The Case of the Faithful Heart (1939) by Brian Flynn

The Case of the Faithful Heart (1939) is Brian Flynn's twenty-fourth Anthony Bathurst mystery and picked this particular title as the next stop in the series to see how different it's from the previous novel, Black Edged (1939), which braided an inverted mystery and chase thriller into a single narrative – forming a fun, pulp-style romp with detective interruptions. So, as to be expected, the always versatile Flynn shifted style for his next novel by doing a complete 180 as there's nothing pulpy or thriller-ish about The Case of the Faithful Heart. 

The Case of the Faithful Heart is best described as a scintillating, character-driven whodunit reminiscent of some of the alternative Crime Queens, like Moray Dalton, who were also brought back into print by Dean Street Press. But with a sturdier puzzle-plot at the heart of the story.

The story takes place in the village of Lanrebel, in Glebeshire, where two incidents happened on the 8th of June, but the incidents is an evening dinner party at one of the two houses of any real size within the village, "Hillearys." Paul and Jacqueline Hillier are the hosts of the party and the table is filled by their son and daughter, Neill and Ann Hillier. The hosts brother, Maurice Hillier, and his wife, Belle. The dinner party is rounded out by the Vicar of Lanrebel, the Rev. Septimus Aylmer, who's accompanied by his wife, Mildred. So a normal dinner party with family and friends without any dark, palpable undercurrents except that the hostess is not her usual self, but that was explained away by "a wretched head" – retreating from the rest of the party until she feels a bit better. Flynn ends the chapter by pointing out to reader that the state of the household at half past eight is an important fact.

Later that evening, Neill notices a car standing at the front gates of "Hillearys" and goes out to investigate, but is shocked to find his dying mother sitting behind the wheel. Jacqueline's face was bruised and bloody, her wrists were "scratched and torn" and her clothes ripped, muddy and looked as though it was grass-stained. She used her last breath to utter a cryptic sentence, "the Mile Cliff. Two...," before dying in the arms of her son. An autopsy revealed Jacqueline had died from an overdose of chloral hydrate.

Fortunately, the well-known "human magnet" of crime, Anthony Bathurst, is on holiday in the village. Wherever he goes, even in a tranquil place like Lanrebel, murder has a habit of running him down to earth and pinning him down – guaranteeing he always gets "a sort of 'busman's holiday.''' Bathurst calls it punishment for having dipped his fingers "so often into the crime pie." This makes The Case of the Faithful Heart the earliest example to date of the detective being referred to as a "murder magnet," which predates Anthony Webb's Murder in Reverse (1945) and Francis Duncan's Mordecai Tremaine series from the late 1940s and '50s. But that's just an aside for the curious.

This time, Bathurst is accompanied on his unofficial investigation by a holidaying novelist from Blackstock, Keith Annesley. So the detection is very much in the detective-on-hobbyhorse tradition, but the strange death of Jacqueline Hillier doesn't provide them with a routine village mystery with more suspects, motives and dodgy alibis than you can shake a truncheon at. There's an almost unsettling lack of serious suspects ("we all liked each other") and no discernible motives ("...there are no shadows in her life"), but who strewn her grave with violets? And why? What's the link between Jacqueline's dying words and the pieces of burned cardboard found at place known locally as One Mile Cliff? However, the case takes an unexpected, dramatic turn when another member of the family dies under suspicious circumstances followed by another "floral tribute" on the freshly filled grave. Just like the last time, there's no hint of a motive or serious suspect to be found. 

The Case of the Faithful Heart is not your typical whodunit and nowhere is this better demonstrated than by the weird, uneven kind of clueing and misdirection. One part of the story almost plays too fair with the (suspicious-minded) reader as it makes a certain something, or someone, standout before it was really necessary. Another part of the plot, which concerned the hidden pattern between the death, is played almost perfectly and I didn't begin to see the light until the third murder – clicking perfectly with the part that played it a little too fairly. Even if you piece together the larger parts of the plot, what happened, why and by whom, you still need Bathurst to fill in the finer details. For example, Jacqueline's dying message is unsolvable and one or two points about the solution raises an eyebrow. Such as how the second death happened or why Jacqueline was found all bloody with torn, muddy clothing. Something that conveniently needed to happen to obscure something else.

So the story and plot The Case of the Faithful Heart comes with its fair share of flaws, but a flawed gem is still a gem. This is a small gem as it found a fresh angle with emotional depth to tell the village mystery with the hidden pattern formed by the deaths being a novel, perhaps even original idea in 1939. This all translated into a compelling detective story that had my full attention from beginning to end. While some details remained obscure until the end, Flynn provided the reader with more than enough information and clues to draw the same conclusions as Bathurst. That made it easy to forgive its imperfections. An honest candidate for my top 10 favorite Brian Flynn mysteries.

Black Edged (1939) by Brian Flynn

So far, March has not been the month of the traditional detective story with reviews of 1970s retro-pulp, vampire murders, pastiches and Dutch and French pulp fiction from the 1960s, which wasn't done intentionally, but wanted to return to the regular whodunits and locked room mysteries of yore – decided to randomly pick one of my unread Brian Flynn novels. However, I forgot Flynn wasn't strictly a traditionalist himself. 

Flynn belongs to that rare group of prolific fiction writers who can boost he never wrote the same novel twice. Steve Barge, of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, who rediscovered Flynn and pens the introductions to the new Dean Street Press editions noted how Flynn "shifts from style to style from each book." You get a 1920s drawing-room mystery or Golden Age courtroom drama in one novel and a Victorian-era throwback or a hunt for a serial killer in the next. On more than one occasion, Flynn dived head-first into the thick, murky waters of the British pulps where John Russell Fearn and Gerald Verner lurk. Only things linking all of his work together are his series-detective, an undying love for Sherlock Holmes and simply wanting to write engaging and entertaining detective stories. And, more often than not, he succeeded in that a goal. Such as the book under review today. 

Black Edged (1939) is the 23rd entry in the Anthony Bathurst series and another example how willing Flynn was to experiment with the genre to produce something entirely different from the previous novel (The Ebony Stag, 1938). This one puts a spin on the inverted detective story and chase thriller.

The story is divided into four-parts, "The First Escape," "The First Chase," "The Second Escape" and "The Second Chase," beginning with Dr. Stuart Traquair's suspicions about his wife involvement with an acquaintance, Rupert Halmar – overhearing them say that "he must be got rid of" when "the time comes." So the doctor steeled himself "to the inevitable ordeal that was close at hand" and confronted Madeleine with a pack of playing cards and a loaded revolver. Dr. Traquair is going to give Madeleine a chance of living by cutting cards and "the winner of the cut may take and use the revolver," which sounds reasonable enough. But it ends in a messy shootout in which Madeleine is shot and killed. Dr. Traquair has precious little time to make his getaway.

So pretty much what you would expect from an inverted mystery that turns into a chase thriller with the detective and murderer playing a game of cat-and-mouse, but early chapters makes it clear more is going on in the background. What did Dr. Traquair mean that Madeleine knew his secret? Why was Madeleine armed? Who's Armitage and why does the doctor need to see him? Who's Halmar and why had he house surrounded on the night of the murder? Which naturally made escaping an even more precarious undertaking, but, throughout the story, Dr. Traquair proves himself to be a resourceful man as slips through closely-drawn nets and dragging red herrings across the trail. And that makes his parts of the story all the more fun.

The chase-parts reunites Anthony Bathurst with Chief Inspector Andrew MacMorran, of Scotland Yard, as they join the local Inspector Rudge at the scene of the crime. While the reader knows what happened there, the police has to try to make sense of "the sight of Madeleine lying dead on the floor with the scattered playing-cards around her" and the story of the frightened maid, Phoebe Hubbard, who had locked and barricaded herself in the bedroom during the night – hearing noises on the stairs and voices in the house until early morning. Opening the door to more than one interpretation of the doctor's disappearance on the investigative side. So there's genuine detective interest in the chase-parts. Such as when Bathurst deduced the meaning of the disturbed dust on the lid of a hatbox and its content, but, even the best detectives, sometimes needs "the finger of Fate" to help guide them in the right direction. Well, either the finger of Fate or a cold, dead hand protruding from beneath a bed ("the dead hand speaketh"). Yes, there are more murders along the way. It helped keep the story engaging and moving along. 

Black Edged gives the reader two novellas, a pursuit and a detective story, which Flynn tightly intertwined and knotted together in the last couple of chapters. Even trying to spring a surprises, or two, on the reader, but you should be able to anticipate in which direction story is heading. However, I was briefly on the wrong track and suspected Madeleine either survived the gunshot wound or had replaced the bullets in her husband's revolver with blanks. Dr. Traquair says in Chapter II Madeleine "had gained access to my private drawer and had read my private papers." Since the story was evidently going to be on the pulpier side of Flynn's work from the start, I thought Madeleine had somehow survived, shot the maid and traded places to play for time and hunt down her husband. While my initial solution was wrong, it still headed in the same direction as the actual solution.

So I have to echo's Steve's opinion on Black Edged, "a tale very much of its time," but the ending shouldn't take away Flynn wrote an entertaining, very well executed chase thriller with detective interruptions and alternating viewpoints. It simply worked. While not one of the top-tier titles in the series, it's another fine example of Flynn's versatility as a mystery writer and his dedication to simply entertain his readers. I'm really curious now to see how different the next one is from either The Ebony Stag and Black Edged. I guess The Case of the Faithful Heart (1939) just got a fast pass to the top of the pile.

Glittering Prizes (1942) by Brian Flynn

Brian Flynn wrote in the Crime Book Magazine, in 1948, that he believes "the primary function of the mystery story is to entertain" and "to stimulate the imagination," but "it pleases the connoisseur most" when it presents "genuine mystery" – an "intellectual problem for the reader to consider, measure and solve." Flynn himself had an incredibly varied approach to ensure his detective fiction presented a stimulating and entertaining mysteries that took on many different shapes and designs. Covering everything from your standard whodunit and impossible crimes to courtroom dramas and pulp thrillers. And everything that can be fitted in between or stacked on top of it. Not all of his mysteries are so easily pigeonholed. 

Glittering Prizes (1942) is the twenty-eighth title in the Anthony Bathurst series and, according to the introduction by Steve Barge, the only time Flynn used the war as a backdrop. Typically, Flynn grabbed the opportunity to experiment with the wartime spy-thriller, but the reader has to figure out whether there's a private motive or a Nazi conspiracy behind "a peculiarly horrible double murder." Something you can never be quite sure of with the man wrote wildly different crime, detective and thriller novels like The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928), Invisible Death (1929), Murder en Route (1930) and The Edge of Terror (1932). 

Glittering Prizes opens with Anne Assheton, a famous Hollywood film star, docking in England, where she's swarmed by reporters and photographers, but she tells the gathered pressmen that one of the richest woman in the world crossed with her on the Myrobella, Mrs. Warren Clinton – a Nebraskan widow whose husband left her an immense fortune ("worth x million dollars"). Mrs. Clinton is an American "who had the honour to be born in England" and returned with the purpose of placing her "entire fortune at the disposal of the British Empire" to fight the menace that's threatening their freedoms and way of life. Mrs. Clinton tells in an interview she has plenty of ideas on how to put her fortune to good use, but nothing definite and a fortnight would pass before her name was plastered across newspaper headlines. So what happened during those weeks?

Mrs. Clinton booked a particular suite of rooms at the Royal Sceptre Hotel, Remington, which the habitual patrons knew as the 'Nonpareil' far beyond the financial resources of most. There she gathered a group of handpicked nine talented men and women with outstanding public records and personal qualities.

Admittedly, the introduction of all these characters slows down the opening chapter considerably, but absolutely necessary to setup one of Flynn's most audacious plots. Something to rival the barefaced cheek of The Padded Door (1932)!

So here they are, more or less, in order of appearance: Mr. and Mrs. John and Angela Ramage who are respectively a barrister with "an absolutely outstanding reputation" and a doctor as well as an M.P. for West Markham. A famous Shakespearean actor, Wilfred Denver, who's "exceedingly well read" with "a perfectly marvelous memory." Captain Ronald Playfair is an ex-Secret Service agent whose "exploits during the War of 1914-1918" won him a Victorian Cross and "was in Berlin in the February of 1933 when the Reichstag went up in flames." Sir Edward Angus, Conservative Member of Parliament for the Rigby Division of Holme, is "the coming man in British politics" whose "fighting speeches in the House" caught the attention of Mrs. Clinton. The Very Reverend Dean Theodore Langton, of St. Sepulchre's Cathedral, is a silver tongued preacher whom modern critics ranked as one of "the greatest preachers of all time." Lord Esmond Curte is both "an isolated, aloof figure" and a strongly opinionated orator whose views usually gets him labeled a reactionary or a ruddy Fascist. Rosamund Kingsley is a well-known explorer and Mrs. Clinton regards her as "the foremost woman of our times," which is why she was selected as one of the people whom Britain sorely needed at this "most critical moment in her history." Cedric Garnett is "a superb physical specimen" who shined in rugger, rowing and cricket who reminded Mrs. Clinton of the "thousands of robust young men" marching through Germany with "unflagging energy and boundless enthusiasm."

So this group of carefully selected, outstanding individuals were royally wined and dined upon arrival, but the after dinner conversation turned serious as their host explained she was going to subject them all to a test to rank their intelligence, initiative and quick-thinking – in order to pick the best two of the litter. Firstly, they have to find the counterpart or associate word to a list of mostly obscure words: Orpheus, Edyrn, Ulema, Roup, Iphicles, Reldresal, Eagle (two headed), Mazikeen and Premonstratensian. Secondly, Mrs. Clinton privately interviewed everyone and asked them seemingly irrelevant questions like if they had any knowledge of jiu-jitsu or bred canaries. When the results were tallied, Mrs. Clinton picked two names and the others were left wondering whether they had been the victim of an elaborate practical joke or had simply wasted their time. So they slowly retired to their rooms only to awaken the next morning to a sensational horror show!

Mrs. Clinton and her two handpicked defenders of the British Empire are nowhere to be found. So the hotel manager was fetched to open the door of the suite of rooms and discovered the nude bodies of the two winners, each had been shot through the left eye, but not a trace of the American widow! The local police immediately recognized they were out of their league and a call went out to Sir Austin Kemble, the Commissioner of Police, who dispatched Chief Inspector Andrew MacMorran and Anthony Bathurst to the scene of the crime. After questioning everyone involved, the story returns to the surviving members of the party as they begin receive threatening warning letters, mockingly signed "Auf wiedersehen! Heil Hitler!," promising to give a demonstration of their far-reaching powers. Like sending ticking packages with an alarm-clock inside or tempering with cigars. I loved the universal, unmistakably British response of the characters to these threats.

There are additional problems like the discovery of a third body and the "appallingly trivial" incident of "a big red china dachshund" in a basement flat window that keeps changing color. So it takes a while before Bathurst can sit down "to marshal on paper all the facts which he had so far been able to amass." A great and fun piece of armchair detective work as he reconstructs and cracks the code of the word association test, weighs the relevance of the questions and eventually retracing Mrs. Clinton's footsteps in England. All of this is beautifully complemented by a bit of cheeky, in-your-face clueing, but misdirection is where the plot truly excelled as a detective story. Glittering Prizes perfectly muddled the waters without mucking up the whole plot or dulling the clues. I spotted the clues and correctly identified the murderer, but Flynn kept me second guessing and a particularly slippery, carefully placed red herring briefly convinced me I had been on the wrong track the entire time. 

Some readers will probably accuse Flynn of stretching things again, but my only complaint about the plot (HUGE SPOILERS, SWITCH TO ROT13!) vf gung guerr zheqref vf dhvgr na rfpnyngvba sbe jung'f ernyyl abguvat zber guna n fuvcobneq ebznapr. Other than that minor quibble, I enjoyed Glittering Prizes tremendously as Flynn kept me second guessing about the solution and what, exactly, I was reading, but delivered with a clear and perhaps a little overly ambitious solution that lived up to its fantastically bizarre premise. A pure, unapologetic and delightful flight of fancy.

The Ebony Stag (1938) by Brian Flynn

Earlier this month, I returned to Brian Flynn with the first novel from the third set of Dean Street Press reprints, Cold Evil (1938), which began promising enough until it all fell apart in the last two chapters – translating into a lukewarm review. Flynn has an excellent win/loss record in my book with only four misses to his name. So the odds were in my favor the next time around, but were they good odds? Time to find out! 

The Ebony Stag (1938) is the twenty-second title in the Anthony Bathurst series and begins three weeks after a gruesome and still unsolved murder in the village of Upchalke. One of those small bungalow retirement communities on the west coast of England.

Robert Forsyth was a 73-year-old rate collector and was brutally attacked on an early October evening in his bungalow, The Antlers, which left quite a mess. A terrific blow to face cut his lip and loosened his front teeth, but the cause of death was "a great gash just above the breast-bone" inflicted by strange, unidentified weapon and every article of furniture near the dead man was spattered with his blood. There are two more peculiar features to the case placing it well above your common, garden-variety murder. A small, carved figure of an imitation ebony stag that used to stand on Forsyth's mantelpiece was "smashed to smithereens" without apparent reason and there's an impossible angle to the murder – which nobody saw fit to mention or point out to me. I would have started this third round of reprints with The Ebony Stag instead of Cold Evil!

The front door of the bungalow was bolted and the backdoor locked and bolted, but the key to that door was missing. However, it hardly explains how the door was bolted. Only possible in the bungalow was a small, partly open scullery-window that big enough for a small child to worm through, which is how they were able to open the front door without breaking it down or smashing a window. Admittedly, the locked room-trick is not all that spectacular, poorly motivated ("...to mystify the police") and only a tiny piece of the puzzle that's not given too much attention. But it counts as an impossible crime. And needs to be included in that inevitable, fourth supplement edition of Locked Room Murders.

So the local police get nowhere Major Marriner, Chief Constable of Remenham, turned to Sir Austin Kemble, Commissioner of Police, but New Scotland Yard is overstretched. Sir Austin has to turn to his friend, Anthony Lotherington Bathurst, who has garnered a reputation as a "well-known crime-expert." And he's pretty much given a freehand to investigate the murder on his own. An amateur detective's daydream come to life!

All three agreed he would have a much better chance of picking up valuable information incognito. So he goes to the village as Mr. Lotherington, "an artist hoping to execute two or three picture commissions during his stay by the waters of the Chal," to poke around Forsyth's circle of acquaintances and cronies. Forsyth had three so-called intimates, Randolph Skipwith, Leonard Burns and Andrew McCracken, who used to spend a lot of time together playing cards or sharing a drink or two at the local inn, The Tracy Arms – earning them the nickname of "old chinas." Among his less frequent visitors and acquaintances were such notables as Reverend Charles A. Sellon, the Vicar of St. Veronica's, and the village physician, Dr. Innes. Mrs. Margaret Swan is an old friend who used to visit Forsyth about once a month. Lastly, there's a young journalist, Cyril Mulrenan, who enjoys a private income and shared Forsyth's liking for amateur-dramatic work. Bathurst gets his most valuable leads from several people outside of "Forsyth's chosen friends and his mere acquaintances."

Bathust has a change encounter with Wilfred Hatherley, chief Audit Clerk to the County Borough of Easthampton, who's a former colleague of the victim and what he reveals puts an entirely different complexion on the case. A complexion allowing Flynn to indulge in his pet trope, namely the false-identity, because the Forsyth he knew "had his teeth extracted two or three years before he retired." So who had been murdered in the bungalow and what happened to the real Forsyth? Don't worry. This is all revealed early on in the story. A second outsider is Captain Falk Stromm, late of the Swedish Navy, who came to England aboard a Swedish timber ship, the Vaar, to enjoy a holiday. But he and Captain Vass helped Bathurst out of tight corner or two over the course of the story. I should perhaps also mention the second victim, who counted as an outsider, because that murder proved to be one of the vital puzzle pieces that ultimately betrayed the murderer.

Needless to say, The Ebony Stag is Flynn's return to his pleasantly busy, knotted whodunits and not only concerns an impossible murder with a strange weapon and false-identities, but also has a very well hidden, cast-iron alibi and eight-decades-old coded message – which Bathurst refers to as the "stag" cryptogram. A cryptogram linked to a long-ago, nearly forgotten maritime disaster and a treasure of lost gold. Flynn practically threw every well-known trope at the story with various degrees of success as he eventually had to pick what aspect of the plot to concentrate on. And his attention mostly went to the triple-W: who was the victim, who killed him and what happened to the real retiree? The locked room is merely side dressing and the cryptogram only comes into play during the final stages of the story. Flynn put too much on his plate. But, just as a whodunit, it was very well done and an entertaining detective novel from start to finish.

There is, however, a very small flaw in the plot that needs to be mentioned, because how Flynn handled it was so endearing. ROT13: Sylaa ortna jevgvat zlfgrevrf “cevznevyl ng gur cebzcgvat bs uvf jvsr Rqvgu jub unq tebja gverq bs urnevat uvz fnl ubj ur pbhyq jevgr n orggre zlfgrel abiry guna gur barf ur unq orra ernqvat,” juvpu nyfb znqr uvz n cebsrffvbany Fureybpx Ubyzrf snaobl. Gurer ner znal, fbzrgvzrf irel fylyl cynprq, ersreraprf gb gur Onxre Fgerrg qrgrpgvir. Frireny bs uvf abiryf jrer boivbhfyl zbqryrq nsgre Fureybpx Ubyzrf fgbevrf be unq cybg-ryrzragf nyyhqvat gb fbzr bs uvf snzbhf pnfrf. Gur Robal Fgnt vf bar bs gubfr Fureybpxvna zlfgrevrf nf vg jnf boivbhfyl vafcverq ol “Gur Nqiragher bs gur Zhftenir Evghny” naq (zber vzcbegnagyl) “Gur Nqiragher bs Oynpx Crgre” (1904). Vs lbh abgvpr guvf, lbh pna'g uryc ohg fhfcrpg n pregnva punenpgre. Na bgurejvfr pyrireyl pnzbhsyntrq punenpgre. Fb ur znqr abg fvatyr ersrerapr gb Fureybpx Ubyzrf be Pbana Qblyr va guvf irel Fureybpxvna zlfgrel, juvpu zhfg unir orra gbegher sbe n snaobl yvxr Sylaa. I found it very endearing. Even if it undid the work of some of his carefully placed red herrings.

Steve Barge, of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, who rediscovered Flynn and wrote the introductions to the reprint editions, reviewed The Ebony Stag in 2020 deeming it to be a "very entertaining and a gripping read" – but "not his strongest work." I agree. But don't let our technical nitpicking get in the way of a good, solid and fascinating read. Highly recommended to everyone who's already familiar with Anthony Bathurst and Brian Flynn! 

A note for the curious: The Ebony Stag has a locked room, false-identities and alibis, but the smashed figure of the titular stag, sort of, works as a dying message. Although done by the murderer and unintentionally provided Bathurst with the first of many clues. So detective story tropes were very much on my mind when another, rarely used trope seemed the materialize. Namely the rival detective. Wilfred Hatherley brings Bathurst into contact with his boss, Frederick Gulliver Sharpe-Lodge, who's the Borough Treasurer of Easthampton. Bathurst "had never met a man like this before," but the most astonishing thing is that he tells Bathurst Hatherley had solved "the mystery of a secret Trust Fund" and cleared up "the St. Angela's kidnapping case in less than a month." This not only smacked of rival detectives, but of a crossover! Flynn wrote a second, short-lived series about a character named Sebastian Stole under a pseudonym, "Charles Wogan." I wondered if he might have written a third series under another name. Maybe even a series of short stories. Curiously, Flynn is one of the few mystery writers (especially from his time) who apparently never wrote any short stories. So I poked around the web to see if I could find any obscure detective novels or short stories with characters named Wilfred Hatherley and Frederick Gulliver Sharpe-Lodge. Nothing so far. I advise to keep those names in mind in case you ever come across a story with an audit clerk and treasurer as the detectives.

Cold Evil (1938) by Brian Flynn

I didn't intend to cram two reviews into as many days, but Dean Street Press released their third set of ten Brian Flynn reprints earlier this week. Since my previous read proved to be a little disappointing, I decided to tack on a review of one of these new editions. 

These reprints all come with an introduction by fellow mystery blogger, Steve Barge, who rediscovered Flynn back in 2017 and championed him getting back in print, which happened less than two years later – unearthing a long-lost gem from the 1920s in the process. Steve rightly pointed out in his introduction that one of the joys and strengths of Flynn's writing is "the variety of stories that he was willing to tell." Flynn wrote detective stories, the traditional kind of detective story, but he produced them in all kinds of different shapes and forms. Covering everything from Doylean thrillers to the old-fashioned whodunit. Steve gives as an example The League of Matthias (1934) and The Horn (1934), consecutive releases, which were so different in style you could believe they were from "the pen of different writers."

Flynn's variety of plots, divergence in narrative styles and willingness to experiment resulted in a handful pulp-style mystery novels of the kind commonly associated (on this blog) with John Russell Fearn and Gerald Verner. 

Somewhat anomalous for a pure, Golden Age writer to indulge in those type of thrilling pulp mysteries, but Flynn was a huge Sherlock Holmes fanboy who wore his fandom on his sleeve. Flynn's pulp-style outings were obvious attempts at reimagining Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot" (1910) and "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane" (1926) as modern, fair play detective stories or neo-Victorian thrillers – which happen to be not unlike the pulp mysteries by Fearn and Verner. The big difference is, of course, quality as Flynn was a better writer and plotter who created some weird, but magnificent, creatures by crossing the detective story with the pulp-style thriller. A strange, fluttering of sound is the harbinger of an Invisible Death (1929) in a house under siege. The Triple Bite (1931) is a Doylean thriller in which a ghastly, whirring kind of noise and puffy pink marks on the body the only signs death left behind. The Spiked Lion (1933) concerns a murderer who leaves his victim's bodies a mass of bruised and broken bones with slash marks. I tremendously enjoyed these pulpier outings stuffed with bizarre characters, strange deaths and the occasional impossible crime.

So my attention was drawn to the new reprint of twenty-first entry in the Anthony Bathurst series, Cold Evil (1938), which tackles the possibility of "murder by projection of evil" on a dark, gloomy moor during the winter months. 

Cold Evil is narrated by Anthony Bathurst's cousin, Jack Clyst, who the opening chapter finds having dinner at the vicarage of St. Crayle with Martin Burke, Christopher Chinnery, Dick Copeland and Edward Verschoyle. During the after-dinner conversation, someone "drags in the occult and the weird" and when that happens "no other topic will get a show." Martin Burke tells a chilling story about the time he witnessed the chimaera, "a fabled fire-breathing monster," coming to life in a Chinese village and "rush madly down the quaint Eastern street" – crying like a stuck pig. The creature left behind three bodies on the street with "a dull red mark," like a burn, behind each ear. Burke believes they were killed by a projection of evil, because they had offended a local holy man who willed them to die.

When the party breaks up to go home, Chinnery vanishes along the moor and his body is not found until a week later by an old quarry. Chinnery is frozen stiff with "reddish marks" behind his ears, but otherwise not a shred of evidence to suggest he was murdered. Nonetheless, Clyst asks his cousin to come down to St. Crayle to see if he can shed some light on Chinnery's mysterious passing. This is where it becomes apparent that Flynn was playing the waiting game with the story. 

Cold Evil takes place between early December and the first two weeks of January during which more people disappear on the moor, while they were on their way home. So there's a lot of waiting with bated breath for the bodies to turn up and discussing everything that has happened or can be expected to happen, which often turns to those cold, dark moors. A place where the bones of ancient Britons have rested for centuries and smiles at you in the summer, but lies in wait to kill unsuspected people in its "cold and callous cruelty" during the winter. Flynn even included a quasi-impossible situation with ghostly footsteps on the moor and a cornered shadow vanishing into nothingness. This added to the atmosphere of a silent, suppressed evil lurking somewhere on those dark, wintry moors in the dead of night.

Regrettably, Cold Evil is a textbook example of past results not guaranteeing future results. Invisible Death, The Triple Bite, The Spiked Lion and The Horn were detective stories masquerading as Victorian-era throwbacks or pulp-style mysteries, but Cold Evil is pure pulp trying to pass itself off as a detective story posing as a Victorian-era pulp. Flynn succeeded in keeping up the pretense until the last two chapters when the story makes a sudden left-turn into Shilling Shocker territory.

You should be able to make an educated guess as to whose hand is behind this "sinister, frightening, eerie business," but the motive, linking the victims together, came out of nowhere and neither can you anticipate the murder method – which definitely belongs on the pages of a dime thriller. So don't expect anything along the lines of Carter Dickson's The Reader is Warned (1939) or even J.J. Connington's Jack-in-the-Box (1944). However, I actually didn't mind this ending as much as you might expect. Flynn always tried to do something different and sometimes that meant he edged away from the traditional elements of the detective story (e.g. The Edge of Terror, 1932). What I did mind is how the ending brushed away all the intriguing clues as insignificant trifles. Those reddish marks? Red herrings. The promising clue of the three light-green hairs? The reader is only told afterwards why it pointed to the murderer without being given an opportunity to spot it yourself. So why even include them? 

Cold Evil is an interesting take on the Doylean thriller as the story gives the impression of holding its breath in silent anticipation until everything burst loose in the final chapters. Whether you end up liking it depends on your personal taste or your level of tolerance for pulp fiction, which is not to everyone's liking. Either way, if you're new to the series, I recommend you begin somewhere else first.

Sorry for two lukewarm (DSP) reviews in a row, but I've something excellent lined up for my next review and will return to Flynn sometime later this month. So don't you even dare think about touching that dial!

The League of Matthias (1934) by Brian Flynn

Brian Flynn's The League of Matthias (1934) is the fourteenth entry in the once criminally overlooked and now justifiably revived Anthony Bathurst series, courtesy of Dean Street Press and Steve Barge, which is another shimmering example of Flynn's versatility as a writer and plotter – who tried to do something different with each novel. So what you get is the best of two worlds as the series offers the advantages of both the standalone and series novels. Flynn effortlessly moved from Victorian-era melodrama and pulp-style mysteries to courtroom drama, whodunits and impossible crimes while unapologetic fanboying all over Conan Doyle. 

You can easily see where Doyle and Sherlock Holmes might have influenced The League of Matthias. A thriller-like detective novel concerning "one of the biggest criminal organisations ever known" that had "entered the arena of Continental crime" screams Professor Moriarty, but Flynn might have been looking at two of his contemporaries, John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie. The League of Matthias struck me as Christie's The Big Four (1927) as perceived by Carr. However, the book anticipates most of Carr's more well-known chase mysteries like The Blind Barber (1934), The Unicorn Murders (1935) and The Punch and Judy Murders (1937). 

The League of Matthias begins with Lance Maturin touring the continent with two of his friends, Adrian Fawcett and Dennis Hilleary, to help him recover from a broken heart and spirit.

So, after a couple of months of touring, the trio arrive in Antwerp, Belgium, where they visit a dingy cabaret place, the Scarlet Flare, with a beautiful dancer, Philippa, whose frightened eyes seem to be sending "a message from her soul" to Lance – not just him imagining things. Lance is handed a folded note pleading him to come to her dressing room as she's in "deadly peril." Philippa asks Lance to pretend to be her husband as protection against the sinister intentions of Raoul de Verviac and, before he knows it, he accompanies her to a lodging-house in the Rue du Sacré Coeur. Where he wears the pyjama-suit of another man and sleeps next to strange woman, clutching a revolver, to protect her from the villainous De Verviac. It was quite a night. A night that ends with a deadly shootout at the lodging-house and Lance and Philippa fleeing from the Belgian police.

However, it's not De Verviac's body laying at the bottom of the staircase with a bullet in his head, but a Scotland Yard detective, Chief-Inspector Rawlinson, who had "journeyed to Antwerp to deal primarily with three matters."

Chief-Inspector Rawlinson and Anthony Bathurst, working in conjunction with Scotland Yard, were tasked with investigating two seemingly unconnected disappearances and "the sinister activities of the League of Matthias." Firstly, the activities of the league had left a trail of bizarre murders that littered Belgium with the bodies of a convicted abortionist, a discredited actors with a forgery charge hanging over his head and "the most audacious embezzlers of modern times" who "despoiled literally thousands of homes in the Netherlands." So he got what he was due! Stranger even is that all of the deaths took "rather fantastic routes to the Styx."

One victim had his veins opened with pieces of broken glass, while another was burned to a crisp inside a baker's oven. A later victim is "drugged and then tied to the railway lines," but never a gun, knife or poison. Only a tiny, tangible clue filtered through the murky, criminally cautious network and that's the number 13 – "nothing more—nothing less." Anthony Bathurst and Chief-Inspector Rawlinson have another problem on their hands of an entirely different magnitude, but with enough pull to throw the whole affair in complete disarray.

Two people of very different plumage have disappeared. Firstly, there's the daughter of the Bishop of Longbarrow, Miss Philippa Castleton, whose disappearance "excited a tremendous amount of interest throughout the entire country." But, eventually, the excitement died down without her being found. Secondly, there's the disappearance of a distinguished member of the Diplomatic Service, Lance Marutin, whose disappearance is difficult to date. But the authorities have every right to be concerned. Two months previously, a colleague of Maturin had vanished under similar circumstances until his body was fished from the Scheldt.

So, as you probably noticed, the narratives of Lance and Bathurst concern the same characters and locations, but the details either don't seem to fit or out of focus and it takes some work to dovetail everything into a fitting pattern. I can't give anymore details without giving away too much, but I can gush how brilliantly Flynn handled this highly fantastical, sometimes unbelievable, mystery novel.

You see, The League of Matthias can hardly be called credible as a detective, or thriller, which considerably stretches credulity with how all the characters are linked or how the lodging-house "became the centre of a circle with various radii reaching the circumference" – seriously testing readers who want some semblance of plausibility in their detective fiction. And yet... The League of Matthias has this dark, grim edge of realism that makes the whole story much more believable than it has any right to be. And it's not the gruesome nature of the murders, the untimely death of Rawlinson or the demented truth behind the league. It's how the romantic subplot between Lance and Philippa is resolved, which dodged all the usual cliches and beautifully fitted this grim, fairy tale-like detective story. How neatly everything else fell into place was just a bonus.

Just like Carr's The Hollow Man (1935), Flynn's The League of Matthias is the utterly bizarre and fantastic detective story done right while maintaining the integrity of detective story with a clues and clever piece of misdirection. It's also another demonstration why Flynn was to the false-identity what Christopher Bush was to the unbreakable alibi and Carr to the locked room mystery! Flynn comes highly recommended to everyone who loves pure, undiluted vintage detective fiction and has now came dangerous close to replacing Bush as my favorite DSP author.

The Fortescue Candle (1936) by Brian Flynn

Brian Flynn's The Fortescue Candle (1936) is the eighteenth novel in the Anthony Bathurst series and had not been reprinted since its initial publication, 85 years ago, which Dean Street Press finally rectified last October with their second set of Flynn reprints – introduced by the doctor of puzzlelogy, Steve Barge. The synopsis promised a detective story reminiscent of early period Christopher Bush and Steve's introduction made even more curious as he named it "one of my favourite motives from Golden Age detective fiction." I can appreciate a good and original motive as much as an expertly crafted alibi or locked room-trick. The Fortescue Candle didn't disappoint! 

The Fortescue Candle begins with the unpopular Home Secretary, the Rt. Honorable Albert S. Griggs, giving consideration to "one rather troublesome problem" that "must be settled within the next twenty-four hours" at "the most generous estimate." Walter and Harper Fowles, two brothers, were condemned to death for the murder of a servant girl during a botched burglary. Griggs was now "the sole arbiter of life and death for two fellow-creatures," but decided not to overturn the verdict. On a wet morning in early March, the Fowles brothers, blazing with resentment and proclaiming their innocence, were duly hanged. And they left a very angry, spiteful father behind.

A few months later, the chambermaid of the Lansdowne Hotel finds the body of Griggs half lying out of his bed with a bullet hole in his throat, but the absence of a gun rules out suicide. There may be more to the murder than mere revenge.

Griggs is somewhat of a philanderer and, before his untimely passing, he had been visited by a rough character, Charles Wells, who promises "to let the daylight into his ugly carcase," if he continues to molest his daughter, but Griggs had already set his sights on another woman, Phillida Fortescue – a stage actress who found his attention unwelcome. Nevertheless, "the Griggs moth flutters to the Fortescue candle" (hence the title) and his stalkerish behavior gave his murder its most curious and baffling aspect. Shortly before his murder, Griggs followed Phillida to the Pier Pavilion, at the seaside town of St. Aidans, where an actress, Daphne Arbuthnot, was poisoned on stage during a performance. Griggs was backstage when it happened! The "two murders are so different in every way," but both cases pretty much share the same cast of players. Pure chance or a sinister design?

So the police reaches out to that amateur reasoner of some celebrity, Anthony Bathurst, who recognizes that the double-sided investigation is "one of the most remarkable cases with which he had ever been called upon to deal" as works hard to separate the genuine clues from the red herrings. And there are plenty of both to be found in this case!

Just consider the following: a small, white cube of chalk found in the pocket of the dead man's pajamas and drawings of a skull and crossbones, drawn in chalk, on the soles of his shoes. A maid passing the door of Griggs' hotelroom and catching snippets of a conversation mentioning murder, fowls and Griggs stating they belonged to him and entitled to do with them as he pleased. The missing glass of "poisoned spirits" that Bathurst expects the murderer disposed of in "an unexpected manner" at the pavilion. A coil of rope that the electrician of the pavilion, Mr. Fowles (yes, him), wore around his body and melon seeds found inside the pages of a book Griggs was reading before he was shot, which can be construed as a warning from "a mighty secret society" that "strikes absolute terror into the hearts of those unfortunate enough to incur its enmity," the Ku-Klax-Klan – which has to be given some serious attention as two witnesses have unexpectedly departed for America. Obviously, this plot-strand is Flynn's obligatory nod and a wink to Conan Doyle and this time picked the least triumphant of all of Sherlock Holmes' cases, "The Five Orange Pips" (collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1891), to pay homage to. Not as customary with Flynn is that aspect of the plot pays tribute to that "marvelously clever creation" of G.K. Chesterton, Father Brown, who he trashed in The Billiard-Room Mystery (1927). Steve suggested Flynn might have been angling for an invitation to the Detection Club. Anyway... 

The Fortescue Candle is "a labyrinthine chase" with many, independent or incidental moving parts and treacherous red herrings, which comes with both up-and downsides, but either way, it's very impressive Flynn succeeded in stringing everything together in a coherent and logical way. Some parts of this plot shined with Flynn's usual creative and innovative brilliance. One example is the original motive for one of the murders, which certainly was a new one to me, but Flynn also snug one of those double-edged red herrings into the story. A red herring that becomes a clue once you realize it's a red herring and stands in stark contrast with the other, more crudely executed red herrings.

There is, however, a downside. Very nature of the plotting and storytelling makes the whole scheme a little loose in the joints and some aspects needed a little shoehorning to make it all fit. For example, a very little, but very convenient, coincidence allows one of the most important clue/red herring to the first murder fit the story like Cinderella's slipper or the unanswered question (ROT13) jub ernyyl xvyyrq gur freinag tvey? Jrer gur Sbjyre oebgure'f gur ivpgvzf bs n zvfpneevntr bs whfgvpr be qvq gurl qrfreir gb unat? I thought it was weird to leave this thread dangling considering its importance to the overall plot.

So this looseness in the joints of the plot prevented The Fortescue Candle from taking a place among Flynn's top-tier novels, like The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928), Murder en Route (1930) and Fear and Trembling (1936), but it's a genuine, Golden Age mystery with a complex, maze-like plot littered with clues and red herrings – some a little better handled than others. But the logical conclusion is everything but disappointing. Flynn deserves a posthumous Detection Club membership!

Fear and Trembling (1936) by Brian Flynn

Brian Flynn's Fear and Trembling (1936) is the nineteenth novel of the Anthony Bathurst mysteries and, like my previous read in the series, The Horn (1934), begins with an unaccountable disappearance and full with Sherlockian allusions, but Flynn has a phenomenal trick up its sleeve – a trick worthy of that Golden Decade of the Golden Age. The way in which this trick was executed proved Anthony Boucher was right that the rules of the detective story can only be broken, twisted or subverted by people who understand and respect them in the first place. 

David Somerset is an analytical chemist with his own manufacturing company, Somerset and Sons, which he runs together with his twin sons, Geoffrey and Gerald.

A respected chemist with a respectable family business, but the start of the story finds David Somerset en route to a secretive meeting with a syndicate in the smoke-room of the Golden Lion in East Brutton, Gloucestershire. The syndicate is a "strange company" of five foreign-looking men dressed in dinner jackets with a white gardenia and they're prepared to part with "a truly noble sum" in exchange for something Somerset possesses. Somerset believes what he has to offer is worth ten times as much ("one million pounds paid in notes") and the negotiations reaches a deadlock, which then heats up with threats and "stupid talk of murder." And the chapter ends with Somerset bending his head to listen to the syndicate's revised terms.

The second chapter brings Gerald Somerset to the office of Sir Austin Kemble, Commissioner of Police, to tell that both his father and brother have disappeared on the same day. On the morning of March 12, Somerset had issued instructions to his sons not to come to the office until midday, but when they arrived, they found that their father had left early in the morning and had not returned – he never did. That same night, Geoffrey didn't come home. Vanishing as completely as his father. So what's going on?

Anthony Bathurst is only too happy to give Sir Austin and Gerald a helping hand, because this knotty problem appeals to him, but admits he hasn't a glimmer of an idea and confided in Sir Austin that he hopes they haven't sent Gerald to his death. Bathurst is justified in believing the case outside routine when the bodies of father and son are found in a copse. David Somerset was shot through the head and Geoffrey had a fractured skull, but, while David Somerset was clasping a revolver, the possibility of murder/suicide is rejected as "fantastic rubbish." Chief Detective Inspector Andrew MacMorran and Bathurst have a long haul ahead of them with more disappearances and murder. 

Fear and Trembling is a genuine, 1930s detective novel, but Flynn wrote and structured the story like a turn-of-the-century adventure thriller with Bathurst retracing Somerset's footsteps on the day he vanished, tracing the elusive syndicate and trying to figure out what they're after – bringing him face to face with a femme fatale. A mysterious woman who acts as a spokesman for the syndicate and she manages to unbalance the normally smart-alecky detective. Steve Barge, the Puzzle Doctor, who wrote the introduction for these new Dean Street Press editions noted in his 2018 review described the flirting between the two as "antagonism interlaced with compliments and a little innuendo" and "cut from the same cloth" as the romances found in John Dickson Carr's work. Steve's not wrong. There's even a fleeting hint of Carr when the woman vanishes from moving taxicab tailed by the police, but their entanglement reminded me of Spike Tracy's predicament with Patsy in Harriette Ashbrook's Murder Comes Back (1940).

Not unexpectedly, chasing this mysterious woman and syndicate around places Bathurst in one, or two, tight corners. Flynn used the aftermath of one of these situations to recreate a scene from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" (collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1905). This is not the only hint of Sherlock Holmes in the story.

So you might be wondering how, what appears to be a Doylean thriller, turns into a proper, fairly clued and inventive detective story, but it's difficult to describe or provide some finer details without giving anything vital away – which would ruin the excellent ending. However, I can say that the second half has one of the all time greatest bookshelf clues I've ever come across and a very relevant clue to the main crux of the plot. And good plot at that. The basic idea behind the plot is something that has been done before and since, but how it was done is something else I've never seen before and is quite ingenious and shrewd. There's one detail that gives me pause for thought, but suppose that can be put down to the times and certain aspects of police work not being as thorough as they are today. See if you can spot it.

Yeah, all things considered, Fear and Trembling is a mystery novel impersonating a turn-of-the-century thriller, but with the inner workings of a cleverly twisted, 1930s detective story with plenty of clues and misdirection to keep the reader engaged. I completely agree with Steve that this is one of Flynn's ten best novels that should have made him a much better-known mystery writer during his lifetime. Highly recommended!

The Horn (1934) by Brian Flynn

Brian Flynn's The Horn (1934) is the fifteenth novel in the Anthony Bathurst series and, like The Triple Bite (1931), Flynn wrote it as an homage to his favorite mystery writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which took its cue from Doyle's most well-known short story, "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" (collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892) – more than a hint of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). Flynn didn't merely wrote throwbacks to a previous, gas-lit era of the detective story. He upgraded the Doylean detective story to the standards of the Golden Age and The Horn is no different! 

Mark Kenriston, of Ilmington House, Whitton, is a young man with "an open, sunny disposition" and
a personal horizon "innocent of the smallest cloud." Mark is engaged to be married to Imogen Halliwell, but, on the eve of his wedding, he told everyone following a dinner party that he was going to take a walk down to the village. And that was the last occasion on which he was seen.

Two months pass without any news, or leads, in

the case and Mark's sister, Juliet, is on the verge of getting married herself with the wedding only a fortnight away. Someone has begun to frighten and terrorize Juliet.

Juliet had been badly affected by her brother's disappearance and her doctor recommended plenty of sunshine and open air, which is why it was decided to move her to Mark's bedroom. Several times, Juliet was awakened during the night by "a curious pitter-patter of feet," or something rushing across her face, like "an animal of some kind" – shades of Stoke Moran and Dr. Roylott! Whatever it was, she caught a flash of it as it escaped through the open window. Juliet's nerves has also been shot to pieces by "a curious noise" heard outside Ilmington House during the early hours of the morning. The braying of a gigantic horn!

So Juliet's fiancé, Julian Skene, has good reasons to believe history about to repeat itself and turns to Anthony Bathurst for help.

Bathurst assumes the scanty disguise of Anthony Lotherington (his middle name), an author, who has taken residence at Samuel Fairbrother's The Rifleman Inn to take in the local color for his prospective book on Northumbrian superstitions. But he's immediately recognized by Juliet and Mark's aunt, Sophie St. Alary, who decides to take him into her confidence about a package Juliet had received. A package containing a watch, a knife, a pair of scissors and thirty-one gray buttons cut from a flannel suit that "the ill-fated Mark Kenriston had worn just before he had slipped over the earth's edge." And with it came a letter with three dates and a curious phrase, "seek the reversed apron." These are not the only clues and hints littering the place that range from a stolen hunting horn and horse racing (of course) to the personality of Marquis de Sade and a locked shed.

So as he pokes and probes the problem from all sides, the day of the wedding comes nearer and, before everything is said and done, two more people have disappeared.

As said above, Flynn paid tribute with The Horn to Conan Doyle and "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," but plotted like a detective story of its time and, considering the story centers on several disappearance, I suspect Doyle wasn't Flynn only inspiration – because The Horn bears some resemblance to Freeman Wills Crofts' The Hog's Back Mystery (1933). I know the gap between the two is a narrow one and it could be a case of parallel thinking, which took the same basic idea in two different directions, but it's telling that two of the disappearances, in each book, took place under somewhat similar circumstances. But, once again, Crofts and Flynn told two very different stories based on the same basic idea. Naturally, arrived at two very different conclusions.

And, while The Horn is written like a Victorian-era melodrama, Flynn gave it a typically, 1930s plot with plenty of clues, some misdirection and "a moderately respectable alibi." The solution is ultimately a simple one, but it took me some time to put everything together only to have briefly sand thrown in my eyes towards the end. Something that would have been a bit of a cheat in any other detective novel where it not for the theme of the story that murder "as a pure expression of sadism is almost unknown." And this case is the almost in that sentence. This is perhaps the reason why the 2020 Dean Street Press edition is the first time the book has been reprinted in "in any form since its original publication."

The Horn ranks alongside Invisible Death (1929), The Orange Axe (1931) and The Edge of Terror (1932) as a solid Flynn novel wonderfully blending the detective story of Doyle's days with those from the 1930s. Flynn was criminally underrated during his lifetime and deserves a posthumous membership to the Detection Club!

The Padded Door (1932) by Brian Flynn

Brian Flynn's The Padded Door (1932) is the eleventh title in the Anthony Lotherington Bathurst series and has plot resembling Tread Softly (1937), in layout and structure, but The Padded Door worked its way towards a much more traditional conclusion than Tread Softly – which can be partially seen as a very early precursor of the modern crime novel. Just an example of Flynn's versatile abilities as a writer and plotter that allowed him to effortlessly shift from classic whodunits and impossible crimes to scheming serial killers and pure, undiluted pulp fiction.

Nevertheless, while The Padded Door is on the surface a typical, plot-oriented 1930s detective novel, it has one of the most audacious solutions of the period that begins with an astonishing surprise at the halfway point. So it's going to be one of those reviews where I dance around the finer plot details.

The first half of The Padded Door centers on the murder of a shady moneylender, Leonard Pearson, whose business practices "sailed exceedingly close to the wind and lay perilously near to blackmail." On the night of his murder, Captain Hilary Frant called on Pearson to fork over a thousand pounds in exchange for letters that belong to his sister, Pamela, which could ruin her engagement to the heir of tobacco empire, Richard Lanchester. Pearson's butler overheard Captain Frant telling his master he would like to cave in his skull and that "the world will be a thundering sight better place to live in," before making his exit through the french windows with the letters in his pocket. But the next day, Pearson is found beaten to death in his study and the money is nowhere to be found.

Detective-Sergeant Waterhouse and Detective Inspector Andrew MacMorran quickly pick up the scent of Pearson's last visitor, Captain Frant, when he finds his name and time of appointment written down in the victim's diary, but things go from bad to worse when he tries "to foist on Scotland Yard a counterfeit alibi" – nor was it very helpful that he lost his heavy, knobbed walking-stick. So he was arrested and charged with murder. Pamela tells their father, Sir Robert Frant, to get Sir Gervaise Acland for the defense and Anthony Bathurst to find the real murderer, but he's abroad on another case. Six weeks elapsed before he could be "called to the scent" and by then, it was "within an ace of being cold." And it was way too late to stop Captain Frant from going to trial.

You can argue that the whole buildup to the trial, culminating with the verdict, is nothing more than one long prologue to the second murder, but the first and second act were so cleverly and daringly tied together that it worked. Second act opened with a smashing surprise with the discovery of a body stuffed inside a large cabin-trunk that was left near a village road. Honestly, I didn't expect [redacted] to bite the dust! This makes everything that preceded it not look as straightforward as it was initially laid out.

Unfortunately, this makes discussing what happens in the second half very difficult, but let's give it the good old college try.

Bathurst has more to do, as a detective, in the second act and becomes ensnared in a webbing of contradictions, dead ends and a latticework of strange clues such as blue-veined cheese, a magazine interview, uncharacteristically light thuds and a cinema fire that claimed the lives of seventy people – a tragedy that had briefly pushed Pearson's murder from the headlines. But even with all those clues and foreshadowing, I was unprepared for the ballsy solution or how the two murders linked up. Flynn came up with something fresh and original here, but it's the kind of cleverness and originality that cuts on two sides. As ingenious as the solution is, it stretches credulity to its limit and it's the kind of precarious, tight-rope stunt more commonly associated with Flynn's better-known, celebrated contemporaries. John Dickson Carr managed to do it with The Hollow Man (1935) and Agatha Christie did it with The Murder on the Orient Express (1934). Very fittingly, the plot of The Padded Door, like The Murder on the Orient Express and The Hollow Man, hinges largely on the author's specialty. I don't believe he'll ever play that game better than he did here.

A second, incredibly cheeky, move is the truth behind Pearson's murder and how it related to the second killing, but the who is something most of his contemporaries would have probably shied away from. Flynn made it work and, while stretching things considerably, did it seemingly effortlessly. I also begin to believe Flynn loved Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes more than oxygen. Flynn was a little more subtle here and the only obvious nod to Holmes was reference to making bricks out of straw, but you can see how big of an influence Doyle had on Flynn in the finer details of the solution.

So, all of that said, not everyone's going to agree with my praise and, by the time this review is posted, surely some reviews of that effect will already have appeared. After all, I was less enthusiastic about Tread Softly than Steve and Kate, but The Padded Door was the antidote I sorely needed after a string of weakly plotted, lightweight and somewhat disappointing detective novels. Sometimes it's just fun to have clues thrown in your face and the wool pulled over your eyes at the same time.