The Fifth Tumbler (1936) by Clyde B. Clason

Clyde B. Clason was an American copywriter, trade magazine editor and author of ten once very popular, critically acclaimed Van Dinean detective novels about a mild mannered Roman historian turned amateur sleuth, Theocritus Lucius Westborough – blessed with "the instincts of a ferret and the brain of a Holmes." Clason certainly was one of the more sophisticated, literate writers to come out of the Van Dine-Queen School driven by a genuine curiosity and knowledge of art, culture and science. Despite his weighty name and occupation, Westborough never becomes a lecturing snob like Van Dine's Philo Vance or early period Ellery Queen.

More importantly, Clason was not an incompetent plotter with a healthy interest in locked room mysteries and impossible crimes. Seven of the ten Westborough mysteries count as impossible crime novels making Clason one of the leading locked room specialists of his day, right alongside John Dickson Carr and Clayton Rawson. Clason's best locked room mysteries are admittedly fairly minor affairs compared to the best locked room trickery from Carr or Rawson. They tend to be practical tricks and smaller parts of a bigger, more complicated plot overall, not the focal point, but Clason usually delivers a cleverly constructed, often fairly clued mysteries. Clason regrettably believed "his kind of book had gone out of fashion with the emphasis on blood-and-guts hardboiled fiction during the post-World War II period" and exited the genre in the early 1940s.

Clason and his ten Westborough novels fell into obscurity for decades. Only people who remembered them were collectors of vintage hardbacks, genre scholars and feverish impossible crime addicts looking for their next fix. So, yeah, there probably was a point somewhere in the late 1970s or early '80s when only Bill Pronzini knew about Clason. Yet, Clason was among the first wave of obscure, long-forgotten mystery writers to return to print when the Rue Morgue Press reprinted his now most well-known locked room mystery, The Man from Tibet (1938), in 1998 – which slowly snowballed into a reprint renaissance and revival. Along the way, Rue Morgue Press reissued all but two of Clason's Westborough mysteries before closing down in 2015. The Death Angel (1936), second title in the series, was one of the last reprints Rue Morgue Press published.

So only The Fifth Tumbler (1936) and The Whispering Ear (1938) missed out on getting reprinted that would have given us a complete, uniform set of reprints. No other publisher has picked up the series since 2015, until recently.

Chosho Publishing, an indy print-on-demand outfit, has reissued a modest selection of slightly overpriced of Golden Age detective novels over the past two, three years. I reviewed their reprint of Isabel Briggs Myers' Murder Yet to Come (1929/30) last year, but they also reprinted Clason's The Fifth Tumbler, The Man from Tibet, The Purple Parrot (1937), Murder Gone Minoan (1939) and Green Shiver (1941). Just be warned The Purple Parrot is the weak link in the series and Murder Gone Minoan too text book-y. I gladly took their reprint of The Fifth Tumbler to get one step closer to that complete set of reprints and crossing another, once rare, title off the locked room wishlist.

The Fifth Tumbler is Clason's debut as a mystery writer and introduces the genial, mild mannered history professor as one of about half a dozen guests in the west corridor, on the third floor, of the Equable Hotel in Chicago – where one of the guests dies under bizarre circumstances. Mr. Elmo Swink is not the most esteemed or popular hotel guests, referred to by various characters in the opening chapters as "that fat mug," "dirty hog" and generally considered to be a bit nasty, who's found lying doubled up in the doorway of his room. Swink died from inhaling a strong whiff of hydrocyanic gas delivered by a booby trap attached to the inside of the door. When the victim opened the door, a test tube dropped containing chemicals that would mix and release the poisonous gas. So the immediate question arising from this situation is how the murderer manage to rig up the booby trap when the door, connecting doors and windows were all locked and bolted on the inside. And the door to the hall is out, anyway, as it could been used without disturbing the booby trap or knocking down the tube ("just like one of the 'murder in a sealed room' things that you read about in detective stories").

This strange murder is officially investigated by Captain Terence O'Ryan and Lieutenant John Mack, but Westborough uses the name of his dead brother, Jim Westborough, to get to sit on the investigation as a quiet spectator. Apparently, Jim Westborough saved Mack's neck when he was framed in "as dirty a deal as was ever cooked up." Westborough gets to sit-in on the investigation and silently begins woolgathering from an armchair in the corner. Even though Mack believes "crimes aren't solved by a guy sitting around on his fanny and thinking about 'em," but simply by old-fashioned legwork to chase the facts. However, I think this division between the leg work done by the police and reasoning largely from an armchair by the amateur detective is the most attractive, well-done part of The Fifth Tumbler. I appreciated "From the Notebook of Theocritus Lucius Westborough" was included early in the story.

A thorough investigation narrows down the list of potential suspects down to the people along the west corridor of the third floor and an employee or two. Like the lovesick night clerk and chemistry student, Chris Larson. The lovely, currently unemployed stenographer, Yvonne Grant. A self-proclaimed broker named James Chilton. A commercial artist, Ronald Graham, who's staying at the hotel with his wife and son. An acid-tongued, gossip mongering hotel widow, Sarah Blakely, and a pair of questionable traveling salesmen, Fred Hammond and Ben Devon. So the problem is not a lack of suspects or even the booby trap method, but that there apparently is not "a motive worth a damn." That actually causes a problem with the solution, but I'll get back to the solution in a second.

The Fifth Tumbler is Clason's first stab at the detective story and firsts rarely translate into classics or practically unblemished gems in our genre. Clason's maiden effort is no exception. For one, it feels much more of an imitation of the Van Dinean detective story than some of the latter books, which mostly comes down to establishing an amateur detective/official police working relationship and the story almost entirely taking place at the crime scene – a staple of the early 1930s Van Dinean detective story. Very different from novels like Blind Drifts (1937), Poison Jasmine (1940) and Murder Gone Minoan. A second problem is that despite the ingenuity shown in setting up an original locked room situation and various promising plot-threads, the solutions are routine and lack imagination. Something the author admitted when Mack groaned upon hearing Westborough's explanation, "the oldest trick known to detective story writers." If this had been all, The Fifth Tumbler would have been pleasant, competently routine first stab, but Clason tried to go for an Agatha Christie-style rug pull. Well, it's kind of impressive to see a mystery writer pull the legs from underneath himself. That's a trick I hadn't seen before!

Not that it did the story any favors. The problem is the extremely well-hidden, vaguely clued motive. There are, technically, "clues" to the motive, but they're just not very helpful and motive really is the key to solution. So what should have been a "surprise twist" to explain an apparent "murder without a motive" simply falls flat. John Norris likened it in his 2011 review to a kangaroo popping out to thumb its nose at the stunned, silent and cheated reader. I found the solution to be both disappointing and somewhat of a cheat, but up until that point, I enjoyed the story that definitely had its moments. Like the gossipy Mrs. Blakely giving a stunned Mack an unexpected demonstration of her psychometric abilities (predictable solution, but fun) or the Van Dinean mini-lectures on a variety of subjects (e.g. chemistry and locks). Westborough interestingly compares the case to "the mechanism of a pin-tumbler lock" with four of his five tumblers (i.e. suspects) in place, but "an obstinate fifth prevents the lock from opening." However, the lock analogies demanded a better locked room-trick.

So the routine plot and clumsily-handled, bungled ending makes it impossible to recommend Clason's The Fifth Tumbler to anyone, except completists or connoisseurs of the obscure.

Note for the curious: because the important motive is so well-hidden, I got hold of a red herring I thought offered a simple and practical solution to the whole mess and a murderer tailor-made for the story. My entirely wrong armchair solution (ROT13) crttrq gur rk-cbyvprzna naq pheerag ubgry qrgrpgvir, Wreel Fcnatre, nf gur zheqrere, orpnhfr uvf cnfg nf n cbyvprzna pbhyq unir oebhtug uvz vagb pbagnpg jvgu Ryzb Fjvax – n pbazna naq cneg gvzr oynpxznvyre. Fb gurer pbhyq unir orra bccbeghavgl sbe oynpxznvy naq cebivqvat gur ubhfr qrgrpgvir jvgu n zbgvir sbe zheqre. Vg'f rnfvre sbe gur ubhfr qrgrpgvir gb trg ubyq bs cnff xrlf gb perngr n cngujnl gb gur ivpgvz'f ebbz guebhtu gur pbaarpgvat qbbef guna vg jbhyq or sbe bar bs gur thrfgf/bhgfvqref. Abg gur zbfg fcrpgnphyne be bevtvany fbyhgvba gb n qrgrpgvir fgbel, ohg qrprag rabhtu naq yvxrq gur vqrn bs gur ubhfr qrgrpgvir orvat gur svefg zheqrere Jrfgobebhtu pngpurf. Maybe I wouldn't cut as an Ellery Queen or Philo Vance, but I would make one hell of Simon Brimmer!

Death's Sober Lamplighter

"Deep in the forest hideaway,

the outlaws made their getaway.

From the sheriff and his men..."

- Opening theme from The Great Adventures of Robin Hood (1990-92)

Clyde B. Clason was arguably one of the brighter, more gifted pupils from the Van Dine-Queen School of Detection, who wrote ten novels between 1936 and 1941, which starred a genial, mild-mannered professor of history as the series character – namely Theocritus Lucius Westborough.

The books are penned in a literate, old-fashioned style without coming across as pretentious and are stamped with all the hallmarks of the Van Dine-Queen School.

First of all, there's an intelligent, well-educated amateur assisting the official police and they operate on a basis of mutual respect. Secondly, the cases often take place on the upper crust of society, where private collectors dwell, or have an industrial background – which provided Clason with more than enough material to put some meat on the bones of his plots to flavor them. 

The Man from Tibet (1938) and Dragon's Cave (1939) are notable examples of stories revolving around dead collectors and artifact-stuffed private "museums," while Blind Drifts (1937) and Poison Jasmine (1940) are interesting specimens of the industrial mystery novel. The latter is, in fact, excellent!

However, The Death Angel (1936) is a departure from rooms harboring privately owned collections and worlds of cutthroat commerce in favor of an English-style country house mystery.

Westborough has come to the estate of a personal friend, Arnold Bancroft, situated in southern Wisconsin and the place is aptly called "Rumpelstiltzken," because the dark woods surrounding the place reminds one "of a German fairy tale."

The plan of Westborough, author of a "ponderous eight-hundred-page tome" on Emperor Trajan, was a spot of relaxation as a guest of his friend, but the region is being disrupted by several events – such as an escaped convict roaming the area and local authorities being tied up in a grim, slowly escalating milk strike. What's about to happen at the estate are soon added to that list.

Bancroft has received several strange, threatening notes and shows one of them to Westborough. It has a few lines of "block capitals" that were "lettered in crayon" saying Bancroft has been cautioned and should now "beware my sting," which was signed "The Firefly." This note of warning is quickly followed by Bancroft's disappearance and the sound of a gunshot emanating from Bowen's Rock, which has a trail of bloody evidence suggesting someone got shot and was chugged into the river below. However, Bancroft isn't the only person who's missing from the house party. So who got shot and why?

Sheriff Art Bell is engaged with "crazy farmers" who "have burned two trucks," spilled "milk over the road from hell to breakfast" and even attempted "to blow up the bridge on the state highway" – showing French truck drivers how to do a strike properly.

The sheriff is short on manpower, resources and time, but is aware Westborough is the "fellow who straightened out those killings at Hotel Equable" and deputizes the professor to carry on the investigation in his absence. Occasionally popping back into the story when there are new developments.

Westborough has his fair share of clues and plot-threads to sift through, which include a bloody handprint, a missing motorboat, a purloined bow and arrows and a stolen saucepan – as well as sorting out alibis in combination with possible motives. This murder-without-a-body investigation absorbs a good half of the book, before other plot-threads begin to manifest itself.

The missing bow and arrows are used in an attempted murder by "a legendary, chimerical figure," a masked archer, "who had vanished in the forest like a phantom" and the firefly is leaving notes again.

But the best part of the plot commences when Westborough begins to extrapolate on the lightening bugs and poisonous mushrooms, which are the main ingredients of a double murder back at the estate – a crime in which the "odds” were “1,542 to 1 against" the victims "receiving all the poisonous mushrooms through chance and chance alone."

I've been arguing with myself if the overwhelming odds, in combination with the logical explanation, makes it qualify as an impossible crime novel, but I can't sway myself one way or the other.

The Death Angel could just as easily be labeled a (semi-) impossible crime as well as a calculated, but botched, attempt at a perfect murder. I decided to tag it as a "locked room mystery" just for the hell of it.

Well, either way, it's was a clever, involved method providing the book with unusual ending concerning the revelation of the murderer and nicely dovetailed with the previous plot-threads – out of which this one arose naturally. Even though, Clason felt compelled to warn his readers that "such complications" arising from multiple, interwoven plots "seem beyond all bounds of credulity." I really thought it fitted nicely together as well as drawing my attention away from the murderer and was completely out of my depth in explaining the odds, which can be as fun as hitting the bulls-eye.

So, yes, I quite enjoyed The Death Angel and just noticed there are only two left in the series to read, which kind of blows. If you haven't had read Clason yet, I'd recommend picking up the previously mentioned The Man from Tibet or Poison Jasmine.

The New Zealand Bird Mystery

"A man will turn over half a library to make one book."

- Samuel Johnson

Contrary to the usual modus operandi of Clyde B. Clason, The Purple Parrot (1937), fourth in the series featuring the meek little professor Theocritus Lucius Westborough, was written from the perspective of one of the characters, Barry Foster, a lawyer who's hopelessly in love with the ward of one of his clients – a rich and influential book collector named Hezekiah Morse.

Morse has hand picked a suitor for his granddaughter Sylvia, a personal friend and next door neighbor, Thomas Vail, and has drawn up a will that effectively disinherits her if she dares to marry anyone else except for a paltry statuette of a purple parrot from New Zealand.

As one of Morse's lawyers, Foster is more than aware of this new development and has decided to confront him, but someone beat him to it and stuck a knife in the old bibliophile! What's worse, all of the evidence seems to be pointing an accusing finger at Sylvia. Morse was stabbed in his study/library and one of the doors was locked from the inside and Sylvia was in the adjoining room holding the only unlocked door under constant observation, but no one was seen either entering or leaving the room (and premise) since their arrival. She also has plenty of motives for wanting her grandfather out of the way.

Luckily, Lt. Johnny Mack, "a bluff, old-school Chicago police detective," owed a favor to that quiet professor of Roman history, Westborough, and gave him permission to follow him around during his next assignment – and he's not convinced of Sylvia's guilt and attaches great importance to the missing statuette of the bird. But why would anyone kill in order to obtain something that isn't even worth the trouble of stealing in the first place? Westborough has a lot of woolgathering to do before he can even begin to disentangle a plot involving, among other threads, a bootlegger and a well stocked wine cellar, a library filled with rare editions and how the psychology of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter" fits in with the ancient tomes stored on its shelves and the life-saving role of Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755).

Clason was a writer from the Van Dine-Queen School and his work is exemplary for this school, but The Purple Parrot felt as the most Van Dine-like of his books (The Parrot Murder Case!). Here Westborough isn't visiting an estate to make a discreet enquiry into the disappearance of a jade figurine of a Taoist goddess or descending into a Colorado goldmine as one of the shareholders, but here he plays the Philo Vance to Mack's Markham and with Morse's residence (with its private library full of rare, first editions) as the center of all the action – it really helped establish that Van Dinean feeling. Minus the annoying presence of Vance, but with the insightful tidbits of information and lectures! The part were the police were analyzing the pool of blood and compared it with the witness statement, in order to determine a more exact time of death, was especially interesting and gives the reader a peek through a window in time showing forensic science before the DNA/digital era.

That's why I don't get the solution. I mean, I understand who stabbed Hezekiah Morse, and all that, but not why Clason opted for an explanation that effectively turned an intelligently written story into a gaudy parody of a shilling shocker. This book was published in 1937! What was Clason attempting to do here? By all accounts, Clason was an intelligent man and I refuse to believe that this was his idea of a "spoof" or a "least-likely-suspect"-scenario. I'm even more baffled that it came as a follow-up to a far more convincing solution, and Clason knew it was good, because he retooled it for one of his later novels. Maybe it was challenge to make this particular scenario as convincing as possible or perhaps we're all missing the punch-line of a now long forgotten inside joke.

All in all, I would still recommend The Purple Parrot to fans of the series, but I advice readers new to Clason and Westborough to start off with The Man from Tibet (1938) or Poison Jasmine (1940). The wonderful Rue Morgue Press has made most of Clason’s work available again.

Speaking of the Rue Morgue Press, they haven't updated their website since 2011 (?), but new books were still being published until September of last year. And then it just stopped. I'm aware that this is my own interest speaking, but I hope Tom Schantz will continue to save out-of-print detective stories from biblioblivion for me us to read. They introduced me to Craig Rice, Stuart Palmer, Glyn Carr, Clyde Clason, Torrey Chanslor, and one of my all-time favorites, Kelley Roos. They made collecting Gladys Mitchell actually look easy and inexpensive! We simply can't afford to lose the Rue Morgue Press! Of course, we also genuinely care, but let's face the facts, we're addicts and we need our regular fix! ;)

On a final note, Less Blatt also reviewed The Purple Parrot in one of his weekly audio reviews. 

Mine Your Own Business

"A box without hinges, key or lid; yet a golden treasure inside is hid."

- J.R.R. Tolkien

The elderly, gentle minded professor Theocritus Lucius Westborough, a scholar whose expertise encompasses the Roman Empire, was the brainchild of mystery author Clyde B. Clason who produced ten detective novels during the mid 1930s-and early 40s.

Clason belongs to the Van Dine-Queen School of Detection and was clearly influenced by its members, from stories centering on collectors with private museums stuffed with artifacts from erstwhile civilizations (e.g. The Man from Tibet, 1939) to taking a murder tour in a business enterprise or institution like perfume manufactures (e.g. Poison Jasmine, 1940), but more importantly, they were cleverly crafted and minutely analyzed mysteries. Sad to say, Clason's insistency to hang on to that particular branch of crime fiction also meant that, once the sex and violence school of Mickey Spillane began to pick up momentum, he felt there was no longer a place for the cerebral detective of yesteryear and never wrote a follow-up to Green Shiver (1941) – which thus became Professor Westborough's last (recorded) case.

However, Clason left us with a small, but memorable, body of work and a notable one for connoisseurs of miracle problems, because more than half of them contain a variation on the impossible crime. Granted, they're not exactly spectacular illusions that are pulled off with the routine of a Las Vegas stage magician, but simple, workable (and convincing) gimmicks that are cogs in the machine of the overall plot. Clason is one of those writers you can get an overall enjoyment from: stories as intelligently written as they are plotted and populated with interesting characters that move around in specialized fields.

For his third outing, Blind Drifts (1937), Clason took a shot at explaining how someone could be hit with a bullet fired from a non-existent gun in front of seven witnesses in a mineshaft at a depth greater than the height of the Empire State Building and to do so he dispatches Westborough from Chicago to Colorado as one of the shareholders of the Virgin Queen Gold Mine – inherited from his late brother. Barely out of the plane, the mild-mannered professor is thrust into a feud between Mrs. Edmonds, major stockholder, and Jeff LaRue, owner of the neighboring Buenaventure Mine, who wants to lease the Virgin Queen. This also gives Clason an opportunity to illuminate his readers on the inner workings of a gold mining company.  

As Westborough takes a few days to inform himself, he also looks into a local mystery that may have ties to his current predicament, a department store owner and a Virgin Queen director, George Villars, disappeared without a trace, but it's the ongoing dispute between Edmonds and LaRue that ends up providing the main puzzle for the mild-mannered professor. Instigated by the suspicious mind of Cornalue Edmonds, they descend into the belly of the Virgin Queen, where, inside one of the blind drifts and in front of a number of witnesses, Edmonds is felled with a bullet, severely injuring her, and a smoking gun fails to turn up in the subsequent search.

It's the side-puzzle of the dissolved gun that contributes the most satisfying portion of the overall solution, simple and therefore convincing, but the remainder of Westborough's problems, including a pair of successful murders, are marred by a convoluted explanation. I love ingenious, complexly woven plots that consist of multiple layers, but juggling with timetables and travel schedules just doesn't do it for me.  

All in all, Blind Drifts is a solid, but not the highest rated, entry in this, altogether too short, series and will be appreciated by both fans of Westborough and puzzle-oriented mysteries.

Clason's work is fairly obscure and older editions of his books come with a hefty price-tag attached to them, however, the Rue Morgue Press has reissued a seven of his ten books and Blind Drifts is their latest offering.