The Perfect Alibi (1934) by Christopher St. John Sprigg

Christopher St. John Sprigg's The Perfect Alibi (1934) is the third novel in the regrettably short-lived series about the Mercury crime-reporter, Charles Venables, which has been out-of-print for nearly a century and an elusive, over-priced item on the second-hand book market – even the 1941 abridged Cherry Tree edition is a rarity. Last year, Moonstone Press advertises they were going to republish a number of his detective novels in September, 2018, but there was an unexplained, nine-month delay. The Perfect Alibi was well worth the long wait!

Anthony Mullins, of Morphopoulos & Mullins, is an armaments manufacturer and "a brilliant engineer" who produces the guns that were sold through "an international system of graft" that had been built up by his late partner.

Six months before the story opens, Mullins drafted and signed an accusatory will that will place his wife, Patricia, in "a terrible position in the eyes of the world." The will states that, unless Mullins peacefully passes away in his sleep or a coroner says he had died naturally, Patricia loses a life interest in his estate. Leaving her without a penny. Mullin's reason is that he suspects Patricia has an affair with his nephew and junior partner, Ralph Holliday, which is why Mullins had cut him out of his will completely and send him abroad to get him away from his wife – under the guise of reevaluating Morphopoulos' network. So his safety has been ensured.

The Perfect Alibi opens with the locked, wooden garage on Mullin's estate, The Turrets, ablaze and inside the fire-fighters find the charred remains of the armaments magnate in the driving-seat of his car.

On the surface, the death of Mullins has the appearance of an unfortunate accident, but a post-mortem examination reveals a bullet lodged in the brain and there was no gun or key found inside the garage. So this was either an impossible suicide or a cold, calculated murder. A murder that will seriously test the determination, patience and ingenuity of several detectives over the course of several months.

Charles Venables makes only sporadic appearances in the story, but has a splendid excuse to largely assume to role of spectator in "the Burning Garage Mystery." When he briefly appears in the second chapter, Venables is busily reporting on the Aeroplane Mystery and later departs for Iconia where "the ruling monarch appears to have been murdered." So The Perfect Alibi takes place between the conclusion of Death of an Airman (1935) and the beginning of Death of a Queen (1935)! I thought this was a nice touch to the story and gives room to other characters to shine as detectives.

Inspector Trenton is officially in charge of the investigation, but his subordinate, Constable Sadler, who sees the case as a release from his routine, humdrum duties, does most of the legwork – until even Scotland Yard (off-page) reaches a dead-end. But there two other people, involved with the case, who turn amateur detective and not entirely without success. Francis "Frank" Filson is an artist who initially provided Patricia with a paper-thin alibi and he's roped in to snoop around by the woman in charge of Mullin's stables, Sandy Delfinage.

Sandy's primary suspect is Dr. James Constant, the Secretary of the Society for the Promotion of Scientific Research, whose organization inherited the bulk of the estate under Mullin's new will, but Dr. Constant possesses an absolutely unshakable alibi. Dr. Constant is not the only person in the lively, humorously drawn and slightly subversive cast of characters who has a role to play in the story. Dr. Eustace Marabout is a Doctor of Philosophy deeply impressed by "the overwhelming documentary evidence" of the supernatural and swears he saw the Devil "coming from the garage the day before the murder." Lord Overture is the owner of The Turrets, which he let to Mullins for a "paltry sum," but why did he take a potshot at Constable Sadler? Mrs. Murples is a rich, elderly woman who looks like "a pre-dynastic mummy" and uses her money to back young pugilists.

Sprigg had quite a gift when it came to integrating quirky, subversive characters into a highly conventional detective story without making them feel like they're out-of-place. Such as in the splendid The Corpse with the Sunburned Face (1935), but the plot and alibi-trick is where the story really shines.

The Perfect Alibi has a plot deeply entrenched in the tradition of breaking down alibis and identities closely associated with Christopher Bush and Freeman Wills Crofts. Technically, the plot is as sound as a whistle and, as Venables states in the final chapter, every "fact and clue we needed was given us" like "the fairest possible detective story in the world" – complemented by a cleverly done, inverted alibi-trick. There is, however, a problem with this cleverly constructed solution. Nobody ever asks that one obvious question or considers it as a possible scenario. There are features of the case that warranted that question to be asked, but Sprigg conveniently ignored this weak spot until the end.

I think most readers will ask this question or consider it a possibility. When you do, the plot becomes a whole lot less labyrinthine and the ending is not as impressive when Venables, "swinging lazily in a hammock in the gardens of the Royal Palace at Iconia," has one of those flashes of inspiration. You still have to work out the finer details, but you, as the reader, have no excuse not to arrive at the correct solution long before Venables stumbles to it. However, to be completely fair to Sprigg, it probably didn't help I recently read three or four detective novels working with pretty much the same central plot-idea.

So, while the plot of The Perfect Alibi is technically sound, strewn with clues and populated with lively characters, the scheme is easily poked through and took the punch out of its ending. I would rank the book along side Sprigg's debut, Crime in Kensington (1933), which is also a well written, cleverly plotted and amusing detective story, but too easily solved by an observant armchair detective. Still recommended to everyone who enjoys the alibi-busting stories of Bush and Crofts.

This leaves me with only one more Sprigg mystery novel on my pile, but I'll probably save Fatality in Fleet Street (1933) for sometime next year.

The Locked Room Reader XI: A Return to the Phantom Library

Back in 2016, I compiled a brief overview, under the title "A Selection of Lost Detective Stories," listing a number of examples of long-lost or unpublished manuscripts from the hands of celebrated and lesser-known mystery writers – such as Glyn Carr, Joseph Commings, Theodora DuBois and Hake Talbot. The idea of the existence, or partial existence, of a phantom library is as fascinating as it's frustrating. Even more so, when it disproportionately affects a writer you happened to be very fond of.

One of my favorite second-stringers, John Russell Fearn, was a prolific writer of lost detective stories and he didn't limit himself to merely losing sight of manuscripts. Philip Harbottle kindly provided me with all the background details.

A fragment from an alt-reality

Harbottle told me that "several wonderful impossible crime novels," written by Fearn in 1946, were lost and apparently destroyed, because hardcover publishing in the U.K. suffered from paper shortages during the post-war years and many books were delayed – often "never appeared at all" and "were lost." Fearn sold three novels under a penname, "Rosina Tarne," of which only one came close to actually being published.

You Murdered Me would have told the story of the ghost of a murdered woman who helps her grieving boyfriend/detective bring her killer to justice and the manuscript was proofed, blurbed and appropriately advertised on the jacket of Gordon Meyrick's The Ghost Hunters (1947). There are only "half a dozen scattered pages of mss carbon" left of the second novel, entitled The Eyes Have It, which reveal that the story followed a husband-and-wife detective team investigating "a dead body in a swimming pool" with resonances of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868). Yes, a Fearn mystery novel along the lines of Kelley Roos' The Frightened Stiff (1942) got lost. God has some serious explaining to do!

Sadly, Murder in Suburbia has been completely erased from existence as nothing, whatsoever, is known about it and "nothing has survived." However, the title makes me wonder if Fearn rewrote the story nearly a decade later as Lonely Road Murder (1954). Murder in Suburbia strikes me as an uncomplicated, straitlaced crime story without any locked rooms, cast-iron alibis or science-based death-traps – like Lonely Road Murder. Something not entirely out of the realm of possibilities, because there's a possible change that the presumed lost Partners in Crime was eventually published as Murder's a Must (1949; retitled later as The Tattoo Murders). However, this is just an educated guess by Harbottle.

The last title to be added to this lamentable list is about "an impossible murder on a railway," titled Unfinished Journey, which he intended to get published under the name of "Hartley Grant," but manuscript was apparently rejected. Regardless, Fearn was an amateur cineaste and, in 1949, created the Fylde Cine Club. One of the movies they made was an ambitious, full-length (silent) movie adaptation of Unfinished Journey starring Fearn, Matt Japp and published author Audrey Weigh, who recorded the lines on a tape recorder – a tape that got either lost or destroyed! However, Harbottle salvaged three boxes of the club's 16mm films and them transferred to VHS tapes, but the firm managed to mix "the running order of the three film spools" and made them run backwards. Harbottle said he only watched the silent VHS once, a quarter of a century ago, and was "so traumatized" that he never watched it again.

Honestly, I would love to get a glimpse of that silent film. Not just to get a taste of a lost impossible crime story, but just to watch Fearn acting. Someone should convert those VHS tapes and upload them to YouTube.

Seems appropriate

Sadly, Fearn is not the only one who lost a handful of manuscripts: R.T. Campbell wrote eight popular detective novels about a botanist and amateur detective, Professor John Stubbs. Five more titles were announced as forthcoming, namely The Hungry Worms Are Waiting, No Man Lives Forever, Death is Not Particular, Death is Our Physician and Mr. Death's Blue-Eyed Boy, but his publisher went into liquidation in 1948 and the manuscripts were lost to history. So just between Campbell and Fearn, you have nine or ten mystery novels that were expunged from our time-line. And, yes, there's more. There's always more of the bad stuff.

Willoughby Sharp was the author of two published detective novels, Murder in Bermuda (1933) and Murder of the Honest Broker (1934), who provided this list with the most peculiar and tantalizing lost title. A third novel was announced for 1935, intriguingly titled The Mystery of the Multiplying Mules, which came with a short description of the premise and the story would have made for a most unusual locked room mystery – as mules keep turning up inside the locked barn of the Logan family. No reason was ever given why the book got canceled.

Another mystery writer with a short-lived career was Kirke Mechem and only saw one of his detective novels get published, The Strawstack Murder Case (1936), which has a strong rural flavor. This is likely the reason why his second Steven Steele novel was never published. The plot of the story, titled Mind on Murder, dealt with miscegenation in Kansas and Doubleday, Doran, turned down his manuscript "on account of this sensitive subject matter." The three novels by Mechem and Sharp have been reprinted by Coachwhip Publications.

Christopher St. John Sprigg plunge into Marxism and untimely death in the Spanish Civil War ended a short, but promising, run as a mystery novelist. Recently, Sprigg has profited from our current renaissance era and all of his seven novels has been reprinted as paperbacks and ebooks, but Curt Evans reported in 2013 that there two unpublished short stories, "The Case of the Misjudged Husband" and "The Case of the Jesting Miser" – existing as typed manuscripts in Sprigg's papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. Evans describes them as "longish short stories" with a certain appeal and a noteworthy detective, Mrs. Bird.

So these two short stories still have a fighting chance to get published and maybe sooner than we think. A recently published anthology, Bodies from the Library 2 (2019), had never before published material by Christianna Brand, Edmund Crispin and Dorothy L. Sayers. I say we loot salvage as much as possible from this phantom library!

Well, hopefully, this rambling filler-post wasn't too depressing and I'll return to you presently with a regular review of a detective story that wasn't cruelly snatched away from us.

The Corpse with the Sunburned Face (1935) by Christopher St. John Sprigg

My last three reads can be described as a varied lot, coming from two different countries and periods, but they had one thing common: a solid idea, such as the locked room-tricks from A. Roothaert's Onrust op Raubrakken (Unrest at Raubrakken, 1935) and Robert Innes' Flatline (2018), which were stuck in middling to mediocre novel. This resulted in some mixed reviews. So I decided to return to a mystery writer who I enjoyed reading very much in 2018.

Christopher St. John Sprigg's The Corpse with the Sunburned Face (1935) is the penultimate mystery novel published during his lifetime, which was followed by the excellent Death of a Queen (1935), after which he enlisted in the International Brigade to fight in the Spanish Civil War – where he was killed in the valley of Jarama during his first day of battle on February 12th, 1937. The Six Queer Things (1937) was published posthumously.

The Corpse with the Sunburned Face cements the fact that Sprigg was not only a good writer and a proficient plotter, but also possessed a wealth of imagination.

A fascinating, splendidly realized detective story comprising of two parts that are poles apart, a satirical village mystery and a thriller set in West Africa, which together form one of those rare anthropological mysteries.

The first part of the story begins with Rev. Samuel Wykeham, vicar of Little Whippering, complaining to himself that nothing ever happened in the village. This proved to be the proverbial famous last words, because at that very moment a small boy shot down a hill accompanied by "screams of terror." William Bundling had a close encounter with "The Invisible Man" who had threatened the boy to slit his belly open, if he ever caught him sneaking around the house.

Sam O'Leary is the mysterious person, known locally as The Invisible Man, who arrived in the village with "his face hidden behind a scarf" and "nobody's seen him by daylight." A recluse has taken possession of the Wilderness, "an eyesore of a cottage," where only tradesman are allowed and groceries enter the home through a little flap in the front door – everyone else can expect to be insulted at gunpoint. Reverend Samuel decides to pay his new parishioner a visit, but is greeted with a barrel of a gun and gets twenty seconds to vacate the premise or he'll blast his goddamned head off ("devil-dodger or no devil-dodger"). Police Constable Collop is treated with a little bit more respect, but O'Leary still calls him a bastard and a "blasted bluebottle."

This last confrontation ends with O'Leary warning Collop that, if anyone else dares to disturb him, they can expect "a charge of buckshot in their gizzards to help them on their way."

So this is grist on the rumor mill of Little Whippering. Some believe O'Leary is a murderer in hiding, while others think he's a leper or a gold hoarder, but, despite the legend growing around him, the isolated miser became a part of the fabric of the little, old-world village. Several years later, a bearded man, George Crumbles, descended upon the village looking for O'Leary, but Crumbles is found a short time later dangling from a rope in his hotel room and the police demands O'Leary discards his disguise – revealing to them an inexplicable sunburned face and an exciting back-story that took place in West Africa. A story about an expedition to steal the treasure of the African Kingdom of Balooma and betrayal among the perpetrators, which is why O'Leary had buried himself in a small English village.

Obviously, this part of the story was inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four (1890) and The Valley of Fear (1914).

However, if you think this is merely another play on the shopworn Birlstone Gambit, you're dead wrong. Sprigg played a dazzling game of three-card monte, but replaced the cards with "an amazing confusion" of identities and clues. Like I said, Sprigg was a proficient plotter.

One more thing I should mention is that the first half of the story is an amusing, satirical look at English village life centering around the vicarage. Reverend Samuel is expecting two guests, Mr. Neptune Jones, who is to become a permanent boarding guest at the vicarage, but Jones turns out to be a black man from West Africa. Very much to the shock of Mrs. Wykeham. The second guest is Dr. Ridge, an American anthropologist, but this person also defies Rev. Samuel's expectations and these two characters show Sprigg had been deeply immersed in Marxism at the time. Neptune Jones and Dr. Ridge obviously were meant as subversive, outside elements in the old, conservative-minded village. However, I appreciate he had a sense of humor about it.

For example, Dr. Ridge has come to Little Whippering to obtain records of the customs of European villages, "which are rapidly dying out," before it's too late and makes observations about their May-Day fertility rites and vegetation God (Jack-of-May) – noting "a certain resemblance to the social tenets of the Wahina tribe." Some of these characters will turn up again in the second half.

The second half begins when a gruesome, ritual murder is committed at the Wilderness and Inspector Archibald Campbell decides to go Africa to unearth the truth behind these deaths. The opening of the second part is basically an overview of the previous half, which untangles the mess of identities and gives a solution to the murders, but there's not much else what I can say without giving anything away. Suffice to say, Campbell runs into a spot of trouble and one of the last chapters has a well-imagined scene of a sacred and secret ritual. This links The Corpse with the Sunburned Face to the detective fiction of such Australian mystery writers like S.H. Courtier and Arthur W. Upfield.

All in all, The Corpse with the Sunburned Face is a rich, colorful and well-written detective story that has both its darker and lighter moments, but, more importantly, it has a cleverly constructed, slightly unorthodox plot. The result is one of Sprigg's more memorable detective novels.

Death of a Queen (1935) by Christopher St. John Sprigg

Death of a Queen (1935) was Christopher St. John Sprigg's sixth detective novel and the last one to be published before his life was cut short in the Spanish Civil War, The Six Queer Things (1937) appeared posthumously, which probably accounts why this particular title has become such a rare, hard-to-find item – a scarcity further exacerbated by the fact that the book was never released in the U.S. Fortunately, Black Heath has recently reissued Crime in Kensington (1933) and Death of a Queen as inexpensive ebooks.

So you can now pick up this once rare and pricey collector's item for a mere pittance.

Death of a Queen marks the fourth and last appearance of Charles Venables, a detective-turned-journalist, who climbed the career-ladder in Crime in Kensington from gossip columnist to the star crime-reporter of the Mercury – demolishing a criminal plot and an impossible disappearance in the process. However, Venables has a very different role to play in his last recorded case.

Venables is summoned by Superintendent Manciple of Scotland Yard and finds him there in conference with three other men. Mr. Lancelot of the Foreign Office. A Mr. Shillingford and his right-hand man, Luigi, but Venables makes an educated guess and assumes "Mr. Shillingford" is a pseudonym. So he addresses Shillingford as Your Royal Highness. An obvious nod to the opening of Conan Doyle's "A Scandal in Bohemia" (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892). Mr. Shillingford is His Royal Highness Augustus Crispin Maximilian, Crown Prince of Iconia, who has come to Britain to ask for help on behalf of his mother, Queen Hanna. Lately, Queen Hanna has turned from an elderly, strong-minded and bad-tempered lady into a "badly scared old woman."

Manciple has recommended Venables to the Foreign Office as someone "possessed of some experiences" in discreet investigations and is asked "to look into certain events which have occurred" at the palace. So Venables is bound to the capital of the tiny kingdom, Isorb.

I think most readers here will probably have the same reaction as Venables, "sounds dreadfully like Ruritania," but Sprigg makes it clear to the reader that Iconia is not Ruritania. One of the most impressive aspects of the story is the back-story of this fictitious Balkan kingdom, which has its own language, culture, history and historical figures who helped shape the country – a kind of world-building that reminded me of the imaginary micro-nations from Peter Dickinson's The Poison Oracle (1974) and James Powell's A Pocketful of Noses (2009). However, Sprigg took a more realistic approach with this fictional kingdom and depicted the place with one eye fixed on the real world.

Iconia is an isolated pocket of a land, "as big as Yorkshire," trapped between the Danube and Transylvanian Alps. The present ruling dynasty, the Herzvogins, are supposed to be "descendants of those original noble brigands" and the present monarch, Queen Hanna, has been on the throne for nearly thirty years. Queen Hanna came to power during "the agrarian troubles" resulting in the Distribution Act of 1904 when the Crown lands were broken up and given to the peasantry, which meant that the palace has been run ever since a shoe-string budget. Venables is given to understand that he expected to pay for his meals and drinks. They still have the revenue from oil royalties, but, entirely coincidental, it "exactly equals the interest and amortization" on the British loans to Iconia. You sure know how to cut a deal, you cheeky Brits.

Venables speaks with Queen Hanna a day before the thirtieth anniversary of her accession to the throne and she has received an anonymous letter warning her to give up her foolish plan. And reminding her of the "Doom of the Herzvogins." A family curse the Herzvogins inherited from the second King of Iconia, Augustus the Clerk. However, Queen Hanna is determined to reveal a great secret on her anniversary, but she never gets to make her proclamation.

Queen Hanna is strangled to death under seemingly impossible circumstances in her Royal bedchamber. There are three doors to the Royal suite and two sentries were posted at each door, who stood guard until midnight when they were relieved, but they claim nobody entered or left the room during that period – as if "the murderer was invisible." Unfortunately, the explanation to this locked room trick is unlikely to excite people who obsessively read impossible crime stories. And... I liked my solution to the problem of the guarded room slightly better.

When the circumstances of the impossible murder were presented, it immediately occurred to me that there were two weak links in the security revealing an unguarded path to the Queen: 1) a room with three doors 2) the young, inexperienced guards. Queen Hanna even demonstrates to Venables the unprofessionalism of her guards when she takes a potshot at a sleeping sentry in the courtyard and, when a minute later, frightened men storm the room, she coldly informs that she "should have been dead by now." So this gave me an idea.

The bedchamber has three doors and you have to assume those doors open in three different portions, rooms or corridors of the palace. So what if two assassins, dressed as sentries, come to relieve two of the guards 10-15 minutes earlier. We already established discipline is something to be desired in the palace guards and probably would not object to be being relieved earlier than planned. And that's if they even noticed the 10-15 minute time-gap. The murderers enter the bedchamber to do their dirty work and take their place as sentries when they come out again. At midnight, they're relieved by the actual guards and they simply walk away without a hint of suspicion – shedding their uniforms as they vanish inside the palace. I honestly think it's better than Sprigg's solution. Well, it would have made for a good false solution in any case.

Anyway, the murder in the Royal bedchamber is not the only inexplicable occurrence in the palace that night. Queen Hanna was seen in the State Office when by all "the laws of logic she ought to have been dead" and another frightened palace guard had opened fire on the ghost of Her Majesty walking down the stairs with either "the devil or St. Boron." A second quasi-impossible crime happens when an attempt is made to poison the newly crowned King of Iconia, Augustus X. The only person who could have poisoned the drinks is an important witness, Dr. Robor, whose loyalty to the queen extended beyond the grave, but these are not the only pieces of the puzzle and Venables has to dig deep to unearth all of the pieces of the puzzles – comprising of old rivalries, dead royals, long-kept secrets, remorse and an exhumation. Sprigg handled all of these intertwining plot-threads with great skill and the flick of the tail provided the story with a twist that slightly gutted my solution. And that's always a nice surprise.

So in terms of plotting, Death of a Queen is unquestionable the best one I have read to date, but equally good is the story-telling that wove the history of an imaginary kingdom together with the plot-strands of a good, old-fashioned detective story – which made for a thoroughly enjoyable read with an unforgettable setting. A detective story that makes you want to shout out, realism be damned! Absolutely recommended!

Hopefully, Black Heath will not let us wait too long for Fatality in Fleet Street (1933), The Perfect Alibi (1934) and The Corpse with the Sunburn Face (1935).

Crime in Kensington (1933) by Christopher St. John Sprigg

Earlier this month, I reviewed The Six Queer Things (1936) by Christopher St. John Sprigg and pointed to the upcoming releases of Crime in Kensington (1933), The Perfect Alibi (1934) and Death of a Queen (1935), published by Moonstone Press, but the release date of September 10, 2018, came and went without them becoming available – leaving me a little bit disappointed. Fortunately, there was an unexpected surprise when another publisher reissued two of the titles I had been most looking forward to reading!

Black Heath has a miscellaneous catalog of Golden Age detective novels and turn-of-the-century thrillers of varying quality. There are some really good or intriguing titles on their list, such as Edward Gellibrand's The Windblow Mystery (1926), John V. Turner's Death Must Have Laughed (1932) and Nicholas Brady's outlandishly fantastic The Fair Murder (1933), but the overall quality has now risen with the single addition of Sprigg.

As of this writing, Black Heath has reissued Crime in Kensington and Death of a Queen. Hopefully, more will follow suit!

I picked the first mystery novel Sprigg ever published, Crime in Kensington, published in the United States under the suitable title Pass the Body, which always struck me as a must read for every self-respecting locked room fanboy, but John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, said in the comments on my review of Death of an Airman (1935) that he was not sure it was for me – warning me that I might find "the solution uninspired and underwhelming." Sure, the locked room trick was childishly easy to figure out, but the plot had so much more to offer than just an apparently miraculous disappearance. John was not entirely right this time. Did you read that, John? You were more wrong than right on this one. Suck on that!

Crime in Kensington reminded me of a lighter, but still darkly humorous, English counterpart of Anita Blackmon's Murder á la Richelieu (1937), which shares a very similar setting that becomes the backdrop of a clever, dark and gruesome crime.

Charles Venables is a monocled policeman-turned-journalist who currently works as a gossip-columnist for the Mercury, a powerful newspaper, that brings him to London. A long-time friend and romantic interest, Lady Viola Merritt, who works as a commercial artist from a residential hotel in Kensington invites him to take rooms at The Garden Hotel. She describes it as a comfortable, amazingly cheap hotel, but "there is something weird about the place" that she can't quite make out. And filled with "such odd people."

The moment Venables walked into The Garden Hotel it was like entering "the plot of a thriller of the vulgarest and most exciting description." Venables overhears how the husband of the proprietress, Mrs. Budge, threatened to slit her throat from ear to ear and meets a slightly sinister-looking, one-eyed Egyptian, named Eppoliki, who recognizes Venables – asking him if their "little hostess's game is up." Later that evening, Mrs. Budge has been put to bed with pleurisy. Or, as we so eloquently say in my country, de pleuris staat op het punt van uitbreken in The Garden Hotel. It's our way of saying shit is about to hit the fan. :)

That evening, Nurse Evans sees how Miss Sanctuary put her head round the door of the sick-room to say that Mrs. Budge is sleeping nicely when "a gloved hand emerged round the edge of the door" and "fastened about her throat." A long, drawn-out scream is followed by the slamming and locking of the door. When the door is opened by shooting the lock, Mrs. Budge and Miss Sanctuary have inexplicably vanished!

Venables is on the premise when this happened and is tasked by the Chief of the Mercury to get an angle on the case before the police, which allows him to rise from the position a special, on-the-scene correspondent to the star crime-reporter of the Mercury. Despite his monocle, wit and somewhat pompous appearance, Venables is a very different and more likable character than the detective he was obviously based on, Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey. You can really warm to him as a detective-character and he works together very well with the competent Detective Inspector Bernard Bray of Scotland Yard. Even though the latter makes a mistake or two when suspects where on the verge of spilling the beans about the hotel.

The police can do very little at this point in the story, as they have nothing to go on, but this changes when one of the hotel guests decided to hold a séance.

Miss Mumby is a terribly rich, elderly lady who "spends all her money on séances and cats" and her rooms are covered in either cat hairs or cat images. She has a large black tomcat with a torn earn, named Socrates, who she attempted to use as a bloodhound to find the missing proprietress without much success. Socrates also has a role to play at the séance, who went beserk towards the end, which lead to a gruesome discovery that lead to the police turning the hotel inside out – effectively turning their inquiry into a murder investigation. I particularly liked the scene with the hatbox and crowd of sight-seers outside of the hotel. Delightfully dark and comedic.

I can't reveal much more about the plot without giving away any vital information, but Crime in Kensington is obviously the work of a young, talented and promising, but inexperienced, mystery writer who could have become a household name had he stuck with the genre. Obviously, the problem of the locked bedroom is easily penetrated and the identity of the murderer was equally obvious. However, the why was not as easy to figure out and could have kicked myself for missing a blatant clue, or more of a hint, in this regard and then you have the secret of the hotel room, which was genuinely clever and original. Sprigg used a variation on this plot-thread in The Six Queer Things.

And then there's the excellent writing, story-telling, characters and splashes of dark humor. One scene that comes to mind is when Bray entered the room of Rev. Septimus Blood, who's obsessed with reconstructing the Coptic rites, and finds him with an embroidered cone in front of the mirror. So he groans "Oh Lord... another lunatic." That should give you an idea about the characters populating The Garden Hotel.

 

In summation, Crime in Kensington is a well written, proficiently plotted, but imperfect, debut from a promising mystery writer who, sadly, only got to write seven detective novels and some short stories during his short life. I really enjoyed me time with this book, even if it failed to (fully) fool me. So definitely recommended to everyone who loves a good, old-fashioned detective story.

This leaves me with one problem: what to read next? I want to immediately dip into Death of a Queen, but have already reviewed quite a few locked room novels and short stories recently. So I might do a non-impossible crime before tackling Death of a Queen. However, it's very tempting to do two Sprigg's back-to-back. But we'll see.

The Six Queer Things (1937) by Christopher St. John Sprigg

Christopher St. John Sprigg was a British writer who left school at the age of fifteen to work as a cub reporter on a now defunct newspaper, Yorkshire Observer, where his father had been a literary editor, before becoming the editor of British Malaya, but earned his literary stripes as a young, versatile novelist – writing reams of poetry, ghost stories, plays and aeronautics textbooks. During a brief, five-year period in the 1930s, Sprigg produced seven well received, highly regarded and cleverly constructed detective novels.

Some of them were praised by Dorothy L. Sayers for being "full of good puzzles" and bubbling with "zest and vitality."

Unfortunately, Sprigg contracted Marxism in 1934 and came to regard his detective fiction as trash he wrote to make money. Two years later, he joined the International Brigade to fight in the Spanish Civil War against General Francisco Franco, where he became a machine-gun instructor and editor of the Battalion Wall, but was tragically killed on his first day in the field – during the Battle of Jarama in February, 1937. I guess you could say communism kills.

Sprigg's untimely passing plunged his mystery novels into total obscurity and his books became scarce, expensive and hard to come by for regular readers. Ironically, this meant his books were primarily accessible to deep-pocketed collectors. Until recently, that is.

Back in 2015, British Library Crime Classics reissued Death of an Airman (1935) and earlier this year Valancourt Books published The Six Queer Things (1937). By the time this blog-post goes live, Moonstone Press has probably printed brand new editions of Crime in Kensington (1933), The Perfect Alibi (1934) and Death of a Queen (1935). So Sprigg is gradually being wrested from the dust of obscurity and wanted to knock The Six Queer Things from my list before the Moonstone Press releases become available.

The Six Queer Things was Sprigg's last, posthumously published detective novel and the story dragged the Victorian-era damsel-in-distress into the Golden Age with an eclectic plot encompassing mystery, suspense, fake occultism and an impossible poisoning – which tempted me to place the book in the John Dickson Carr-Hake Talbot school of detective-fiction. However, the dark, grim and humorless tone made it inherently different from Carr's wondrous "Baghdad-on-the-Thames" stories or Talbot's delightfully, thrill-filled hair-raisers. So what made this menacing, claustrophobic and often unpleasant story a great, but unusual, read was its excellent story-telling and plotting.

Miss Majorie Easton is a twenty-year-old, junior shorthand typist earning a modest wage at the Brixton Cardboard Box Works and is engaged to be married to Ted Wainwright. A young, hardworking man expected to become a foreman in the press shop of Bilford Metal Furniture Company, but, until they can afford it, Majorie has to live with her "stingy louse" of an uncle, Samuel Burton.

During one of their arguments over money, Burton tells her its time to stand on her own two feet and find a job that has more to offer than a 26-shillings-a-week salary. Shortly after this confrontation, Majorie is approached in a tea shop by a curious-looking, yellow-faced man and his sister, Michael and Bella Crispin – who tell her she may possess a talent of which she had been unaware. And they offer her a well paying job as their research assistant. Michael and Bella Crispin are psychical researchers and have gathered a group around them, Immortality Circle, with whom they hold weekly séances at their home. The only strings attached is that Majorie has to live with the Crispins and be available to them at all times of the day.

Slowly, but surely, Majorie becomes a believer as "phosphorescent shapes" took "visible bodily form" before her eyes. She witnessed how "disembodied voices" gradually acquired "an ectoplasmic face" and had felt "the touch of spirit hands." Even the ghostly, disembodied voice of her dead mother spoke to her through Crispin. Majorie eventually begins to develop her own mediumistic abilities, but in the process she began "to become more isolated" and "withdrawn into herself." This severed all her ties to the outside world and isolated her from Ted.

I suppose the most experienced mystery readers probably has an inkling of what's going on in that house, but these events are only the preliminaries and the story becomes really interesting, as well as more complex, towards the end of the first half – when the séance room becomes the stage of an apparently impossible poisoning. Once Majorie stopped attending the séances, Ted infiltrates the circle under the name of George Robinson. At the end of one of these séances, an exhausted Crispin asks Ted to get him a glass of water from the little sink and tap in the corner of the room. Ted went to the sink and held a glass under the tap, rinsing it out once or twice, before filling it. Then he brought it to Crispin, but, as he sipped the water, yelled out "you devil" and accused Ted of having poisoned him. After this accusation, Crispin dropped to the ground, convulsed and died!

This is the point where the plot splits in two distinctively different, but closely intertwined, story-lines combining police detection with a stiff dose of dark suspense.

Detective-Inspector Charles Morgan is a meticulous, detail-oriented policeman who tackles the detection end of the plot and has to find an answer to a number of pressing questions. Such as how it was possible that "clear, unpoisoned water had flowed out of the tap," but when it reached Crispin it contained a large dose of strychnine. Why was a small bottle with traces of prussic acid found in Ted's pocket? What is the meaning behind the six queer things Morgan found in a locked drawer Where are Bella and Majorie? They disappeared around the time of the murder and Morgan's investigation is interspersed with scenes of Majorie being held captive, which gives the plot its Gothic resonance, but can't tell too much about this end of the story without giving anything away. However, I can say that the suspense part of the plot was very well written and handled.

Most surprisingly, Morgan's meticulous detective work and the technical nature of the impossible poisoning-trick in the séance room (largely) reminded me of John Rhode's plotting-style (c.f. Invisible Weapons, 1938), which the unimaginative, fact-based policeman solved by an unexpected hunch "without any basis in hard fact" – which he uncharacteristically followed with "a shamefaced feeling." Perhaps the only real hint of humor in the whole story. Only facet of the plot that let me down was the explanation for the titular six queer things. I had expected more from these items, but that's my only real complaint. And a very minor complaint at that.

So, all in all, The Six Queer Things is a suspensefully written, solidly crafted story of detection and suspense, dripping with sinister gloom, which successfully transplanted the anxious, Gothic-style damsel-in-distress to the genre's Golden Age. The Six Queer Things certainly is not your typical, traditionally-styled impossible crime novel, but turned to be a surprisingly good and rewarding read. One that has made look forward to the upcoming reprints. Definitely recommended.