The Five Red Fingers (1929) by Brian Flynn

Several years ago, I reviewed Annie Haynes' The Crime at Tattenham Corner (1929) in which a well-known racehorse owner on the eve of the Derby, but the victim owned the odds-on favorite to win the race and the rules are clear on this – an owner's death renders void all his horses' nominations and entries. So the death of the owner took the prospective winner out of the race.

Brian Flynn was a criminally underappreciated mystery writer, as well as a racehorse enthusiast, who used a practically identical premise in one of his earlier detective novels. A novel that was published in the same year as The Crime at Tattenham Corner.

The Five Red Fingers (1929) is the fifth entry in the Anthony Bathurst series, rediscovered by Steve Barge and Dean Street Press, which centers around a South African millionaire, Julius Maitland, who returned to England to indulge in his ruling passion – horse racing. Maitland and his much younger wife, Ida, each own a racehorse, Red Ringan and Princess Alicia, who have the odds in their favor to win the Big One of the racing season. But, even more than that, Maitland dreams of "the classic double" of Derby and Oaks "won by husband and wife."

A good portion of the first half flies through the year leading up to the Derby with hints drops throughout the narrative that something is amiss.

Maitland suffered a severe shock when he spots a stout, overdressed man and a dark-haired woman of "very uncertain years" passing through the corridor of a train, but the person with him could not say whether it was the man or woman who shocked him. Even stranger is that Maitland is unexpectedly called back to South Africa to attend to an extremely urgent and important business matter, which means he has to miss the highly anticipated Derby. And with her husband out of the picture, Ida decides to run her own horse in the race.

Red Ringan and Princess Alicia "pulled up within a few yards of each other past the winning past," respectively coming in first and second, which is a huge victory for Maitland's stable, but as the results were flashed around the world, the police station at a seaside village receives a frantic phone call – a man shouting he's being murdered. What the policeman on the phone hears next is a heavy thud, loud laughter and the strains of a violin before the line goes dead. So they go to the bungalow from which the telephone call came and find the body of Maitland. Shot through the throat! And according to the medical examiner, he had been "dead for a good couple of days."

This has costly, far-reaching consequences because, under Derby rules, his horse had "no right to run in the race" and is retroactively disqualified with Princess Alicia declared the new winner. A change that was either a deadly blow or an unexpected blessing to the people who had either drawn Red Ringan or Princess Alicia in the Calcutta Sweep.

Flynn never explained what, exactly, the idea behind the Calcutta Sweep is, but Steve Barge, our very own Puzzle Doctor, explained it in the introduction as follow: "a high money sweepstake, linked to important races, where, for a significant sum of money, a ticket is bought that is randomly assigned to one of the horses. The money is put into a prize pot, but then the tickets are potentially auctioned off, with that money also going into the pot. The prizes are then apportioned between the owners of the tickets for the first, second and third horses." You only get an idea how high the stakes truly were until Maitland is willing to part with twelve thousand pounds for half a share on a single ticket. If you adjust for inflation, "£12,000 in 1929 is equivalent in purchasing power to about £767,355.07 in 2020."

So with all the bizarre circumstances and high stakes, Sir Austin Kemble, Commissioner of Police, immediately throws up his hands in despair and tells the family that he's prepared to hand over the case to "a brilliant man" who "has helped Scotland Yard more than once when it has confronted very grave difficulties," Anthony Bathurst – a dilettante with no official standing whatsoever. I liked it!

During their investigation, I began to disagree with the general consensus that The Five Red Fingers is not to be counted among Flynn's best detective novels, but that was because I was following a false trail with a familiar scent to it.

I was already gravely suspicious of the gunshot wounds to the throat. You can bet dollars to donuts that every notable deviation from the knife in the back, bullet to the head or twist with the scarf usually turns out to be an important piece of the puzzle. Robin Forsythe made it a specialty of his Anthony Vereker series (e.g. The Ginger Cat Mystery, 1935). So when Bathurst comes across a nest of clues, inside a disused barn, I read them to mean that the plot was a delightful, Golden Age-style elaboration on a very well-known Sherlock Holmes story. Flynn was not only a horse racing enthusiast, but also a massive Conan Doyle mark and his detective novels are littered with references to the Great Detective and Easter eggs.

Well, I missed the mark completely here. The Five Red Fingers does a good job in setting out false trails, real or imagined, with strategically placed red herrings all over the place, but there were so many of them that actual clues became scarce and weakened an already coincidence-laden, sometimes illogical, solution even further – with one of the coincidences bordering on an Act of God. An anti-climatic and deeply unsatisfying solution to a detective story that began with the promise to play a high-stakes game.

So, yes, The Five Red Fingers is not representative of Flynn's work of the period and, if you're new to him, I recommend you begin with either The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928) or Murder en Route (1930). But if you, like me, are waiting for the next ten reprints to be released, The Five Red Fingers will do until then.

The Edge of Terror (1932) by Brian Flynn

Brian Flynn's The Edge of Terror (1932) is the twelfth title in the Anthony Bathurst series and part of the much deserved, long overdue second set of reprints, published by Dean Street Press, which nearly became "the book that got away" as not even Flynn's estate had a copy of it – only copy for sale came with "a stratospheric price tag." Luckily, a generous collector came to the rescue and made his copy available to Steve Barge and DSP.

However, the extreme scarcity of copies explains why The Edge of Terror never figured or was even mentioned in connection with a very exclusive list of vintage detective novels and short stories. The serial killer tale!

Steve Barge, the Puzzle Doctor, wrote in his introduction that the serial killer "posed a problem for the writer of the pure mystery," mainly centering on the motive, which leaves the writer with "two primary options." The victims are either linked or picked at random. The locked room mystery, the closed-circle of suspects and the dying message as restrictive tropes, but, compared to the serial killer, they're open worlds that are still being explored today. And how ironic it's that the serial killer has become a staple of the modern crime novel.

Now, to be honest, the giants of the past were very hit-and-miss when trying to tackle the serial killer with Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders (1936) and Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails (1949) standing as the iconic, Golden Age serial killer novels, but John Dickson Carr's Captain Cut-Throat (1955) and William D. Andrea's The HOG Murders (1979) found two nifty variations on the two previously mentioned options – cementing a spot right underneath Christie and Queen. But there were also some real stinkers. Such as Philip MacDonald's massively overrated Murder Gone Mad (1931) and Jonathan Stagge's lackluster Death's Old Sweet Song (1946), but opinions differ on those two. Carr heralded Murder Gone Mad as one of the best crime novels of all time (no idea why) and Curt Evans valiantly defended Death's Old Sweet Song against its detractors in the linked review. We shouldn't overlook Gladys Mitchell's The Rising of the Moon (1945), which offers the reader an experience all of its own.

So, as said above, the result varies enormously, but where does Flynn's The Edge of Terror rank on the list of Golden Age serial killer novels? Let's find out!

The Edge of Terror is narrated by Dr. Michael Bannerman, village physician of Great Steeping, who six months previously was taken into the confidence of Inspector Goodaker about a threatening warning letter they received. A letter promising to remove "one of the most prominent citizens of your most atrocious town" by "by the 31st day of August next" and “the matter may not end there." The letter signed "The Eagle." They assume it's a hoax or someone trying to stir the pot, but, on August 31, Goodaker calls Dr. Bannerman to tell he had received a second letter announcing the murderer's arrival. And the next morning, Dr. Bannerman receives a second call informing him a milk boy had found the body of Walter Fredericks in Taggerts Lane with his throat cut.

Walter Fredericks was one of the richest men in the district and owned, among other things, two big cinemas. So the murderer couldn't have picked a better victim to create a first-class sensation, but what the murderer couldn't have foreseen is the presence of a holidaying murder-magnet, Anthony Bathurst, who's immediately roped into the case by the Chief Constable. When the murderer strikes down another member of the Frederick family, the motive appears to be a personal one, but a third murder seems to break the link. It's this third murder that's the most interesting of the lot.

Fredericks owned two cinemas and in one of them, Beaufoy Cinema, the people in attendance were startled by "a piercing scream that was easily separable from the "talkie" to which they were listening." The body of the girl in charge of the confectionery counter was found lying close to the top of a flight of stairs with a knife wound.

John Russell Fearn's One Remained Seated (1946) and Pattern of Murder (2006) made me wonder if there were any more detective novels with a cinema setting, which was actually rarely used, but have since found several additional titles – one of them being another DSP reprint, Moray Dalton's The Art School Murders (1943). The Edge of Terror definitely belongs on that list and gives the reader a brief, but welcome, peek behind the scenes of a 1930s cinema through the questioning of a uniformed boy who sold chocolates and cigarettes to the patrons ("on a tray suspended from his neck") and found the body. This leads to the clue of "little blurred blot of pink cream" that "is going to bring a man to the gallows."

There's not much more I can tell about the plot, because, as Steve noted in his own review, The Edge of Terror is something of fairground ride of novel, but have to compliment Flynn for his use of a neighborhood patrols as a response to mounting body count. A logical response to a vicious killer roaming a small community that's too often absent in these kind of serial killer stories, e.g. Paul Halter's L'arbe aux doigts tordus (The Vampire Tree, 1997). Secondly, Flynn once again shows here that he was to the false identity what Christopher Bush was to the unbreakable alibi and Carr to the locked room mystery. It's fascinating how some writers succeeded in making their names synonymous with certain tropes.

My sole complaint is that the finer details of the motive, which is the linchpin of the serial killer story, were obscured until Bathurst's explanation, but, on a whole, it was tremendously fun read and a good, early attempt to wring a proper detective story out of the work of an apparent homicidal maniac. The Edge of Terror doesn't soar to the same heights as The ABC Murders, Cat of Many Tails or Captain Cut-Throat, but it's mostly certainly a cut, or two, above most of the other, lesser-known Golden Age serial killer novels. Flynn was great!

Tread Softly (1937) by Brian Flynn

On October 5, 2020, Dean Street Press is going to drop the second set of Brian Flynn reprints, comprising of books 11-20 in the Anthony Bathurst series, which includes a title with all the promise of being as much as a classic as The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928) and Murder en Route (1930) – namely Tread Softly (1937). Steve Barge, the Puzzle Doctor, wrote the introductory pieces and described Tread Softly as having "a truly unique plot" that, to his knowledge, has "never been imitated." So my inner fanboy was squealing with delight when I found a review copy in my inbox.

Tread Softly begins with Chief Inspector Andrew MacMorran, of Scotland Yard, consulting the Sherlockian gentleman detective, Anthony Bathurst, on what should have been a cut-and-dried case.

Claude Merivale is a reasonably successful stage-and screen actor, of independent means, who appeared to have been happily married, but one day, he turns up at the Yard to announce he had strangled his wife, Vera Merivale – whose body was left in their bedroom. The police immediately went out to investigate and found that the facts were exactly as he had stated, but "the defense that he's putting up is so extraordinary" that he very well may "leave the New Bailey a free man." What he claims has happened is that "he dreamt he was being attacked by a number of people" and he fought back, but in the struggle he turned to his sleeping wife, "seized her by the throat and strangled her." Supposedly, this happened in a state of semi-conscious unconsciousness.

A hardly credible story, to say the least, but with an eager counsel for the defense, a highly reputable medical expert, a hypothetical motive and a presentable suspect who obligingly confessed suddenly placed the case for the Crown in jeopardy. MacMorran wants "to hang the woman's murderer" and there only three weeks left until the trial starts.

Anthony Bathurst, astute and helpful as ever, promises MacMorran to look into the case and raises a number of points the police missed, or neglected to investigate, because the murderer had come down to the Yard and volunteered to full story to them – a story that checked out. So there was no reason to delve deeper until they realized the strength of the defense. And while some time has elapsed, Bathurst still manages to unearth a clue or two. Such as a seaside snapshot of Claude and Vera, the position of the seating of a deckchair, two hidden tickets to a dance party at a fashionable night club and nail-scratch on the body that shouldn't be there. Flynn even shows the reader a scene where Bathurst is not present and tells the reader that, had he witnessed the scene, it would have "proved invaluable to him in his initial attempts to understand thoroughly the psychology of the case." You don't often get a bonus clue, but they don't make the core problem any clearer.

You're never exactly sure what you're reading. An inverted mystery with a murderer who plays a high stakes game of bluff poker? A whodunit posing as an inverted mystery, because Claude Merivale was either framed or shielding someone? Or perhaps an early precursor of the psychological crime novel? These possibilities kept me puzzling along with my first suspicion being something along the lines of Harriette Ashbrook's The Murder of Sigurd Sharon (1933), which had at the time of its publication a startling original and unique solution, but it didn't hold water for long. A second, more traditional, idea formed around the facts that Merivale locked the bedroom door behind him and went straight to the Yard instead of the local police, but that one didn't hold either. Before you know it, you've arrived at the last two chapters of Part One, "The Trial" and "The Verdict," which didn't conclude in the way I expected.

There's not much that can be said about Part Two without giving anything vital away except that it involves a recently finished movie, The Painter of Ferrara, which linked to a second death with all the ingenuity of the Golden Age that was briefly teased as an impossible crime – because a towel went missing from the locked crime scene. So how does it all stack up? Is it as good as people say it is? Well... it depends on what you expect.

Steve noted in his introduction that Flynn always tried to do something different with his novels and the style, or framework, "shifts from courtroom drama to gothic darkness, from plotting serial killers to events that spiral out of control." Where Tread Softly can be called original, or unique, for its time is how the plot is presented and played out, but not how it's resolved. Part One is a modern crime novel decades ahead of its time with Part Two returning to the proper, Golden Age-style detective story with one of those devilishly murder methods. So, needless to say, I preferred the second half over the first half.

I'm a little cautious here, because I don't want to overpraise Tread Softly and give the false impression it's another The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye, The Murders Near Mapleton (1929) or Murder en Route. Tread Softly is not that kind of detective story. What it is, is another fine example of the creative versatility of Brian Flynn who continues to emerge as one of the most unjustly forgotten mystery writers of the genre's Golden Era. You can look forward to reviews of The Padded Door (1932), The Edge of Terror (1932), The Horn (1934) and The Fortescue Candle (1936) in the not so distant future.

A note for the curious: Steve and Kate were the first to review Tread Softly in 2017 and 2018 and they were less hesitant in praising it as a masterpiece.

The Triple Bite (1931) by Brian Flynn

Last year, the indispensable Dean Street Press reissued ten detective novels of one of the unsung, long-forgotten mystery writers of the past, Brian Flynn, who was unearthed by the Puzzle Doctor, Steve Barge, when he found a copy of The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928) among his Christmas presents in 2016 – he has been beating Flynn's drum ever since. Fast-forward two years, Flynn got his long overdue reprints and these new editions came with introductions written by the newly-minted crime fiction historian, Steve Barge.

The Triple Bite (1931) is the tenth novel in the Anthony Bathurst series and, "out of all of the first ten Brian Flynn novel," it was by far the rarest of the lot. A novel which had never before been reprinted and only a single copy was located outside of the British Library! So this might be the rarest title DSP has reprinted to date.

The introduction aptly describes The Triple Bite as a "love-letter to the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" with a mysterious cipher, hidden treasure and a villain who could have been member of The Red-Headed League.

Young Cecilia Cameron is the story's narrator and she relates the unbelievable events that took place in "a big, ten-roomed bungalow" in Dallow Corner, Sussex, which Colonel Ian Cameron was prompted to buy by a friend of his son, Nigel Strachan – who had a very peculiar reason for doing so. Strachan is a barrister and six months ago, he was called upon to defend "a born thief," Sam Trout, who got a reduction in sentence. Something the old career criminal gratefully remembered when he was dying of pneumonia. Trout wrote a letter to Strachan telling him he had been one of only two people who ever lifted a finger to help him and gives them "an equal chance of a fortune."

An opportunity encoded in "a piece of doggerel" and the only part Strachan had been able to decipher is a location, Dallow Corner, which is why he brought the bungalow to Colonel Cameron's attention. But there are pirates on the horizon!

Colonel Cameron and Cecilia caught whispered fragments of a conversation in a restaurant mentioning Dallow Corner and salmon-fishing, but there's not a stretch of water big enough for such a thing as salmon-fishing within ten miles of Dallow Corner. Someone else is looking for Sam Trout's fortune is confirmed when they're visited by a red-headed giant of a man, "Flame" Lampard, who introduced himself as "the bearer of a warning" and advises Colonel Cameron to immediately leave Dallow Corner. Otherwise, it may be too late. What treads on the heels of this ominous visit is best described as a siege on the bungalow and echoes the plot of Flynn's tremendously enjoyable Invisible Death (1929).

Shots are fired at the bungalow in the middle of the night. The housekeeper is tied to a chair and gagged, while the intruders excavated the garden, which culminated in the apparently death by heart failure of Colonel Cameron – whose body was found lying against the hedge between the bungalow and their neighbor's house. Cecilia is convinced her uncle had been murdered and "send for Anthony Bathurst first thing in the morning." Bathurst not only agrees with her opinion Colonel Cameron had been murdered, but found the page that had been torn from his notebook curled against the hedge. A piece of paper with the dying man's "last message to the world" scrawled on it, "for God's sake, mind the red thing that flies." More than once, this last message is referred to as "the dying message of Colonel Cameron."

Brian Flynn

The dying message is a trope closely associated with Ellery Queen, but this association began with two novels post-dating The Triple Bite, namely The Tragedy of X (1932) and The Siamese Twin Mystery (1933), which makes Flynn's novel one of the earliest examples of the dying message story. There are, however, a number of short stories and novels predating The Triple Bite, but I believe Flynn was the first to use the phrase "dying message." Interestingly, Flynn was perhaps the first to use another trope inextricably linked to another American writer, S.S. van Dine, who introduced to concept of a collector's private museum in The Bishop Murder Case (1929). Something that became somewhat of a trope with Van Dine and his followers, such as Clyde B. Clason (e.g. The Man from Tibet, 1938), but Flynn was there first with The Case of the Black Twenty-Two (1928). Flynn was a little ahead of the curve when it came to the Golden Age mindset!

A second, typical American aspect of The Triple Bite are the brief, but unmistakable, "Had-I-But-Known" moments in Cecilia's narrative. A very specific brand of suspenseful mysteries almost exclusively written by American female novelists such as Mary Robert Rinehart and Dorothy Cameron Disney.

You can find the clearest example of HIBK in the final lines of the opening chapter when Cecilia writer, "had I known, however, what lay in store for us," from "the coming of "Flame" Lampard" to "the night of horror in the darkened room" when the last scene was enacted, she would not have responded so flippantly to salmon-fishing. So not style you expect to find among the works of a male, British mystery writer who debuted in the 1920s.

Anyway, Colonel Cameron's dying message is one of the practically unusable clues to the fanciful method employed to dispose of two men in the story, which also includes "the puffy pink marks" on the bodies, a pink smear of blood and "a ghastly whirring kind of noise" – like "something was zipping through the air." I gathered from these clues and the many allusions to fishing that the murderer was fooling around with a rod and a hook smeared with some kind of exotic poison, but the solution was something else altogether! John Norris described this utterly bizarre method as something "right out of the weird menace pulps." I agree!

Fascinatingly, the method was based on an obscure line from a Sherlock Holmes story, which helped Bathurst tumble to the solution, but he refers to Holmes and Dr. Watson as actual people. And not as fictional characters like he did in The Billiard-Room Mystery (1927). Flynn was such a massive fanboy!

The who-and why were much easier spotted and the coded message, or parts of it, can be deciphered by the reader, but everything is draped in the style of the 19th century detective story and pulp-thrillers. Some bits of the plot might be hard to swallow for the Golden Age purists, but The Triple Bite stands as a warm homage to Conan Doyle and is as enjoyable as the previously mentioned Invisible Death. Just pure, pulpy fun! I think pulp readers and Sherlockians will get the most out of this classic rendition of their favorite reading material.

Well, this leaves me with only two more of Flynn's novels, The Five Red Fingers (1929) and The Creeping Jenny Mystery (1930). So, hopefully, we don't have to wait too long for DSP's second serving of Anthony Bathurst cases.

The Orange Axe (1931) by Brian Flynn

When you're a wholesale consumer of detective fiction, like yours truly, you inevitably come to appreciate originality and, as Steve Barge stated in his introduction to The Orange Axe (1931), Brian Flynn made "an effort to do something original with each of his books" – which should explain why I've been enjoying his work so much. The Orange Axe has an original premise that allows the story to be told as both an inverted mystery and a fully realized whodunit.

André de Ravenac is an unmerciful blackmailer and likely the Parisian serial killer, known as "Le Loup de Poignard" (The Dagger Wolf), who murdered "nine of its most worthy citizens" with "a dagger through the victim's heart." Unfortunately, the French authorities were too late to apprehend him and he had cleared out of the country before they could get to him. Now he has turned up in England as a high society blackmailer with the wife of a British minister as his latest victim. However, Josephine Pelham counts a number of "certain men of honour" among her inner circle who are more than happy to remove De Ravenac from her life.

Major Daniel Wyatt summoned these men to a private-room of a restaurant, in Soho, where he unfolds a plan to them to commit the perfect murder.

This group comprises of Lady Pelham's brothers, Dick and Robin Blaker, their cousins, Gerald and Nick Twining, and journalistic friend of Major Wyatt, Martin Pierpoint – who are told about De Ravenac's bloody past in France. So they all agree that he has to be removed, but, as one of them ask, is "a beetle worth hanging for?" The answer is clearly no, but Major Wyatt has plan that should prevent them from meeting the hangman.

Sir Beverley Pelham is the newly appointed British Minister at Santa Guardina, the capital of the fictitious Republic of San Jonquilo, in South America. A bal masque is scheduled to take place at the Pelham house in honor of San Jonquilo's President, Sebastian Loredana. De Ravenac has secured an invitation to the carnival ball.

So the plan is to, anonymously, assign everyone a random role to play in the murder by drawing lots. The person who draws "the slip of paper that means 'direct' action" may be any one of them and only one "will ever do more than suspect who it actually is." A very original premise, especially for the time, which appeared to have gone off without a hitch when De Ravenac's body is found, lying across the threshold of the refreshment-room, with a long, ivory-handled knife in his chest and clutching a torn piece of black and orange silk – which are the national colors of the Republic of San Jonquilo. This murder brings an honored guest at the ball to the scene, Sir Austin Kemble of Scotland Yard, but President Loredana, angered by the murder, tells him to call upon the "finest English detective" he knows. And that brings Anthony Bathurst into the case.

Obviously, the readers knows a little more than Anthony Bathurst, but this is hardly any help as another original bit turns up in his investigation: two "absolutely different sets of clues." Not a set of false and true clues, but two sets of "thoroughly authentic and genuine" clues. Such as strange discovery they made in the bowl of claret cup and the inexplicable fact that Señor Miguel Da Costa, the Chancellor of San Jonquilo, was apparently in two different places at the same time. These complications, in combination with the masked ball, gives Flynn an opportunity to indulge in his beloved Doylean disguises and false-identities. Something he was hesitant to fully utilize was the impossible crime element.

There were locked room and seemingly impossible murders in The Case of the Black Twenty Two (1928), Invisible Death (1929) and Murder en Route (1930), which were clearly defined as impossibilities, but the murderer in The Orange Axe apparently managed to escape from a place a rat couldn't get out of without being seen. So, technically, this would qualify as a locked room mystery, but, the semi-inverted nature of the plot, made me decide against labeling this review as such and that's a shame – because the answer to this impossibility helps Bathurst demolish a number of alibis. However, this is just nit-picking on the part of a chronic sufferer of miraculitis and the main tricks of the plot are the two sets of clues and the breaking down of alibis. Not just the previously mentioned cast-iron alibis, but also "an absolutely perfect alibi" the murderer concocted.

If there's anything to honestly complain about The Orange Axe, it's that the semi-inverted approach allowed to reader to catch on what really was happening way too early. The clues become less mystifying and the murderer is not the surprise it could have been. That being said, Flynn did his damnedest to mislead the reader until the last possible moment, which actually made me second guess myself. Something I can always appreciate in a mystery writer.

Flynn was evidently experimenting with the possibilities the detective story has to offer in these first ten novels and The Orange Axe is a good example of this. The story and plot are not entirely flawless, but has good story-telling with a complex and innovative plot that coherently sticks together. Add to this a galore of fabricated alibis and you have a detective novel that comes particularly recommended to fans of (early) Christopher Bush and Freeman Wills Crofts.

Well, I only have three more reprints, from Dean Street Press, left to go, The Five Red Fingers (1929), The Creeping Jenny Mystery (1930) and The Triple Bite (1931), which makes me really hope there will be more next year, because I want to see where Flynn goes from here. So I'll try to save at least two of them for early next year.

Invisible Death (1929) by Brian Flynn

Invisible Death (1929) is the sixth novel about Brian Flynn's Holmesian gentleman detective, Anthony Bathurst, which has the distinct honor of being the most unconventional, but very memorable, entry in the series – written and structured like a turn-of-the-century shilling shocker. I think Flynn intended to write the book as an homage to Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four (1890), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and The Valley of Fear (1915), but ended up being more reminiscent of Agatha Christie's The Big Four (1927). Only Invisible Death has much more consistency than the patchwork plotting and story-telling of The Big Four.

Anthony Bathurst receives a letter from Constance Whittaker, a cousin of Diana Prendergast from The Murders Near Mapleton (1929), who pleads for him to come down to Shallowcliff Hall in Lacashire. The letter strongly hinted that "something very dark and very sinister" had placed her husband, Major Guy S. Whittaker, in "grave danger."

So, since he never lets a cry for help go unheeded, Bathurst sets out for Shallowcliff Hall, but, the moment he sets foot in Liverpool, he finds there are some nasty-looking shadows close on his tail.

There's a man with a withered arm. A fat, silky-voiced slug of a man. A huge man with a, dirty, brown-beard. Lastly, a man with mutilated lips who turns out to be the leader of the group. Bathurst later learns these men are what remains of a Russian society, The Silver Troika, who were decimated by Major Whittaker during a special in the Great War – returning to England with the documents, papers and minute-books of the society. Now they want it back! Since the favorite afternoon pastime of the Troika is the same as the evening occupation, namely murder, only "a trifle more so," Bathurst decides to enlist the help of an old acquaintance.

Peter Daventry is the young lawyer who brought Bathurst into The Case of the Twenty-Two Black (1928), but here, to fit occasion, Flynn transformed him into one of those posh, smart-aleck men of action. A handy person to have around when you find yourself in the middle of a chase thriller.

Bathurst and Daventry attempt to sneak their way up to Shallowcliff Hall unseen and have to go through several middle-men, give them passwords and cross Ugford Moor, locally known as The Knype, into the eerie, foggy Little Knype Wood. Needless to say, this is quite a departure from the more conventional novels that preceded it, like The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928), but I thought it was very well done. And an excellent premise for what is about to happen!

Shallowcliff Hall eventually comes under siege by the Silver Troika, but, before they can get their murderous hands on Major Whittaker, he suddenly drops dead without anyone being nowhere near him and a post-mortem reveals he had been cleverly murdered – poisoned with a "tincture of aconite." Only question is how the poison could have been administrated without being seen. This poses a two-sides problem: on the one hand, Bathurst has to deal with the Silver Troika, while on the other hand he has to figure out who poisoned Major Whittaker. And how. A pretty and unusual puzzle comprising of such pieces as a stolen letter and the presence of an American entomologist, Horace Garland-Isherwood, who has the habit of surreptitiously sneaking around the garden.

The only plot-thread here that can really be discussed, without spoilers, is the impossible murder, but there's one part about the siege of the Silver Troika that needs to be highlighted.

There's a brief, uncharacteristic torture-scene in which the Troika try to extract from Major Whittaker's batman, Neville, with a so-called "Persuader." A tool that left Neville's right thumb "a piece of red, raw pulp." You practically never find this kind of gory violence in the work of writers associated with the traditional detective story and, if you ignore the rare third-degreeing at the hands of the police, the only other example I can think of is Rex Stout's The Golden Spiders (1953) – in which Archie uses some physical persuasion to make someone talk. Stout had the excuse of being an American. So this is just a very small example of how unusual a mystery this one really is.

However, you're not here to read about the professional proclivities of a bunch of homicidal villains who were plucked from the pages of a dime pulp. You're here for the impossible crime! Why else would you come here?

Steve Barge, the Puzzle Doctor of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, who wrote the introductions for these new Dean Street Press editions said in his 2017 review that the poisoning method, as far as knew, "original for the time." This is kind of true. The trick has been used since 1929, one example can be found in a late '90s episode from the Dutch TV-series Baantjer, but there's a little-known short story from 1928 that used a similar poisoning-trick. Nonetheless, the book may be a first in another department.

Invisible Death intriguingly merged the impossible crime story with the dime thriller by setting it in a house under siege by criminals. An original premise more famously used in T.H. White's Darkness at Pemberley (1932) and Carter Dickson's The Unicorn Murders (1935), but Flynn's Invisible Death was there first.

Admittedly, the book is, plot-wise, the lightest so far encountered, but what it lacked in complexity was made up by the sheer joy of the story-telling, the weirdness of the plot and the evil, pulp-style villains – something that would have sunk it in the hands of a lesser writer. This is how you book evil foreign heels! As usually, Flynn's undying love for Sherlock Holmes bleeds through the pages and it's starting to have its effect on me. I now want to reread The Sign of Four or The Hound of the Baskervilles before the year draws to a close.

So, in closing, I highly recommend Invisible Death to everyone who already has read some of Flynn's conventional detective novels, because he'll be giving you something completely different here that worked surprisingly well. Invisible Death is easily one of the most fun detective stories that I have read this year.