Dead Man Twice (1930) by Christopher Bush

Dead Man Twice (1930) is the third title in Christopher Bush's Ludovic "Ludo" Travers series and has been recommended to me several times by Nick Fuller and Curt Evans. The book considered to be one of the stronger titles from the early period of the series and not entirely without reason.

Reprinted by Dean Street Press

In this early title, Travers is still working as a financial adviser for that distinguished inquiry, advertising and publicity firm, Durangos Limited, which means that his role is still that of a chameleon in the background and cedes the stage to his friends, Superintendent Wharton and John Franklin – head of the Detective Bureau of Durangos Ltd. So the story has a slightly different feeling than those that have a more prominent role for Travers.

Franklin is visited in his office by Kenneth Hayles, a writer of hackneyed, cliché-ridden thrillers, who wants to use him and his office as a model for his next novel, but Hayles also co-authored Two Years in the Ring. A book he wrote together with Michael France, a gentleman boxer and heavyweight champion of Europe, who's scheduled to fight Toni Ferroni in New York and everyone expects him to bring the world title back to England. So their meeting ends with Franklin getting an opportunity to meet the public hero of the moment.

However, Frankling comes down to Earth again when France wants to consult him on a string of threatening letters, which gave him a few days to leave the country or his "numbers up," signed by "Lucy" and gave Franklin three specimens of handwriting to compare – all three specimens were procured from people who stand close to the boxer. France also asks Franklin to drop by his house, but when he arrived it looks as if nobody is home. The hammering with the door knocker and ringing the bell gets no response whatsoever.

After a while, the valet of France, Mr. Usher, arrives and opens the door, but what they find inside is a scene as bizarre as it's inexplicable.

The body of the butler, named Somers, was lying on the rug of the lounge with tumbler next to his outstretched arm and on the table, next to the decanter and siphon, stood "a small, blue bottle with a red poison label." A suicide note is found, "this is really the end of everything," but Usher recognizes the handwriting as that of his master, Michael France! So this prompts them to further explore the house and they find a second body in an upstairs room. France lay on the bedroom floor with a bullet wound in his forehead and a tiny, toy-like pistol two feet from his outstretched hand. However, the medical evidence reveals that the shot was fired from "a devilish awkward position" and "the bullet might have missed the brain altogether." And the awkward angle of the bullet is a clue as to what happened in that bedroom!

Travers is only a background figure in the investigation, who analyzes the published work of France and Hayles, which leaves all of the legwork to Franklin and Wharton. Once again, the performance Superintendent George "The General" Wharton demonstrated that we lost a great lead-character for a series of detective novels.

Layer by layer, Wharton slowly peels away the mysteries and is "worming his way into some subterranean and buried essential," but the complications are numerous and one of these is that there was a six-inch circle of glass cut out of the window – except this was not a garden-variety burglary. And then there's France's involvement with the wife of the well-heeled, aristocratic racing motorist and his chief financial backer, Peter Claire, who had planted Usher in France's house to keep an eye out. Compounding these confusing jumble of problems and the contradictory facts at the scene of the crime are a couple of durable alibis.

The unbreakable alibi is a trademark of Bush's detective fiction and this begs comparison with another craftsman of cast-iron alibis, Freeman Wills Crofts, but Bush's plotting technique actually makes him closer to John Dickson Carr and John Rhode than to Crofts.

The murder of France could have easily been presented as an impossible situation and Bush's plots are often borderline or quasi-impossibilities (e.g. The Case of the Bonfire Body, 1936), but rarely crosses the border to become a full-fledged locked room mystery. Regardless, this could have been a nifty locked room yarn and the method, which also helped the murderer forging a cast-iron alibi, could have been plucked from the pages of Rhode's mystery novel. As a matter of fact, I have seen variations of this trick in the works of both Carr and Rhode.

Nevertheless, this could have been a nifty locked room and the murder method is something straight out of of a Rhode's novel. As a matter of fact, I have come across variations of this trick in the works of both Carr and Rhode. John Russell Fearn even used a very similar trick to create an actual locked room murder, but I believe Dead Man Twice predates all of them.

So I really liked this plot-strand of the story, which came with diagrams and floorplans, but the poisoning plot wasn't bad either and the nature of the crime, with all its complexities, fitted the personality of the murderer like a glove – which nicely contrasted with the more plot-technical killing of France. But the best part of the plot is how these plot-strands were intertwined and threw one of these plots in disarray.

Only thing you can hold against the plot is that the identity of the culprits were rather obvious. A problem corrected by the intriguing question as to how the murders were committed and the attempt to fit every piece of the puzzle together to form a logical and coherent picture of all the events.

I've not read the first title in this series, The Plumley Inheritance (1926), but feel confident in stating that Dead Man Twice is the first of Bush's baroque-style detective novels that introduced his favorite plot-device of having two murders taking place in close proximity of each other and link them together with a bale of plot-threads. An approach he used to great effect in Dancing Death (1931) and The Case of the April Fools (1933). The result is usually a pleasantly intricate, mind-twisting and challenging detective story and Dead Man Twice is not the exception to this rule.

Dead Man Twice is a grand old-fashioned detective story and more than worthy of the praise it has received, but, personally, I would not go as far as placing it right alongside the superb Cut Throat (1932) and the equally superb The Case of the Missing Minutes (1936). Dead Man Twice stands a step below them along with the previously mentioned The Case of the April Fools, The Case of the 100% Alibis (1934) and the Carrian The Case of the Chinese Gong (1935), which is not a bad company to be in.

So, a long story short, I continue to enjoy my exploration of Bush's detective fiction and will return to him soon, but first have to pick a title. Currently, I have whittled down my options to three titles: The Case of the Dead Shepherd (1934), The Case of the Hanging Rope (1937) and The Case of the Green Felt Hat (1939). Ah, luxury problems!

The Case of the 100% Alibis (1934) by Christopher Bush

Christopher Bush was "a supreme alibi artisan" and was "to the unbreakable alibi what John Dickson Carr was to the impossible crime." 

A claim he cemented with two classic detective novels, Cut Throat (1932) and The Case of the Missing Minutes (1936), crafted around ingenious, clockwork-like plots cunningly manipulating the perception of time – which is helping with turning Bush into a personal favorite. I assume The Case of the 100% Alibis (1934) is one of his lesser-known, alibi-oriented mysteries, but the story could not have made "his fascination with the alibi problem any clearer." As well as showing flashes of that Carrian ingenuity that was on full display in The Case of the Chinese Gong (1935). 

Reprinted by Dean Street Press

The Case of the 100% Alibis opens with a short prologue, titled "For the Ingenious Reader," which could have been written by Dr. Gideon Fell.

A prologue purporting to explain to the reader the apparent contradiction of a solved murder case that was littered with one-hundred percent, cast-iron alibis, because "such an alibi admits of no loopholes." After all, even "the law cannot move the unmovable" or "break an unbreakable alibi," but the murderer was apprehended and the prologue gives two reasons why this person was discovered: Mrs. Hubbard's prize-winning cake recipe and Captain Moile's first attempt to fly the Atlantic solo – neither appear to have any relevance whatsoever to the story. 

So the prologue was as elucidating as the cryptic remarks of detective characters, like Dr. Fell, when they begin to mumble about the significance of the untouched sandwich on the secretary's desk or the sawdust found underneath the bookcase. Anyway...

This time, the clockwork-like plot of this eleventh title is set in motion by three telephone calls made shortly before and after the murder. And these phone calls complicate the case almost as much as the parade of unbreakable alibis flaunting the detectives as they pass them by.

During the first phone call, Frederick Lewton had rang up an acquaintance, Mr. Beece, in "a normal voice mentioning some tolerably unimportant meeting," but five minutes later rings Dr. Rule, "scared stiff," urging her to ask her husband, Dr. Rule, to come and see him immediately – followed only three minutes later by a phone call to the local police station. A voice identifying himself as Lewton's manservant, Robert Trench, tells the policeman on duty that he found the body of his master when he got back home. Someone had stabbed him to death.

Superintendent George "The General" Wharton of Scotland Yard happened to be in the coastal town of Seaborough, which was also the setting of The Case of the Chinese Gong, who lends a hand to Chief Constable Tempest. On a side-note, Wharton is here accompanied by his wife, Jane Wharton, who shines in her supporting role.

Wharton and Tempest hunt down every possible lead and clue with the dogged determination of a bulldog, but problems and complications quickly pile up all around them.

Trench appeared on the scene after the police had discovered the body and swears he never reported a murder to them. The murder weapon was found stuffed up the chimney and a safe had been rifled. An innocent looking note has a cryptic line scribbled on the bottom right-hand corner, "little fish may be sweet, but what about this for a middle cut of salmon," followed by "R.C. 105" and "B.C. 33" in the bottom left corner – a clue connected to a thread of blackmail. But it gets more entangled. One of the suspects is an actor, who could have mimicked one or two the voices on the telephone, while another suspect is a lauded mystery novelist. Someone who knows his way around an alibi. And that's the unmovable wall Wharton bumps into. Every single suspect is in possession of "the most beautiful twenty-two carat, diamond-studded alibi."

Around the halfway mark, Ludovic Travers arrives on the scene to save the day. Or, as Wharton cynically observes, "to poke his nose in." Honestly, Wharton has a point.

During the first half, Wharton showed he can carry a story and it was a pleasure to see him at work as he used different tactics and approaches to get information. Such as in the way he approached witnesses and assumed a personality that would get the most results, but also takes the time to ponder and tabulate all of the evidence and information – which should have brought him the solution. Travers only really becomes a functioning presence in the story towards the end. So, in my humble opinion, The Case of the 100% Alibis should have been written as a solo outing for the superintendent. He could then have bragged to Travers that he once gutted one of those clockwork alibis of its wheels, cogs and springs without his help.

However, you can only think of that as a missed opportunity, not a flaw, but the one thing that can be said against the plot was cleverly acknowledged and lampshaded by Bush.

Travers asks the suspected detective novelist, Raymond Rennyet, what he considers to be "the first essential" of a plot. Rennyet answer is that if you give him "a perfectly good faked alibi" he'll write "a murder story—of sorts—around it." And that's probably what happened here. I think the story and characters was written around the alibi-trick and this is probably why, in spite of a pack of alibis, the plot felt rather slight when compared with earlier titles like Dancing Death (1931) and The Case of the April Fools (1933).

Regardless, The Case of the 100% Alibis presents a cleverly constructed, minutely-timed plot with pleasant, solid police work that should not fail to entertain the puzzle-oriented mystery reader, but stands a step or two below Cut Throat and The Case of the Missing Minutes – which are admittedly two hard-to-top classics of the unbreakable alibi. So this one comes still very much recommended as a good example of the traditional, plot-driven mystery novel from the genre's Golden Age.

On a final note, my next Bush is (finally) going to be much recommended Dead Man Twice (1930), but it's not going to be my next read. That's going to be a three-way toss-up between Case Closed, John Russell Fearn and E.R. Punshon.

The Case of the Monday Murders (1936) by Christopher Bush

The Case of the Monday Murders (1936) is the fourteenth title in Christopher Bush's long-lived Ludovic Travers series and, in this instance, the story-telling turned out to be more interesting than the plot itself, which was as translucent as a ghost and lacked the complexity associated with Bush's earlier detective novels – c.f. Cut Throat (1932) and The Case of the Chinese Gong (1935). A somewhat unusual detective novel presented as a serial killer story, however, this is not entirely the case.

Our neighborhood genre-historian, Curt Evans, who wrote the introductions for these brand new editions, published by Dean Street Press, pointed out that Bush's breakthrough novel, The Perfect Murder Case (1929), is not (as often argued) a serial killer novel. And goes on to state that The Case of the Monday Murders "unquestionable qualifies" as such. Only problem is that the titular murders only serve to dress up the actual plot and, if this one qualifies as a serial killer novel, than every Golden Age mystery with a body-count of two or three victims does. And, more importantly, the Monday murders aren't even the work of a serial killer. So I didn't tag this post with the "Serial Killer" toe-tag.

However, the story-telling has some interesting aspects and Evans called the book "crime fiction at its most puckishly meta," because part of the story's background may have been inspired by Bush's first experiences with the Detection Club and there's a character who could've been modeled on the well-known, grumpy bugbear of the club, Anthony Berkeley – who was "a cross to bear" for his colleagues. The name of this takeoff is Ferdinand Pole, a celebrated mystery writer, who's the founding father of the Murder League.

Pole has made a discovery that a "perfectly uncanny number of unsolved murders" that "have taken place on Mondays" since 1918 and claims one and the same person is behind all these murders. A serial killer or perhaps even a new Jack the Ripper. Pole communicates his finding to a newspaper, Evening Blazon, which brings us to the secondary theme of the story that critically glances at the sensationalists, scandal-mongering print-press of the time. Evening Blazon splashes their pages with thickly printed headlines like "MURDERS ON MONDAY," "WILL THERE BE MURDER ON MONDAY?" and "WE CHALLENGE SCOTLAND YARD."

Later in the story, a person, who calls himself "Justice," claims to be the murderer and provides details of his crimes. He even describes himself as an elderly man with a squint. Bush also gives the reader a glimpse of the typical English response to this latest sensation. The figure of the man with the squint became a public joke and the BBC's pet comedian, Giggling Gilbert, made people roar with his song "I don't want to be murdered on Monday."

However, as said above, the serial killings only serve as a background, or framing, for the investigation into two other murders.

T.P. Luffham was a once well-known schoolmaster of a prestigious public school, but had to resign with "ugly rumors" abound that were never officially denied. The nature of those rumors aren't made clear, but there's a possibility Luffham pulled a Sandusky on the students. After he had withdrawn from public life, Luffham assumed the name of Clough and began to life as a hermit. And the story went around that he had died somewhere abroad.

So the news of his accidental death came as a surprise to Travers, who also assumed he had passed away, which prompts him to accompany a junior crime-reporter of the Evening Blazon, Tristram Cane, to the scene – where they discover that the old man had fallen down a flight of stairs. However, Travers and Cane find a black elastic-band and a drawing-pin, which could been used to stretch the elastic across the top of the stairs.

This is a murder on a Monday and not long thereafter the newspaper headlines scream: "GREATEST PROPHECY OF THE CENTURY!" and "T.P. LUFFHAM WAS MURDERED!!"

The second murder is that of an elderly actress, Laura Delayne, who was stabbed to death in her hotel room, where she lived, but here the story began to loose steam. After a while, it becomes clear that the serial killing are only there to muddle the waters and the investigation is primarily focused on digging into Delayne's past or finding a connection with the first murder.

This would not have been problem had there been more than two suspects, but the murderer sticks out from the very beginning and becomes impossible to ignore as the story progresses – especially when the only other suspect becomes the victim of an attempted murder. An attempt that could not been faked by this person in order to throw suspicion off him.

So, on a whole, The Case of the Monday Murder turned out to be a rather disappointing read. Sure, the story-telling was good, particularly during the first half, but the plot is so thread-bare that you can see through it from the beginning. Honestly, it's kind of hard to believe that this came from the same man who intricately plotted Dancing Death (1931), The Case of the April Fools (1933) and The Case of the Missing Minutes (1936). Yeah, this is, unfortunately, the first time Bush let me down, but only a single dud out of nine titles read is not a bad score at all. So let's end this review on that semi-positive note.

The Case of the Missing Minutes (1936) by Christopher Bush

Christopher Bush's The Case of the Missing Minutes (1936) is the sixteenth title in the Ludovic Travers series, published between 1926 and 1968, in which Travers has to demolish an alibi as ingeniously contrived as the time-manipulation trick from Cut Throat (1932) – except that here there was a human element as to how ten minutes were lost to time. Or, as a certain detective would have called it, "the blinkin' awful cussedness of things in general."

I have come to appreciate Nick Fuller's observation that Bush was to the unbreakable alibi what John Dickson Carr was to the locked room mystery, but The Case of the Missing Minutes has another aspect that makes the book standout. The truly reprehensible personality of the victim and how his own revelations forced Travers to bow out of the case.

Quentin Trowte is an elderly, eccentric sadist and his crime makes him as repulsive a character as Mary Gregor (Anthony Wynne's The Silver Scale Mystery, 1931), Sandra, the Fat Woman (Nicholas Brady's The Fair Murder, 1933) and Mr. Ratchett (Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Orient Express, 1934).

Trowte has obtained fully custody over his 10-year-old granddaughter, Jeanne, who lives with him a dark, lonely house where she's home-schooled by a private-tutor, Mr. Howcrop. Only other people who are present are the two servant, Lucy and Fred Yardman, who are banished to their cottage after the dinner table had been cleared. However, they did not suspect anything untoward was happening in the house, because the elderly eccentric appeared to dote and adore his granddaughter. Yardmans were also of the opinion that Jeanne was "a very deceitful child," but then they began to hear the shrieks coming from the house in the dead of night.

Lucy Yardman decides to write her former employee, Helen, whose brother is Ludovic Travers and he decides to go down to place to observe the situation, but when he arrives at the home he finds the door slightly ajar and inside he finds Trowte sprawled in the hallway – gasping for his last breath. Someone had knifed the old man in the back mere minutes before he arrived. A frightened, white-faced Jeanne was crouched by the stairs and she turns out to be fully dressed beneath her nightdress, which is the first of many unsettling discoveries they make about the girls.

A doctor determined that Jeanne was an undernourished, "bundle of nerves," which comes on top of the unsettling discovery that the house had been fitted with means to spy on Jeanne and Howcrop. Such as a secret panel in the dark, windowless bedroom of the girl and the presence of a locked, but empty, room.

Travers not only plays his usual part as a lanky, bespectacled detective, but doubles as "Uncle Ludo" in an attempt to win the confidence of the frightened child. But his interest in Jeanne is not merely to pry information from here. Travers becomes genuinely fond of the child and tries to analyze why he wanted her to be fond of him, which eventually makes him to decide to withdraw from the investigation. 

 

Overall, the murder of the Quentin Trowte is a complicated one with many side-issues. Why did the girl's tutor showed such great affection to the girl after the murder and is there a link to a famous pianist who's holidaying in the neighborhood? The local village physician, Doctor Mannin, was asked by a passing car to help one of the passengers, who had a stab wound in the arm, but after he had stitched up the man he was knocked over the head and thrown in a ditch – from which he emerged with a broken leg. However, this plot-thread was the only one of the bunch that had a less than satisfactory answer.

Japanese edition

And then there are the alibis. One of these alibis, if it was manufactured, makes absolutely no sense. Not if that person is the murderer. Interestingly, there was a very brief promise of an alibi-lecture, like the Dr. Fell's locked room lecture in Carr's The Hollow Man (1935), when one of the suspects asked Travers what kind of ideas he specialized in. Travers answered that he specialized in testing people's alibis and "trying to prove that no gentleman, however ingenious, can be in two places at once." Sadly, he only mentioned "clock manipulation" and the time-honored dodge of convincing an impartial witness that "you were not where the police claimed you were." I would have liked a chapter-length lecture on all of the familiar alibi-tricks used in detective stories. Has this been done by any other mystery writer or perhaps in later Bush novel?

So the case has more than enough peculiarities to keep an inquisitive amateur fully occupied, but when Travers discovers why Trowte had a twenty-five shilling bill from a pet shop he throws in the towel.

By this point, Travers has a good idea who the murderer is and, eventually, his policeman friend, Superintendent George Wharton, finds his way to the murderer as well, but both are stumped by the alibi. An alibi that continues to stump Travers until the very last pages, during which he gets a flash of inspiration when Jeanne is trying to stay up pass her bedtime and grasps the answer to the missing ten minutes. An answer that's as clever as it's bittersweet.

The Case of the Missing Minutes is Bush's The Crooked Hinge (1938) and, while the alibi-trick does not exactly qualify as an impossible crime, the plot is more Carr-like than The Case of the Chinese Gong (1935) and the cruel abuse of a 10-year-old child makes this a highly unusual, but memorable, detective novel from the genre's Golden Era. Highly recommended.

I guess the time has come to induct Bush into my personal hall of favorite mystery novelists. Let's be honest, it was inevitable after Dancing Death (1931) and The Case of the Arpil Fools (1933).

On a final note, I wanted to do three Bush reviews in a row, but there will be break and you can blame our mutual friend, "JJ," because he said Randell Garrett wrote a short Lord Darcy story with a locked room trick that he considered to be top 20 material. Yes, the guy who made an impossible crime novel about wizards, swashbuckling specters and locked room murders a dull snore-fest wrote a classic locked room tale. I'm sure he did. So you better pray that the story is as good as you remember it, JJ, because it's next on my chopping block. 

The Case of the Chinese Gong (1935) by Christopher Bush

Late last year, I reviewed Christopher Bush's The Case of the Amateur Actor (1955), a relatively late entry in the series, by which time Ludovic Travers had transmogrified from an amateur detective into a genteel private-investigator working for the Broad Street Detective Agency – even narrating his own cases like a proper gumshoe. Stylistically, it was a radical departure from the earlier, puzzle-oriented novels with their minutely timed, clockwork-like plots and seemingly indestructible alibis. A style that has been affectionately dubbed "Golden Age baroque."

Regardless of this change, The Case of the Amateur Actor showed clearly Bush still knew how to construct an intricate plot during his later years and that makes me really look forward to their republication in the not-so-distant future. Anyway, I ended my review at the time with a promise to return to those early-period titles and had Dead Man Twice (1930) lined up for January of this year.

Evidently, that whole plan didn't exactly pan out and Dead Man Twice has since been returned to the big pile, because I recently got my hands on a number of titles I had been eagerly looking forward to.

Only a few days ago, Dean Street Press released the second set of reprints in Bush's Ludovic Travers series and this second batch has a couple of intriguing titles, such as The Case of the 100% Alibis (1934) and The Case of the Missing Minutes (1937), but the title that really aroused my curiosity was The Case of the Chinese Gong (1935) – an impossible crime novel that has invited reviewers in the past to draw comparisons with John Dickson Carr. So that got my full attention and the reason why I picked it first.

The Case of the Chinese Gong is the thirteenth entry in the series and, as said above, considered by many to be a Carrian impossible crime story, but the opening chapters initially reminded me of Cat's Paw (1931) by Roger Scarlett. A detective novel that's still freshly lodged in my memory.

Hubert Greeve is a thoroughly unpleasant, foul-tempered and tight-fisted man who made "a pretty big fortune" by liquidating a family business in Russia and investing the money in an engineering company at the beginning of the munitions wave of the First World War – which came at the expensive of his four nephews. Greeve's settled with a gentleman's agreement that all of his money would come to them upon his death and promised to lend a helping hand whenever he could. The nephews agreed at the time, because none of them was in direct need of money and promised to come by every year to celebrate his birthday, but "then the slump came."

Hugh Bypass is a schoolmaster and the oldest of the cousins, who had invested all he had in a private school, but there were not enough pupils to keep the place afloat. Martin Greeve was an engineer with his own toy-factory, but the Great Depression and a defaulting partner had completely ruined him. And he even tries to take his own life at the beginning of the story. Romney Greeve is an artist with a wife and two children, but ever since the slump he had been unable to sell any pictures. Finally, there's Tom Bypass, a retired army officer with bad lungs, who had a comfortable, yearly, income of five hundred pounds, but he had been using most of it to help his failing relatives and this came at a personal cost – least of all having to give up a high-class service flat in town. His doctor advised him to move to a country with a more agreeable climate or else he would not make it another year. Only problem is that Tom didn't have to money anymore to live abroad.

So they all turned to their uncle to make good on his promise and pay them what he owned them, but he turned them all down! And became as unpleasant as humanly possible.

Hubert began "a deliberate policy of provocation" and tried to get the four to quarrel, or even fight, with him, which would have given him an excuse to disinherit them. His latest provocation, as the cousins learned from his lawyer, Charles Mantlin, was the drafting of a completely new will in favor of his long-lost sister, Ethel, who everyone assumed had died decades ago. Hubert even asked Hugh and Martin to witness "a very important document." Unsurprisingly, the cousins aren't particularly fond of their uncle, but, in this case, they appear to actually take steps to eliminate him from their lives!

Meanwhile, Hubert called in the local police on two separate occasions: one of them is to report an intruder in the garden, who left behind a measuring tape in the summer-house, which is followed by a threatening letter from his long-lost brother-in-law demanding that all the money goes to Ethel.

All of this culminates when the four cousins, alongside the lawyer, come to his country estate to celebrate his birthday.

On the second day, Hubert is playing a game of cribbage with Martin in the drawing-room, while Hugh, Tom and Mantlin are sitting, or watching, in the same room. Romney is working in the summer-house twenty feet away from the room. And, as the butler smote the dinner-gong, Hubert slipped from his chair to the ground with a bullet-wound in his right temple and nobody in the room saw the shooter – who appears to have performed "a first-class miracle."

The apparently inexplicable death of Hubert Greeve was very reminiscent of the second impossible shooting in Stacey Bishop's Death in the Dark (1930), in which a member of the family, surrounded by witnesses, is shot to death in the middle of the living room. And nobody saw the murderer. Interestingly, Bush smoothed over a flaw I had with that impossible shooting from Death in the Dark. I could see how the trick could possibly work, but doubted that nobody would have noticed, or heard, from whose direction the gunshot came. A problem Bush neatly solved by timing the fatal shot with the ringing of the dinner-gong.

Bush's explanation for the shooting also differed from Bishop. The latter had a more technical solution, while former employed stage trickery. This prompted genre historian, Curt Evans, to compare the impossibility to one in Carr's Seeing is Believing (1941), published as by "Carter Dickson," but with a better explanation. As matter of fact, the explanation is an unusual one and know of only one variation on this particular trick, which can be found in a short story that was written over half a century later. No. I'm not going to say which one, because that would give the whole plot away. Once you know how it was done, you'll immediately spot the killer and the rather nifty clue that only becomes obvious in hindsight. However, Travers soon learns that getting to that conclusion is easier said than done.

I imagine there are readers, even among us, who sneer at the idea that practically everyone, independent of each other, is in the process of murdering the old man and the question is really who got to him first. Travers even concludes that Hubert could have been struck by two bullets at the same time, which were fired by two murderers who were unaware what the other was doing!

I know this stretches credulity a little bit, but I think it's a nifty way to make sure nobody is above, or below, suspicion, because literately everyone could have done it. Even the butler, John Service, who was lost mobility in one hand and used the other the smote the gong. However, someone saw him pointing his bum-hand in the direction of the drawing-room. And Service and his wife also play a bigger than normal role, for servants, in the story. One of the many problems facing Travers.

Other puzzle-pieces Travers has to toy around with are two missing volumes of The Decline and Fall of Roman Empire and a small collection of fire-arm recovered from a drained pond in the garden, which turn out not to have been used in the shooting in the drawing-room. They also find a tree with a contraption nailed to it.

Three further things that have to be mentioned is that Superintendent George Wharton is absent from the story and his position is filled by the Chief Constable of the county, Major Tempest, who reportedly made his first appearance in The Case of the 100% Alibis. Secondly, Travers is writing a new book, Kensington Gore: Murder for High-Brows, which hopefully he'll get recognized as much for in the coming books as for his famous The Economics of a Spendthrift. A book that's referred to in all the books I have read to date. Lastly, one plot-thread remained unsolved by the end: who sent that threatening letter at the start of the story? We never get an explanation for that. I suppose the plot was so complex that Bush lost sight of that minor plot-thread.

So, all in all, The Case of the Chinese Gong is a delightfully complex and knotty detective story, which might stretch believability for some readers, but those who love these intricate, baroque-style puzzles will get their moneys worth when they crack open the pages of this long-neglected detective novel. A real shame Robert Adey overlooked this one, as well as The Perfect Murder Case (1929), when he compiled Locked Room Murders (1991). It makes you wonder how many more impossible crime novels there among those sixty-three mysteries Bush penned during his life-time.

Here's to the new age of discovery and I'll be returning to Bush for my next post!

A Score to Settle

"Oh, it's a very nasty bit of goods, this is. And so clever, so filthily clever. Everything nice and simple. No fancy touches. I tell you one thing, all of you, for what it's worth. I've been telling it to myself ever since this started. We're up against good acting."

- Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn (Ngaio Marsh's Enter a Murderer, 1935)

Back in October, Dean Street Press reissued the first ten of sixty-three Ludovic Travers detective novels by Christopher Bush and the earlier titles in this series are known for their minutely timed, clockwork-like plots – a plotting-style affectionately referred to as "Golden Age baroque." Reputedly, the plots became leaner and less in-depth during the post-WWII era without losing their intricate nature.

Nick Fuller commented on my review of The Case of the April Fools (1933) and described the later titles as "less GAD" with "more hardboiled influences." Travers acts as "a genteel PI" who narrates his own cases, but, according to Fuller, the first person narration works and there are clever plots to be found in this phase of the series. So my interest in later-period Bush was piqued and wanted to sample one of his titles from the 1950s. And that immediately brings me to the subject of today's blog-post.

The Case of the Amateur Actor (1955) is the 44th book about Travers and, as late an entry as it is, the plot is structured around Bush's favorite ploy of meticulously linking together multiple (unrelated) murders. A ploy he played around with in earlier titles such as Dancing Death (1931) and The Case of the Bonfire Body (1936).

The story begins when Travers, who now works as an operative for the Broad Street Detective Agency, is summoned by his policeman friend, Superintendent George Wharton, to Room 323 of the Royalty Hotel – where he's asked to identify the body of a murdered man. An engagement book with Travers' name in it had been found in one of the coat pockets of the victim and he identifies the body as having belonged to a literary agent, Gordon Posfort.

Someone had lured the literary agent to the hotel room, perforated his abdomen with no less than six bullets, and left him on the floor to face a lonely, agonizing death.

Travers and Wharton promptly arrive at the conclusion that the murder of Posfort wasn't "a simple killing," but a murder out of revenge, because "someone meant him to die a pretty painful death." A second clue is that the small caliber of the bullets insured irreparable damage instead of instant death. As the detectives poke around in the victim's past, they uncover a gem of a motive that fits the circumstances of the murder like a glove and concerns the untimely passing of Posfort's former receptionist-secretary, Miss Caroline Halsing – who died from "an overdose of sleeping tablets." Miss Halsing committed suicide when she became pregnant and there were more than enough willing avengers to be found in her immediate circle of family members and friends.

However, halfway through the story, the Posfort Case became an unsolved murder and left Travers with "a gnawing curiosity" as he began to realize that something had happened to which he might never find an answer.

Over the course of the second half, Travers is shepherded back onto the trail of Posfort's murderer by looking into two, seemingly unrelated, police cases.

The first of these two cases is known as the Marland Affair, a deadly robbery, in which the victim, Rickson, was beaten to death on a path that led to his home and his murderer took his attache case and wallet. Only thing linking both murders is that one of the suspects of the Posfort Case lives in Marland. But to be honest, this second murder is a pretty slender plot-thread in the overall scheme of the story and the book could probably have done without it. I believe the plot and story would have across as a tighter job without this second, sloppy murder in the background, but suppose it was necessary for the murderer to leave a trail behind that could be connected. But the third case is of integral importance to the plot.

Richard Alton was a schoolmaster at Queen's School, Dorminster, who ran the school dramatic society and was a prominent member of the dramatic society in the city, but his colleagues thought him "a bit too assertive in his Socialist views" – which they assume had a hand in his disappearance. A lot of them assumed he simply was a Communist who had been "called behind the Iron Curtain" and he reputedly send a letter from Berlin. However, the disappearance of Alton ends with a gruesome discovery in a ditch by the side of the road.

The Case of the Amateur Actor is definitely different in tone and tenor from the earlier, baroque-style, novels from the 1930s and impressed me as a concession by Bush to the changing landscape of the genre during the post-WWII years.

First of all, there's the first-person narration by Travers recalling the hardboiled private eyes from the United States and, secondly, the murders here are seedier in nature than the grandiose crimes found in such earlier novels as The Perfect Murder Case (1929) and Cut Throat (1932). The execution of the murders here are simple and pretty ugly without any of the bells and whistles often associated with the Golden Age detective stories.

All of that being said, Bush did not appear to have compromised all that much on plot-complexity, because the multiple, apparently unrelated, murders are expertly tied together. Travers gradually gets a hold of the practically invisible thread linking all of the involved parties and this leads to a monumental discovery, nicely foreshadowed in the first part of the book, which hands him the tools needed to demolish a clever little alibi – an alibi that was perhaps too clever for its own good. A sizable portion of the problems that had faced Travers and Wharton came as a result of this alibi-trick. So it was a nice touch that the whole matter became plain as day once the alibi was cleared.

On a whole, I found The Case of the Amateur Actor a compelling and surprisingly well done departure from the earlier books in the series. The plot may lack the density of such (baroque) titles as Dancing Death (1931) and The Case of the April Fools (1933), but not their intricacies or its deft handling of the complected cases ploy. So that makes me very curious about other late titles, like The Case of the Counterfeit Colonel (1952) and The Case of the Flowery Corpse (1956), but the next Bush on my pile is the very early Dead Man Twice (1930). A book that had been recommended to me numerous of times. So you can expect a review of that one in January of 2018.

Sorry of this post came across as a little hurried, but had to crank this one out under time constraint. Anyway, there will be one more review before this year draws to an end and, hopefully, it will end 2017 on a high-note. So you'll be expected back here later this week!