About the Murder of the Night Club Lady (1931) by Anthony Abbot

"Anthony Abbot" was the pseudonym of Charles Fulton Oursler, an American journalist, editor, playwright and writer, who Mike Grost rightfully called "one of the most of the "little known" mystery writers" and, like Ellery Queen, "an early follower of S.S. van Dine" – distinguishing himself by presenting the traditional Van Dine-Queen detective story as a modern police procedural. The detective in Abbo's detective novel is not an amateur dilettante with police connections, but the Police Commissioner of Greater New York, Thatcher Colt. A well tailored policeman who resorted "to no magic except applied intelligence" and "relying invariably on strict police practice" with the invaluable cooperation of "scientists and their laboratories."

So take Abbot's interest in the latest, cutting-edge police techniques and his skillful handling of  intricate, maze-like plots with a penchant for misdirection, you can understand why so many consider him as one of the more important American mystery novelists of the 1930s. Despite his credentials, Abbot's work has been out-of-print since the fifties. You really need a bit of luck to find reasonably priced copies, especially those from the early thirties.

During the past year, I was lucky enough to come across two novels and a short story, "About the Disappearance of Agatha King" (1932) and About the Murder of the Circus Queen (1932), which were both glittering examples of the Golden Age detective story – demonstrating a deft hand at both clueing and misdirection. Recently, I got my hands on a cheap, hardcover copy of About the Murder of the Night Club Lady (1931) in poor condition, but still perfectly readable. A novel that came with the warning that the story showed far less of the colorful storytelling and imaginative plotting than "the best of Abbot's writing," but has "an original impossible crime" as its central puzzle and "this impossibility is the best part of this work." There's actually a second impossibility that's even better!

Firstly, I need to point out that About the Murder of the Night Club Lady strongly reminded me of the detective novels of another little-known writer of the Van Dine-Queen School, Roger Scarlett. Scarlett's Murder Among the Angells (1932) helped shape the Japanese yakata-mono (mansion story) mystery and this novel can be categorized as one with most of the action taking place in the Night Club Lady's spacious penthouse on the twenty-second floor of a New York skyscraper. More on that in a moment. 

About the Murder of the Night Club Lady opens in the Crystal Room of the Ritz, on New Year's Eve, where the District Attorney, Merle Dougherty, has summoned Thatcher Colt and Tony Abbot to discreetly discuss "a highly secret criminal investigation" he has been personally conducting. Something the Police Commissioner not wholly approves of ("the functions of police of the police were too often usurped by the District Attorneys"), but Doughtery apparently discovered a breakthrough in a string of jewel robberies. The D.A. believes the thieves are in cahoots with somebody "who hob-nobs with the swells and plans the jobs." Someone who freely moves around the upper-crust of New York City. Doughterty believes the higher-up is no less a figure than the Night Club Lady.

Lola Carewe is "the most mysterious woman in New York," a "dangerous beauty" better known as the Night Club Lady, who got her break as a cinema performer and became a widow a year after her sensational marriage to a cotton millionaire, Gaylord Gifford – who barely left enough money to pay the undertaker. Yet, she continues to live in luxury and spend money like water. Doughtery wanted to meet Colt at the Crystal Room to get a close-up look of the famous Night Club Lady, but they are in for a surprise! Lola arrives at the Ritz in the company of Vincent Rowland, a well-known, sharp-eyed railroad attorney, who "loved to play Crœsus to modern young painters." The three men observe the two having "a spirited discussion" as Lola scribbles a note, which is passed to their table. Lola wanted to talk serious police business with Colt.

A week ago, Lola's dog unexpectedly died and the day before her parrot died under similar circumstances, which is to say that the animal hospital were unable to determine the cause of death. They could "find no trace of any poison at all." Only an hour ago, she received a threatening letter promising she was going to die before three o'clock that night.

Colt dispatches several detectives to the top floor penthouse on East Fifty-Eighth Street, "an aerie perched high in the New York skyline like the nest of some predatory bird," which Lola shares with several other people. There's her elderly mother, Mrs. Carewe. A close friend of Lola, Christine Quires, who has been living with them for the past few months. They employ a Chinese butler, Chung Wong Duk, whose backstory, as an Oxford educated "civilian observer" in the service of his government, could very well have served as the model for one of C. Daly King best characters, Katoh – who's the Japanese valet/spy of King's gentleman detective, Philip Tarrant (The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant, 2003). Lastly, there's the maid, Eunice James, who has done a bit of domestic spying herself. So, when the police arrives, all the rooms are thoroughly searched and guards posted at every door and window "except the ones that open on a sheer drop to the street." The terrace and rooftop were not overlooked or left unguarded. Everything appears to be secure, but an unguarded moment of carelessness proved fatal.

Lola says she's going to get her cigarette case from the guest-room, ignoring Colt's warning not to go in alone, but, before anyone could go with her, she went inside. Almost immediately followed by piercing scream and the sound of a body falling to the floor. What they find inside is a dying Lola, "contorted almost into the form of a question mark," but without a single suspicious mark or scratch on her body. And she was all alone in the room.

So the entire New York police apparatus is put into motion and "a corps of specialists was being organized and dispatched to the scene," which range from the Medical Examiner and police photographers to the Captain of the local precinct. Detectives who arrived from Headquarters began to search the penthouse again, while others were dispatched to delve into the past histories of persons considered important or check out alibis, but this is merely background chatter compared to a few genuinely interesting pieces of early forensic detective work. Firstly, two young detectives arrive from Centre Street arrive at the penthouse with a special vacuum cleaner and meticulously go over the guest-room collecting "every particle of dust in the room where the crime had been done," which may contain, "somewhere in the multitudes of particles," the vital clue to puzzle. The vacuum cleaner bags and the victim's clothing are send to a retired scientist, Professor George Luckner, who's "at heart a great detective," but "regards detective work as degrading to a scientist" and devotes himself to criminal research only as a special favor to Colt. And he does find the key-clue. Secondly, Colt is very interested in a photograph of a young Frenchman and has it sent to the Paris police by telephoto (wirephoto). A still very new, time consuming and expensive technology that were large machines and required a untied telephone line. The reader gets a brief description of how it exactly works. I love finding these little time-capsules in my vintage detective stories!

While his men doggedly pursue every lead, Colt has to try and make sense out of such bizarre clues as a wrongly-buttoned bathrobe, a small, unpainted wooden box and a missing suspect who was seen by the elevator boy returning to the penthouse – except this person is nowhere to be found. What happened? There are also two outsiders who have to be considered. Lola's former physician, Dr. Hugh Baldwin, was called to her bedside when she was dying and told the police she had a history of heart trouble. But they apparently had a falling out. Guy Everett is a young actor who escorted Christine Quires that evening to a New Year's party, but he also might have had a motive. And his speakeasy alibi is very shaky. But the case becomes even deeper and more perplexing when a second impossibility occurs inside the closely watched and guarded penthouse. Practically under the nose of the police!

A body miraculously appeared in the boudoir, twisted and contorted like a question mark, but, this time, there are terrible welts on the throat. However, the doctor tells Colt that those monstrous marks were put on the victim's throat after death. Not to mention the problem of the body materializing out of thin air in a previously thoroughly searched, closely guarded premise.

So how well does About the Murder of the Night Club Lady stack up as an impossible crime novel? Pretty well, actually, but with some minor qualifications. I don't think many readers today will be too impressed with "the instrumentality of death" as it seems more suited to a pulp thriller instead of a traditional detective story. Abbot used it expertly and smartly didn't wait until the very with revealing how death was delivered. Apparently, it might have actually been employed in a real-life murder as Colt references "the Falk case in Vienna" and mentioned their killer might have knowledge of that case, but the wise, all-knowing internet was unable to find anything. So no idea if this trick was inspired by a real murder case. The impossible appearance of the body in the boudoir is shockingly brilliant! I sort of figured out how it must have been, but that took nothing away from it and added a delightful, creepy afterthought to everything that had previously happened at the penthouse. Very fitting for a Japanese-style mansion story! 

About the Murder of the Night Club Lady is arguably even better as a whodunit with Abbot demonstrating the skillful agility of a practiced card mechanic when dealing the reader their clues and red herrings. Abbot beautifully hid his murderer among a small cast of characters, but giving the reader enough clues, hints and tells to spot this person before arriving at the explanation. And, if there's anything to complain or nitpick about, it's Abbot wasting a brilliant and daring clue. Had he told the reader the name of the dance early on in the story, I would have stood up to applaud his guts and cunning as a mystery novelist. Nevertheless... About the Murder of the Night Club Lady is a very game, boldly executed 1930s detective novel crammed with inexplicable death, impossible situations, strange clues and treacherous red herrings in camouflage. Not every aspect of the plot has aged particularly gracefully, but the pleasingly complex plot retained enough of its radiant, Golden Age ingenuity to make it a worthwhile recommendation.

I hope About the Murder of the Clergyman's Mistress (1931) and About the Murder of a Man Afraid of Women (1937) will find their way into my hands as easily as the last two.

About the Murder of a Circus Queen (1932) by Anthony Abbot

Back in November, I reviewed an excellent short story by Anthony Abbot, "About the Disappearance of Agatha King" (1932), which might not have been much as an impossible crime story, but the who-and why were splendidly and detailed clued – punctuated with a well-done and satisfying ending. A glittering gem of the short Golden Age detective story that begs the question why Abbot still hasn't returned to the printed page. 

So it was time to do some detective work and track down a secondhand copy of one of his long out-of-print novels, which brought one of Abbot's most striking detective novels my way. A novel with a "classic crime in Madison Square Garden" and a mention Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). 

About the Murder of a Circus Queen (1932), alternatively published as The Murder of a Circus Queen, marked the fourth appearance of Commissioner Thatcher Colt, of Centre Street, who's visited in the opening chapter by Colonel Tod Robinson – owner and manager of the Combined Greatest Shows on Earth. Colonel Robinson is "the last of the large independents" and recently obtained an engagement at Madison Square Garden, which required a large investment, but ever since the circus has been plagued by costly accidents. A train wreck destroyed two display floats and a gondola loaded with bleachers and grandstand seats. Sickness broke out along the elephant line, a "peculiar malady" attacked the bulls, their prize lion died of indigestion and trained clown mule broke its leg and had to be shot.

All of that could have been put down to a string of bad luck, but then the star performers began to receive threatening letters warning them, under penalty of death, "not to exhibit their best tricks during the New York engagement."

Initially, a little skeptical ("...I suppose you are advising the newspapers that in spite of these thrilling threats, your star performers are positively going to appear..."), Colt decides to personally tackle the case when the news reaches them that a mechanic had toppled off a high platform. So the police is confronted with a colorful cast of characters who form a closed community that's next to impossible to penetrate and "the black magic of dark ages" that filled the hardened New York policemen with horror.

The star of the show is the Queen of the Air, Josie LaTour, who's "paid the biggest salary in the history of the business" and Colt is an attendance when her flying body performed death defying stunts, but all of a sudden, she began to shake and struggle to keep her grip on the rings – uttering a cry before plunging to her death. Colt knows what he saw was not an accident. An impossible crime with nearly twenty thousand possible suspects and witnesses!

As a quick aside, to my knowledge, there's only been one other detective novel MSG as a setting, Ellery Queen's The American Gun Mystery (1933), which came a year after About the Murder of a Circus Queen. There's something else in About the Murder of Circus Queen that makes me suspect it might have given Queen an idea that was turned into The American Gun Mystery.

Anyway, Abbot made excellent use of the circus background of the case to fill the MSG with a pool of colorful, sometimes even lurid, suspects. There's the victim's husband, Flandrin, who's a rising young trapeze artist and really seemed to have loved his wife, but also has motives and opportunities to spare. They employed a husband-and-wife team of catchers, Flandreau and Flandra. Marburg Lovell is the millionaire backer of Colonel Robinson who had a side-interest in the Queen of the Air, which appeared to have earned him a black eye. Signor Sebastian is known as the King of the Air, but he's getting older and might be on his way down the ladder. The most curious of the bunch are undoubtedly the Ubangis, of the Mazzi tribe, who only speak a tribal dialect. Something that will become a stumbling as only their witch doctor, the educated Keblia, speaks English and he's conducting his own investigation.

Even more troublesome, the Unbangis possibly have a motive as the temperamental LaTour ("just a human tiger") savagely whipped two of them when she found them snooping around in her dressing room. Understandably, the Unbangis were quite sore at her and had closed door meeting. Throughout their investigation, the police come across "crude, awkwardly shaped" mud images that nevertheless "bore a definite and forceful resemblance to Josie LaTour" with long, sharp needles driven straight through the heart. Some of you are probably gritting your teeth at this point, but the depiction and treatment is not as harsh, or unflattering, as this plot-thread suggests. You'll probably be surprised how their role in the story is played out. Yes, it's a bit rough and unpolished by today's standards, but it's certainly not another The Stingaree Murders (1932).

So what more could you want from a vintage, 1930s mystery novel? A plot, you say. Abbot has you covered there!

Abbot plotted About the Murder of a Circus Queen like a chess player who willingly sacrificed (i.e. gave away) part of the solution to successfully misdirect the reader (this one anyway), not once, but twice. The observant, or seasoned, armchair detective will likely spot something that apparently gives the whole game away, but you'll probably get suspicious along the way, because the police is only too willing to go along with the obvious solution – particular the unlikable D.A. who loves third-degreeing suspects a little too much (see About the Murder of Geraldine Foster, 1930). Regardless, I figured the solution (how it was done) was not as obvious in 1932 as it's in 2021 and assumed Abbot banked on its relative newness to be more carefree with his clues and hints. A line halfway through the story, "what curious motives may exist in the terra incognita of the circus," gave me pause for thought and another suspect occurred to me. Someone who fitted the role of murderer perfectly and the clue of the second (not exactly) impossible crime also appeared to point towards this person.

So I had it all figured out, who, why and how, but then Colt began to talk about enclosing the murderer in "a narrow circle of deduction," a circle growing smaller and smaller, until an unexpected name remained – leaving me with egg and greasepaint on my face. It was comforting to know Colt worked on the exactly the same "false theory" before arriving at the correct solution, but none of that changes the fact that this was another one of my famous Roger Sheringham moments.

Only thing that can be said against the solution is that it only accomplished to skillfully sneak the murderer pass the reader, who's likely too busy with turning red herrings into fantastic theories, while either of the incorrect theories would have given the story a better, more fitting and darker ending. The actual solution is more in the "tadaah, surprise!" category.

But who cares? About the Murder of a Circus Queen is a genuine, fair play detective novel with a fascinating, vividly realized backdrop and a masterly-done piece of double-layered misdirection designed to teach readers who like to pretend they're the flesh-and-blood incarnation Mycroft Holmes a lesson. A small, plot-technical marvel and a fine piece of old-fashioned craftsmanship showing why the 1930s were the Golden Years of the Golden Age. Abbot deserves to be reprinted!

Forever Hold Your Peace: "About the Disappearance of Agatha King" (1932) by Anthony Abbot

Fulton Oursler was an American journalist, critic, editor and writer, who's best known for his bestselling book The Greatest Story Ever Told (1949), but, as "Anthony Abbot," he produced a short-lived, now obscure, series of detective novels and short stories – which were firmly rooted in the traditions of the Van Dine-Queen School of Mystery Fiction. There is, however, one notable difference: Abbot's series-character is not a dilettante detective, like Philo Vance or Spike Tracy, but a sharply dressed New York police commissioner, Thatcher Colt.

Anthony Abbot has been rightly praised as "one of the most important of the "little known" mystery writers" whose novels are distinguished by "a wonderful plot complexity" and a good hand at misdirection, but they have been out-of-print for decades. And there are no apparent plans to reprint the series anytime soon.

Luckily, Alexander, of the Writer's Desk blog, provided me with one of his short stories that was listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991).

"About the Disappearance of Agatha King" was originally published in the June, 1932, issue of Cosmopolitan and reprinted years later in The Mystery Book (1939), but has since vanished from sight, which is a shame, because Abbot came up with a new solution to Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor" – collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892). Some would even argue Abbot improved on the original idea by adding an impossible disappearance to the mix. ;)

Reggie Wallis is "the patron saint" of the New York nightclub scene and “some day soon he would come into two ancestral fortunes,” but, when the story opens, he's about to marry the blond and beautiful Agatha King. A match that greatly pleases her ward, General King, because the marriage is his "pawn ticket to redeem the family fortune." But a day before the wedding, Reggie is sitting in Thatcher Colt's office to ask for police protection.

Once upon a time, Agatha was deeply in love with an old friend of Reggie, Jim Dwight, but old General King naturally disapproved and trouble began, which ended in them splitting up and him moving away. Unfortunately, trouble kept dogging Jim's footsteps and was sentenced to ten years in chains after intervening in the beating of a black man in the deep South. So he asked Reggie to tell everyone at home that he was dead and that's where things would have remained, but Reggie wrote him that he was going to marry Agatha and Jim wrote back that he would murder him, Agatha and the whole damn world – promising he would "smash the universe that had smashed him." Reggie becomes nervous when he learns Jim had broken out of prison.

Thatcher Colt immediately removed Agatha from her home and places her in a hotel, registered under an alias, where "every corridor was manned with sentries." Not a single fire escape, air shaft or exit was left unobserved. Somehow, Agatha King vanished without a trace from a locked and closely guarded suite of rooms!

Admittedly, the locked room-trick is nothing special and the story should not be read solely as an impossible crime, but what makes "About the Disappearance of Agatha King" a fantastic detective story is the splendid and detailed clueing of the who-and why – punctuated by a very well done and satisfying ending. A fine and glittering example of the short Golden Age detective story more than deserving to be reprinted. It would be a perfect story for that hypothetical, American-themed British Library Crime Classics anthology, Bloody Colonials.

Who Killed Geraldine Foster?

"Chemists employed by the police can do remarkable things with blood. They can weave it into a rope to hang a man."

- Margery Allingham.

When I open the yellow pages of a venerable paperback or a timeworn hardback, I always gaze briefly at the dedication in front and ponder what forgotten, often domestic, stories prompted a writer to permanently inscribe a book to a Peter or Mary. Every now and then, these inscriptions are accompanied with a cursory explanation, "in memory of a perfect holiday" or "as a token of appreciating for allowing me to draw on your expertise of the poisonous Golden Dart Frog," or the person on who this diminutive honor is bestowed was a rather well known personality himself – in which case the story pretty much tells itself. But they seldom, if ever, have any bearing on the content of a book, nevertheless, I couldn't help but think of the people to whom Anthony Abbot dedicated The Murder of Geraldine Foster (1930) as I went from chapter to chapter – and I will divulge the reason for this near the end of this post. 

The grisly murder of Geraldine Foster began as a routine missing persons case when a young woman, Betty Canfield, reports that her room-mate has gone missing and since the declarant is a niece of a friend of Thatcher Colt the case ends up on his desk. 

But before I continue, I have to make an annotation here on Thatcher Colt who's crudely drawn character in his first recorded outing. In the previous novel I read, About the Murder of a Startled Lady (1935), he was a sharply dressed, upper class commissioner of police – who relied on thorough police work and sound forensic science to bring a case to a satisfying conclusion. He's still one of the best-dressed, most sophisticated policeman on duty, but here he depends on third-degreeing information from an unwilling suspect and questionable pseudo-scientific methods.

This unfortunately ended up devaluing an otherwise class-act detective story with a dazzling plot from superb to merely excellent. It didn't help, either, that Colt was making a series of incredible, rarely substantiated, assumptions deductions like working out what brand of ink was used on a letter by merely glancing at it – turning him into a Philo Vance or Ellery Queen clone with a badge. But let us return to the story. 

With an official report to set the wheels in motions, New York's finest begin sifting through the last reported moments of the missing girls life, questioning family members, interrogating friends and putting everyone else even loosely connected with the case under the gravest of suspicion as they slowly, but surely, uncover a slew of bizarre clues – ranging from a torn-up blackmail note to the cadavers of six doves stained with human blood. These clues all point like a neon-sign post to an abandoned house, where the walls are covered blood, and a shallow grave near the site in which the murderer deposited the denuded body of Geraldine Foster – hacked to death with a double-bladed ax with a pillow-case wrapped around her head.

The elaborate plot is pleasingly entangled in its complexity and the inducement for the murderer to make a bloody mess with a clumsy ax, strip the body and dress her split face with a pillow case before dumping her in a shallow hole in the ground are logically explained – and really is what you hope to find when you begin flipping through the pages of a detective novel. What holds this book down are the aforementioned third-degreeing and exploration of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. I wouldn't have been surprised, or shocked, in the least if Colt would've whipped out a volume of Cesare Lombroso's theories and a ruler to measure facial features in search for hereditary traces of guilt.

But what really casts a dim-light on these proceedings, is the fact that the commissioner has an incredible dense district attorney looming over his shoulder, whose mind runs along a single, unbending track with as only destination strapping someone in the electric chair to further his career, making this even a bit of an uncomfortable read at times – which made me wonder throughout these portions of the story what the people on the dedication page thought of this book. 

Abbot dedicated to the book to the standing army of New York City, the police department, but what did these men think of a police commissioner pumping a suspect full of truth serum after keeping him up all night – hoping to break-down the strong minded, individualistic personality of this person? It was noted in this very book that third-degreeing and intimidating a suspect were already frowned upon as an investigative method and inadmissible in a court of law, but nonetheless incorporated them into the plot and making them run the risk of tainting a possible case against the actual murderer. Not really reflective of proper policework.  

Plot-wise, it comes dangerously close to being absolutely brilliant, but the modus operandi of Thatcher Colt is problematic to say the least. Still, if you're a fan, like me, me of those elaborately plotted mysteries from the Van Dine-Queen School of Detection than the plot of this book warrants your full attention.

She Looked So Startled

I'm certainly no authority on Anthony Abbot, having read only two of his novels, About the Murder of Startled Lady (1935) and The Creeps (1939), but according to the introduction of the former Abbot was the alias of a well-known novelist, Fulton Oursler, who turned to detective stories in the early 1930s – and what I gathered from them was that he was an early practitioner of the police procedural in the Van Dine-Queen mold. Just like the aforementioned writers he was a plot-orientated writer who casts himself in the role of Thatcher Colt's narrator – a debonair Police Commissioner, who can be seen as a combination of Ellery Queen and his father. And all but the last two titles in the series begin with About the Murder of [a Person], which is akin to Van Dine's The [Six Letter Word] Murder Case and Queen's The [Country] [Noun] Mystery novels.

However, that's where the similarities end: whereas Van Dine and Queen have detectives who make incredible deductions based on mathematics and arcane knowledge, Thatcher Colt has an entire police department at his disposal for proper, methodical police work and early forensic methodology.

The case at hand begins as a simple, straight forward and routine police job of pulling in a couple of self professed spiritualists, a wife and husband, who were giving private séances and exhibiting ghosts at three dollars per exhibition, but when frisked the police exorcized a ghost from the mediums bosom – i.e. forty yards of cheese cloth daubed with luminous paint. But in the face of this overwhelming and damnable evidence, they maintain that they're legitimate mediums with a direct line to the spirit world. Not only that, but recently they have been making contact with the ghost of a murdered woman whose body has never been found.

Thatcher Colt is more than a little skeptical, but lets himself being persuaded by their champion, a professor turned psychic investigator, to give them the benefit of the doubt and an opportunity to vindicate their assertion of mediumship. The result is a spook show at Centre Street, in which Colt apparently receives a first hand account of a gruesome murder from the Great Beyond – detailing the horrifying circumstances in which a murdered woman, named Madeline, was dismembered and put into a watery grave.

She's even able to give an exact location of the spot where the murderer dumped her remains, and, to everyone surprise, they find a heavy box filled with a skull and bones. Unfortunately, for the police, the girl was shot through the head and therefore her ghost is unable to remember her last name or identity of her butcher (convenient, eh?). But Colt does a bang-up job at identifying the girl in less than two days by employing a skilled forensic sculpture to reconstruct the face on the skull, and from here on out the story concentrates on fishing the murderer from a small pool of suspect – ranging from her religiously fanatical father and a unbalanced half sister to a swinging boyfriend and his dominating sister, and the two spiritualists who knew more than they were letting on.

The apparent supernatural knowledge of the mediums is a neat variation on the impossible crime story and is adequately, if a bit dully, explained. Its main problem is that I have seen other writers propose more inspired solutions for this type of miracle problem, but otherwise it's an excellent and competently plotted detective story with a great dénouement – set in an operating room where the doctors are in the progress of stitching together the second victim.