The Case of the Seven of Calvary (1937) by Anthony Boucher

The Case of the Seven of Calvary (1937) is the ambitious first detective novel from the hands of respected genre critic, editor and science-fiction author, Anthony Boucher, which drew heavily on his college days and knowledge of the detective story – delivering what can only be described as a mystery reader's mystery novel. Boucher also used his debut as a stage for his diverse array of talents and interests.

Boucher was "a natural linguist" who was fluent in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and more than averagely proficient in Sanskrit. During his college days, Boucher was active on-and around the stage as an actor, director and playwright, which are all worked into this academic mystery novel. More importantly, the plot, structure of the novel and storytelling radiates with its authors love and understanding of the Grandest Game in the World. Boucher is more restrained in his later novels (The Case of the Solid Key, 1941), but him going all out here was a treat. I can understand why so many readers consider The Case of the Seven of Calvary to be his best detective novel.

The Case of the Seven of Calvary hits the ground running with its dramatis personae that comes with a footnote: "the reader who approaches a mystery novel as a puzzle and a challenge is cautioned that he need keep his eye only on those characters marked by an asterisk; the rest are merely necessary extras." But it doesn't stop there.

The story begins with a prelude in which Anthony Boucher discusses whether, or not, the Watson is "an outworn device" with one of main characters of the story, Martin Lamb, who's a student and resident of International House at the University of California – where he once acted as a Watson to Dr. John Ashwin. A well-known and celebrated professor of Sanskrit whose translations rank among the indispensable standard works of every library worth its name. Martin begins to tell him the story and promises that his account "shall be a model of fair play."

A story that begins with the arrival of Dr. Hugo Schaedel, an unofficial ambassador of the Swiss Republic, who's on a worldwide lecture tour to preach World Peace and argue in favor of a universal brotherhood of man. A brotherhood as exemplified by the "incredible assortment of nationalities" at International House, which is one of the reason why he decided to address them. So a peaceful and harmless man, who was a complete stranger, but, during an evening stroll, Dr. Schaedel is attacked and killed with an ice pick! The murderer left behind a piece of paper with a symbol on it: "a curious sort of italic F, mounted upon three rectangles shaped like steps."

This symbol is quickly identified as the calling card of the Vignards, "Seven of Calvary," which is an obscure Swiss sect of political and religious sectarians who have fomented and fostered "most of the dissensions which have torn Switzerland." Such as their 1920s secret campaign against the League of Nations, but even Dr. Ashwin finds this possibility "a trifle too early Doyle" for his taste.

Dr. Ashwin acts throughout the story as an armchair detective and uses Martin as an accessory to his reasoning (i.e. a Watson) as they discuss and analyze that immortal trinity of detective fiction – namely Motive, Means and Opportunity. They go over the six motives for murder classified by F. Jesse Tennyson in Murder and Its Motives (1924) and exchange ideas why a murderer would leave behind a cyrptic message. Was it an artistic embellishment? A warning to others? A red herring? There's also the question of opportunity and a peculiarity with the alibis or why the murderer used an ice pick to kill his victim. Was it because it's an uncharacteristic and untraceable, but deadly, weapon? Dr. Ashwin funnily remarks that Sherlock Holmes would have deduced from the ice pick that "the murderer was a cuckold," because "his household still employs an icebox in these days of electric refrigeration" and "most probably occasioned by his wife's intrigue with the proverbial iceman."

Boucher made a gutsy move during the first seven chapters by revealing the truth behind the murder, minus the murderer's identity, which is something that has been done before and since, but usually trotted out as a surprise twist towards the end. A surprise that rarely lands. But here it beautifully paved the way for the second murder. An onstage poisoning during a dress rehearsal of a college play, Don Juan Returns, with another cryptic note left on the stage.

The Case of the Seven of Calvary very much belongs to that category of the simon-pure jigsaw-puzzle detective story (to borrow a phrase from Boucher) sharing the essential facts with the reader and then, "in the manner of the admirable Ellery Queen," challenges them to solve it – referring back to all of the clues in the footnotes of the penultimate chapter. And urges the reader to check their solutions against "the obvious certainty of Dr. John Ashwin." That's how you write a detective story!

Nevertheless, classifying The Case of the Seven of Calvary merely as a solid, puzzle-oriented detective novel in the Van Dine-Queen School would be selling Boucher short as a writer in general. All of the locations in the book are places where Boucher had lived, studied or worked and this allowed him to portray university life in an authentic and convincing manner. It feels like a real place filled with real people. Boucher was very brazen for his time when he touched upon the interracial romances at International House and an abortion, which must have raised some of his readers' eyebrows at the time. You have to remember that the author of The Strawstack Murder Case (1936), Kirke Mechem, had his second manuscript rejected because these subjects were central to the plot. The manuscript was lost to history and Mechem never wrote another detective novel.

So it was quite daring for a debuting novelist to casually throw that into the story, but Boucher didn't stop there. Dr. Ashwin and Martin discuss how a very sordid crime, known as the Twin Peaks Murder, usurped the newspaper headlines. A married man who left behind his mistress, naked and dead, in his own car that was parked on Twin Peaks. The murder weapon, covered with fingerprints, was found nearby. A stark contrast with the puzzling, seemingly motiveless, murder of the visiting emissary and the curious symbol that was left beside the corpse.

But these realistic touches and convincingly drawn backdrop helped massage out a flaw usually found in these overindulgent detective stories that are more than a little conscious that they're a detective story ("Well, I'm that worst abortion of nature, an amateur detective"). As fun as they may be to wholesale consumers of detective fiction, they tend to be a trifle artificial, but that was not the case here. The Case of the Seven of Calvary reads like a storybook murderer had escaped the printed page and there just so happened to be a brilliant professor and a student on hand to help sort out the mess as that "imperishable Master of Baker Street" and his indispensable Watson. I also liked how Boucher handled and used, what could be called, an unrealistic, minutely-timed alibi and cleverly employed in the greater good of the plot. And how it related to the second murder. Very 1930s Christopher Bush! And that's another point in its favor!

So, all in all, The Case of the Seven of Calvary is an enthusiastic and vigorous first detective novel from a well-known, highly respected critic and with logical, fairly clued plot that arguably makes it one of the best debuts of the Golden Decade of the Golden Age. Highly recommended!

The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories

"It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..."

- Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933) 

One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of a famous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of a cliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carr even "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story.

At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively, assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories and unpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. This realization came with a collection of short stories.

A long-lost, pseudonymous JDC novel?

The late Robert Adey, who compiled Locked Room Murders (1991), wrote an introduction for Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004), in which he mentioned Joseph Commings attempted to transition from writing short stories to writing novels – an attempt that ended in the most tragic loss on this list.

During the 1960s, Commings found "sales of short fiction were either slow or stationary" and tried his hand as novelist. Adey mentioned how Commings "vividly recalled a lunch he once had with John Dickson Carr," someone he greatly admired, who was very enthusiastic about the idea and had some sage advice for the budding novelist: "why not make it a locked room?" The first attempt, The Doctor Died First, was aborted after only four chapters, but Commings eventually completed four, full-length mystery novels starring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lost manuscripts!

One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent to France and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, The Crimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel and containing two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and time probably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain of existence.

From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings the most. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchange for One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this.

Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) and mentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completed the manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was to be published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeled King's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditional detective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writers who began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S. Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – a locked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detective stories.

A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, Glyn Carr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissued by the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revised introduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carr produced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "one last, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it.

The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts to a long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930s and early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red (1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of her work. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career.

Once a lost, unpublished story

Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and the collection contains several unpublished manuscripts written in her later years." Her papers are archived at the City University of New York and you can find a listing of her unpublished work on their website, which includes such titles as The Fearful Guest (1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) and Sweet Poison (c. 1970).

So they're not completely lost forever and I've several more of such examples, but first there's one more lost manuscript that ought to be acknowledged on this blog.

Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewed several novels from The Three Investigators series, which were penned by such writers as Robert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey, but even this fairly innocent series suffered a great loss: a number of websites, dedicated to The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey and an editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not known with certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists."

Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in "cold storage." Here are two of them.

Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalone mystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which is patiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand's short fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previously unpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar dropped a message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublished novel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center of unpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast."

So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lost detective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck Season Death (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten, unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's a future opportunity to publish them.

Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-white photocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really a long-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete and utter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher of a 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors into believing they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperback outfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story, because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch was apparently the first one who saw through the hoax.

Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of you found it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recently brought back into print. So some things are looking up!

The Voice of Reason

"Our lives are drawing towards eventide and old faces and old scenes are gone forever. And yet, as I lean back in my chair and close my eyes, for a while the past rises up to obscure the present and I see before me the yellow fogs of Baker Street and I hear once more the voice of the best and wisest man whom I have ever known: 'Come, Watson, the game's afoot.'"

- Dr. John H. Watson (John Dickson Carr and Adrian Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Red Widow," from The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, 1954) 

The 1930-and 40s are generally considered to be the glory years of the detective story, but what's often overlooked is that the genre prospered around the same time as radio dramas experienced their golden age and detective stories thrived as much on the airwaves as they did on the printed page – reaching an audience of millions of listeners.

During that time, there was a wide variety of crime shows to be found across the radio dial. Radio shows such as Suspense, Murder by Experts, Cabin B-13 and The Inner Sanctum offered episodic, standalone stories, but there was also a whole slew of recognizable sleuths who got their own regular program. These shows included The Adventures of Ellery Queen, Philo Vance, The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe, Casey, Crime Photographer and The Adventures of Sam Spade.

You probably noticed I omitted one very well-known and recognizable name from that short overview, but rest assured, I had not forgotten about the immortal Sherlock Holmes and the indispensable Dr. Watson. Who could forget about them?

The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was one of the popular radio shows of the day, which ran from 1939 to 1947, starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson – cementing a place for itself in the Holmes fandom. But enthusiasts of classic mysteries also remember the show, because the series was co-written by Anthony Boucher and Denis Green. Both men collaborated on another popular show, The Casebook of Gregory Hood, and Boucher himself was a very respected as both a mystery novelist and reviewer. 

During the late 1980s-and early 90s, the series experienced a brief resurgence when a whole slew episodes were released on cassette tape and these eventually numbered twenty-six volumes in total. However, the object of interest of this blog-post is the book spawned by this project, The Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1989), which consists of about a dozen short stories adapted from the original radio-plays by Boucher and Green.

Ken Greenwald is the author of the book and the introduction goes over how this collection of short stories came into being, which stretched all the way back to when he was ten years old, "tucked safely in bed with the lights out," listening to the show on a small radio next to his bed and these childhood memories came back in the late 1980s – when, as one of the archivists for a radio museum, he "learned of a long run of missing Sherlock Holmes radio shows from 1945." This lead to the episodes being released and his colleagues came to him with the suggestion of writing a book based on radio-plays, which was grateful task and the end result is a charming homage to the work of Boucher, Green, Rathbone and Bruce.

As Greenwald stresses, The Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is not a close imitation of the writing by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but instead tried "to be true to the writings of Green and Boucher" and utilize as much of their material as possible – which seems to have succeeded at. He also emphasizes that he adapted these stories with the original (voice) actors in mind and asks the reader to "think of Rathbone and Bruce in the roles of the great detective and his companion."

So now that we got that out of the way, lets take these stories down from the top and I'll try to keep it as brief as possible. I'm painfully aware that the size reviews of short story collection tend to resemble a bloated canal corpse.

The opening story, "The Adventure of the Second Generation," takes place after Sherlock Holmes retired to the countryside and dedicated all of his attention to tending his bees, but an extended visit from his old friend, Dr. Watson, coincided with a plea for help from the daughter of Irene Adler – who finds herself in the clutches of a blackmailer. She is being blackmailed by Holmes' awful neighbor, Mr. Litton-Stanley, who has "some rather indiscreet letters" in his possession and expects a small fortune for their return, but Holmes and Watson encounter a snag when they try to retrieve them. There's also a nifty twist towards the ending that I actually foresaw. A charming little story. 

The second story, "The Adventure of the April Fool's Adventure," occurred not long after the first meeting between Holmes and Watson, which makes the latter slightly uncomfortable when a friend, James Murphy, draws him in a conspiracy with the objective of pulling a prank on the promising detective. Lady Ann is going to call on Holmes and ask him to help her find the famous Elfenstone Emerald. Apparently, the stone was lifted from her wall safe and the joke is that all of the planted clues identify Holmes as the thief, but, after they all had a laugh at his expense, the stone vanishes for real – and he has to figure out who used the prank as a cover for the theft. You can probably guess the hiding place for the stone, but the real surprise is the secret identity of the thief.

I'm afraid I didn’t care for the third story, "The Case of the Amateur Mendicants," in which Watson is called upon by a woman, "dressed in rags and tatters," who, in a surprisingly cultured voice, assures she came on "a matter of life and death." So he allows her to bring him to a luxuriously furnished basement, strangely filled with dirty looking beggars, where he's shown a dead man with a broken neck. However, the people there are opposed to his presence and he quickly takes his leave, but, alongside Holmes, returns to that basement and uncovers a dark conspiracy that could endanger the whole of England. A story with an interesting premise, but I was impressed with the resolution of the plot.

Luckily, the fourth entry, "The Adventure of the Out-of-Date Murder," turned out to be one of my favorite stories from this collection. Holmes has been overworking himself and Watson senses "an attack of nerves and total breakdown approaching," which makes him decide to pull his friend out of his private laboratory for a holiday in Eastbourne. Both men decide to meet up with an old acquaintance, Professor Whitnell, who recently garnered fame with the discovery of a network of underground caverns – saturated with "a heavy deposit of lime" that have "the property of rapidly mummifying any flesh," human or animal, "deposited in them." What they find in them pertains to several men who went missing in the area over the past two-or three hundred years. I love archeological mysteries and this story should have been adapted for the Jeremy Brett TV-series.

The next story, "The Case of the Demon Barber," has a theatrical background and concerns a well-known actor, Mark Humphries, who is playing the lead role in Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, but now fears the personality of Sweeney Todd has taken possession of his subconscious. Several times, he has woken up to find that his boots were caked with mud and his razorblade stained with blood. A good and tantalizing premise, but the attraction of the plot is mainly derived from using the tale of Sweeney Todd as a template and Holmes taking over the role from Humphries – after he apparently committed suicide in his dressing room. 

In "Murder Beyond the Mountains," Holmes finally tells Watson about one of his many adventures in Tibet, which read like one of Glyn Carr's mountaineering mysteries as perceived by Robert van Gulik. 

Holmes is braving the harsh conditions of the Tibetan mountains, as Olaf Sigerson, in the hope of getting permission at the monastery of Puncha-Pushpah to enter the forbidden city of Lhasa, but his traveling party and equipment gets obliterated in an avalanche – wandering delirious in the white, desolate mountains of Tibet. Luckily, he's saved by an American missionary, Miss Farley, who travels with him to the monastery and they're joined by a Russian envoy, Borodin. All of them seek permission to enter the forbidden city, but the Chinese emissary, Wah-tzun, refuses to give permission. So, before long, Holmes has to investigate the murder of the emissary, which is a relatively simple affair. The main strength here definitely lies in the backdrop of the story.

The following story, "The Case of the Uneasy Easy Chair," provides the collection with its first or three (borderline) impossible crime stories, which is brought to Holmes and Watson by a young woman, Miss Harriet Irvin. Her father, Sir Edward Irvin, was stabbed to death in his study and "the only entrance to the study through an anteroom," but that room was occupied by his secretary, Robert Binyon, who "swore that no one had entered or left the study." The problem is that Sir Edward was strongly opposed to the blossoming love between his daughter and secretary, which provided the young man with both a motive and opportunity. So the police arrested him on suspicion of murder. Well, the how-aspect of the crime is easily solved, but whodunit-angle had a small surprise that showed even Holmes was prone to misjudging a situation.

Initially, I really wanted to like the next story, "The Case of the Baconian Cipher," but ended up not caring for it. Holmes is engaged in a discussion with a French colleague and friendly rival, Francois la Villard, who asserts that "the English criminal is a very dull dog" and in order to prove him wrong Holmes introduces him to The Agony Column – which is "liable to contain anything from a lover’s frantic appeal" to "a ransom note." Immediately, they find a coded message that could be a call for help and this lead them to a house where a wheel chair bound man might be in mortal danger. But the only interesting aspect of the plot is Mycroft Holmes' off-page cameo and how this affected the events in the story.

The next story, "The Case of the Headless Monk," is a very atmospheric, Carrian tale that offered a borderline impossible crime to Holmes and Watson. A restless Holmes and Watson are bound to their rooms in Baker Street by a thick, impenetrable mist that drowned the city of London for the better part of a week, but rescue came when they received a visit from Mortimer Harley – a specialist in the supernatural. Harley has been presented with a rare opportunity to investigate one of Cornwall's legendary ghosts, the Headless Monk of Trevenice Chapel, which has recently become very active again. The specialist of the supernatural wants to know whether the phenomena is genuine or driven by human agency, in which case it's a problem for someone like Holmes.

Holmes and Watson gratefully accept this unusual invitation to escape from foggy London and accompany him to Cornwall, but they are unable to prevent a deadly stabbing in the disused and closely watched chapel. However, the explanation for the semi-impossible circumstances of the murder will be considered a cheat by many readers, but, technically, the witness did not lie. I still kind of liked the story. But, yes, I recognize that these type of plots have been done better and far more competent than this. So keep that mind when you read it for yourself.

The plot of "The Case of the Camberwell Poisoners" began as a classic tontine-scheme: Edmund Lovelace comes to Baker Street to ask Holmes if wants to save four lives. Lovelace lives with four cousins in an old house in Camberwall, which was left to them by their grandfather, but the place and a sizable fortune came to them under the sole condition that they "live together and maintain the family unit" – everything will eventually go to the last surviving cousin. The problem arose with his cousin Gerald, administrator of the estate, who was found to be in possession of cyanide-filled syringe, but upon their arrival in Camberwall it becomes apparent that the story was going to be one of human interest. One with a rather obvious explanation. But not too bad of a story.

The next story, "The Adventure of the Iron Box," is a fine and fun yarn, which is definitely one of the highlights from this collection. An old friend, Sir Walter Dunbar, invites Dr. Watson to spend the New Year's Eve at Dunbar Castle in Scotland. Of course, Holmes accompanies him there. Sir Walter has a very special reason for inviting his friend and personal chronicler of Europe's most celebrated detective. The late father of the current lair of the castle, Sir Thomas Dunbar, returned severely wounded from the battle of Waterloo and left his unborn child an iron box filled with gold, but there was a condition attached to this legacy: the box was to be given to his son on New Year's Eve before his twenty-first birthday.

There is, however, one snag that Sir Thomas did not foresee on his deathbed: his son was born on February 29th, which made him a "leapling" and therefore had to wait for over eight decades before to finally come into his inheritance. Unfortunately, Holmes has to play the specter at the feast and informs everyone that, due to a technicality, 1900 is not going to be a leap year. So the old Lord has to wait another four years. As to be expected, this casts a shadow over the proceedings and leads to the unsettling discovery that Sir Walter has disappeared. It's a very Ellery Queen-ish story (c.f. "The Mad Tea Party" from The Adventures of Ellery Queen, 1933) and another example of a plot that would have lent itself perfectly for a television adaptation.

The next story, "The Case of the Girl with the Gazelle," is the last of the three locked room stories from this collection, which has the ominous presence of Moriarty hanging over the case of a stolen painting. In the opening of the story, the reader is informed that illustrious Napoleon of Crime has particular love for the paintings of Jean Baptiste Greuze and his hand is clearly at work when an authority on the work of that famous painter vanishes from his hotel room in London – which puts Holmes and Watson on the trail of recently purchased work by Greuze. Sir Henry Davenant paid a small fortune for the titular painting and has safely stored away in a small, steel-walled strong room equipped with a combination-and time lock, but, somehow, someone managed to switch the real painting for a fake.

The explanation for the theft from the secured strong room is almost disappointingly simple, but it is very workable and its simplicity nearly fooled Holmes. As a result, this nearly ended in a tie between Holmes and Moriarty, but I think round should go to Holmes – because he prevented the theft of the painting. All in all, a pretty nice and fun little story.

Finally, "The Adventure of the Notorious Canary Trainer" began as a messy story as Holmes and Watson, during a holiday, are confronted with a young woman who's being stalked by a man she is trying to escape from, but this man turns out to be attached to the Foreign Office and knows Mycroft Holmes. A second plot-strand involves Wilson, the notorious canary trainer, who Holmes had sent to prison in 1895, but he escaped and since then he has apparently assumed the identity of a Mr. Wilson. However, when he notices Holmes he confesses to a murder at the inn and commits suicide in front of Holmes and Watson, but nobody is aware anyone had died at the inn. Let alone murdered. Here the plot begins to become a bit clearer and the suicide of Wilson proves to be a cleverly disguised story. So a decent story to round out this collection.

I should also note that Watson meets Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in this story and Holmes reveals he has collaborated with Dr. John Thorndyke in R. Austin Freeman's The Red Thumbmark (1907), which was a nice touch and nod.

So, all in all, a nice and pleasant collection of short stories, which may not be overflowing with stone-cold classics, but a fun bundle of stories nonetheless and that's coming from someone who usually hates (Holmesian) pastiches. I'm often annoyed at the liberties some writers take with someone else's creation, but this was an obvious labor of love and that makes every minor inconsistency in the characters or canon somewhat easier to forgive. Anyhow, recommended to everyone who loves Sherlock Holmes and Basil Rathbone's interpretation of the famous detective.

Well, I completely failed to keep this review as short as possible. Oh well. I just hope this blog-post was not too much of a mess and I'll try to keep somewhat shorter for the next post.

Cards on the Table

"Cards are war, in the disguise of a sport" 

- Charles Lamb

Anthony Boucher (rhymes with voucher) tends to linger on in our collective memories as a critic, whose compendium of newspaper reviews, published under the title The Anthony Boucher Chronicles: Reviews and Commentaries (1942-1947), has become an important reference guide for contemporary mystery fans excavating the genre's lost history, but aside from penning critical commentary, science fiction stories, radio plays or compiling anthologies he also has seven detective novels to his credit – including a triad of books in which he confronts his private shamus, Fergus O'Breen, with a few very familiar tropes.

The Case of the Solid Key (1941) has him jimmying the door of a locked room problem and The Case of the Seven Sneezes (1942) drops him off on an isolated, cut-off islet with a murderer and an entire cast of suspects. Boucher's second endeavor as a mystery novelist, The Case of the Crumpled Knave (1939), takes a stab at the Queenian motif of the dying message.

Humphrey Garnett was a former research scientist, attached to the military, who has contented himself with doing private research from his private laboratory, collecting vintage playing cards, playing four-handed chess and worked on a five-pack solitaire, but he was not granted the time to complete these projects. Someone spiked his drink with poison and the only clue the police have to go on is a crumpled playing card they pried loose from Gernett's cold dead hand. Luckily for them, Colonel Rand arrives from New York City at the home of his old friend and he has a telegram that could refer the entire case to dusty, cobweb strewn archives where the police store their solved cases.

Before he faced his would-be-killer, Garnett dispatched a telegram to his old friend, Colonel Rand, asking him to come to Los Angeles because he might be an important witness at the inquest of his body. It turns out to be a pretty accurate prediction. Colonel Rand identifies Richard Vinton, engaged to Kay Garnett, Humphrey's daughter, as a cardsharp who used to work aboard ocean-liners and the one to whom the crushed knave of diamonds must refer to, however, his fiancé is not convinced and engages the services of her old childhood friend, Fergus O’Breen, who has just opened up shop as a private investigator. Now that trouble is his business and daily bread, he decided to take on the case.  

O'Breen goes over the Garnett household with a fine toothcomb and examines Kay herself and her ineffectual uncle, Arthur Willowe, the lab-assistant and Vinton's rival, Will Harding, the mysteries Camilla Sallice and few outsiders, but it's one of the attendees of the classic drawing room scenes who sees the truth after O'Breen delivered a clever, but wrong, solution and both of them have a specific problem. The false solution appears to be lifted from a Nicholas Blake novel and has nothing new to offer to a seasoned mystery reader. The correct solution is not bad, but, as it is explained, you realize that you already knew basically everything that is being told except that everything is now in its proper place and context. I can see and appreciate what Boucher was trying to do with this novel, but I can also understand readers who say "Oh, is that all" after reading the final chapter.

Still, the final part of the book might not deliver the punch promised in the set-up, but it's still better than some detective stories I have read that were actually a mess. I also enjoyed the characterization (especially of the amiable Colonel Rand and the pathetic and longsuffering Arthur Willowe) and the entertaining writing, which included some self-referential humor and even a bit of lamp shading ("It's against all rules,” Fergus groaned in desperation. “A new character at this hour!”). However, it was not all laughs and giggles as there were also a few interesting tidbits on playing cards and an interesting discussion (read: condemnation) of modern warfare and all of its horrors – especially against unarmed citizens. It's a bit discomforting to read knowning what the world had to look forward to in 1939.

Anyway, not a perfect detective story, but good enough to warrant a read if you're a fan of either Boucher or the Queen-Van Dine style detective novels.

Geniuses at Work

"A picture says more than a thousand words."

While browsing through my files, I came across the following snapshot – depicting ten core members from the early days of the Mystery Writers of America who were evidently hard at work and strenuously taxing their mental dexterity. You have to love the fact that Pat McGerr, who was known for fooling around with unidentified bodies, completely immerged herself in the role of corpse in this picture. What dedication! ;-)

The Gang: Georges Simenon, Anthony Boucher, Lawrence Blochman, Harold Q. Masur, Burke Wilkenson, Dorothy Cameron Disney, Fred Dannay, Leslie Ford, Manfred Lee and Pat McGerr.  

Update: I was searching for a website to attach to Burke Wilkenson's name when I found the place I originally snatched this picture from, but I still haven't the faintest idea who he was or what he did.

"Fighting crime in a future time"

"Mystery and science fiction have always had one oddity in common: each has devoted addicts who refuse to read any other kind of fiction. I hope there will be readers of this book who never before read any science fiction, and other readers who never before read any crime stories. And I hope, and believe, that both will find out to their pleasure how much they have been missing."

- Miriam Allen DeFord (from the introduction of Space, Time and Crime)

Over the past few years, I have heard several people suggest that the advent of revolutionary new technology and forensic science has driven the final nail in the coffin of the classic whodunit – which always struck me as a narrow-minded view of things. As if we are the first generation of humans to witness a rapidly changing world due to technological and scientific advancement. Back then, radio and telephone made the world a lot smaller, much in the same way as the internet has done for us today, and DNA shouldn't be any more of an obstacle, for a talented mystery writer anyway, as fingerprints did for the great pioneers of the genre.

But this shallow and near-sighted argument was already refuted long before it was made, and the person who shattered it to smithereens was science-fiction legend, Isaac Asimov, who published a groundbreaking detective novel, Caves of Steel (1954), that intertwined a formal detective story with a visionary image of the future – and it worked, flawlessly!

In spite of being set in the distant future, which has the advantage of super advanced technology, it managed to come up with a brilliant and perfectly fair solution and even offers several equally neat false solutions in the process.

The anthology Space, Time and Crime (1964) tries to continue that tradition, but, unfortunately, it suffers from nearly every flaw a short story collection can have: the selection of stories are very uneven in quality, ranging from quite good to absolutely bland, and some of the stories really make you scratch your head and ponder why they were included into the book. However, none of the stories are really bad, and it makes for a nice, experimental read, but overall it holds more interest for a SF than a mystery fan.

Here's a complete overview of all fourteen stories:  

Crisis, 1999 by Fredric Brown

This tale was published at the tail end of the golden era of the detective story, 1949, and is the only entry in this collection that represents that particular period in literary history. The story itself is set 50 years into the future, 1999, and describes an advanced, but troubled, civilization – whose professional criminals are literarily getting away with murder by beating the lie detector. It's fortunate for that society that great detectives haven't gone the way of the dinosaurs, and Bela Joad descents into the underworld to undrape what covers up all these seemingly undetectable lies, but instead finds a method to root-out criminal behavior once and for all. The story is not without interest, but more so as a classic science-fiction yarn than as a clever detective story – as the proposed solution would've never been accepted in a straightforward mystery.

Fredric Brown is also the author of several detective novels and short stories, including the phantasmagorial Night of the Jabberwock (1951) and the nightmarish locked room mystery, "The Spherical Ghoul" (1943). Both highly recommended.  

There's a Key

Californian science-fiction writer, anthologist, reviewer and author of seven detective novels and numerous short stories William Anthony Parker White, known better under his penname Anthony Boucher (which rhymes with voucher), was one of the most important figures in the genre, perhaps only second to Fredric Dannay, whose critique and insightful comments on the works of his fellow composers in crime were especially significant – and which are still heavily consulted today by readers and historians alike.

He also appears to have been an admirable and multiple talented human being, who, despite lifelong health problems culminating in an early death, enjoyed life to the fullest and only had something bad to say about Mickey Spillane (LOL!) – and what better way to squeeze as much enjoyment out of life as humanly possible than by plotting and writing detective stories?

There's definitely a lot to enjoy about The Case of the Solid Key (1941), which features his redheaded shamus, Fergus O'Breen, who was created as a West Coast version of Ellery Queen, however, he's much closer to your typical gumshoe than the brilliant amateur reasoners of Ellery's ilk.

The majority of the plot focuses on what goes on at Carruthers Little Theater, a small theatrical company dedicated solely to selling contracts of young and upcoming actors and writers to Hollywood agents, but the opening act takes place in a restaurant where Norman Harker, an aspiring playwright, saves one of their actresses, with whom he promptly falls in love, from an embarrassing situation by paying her bill. One thing leads to another and the next thing he knows he's neck-deep in the muck and none of it seems to stick.

There's no discernible reason why Rupert Carruthers, the manager director of the place, should produce an awfully bad play, entitled The Soul Has Two Garments, by one Lewis Jordan, a shabby old man with a turbulent past, or why a detective from homicide is poking him about a 13-year-old murder case and why Fergus O'Breen is snooping around the place in the guise of a wishful actor. Of course, with a detective in the middle of it all it doesn't take very long for the inevitable corpse to rear its ugly and badly burned head – found inside a workshop with all doors and windows securely locked from the inside.

It's a very readable story that offers the reader a picture of Hollywood of the 1940s, and the struggle of young talent to make a name for themselves in this world, as well as an interesting problem in which the clues are, perhaps, a bit thinly spread around, but they're enough for the observant reader the piece together most of the solution before Boucher produces a neat little twist on an old trick – resulting in an ending that you can both "solve" and still be surprised at. No mean feat!

The solution to the locked room problem, on the other hand, has an overly simplistic solution, but the reason why the key had to have a solid handle was quite clever and one feels it could've contributed to the book being more well known, especially among locked room fan boys like myself, if the trick had a bit more imagination and originality to it.

All in all, a solid effort by a writer who was better known and praised for his critical work than his writing, but showed some true craftsmanship by springing a surprise or two on the reader with a relatively simple plot.

And on a side note: after my enthusiastic start on this blog my output will probably trickle down a bit in the weeks to come, but please continue checking back here regularly for updates and I will try to vary the subjects of my posts in the near future (i.e. not just reviews).