The Ghost of Athelstan

"School seems in a bit of a mess."

- Carolus Deene (Leo Bruce's Death at St. Asprey's School, 1967)

Last week, I posted a review of Gladys Mitchell's The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935) and was helped in the comment-section by the editor of Sleuth's Alchemy: Cases of Mrs. Bradley and Others (2005), Nick Fuller, with picking my next read in this series by going through the titles residing on my to-be-read pile – starting with a dozen possibilities and ended with two candidates. My choices had boiled down to either The Longer Bodies (1930) and Laurels Are Poison (1942).

I decided to go with the latter as it was a personal favorite of Mitchell, who drew on her own, "fondly evoked," memories of attending a teacher's trainer college for the story's setting. The result is a mystery novel "filled with high-spirited dialogue" and "camaraderie," written around an unusual plot, which was eerily bizarre and weirdly humorous. And the book introduced several characters who'll make regular appearances in subsequent novels (e.g. The Worsted Viper, 1943). One of them even becomes an occasional stand-in for Mrs. Bradley, but more about that later.

Laurels Are Poison is not an unimportant milepost in the series history and the plot, with some minor qualifications, delivers on the promise made by its reputation.

The story casts Mrs. Bradley, often referred here to as Mrs. Croc, in the role of Warden of Athelstan Hall, Cartaret College, where her presence had been requested by the Principal, Miss Du Mugne, who desired a discreet inquiry from the famous psycho-analyst and criminologist – concerning the disappearance of the previous Warden. Miss Munchan was taken ill at the College End of Term Dance, but not "the slightest trace" has "come to light" of her whereabouts in the ten weeks that have since passed. There's a reason to believe something serious might have happened to the previous Warden.

Miss Munchan had been a biology teacher at Cuddy Bay's County Secondary School for Girls and "a child was killed in the school gymnasium," briefly before she took her leave, but the death was officially ruled to be an accident and the school was exonerated from all blame – which the girl's grandfather refused to accept. And had to be temporarily hospitalized in a mental asylum. Only a month after the inquest the police received a letter, written in Miss Munchan's name, suggesting she wanted to come clean about the death of the girl. However, when the police questioned her she denied all knowledge of the letter and vacated her teaching position.

So Mrs. Bradley has a lead to work on when she arrives at the teacher's training college, but her attention is initially occupied by a rash of jokes, rags and some outright malicious pranks plaguing the college dorms.

During a math lesson, a cabinet in the classroom burst open and "a couple of assorted vipers" spilled out, which created quite a sensation, but the pranks got progressively worst. A bath was allowed to overflow and a thick piece of string had been dangerously stretched across the floor. The clothes of two poor sisters, whose family had sacrificed in order to get them to college, were torn to shreds and the hair of another girl was cut short as she slept. One night, the peace was disturbed by an chilling, unearthly noice, which was ascribed to "the ghost of Athelstan." All of this culminates in the violent death of the college cook, Mrs. Castle, whose lifeless body was dragged by the police from a nearby river.

Mrs. Bradley has a lot to deal with in this case and early on in the book took the new Sub-Warden of Athelstan Hall, Deborah Hall, took into her confidence. She looks favorably upon the young woman, like "a benevolent snake," and plays cupid by engineering a meeting between Deborah and her nephew, Jonathan, who are engaged by the end of the book – who return, as a married couple, in My Father Sleeps (1944), The Croaking Raven (1966) and Lovers, Make Moan (1981).

And then there are the three plucky students, Alice Boorman, Kitty Trevelyan and Laura Menzies, who refer to themselves as the Three Musketeers. They would appear together in the previously mentioned The Worsted Viper and Death and the Maiden (1947), but Laura became Mrs. Bradley secretary and reportedly took center-stage in some of the middle-period novels (when Mrs. Bradley became Dame Beatrice). Those three are primarily responsible for the high-spirited, energetic tone of the story and even do some (unintentional) detection (e.g. when they fished the victim's corset from the river). However, their presence also had two noticeable drawbacks.

One of them is that they were, partially, used as a vehicle for Mitchell to indulge in a stroll down memory lane. It's true that the rags and pranks were an important cog in the machine of the plot, but, until the cook was murdered halfway through, the story felt like Mitchell was taking the time to enjoy the setting of the teacher's college. Or to put it more accurately, the plot often felt like it was a pace or two behind the spirited story-telling. Secondly, I knew that Deborah, Laura, Alice and Kitty would become (semi) regular characters in the series and this practically dried up the entire pool of potential suspects. Those girls really usurped the character-department of the book.

So it's to Mitchell's credit that the revelation of the murderer's identity was both memorable and did not disappoint, but, out of necessity, this person had to be mentally unbalanced in order to explain some of the inexplicable actions that drove the plot – such as the whole rigmarole with the college skeleton or throwing the corset into the river. A slightly more sane murderer would probably have acted very differently.

Overall, Laurels Are Poison might not be the best entry in the Mrs. Bradley series, but the story is told with zest and gusto, which served perfectly as an introduction to a host of new characters and a new phase in the series. On top of that, the solution to the case, although not entirely perfect, is memorable and better put together than the explanations found in some of the subsequent novels (e.g. The Rising of the Moon, 1945). So the book did not leave me disappointed.

The Body in the Library

"Surely a collection of old books is harmless enough?"

- Bobby Owen (E.R. Punshon's Comes a Stranger, 1938)

Jill Paton Walsh is a British novelist, who began her career as an author of children's fiction, but during the early 1990s she turned her eye to detective stories and her first, tentative steps in the genre were shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award – which was an auspicious beginning. However, Paton garnered most of her fame, as a mystery novelist, when she was tapped by the estate of Dorothy L. Sayers to complete her unfinished Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Thrones, Dominations (1998). She has since then penned three additional books based on the characters created by the Queen of the Literary Detective Novel.

As a purist snob, I tend to curl my upper lip in absolute disgust at the mere idea of pastiches. I share Rex Stout's sentiment when he said that writers should "roll their own," but there are a few, rare exceptions that even I found impossible to condemn, because they actually respected and did justice to the original – one of these exceptions to the rule was Walsh's Thrones, Dominations.

Walsh's commentary on the completion of the unfinished manuscript showed the kind of respect you should expect from a writer handling someone else's creations. She mentioned that "the fragmented notes made it clear who the murderer was," but felt tempted to "invert her scheme" and make "the victim top the murderer." But it was Sayers' book and therefore Walsh followed her pattern, which is what made Thrones, Dominations and A Presumption of Death (2002) such pleasant reads.

So the remaining titles in this continuation of the Lord Peter Wimsey series, The Attenbury Emeralds (2010) and The Late Scholar (2013), were jotted down on my never-ending wishlist years ago, but also wanted to sample some of Walsh's own crime-fiction. I actually collected all but one of them over the years and dumped them on the big pile. It was kind of time I finally took a look at one of them.

The Wyndham Case (1993) is the first of four novels about Walsh's own series-character, Imogen Quy, a college nurse attached to the fictional St. Agatha's College, Cambridge. My reason for picking this particular title is that I had seen it billed as a locked room mystery, but that turned out not to be the case. However, it was still a good detective novel in the tradition of such (lesser-known) literary Crime Queens as Dorothy Bowers, Joanna Cannan and Elizabeth Gill.

The story begins with Walsh's heroine, Nurse Quy, being dragged by the Master to the Wyndham Library where the body of Philip Skellow, a history student with a scholarship, was found spread-eagled beneath the famous "Wyndham Case" - a ginormous, "two-storey bookcase of ancient oak" with "a little gallery running along it."

Wyndham Library was bequeathed to the college by a seventeenth century occultist, Christopher Wyndham, who was a "passionate opponent of Sir Isaac Newton," but the Wyndham Bequest came with a series of conditions that proved to troublesome as the time went on.

A permanent, overpaid library keeper was to be appointed and his only task was to make sure no books were taken out, or added to the collection, which consisted of books dealing with such obscure and rejected ideas that they were only of interest for "their splendid binding" or the insight they offered on "the history of typography" - which means they were "reverently inspected, but never read." Wyndham also designed the special lock on the door and only two people were supposed to be in possession of the keys: the library keeper and an (unknown) auditor. One every century, on an unknown date, the college is visited by an auditor to inspect the library. So a lot of trouble to simply become the custodians of a burdensome collection of ancient, yellowing tomes without any appear to scholars, but the college was in financial dire straits in 1692 and could not afford to turn the bequest down.

All of the conditions Wyndham placed on the college was the first domino stone to fall in a long series of events that resulted in several deaths, but I'll return to that aspect of the plot later on in the review.

First of all, there's the police investigation and Quy finds herself working on the inside of the college to help her policeman friend, Mike Parsons, with clearing up the numerous questions surrounding the death of the young student. One of them is what Philip was doing in the library, after dark, and how he obtained access to the vault-like room, but there's also the inexplicable pool of wet blood around the head of the stiffened body – as he was not a haemophiliac. Quy is the kept the busiest with sorting out the mess of Philip's college life. Philip was "a grammar-school boy," with poor parents, who was not very popular with his more well-to-do peers, such as his roommate, but lately, he had ready cash to spend. Who did he get the money? Why did his roommate, Jack Taversham, suddenly disappear? And how is all of this related to the drowning of a medic student in the fountain pool?

What impressed me the most about all of the plot-threads is not only how tightly they're interwoven with one another, but how they're depended upon one another to have played out in the way they did. It's like one, long row of falling domino stones that began in the late 1600s and if one thing had gone differently nobody would have died.

If the Wyndham Bequest had not such idiotic, strenuous conditions the subsequent tragedies would simply not have happened. If the Domestic Bursar of St. Agatha's College had assigned Philip and Jack to different rooms, the former probably would not have died on the cold floor of the library. If Philip had not planned an Easter holiday in Kashmir or forgot his appointment with Quy to get holiday inoculations he would certainly not have died (etc, etc, etc).

It's one of the best examples of the Merrivalean "blinkin' awful cussedness of things in general" at work, which is a lovely way to structure a plot, but it should be pointed out that the actual clues are rather thinly spread around – which might be a problem for an armchair detective. There is, however, an important clue hidden early on in the story that should tell you what Philip was doing in the library and how he got pass the locked door, but, as you probably guessed from this blog-post, that's only a minor part of the overall plot. So you have to keep that in mind when you pick up The Wyndham Case.

All in all, The Wyndham Case is a well-written mystery novel, like a modern Crime Queen, with a tricky plot structure that's as unusual as it satisfying, but not one that really lends itself to the reader who wants to play armchair detective. Once again, you have to keep that in mind. However, in spite of this minor reserve, The Wyndham Case is light-years ahead, in overall quality, of pretty much 99% of what has been published since the 1960s under the banner of crime-and detective fiction. I can specifically recommend the book to readers who love the Golden Age Crime Queens and their followers.

Finally, the next blog-post will probably be a review of a locked room novel, but I'm torn between two options. One of them is a writer from the seventies and eighties who penned three locked room mysteries and the other one is an obscure Dutch novel from the early 2000s with a very unusual impossible situation. Ah, luxury problems!

The Collegian Bodies

"Sometimes you learn something you don't know is important until, when it fits in with everything else, it turns out to be the key piece of the puzzle."

- Ed Baer (Herbert Resnicow's The Dead Room, 1987) 

A month ago, I posted a review of Clifford Orr's second and last published mystery novel, The Wailing Rock Murders (1932), once a rare and highly collectible item, but has since been reissued by Coachwhip as a twofer edition alongside his genre debut – a college-set detective story entitled The Dartmouth Murders (1929). I did not want to wait too long with eliminating this two-in-one volume from the Big Pile. So here's the blog-post that’ll complete my overview of Orr's short-lived stint as a mystery novelist.  

The Dartmouth Murders was published in the same year as Ellery Queen's prize-winning debut novel, The Roman Hat Mystery (1929), which introduced the eponymous series-character of Ellery Queen and his policeman father, Inspector Richard Queen of the New York Police Department. A remarkable coincidence for a number of reasons. 

First of all, The Dartmouth Murders also had a father and son poking around in a murder case in a semi-official capacity. Secondly, the father from Orr's novel, Joe Harris, is an amateur criminologist who authored several "so-called detective stories," which happens to be a pretty apt description of Ellery Queen – especially of his early incarnation from the international series. Finally, the victims from both books were missing a particular article of clothing: one of them was found in a theatre without his top hat, while the other had last been seen wearing a stripped pajama, but was found clad in a blue, rain-slicked pajama. So it was quite a coincidence these books were rolling off the press around roughly the same time (give or take a few months).

I was also surprised how few father-and-son detective teams followed in footsteps of the Queens and the Harrises. I'm sure there are a few of them, but I can honestly think of only two examples: Porterfield and Andy Adams from Robert Arthur's marvelous "The Mystery of the Three Blind Mice," which can be found in Alfred Hitchcock's Solve-Them-Yourself Mysteries (1963) and Mystery and More Mystery (1966). And then there are Ed and Warren Baer from Herbert Resnicow's The Dead Room (1987) and The Hot Place (1990).

So far my shallow observations about the similarities between these two mysteries and now that I cut through all of the extraneous stuff, lets finally take a jab at the book itself. 

The Dartmouth Murders is told from the perspective of its main character, Kenneth "Ken" Harris, who is called away by his father from a fall house party on campus with the request to fetch from a hotel so he can spend the weekend with him – which takes a lot longer than planned. When he finally returned to the dormitory, "the clock on Dartmouth Hall was just striking three across the campus," he found the door to the dorm room he shared with his best friend locked and deadly silent. Nobody answered his knocking. So he decided to crash in Charlie Penlon's room on the floor below, but his sleep is repeatedly disturbed by the sound of dull thuds against the window. 

Kenneth finally ran up the window shade and saw the thumping came from two bare feet: the body of his best friend and roommate, Byron Coates, was hanging by his neck from the rope fire-escape that had been tossed out of their window. Back in those days, the fire escape could be a thick, stout piece of rope you had to slide down from in case of a house fire, but the rope is the first indication that Byron was murdered. A rope the size of the fire escape, "which must be large enough for a hand grip," is unfit for hanging and the bruises under the rope suggest Byron "was dead before it was even tied around his blessed neck." The final piece of evidence is a very peculiar murder weapon that is found inside his body during the post-mortem examination. An "instrument of death" that's used almost immediately after the first murder when a student suddenly drops dead in the college chapel during a service. 

The second death in the chapel came very close to being an impossible crime, but Orr never went the full distance with it. However, the method he employed did anticipate one of John Dickson Carr's earlier Sir Henry Merrivale novels, published as by "Carter Dickson," which demonstrated how this strange murder weapon could be used to stage a full-fledged impossible crime – which makes for an interesting link between both authors. However, the subsequent investigation is a bit of a hit and a miss for various reasons. 

Joe Harris practically takes over the entire investigation from the local sheriff, Ad Barker, who refuses to play the role of "the blundering up-county constable" that populate detective fiction and eagerly cooperates with the criminologist. This effectively gives Joe and Kenneth a free hand to act as they wish, which leads to some unusual developments: a "ghost" who looked like one of the victim was seen fleeing the chapel and Kenneth slowly begins to suspect that his father might be personally involved in the case. Why else would there be a photograph of his father in the picture album of the Coates family? 

All of these developments and Orr's ability to spin a good yarn keeps the reader engaged, but the plot begins to shake and rattle as the final chapter begins to loom on the horizon. 

The truth behind the college murders is firmly rooted in Byron's muddled family history. A history he learned about in a missing letter he received from his mother on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, which contained the motive for his murder, but you can hardly work out the (full) identity of the murderer from all of this information – even when you finally learn the content of the letter. I actually suspected the local inn keeper, because his personal ties to one of the students gave him a motive-by-proxy, but the eventual solution was an even less inspired play on the least-likely-suspect gambit. So that aspect of the plot left something to be desired. Still, I found it to be a well-written detective novel and loved the journey to that final chapter.

So, all in all, The Dartmouth Murders is a dark, moody tale of murder and hidden motives, which is noteworthy for being one of the first college-set mysteries, but plot-wise, the book is standard fare for the period. I agree with Curt Evans, who wrote an introduction for this twofer edition, that Orr's second detective novel, The Wailing Rock Murders, is "an altogether more original work."

A Chimerical Impossibility

"One of the most extraordinary cases Ellery has ever investigated. The newspaper called it "The Case of the Wounded Tyrolean;" more specific identification may not be given here. It is one of the few problems, to my knowledge, which stalemated Ellery; and it is still an unsolved crime."

- J. McC. (Ellery Queen's The Spanish Cape Mystery, 1935)

Last month, I wrote a blog-post, headed "The Locked Room Reader IV: The Lazy Anthologist," that used a line from an essay by Donald A. Yates, titled "The Locked Room: An Ancient Device of the Story-Teller, But Not Dead Yet," which attracted the attention of our resident archivist, Mike Gray – who can be found blogging at Ontos. This resulted in a compilation post with links to the essay, articles, blog-posts, a short video-clip and a short story by Yates.

Yates' short story, "The Wounded Tyrolean," began as a Watsonian reference in Ellery Queen's The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935), which was meant as a nod and a wink at the unrecorded cases noted by Dr. Watson in the official Sherlock Holmes canon. As Ellery Queen observed, Dr. Watson's allusions have "sent Sherlockians screaming into the night hunting for the reference source and finding only a ghostly chuckle," but the consequence of these tantalizing allusions is that people began to write their own Sherlock Holmes stories – which has grown into a sub-genre of its own. The mountain of Holmesian pastiches, parodies and semi-official sequels dwarfs the number of original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

So it was only to be expected that Ellery Queen's oblique reference to "The Case of the Wounded Tyrolean" would result in at least one write-up.

According to this blog-post, Yates wrote "The Wounded Tyrolean" during the early fifties and at the time he was "trying repeatedly to write a story" that "he [Fred Dannay] would accept for EQMM." One of the editors, Mildred Falk, suggested writing a story that could carry the title "The Wounded Tyrolean" and "be so perplexing that even Ellery himself had not been able to solve it." Yates picked up the gauntlet and decided to turn his hand to the classic locked room mystery, determined "to come up with a new solution that had never been devised before," but the fruit of his labor was rejected by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and only a Spanish translation of the story made into print – appearing in the Argentine magazine Leoplán in July of 1955. Fifty-seven years after being published in Argentina, the story appeared in English in the Fall 2012 issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review, published in Ann Arbor, the "very setting where the action of the baffling locked-room murder had been situated." So, let's take a look at the story.

The Austrian-born Professor Behring of the Middleton University physics department is "The Wounded Tyrolean," whose "characteristic limp was the consequence of a leg wound he had suffered in the First World War," but the "indelible figure" of the old professor was cruelly snatched away from the campus-town – stabbed to death in his study. There was a sense of the unreal clinging to the circumstances of the crime, because, from all perceivable angles, it seems like an impossible murder.

Donald A. Yates

Professor Behring had scheduled an appointment with Dr. Gaines and Wenley, the College President, but nobody appeared to be home and when they entered the premise found that only the study door was locked. Dr. Gained and Wenley forced open the door and discovered the body of the professor in the middle of the room, "the handle of a kitchen knife protruding from his back," but they found nobody else inside the windowless room, which had walls lined with bookshelves. The only door was locked from the inside and the modest furnishings, a desk and some chairs, offered no hiding place for the killer.

The rundown of these facts showed a missed opportunity for a false solution and one that would have been as classic as the locked room problem itself, which would have been very similar to such short stories as Agatha Christie's "The Idol House of Astarte" (The Thirteen Problems, 1932) and Peter Godfrey's "The Flung-Back Lit" (The Newtonian Egg, 2002). Essentially, it would have been a play on the "replacement of space-and time" illusion and this trick would have fitted the given facts, but Yates deserves some points for trying to come up with an explanation that was a little bit different.

A bright senior and editor of the student newspaper, John Rossiter, eventually stumbled to the truth "through a feat of inspired logic," but "never revealed the solution to a soul." I think the best part of the plot is explaining how someone like Ellery Queen could have failed to reach the correct answer. I can easily imagine Queen would've read about the case and came to the campus-town to investigate it himself, but by that time, Rossiter had already swept the whole affair under the rug and the tell-tale clues expunged – which makes it very difficult for even the best logicians to reach a sensible and rational conclusion.

With that being said, the locked room facet of the plot under-performed to the who-and why, which were far better imagined and linked than how the trick was pulled off. The locked room was pretty incidental to the whole thing. Not to mention borderline insane and extremely risky. If it weren't for the high concentration of spoilers, I would probably slap together a re-imagining of this plot, because I see an alternative explanation for the locked room that would've served the purpose of the guilty party a whole lot better.

Regardless, "The Wounded Tyrolean" is a good and laudable attempt at an original locked room story by a then still young and ardent mystery enthusiast, which, arguably, required some polishing. But you can read and judge the story for yourself by clicking here.

The Bludgeoning Method

"One dumb-bell, Watson! Consider an athlete with one dumb-bell. Picture to yourself the unilateral development—the imminent danger of a spinal curvature. Shocking, Watson; shocking!"

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear, 1915)

From the very first paragraph, Case with Ropes and Rings (1940) plunges diligently in what readers have come to expect from Leo Bruce and Sgt. Beef: a high spirited, but intelligent, tongue-in-cheek treatment of the detective story, while obliterating the fourth wall.

"This isn't a love story... it's a detective novel," is one of the clues that Beef is more than aware of his status as a fictional character, but his long-suffering and under appreciated chronicler, Lionel Townsend, has become anxious about his job – as three months has passed since they had a case and Beef is starting to enquire about the book rights.

A headline in the Daily Dose finally spurs Beef into action. Lord Alan Foulkes, second son of the Marquess of Edenbridge, who was being educated at the prestigious Penhurst School, was found hanging from a beam in the gymnasium on the morning after having won the School Heavyweight Boxing Championship. Coincidently, Townsend has a brother, Vincent, who teaches at Penhurst, but they've never been particular close and Lionel has to absorb some backhanded abuse over the course of the investigation. Like when his brother suggested that Beef should've approached someone with a genuine gift for writing prose, such as Aldous Huxley, which gave Beef a swelled ego.

The first part of Case with Ropes and Rings follows Beef and Townsend around Penhurst, as the former (poorly) pretends to be the temporary School Porter, but the "bludgeoning method" of Beef doesn't make it easy on the formal-minded Townsend – and neither do the students give him a break. I particularly liked the scene with the boy asking "Ticks," which is his nickname for Townsend, if they are still on the old game and follows it up with:

"The detective racket... you're both nosing round after someone to pin a crime on, aren't you? God, how that sort of thing bores me! All these fearful women writers and people like you, working out dreary crimes for half-wits to read about. Doesn't it strike you as degrading?"

Well, I never! And as Townsend said, "one can scarcely expect schoolboys to appreciate the subtlety and depth of modern detective fiction" and one has "only to quite the name of Miss Sayers to remind you of what this genre has already produced." This all sounds perhaps more fun than it is, but there's a well thought out, expertly knotted plot at the heart of the story and an abundance of suspects that are being questioned – which gives room to the reader for a spot of theory building.

The second portion of the plot deals with an identical death in Camden Town gymnasium and the background stands in stark contrast with the supposed suicide of Alan in a prestigious bastion of knowledge and education. A young and professional boxer, Stanley Beecher, was found swinging from the rafters, but it has handled as a homicide as the case is surrounded with all the "paraphernalia of low life" – from criminal associates to ties to Spanish Nationalists and the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War.

It's an unlikely combination of characters, events and background to produce two identical deaths, but Bruce, evidently, knew his way around a plot and brings everything together coherently. I'd place Case with Ropes and Rings alongside the best in this series, which includes Case for Three Detectives (1936) and Case for Sergeant Beef (1947). Needless to say, I quite enjoyed this one.

Bruce was a mystery reader's mystery writer and you'll probably enjoy the Sgt. Beef novels the most, if you have more than a passing acquaintance with the Golden Age detective story. Bruce is the kind of mystery writer you grab when you've come to the starling realization that you've gone through every Agatha Christie novel, while burning through the remaining Crime Queens like an inquisitor in a medieval witch hunt, and your supply of yet to be read mysteries by John Dickson Carr and Nicholas Blake are dwindling. That's the excuse moment, you can start adding Leo Bruce to your wish lists and TBR piles.

Finally, the opening was quote was the only sports-related mystery quote I could think of/find.

The Final Snarl

"Inquisitive and presumptuous. I do not deny it. But I am a private detective. I am paid to be inquisitive and presumptuous. Not as often or copiously as I would wish, but I am nevertheless inquisitive and presumptuous on a professional basis."

- Dirk Gently (Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, 1987) 

Norbert Davis' Oh, Murderer Mine (1946) is the last hurrah for the unlikely tandem of Carstairs and Doan, but the page-count, 120 odd pages, makes it more of a novella like "Holocaust House," published as a serial by Argosy in 1940, than a novel such as Sally's in the Alley (1943). However, Davis knew how to properly jam-pack those pages, but his series detectives deserved a grander exit.

Doan is a short, chubby private-eye of the half drunk, shabby variety and Carstairs, a fawn-colored Great Dane, has never been able to reconcile himself with the fact that he's owned by a human of such low stock. I have mentioned in my review of The Mouse in the Mountain (1943) that Carstairs' intelligence gives the series a slight nod in the direction of SF/Fantasy territory, but it made the interaction between Carstairs/Doan possible and that is what's most attractive about these stories – even in the face of a weaker plot.

In Oh, Murderer Mine, Doan is hired by "Heloise of Hollywood," whose cosmetic products smear the entire upper crust of Western society, to keep a short leash on her 26-year-old husband, Eric Trent – commercialized in Heloise's ads as "Handsome Lover Boy." Professionally, Trent is a meteorologist and has taken up residents at Breckenbridge University, which means Melissa Gregory (an anthropology instructor) had to give up her office and perhaps even her apartment on the campus ground. I was surprised at this point to find the story shaping up to be college-type mystery, albeit an offbeat one, but than the nightly intrusion happened and were suddenly back in the zany, hardboiled wonderland of Norbert Davis.

The intruder clobbers a screaming Melissa to the floor and fires shots at his pursuers, Carstairs and Doan, who fail to nap the thief red handed. And then thing get complicated for them. They may have failed to find the intruder, but they did find another victim. However, Frank Ames, English Professor at Breckbridge, was less fortunate than Melissa: his throat was cut and the body stuffed inside a trashcan.

Oh, Murderer Mine has been widely pegged as the weakest of the three books and I agree, plot-wise, but (for me) it’s the same story as with Rex Stout. It's one of those rare series I read for the characters rather than a clever plotting and there were one or two supporting characters that played well off the main protagonists. There's deputy Humphrey, whom impressed me as a deliberate, overdrawn parody of the stereotypical dumb, aggressive police cops from the pulps – 'cause seeing Doan is enough to put him in irons and hurl accusations at him. Humphrey positively gloats and rubs his hands at the prospect of "a chance to peek" at Doan "in the gas chamber," which is about as friendly a gesture as scrawling "I Can Only Tolerate You For So Long" on a brochure for a funeral parlor and shoving it in a lovely decorated Valentine's envelope. A far more pleasant characters, and parody, emerges later on when one of suspects reveals himself as somewhat of a Great Detective working incognito. I liked this character and wished Davis had done more with them as rival detectives, alas, this was to be the last novel in the series.

There's a definite decline in quality here, but the weakness of Oh, Murderer Mine lay mainly in the overly complicated, twisted explanation that felt too heavy for the light, semi-hardboiled comedy mystery that preceded it – dragging the rest of the story down with it. The solution even revealed a complicated murder method for a death that was mentioned in the background of the story and could've easily been a short story (or epilogue) in itself. However, the rest is pretty much what you'd expect from a Carstairs and Doan mystery. The high point of that was the trail of destruction Carstairs left at the salon of Heloise, which reminded me of the subway riot caused by H.M. in Carter Dickson's A Graveyard to Let (1949). Recommended to fans only.

A Bridge Too Far?

"Let's not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories. Let's candidly glory in the noblest pursuits possible to characters in a book."

- Dr. Gideon Fell (The Hollow Man, 1935) 

J.C. Masterman may've been one of the last of the erudite, university dons who saw the detective story as a fertile playground of the mind and interrupted his scholarly pursuits twice to pen a full-length mystery novel: An Oxford Tragedy (1933) and The Case of the Four Friends (1957). The sleuth in both stories is a German lawyer, Ernst Brendel, with a European reputation and his occasional utterances in his native tongue completed the image of the reputable foreigner with a deep understanding of the English people and human nature in general, i.e. a literary descendant of Hercule Poirot. 

 Fittingly, I began with the second book in this two-part series, which is subtitled "a diversion in pre-detection," and put a new spin on a then (fairly) new angle that Leo Bruce's Case with Four Clowns (1939) and Pat McGerr's Follow As the Night (1951) introduced to the inverted detective story – a who-will-be-done-in-and-by-whom! A story in which you not only have to figure out the identity of the killer, before he strikes, but the name of the victim-in-waiting as well!
 

The Case of the Four Friends has a story within a story structure and is narrated by Brendel to three of his friends in the Senior Common Room at St. Thomas' College, Oxford, after a game of bridge deteriorates into a discussion about crime detection. Brendel showcases his deductive abilities similar to Philo Vance's dubious poker scheme from The Canary Murder Case (1927) by analyzing and exposing the weaknesses in the playing styles of his friends. I've to pause here for a moment and wonder how it's possible, after plowing through fields of mysteries of British stock, to still know next to nothing about bridge. If Brendel had given his expose in Chinese, I probably wouldn't have noticed it. And yes... the post-title is a pun (tee hee!). 

Anyway, there's a story behind the intellectual posturing of Brendel, but, like a reluctant vampire about to turn down an invitation, has to be nearly pressured in staying late to tell his pre-construction of a crime that was prevented – which is interspersed with their analyzes and commentary. 

Charles Sandham stands at the head of an old-established and respected firm of solicitors, Sandham, Sandham and Bovis, dating back four generations and has a traditional New Years golf-and bridge holiday which originally began with three of his WWI army comrades. But, one by one, they fell off and were replaced. Currently, the other three "friends" consist of Evelyn Bannister, his oldest friend, Toby Barrick, a junior partner in the firm, and Bannister's nephew, Piers Gradon. In the first part of this pre-construction, the chess pieces are introduced and we learn of what goes on behind the pristine reputation of Sandham's firm – from embezzlement and petty rivalries to blackmail. 

Meanwhile, in the Senior Common Room, Brendel's narrative is interrupted not only to discuss the story itself, but also to lecture on (for example) the unpopularity of blackmailers in fiction – where as thieves, highwaymen and pirates often become the hero of the tale. There's also an exemplary piece of plot-driven characterization that I particularly liked. A heiress of major interest to both Barrick and Gradon, Dhalia Constant, is described as an "advanced yet static pawn," a piece that had been "boldly advanced two or three squares at the commencement of the game, thereafter remains static" and "its capture is the darling wish of one player... its defense the sustained endeavor of the other." 

The following section of the story has Brendel as the narrator and a participating character, because he was staying at the same hotel as the New Year's Party of Sandham and becomes a player in the events on a very peculiar night. The night in question is seen from the view point of the various characters, adding up to rashomon-like accounts of what happened, but I think the conclusion can be experienced as disappointing by some readers and they'll be glad to find that one of Brendel's friends provided an alternative solution after he retired from the room. The solution I was suspecting (by the way) and one that owed some debt to a very famous mystery novel. But hold one, Masterman has tucked away the introduction to The Case of the Four Friends at the end of the book and you could call it a defense of his own story. The English language would allow him to call it that. Sure. Here's a direct quote from the "introduction" by Masterman: "This, My Lord... is a very bad book, and it is my painful task, without undue prolixity, to expose its manifest faults and absurdities". As you can understand, the afterword made me feel justified for liking the book. Masterman was a good chap, as Cap. Hastings would've said. 

Finally, I should’ve mentioned Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929), which shares similarities in structure (a group discussing a murder), but I felt The Case of the Four Friends is what Agatha Christie's Cards on the Table (1936) would've been like if the setting had been used to develop the central idea from the short story "Wasp's Nest," first collected in Double Sin and Other Stories (1961), into a full-fledge novel.

Playing the Grandest Game in the World

"Because we're in a detective story, and we don't fool the reader by pretending we're not."

- Dr. Gideon Fell (The Hollow Man, 1935) 

T.H. White carved himself a legacy in English literature with The Once and Future King (1958), a composition of older and some new work forming an epic Arthurian fantasy, but like so many of White’s contemporaries, he was an avid mystery reader in his earlier years – and wound up with an excellent, but mostly unacknowledged, detective novel to his name.

In many ways, White’s Darkness at Pemberley (1932) echoes the one-offs from other literary/academic visitors such as Morris Bishop (The Widening Stain, 1942) and A.A. Milne (The Red House Mystery, 1922). They're intelligently written stories filled with literate characters, but they're also witty and a lighthearted touch makes them fun to read. Where White distinct himself from his colleagues, however, is that Darkness at Pemberley emphatically proved itself to be a superior example from this sub-category and the structure of the plot was (for me anyway) an interesting composite of two eras – turn of the 20th century mystery fiction and Golden Age Detectives.

The first part of the book, roughly 90-pages in the Dover edition, is a classic Golden Age mystery and has everything you want from that period, from a multitude of maps and floor plans to a genuine locked room problem. Yay!

St. Bernard's College is the setting for the first act and opens when Mr. Beedon, a history don, fails to meet his colleague, Mauleverrer, and a student for an appointment, but when their knocks is answered with music from a gramophone being turned on, they take their leave – only to hear the next morning that Beedon has died. The history don was found locked inside his room, dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, with a gun lying at his feet that's quickly tied to the shooting of an undergraduate earlier that evening. A close and shut case of murder/suicide, or so it appears, but chance, forensics and Inspector Buller's determination throws a monkey-wrench in the carefully planned plot of the killer.

It's a knotty little affair involving a crafty alibi, invisible ink, cocaine addiction and a twist on an old trick to create the effect of the locked room. The trick itself shows that White has read impossible crime stories from a different era, they're crude in principle, but White found another way to apply one of them and the overall result was pleasing. Before the halfway mark, Buller has figured out the identity of the murderer and how the trick was done, but legally, he has not a leg to stand on and after his adversary kills a third person, after bragging about the crimes in a private conversation, Buller quits the force.

Here's a crook in the logic of the book that I can't get over: Buller's motive for giving up his job is obviously hurt pride over his failure to put a homicidal maniac behind bars, but notes that his superiors are also unhappy with him for putting an unsolvable case on the shelves when they had a perfectly good explanation – Beedon shot himself after killing the undergraduate student. But they would've had that case sitting on shelf unsolved because forensics proved it wasn't a murder/suicide and then there's the third murder to consider. It would've required looking into before ending up (officially) as unsolved anyway. Petty nitpicking, I know.

After Buller's early retirement from the force, the book takes a rapid departure from the traditional detective story as the former inspector visits his friend Sir Charles Darcy and his sister Elizabeth – with whom he's secretly in love but doesn't dare to dream due to class difference. Ah, that silly interwar period with their Victorian morals. Anyway, Buller explains to them why he left the police and the somewhat eccentric Sir Charles decides to pop-in on the murderer for a challenge which he almost immediately backs away from, but as Buller predicted, they find themselves beleaguered by a madman who can slip in and out of a guarded house and locked rooms unseen! Leaving a prop skeleton or chalking skulls on a mirror before disappearing again like a puff of smoke. This changes not only the pace of the story, but also goes from an intellectual game of Clue to a deadly variation on Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? confined to a tightly secured mansion under siege.

This splitting of a novel in two different parts is recalls Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Valley of Fear (1915), but here the two separate sections form one coherent narrative instead of two separate novelettes and the events/tone of the second portion recalled French mystery writers like Gaston Leroux and Maurice Leblanc. In fact, the situation Buller and the Darcy household finds themselves in reminded me a lot of Rouletabille's predicament in Leroux's Le parfum de la dame en noir (The Perfume of the Lady in Black, 1908), in which a group of people locked up in a fortified castle are fighting off a single man endowed with the same cunning as the killer in Darkness at Pemberley. By the way, the killer in this book struck me as a distorted, villainous mirror image of Sherlock Holmes (e.g. the cocaine habit).

All in all, a highly entertaining novel that stitched together Doyle's era of detective stories with those from the author's own time and the great tragedy of Darkness at Pemberley is that it was White's only contribution to the genre. I think Buller in the capacity of an amateur detective, alongside the methods he employed in the second act, would've made him an interesting addition to the genre. Recommended to fans of classic mysteries and old-fashioned thrillers.

And on a final note, I got the idea for the opening quote from this line by Buller, "we shall just have to pretend we're in a detective story." Do you think Fell was reprimanding the inspector in his Locked Room Lecture? ;)