The Case of the Black Twenty-Two (1928) by Brian Flynn

The Case of the Black Twenty-Two (1928) is only the second entry in the Anthony Bathurst series, but the plot already showed improvement over Brian Flynn's debut, The Billiard-Room Mystery (1927), skillfully unraveling two distinctly different, but inextricably intertwined, murders – committed on the same night while miles apart. Flynn's admiration for Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes very subtly bleeds through the story. But more on that later.

The Case of the Black Twenty-Two begins when a solicitors firm, Merryweather, Linnell and Daventry, receive "a rather peculiar commission" from an American millionaire, Laurence P. Stewart.

Stewart is a collector of "articles of great historical significance" and proudly possesses more than two-thousand objects of "historical interest and association," which have found a home in his private museum. Stewart has a strong preference for historical items with a Royal association, but has "a perfect mania" for anything connected to Mary, Queen of Scots. This all-consuming passion is why he reached out to the firm with a curtly worded letter with instructions.

The senior partner, David Linnell, is instructed to act on Stewart's behalf and purchase three historical articles, a collar of pearls, a tapestry fire-screen and a rosary of amber beads, which all have been "indisputably the property of Mary, Queen of Scots" – all three items will be on sale shortly at the Hanover Galleries. A not entirely conventional request, but a snappy telegram from Stewart confirms the commission. So the junior partner, Peter Daventry, goes to the gallery to inspect the articles in question, but, when Linnell goes there the following day, he found the gallery in "a condition of extreme excitement and agitation."

During the night, the gallery was robbed and the three items on Stewart's shopping list, the pearls, fire-screen and rosary, were taken away, but tragically, the night-watchman was brutally murdered during the robbery. And while Linnell is talking with Detective-Inspector Goodall, Daventry calls the gallery to tell his partner that the son of their client, Charles Stewart, has informed him that his father was bludgeoned to death last night in his library at Assynton Lodge. Inexplicably, the library door and french-windows were securely locked or fastened on the inside. Nothing appears to have been stolen from his private museum room. A pretty solid premise!

But before I continue, I've to pause here a moment and point out two interesting facts about the private museum in The Case of the Black Twenty-Two.

Firstly, a collector's private museum, or room where a collection is stored, is a trope commonly associated with S.S. van Dine and his followers, most notably Clyde B. Clason, but Flynn's use of it anticipates Van Dine – who used it for the first time in The Bishop Murder Case (1929). I thought it was very fitting the museum here is the property of an American millionaire. Secondly, there's a gem of a Sherlockian reference hidden in the museum. A reference that was never acknowledged, but one that can unmistakably linked to one of my favorite Sherlock Holmes stories and, if you spot it, the reference works as a bonus clue to the underlying motive that ties the cases together. What a fanboy!

Daventry has a brother, Gerald, who was peripherally involved in The Billiard-Room Mystery and "never tires of singing Bathurst's praises." So when Charles asks the solicitors to recommend him "an efficient, discreet, and trustworthy private detective," Daventry suggested seeking the help of that budding detective. Anthony Bathurst plays the role of Great Detective with his accustomed vigor and deduces his way from stolen fire-screens and little brown stones in a ink-bowl to a missing bullet and an obscure, murky passage of history. A passage telling of a Cardinal's great gift, the Black Twenty-Two. This titular plot-thread is very much in the Doylean tradition and can be linked to that fantastic Sherlockian reference that can be found in Stewart's private museum.

In my opinion, the historical mystery of the Black Twenty-Two is one of the better and most imaginative aspects of the plot. Only overshadowed by the reconstruction of the murder in the locked library. Unfortunately, there are also some less than stellar aspects of the plot that drags it down to the apprentice level of The Billiard-Room Mystery.

Even if you're really generous, there are only a handful of viable suspect. There's the son, Charles Stewart, the victim's ward, Marjorie Lennox, and his private-secretary, Morgan Llewellyn. You can add the mysterious man and who to the list who are, somehow, connected to the gallery murder. But when the genuinely surprising murderer is revealed, you want to cringe so damn hard you start believing Julian Symons had a point after all. A second drawback is the clumsily handling of the locked room angle, which had an uninspired, routine solution, but it hampered the murderer more than it helped – because leaving the french-windows open would have thrown red herring across the trail. Now all of the focus was on the people inside the house.

So, on a whole, Flynn's The Case of the Black Twenty-Two is an entertaining, well-written, but typical 1920s, detective novel with all the flaws and gusto of a burgeoning mystery writer. What really is impressive, considering the imperfections of The Billiard-Room Mystery and The Case of the Black Twenty-Two, is how the quality of plots and originality shot up like a bottle rocket in his next two novels. The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928) and The Murder Near Mapleton (1929) are two of the best detective novels from the twenties, which followed on the heels of two apprentice novels. That kind of rapid improvement is something to be admired.

I want to read Invisible Death (1929) or The Orange Axe (1931) next, but I'll probably cram something else in between to keep things a little varied.

Murder en Route (1930) by Brian Flynn

Back in February, I reviewed a Dutch short story, Anne van Doorn's "De bus die de mist inging" ("The Bus That Went Into the Fog," 2018), in which a shady American is inexplicably strangled aboard a regio bus (regional bus) on a cold, foggy winter day in February – because neither the passengers or the bus driver heard or saw the murder happen! Ninety years ago, Brian Flynn wrote a detective novel with a similar premise, but with an entirely different explanation.

Murder en Route (1930) is the eighth entry in the Anthony Bathurst series and begins on a cold, wet and "unutterably cheerless" night in mid-November that coated the coastal line in a thick fog.

The last motor-bus of the day is the 8.33 from Estings to Raybourne. A one-hour, fourteen-mile journey in an open-decker and the conductor, Frederick Whitehead, has began to notice the same man boarded the bus every night, for a month, at the exact same spot – who always traveled on the open top "no matter what the elements is like." And this rainy night was no different. Whitehead had not been off his platform and can account for every second of the journey, but only the mysterious passenger had ascended the staircase to the open-top of the bus. There he stayed, all alone, until the bus reached its destination. But he never descended that closely observed staircase. So, when Whitehead goes up to investigate, he discovers that the bus was "a blinking hearse" carrying a corpse!

The rain-soaked man is sitting in one of the seats and slumped to floor when the conductor touched his shoulder, but the man had no died of heart attack or exposure to the elements. There were the tell-tale marks of strangulation on his throat. But how did his murderer get on, and off, the bus without being seeing by the conductor or any of the passengers. By the way, the response of the bus driver to the discovery of a murdered man ("why can't people die in their homes—decently?") is why I love the English.

Reverend Parry-Probyn is the Rector of Kirve St. Laudus and the uncle of the wife of the Divisional Surgeon and has recently made his acquaintance with "a brilliant investigator," named Anthony Bathurst, who's greatly admired by the rector's son, Michael – immediately gets called upon to help the local police. Inspector Curgenven accepts his help with the rector and his son only to willing to lend a helping hand.

Firstly, I've to note here something John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, touched upon in his own review and that's the weird narrative structure of the story. The story begins in the third person, but Chapter IV introduces manuscript excerpts written in the first-person by the Rector Parry-Probyn. And he was not present for all of the scenes he described. So you get this unusual mixture of first-and third person narration that can be a little distracting, but hardly detracts from the clever plot and the diligent detective work. And Bathurst is in fine form here.

In the even earlier novels, like The Billiard-Room Mystery (1927) and The Murders Near Mapleton (1929), Bathurst played the role of Great Detective like a stage-actor with very little of his own personality bleeding through the performance. Bathurst is still the great, oracular detective in Murder en Route, but something was different this time. This time he was what you get, if you gave Philo Vance a soul.

The victim is identified as an American, Claude Sutcliff, who confided in his landlady that he offended a native tribe, in South America, "over some treasure-hunt" and they were determined "to get even with him" before they were finished – which is why he moved to the Old Country. Bathurst methodically extract the truth behind the murder by closely examining the body, which showed strange wounds on the wrists and peculiar smudge on the back of his overcoat. The fatal bus ride is reconstructed and this leads to a photographic clue as well as a link between the seemingly impossible murder on the top of the bus and the disappearance of an American fruit farmer in the City of Liverpool. This is merely a glimpse of a very involved, clockwork-like plot with many moving parts. Something that could have easily become a complete mess in the hands of a lesser plotter.

A plot with an original, well-clued and imaginative impossible crime with a surprisingly simplistic explanation considering how complex and involved the overall plot is.

I roughly figured out the general idea behind the trick very early on in the story, but completely misinterpreted the wrist-wounds and the smudge on the back. So my idea of the impossible murder played out a little different than the more practical explanation Flynn imagined. A simplistic and practical solution that logically fitted in the overall scheme of the plot. However, the best aspect of the plot and solution is undoubtedly the way in which Flynn played with multiple identities, which came together through the blinkin' cussedness of things to form a truly baffling crime.

I've only read five of Flynn's earlier novels, but he appears to have been to the false-identity what Christopher Bush was to the unbreakable alibi and John Dickson Carr to the locked room mystery. Flynn tackled the problem of identity with the same kind of ingenuity as Bush's cast-iron alibis and Carr's impossible crimes. So I've got something new to obsess about.

Overall, Murder en Route is a solidly plotted and fascinating detective novel about a victim who's as elusive as his murderer, but all of the clues are there for you to pick up and put together, if you can – making it my favorite entry in the series so far. Highly recommended!

The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928) by Brian Flynn

They're finally here! Earlier this month, Dean Street Press reissued the first ten novels in the long out-of-print Anthony Bathurst series by an unjustly forgotten mystery writer, Brian Flynn, but I grew tired of waiting and dipped into three novels ahead of the reprints – namely The Billiard-Room Mystery (1927), The Murders Near Mapleton (1929) and The Spiked Lion (1933). I was favorably impressed by all three of them and made me look forward to the rest even more.

So, now that I finally got my hands on a couple of reprints, I wanted to read the novel that put Flynn on his journey back to the printed page.

Some years ago, Steve Barge, who's better known as "The Puzzle Doctor" of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, received a normally hard-to-get copy of Flynn's The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928) as a Christmas present. It was love on first sight. Over the next two years, Steve posted many tantalizing reviews on his blog of Flynn's often obscure, long out-of-print detective novels and probably began blackmailing pestering Dean Street Press behind the scenes to get Flynn reprinted – until they finally relented. Steve also introduced these new editions instead of Curt Evans (turf war, turf war, turf war!). So, with the intro out of the way, let's dig in!

The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye is the third entry in the Anthony Bathurst series and shows the same quality of complex, but ultimately simple, plotting that was on display in The Murders Near Mapleton and an obvious admiration for Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

The first three chapters set the stage with the introduction of three, apparently separate, events that become hopelessly intertwined when they begin to interact and disentangling all the plot-threads takes quite some work. The first act takes place at The Westhampton Hunt Ball, "the outstanding event of the season," which has been honored with "the presence of Royalty" and Sheila Delaney dances with a stranger. A stranger who prefers to stay incognito and was introduced to Sheila as Mr. X. In the next chapter, Flynn takes a page from Doyle's "A Scandal in Bohemia" (collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892) when Bathurst is called upon by Alexis, Crown Prince of Clorania, who's engaged to the Princess Imogena of Natalia – a union that will bind Clorania and Natalia in "an irrevocable alliance." Regrettably, His Royal Highness had been indiscreet with a woman and is now being hounded by a blackmailer.

Chief Detective-Inspector Richard Bannister is one of the "Big Six" of Scotland Yard and in the third chapter "Dandy Dick," as he's known to friends, is enjoying a well-deserved holiday, but is disturbed by Sergeant Godfrey from the Seabourne Police Station. A murder has been reported to them and they immediately turned to the famous Scotland Yard detective for help.

A young lady went to the dental surgery of Mr. Ronald Branston, a posh dentist, to get a tooth extracted, but when Branston briefly went into his workroom, he was locked inside. Branston's cries attracted the attention of his housekeeper, but, when he returned to his surgery, he found that the lady was sitting dead in the operating chair. All around her mouth "hung that unmistakable bitter almonds smell." This is merely the premise of a case that becomes hard to comprehend when these three, seemingly unconnected, events begin to interact and found myself grasping at shapes and shadows without getting hold of the full truth. But the beautiful and complex layering of the plot doesn't allow me to divulge much more about the story.

What I can tell you is that Bathurst and Bannister made a great team, wonderfully playing of each other, as they tried to grapple with the problems facing them. Such as why the identity of the victim was obscured, who was the mysterious Indian who called upon the victim a month before the murder and how all of this is tied to the Peacock's Eye – a "magnificent blue-shaded emerald" of "somewhat peculiar shape." There's also a delightful series of chapters in which the detectives track down several banknotes that were stolen from the victim. And these banknotes changed hands quite a few times between suspects and side-characters in the story. Flynn knew how to pen an engrossing detective story!

However, the biggest surprise, besides the solution, came in the final chapters when the action moved from England to "the spider-web city" of the "Land of Water," Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where the chief of the Dutch police, Cuypers, lends a hand in apprehending the killer. Normally, when English detectives cross the channel, they go to France. So this was a very pleasant surprise. It almost felt like going from an English Golden Age mystery to a translation of a Appie Baantjer novel.

So, all in all, Flynn's The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye succeeded marvelously in making an ultimately simple, grubby crime appear like an inescapable, maze-like problem, but with all the clues to the very interesting solution sprinkled throughout the story – making it one of the better detective novels of the 1920s. Obviously, Flynn admired Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, but I unreservedly recommend The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye to devotees of Agatha Christie. The story has the feeling of very early Christie, like The Secret of Chimneys (1925) and The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928), but with one of those shimmering plots that defines her 1930s mystery novels.

I'll definitely tackle the other Flynn's on my pile ASAP, but not until early November, because my blogging schedule is filled until then.

The Spiked Lion (1933) by Brian Flynn

This month, Dean Street Press is finally reissuing the first ten Anthony Bathurst by an unsung Golden Age mystery writer, Brian Flynn, who was all but forgotten until the Puzzle Doctor, of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, began raving about Flynn in 2017 and pestering DSP with requests to bring Flynn back into print – a strategy which has now borne fruit. I was even enticed to "sample" the series ahead of the reprints with The Billiard-Room Mystery (1927) and The Murders Near Mapleton (1929).

There's one more sample on my plate that has to be taken care of before I can dive into those tantalizing reprints of The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1929), Invisible Death (1929), Murder En Route (1930) and The Orange Axe (1931).

The Spiked Lion (1933) is the thirteenth title in the series and the first chapter immediately comes to business with Sir Austin Kemble, Commissioner of Police at Scotland Yard, who consults Anthony Bathurst on an extraordinary case. John Pender Blundell was a comparatively well-to-do man with a "particular penchant" for ciphers and cryptograms, on which he wrote two books and worked for the Intelligence department during the Great War. A fortnight ago, Blundell disappeared from his home and was found two weeks later in Bushy Park, "dead as a doornail," with a fractured skull, broken bones and "a peculiar jagged slash" down his right cheek – which were non-fatal injuries. So what did kill him? A whiff of cyanide of potassium sprayed up his nostrils!

A creased fragment of notepaper with faint, incomplete writing is found in Blundell's pocket. The writing that's legible speaks of a "crackling voice" and a spiked animal.

Bathurst plays the role of armchair detective in this nicely done set piece as he "extracted just the germ of an idea" without ever leaving Sir Austin's office. This leads to the discovery of a second victim on the list of missing persons, Hubert Athelstan Wingfield, who was a recognized authority on legendary inscriptions (Heraldry), but one day, he vanished without a trace. A month later, the bruised and broken body of Wingfield is found in the Valley of Ferns, but the cause of death is cyanide of potassium sprayed, in some way, up the nostrils! And this is still only the beginning of the case.

Chief-Inspector MacMorran had a lengthy interview with Blundell's nephew, Hugh Guest, who was granted an extended leave from Oxford and stays with Sir Richard and Lady Ingle at Beech Knoll, on the Isle of Wight, where the usual group of house guests have gathered – as dark, treacherous intrigues are afoot. The people at Beech Knoll are the aforementioned hosts and the daughter of the house, Ella. Hugh and his sister, Celia. Barry Covington who warned Hugh something strange was going on that involved him. Finally, there's a friend of the host, Slingsby Raphael, who wrote many books dealing with "the mysticism and occultism of the East."

Hugh Guest is murdered behind the locked door of his bedroom with the only key found inside his breast pocket and "a cat couldn't have got away from that window-ledge."

So "the fatal circle" in the relationship between the first and last victim makes Bathurst decide to focus his attention on the Isle of Wight, which is when the story becomes an intricate play on the Tichborne claimants. Sir Richard was set to inherit a title and Tresham Castle when the elderly Lord Tresham passed away, but his long-lost, presumed dead, black sheep son, Nicholas, turns up out of nowhere to claim his inheritance. Nicholas has cast-iron evidence to back up his claim: a birth certificate, documents, genetic traits and "a set of rectangular mother-of-pearl counters" gifted to the family by Pope Adrian IV. So how is this new development connected to the three bizarre poisonings?

Early in the story, I noticed something that gave part of the game away and feared this was going to be a lukewarm review, but slipped on, what may have been, a red herring placing my focus on the wrong person – allowing a (more) complete picture of what happened to elude me longer than normally. Nevertheless, I figured out the locked room-trick (very easy) and why two of the victims were a mass of bruises and broken bones. And for that, I'll pad myself on the shoulder.

So you can easily collect all of the puzzle pieces, but putting them together requires a little bit more work (especially if you missed one) resulting in a largely satisfying detective story.

Just like in the previous two novels, Bathurst is merely here to play the role Great Detective, but a pleasantly active one, who travels all over the map to visit the crime scenes and talk with suspects, relatives and suspects to mine for clues and information. I particularly liked his one-man brainstorming session in which he tried to find a common link between all of the victims. His conclusion has him scrambling to Sir Austin with a request to exhume the bodies! Coincidentally, their discovery gives The Spiked Lion something in common with my previous read, Akimitsu Takagi's Shisei satsujin jiken (The Tattoo Murder Case, 1948). Something you don't often see in the detective novels from this period.

What struck me the most is how different The Spiked Lion compared to the other two I read. The Billiard-Room Mystery is a very conservative, but above average, 1920s country house mystery, while The Murders Near Mapleton is classic Christmas mystery, but The Spiked Lion had a pulp-style plot presented as a straightforward detective story. The explanation to the wounds on the bodies is a good example of something you would expect to find in the pulps. In a way, I was reminded of similar, pulp-style detective novels like Herman Landon's The Back-Seat Murder (1931), Philip Wylie's Five Fatal Words (1932), Gerald Verner's Terror Tower (1935) and John Russell Fearn in general, but Flynn had a much tighter grip on the various plot-threads – even if he glossed over some important details in the end. Such as how the murderer exactly entered the bedroom and the murder method.

On a whole, The Spiked Lion is not a pitch-perfect detective novel, but had a good plot that strayed a little from the beaten path and, more importantly, I enjoyed my time with it. So, if you thought Puzzle Doctor was bad with his constant Flynn reviews, just you wait until the reprints are finally released, because I'm really starting to like Flynn. A man who simply wanted to write good and entertaining detective stories is a man after my own heart!

The Billiard-Room Mystery (1927) by Brian Flynn

Brian Flynn was a government accountant, lecturer and author of more than fifty detective novels, most of them starring his dilettante, Anthony Bathurst, but they had fallen into complete obscurity – until The Puzzle Doctor began reviewing a good chunk of his often rare, hard-to-get mysteries on his blog in early 2018. Nearly two years later, Dean Street Press announced they're going to reprint Flynn's first ten mystery novel.

Curiosity got the better of me and decided to dip into the series ahead of the reprints in October, which brought me to a cleverly crafted, Christmas-themed detective story, The Murders Near Mapleton (1929). A criminally overlooked mystery novel that whetted my appetite, but we're still a good month removed from the republication of Flynn's tantalizing, long-lost gems such as The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928) and The Orange Axe (1931). Luckily, the first book in the series is relatively easy to get hold of nowadays.

The Billiard-Room Mystery (1927) is a fairly typical, 1920s country house mystery presented by the narrator, Bill Cunningham, as one of the cause célèbre of its day.

The stage of the crime is Sir Charles Considine's ancestral home, Considine Manor in Sussex, where he holds an annual Cricket Week. Cunningham is the bosom companion of Sir Charles' eldest son, Jack, which is why he comes down every year to take part in the Cricket Week, but also present are Jack's two sisters, Helen and Mary. Helen is married to "a big, bluff Dragoon," Captain Arkwright, while Sir Charles invited a newly-minted friend of Mary, Gerry Prescott – who took Cunningham's place on the cricket team. There are two service men and friends of Arkwright, Major Hornby and Lieutenant Barker. And the latter lost a chunk of money in a card game to Prescott on the eve of the murder.

Lastly, there's another, old school chum of Cunningham, Anthony Bathurst, who has been with at Uppingham and Oxford. Bathurst is described by his friend as "the kind that distinguishes whatever he sets his hand to" and the discussion on detective stories, in the first chapter, can be read as a brief prologue to his impending career as an amateur detective.

One of Bathurst favorite topics is "The Detective in Modern Fiction" and, like everything that aroused his interest, he knew it "backwards, forwards, and inside out."

Bathurst states that, like the immortal Sherlock Holmes, he has the greatest contempt for Emilé Gaboriau's M. Lecoq, but Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin "wasn't so bad." So who are, in his opinion, who can stand with Holmes? Bathurst thinks "Mason's M. Hanaud, Bentley's Trent, Milne's Mr. Gillingham, and to a lesser degree perhaps, Agatha Christie's M. Poirot are all excellent in their way" – dismissing Father Brown as being too Chestertonian. You can definitely see the influence of some those writers had on the characters, plot and writing of The Billiard-Room Mystery.

Bathurst is asked, in the event of finding himself on the spot of a murder, if he could solve the case quicker than a trained policeman? His answer: absolutely!

Everyone wakes up the next morning to the screams of the maid yelling blue murder. She found the body of Gerry Prescott lying on the billiard-table, face down, with the Venetial dagger from the curio table driven down the base of his neck, but the police doctor determines he had been strangled to death with a boot-lace – which is missing from the body. There were chairs overturned and window was standing open with footprints beneath it. If things weren't complicated enough, the discovery is made that Lady Considine's pearl necklace had been stolen on the night of the murder.

In the first chapter, Cunningham mentioned he had attended a private theatrical performance in which Bathurst was playing the lead. I thought this is very fitting pastime for Bathurst, because he strikes me as a character-actor who plays the role of Great Detective. A similar observation was made in my review of The Murders Near Mapleton.

Bathurst utters such phrases "an elementary piece of reasoning" and "I'm beginning to see a little more light" as he makes deductions or adds a new item to the "maze of clues." There's even a scene in which he examines the floor-covering of the billiard-room, on all fours, with a magnifying glass. So he's very much a late addition to the Rivals of Sherlock Holmes that bridged the gap between the Gaslight Era and Golden Age. Nonetheless, as theatrical as his performance may be, Bathurst tackles the problems of the billiard-room murder with enthusiastic vigor and works hard to separate "the faked clues from the true ones" with Cunningham playing the role of baffled Dr. Watson – which gives the story some period charm. Hey, there's something affectional about two friends interfering in an official murder investigation.

The Puzzle Doctor touched in his own review of The Billiard-Room Mystery on "one aspect of the story resembling something else in another Golden Age title," but assured that the books were developed independently with Flynn's manuscript doing "the rounds of publishers for over a year." 

However, the characters, story-telling and central-trick of the plot were definitely inspired by two mystery novels that were published earlier in the decade. And these two books probably also inspired the novel this one resembles. Unfortunately, this is a bit of a drawback, because Flynn was clearly imitating what others had done before him and this strangely makes The Billiard-Room Mystery feel like a modern pastiche of a 1920s country house mystery.

On the other hand, I have to defend the book against the claims that it didn't play entirely fair with the reader. There were clues. However, the good clues were clumsily handled and showed Flynn's inexperience as a plotter, but the clue of the person who was seen spying on Prescott by Mary, more than once, could have been brilliant in the hands of someone like John Dickson Carr – same goes for the clues of the discovery of the missing I.O.U. and the torn letter found under a bed. The torn fragments of the letter poses a minor, quasi-impossible puzzle: the handwriting is easily identified, but this person claims not to remember ever having written it. A clue, of sorts, that could also been put to better use. So the solution didn't entirely came out of left field, but the clueing wasn't optimal.

Obviously, Flynn still had a lot improving to do in the plotting department, but the sub-plot of the stolen pearls was deftly handled and reads like a short story that got ensnared in the web of a bigger, more ambitious plot. Yes, this involves one of those unlikely coincidences of two criminals striking in the same place, at the same time, but Flynn handled it convincingly here. Showing some of that promise on full display in The Murders Near Mapleton.

So, while the plot has its imperfections, The Billiard-Room Mystery is still a cut above the average, 1920s drawing-room detective novel and played the Grandest Game with infectious enthusiasm. A promising debut from an unjustly forgotten mystery writer and look forward to the first ten reprints coming in October.

The Murders Near Mapleton (1929) by Brian Flynn

The Puzzle Doctor, of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, has been beating the drum for an obscure, little-known mystery writer, Brian Flynn, ever since he received a rare, hard-to-get copy of The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928) as a Christmas present – marking it as "a cleverly clued mystery" and one "the genuine long-lost classics" of the genre. Over the next year-and-a-half, he unearthed many more gems like Murder En Route (1930), The Orange Axe (1931) and Thread Softly (1937).

Unfortunately, the lion's share of Flynn's work has been out-of-print for decades and used copies tend to be scarce or expensive. I've seen copies floating around with asking price of more than 1500 dollars! That is about to change.

Dean Street Press is reprinting the first ten of Flynn's Anthony Bathurst detective novels in October, but this time, I couldn't even wait for a review copy and decided to preemptively dip into one of these long-lost classics – picking the highly praised The Murders Near Mapleton (1929). A cleverly done, old-fashioned Christmas mystery lauded by our resident genre historian, Curt Evans, as "a meritorious example of the pure puzzle type of detective novel." I couldn't agree more and would place the book in my top 5 of favorite seasonal mystery novels. Something I'll probably do in December.

The Murders Near Mapleton opens with the host of a Christmas party at Vernon House, Sir Eustace Vernon, asking his guests to charge their glasses and "drink to the empty chairs" of those dear ones "who once were with us," but who have now passed on. A bizarre toast that was the beginning of "one of the strangest cases that ever fell to an investigator's lot to unravel."

Towards the end of the dinner, Sir Eustace announced he had received some bad news and excused himself from the table, but he never returns to them. And what follows is a night of terror with shock following shock. One of the maids gets the scare of her live when she's surprised by an intruder. A suicide note is found in Sir Eustace's study and the door of a small safe in the wall stood wide open, but the second biggest shock of the night comes after the body of the butler, Purvis, is found poisoned in the butler's pantry – a red bonbon with a death threat is found in the victim's pocket. However, the biggest shocker of the evening comes when the doctor takes a closer look at the body.

I'm not going to reveal here what this early plot twist entails, but suffice to say, it would have raised some eyebrows ninety years ago. Interestingly, a similar surprise was used in another mystery novel published in the same year as The Murders Near Mapleton, but Flynn gave it a more practical explanation. Something that'll probably disappoint some modern readers.

Anthony Bathurst and Sir Austin Kemble, Commissioner of Police at Scotland Yard, enter the picture when they accidentally stumble across an abandoned car and the body of the missing Sir Eustace on the line near Dyke's Crossing. There are traces of blood inside the car and the pathologist finds a bullet in the back of his head. So this was definitely not a suicide. This has only been about a quarter of the story!

Flynn's plotting in The Murders Near Mapleton reminded me of early Christopher Bush with its double murder, closely-linked and committed in short succession, muddling the waters of the investigation – a plot-device Bush often used during the first decade of his career. Some good examples are Dead Man Twice, (1930), Dancing Death (1931), The Case of the April Fools (1936) and The Case of the Tudor Queen (1938). There was another aspect of the solution that recalled Bush, but you have to spot that one yourself. However, where Flynn differs with Bush are his two detectives, Bathurst and Sir Austin, who are the polar opposites of Ludovic Travers and Superintendent George Wharton. Sir Austin is a colorless character and hardly contributed to the solution, while Bathurst very much plays the role of Great Detective. A detective who plays his cards close to the chest, without withholding any clues, as he mutters "I think I begin to see light at last" after asking apparently irrelevant questions about bonbons or "the colors of the dresses worn by the various ladies" during the Christmas dinner.

The line-up of suspects is not littered with the familial, stock-characters you normally expect to find in these type of Christmas-time detective stories (e.g. Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot's Christmas, 1938).

Sir Eustace only relative is his niece, Helen Ashley, who's orphaned and lives with her uncle. She invited her friend and obligatory love interest, Terrence Desmond. Father Jewell, the ascetically priest in charge of the Roman Catholic Church in Mapleton. The mayor and mayoress of Mapleton, Alfred and Emily Venables, who felt snubbed when he was passed for baronetcy in favor of Sir Eustace, because he had heroically saved a dozen children from "a rapidly burning building." Major Prendergast and his wife, Diana, who was in a bidding war with Sir Eustace over a patch of land that may have a vain of tin under it. Doctor Lionel Carrington is the physician who makes a starling discovery. There are two London friends of Sir Eustace, Mr. and Mrs. Morris Trentham.

Finally, there are some local characters who play a role in the story: the coffee-stall keeper, Sam McLaren, who was attacked somewhere in the vicinity of Vernon House. One of the maids has a sailor boyfriend, Albert Fish, who may also have been near Vernon House on the night of the murders. However, the only truly good, well-rounded character turned out to be the victim, Sir Eustace, who was revealed by the end to be somewhat of a dualistic character. Someone with a great capacity for doing good and evil in equal measures.

As Flynn probes this group of suspects and considers such clues as red bonbons, cigar ashes, two suicide notes, stage-plays and a piece of slab-tobacco, as he works his was to a truly surprising solution – a surprise because I had briefly considered it and completely rejected it. So I was as astonished as Sir Austin when the murderer was revealed. Well played, Mr. Flynn. Well played.

There are, however, two minor points I have to nitpick about. Why didn't they immediately tracked down Cornelius van Hoyt to ask him what Sir Eustace kept in the wall safe? Sure, it would have resolved the plot-thread about the intruder, but this would not have been to the detriment of the overall story. The plot had more than enough to go on had the problem of the intruder been resolved by the halfway mark. Secondly, even with all the clues, you can only really guess at the motive. Or the story that lay behind it.

Other than those two, relatively minor complaints, The Murders Near Mapleton is a shrewdly plotted, fairly-clued detective novel and deserving to be marked as a long-lost classic of the seasonally-themed mystery novel. A fine addition to the ever-growing list of unjustly forgotten detective stories rescued from obscurity by DSP and look forward to October!

On a final, related note (or two): I asked in my recent review of Moray Dalton's The Night of Fear (1931) if the tradition of Christmas mystery novels started with The Night of Fear and Molly Thynne's The Crime at the Noah's Ark (1931), because I couldn't remember any example of one predating those two. Well, that question has now been properly answered. Secondly, a German translation of The Murders Near Mapleton, entitled Die morde von Mapleton: ein weihnachtkrimi, is slated for release on September 16, which is around the same time as the DSP reprints. So does this mean that even Germans are abandoning the drab, soulless post-modernish of contemporary crime-fiction? Huge, if true!