at her last novel.

The Crystal Beads Murder is the last recorded case in the Inspector Stoddard series and has a plot clustering around the murder of the odious William Saunderson, a professional moneylender and part-time blackmailer, who's shot to death in the summer-house of Lord and Lady Medchester – during an evening of drawing-and billiard room activities characteristic of the early 20th century.

A full house of potential suspects moved about the premise and garden, which isn't exactly helpful to the police, even though "an alibi is the easiest thing in the world to fake" and "the least satisfactory of defenses."

There is, however, one tangible clue, "three crystal beads finked together by a thin, gold chain," which was found upon a second examination of the body, but a superintendent swears it wasn't there during the initial inspection of the victim. So did the murderer, or someone else, returned to the scene of the crime and left a "clue," of sorts?

In this respect, the first half of the book often reminded me of the typical, 1920s mystery novel, but without excessive littering of monogrammed handkerchief and train tickets – which is a huge plus for a mystery writer who wrote and published practically her entire body of work during that decade. It's only to be expected that, stylistically, Haynes' work reflected the genre, as it was in the 1920s, which made the change of author especially noticeable in the second-half.

A policeman is mortally wounded by a bullet in the second leg of the story and his dying process, and aftermath, isn't the emotionless affair that the murder of Saunderson was.

Saunderson had a wife turning up out of nowhere. A wife who admitted her husband "had his faults" and didn't "see why he should be done in and nobody punished," but her main interest is the possible inheritance that could come her way in lieu of an official will. The portrayal of the emotionally devastated widow of the poor policeman is the complete opposite.

There's a genuine sense of lost and even their home reflects this sudden, painful lost: the home looked "so familiar, and yet with life turned gray and the pivot of her very existence removed, it all looked flat and unresponsive," followed by, "the clock on the mantelpiece that she and Bill had bought when he got promoted to sergeant still ticked on with the same monotonous perseverance as ever, but it seemed somehow to be telling quite a different story." These brief snippets of grief really made me sympathize with the hangman.

If you link that with another plot-thread, involving a domestic intruder attempting to force a marriage, and you've got another indication that the mystery author might have been Anthony Gilbert – because it reflects the kind of domestic strains she specialized in when her own career took off (e.g. Something Nasty in the Woodshed, 1942).

I've got one, minor complaint, before I cut this overlong, rambling review short, which is the clue Stoddard uses to solve the case. It's a piece of evidence that’s sloppily overlooked by the police during their first investigation of the crime-scene and thrown in the inspectors lap by a passing tramp (Curt?!) and the policeman's widow, which prevents Stoddard from leaving an ever-lasting impression on the readers – and that's a shame since this was his last recorded case.

But, aside from that, Connoisseurs of Murder will find another interesting and exciting rediscovery from the Golden Age of Mysteries in Haynes and The Crystal Beads Murder. The book is slated for release in early October of this year.