A Thing of the Past

"Outside the window, so close to the pane that it seemed to be pressing against it, was a white face—a chalk-white face, whether man or woman none could tell."

- Annie Haynes (The House in Charlton Crescent, 1926)

In my previous blog-post, I reviewed an archaeologically-themed mystery novel, Arthur Rees' The Shrieking Pit (1919), which left me in the mood for a similar sort of detective story, but there were only two such titles on my shelves that had not been previously discussed on this blog – namely R. Austin Freeman's The Penrose Mystery (1936) and Agatha Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia (1936). Logically, I should've gone with the former, because it has been wasting away on my TBR-pile for ages, but settled for the latter. So, yes, this is the second re-read this month.

Murder in Mesopotamia is fourteenth novel about Christie's most popular and enduring creation, Hercule Poirot, which also happened to be part of a sub-category, called "Poirot Abroad," that includes some of the Belgian detective's most celebrated cases – such as Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Death on the Nile (1937) and Evil Under the Sun (1941). The books and short stories from this sub-category take place between the countries of continental Europe (e.g. Murder on the Links, 1923) and the sun-drenched Middle East (e.g. Appointment with Death, 1938).

Christie's second husband, Max Mallowan, was a prominent British archaeologist and she spend many years helping her husband with pulling the remnants of past civilizations from the earth of the Middle East. So you can easily see how this region became the backdrop for so many of her stories, but there are only two that used an excavation site as the scene of a crime: an early short story, entitled "The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb," collected in Poirot Investigates (1924) and Murder in Mesopotamia. A pity, really, because archaeological settings are criminally underutilized in detective stories. Anyhow...

Murder in Mesopotamia takes place during an archaeological dig near Hassanieh, "a day and a half's journey from Baghdad," situated in present-day Iraq and was at the time of the story a young, independent kingdom – having been granted full independence from British rule in 1932. However, the presence of a British policeman, Captain Maitland, suggests the story took place when the region was still a protectorate of the British Empire.

The story at hand is narrated by a nurse, named Amy Leatheran, who has been engaged by a well-known archaeologist, Dr. Erich Leidner, to keep a weary eye on his wife. Louise Leidner is a beautiful, charming and intelligent woman, but Leatheran quickly comes to the conclusion that she's also "the sort of woman who could easily make enemies." Lately, she seems to be genuinely afraid of someone.

Dutch edition (pastel series)

During the Great War of 1914-18, Louise was married to a German, Frederick Bosner, who she discovered to be "a spy in German pay." She had a hand in the arrest and he was to be a shot as a spy, but escaped and was, reportedly, later killed in a train wreck. However, she started to receive threatening signed by her late husband. So did her husband escape death a second time? Or is his younger sibling, who idolized his older brother, plotting revenge? In any case, two days after her marriage to Dr. Leidner she received a death threat ("You have got to die"). Several additional letters arrived, recently they even had an Iraqi stamp, but the most disturbing ones announce "death is coming very soon" and "I have arrived." She even saw "a dead face," grinning against a window pane, which only she saw.

So not everyone takes her completely serious and Leatheran even suspects Louise might have been sending those threatening letters herself, but the situations becomes as serious as the grave when Dr. Leidner stumbles across Louise's body in her bedroom – struck down by "a terrific blow on the front of the head."

Coincidentally, the world-renowned private-detective, Hercule Poirot, is passing through the region after "disentangling some military scandal in Syria" and is basically given full control of the investigation by Captain Maitland. Something for the curious-minded: Poirot's experience in this case is what inspired the famous quote from Death on the Nile that compared detective work with an archaeological dig. Poirot does something like that here: removing all of the dirt and extraneous matter surrounding the problem, and small cast of characters, until the truth clearly emerges from all of the facts, questions and personality of the victim. As one of the characters observed at the end, Poirot has "the gift of recreating the past" and would have made a great archaeologist.

Interestingly, Poirot's explanation reveals that the book, all along, was an impossible crime story.

Scene of the Crime

One of the two reasons for re-reading Murder in Mesopotamia is the archaeological angle, but also for the fact that Robert Adey listed it in Locked Room Murders (1991). However, the claim of the book being a locked room mystery seems shaky at first, because the bedroom was neither locked from the inside nor under constant observation from the outside. It's established that nobody from outside of the large house could have committed the murder, but there was a window of ten minutes when nobody was in the courtyard to observe anyone entering, or leaving, the only door that opened into Louise's bedroom – which would make this a closed circle of suspects situation. There is, however, a very good reason why it would still qualify as an impossible crime novel.

I recently posted a comment on a blog-post on The Reader is Warned, titled "The Case of the Impossible Alibi," in which I gave my (poorly typed) opinion under what strenuous conditions an apparent cast-iron alibi can be considered an impossibility. I think Murder in Mesopotamia meets those qualifications and the explanation as to how the murderer pulled of the killing could've been used to create a full-fledged locked room scenario. So I filed this review under "locked room mysteries" and "impossible crimes."

However, I would recommend not to read my comment on that blog-post unless you've read the book.

I should point out something that's often overlooked or ignored: a second, gruesome murder occurs towards the end when a colleague of Dr. Leidner, one Anne Johnson, swallows "a quantity of corrosive acid" and burns to dead from the inside, but when she lies dying she gives, what's known as, a dying message – one that gives away a huge clue about the method of the first murder. And that gives a huge hint about the identity of the killer.

So, all in all, Murder in Mesopotamia has all the ingredients for a top-tier Agatha Christie novel, but the plot has one very black mark against it. You can only accept the solution, if you accept that Louise Leidner was a very dense, unobservant and low-conscience person. And there was an attempt to foreshadow the fact that she could have missed the keypoint of the plot. However, it's was confirmed that she was actually an intelligent woman. So this single point makes the solution, as a whole, hard to digest and condemns the book to the rank of mid-tier Christie.

I was actually reminded of Ellery Queen's The American Gun Mystery (1933), which came inches from being a first-class detective story and a classic title from the early EQ period, but then came the mind-numbing explanation for the vanishing gun – which was impossible to swallow. The American Gun Mystery and Murder in Mesopotamia are actually the same in that regard, because that single point makes the whole explanation a tad-bit implausible.

Regardless, it was still a well written and interesting mystery novel, but simply not in the same league as Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun.

Well, that ended on a less than enthusiastic note. Anyway, not sure what I'll dig up next, but I'll continue my futile attempt to reduce the mass of my semi-sentient TBR-pile.

A Frame of Mind

"Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole. You cannot recall the spoken words, you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew." 

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Back in 2012, I positively reviewed The Moon Rock (1922) by Arthur J. Rees and John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, suggested in the comment-section I take a look at Rees' The Shrieking Pit (1919) next, which he described as "one of the best detective novels written prior to 1920." 

Well, that was enough to secure it a spot on my elephantine TBR-pile, but then this long-forgotten mystery novelist began to slip from my mind and had not really given him a second thought until one of my fellow bloggers, "D for Doom," reviewed the book over at his excellent blog – called Vintage Pop Fiction. So I decided to finally excavate the book from the big pile and see what all the fuss is about.

The Shrieking Pit is set in Norfolk, England, in 1916, when the European continent was in the middle of the First World War and this global skirmish has a prominent presence in the story. In the first chapter, there are references to young army officers, war widows and a nearby zeppelin air-raid that had nearly emptied out the Grand Hotel. Something that may have affected the peculiar young man in the public room of the Grand Hotel.

David (or Grant) Colwyn is an American-born Englishman and a private-investigator of some celebrity, who is supposed to be taking a well deserved holiday, but he can't help observing the troubled man sitting in an alcove and assumes the poor soul is shell-shocked – until another guest takes a seat at his table. The man is Sir Henry Durwood, a Harley Street specialist, who recognizes the signs of furor epilepticus and asks Colwyn to help him intervene when the attack comes. Sure enough, they find themselves carrying a now unconscious man, who registered as James Ronald, to his room, but refuses any additional help once he regained consciousness. And that same day, he leaves the hotel without paying his bill of thirty pounds.

However, the memory of this incident comes back the following day when news reaches the hotel that a murder has been committed in a neighboring village and it looks as if the author of that crime is James Ronald!

The scene of the crime, called Flegne-next-sea, is a dying seaside village surrounded by "swamps and stagnant dykes." A place of outstretched marshlands, which encroached on the roads, dotted with often abandoned stone cottages, ruins of a priory and "a crumbling fragment of a Norman tower" - remnants of a long, sustained struggle against the hostile elements of the place. It was "a poor place at the best of times," but the war had made everything worse and everyone a whole lot poorer. So the arrival of an archaeologist to the village was seen as a godsend, because of the work and money this brought to the locals.

Roger Glenthorpe was an elderly archaeologist, who lodged at the Golden Anchor, which he used as the home base for his extensive research into the fossil remains that are common to that part of Norfolk. Unfortunately, for the archaeologist, the locals of this remote spot are scientifically illiterate. So he welcomed the arrival of Ronald at the inn, because the young man was obviously educated and knew a thing or two about science and history.

However, Ronald leaves the inn in the wee hours of the morning and Glenthorpe's bedroom is found empty, but the key is, uncharacteristically, sticking in the lock on the outside of the door. A track of boot-prints lead from the inn to the mouth of a pit, which is a part of "a number of so-called hut circles" that were "prehistoric shelters of the early Britons," where a workman was lowered into by rope and finds the murdered remains of Glenthorpe – stabbed in the chest. A sum of 300 pounds and a table-knife, used by Ronald at dinner, are missing. So things don't look very good for the missing Ronald.

One thing pointed out by "D" in his review is the fascinating treatment of circumstantial evidence and how this evidence can be interpreted, which runs like a red thread through the plot. According to Colwyn, there are two kinds of circumstantial evidence: in one of them the presumption of guilt depends on "a series of links forming a chain," while in the other "the circumstances are woven together like the strands of a rope." Colwyn thinks the latter is the strongest kind of circumstantial evidence of the two, but believes the case against Ronald hinges on the former and believes the strongest link in the chain of evidence are the boot-prints. And take that away and the evidence "snapped in the most vital link."

However, Colwyn's professional opinion does not prevent a devastating loss in the courtroom. The courtroom scenes were one of the highlights of the book. They were very well written and characterized, which makes you almost wish the entirety of the story had been penned as an old-fashioned courtroom drama. One of the very few genuine weaknesses of the plot is the repetition of the all facts and this would've been less of a problem in a courtroom setting, because the reiterations could be done by the lawyers, prosecution and a final summing up by the judge – as well as by witnesses on the stand. Nevertheless, I think plot-oriented readers can cope with some of the repetition here.

I suppose this sounds a bit weird, following that minor complaint, but The Shrieking Pit struck me as a predecessor of E.R. Punshon's work. There's more than a passing resemblance between Rees' The Shrieking Pit and Punshon's The Conqueror Inn (1943).

Rees also had a similar verbose, ornamental writing-style as Punshon, with a keen eye for historical detail, which might be off-putting to some readers, but, personally, I love this approach when it's wrapped around a strong, intelligently constructed and well imagined plot – which was definitely the case here. A story gets so much better when there's a strong sense of place, time and history.

The ghosts of past centuries, even millenniums, appear throughout the book, which range from the prehistoric, stone-age dwellings and the bullet tinted wall of the inn telling of a long-ago battle between a gang of smugglers and the King's troops to the sporting magazines from the 1860s at the inn's fireside bookshelf – all of them alluding to a different and sometimes better, more prosperous time. They make the impoverished state of the small, dying village even more tragic. If that's not gloomy enough, there's the encroaching marshlands, the dank swamps and the ghost of a cursed woman in white who haunts the region. But there are also whispers among the locals of a ghostly dog, "Ol Black Shuck," roaming the dense woods. So the book also has a touch of Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).

So, the atmospheric and historically rich backdrop, alongside the role of the First World War, undoubtedly counts as the book's strong point, but the very involved plot also proved to be noteworthy.

Granted, the explanation revealed that the crime-scene resembled a busy train-station, with characters popping in-and out of the bedroom, which caused many of the plot complexities, but Rees held a firm grasp on all of the plot-threads – which resulted in a pleasing, clear-cut explanation of all the events. You'd want to kick some of the characters for being so bone-headed, however, it made for a nice, complex and involved detective story. One that appeared, on the surface, to be a straightforward case for the police, but Corwyn uncovered many complications and contradictory evidence. All of which he managed to explain away by revealing that there was a simplistic, even sordid, truth behind the crime.

So, yes, The Shrieking Pit is a well-written, competently plotted and interesting detective novel from the transitional period between the Doylean Era and the Golden Age. As such, I can particularly recommend it to readers whose personal taste veer towards the Victoria-style of mystery writing or to fans of Punshon's Golden Age mysteries.

Well, so far my hasty, sloppily written review and my next one will probably be of another archaeological-themed mystery novel, but I've not yet made up my mind. So we'll see.

P.S: see comment-section for an explanation on the confusing first name of the detective. 

A Gaggle of Galloping Ghosts

"There is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out."

- James Randi

Only a few days ago, I reviewed The Pleasure Cruise Mystery (1933) by Robin Forsythe, which was recently summoned from its perennial slumber in the dark abyss, commonly referred to around these parts as "biblioblivion," by publisher Rupert Heath and genre-historian Curt Evans – who furnished all of the Dean Street Press editions with insightful introductions. I was sufficiently pleased with my introduction to Forsythe's work that I wanted to read another one of his mysteries as soon as possible.

I was torn between The Ginger Cat Mystery (1935) and The Spirit Murder Mystery (1936), but settled in the end on the latter because I found the synopsis to be enticing. Surprisingly, the plot turned out to contain an impossible situation or two that were overlooked by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991).

These seemingly impossible situations are presented as supernatural phenomenon and occur at Old Hall Farm, situated in the village of Yarham, where John Thurlow lives in the company of his niece, Eileen – an ardent devotee and practitioner of spiritualism.

John is naturally "skeptical and cautious," preferring a scientific approach, but has become a tentative believer after "quite a lot of persuasion and study." He would love to experience the "spirit music," which was heard by Eileen in the old house that was "impregnated with the spirit of the bygone" and "bore the indelible imprint of the activities and designs of people since dead and forgotten" – leading to an experimental séance during which the eerie sounds of organ music are heard. A sensible and natural explanation for the spectral music proved to be as elusive as the ghosts themselves.

Old Hall Farm was not equipped with a wireless or a gramophone, which were both deemed by John as a "damned annoying contraption," and the church is a mile away. So where did the ghostly bars of music emanated from?

However, there a more pressing, Earth-bound questions raised directly after the séance. John Thurlow appears to have stepped out of the window of his study and simply vanished, but a more baffling problem presents itself the following day: the remains of Thurlow and Mr. Clarry Martin were found on a piece of wasteland called "Cobbler's Corner." Thurlow had his skull bashed in and Martin had been shot, but physical evidence precluded the possibility that they had murdered each other.

A gentleman-painter and amateur detective of some repute, named Anthony "Algernon" Vereker, happened to be in the neighborhood to sketch and paint, but a double-murder is as good an excuse as any to take a break from the artistic process.

Vereker's private enquiry looks into every person who orbited the lives of Eileen and the John Thurlow, which included a twenty-six-year old widow, Mrs. Button, who was still known locally as Miss Dawn Garford and the dead men were both vying for her affection. Arthur Orton rented the next-door property from Thurlow, called Church Farm, and he showed a great interest in both Eileen and the property, which might have given a double motive. Ephraim Noy is a mysterious individual who lives alone in a new bungalow and "about as communicative as a brick wall," but may have shared a "youthful indiscretion" with Thurlow in British India – which involved an Indian dancing girl and her murdered husband. And then there is the local amateur archaeologist, Rev. William Sturgeon, who's exploring a crypt and underground vault for King John's treasure. 

On an unrelated side-note, King John's treasure was a major plot-thread in a historical mystery novel I read last year: The Song of a Dark Angel (1994) by Paul Doherty. Just so you know.

Anyway, Vereker alternates his role as an amateur detective with that of a ghost-hunter and personally experiences some of the ghostly events at Old Hall Farm, but the most interesting occurrence is the poltergeist activity in the late Thurlow's study: Eileen "heard the sound of footsteps" in the study and discovered upon inspection that "chairs, ornaments, clocks and the little table had all been moved," but all the doors and windows were securely locked and fastened!

Unfortunately, the explanation for all of these apparently supernatural and impossible situations was even in the mid-1930s very dated and "rather moth-eaten," which makes it advisable to not read The Spirit Murder Mystery as an impossible crime novel. You might end up disappointed if you do. However, in spite of that, Forsythe wrings an unusual and still fresh explanation from this extremely dated and moth-eaten plot device, which showed the same streaks of originality that was so prevalent in The Pleasure Cruise Mystery. The explanation for the gunshot wound was perhaps one coincidence too much and more consideration (and time) could've been given to the circumstances in which the bodies were found (i.e. cause of death), but I found them minor drawbacks in what was a wholly enjoyable detective story.

So, in the end, I think I preferred The Pleasure Cruise Mystery to The Spirit Murder Mystery, but, regardless of some flaws in the latter, I begin to become very fond of Forsythe. I don't think I'll allow his other books to linger much longer on my TBR-pile. There are only three of them left and then I still have three non-series to look forward to, which I'm sure will be reprinted sooner or later by the Dean Street Press.

Anthony "Algernon" Vereker series:

Missing or Murdered (1929)

The Polo Ground Mystery (1932)

The Pleasure Cruise Mystery (1933)

The Ginger Cat Mystery (1935)

The Spirit Murder Mystery (1936)

The standalone series:

The Hounds of Justice (1930)

The Poison Duel (1934)

Murder on Paradise Island (1937)

The Enemy Within

"Never was anything great achieved without danger."

- Niccolò Machiavelli 

In my previous blog-post, I reviewed Let Him Lie (1940) by Ianthe Jerrold and noted that it was the first of her final two contributions to the genre, which were published a decade after The Studio Crime (1929) and Dead Man's Quarry (1930) under the pseudonym of "Geraldine Bridgman."

The main difference between Let Him Lie and its predecessors was that it's a standalone novel with a character-oriented plot, but Jerrold's final novel differed from all three of its forebears. There May Be Danger (1948) falls in the category of spy-cum-adventure thriller. However, I'd say its unusually structured plot also clung to the traditional mystery, which was abandoned in the end, but it had a grasp on it.

In his introduction, genre historian and author of Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery (2012), Curt Evans, wonders if There May Be Danger was composed in the early 1940s "as a war-time follow up to Let Him Lie" and may have been turned down "on the grounds that it was more a war-time thriller than a classic detective novel" – which could explain how the book ended up eight years later with the same publisher as The Private Life of Adolf Hitler: The Intimate Notes and Diaries of Eva Braun (1949). 

All the same, I think the book stands (IMHO) alongside Dead Man's Quarry as Jerrold's finest piece of crime-fiction. I found it an immensely satisfying story and appreciated the unorthodox structure of the plot, which, I imagine, even diverted from your stock-in-trade spy yarn.

One of the main attractions of There May Be Danger is the protagonist, Kate Mayhew, who used to be a "stage-manager and general factotum" of a small repertory company in London, but a "receding tide of theatre-going" followed the bombers in the sky and the ever-increasing familiar sight of air-raid wardens and gasmasks in the streets below – effectively putting her out of a job. She's contemplating her next course of action when a handbill pasted to a shop window attracts her attention.

The handbill asks "PLEASE HELP" in regards to a missing twelve-year-old London evacuee, named Sidney Brentwood, who resided with a couple in a sparsely populated village in Radnorshire, Wales, but has been missing for several weeks. It seems Sydney "got up in the middle of the night" and "went off on his bicycle" without "saying a word to anybody" and "simply never came back."

Kate concerns herself over the fate of the missing boy and decides to go out there and search for him, which is an undertaking that begins with a visit to Sydney's cat-obsessed aunt in London. But she soon finds herself roaming the streets of the small, Welsh village of Hastry and the surrounding area that's strewn with old homes, neglected building and ancient tumuli – providing the tantalizing possibilities of long-lost hidden passages and chambered barrows.

That's why I enjoyed Kate Mayhew over Jeanie Halliday, the leading heroine from Let Him Lie, because she was a passive character, unwittingly picking up pieces of the puzzle, while Kate went out of her way to find a child she had never met before. It's a premise that energized an already excitingly original plot. A plot that begins somewhat as a traditional mystery novel, but the familiar murder enquiry is ditched in favor of a missing child and nobody even believes there was a crime. Such as Sydney's schoolteacher, who believes he has met with an unfortunate accident, which gives the story an unusual sense of dread, urgency and mystery. Because you want to reach the ending to find out what has happened to Sydney.

Interestingly, there's an archeological-angle to the plot with its burial mounds, possible underground passages from long-ago and a 9th century silver penny of Ceowulf, but, by the end of the book, the story begins to encroach on the territory of blood-curdling thrillers and treacherous espionage novels.

As a large-scale consumer of traditional mysteries, I found the hybrid structure of an espionage-thriller posing for a large part as an atypical detective story to be a pleasant divergent from the norm. I'm just afraid that my review has not done the book any justice, because I glossed over a lot of plot details and fun characters that I did not want to give away.

There May Be Danger is one of those novels you should try and discover for yourself, which I can especially recommend to readers who appreciated the more adventurous outings of Agatha Christie's Tommy & Tuppence (e.g. The Secret Adversary (1922) and N or M?, 1941). Or simply are a fan of Jerrold. Or fond of discovering obscure, long-forgotten vintage crime novels. The wonderful Dean Street Press is reissuing the book in January, 2016.

I'll return to the traditional mystery for my next review, but I've not yet decided whether it'll be an impossible crime novel or a war-time mystery.

In a Mound of Trouble

"...murder sneaked out and invaded the village, upsetting its routine and disarranging the regularity of its program."

- Maureen Sarsfield (Green December Fills the Graveyard a.k.a. Murder at Shots Hall, 1945)  

Earlier this year, I reviewed a pair of mystery novels by Ianthe Jerrold, The Studio Crime (1929) and Dead Man's Quarry (1930), which were assumed to have been her sole contributions to the genre, but there were two additional novels – published under the pseudonym of "Geraldine Bridgman." However, they differ in a few ways: both are standalones with different lead characters operating in separate branches of the genre.

Let Him Lie (1940) is a genuine, Golden Age detective, but lacks the presence of Jerrold's series characters, John Christmas, and There May Be Danger (1948) is a World War II spy-thriller. You can probably guess which of the two novels is going to be the subject of this review.

A decade separated Dead Man's Quarry from Let Him Lie and Jerrold appeared to have inched away from the "Great Detectives" that dominated the pre-World War II scene, which accounts for the absence of her brilliant series characters, John Christmas. He has been replaced by a former arts student, Jeanie Halliday, who has settled herself "in proud and lonely independence" at Yew Tree Cottage in Gloucestershire. 

Halliday differs from Christmas in that she does not "create a theory out of the broad characteristics of the case" and then "test the facts," or simply actively detects, but inconspicuously buzzes around the involved with the case and picks up spores of information along the way – which eventually leads to a nasty murderer. Guess you can compare the method of detection in this mystery with pollination.

Anyhow, the opening of Let Him Lie sets the tone of the book: Halliday takes an interest in the welfare of thirteen-year-old Sarah Molyneux and experiences first hand how "confederacy between the adult and the child has its difficulties," which begins when her "queer, neurotic and unhappy mother," Myfanwy Peel, turns up brandishing a service revolver. Sarah was left in the care of her uncle, Robert Molyneux, after being dragged across "Europe in the course of two more ill-starred marriages and one or two less regular alliances."

Lately, Peel has been nurturing "a maternal sentiment" and demanded her former brother-in-law to return Sarah to her. Even saying to the unwilling child that she would not like the be returned to her mother by force of law and how she would not like her daughter as much as she does now. Well, that makes her an obvious first suspect in the murder that soon followed her arrival.

Ianthe Jerrold, 1936
© National Portrait Gallery

Robert Molyneux was busy in his orchard, pruning the branches of an apple tree, when he dropped to the ground, but he did not accidentally slipped and fell to his death – because there was a bullet-hole in the left side of head. Someone had simply shot him out of the apple tree!

There are, however, more people with a motive for murdering the apparent nice and inoffensive Molyneux. A former secretary, Peter Johnson, was fired earlier in the year for stealing, but has returned to the region with an additional motive involving the wife of her former employer. Agnes Molyneux was an old acquaintance of Jeanie, but her marriage has transformed her in a very selfish, unfriendly and money spending woman, which caused many quarrels in the household. The locals have a different ideas about what lays at the heart of the murder: namely the curse of an ancient burial mound, locally known as "Grim's Grave," which he had given permission to excavate and this was especially opposed by Mr. Fone – a local poet and armchair historian obsessed with the men of the Neolithic era and would've "done anything to stop it."

Jeanie moves around these people, inadvertently picking up crumbs of information, which combined with such clues as a dead, snow-white kitten, the directional sound of a gunshot and a broken string of pearls lands her in the obligatory spot of hot water.

In the decade that separated Dead Man's Quarry from Let Him Lie, Jerrold wrote a number of mainstream novels, which had an obvious effect on this book: the writing and characters have matured from the pure game aspect of her late 1920-and early 30s mysteries. It's very reflective of the changes that would sweep across the genre in the coming decades, but retained the structure and necessary ingredients of a proper, classically-styled detective story.

I was actually reminded of the debut novel of another writer with a short-lived career in the field: Murder at Shots Hall (1945) by Maureen Sarsfield, which has a young, artistic (sculptor) woman as the main protagonist confronted with murder at a small English village dominated by a grand old tower. But, more importantly, you have to wonder how the genre had looked if the short-lived careers of such writers as Jerrold and Sarsfield had extended pass the 1940s. Would writers such as Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh still be considered Crime Queens today?

Let Him Lie has a good plot that's populated with convincingly drawn characters and its only short-coming is that it does not reach the same, lofty heights as its predecessor, which some of us consider to be somewhat of a masterpiece. But that's only an issue if you're a spoiled, impudent brat, like yours truly, because the book should be judge as a standalone effort – which was (IMHO) a success.

Let Him Lie and There May Be Danger are scheduled for republication in January, 2016 and the responsible parties are, of course, Dean Street Press and Curt Evans. Evans has traditionally written an introduction and him vetting the books for DSP is as close as you can possible get, as a publishing house, to stamping a seal of quality on your products. 

Death Trap

"I often think that a highly expert archaeologist would make a perfect detective. He has the education that the best of professional policemen often lack and the knowledge of things as such that the theorist and literary man never has at all."

- Canon Burbery (Stanley Casson's Murder by Burial, 1938)

In his introduction for Ten Thousand Blunt Instruments and Other Tales of Mystery (2010), Bill Pronzini described Philip Wylie as a versatile writer who had a broad range of interests, encompassing many fields of expertise, such as science, education, deep-sea fishing, UFOs and pretty much every kind of genre-fiction out there – including our beloved detective-and thriller stories.

Wylie's detective stories that are of special interest to me are, of course, those catalogued in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991). Hey, I came close to churning out five successive blog-posts without touching upon a single locked room mystery or rambling semi-coherently about impossible crime stories in general. It was an untenable state of affairs and you know it!

Corpses at Indian Stones (1943) is, reportedly, the only mystery novel Wylie wrote single-handedly and collaborated with Edwin Balmer on some of his other forays into the genre such as Five Fatal Words (1932) – which also happened to be a locked room novel and one I'll be reading before long. But lets get this review out of the way first.

I think the first thing I should mention about Corpses at Indian Stones is that Wylie used both the figure of the amateur sleuth and the traditional mystery as vehicles for a very peculiar coming-of-age story. One with a protagonist who's already in his thirties.

The detective duties in Corpses at Indian Stones are relegated to an introversive, classically named professor of anthropology and distinguished archaeologist, Agamemnon Telemachus Plum, who'd spend most of his days digging up old bones and excavating ancient cities.

Professor Plum is referred to by everyone as "Aggie" and has come to "prefer a book to a tea dance" and "an assorted stack of petrified bones to a pack of playing cards," which came from spending his days "seal-hunting in kayaks" and "pushing dugouts into the Everglades and up the reaches of the Amazon" – basically living in the boys' adventure stories from his youth.

Unfortunately, for Aggie, his aunt, Sarah, has plans to drastically change all of that. She believes the time has come for Aggie to get a wife and making sure the family name lives on. Luckily, for her, they're going on holiday together and therefore has ample opportunity to find a suitable match for her nephew.

They'll be spending the summer days together at a place where Aggie left some memories from his youth, a place named Indian Stones in upstate New York, which brings him back into contact with people he hadn't seen for decades.

However, his first, genuine recorded emotion in this story was getting misty-eyed when being reunited with the objects from his childhood, such as "banners, pictures, trophies, knickknacks and books," in his old bedroom – which is fitting for a misanthropic archaeologist. He also retraces some of the routes he had memorized as a teenager of the surrounding woods, but that's where the trouble begins as he stumbles across the first, suspicious-looking death in the area.

Jim Calder was an unpopular figure at Indian Stones. He had managed the finances of several prominent residents with varying degrees of success, which made Calder's presence at such a tranquil place like having "a ghoul at a feast," but did this provoke someone in doing something irrevocable? Calder's cold, lifeless body is found trapped between a pair of heavy logs of a deadfall, which is a bear trap and the trigger seems to have required a heavy pull. And that places a prominent question mark behind the possibility of it being an accident. 

The intended victim of a deadfall-trap

Aggie begins to act as a sort of unofficial deputy to Captain Wesley "Wes" Wickman, a good-humored state trooper, who doesn't seem to mind all too much that someone's meddling in his case – which he's willing to write-off as a simple accident.

So, while the professor is slowly becoming used to socializing (read: being domesticated) he wades through such nebulous clues as a fox with a dog collar and a calling card pinned with a knife to a door. A guest who didn't show up and a submerged car with veal bones as its "cargo." A forgotten, hidden piece of architecture of the place they're staying and it's connection to the financial panic of 1907, Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the gold hoarding during the 1930s, but the best possible evidence for murder proved to be a second body.

The local doctor, George Davis, was seen taking photographs of the accident-site and evidently made someone very nervous, because he's discovered in his makeshift darkroom with a hunting knife buried in his chest. However, complicating a verdict of a plain and simple homicide is the locked-and bolted door and a window the size of a book, which makes the doctor's violent passing either a case of suicide or an impossible murder.

Because the reader knows just as well as Aggie that the Dr. Davis was murdered, but the question is how the killer left a door locked-and bolted on the inside or a passed through a tiny window. 

The answer to that particular question was disappointingly simplistic, but there were other interesting aspect about the explanation that should be pointed out. It's one of those tricks that's hard to believe was pulled off in one go, especially considering the lack of wiggle room the murderer had to work with, but Wylie carefully avoided that particular pitfall and in the process provided an original explanation as to why the telephone lines were pulled down. A more original explanation would've been preferred, but Wylie worked well with what he put into the plot. 

Well, I feel like I've been droning on without saying too much of substance, because Corpses at Indian Stones is essentially a light-weight mystery novel with an easily discernable plot, which is why I have been dancing around the finer plot-details – afraid of giving away anything of importance. But I liked it, because despite its shortcomings and simplicity, it's a very enjoyable detective story with an interesting sleuth who solves a couple of bizarre murder during one of the most important weeks of his personal life. I also loved how his background and skills as an archaeologist was used to literarily unearth parts of the truth towards the end and even dug up something a little more animated than your basic, run-of-the-mill skeletons.   

So, yes, Corpses at Indian Stones is less than perfect as a detective story, but I still very much enjoyed the read and the book comes recommended if you simply love a fun, little detective story – or an attempt at one. I'd also recommend reading John Norris' review on Pretty Sinister Books, which interestingly contrasts the book with Wylie's other, non-mystery novels.

Well, that was almost two pages worth of text with very little to no substance at all, but, as always, I'll try to do better in my next post.