Murder with Minarets (1968) by Charles Forsyte

Earlier this year, I was introduced to the excellent detective fiction of "Charles Forsyte," a penname shared between Gordon and Vicky Philo, who wrote four detective novels in the traditional mold of the genre's Golden Age – three of which Robert Adey listed in Locked Room Murders (1991). Diplomatic Death (1961) evoked the spirit of Clayton Rawson with a murderer resorting to stage illusions at the British Consulate in Istanbul. Diving Death (1962) uses a tight bundle of alibis to create an impossible murder at the bottom of the sea, but their last novel has a surprisingly chatty, character-driven story and plot.

Murder with Minarets (1968) is a standalone mystery novel with the center stage being a block of flats, in Ankara, Turkey, where the British Embassy houses its staff members. Story is mainly concerned with the domestic and social side of the diplomatic life with dinners, social functions and a picnic filling out the story, which is the dominion of the Embassy wives.

Embassy wives "as a breed were no better and no worse than any other group of woman in a small community," but they "could be nearly as devastatingly cruel as small children to anyone who does not go with the herd." Nobody tried harder to belong than the Austrian wife of one of the First Secretaries, Magda Tranter. An unlikable and impossible woman who could have been forgiven her unsuitable clothes, artificial manner and tantrums, but she had "no vestige of a sense of humour" – British "can forgive almost anything but that." But it still comes as a shock when her husband finds her body in the bathtub. Apparently dead of a heart attack.

Magda was under treatment for a weak heart and was buried without any questions being asked, but Paul Tranter is behaving oddly after her funeral and people begin to imagine things. But, as one of them states, "do you really want to hang him?" It's not until Paul dies in that same bathtub that an investigation, official and unofficial, is carried out. This time, it could have been nothing else than murder! But first there's something I need to nitpick about.

Murder with Minarets is listed in Adey's Locked Room Murders as "death by induced heart attack in a locked room," but there never was any mention of a locked or broken down door in Magda's case and with the second death it was explicitly mentioned that the door was unlocked. So not a locked room or impossible crime at all. I suppose the clever method would have allowed for an impossible crime scenario, even with an unlocked door, but, for that to have worked, the murderer needed a dominant alibi. And then you would have gotten an impossible crime akin to Henry Wade's Constable, Guard Thyself (1934).

Nevertheless, even without resulting in an impossible murder, the trick is a clever one and worthy of the bizarre murder methods that was one of the specialties of the Golden Age detective story. Jan Duquesne is one of the Embassy wives who had nagging questions about the death of Magda and, when Paul is killed, she decides to turn amateur detective together with her sister, Gina, and a visiting archaeologist, Christopher Milner-Browne – who's the brother of a Second Secretary, Peter Milner-Browne. But they have to look for the murderer among some very familiar faces.

Tom Hadley is Her Majesty's Consul in Ankara and lives with his wife, "Ba," and their two children on the second floor of the Embassy block, which they shared with the Tranters. The thin wall separating the two flats made it impossible not to hear the Tranters rows and Magda's "mid-European tantrums." The spacious flat on the floor below is occupied by the Counsellor, Charles O'Halloran, and his wife, Laura. Peter Milner-Browne has the floor above the Hadleys and Tranters, but there also two outsiders who have to be considered. Francis Allerdyce is a violin professor at the Ankara Conservatoire and had "not only a natural inclination to meet Magda's advances halfway," but "a conviction that it was almost a professional necessity" to do so. And then there's his wife, Doune Allardyce. Most of the clues have to be picked from what they did or, more importantly, what they said.

John Norris said in his review that he had the feeling the female half of the writing duo was in charge of writing Murder with Minarets, which is exactly the impression I got while reading the story. I suspect Gordon's most important contribution to the plot was the murder method. Everything else is exactly what you would expect from the some of (lesser-known) Crime Queens.

To quote John, "the ingenious murder method" is "reminiscent of the kind of thing Christianna Brand would dream up" with "the best clue planting is done in casual conversation," which is another reminder of such writers as Brand, Dorothy Bowers and Helen McCloy. So the plot is very talkative and without the focus on alibis, false-solutions and impossible crimes, the book notably differs from its predecessors in tone and style. But not for the worst!

Murder with Minarets is purely a character-driven whodunit with cleverly planted clues in seemingly meaningless patter or casual remarks, which can make the technical murder method feel a little out of place in a novel resembling a gentle comedy-of-manners – coated with a thin veneer of the detective story. But don't be mistaken! Underneath the chatter and cocktail parties, there's a genuine detective novel that would have been more at home in 1938 rather than 1968. So definitely recommended, but, depending on your personal taste, you might want to begin with either Diplomatic Death or Diving Death.

Hold on! Just one more thing... Over the past year, or two, I've come across three writers, Kip Chase, Charles Forsyte and Jack Vance (Sheriff Joe Bain series), who wrote a few traditional, classically-styled detective novels in the 1960s and abandoned the genre or stopped writing altogether. Does anyone know of any other mystery writers from that period that fit the profile? I would like to read more from this lost generation of Golden Age mystery writers.

Diving Death (1962) by Charles Forsyte

Last month, I reviewed Diplomatic Death (1962) by “Charles Forsyte," a shared penname of a husband-and-wife writing tandem, Gordon and Vicky Philo, who, regrettably, wrote only three, classically-styled detective novels and a standalone chase thriller that have a penchant for impossible crimes – published between 1961 and 1968. A surprisingly solid, ambitious and puzzle-oriented debut for the period that made me even more curious about their second detective novel.

Forsyte's Diving Death (1962), alternatively published as Dive into Danger, is the second appearance of Detective-Inspector Richard Left, of Special Branch, who had been "overworked to the point of exhaustion." So he was glad to finally go on a long-anticipated, much deserved holiday in the south of France.

Port-st-Pierre is a fishing village and a holiday resort where Left plans to do little more than relax, eat, swim and trying to avoid his fellow countrymen, but he's recognized by an old acquaintance, Sir Paul Pallett. A world-famous archaeologist who looks like "a more animated Churchill" and speaks (mostly) in telegraphic sentences ("Probably hopes to find a drowned city. Atlantis. Underwater archaeology. All my eye. Good excuse for undergraduates who want a holiday in the Mediterranean"). Sir Paul is not only a celebrated scholar, but a decidedly poor one as well and has to indulge the fancies of a rich, dilettante archaeologist with "intellectual pretensions," Dermot Wilson – who has assembled a respectable crew for an archaeological expedition at sea. An expedition scavenging the sea bottom around the recently uncovered, spongy remains of an ancient Greek shipwreck where Roman coins were found on a previous diving excursion.

Sir Paul was persuaded (read "cornered") to have a look at the site and arranged to have him picked the next day with a motor-boat, but nobody expected Left would be invited by the eminent scholar to come along with him. And unwittingly acts as the fuel powering the engine of the plot!

When they arrive on the spot, the crew aboard the anchored Knossos were getting ready to dive. So the three people on the motor-boat, Sir Paul, Left and the boatman, had to stay on there and watch the divers plunge below the surface to the wreck. An area marked by a couple of buoys moored about a hundred yards apart. The minutes leisurely ticked away when the body of Wilson comes bubbling to the surface with a steel harpoon projecting from a bloody patch on his chest! Left realizes that it will be hours before the French police can get to them, "evidence may have vanished by then," which prompts him to take charge of the investigation until the proper authorities arrive.

An investigation forcing Left "to follow the route that had just been taken by a corpse" and dive to "the muted two-colour world of the sea-bed" where he establishes the time of the murder and searches the bottom for clues – finding a used harpoon-gun, a weight belt and a small hole in the sea-bed. These diving scenes recall the underwater explorations from Vernon Loder's Death by the Gaff (1932) and Allan R. Bosworth's Full Crash Dive (1942), which helped make the book standout as something different from your average detective novel. And, here, it's an integral part of the puzzle-plot. But not the whole puzzle.

Left also to untie a tightly-knotted mess of alibis, motives and opportunities of the crew-members. A crew comprising of an experienced, much respected archaeologist, Edward Syce, who made "some unexpected finds on his digs." A younger, inexperienced, but brilliant archaeologist, Sidney Lockhead. The victim's "current girlfriend," the Honourable Julia Ferrers, who's the daughter of an impoverished Irish peer. A student of Wilson, Mary Lawton, who does his secretarial work and mechanic/diving expert, Joe Marshall. Only problem is that everyone has an alibi! The divers alibi each other and everyone on the surface have an alibi as unshakable as a bloodhound! So, where's the impossibility, you may ask? Diving Death qualifies as an impossible crime novel, but it's one of those stories in which the impossibility becomes apparent after the solution.

I compared Diplomatic Death with the detective novels and short stories by Clayton Rawson (stage illusion-inspired crime) and Peter Godfrey (setting), but Diving Death is more in line with Anthony Berkeley and Christopher Bush.

The multiple alibis and the importance of timing is what reminded me of Bush, but Forsyte's brilliant use of false-solutions and grand play on the fallible detective trope was pure Berkeley! Forsyte provided the reader with three false-solutions of which two are tightly intertwined, giving different perspectives to the same story, while a third accounted for the possibility of an outside killer – lovely foreshadowed in the third chapter. Even better is how Left blundered to the solution. Or, to be more precise, how his blundering affected and hampered reaching the correct solution earlier. Left has to pay the devil for his "unforgivable police sin," but, by that time, you probably feel too bad for him to laugh. The physical altercations also give the story a slightly hardboiled edge.

Nevertheless, it was his mistakes and blunders, in combination with the false-solutions, setting and technically-detailed underwater murder, that turned an otherwise routine plot into a first-class detective tale that, like its predecessor, stands out. This all makes for a very satisfying, puzzle-driven detective novel with a superb play on the fallible detective trope that helped to lift the plot above its normal status. My only piece of nitpicking this time is that it occurred to nobody that the harpoon could have been used to stab, instead of having been shot, which is what I expected until the empty harpoon-gun was found. So my expectation were thoroughly subverted.

So, yes, Diving Death comes highly recommended and particular to mystery readers who love their false-solutions, fallible detectives or picking apart alibis and stands as solid argument why these two unjustly forgotten mystery writers deserve to be reprinted.

A note for the curious: locked room murders and impossible crimes under water are relatively rare, but there are two finely-crafted examples that deserve a mention. Joseph Commings' 1953 short story "Bones for Davy Jones," collected in The Locked Room Reader (1968), in which a hard-hat diver is murdered while exploring a recently sunken shipwreck. The 15th episode of the Detective Academy Q anime-series, which deals with the body of a diver found in a locked cabin of a sunken ship and the underwater setting allowed for a new variation on an age-old locked room-trick.

Diplomatic Death (1961) by Charles Forsyte

Gordon Philo was a British diplomat and magic aficionado with a background in the secret intelligence services who, reportedly, was "instrumental in the processing and circulation of the material revealed by Russian double agent Oleg Penkovsky," which revealed the presence of Russian missiles in Cuba – a move that prevented "a catastrophic third World War." More importantly, Philo co-authored a handful of classically-styled detective novels with his wife, Vicky Galsworthy Philo.

Diplomatic Death (1961) was the first novel to be published under their shared pseudonym, "Charles Forsyte," but the introduction revealed that the period between the first draft and publication was a long, arduous journey.

During the 1950s, Philo worked at the British Consulate-General in Istanbul, Turkey, where whiled away the winter evenings reading detective stories and decided to would be more entertaining "to write one myself." So he began to work on a plot and had drafted several chapters, but abandoned the fledgling manuscript when his wife returned to Istanbul. Some years later, the manuscript was "resurrected from a drawer," completed and they entered it in a competition, but the judges commented that the ending, while original, was wrong – back "the manuscript went into the drawer." Very likely, the drawer is where the manuscript would have stayed had it not been for a chance meeting with a member of the Detection Club.

Vicky was standing at a bus stop in Maida Vale, London, when "a passing taxi was hailed by another lady in the queue" who "asked if anyone else would like to share it with her." Vicky accepted the offer and discovered that her companion was "the well-known mystery writer," Christianna Brand!

When Brand heard Vicky had co-written an unpublished mystery novel, she advised her to contact her literary agent, but the agent returned exactly the same answer as the judges. So they re-wrote the whole book, which was finally accepted and published in Britain and the United States. A great "prologue" to a wonderful detective story that even challenges the reader to spot "the original ending." I think I may have spotted the original solution and agree with the experts that it would been the wrong kind of solution for the story, but ditching it robbed the story of a murderer with an iron-clad alibi dipped in solid concrete. However, it was a necessary sacrifice.

Diplomatic Death begins with the arrival of Inspector Richard Left, of Special Branch, in Turkey on a quasi-secretive mission concerning a murder and disappearance at the British Consulate in Istanbul.

Two days before Left arrived, the Consul-General had been working late when the sound of a gunshot emanated from his office and two Vice-Consuls in the opposite room immediately investigated and found the Consul-General slumped in his chair – an automatic lay on the desk and "the unmistakable smell of powder" in the air. Hardcastle and Westers, the Vice-Consuls, checked for a pulse, but the Consul-General was "stone dead." So a senior official is called, Mr. Bretherton-Fosgill, but when they returned to the office, the body of the Consul-General had disappeared!

They combed through the garden, searched the vehicles in the courtyard and turned the whole building inside out, which even turned up "an endless grimy brick tunnel" between floors nobody knew existed, but without any result. So they decided to lock the office and sealed the door in two places with sealing wax, stamped with signet rings, until "a proper investigation can take place." Diplomatic Death has an entry in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), but the impossibility listed is the closing of a safe-door and the presence of an item in the office at the time it had been securely locked and sealed. And not the quasi-impossible disappearance of the body. However, these aspects of the case are never treated as actual impossibilities, but as smaller pieces of a bigger puzzle and my advise is not to the read book solely for its locked room elements.

A knotted, tangled headache of a case that Left is tasked with unsnarling and you can't help but sympathize with the long-suffering, underdog policeman who's frustrated in every way imaginable, which began with "the purgatory" of a long, uncomfortable plane ride to Turkey and continued even at his hotel. A dirty, rundown place where noisy cabaret artists returned at all hours of the night and the shattering sound of the aged, under-lubricated laboring of the automatic pump of the large cistern on the roof filled Left's hotel room – keeping him awake until the early hours of the morning. And then there are all the dead-ends, red herrings and lack of tangible evidence.

Nevertheless, you should not assume Left is one of those modern, bungling detectives who accidentally stumbles to the correct solution by sheer luck. Left constructs a clever and logical false-solution based on an office chair, a sound recording, a key and a limb arm. This false-solution cracked, what could have been, a cast-iron alibi like an eggshell! A perfect use of the false-solution.

John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, wrote in a 2014 blog-post, "The Detective Novels of Charles Forsyte," that when Diplomatic Death was first published Forsyte was compared to Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen, but John thought "a more apt comparison would be Clayton Rawson" whose "impossible crime mysteries are inspired by stage illusionist's bag of tricks." Something you can definitely see reflected in the both the false and correct solution in this novel, but the plot, setting and the detective also reminded me of the impossible crime stories of Peter Godfrey. I wonder if Godfrey's Death Under the Table (1954) is one of the books Philo had been reading during the mid-1950s. I know Death Under the Table wasn't widely circulated outside South Africa and is somewhat of a rarity, but therefore not unlikely to turn up in the library of the British Consulate in Turkey. Diplomats who read detective stories would have easier access at the books not published in the Britain or the United States.

I was able to work out the correct solution based on exactly the same clues that Left used to get there, but this takes nothing away from how clever and fairly the whole plot was handled. A plot that could have been disappointing, or unconvincing, were it not for the excellent way in which setting was utilized, which created the time and space needed to make the trick work. A setting not merely limited to the British Consulate, but ventures out into the then still young Turkish republic of Atatürk where the ancient and modern world came together on the streets of Istanbul. The dual setting of the British Consulate and Istanbul where absolutely instrumental in making both the plot work and give the story a distinct personality of its own, which would have even made the story standout had it been published two or three decades earlier.

Sadly, this means you can count Forsyte, like Kip Chase and John Sladek, among the Lost Generation of Golden Age-style mystery writers who had the misfortune to arrive on the scene too late to be fully appreciated. What's even sadder is that their work is now perhaps a little too recent to be revived in our current Renaissance Age.

So, on a whole, Diplomatic Death is not only a very well-written, fairly clued mystery novel with a plot hearkening back to the golden days of the detective story, but a strong debut without any of the real flaws often found in such works. A highly recommendable first that has made me even more curious about the other Forsyte novels listed in Locked Room Murders and in particular Dive into Danger (1962), which apparently deals with the impossible (underwater) murder of a treasure hunter and a circle of suspects comprising of marine archaeologists. How can anyone resist such a premise?

To be continued...