Death Has Deep Roots (1951) by Michael Gilbert

Last year, I reread one of my favorite detective novels, The Danger Within (1952) by Michael Gilbert, alternatively published as Death in Captivity, which is best described as a semi-autobiographic wartime detective-cum-thriller novel about British soldiers in an Italian POW camp – who find a body in one of their secreted tunnels. A brilliant novel reminiscent of The Great Escape (1963), but the book preceded the movie by more than a decade.

I ended my review with the promise to airlift more of Gilbert's novels from the snow-capped tops of Mt. To-Be-Read. However, this promise never materialized in 2017 and sounded incredibly hollow in 2018, but there was still time left. So, on the threshold of the new year, I decided to take Death Has Deep Roots (1951) down from my bookshelves. I really should have gotten to it sooner.

Death Has Deep Roots is a marvelous detective novel in the tradition of Carter Dickson's The Judas Window (1938) and Anthony Gilbert's The Clock in the Hatbox (1939).

Mademoiselle Victoria Lamartine was engaged in resistance work, in occupied France, where she came into contact with a British officer, Lieutenant Julian Wells, which resulted in a pregnancy, but she arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and had to give birth in a prison – a boy who died of malnutrition two years later. Wells was never seen or heard of again. So, when the war ended, Lamartine came to England to work at a residential hotel and used her spare time "pestering the War Office" for news of Well and a Major Eric Thoseby.

Major Thoseby is a tough, crafty and diligent investigator for the Tracing Staff, an international team tasked with finding victims of the war, but in 1943 he helped run the French resistance in Lamartine's district and has agreed to meet her at the hotel. However, Major Thoseby is stabbed to death shortly after he arrived at the hotel and Inspector Partridge arrests Lamartine for the murder.

Inspector Partridge believes Major Thoseby was the father of Lamartine's dead child and his hypothesis is strengthened when a kitchen-knife was found in the room with her fingerprints on it, but there's also "an element of what you might call" a sealed box mystery – because "the only means of access to Major Thoseby's room" is a flight of stairs closely commanded by the reception desk. The desk itself was under observation from the lounge and a map of the situation is included. So "the closed box" was sealed, "not by locks, and bars, and bolts," but by human observation. However, the sealed box has "a number of cracks or loopholes in it" and the solution practically disqualifies it as a locked room mystery. This was hardly enough to spoil an otherwise excellent detective story.

Only real weakness of the plot is the weak, circumstantial case of the prosecution. You have to wonder why Lamartine's defense wanted to plead guilty, under provocation, with "a strong plea for leniency of the court," but wisely refused and engaged another lawyer.

Noel Anthony Pontarlier "Nap" Rumbold, the junior partner in his father's firm of Markby, Wragg and Rumbold, Solicitors, of Coleman Street, decided to take the case and assembles a team of professional and amateurs detectives.

Mr. Hargest Macrea has argued law, in every kind of courtroom, for a quarter of a century and is hired to argue for the defense. Major Angus McCann is a publican and a friend of Nap, who helps with the legwork, but McCann and Nap got more than they bargained for when they followed a lead to a bad side of town. And these exciting, thriller-like scenes makes Death Has Deep Roots one of the more lively courtroom mysteries. There are even brief appearances from Chief Inspector Hazlerigg at the beginning and end of the story. This group of amateurs and professionals have two lines of attack: the people who were staying at the hotel and finding out what had happened to Lt. Wells in 1943.

On the England end, they have the hotelier, Honorifique Sainte, who came from the same Basse Loire province as Lamartine and had been aware of the story of her capture in occupied France. Ercolo Camino is the waiter, porter and general factotum of the hotel and was charge of the desk on the evening of the murder. The only two guests in the hotel at the time were Colonel Trevor Alwright, who was getting drunk in lounge and had a view of the receptionist desk, while Mrs. Roper turns out to have a double life – which plays out on "the fringe of the law." Across the channel, they have to piece together what happened to Lt. Wells after the Gestapo raided the farm where he was hiding and arrested Lamartine.

As, as usually with these channel-crossing mystery novels, there's a smuggling angle involved, e.g. Christopher St. John Sprigg's Death of an Airman (1935), Basil Thomson's The Milliner's Hat Mystery (1937) and John Bude's Death on the Riviera (1952).

The private investigation of McCann and Nap is interspersed with the cross-examination of police experts and witnesses in court, which slowly, but surely, unearth the deeply tangled roots of the case. These roots lead all the way from war-torn, occupied France to a quiet residential hotel in London. I think the plot fitted nicely together, notably the who and how of the crime, but the motive and the answer as to what happened to Lt. Wells could have been better clued. Or more strongly hinted at. Regardless, Death Has Deep Roots still stands as an excellent and strong example of the courtroom detective novel. And highly recommend it, if you like courtroom dramas and mysteries.

Lastly, I have some good news about Michael Gilbert. British Library Crime Classics is reprinting Smallbone Deceased (1950), Death Has Deep Roots and Death in Captivity in 2019! So more people get to read my personal favorite and gem of a classic, The Danger Within a.k.a. Death in Captivity. Yes, I used the BL cover of Death Has Deep Roots for this review. 

So I wish you all a Happy New Year and hope to see you back in 2019.

The Locked Safe Mystery (1954) by Norvin Pallas

Norvin Pallas was "a free-lance writer" whose "day job was part-time accounting" and is remembered today, if he's remembered at all, as the author of a series of intelligently written, well-characterized juvenile mysteries with "complicated, logical, adult-style plots" starring a high-school newspaper reporter, Ted Wilford – inviting comparisons with the Ken Holt series by Bruce Campbell. Campbell and Pallas not only had similar series-detectives, but also had "a high regard for children" and "their thinking abilities."

Pallas knew he was writing for children and, to use his own words, "respected them for it" and did not talk down to them. On the contrary, Pallas appeared to have treated his readership as his intellectual equals and that might have actually been a serious flaw in the series.

Mathematical puzzles, games and codes were Pallas' "consuming interest," writing such non-fiction books as Calculator Puzzles, Tricks and Games (1976) and Games with Codes and Ciphers (1994), which is reflected in the complicated plots of the Ted Wilford stories – designed like puzzles with "clues and bits of germane information." Apparently, even older readers were not always successful in anticipating the solution. This, coupled with a complete lack of action and excitement, probably made this series a little bit too dry and cerebral for its intended audience.

Nonetheless, I was intrigued when I learned of this series and one title, in particular, beckoned for my attention. You can probably deduce from the post-title what attracted my attention. What can I say? I have an unhealthy love for locked room puzzles.

But before I take a look at the book in question, I would like to point out that all of the background information was scraped from a single (PDF) article, "A Dark Horse Series: The Ted Wilfords," written by David M. Baumann and is perhaps the only credible, in-depth source of information to be found on this series – discussing the author, characters, plots and honestly assessing the strength and weaknesses of the series. A really well-written, informative and honest article. It's definitely worth a read if you're interested in juvenile detective fiction and this obscure series in particular.

The Locked Safe Mystery (1954) is the second title in a series of fifteen books, beginning with The Secret of Thunder Mountain (1951) and concluding with The Greenhouse Mystery (1967), which follows the exploits of a high-school student, Ted Wilford. Reportedly, he "grows older from one book to the next" and graduates from high-school halfway through the series with the last books taking place during his college years. This second title shows him taking his first, tentative steps over the threshold of adulthood and gets taste of the perks, and challenges, that come with the responsibilities trust upon him as a young adult.

The story begins with Ted receiving some bad news from his doctor: a nagging ankle injury makes him ineligible for the high-school football team, because his ankle is still vulnerable and not ready for the strain of a football game. So this naturally puts a damper on his mood. However, the Forestdale High School newspaper, the Statesman, unanimously elects him as their new editor-in-chief and his hometown's twice-weekly paper, The Town Crier, took him on as a special high-school correspondent – following in the footsteps of his older brother, Ronald Wilford. Over the course of the story, Ted learns (as editor) that you can't please anyone and (as a cub-correspondent) that you have to begin at the bottom of the ladder. But this is not all he has on his plate.

Ted is asked by the new assistant principle of the school, Mr. Clayton, to assist him with the annual charity fund raiser during the Fall Festival and the event netted a sum of $13,000, which is placed in a strong-box and locked inside the school safe. However, the money disappears from the safe and only three people knew the combination: the high-school principle, the assistant principle and a secretary, but only one of those three people, namely Mr. Clayton, has inexplicably disappeared. Ted is the only person who really believes him to be innocent and writes an editorial, accidentally published in The Town Crier, making a case in his favor. Something, in itself, that will prove to be valuable lesson to the aspiring newspaper reporter.

So the problem of the theft of the charity money from the locked school safe, if you believe those three aforementioned people to be innocent, presents the reader with a quasi-impossible situation.

Unfortunately, this problem is resolved during a dry-as-dust courtroom scene when a lock-expert gives a technical explanation for this problem that you expect to find in Freeman Wills Crofts or John Rhode. You can hardly blame children, or even (older) teenagers, for not figuring out this trick. Which is a pity, since I can think of at least two tricks this particular thief could have used to open the safe. On the upside, this explanation revealed a second layer to the problem that's a genuine, full-fledged locked room puzzle. I can't say too much about it, because this development comes very late in the story, but the locked room trick was decent enough. A trick of the same caliber as Bruce Campbell's The Mystery of the Invisible Enemy (1959) and William Arden's The Mystery of the Shrinking House (1972).

Well, this is all I can really say about The Locked Safe Mystery. The story is skillfully-written, cleverly plotted and realistically presented, especially the life and personality of the main-character, Ted, but the pace is incredibly slow and the story is completely devoid of action or excitement – actually making this some kind of crossword puzzle in prose form. Personally, as a plot-oriented mystery reader, I didn't mind too much, but I have to wonder how this approach was able to attract younger readers.

I have mentioned above how this series has been compared to the Ken Holt series, but Sam and Beryl Epstein, who were behind the Campbell penname, were far more successful in balancing intelligent plotting with exciting writing and more realistic characterization to craft engaging detective stories (e.g. The Clue of the Phantom Car, 1953). The Locked Safe Mystery had intellect and a heart that was in the right place, but had no energy and was missing that all-important spark of life. Something that's absolutely necessary in a juvenile detective novel.

Still, this was an interesting read and is yet another impossible crime novel from the juvenile corner of the genre that has been overlooked by such locked room experts as Robert Adey. I hope John Pugmire, of LRI, adds them to the forthcoming supplemental edition of Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) in 2019. They deserve to be finally acknowledged.

The Other Bullet (1930) by Nancy Barr Mavity

Nancy Barr Mavity was an American biographer, reviewer and journalist, who wrote for such publications as The San Francisco Chronicle, Oakland Tribune and Sunset Magazine, but between 1929 and 1933 she produced six detective novels about her series-character, Peter Piper – an ace reporter for the Herald. A final, non-series, mystery appeared in 1937.

I was recently reminded that one of her detective novels, The Other Bullet (1930), was listed by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991) and the book happened to be on my shelves. I left it there to collect dust after my disappointing 2012 read of Mavity's The Case of the Silver Sandals (1930), but that was nearly six years ago and the time had come to give her work a second look. However, Adey had incorrectly labeled this book as an impossible crime story. So the string of non-impossible crime reviews continues for now.

The Other Bullet is set in the Californian village of Hangtown in the Sierra foothills where Peter and Barbara Piper are spending their holiday panning an exhausted stream for its last crumbs of gold, but a "tragedy that had crushed in upon them" put a halt to their holiday fun – beginning when an out-of-breath housekeeper, Mrs. Coak, announces that a man had been shot at the ranch-house office. Don Mortison had been hired by Max Everett, a construction engineer, to manage the ranch when he's away to work on an irrigation dam project. This meant he was away from home most of the time and left his urban wife, Aline, behind in Hangtown like an Englishman in the jungle.

So, naturally, Aline felt attracted to the well-read, equally out-of-place ranch-hand and they got involved with one another, but a witness claims he saw Aline shooting her loves. She does not even deny that she killed Mortison. However, Aline claims she only shot Mortison once. Not twice.

On a side-note, the aspect that earned The Other Bullet its spot in Adey's Locked Room Murders is the early onset of rigor mortis shortly after Mortison was shot. So I expected trickery where the time of death was concerned or perhaps even something along the lines of the rapidly-decaying body from Hake Talbot's The Hangman's Handyman (1942), but the problem of early rigor mortis turned out to have simple, natural explanation – which came to light during the postmortem examination. I've no idea why Adey included it in Locked Room Murders.

Anyway, there are a number of potential suspects and one of them was criminally underused. Hermann Schnitzler is a retired farmer from Pennsylvania and he's convinced that Mortison had hexed him, preventing his crops from growing, which is a superstition that was once rife in Pennsylvania and was used in Alexander William's The Hex Murder (1935).

Aline Everett is put on trial for Mortison's murder and the courtroom scenes constitute the best parts of the story. One scene in particular was very memorable. As an outsider, Aline was not very popular with the people of Hangtown and she came to court dressed like "an advertisement out of Vanity Fair" flourishing a "cigarette-holder at the jury the minute court adjourned" – an action that was akin to "a red rag to a bull." So her own lawyer felt compelled to wrench the cigarette-holder from her hand and "grind it under his heel on the courtroom floor." A great scene! Sadly, the story went rapidly down hill after Aline was acquitted of murdering Mortison.

The first half is undoubtedly the best part of the book, but there were also hints in this portion that the plotting was as shoddy as the police work.

Mortison had two bullet-holes in him: a fatal shot in his neck and a bullet in his lung, which was fired after he had already been shot and killed. This should have come to light during the postmortem examination and should have prevented Aline from going to trial. This was shoddy plotting, to say the least.

The Other Bullet is best described as a tale of two bullets with the victim as the only link between the two stories. So, once the trial is over, Piper tries to figure out who really shot Mortison and follows a trail of clues that includes a mutilated photograph, a signet ring and an 11-year-old murder case. The plot of the second story struck me as an imitation of some of the Sherlock Holmes novels (e.g. The Sign of Four, 1890), but an imitation that was as pale and poorly done as Joseph Bowen's The Man Without a Head (1933) – only difference between the two is that Mavity was better writer than Bowen. You should not expect too much from the eventual solution, which was hardly fair and the only surprise is that neither of shooters turned out to be legally murderers.

My impression is that Mavity constantly wanted two different things at the same time, but failed to deliver on any of them. The story of the first bullet had potential, but ended with a disappointing, anti-climatic acquittal and the second bullet-story simply harked back to the works of Conan Doyle. I think this part was not half as interesting as the first leg of the story. Another example is the forensic aspect of the plot. Mavity made a point of ballistics and the early onset of rigor mortis, but completely ignored that an autopsy would have revealed that Aline's bullet was not the fatal one.

If you look to whom Mavity dedicated the book (Edward Oscar Heinrich, scientific crime analysis), I suspect she willfully ignored the postmortem gunshot wound, because she wanted to write those courtroom scenes.

So, as said, my impression of The Other Bullet is that Mavity wanted to have her cake and eat it to. Unfortunately, this resulted in a mess of a detective story that began promising, but ended up frustrating and annoying me to no end. I can't really recommend this book to anyone. I'll probably abandon this series altogether unless someone can give me a recommendation with an iron-clad guarantee that the plot can pass the muster.

Well, I try to dig up something good for my next post to make up for this. Probably a good, old-fashioned locked room mystery. So stay tuned!

Nocturne of Remembrance (2013) by Shichiri Nakayama

In my previous blog-post, I looked at Craig Rice's zany The Corpse Steps Out (1940), a madcap chase novel with method to its madness, but the plot only gave a minor role to one of my favorite characters from the American detective story, John J. Malone – a crumpled, hard-drinking Chicago lawyer with malleable ethics. So I was considering reading The Name is Malone (1960) or an Erle Stanley Gardner novel next, but then I remembered there was a shin honkaku mystery on my pile with an unscrupulous attorney as the protagonist.

And, as to be expected from the Japanese, they took the concept of an unethical criminal defense lawyer as the anti-hero to the next level. Perry Mason, Arthur Crook and even that villainous hypocrite, Joshua Clunk, look like saints compared to Reiji Mikoshiba!

A translation of Shichiri Nakayama Tsuioku no nocturn (Nocturne of Remembrance, 2013) was published in 2016 by Vertical and is a sequel to the untranslated Shokuzai no sonata (Sonata of Atonement, 2011), which is what made the opening chapters a little bit confusing and muddled – as they dealt with past events. Apparently, Mikoshiba was attacked and wounded in his first recorded case "by the family of the opposite side," because he had the body of "the victim that the accused had murdered removed from the crime scene." The opening chapter also revealed a dark childhood secret.

A fourteen-year-old Mikoshiba had murdered and dismembered a child, littering the neighborhood with body parts, which earned the then unknown murderer the nickname of the "Corpse Delivery Man."

Mikoshiba was apprehended by the police, before he could dump the torso, but the law in Japan prohibits the identification of juvenile offenders and rehabilitation is preferred over punishment. So, upon release, Mikoshiba was able to resume a normal life and even carve out a name for himself as a criminal defense lawyer. I assume Mikoshiba's back-story was partially inspired by the real-life murder case known as "The Sasebo Slashing." The murderer in that case was an 11-year-old student who had slashed a classmate to ribbons and was referred to in official police documents only as "Girl A," but the internet bestowed a nickname on her that stuck with the case – namely "Nevada-tan." So you can hardly call Mikoshiba your ordinary, shady neighborhood defense lawyer and after getting discharged from the hospital he immediately blackmails a colleague into handing over a case to him. A kind of case he would normally never touch, let alone demand.

An abused, downtrodden housewife, Akiko Tsuda, has been sentenced to sixteen years in prison for the murder of her husband, Shingo Tsuda, who was stabbed to death in the bathroom of their home. The marriage had begun as a happy one and they had two daughters together, but their family life began to deteriorate when Shingo was laid-off from his software company. Shingo became a shut-in and poured all of his severance pay into the stock market, but the only thing he accumulated was debt. And this ended with him becoming physically abusive.

Obviously, the Tsuda affair is an open-and-shut case: Akiko had practically been caught in the act by her father-in-law and she gave a full confession to the police. So why does Mikoshiba insist on representing Akiko during a hopeless appeal process with no prospect of a fat fee. He simply tells the family to pay him whatever they can afford. Something that's very out-of-character for the shady lawyer.

This not only makes Akiko very suspicious, who regards him as dangerous, but necessary, tool needed to reduce her sentence and return to her two children, but also arouses the suspicion of Deputy Chief Prosecutor Kyohei Misaki and he decides to take on the case himself – who proves to be a formidable adversary for Mikoshiba. Misaki even has the upper-hand in the courtroom right up until the end when Mikoshiba slowly unfurls the truth, which hits everyone in attendance like a proverbial bombshell. And has reporters shooting out of the courtroom with "a precious scoop cradled in their arms."

I think most seasoned mystery readers can probably make an educated guess about the solution and why our lawyer-detective picked this apparently hopeless case, but this only gives you a very rough outline of the plot. So pay close attention to the detective work done by Mikoshiba, which lays bare enough clues and hints to help you discern the finer details of the overall plot. One of these all important details is the dark, depressing motive of the murderer and the truth behind the stabbing places the story as close to the gritty crime novels of today as to the clever, plot-driven courtroom dramas of the past.

So, while it's not a entirely perfect, Nocturne of Remembrance is a perfect example of what the modern crime novel in the West could have looked like had coherent plotting and proper clueing still been a thing.

Ho-Ling Wong drew in his own review a comparison with the work of Keigo Higashino and certain aspects of the plot recalled Yogisha X no kenshin (The Devotion of Suspect X, 2005), which also succeeded in taking a grimy, sordid and everyday crime and structure it like a traditionally detective story – complete with clues, twists and a memorable detective character. Nocturne of Remembrance accomplished doing the exact same thing and demonstrated, when you have writer who knows how to plot and clue, how well a traditional detective story can work in a contemporary setting with pitch-dark material.

Sadly, the West has a chronic shortage of such mystery writers at the moment, but we can console ourselves with these little gems that reaches our shores from Asia. I sincerely hope we'll see more of Nakayama and Mikoshiba in the future. Until then, I can highly recommend Nocturne of Remembrance as a dark take on the Perry Mason-like courtroom drama with an excellent, well clued plot that should especially delight readers of Gardner and Higashino.

The Clock in the Hatbox (1939) by Anthony Gilbert

The Clock in the Hatbox (1939) is an early title in the Arthur Crook series, only the sixth of fifty-some novels, written by "Anthony Gilbert," a pseudonym of Lucy Beatrice Malleson, who distinguished herself from her contemporaries by blending (domestic) suspense with a formal detective plot – resulting in some unusually-structured mystery novels (e.g. Something Nasty in the Woodshed, 1942). As unconventional as Gilbert's approach to plotting is her morally ambiguous lawyer-detective, Crook, who was accurately described by Nick Fuller as having something of "the gusto and cynicism of Sir Henry Merrivale himself."

The Clock in the Hatbox appeared on my radar after coming across it on a list, "Recommendations by Nick Fuller," originally posted on the GAD group, which listed this book as the only recommendation under Gilbert's name. John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, published a laudatory review of the book last year. Concluding that Gilbert's "unusual treatment" of the detective story, courtroom drama and Hitchcockian suspense culminated in a "mindblowing crime novel." A "landmark mystery novel" that "for some reason is never mentioned in the many studies of the detective novel." There were a number of other reviews that really enticed me.

My reason for referring back to their opinion on The Clock in the Hatbox is that, halfway through the story, I began to suspect my own opinion was going to be a contrarian one. And then that ending happened!

The story opens with the trail of Viola Ross, who stands accused of having murdered her husband, Teddy Ross, a schoolteacher who was smothered to death and the clue that landed her in the docks was the bedside alarm clock – which was found inside a hatbox in the closet. Whoever put the clock in the hatbox was likely the same person who placed a pillow over the victim's face. And had forgotten to replace it.

Viola was only twenty-three when she married Ross, a man twice her age, but the marriage provided Viola with security and Teddy with wife. However, as the years passed, Ross become "the complete domestic tyrant" and alienated his son from a previous marriage, Harry Ross, who refused to become a teacher like his father. Ross resented that Viola sided with his son and even began to harbor suspicions that they were having an affair. Predictably, he died the night before he was going to change his will.

So the police had a motive and all of the evidence argued against Viola, as well as public opinion, but a death sentence is delayed when the jury was unable to come to an unanimous decision – deadlocked by a single juror. The result is a hung jury and a new trial date is set.

The lone holdout in the jury is an aspiring novelist, Richard Arnold, absolutely convinced of Viola's innocence and is determined to rescue her from the gallows.

A mission supported by Arnold's fiance, Bunty, but her support begins to slowly wane when a threatening letter arrives demanding that she tells her boyfriend "he has twenty-four hours left in which the change his mind." However, this threat only works only worked as an incentive to carry on the investigation, because Arnold is clearly making someone nervous. Someone who doesn't want anyone looking closer at the murder, which is where the Hitchcockian suspense and thriller-ish elements of the plot come into play.

There are several attempts to kill Arnold, one of them employing the gun-with-a-string trick, but a second tragedy happens when the fumes of a tampered bathroom heater killed a completely innocent man. A man who died in Arnold's place!

During his investigation, Arnold engages Arthur Crook, a shrewd lawyer of "the most enviable repute," but Crook is only peripherally involved in the case until he pulls the rug from underneath the reader at the end. Until then, Crook makes a couple of appearances to warn Arnold not to meddle and give their prey the time to gather "sufficient rope" to hang himself. A warning that was duly ignored.

A note for the curious: Crook quotes Gilbert's original series-detective, Scott Egerton, a rising politician, who appeared in only ten novels until Crook replaced him in the mid-1930s. Towards the end, Crook tells Arnold how Egerton always used to say "the last trump always lies with fate and she bein' female, there's no telln' how she'll play it." I always like it when mystery writers acknowledge, one way or another, that their various series-detectives live in the same fictional universe.

Somewhere around the halfway mark of the story, I began to slowly doubt the judgment of my fellow mystery enthusiasts. After all, the murderer's identity looked to be rather obvious, especially to seasoned mystery readers, which would have hardly justified the lavish praise. Don't get me wrong, it would still have been a well-written, cleverly put together detective novel with a good play on the least-likely-suspect gambit, but I began to think that the book had been overpraised – which is when I arrived at the twist in the story's tail. A triumphant ending that can be likened to Anthony Berkeley's Jumping Jenny (1933).

I also understand now why Norris liked the book so much, because The Clock in the Hatbox reminded me of Joan Fleming's Polly Put the Kettle On (1952), which Norris glowingly reviewed. The books are as similar as they differ, mainly in the approach they take to the plot, but, in the end, the similarities really are striking. If you like the one, you'll probably like the other.

All in all, The Clock in the Hatbox is a classic textbook example of what it is that attracts me to these cunningly cut gems from the genre's Golden Era. I went in with expectations that were, perhaps too high, but began to get slightly disappointed as the explanation appeared to be obvious in spite of the author's to cover it up as inconspicuously as possible – only to learn at the end that I was supposed to think that all along! The Clock in the Hatbox is without question one of Gilbert's best detective novels and deserves to better known.

And speaking of detective stories that (probably) deserve to be better known, I recently got my hands on a genuinely unknown collection of short detective stories. They look very promising and, if they're any good, I might have actually unearthed something interesting. I think there are even some impossible crime stories in this collection! So that surprise collection will be next.

A Vicious Substance

"Stale venom might take longer to kill."

- Elaine Gurdon (Vernon Loder's The Mystery at Stowe, 1928)

Jan Gordon was born as Godfrey Jervis Gordon in England, 1882, who studied mine engineering at the Truro School of Mining and worked in Malaysia as a mine manager, but spend his spare time drawing and this inspired him to pursue a more artistic vocation upon his return to England – enrolling into the London School of Art. Gordon would go on from there to become a noted writer, musician and artist known for his paintings of the First World War and camouflage art.

You can call me bias, if you want, but I believe Gordon peaked as an artist during the 1930s when he penned three detective novels, There's Death in the Churchyard (1934), Death in the Wheelbarrow (1935) and Murder Most Artistic (1937), all written under the nom-de-plume of "William Gore." According to "The Jan and Cora Gordon Pages," these detective stories bestowed "the nickname of 'Bloody Bill' upon Jan" and told how he had to admit that writing them "drove him potty," because he found "the crime genre far more difficult than that of travel writing." So that would explain why he wrote only three of them.

Recently, two of his William Gore detective novels were reissued as dirt cheap ebooks by Black Heath Editions.

I did a background check on the most appealing sounding titles in their catalog and came across a promising review of There's Death in the Churchyard by William F. Deeck, posted on Mystery File, who described it as "a well-plotted, well-written and amusing novel." The comments underneath his post showed how rare the book was at the time the review was published, because there were only two copies available on the internet that had hefty price-tags attached to them – an ex-library copy would have set you back $80 and a second-printing in DJ (in poor condition) went for $200. So this brand new edition is a splendid alternative for ordinary readers, like myself, who merely want an opportunity to read these rare, long-forgotten detective stories.

One of the central character of There's Death in the Churchyard is Captain Richard Stoyner, the Squire of Sutton Eacham, who's a war hero, a famous explorer and "a scientist of local repute."

Captain Stoyner is trying to produce "a cheap and satisfactory carburant," or motor spirit, from waste vegetable products. This potentially revolutionary research is bankrolled by Pondersby Jonson, but Stoyner had no idea Jonson was "a financial shark of the worst order." A bloodsucker who had "ruined dozens" with his dirty, underhanded tricks.

The person who alerts Stoyner to Jonson's shady business ethics is a past victim of the financier, Harold Gunning, who had since then been making a name as a landscape artist and had been painting around Sutton Hall all summer long – which is where he learned of Jonson's involvement with Stoyner. This resulted in a confrontation between them and "the City shark" told him to hand over full control over his project in exchange for the few thousand necessary to complete his research, but a furious Stoyner reminded him that without him completing his work he would not be able to reap the benefits of his invention. So this clash ended in a stalemate that slightly favored the financier. However, the confrontation cast the long shadow of suspicion over Stoyner when his bogeyman unexpectedly died during a Sunday morning church service.

Jonson was staying the week-end at Stoyner's ancestral home and decided to accompany his host to church, but during the service he becomes gravely ill and Stoyner tries to rush him out of the place. But they don't make it pass the churchyard.

A horror-stricken Jonson, "fear twitching his every feature," pushes Stoyner away and loudly denounces him as a murderer, mutters the word poison and collapses on the churchyard walk. The poison in question belonged to the curare group, used during witch-doctors' ceremonies in South America, which Stoyner obtained during a dangerous expedition into the hinterlands of Brazil and he had an opportunity to introduce the poison into the victim's bloodstream – when he treated a cut in his finger before going to church. Such poisons can have delayed actions. Particularly when the substance is deteriorated by time and therefore slower in action.

So the situation looks very dire for the local Squire and war hero, but the village is crawling with detectives, professional and amateur alike, who try to get to the bottom of the case. The book could very well have been titled Too Many Detectives.

Superintendent Priddom and Colonel Henderby, the Chief Constable, find themselves between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, the prime suspect is a pillar of the community, but, on the other one, even the community believes him to be guilty. And this is what lands Stoyner in the docks to stand trial for murder. The end of the trial has a great scene centering on his manservant and assistant, Burrows, who gives a public demonstration of old-school loyalty and friendship. It made him my favorite character in the book!

Anyway, there are enough people, like Burrows, who believe him to be innocent and they go out of their way to prove it (e.g. Burrows' courtroom shenanigans).

Belle is the sister-in-law of the vicar and in love with Stoyner, everyone around them expected a proposal to marry, sooner or later, which is why she engages "a private inquiry agent," Mr. Elkings, who pokes around the village for clues. Elkings gets entangled in a minor feud with Gunning, who he tags as the potential murderer, but the painter also knows how to play detective and makes some astute observations outing Elkings as a detective – much to his annoyance. Belle also has a young niece, Ally, who could have wandered from the pages of a Gladys Mitchell novels. She's a very convincingly drawn child and forms "the Captain Dick rescue gang" with the choir boys and they actually bring part of the solution to the adult characters.

However, the one who eventually stumbles to the truth is Reverend James Cliffe. During a church service, he suddenly sees the whole truth by asking himself the obvious question that nobody, up to that point, asked themselves. What really surprised me about to the explanation is how incredibly close my initial inkling was, but abandoned that line of reasoning when the story appeared to had morphed into a how-was-it-done type of detective story.

I knew There's Death in the Churchyard was praised by Dorothy L. Sayers and she had once stated that it was much more interesting to try to figure out how the crime was committed than identifying the murderer. So the direction of the plot made me presume the book was plotted in a similar fashion as Sayers' own Whose Body? (1923), Unnatural Death (1927) and Strong Poison (1930), which would explain her warm praise for the book. But, instead, it turned out to be more along the lines of Agatha Christie's least-likely-suspect gambit without the rug-puller of a surprise (feeling) fastened to it.   

An observant and experience mystery reader can work out the solution for themselves, but only if you don't make my mistake by thinking halfway through that you're reading a how-dun-it instead of a regular who-dun-it. 

One more thing about the how of the murder: I think a very well-known mystery writer, who was usually known as a true original and innovator, might have appropriated the poisoning trick for a novel about an entire series of curare killings (click here for a review of that book). The solutions are eerily similar.

So, all in all, There's Death in the Churchyard is (indeed) an amusing, well-written detective novel with a competent and solvable enough plot, which (so far) stands alongside Nicholas Brady's The Fair Murder (1933) and Ebenezer Investigates (1934) as one of the more stronger titles in the catalog of Black Heath Editions.

Finally, the next post on this blog is most likely going to be my best-of list of 2017 and will go up before Christmas, but not entirely sure whether I'll get around to posting anything else until after Christmas. So this might be the last regular review until then.