An American Tragedy: Q.E.D, vol. 10 by Motohiro Katou

Seven months ago, I began my review of Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. volume 4 with a belated New Year's resolution, namely to reach volume 10 before 2020 draws to a close, which came sooner than imagined with a little less than five months to go – opening the way to end 2020 with a review of volume 20. This should be doable if I discuss volumes 11-20 as twofer reviews. But lets take a look at volume 10 first!

I've commented in previous reviews that Q.E.D. is practically incomparable the other, more well-known, anime-and manga detective series, because Motohiro Katou took such a radically different approach to characterization, plotting and storytelling-and structure than Case Closed, Detective Academy Q and The Kindaichi Case Files. The tenth volume honors this reputation with one of the most atypical anime/manga detective stories. Yes, I've said that before about previous volumes, but this is truly something else. And for various reasons.

Firstly, the previous ten volumes all comprised of two stories, spread out over two longish chapters, but volume 10 is one long, novel-length story, "In the Hand of the Witch," which is a prequel story that takes place in Salem, Massachusetts – where 300 years ago "the famous witch hunts started in America." So you might reasonable expect a detective story drenched in the lore of witchcraft and witch hunts, but the story is one of murder trial with all the courtroom shenanigans and wizardry of Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason. You never see a good, old-fashioned courtroom dramas in these anime/manga detective series.

"In the Hand of the Witch" begins with the return of Sou Touma's younger sister, Yuu Touma, who was introduced in volume 6. She came back to Japan with a postcard that was delivered to her brother's address in the United States and she needed an excuse to visit Touma, but he's not home when she arrives. So she begins to tell Kana Mizuhara the story of the case he had been involved in when he was a 10-year-old child prodigy at MIT. A case that happened five years ago.

At the time, the 10-year-old Touma held a part-time job inputting data for the Massachusetts' District Attorney office where comes into contact with a young and ambitious prosecutor, Annie Craner, who's about to make her courtroom debut.

Craner has been placed in charge of the Marcus Osborne murder case and is tasked with prosecuting and securing a conviction against their suspect, Mrs. Sarah Osborne, who was found to be all alone with the body of her husband when two local policemen on patrol heard a gunshot coming from the Osborne mansion – perched at the end of a cape in Salem. The roads coming in and out of the cape were barricaded and a mountain hunt was conducted without result. So the only person who could have shot Marcus Osborne was his wife. Sharah was a devout member of a dubious organization, The Path to Arcadia, which taught "self-enhancement through the cosmic forces" and "donated a lot of money" to the group.

The police "suspected she killed her husband for the inheritance" and was taken into custody a week later.

 

An easy, slum-dunk case that a young prosecutor can put on their resume, but the oafish, incompetent-looking and nameless defense attorney is giving her an unexpectedly tough fight. A character halfway between Gardner's Perry Mason and Craig Rice's John J. Malone, who not only begins to punch holes in Craner's case, but drops a bombshell in the middle of the courtroom with an alternative solution! A (false) solution backed by ballistic evidence. And on top of that, the public opinion begins to turn against Craner as she's being accused of conducting a modern-day witch hunt.

It takes an astute observation from Touma to put Craner's case back on track, but Touma acts mostly as background character struggling whether, or not, he should help a troubled student, because he sees himself as "a bringer of misfortune" – who always ends up hurting the people around him. Touma is depicted here as a child with too much weight on his shoulder, which gives the story a dark edge. Particularly in the light of the tragic conclusion of the story and trial. Something that had a "profound influence" on him.

So, character-wise, "In the Hand of the Witch" is an important entry in the series and the solution to the murder has some clever and even ingenious ideas, such as where the murder weapon was hidden, but the scheme had too many loose nuts and bolts rattling around to make it convincingly work. Some of those loose nuts and bolts depended on a large repository of pure, undiluted cosmic luck and planning to either obtain or make them work the way it did. This made the murder look more like a reckless gamble than a carefully planned crime and ruined, what could have been, a first-class cat-and-mouse courtroom drama.

Yeah, the plot-technical side of this volume was slightly disappointing with bits and pieces that were hard to swallow, but the storytelling and characterization were as fascinating and surprising as usual. How many of these anime/manga detective series would reduce their main protagonists to background characters in the longest story of the series? A story with a sequel, of sorts, that will be told in the second chapter of volume 12. So you can very likely expect a twofer review of volumes 11 and 12 sometime later this month.

Murder at Bayside (1933) by Raymond Robins

Raymond Rodney Robins was an American soldier with a distinguished military career and there were few officers, if any, who knew as much about the capabilities and limitations of tanks, but he didn't earn his stripes on the battlefields of that small, European skirmish – known in the annals of history as the Second World War. Robins was one of the dedicated and competent professionals who prepared his nations for "the challenge of a global war." You can read a memorial to Robins here.

The memorial also highlighted "an intensely cultivated and literary side" to Robins, which manifested in a book written together with his wife, Ruth. A detective novel in which "the inner workings of the Colt .45 Service Revolver" supplied "the intricacies of the plot" and "the key of the mystery."

Robins' Murder at Bayside (1933) is not particularly well remembered today and too obscure to be even listed on the Golden Age of Detection Wiki. A veritable who's who of who the hell are these guys, but a (digital) copy of Murder at Bayside is surprisingly easy to obtain. You can download a free copy from the Internet Archive or buy a properly edited, dirt cheap ebook edition published by Phocion in 2019. I believe the reason why Murder at Bayside had slipped through the cracks of public consciousness is that the book is somewhat of an anomaly within the American detective story of the 1930s, because it squarely falls within the thoroughly British "humdrum" school of Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode – focusing more on the how than the who-and why. I was particularly reminded of Victor MacClure's Death Behind the Door (1933).

This is, perhaps, not very surprising considering the engineering background and technical expertise of Robins, but an American "humdrum" mystery is not something I had read before. So let's dig in!

Robert Williams is a young, Baltimore lawyer and narrator who receives an invitation from a client, Charles Evans, to "go down to Bayside for some duck-shooting." Charles and his brother, Edwin, were born out of their time and have "the temper which would have written fresh pages in the history of the old West," but they're kept in check by their uncle, Cyrus Evans. A self-made man who made his pile in "the swashbuckling days of the turbulent nineties" and kept "an inquiring finger on the business of the South" during his retirement years. Strangely enough, his adopted son, Tom, is "a chip off the old block with a vengeance." And he made a name for himself as a criminal lawyer. They lived together at Bayside with Charles and Edwin subsisting on their uncle's charity.

When he arrives at Bayside, Williams learns from Tom that someone has been lying low around the premise and suspects this is not an ordinary hobo, but a former client he defended in court, Jim Hirstein – a convicted murderer whose day of execution had been set when he broke jail. Hirstein becomes the first suspect when Cyrus is found down by the boat landing with a bullet in his back.

However, the police quickly receives confirmation that Hirstein has an unassailable alibi for the time of the murder and they shift their attention to the people who were present at Bayside when that mysterious, fatal bullet was fired. Williams statement that he heard only one shot, where others have heard two, places one of the family members in the dock. And what follows is a trial that ended (melodramatically) as quick as it started without resolving the murder. This is the point where the detective of the story, John Patrick, enters the picture.

John Patrick is Williams' senior partner, a southern Dr. Lancelot Priestley, who looked like "the living prototype of the traditional Southern Colonel" and he had developed "a belated interest in the field of criminology," but was "more fit for arm-chair detection" than good, old-fashioned legwork. Patrick and Williams decide to ferret out the murderer, but, regrettably, the second half of the story was a bit dull compared to the opening chapters that concluded with the hasty trial. You can blame this on the second half continued the play story as a whodunit, instead of an inverted detective story, because the murderer and overarching scheme have become blindingly obvious at this point – which made clearing all the extraneous matter dull, unexciting detective work to read. Not even a second, somewhat late, murder could liven up the story.

All of that being said, the gun-trick was not bad and can be viewed as a borderline impossible crime, in line with Ellery Queen's The American Gun Mystery (1933) and John Dickson Carr's "Inspector Silence Takes the Air" (collected in Thirteen to the Gallows, 2008), which is why the second half should have concentrated on figuring out how it was done. It would have probably made for a much more interesting and engaging read.

So, on a whole, Murder at Bayside is not an unheralded, long-lost classic of the detective story, but, as an American take on the British humdrum school of detection, it's a fascinating curiosity that comes recommended to fans of Crofts, Rhode and MacClure.

A note for the curious: Murder at Bayside was published under Raymond Robins' own name and Ruth Robins is not credited as co-author, but the novel is dedicated to "the girl who really wrote this book."

The Dog Was Executor (1973) by K. Abma

Karel Abma was a Dutch notary and the author of De hond was executeur (The Dog Was Executor, 1973), a practically forgotten and long out-of-print novel, which has been summarily described on the internet as a detective story about "an inheritance issue and a divorce case" – converging around the tangled legacy of a lonely miser. If you glance at the cover, you can probably make an educated guess what drew my attention to this little-known mystery novel.

Unfortunately, The Dog Was Executor is not exactly an all-out, guns blazing, locked room mystery and the locked room element was so insignificant, I decided against tagging this review as an impossible crime. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Riemsdorp is the backdrop of The Dog Was Executor, a village "rich in front gardens and white-painted bridges," which is slowly being annexed, "field after field, yard after yard, with everything on it," by Amsterdam – less than 5 kilometers (3 miles) away. The bailiffs perpetually haunted the village with "a bag full of expropriation writs." Setting the tone for the rest of the story.

Johannes Blaudop is a 77-year-old recluse and miser who lives in a small, blue plastered house on the Vaartweg, known locally as "het Zwartelaantje" (the dark lane), where his only companion is a Belgian shepherd, Argus. Blaudop is "criminally tight" when it comes to spending money and notorious for his dogs, which has lead to legal problems on more than one occasion. The villages thought he was mostly crazy, but with "damned cunning" edge to his twisted mind and they generally disliked him. So nobody really missed Blaudop when he didn't show his head for a couple of days until the mailman notices a card stuck behind one of the windows, saying "On Holiday," but the dog can be heard frantically barking inside. And the odor emanating from the place has the kind of presence that lingers.

The police is notified and they enter the house to rescue the dog, but what they find is Blaudop's decomposing body in the anteroom, close to the wardrobe, where he had been laying for nearly two weeks! Blaudop had a died of cardiac arrest, but a slight head wound showed he had fallen with his head against the wardrobe and the card behind the window, in combination with the missing key to the backdoor and the presence of a bloodstained handkerchief, suggests the possibility of murder – leaving the authorities with a plethora of unanswered questions. Admittedly, the premise of a man of whom no one can say for sure whether, or not, he was murdered and whether he was rich, or poor, sounded intriguing, but don't expect too much from the answers to this various questions. The Dog Was Executor is an entirely different type of animal compared to the Golden Age and neo-classical detective novels that dominate this blog. A character-driven crime novel with a social conscience and a handful of different "detectives" to tackle the various criminal and legal aspects of the case.

Chief Inspector Messing is officially in charge of the case, but Blaudop named his former lawyer, Karel IJ. van Woudrichem, his testamentary executor and is tasked with finding his long-estranged daughter, Dinie. She was taken as a 9-year-old girl to Canada by his ex-wife, which is the source of Blaudop's bitterness and disdain for authority because they allowed his daughter to be taken. And the legwork of the tracking down the inheritors (including a not-legally disinherited son) is placed on the shoulders of a junior notary, Evert Dijkgraaf. Frank Kok is the police's dog expert-and trainer who has to get the wild dog out of the house and tame it. Lastly, there's the village itself, which is always buzzing with rumors and speculations about the case.

The questions they try to answer is who was in the house when Blaudop died and did this person had a hand in his death? Why didn't his dog defend him? Was there a modest fortune in 1000 gulden banknotes and what happened to it? Where's his daughter and who was the mysterious fisherman? Why was a World War I photograph stolen after the body had been found and removed? There are even some courtroom scenes when someone is apprehended with incriminating evidence on him and is charged. So the story is busy enough, but hardly any of it made for a good or even mildly satisfying detective story.

K. Abma

When I started reading The Dog Was Executor, the plot's legal wrangling brought the novels of Cyril Hare to mind (e.g. Tragedy at Law, 1942), but written in the style and spirit of the Realist/Social School of Georges Simenon and Seicho Matsumoto, until turning over the last page and realized it was very similar to another 1970s "detective" novel – namely Ulf Durling's Gammal ost (Hard Cheese, 1971). Hard Cheese is a Swedish novel that began as an old-fashioned, classically-styled homage to the Golden Age detective novel, but the ending revealed it to be a novel of character and petty crimes masquerading as locked room mystery. You can pretty much say the same about The Dog Was Executor. Only difference between the two is that Abma obviously never had any intention, whatsoever, to write anything remotely resembling a traditional whodunit. The Dog Was Executor is a modern crime novel with a pinch of social commentary loosely based on true stories reported in the daily newspapers, which Abma acknowledges in "A Message to the Reader" printed on the opening page covered with newspaper clippings.

So, all in all, Abma's The Dog Was Executor was not exactly a rewarding read, if you prefer the plot-driven puzzle detective story, but it was a shot in the dark based solely on the cover art vaguely hinting at the possibility of a locked room mystery. The book could have been a brilliant and criminally forgotten impossible crime novel, but it wasn't. I took a gamble and lost, but hey, it was worth a shot. And if you actually like these social/realists crime novels (why?), you might actually enjoy this atypical crime novel.

I can't really be angry that the book didn't turn out to be one of those very rare, completely forgotten Dutch locked room mysteries, such as Cor Docter's Koude vrouw in Kralingen (Cold Woman in Kralingen, 1970), but I was disappointed that the story had all the material necessary to have made it a full-fledged locked room mystery with some minor tweaks to the plot. So why not end this review on positive note and pad it out with the locked room-trick I envisioned. Some very mild spoilers ahead!

Needless to say, the tightfisted Blaudop acquired an expensive watchdog to guard something on the premise and, let's say, X suspected what it was and wanted to get his hands on it, but how to get pass the locked doors, latched windows and an a hungry watchdog – because Blaudop was also very economical when it came to feeding Argus. So my idea is that X waited until Blaudop left the house to go fishing and began to carefully remove one of the windows panes and flung drugged piece of meat through the opening, which puts Argus (temporarily) to sleep. X then puts his hand through the opening to unlatch the window and enter the house to begin his search, but places a "Gone Fishing" card on the front door window to prevent any unexpected visitors from intervening. Whether, or not, the search is successful is irrelevant. X leaves the same way as he came in and replaces the window pane with fresh putty, but had forgotten to take away the "Gone Fishing" sign!

So, when Blaudop comes back, he sees the sign on his front door window and, immediately suspicious, goes inside (locking the door behind him) and finds his unconscious dog on the floor. Blaudop rushes towards the dog, but slips on some dog drool and smashes with his head against the wardrobe. The excitement and shock is too much for his heart. The red handkerchief had been carelessly dropped by X and a dying Blaudop had mindlessly picked it up to press against his bleeding head wound. And died in a perfectly locked room, or house, with the keys of the back-and front door in his pocket and evidence all around him that a second person had been present when he died. But he had been alone with his sleeping dog when it happened.

Only problem with my solution is that it effectively removed the evidence of the dog, which was vital to identity the culprit, but in my scenario you can use the fingerprints left on the "Gone Fishing" sign. Yes, not very elegant, but fits the anti detective-like approach of The Dog Was Executor.

Notes for the curious: in case you wondered, Argus survived his ten-day ordeal because there was a large aquarium in the house and the book was actually turned into TV-movie in 1974, but have been unable to locate any copies or find it anywhere online. Lastly, you can expect a new review to be posted tomorrow, because this book obviously holds no interest to 99% of people who read this blog.

The Mystery of the Hidden Room (1922) by Marion Harvey

I've a long-standing affinity for the American detective story and in particular those who belong to the Van Dine School of Mystery Fiction, which was founded by S.S. van Dine when he introduced his snobby, upper-class sleuth, Philo Vance, who appeared in twelve novels – starting with The Benson Murder Case (1926) and ended with the partially-finished The Winter Murder Case (1939). A series that served as a model or influenced many of my favorite American mystery writers. Such as Harriette Ashbrook, Clyde B. Clason, Stuart Palmer, Ellery Queen, Kelley Roos, Herbert Resnicow and Roger Scarlett.

So my curiosity was piqued when I stumbled across a potential forerunner of the Van Dine-Queen School detective story.

Marion Harvey was a Brazilian-born American lawyer and, unlike the name suggests, a man who turned to writing detective stories, stage plays and pulp fiction, but the only magazine publication I was able to find is the novel-length "The Gramercy Park Mystery" – published in the December, 1929, issue of Complete Detective Novel Magazine. Nothing else is known about this elusive writer except that he penned at least six detective novels during the 1920s and two mystery plays in the 1930s.

Three of Harvey's mystery novels were listed by the late Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991), of which two are the extremely rare, hard-to-get The Arden Mystery (1925) and The House of Seclusion (1925). Fortunately, Harvey's first locked room mystery is now in the public domain and you can grab a digital-copy from the Project Gutenberg website.

The Mystery of the Hidden Room (1922) looks to also have been Harvey's debut as a novelist and is narrated by a young stockbroker, Carlton Davies, who recently had his heart broken when his fiance, Ruth Trenton, married the director of the Darwin Bank, Philip Darwin. But money was not the reason behind their break. Ruth has a "handsome, spoiled" brother, Richard, who "she had mothered almost from the time he had been born" and had been given everything on silver platter by his doting father. So no wonder Richard possessed "no moral strength" to resist temptation as an adult and, under Darwin's tutelage, he became "a devotee of the twin gods of gambling and of drink" – which had a dramatic consequences when they visited "a questionable gambling den." During an argument, a drunk Richard pulled a gun and killed someone.

As the shell-casings were still falling to the floor, Darwin extinguished the lights and in the confusion got Richard back home. And his father packed him out West.

There was, however, a price to pay as the devil demanded his due. Darwin had always admired Ruth and was "quite willing" to rat out her brother to the police unless she agreed to become his bride. Reluctantly, she acquiesced and Davies promised to honor her decision. They agreed to sever all ties with one another.

Six months later, Davies receives a note with a brief, but urgent, message from Ruth, "will you return at once with my chauffeur? I need you." So he immediately sets off to the New York mansion of the Darwins. A black bulk of a house, "like some Plutonian monster," modeled after "a type of dwelling" popular when the English held a sway over the Island of Manhattan and basically "a replica of the relic of a bygone era" – reminiscent of the dark mansion stories by Van Dine and Scarlett. Ruth lived a lonely, miserable existence since she got married and in a weak moment she had written a love-letter to Davies, but tore the letter up and threw it away. However, Darwin got his hands on the letter and has threatened Davies. This is why Ruth summoned him to their home.

Davies tells Ruth to get him the letter from Darwin's study, "the den of a sybarite," but this is the point where everything goes horribly wrong.

As the old time-piece in the hall announced the midnight hour, the sharp report of a gunshot emanated from the direction of the study and Davies finds Ruth standing over the body of her husband with a gun in her hand. Davies had seen Ruth enter the study and had the only door under constant observation. The windows were not only securely locked on the inside, but were equipped with burglar-alarms! Nobody else had been in the room unless this person vanished into thin air after shooting Darwin. So nobody, except for Ruth, could have pulled the trigger and the jury of the inquest, covering six chapters, found that "the deceased had come to his death by a pistol shot fired at the hands of his wife." A trial date is set giving Davies only two months to prove her innocent.

This brings Davies to the doorstep of a gentleman detective, Graydon McKelvie, whose hobby is solving problems of crime and only takes cases he finds interesting or pose a challenge. McKelvie is a devotee of Sherlock Holmes (referred to as a real person) and, as to be expected, he makes such comments "you see and hear without observing" or "eliminate the impossible, you see" – even performing Holmes' mind-reading trick on Davies. But as Van Dine remarked in The Great Detective Stories (1927), "the deductive work done by Graydon McKelvie is at times extremely clever." McKelvie makes his entrance in Chapter XIV, but hits the ground running with a list of fifteen questions that need to be answered in order to name "the person who committed the crime."

However, while the story acknowledges Sherlock Holmes and M. Leqoc, McKelvie is the prototype of the American detective-character from the Golden Age.

There are the obvious features of the Van Dine school: an upper-class, amateur detective operating in New York City and on friendly terms with an official homicide detective, Jones. A welcome departure from the stubborn, bumbling Lestrade-type of policemen from the Gaslight-era of crime fiction. The scene of the crime is closely scrutinized and the peculiar architecture of the house plays a key-role in the solution, but more on that in a moment. Another interesting aspect is how McKelvie's investigative-style sometimes anticipated Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason (e.g. taking a peek inside a locked strong-box stored in a bank vault without a warrant).

The intricate, maze-like scheme of The Mystery of the Hidden Room is indeed delightfully complicated with multiple twists and shines with the first glimmers of the Golden Age, but the plot is not a flawless diamond. Firstly, there's the titular room that gives the locked room a disappointing explanation. Harvey gave the hidden room a little more thought than merely placing an invisible door inside the room, but not the kind of solution you want to find in a locked room mystery. Secondly, in order to succeed, the murderer had to take an enormous risk that would not have dissipated along with the gun smoke, which would have collapsed the whole scheme had only person, such as Ruth, had noticed it – which was a very serious risk. This is one of the things that the murderer look like a hard-to-take, omniscient arch-manipulator.

Finally, as Kate of Cross Examining Crime pointed out in her 2015 review, The Mystery of the Hidden Room is probably what Monsignor Ronald Knox had in mind when he compiled his Decalogue, because the story breaks a number of his commandments.

So the plot is unquestionable flawed with a disappointing locked room-trick, but there's more to the plot than mere a shooting a locked and watched room. There are many complications, clues and an odd bunch of suspects to content with. How did a decorative lamp in the study turned itself on? Was there a second bullet and what happened to it? Who's the woman supposedly to be the sole beneficiary under Darwin's new will? Why did he kept a stoneless ring in his safe? Who unlocked the door and why did one of the suspects commit suicide? These clues have to be fitted to a cast of suspect befitting such a dark, gloomy place. A disinherited nephew, Lee Darwin. A prowling, eavesdropping private-secretary, Claude Orton, who has no problem with helping the police strapping Ruth to the electric chair. A brother-in-law who already has committed a murder and a father-in-law who had been humiliated.

Harvey genuinely wanted to give his readers an opportunity to solve the problems for themselves and you can read, between the lines, how he tried to spell out the truth without giving anything away in an too obvious a fashion. Only problem is that the plot is perhaps a little too involved to expect the readers to figure out everything for themselves, which isn't helped by that previously mentioned risk that needed an illogical line of reasoning to arrive there. Nonetheless, the solution to the who-and why were much better than the potential suicide-disguised-as-murder-trick that some of the clues began to suggest.

So, on a whole, I tremendously enjoyed The Mystery of the Hidden Room, in spite of some of its shortcomings, which is still very readable today and full of historical interest. A detective novel showing the genre transitioning from the Gaslight-era of Conan Doyle to the (American) Golden Age of Van Dine and Queen.

A Twisted Fairy Tale: "The Too-Perfect Alibi" (1949)

"Dark theaters are best for dark deeds."

Previously, I reviewed Christopher St. John Sprigg's The Perfect Alibi (1934), a detective novel that turned the idea of an iron-clad alibi on its ear, which reminded me of a truly brilliant and innovative, but practically unknown, detective story that used the unbreakable alibi to perfection – performed over seventy years ago on the timeless CBS radio drama-series, Suspense. A bleak, mournful story that still stands today as one of the best episodes in the twenty year history of the show!

"The Too-Perfect Alibi" was written by Martin Stern and originally aired on CBS radio on January 13, 1949, starring actor/comedian Danny Kaye as the story's antagonist, Sam Rogers. Sam is a close friend to the woman he loved and "the fellow she loved."

Catherine was "the loveliest thing on God's earth" and Jack was "a beautiful hunk of man," a perfect match, but Sam never understood why Catherine was so made about him. A good-looking nobody who works as a clerk in a sports shop. However, when they announce their engagement, the well-to-do Sam takes it on the chin and offers them a lovely house as a wedding present, which delights Catherine, but Jack resents that Sam gives them everything he can't afford – sarcastically comparing him to Prince Charming. Unfortunately, for Jack, this remark reminded Sam of the fairy tale of "the Prince, the Princess and the Ogre." A story in which the Ogre dies because "the Prince kills him."

"The Too-Perfect Alibi" is an inverted mystery and the first 15, of 30, minutes comprises of plotting and carrying out the murder. Sam's plan hinges on an alibi, "a strong, unshakable alibi," designed to keep him out of the electric chair.

Usually, these alibi-tricks hinge on the manipulation of clocks, eyewitnesses or documents, such as dated tickets, letters or postcards, which gives the murderer a (small) window to do the dirty deed. Sometimes this window of opportunity is counted in minutes, not hours, which makes them quite risky endeavors. Sam created an indestructible alibi that removed much of the dangers of the initial stages of murder and the only dangerous obstacle was disposing the body where it would be found the following day. When the police started asking question, they got "thirty-five affidavits from responsible people" who swear Sam was at a party at the time of the murder.

A very inventive, yet simple, alibi that's impossible to crack open and can stand with the best alibi-stories by Christopher Bush, who might have partially inspired the story, because Sam utters an unusual phrase when he's almost caught deposing of the murder weapon – saying to himself that his "alibi was still 100%." A possible reference to Bush's The Case of the 100% Alibis (1934)?

So the first half of "The Too-Perfect Alibi" deals with the plotting and execution of Jack's murder, but, in the second half, Sam is confronted with the dire, unintended consequences of his perfect little crime. You have to listen for yourself how this dark, twisted fairy tale ends, but, if you want to end a detective story on a bleak, melancholic note that will cast a gloom on your audience, this is how you do it. I could hear "The Real Folk Blues" playing in my head when the episode ended ("you're gonna carry that weight!").

"The Too-Perfect Alibi" is, in my humble opinion, one of the best inverted detective stories ever written, which not only has an excellent and original alibi-trick, but an unforgettable conclusion that ended the episode strongly. You can listen to the episode on the Internet Archive (here) or Youtube (here). Enjoy!

The Night of Fear (1931) by Moray Dalton

Back in March, Dean Street Press reissued a handful of long out-of-print detective novels by the elusive "Moray Dalton," a penname of Katherine M. Renoir, who wrote close to thirty detective novels branded by resident genre-historian, Curt Evans, as "one of the more significant bodies of work by a Golden Age mystery writer" – which remained accessible "almost solely to connoisseurs with deep pockets" for decades. The Strange Case of Harriet Hall (1936) was recommended by Evans as "one of the finest detective novels" of the period.

I politely disagreed with Evans on The Strange Case of Harriet Hall, but he commented that The Night of Fear (1931) or Death in the Cup (1932) were probably more to my taste.

So, with the final quarter of the year in front of us, I decided to go with Dalton's take on the traditional, Christmas-themed country house mystery. A note for the curious: this review was written in late June.

The Night of Fear opens with a telephone call to Sergeant Lane, of the Parminster constabulary, summoning him to the home of George Tunbridge, Laverne Peveril, where a costumed Christmas party concluded with a game of hide-and-seek in the dark – during which one of the participants found a body in the long gallery. Hugh Darrow is an old school friend of the host, blinded in the Great War, who had hidden himself behind the curtain of an alcove in the gallery. As he sat there waiting, he heard a steady dripping, "like the ticking of a clock," but slower. The sound seemed to come from another alcove and when he investigated he found the body of another party member, Edgar Stallard. Who's known to the general public as "a prolific writer of memoirs of a certain type."

Laverne Peveril was packed with family and guests at the time of the murder: there are Mr. and Mrs. Tunbridge. His cousin, Sir Eustace Tunbridge and his much younger fiancée, Miss Diana Storey, who's accompanied by her domineering grandmother, Mrs. Emily Storey. She arranged the marriage between Sir Eustace and Diana. Two of his old friends, Hugh Darrow and an American, Ruth Clare. There's "a kind of protégée" of Mrs. Tunbridge, Angela Haviland, who brought along her brother, Julian. Jack "Rags" Norris brought his two sisters and two of his undergraduate friends with him. So fourteen potential suspects in all, if you exclude the servants.

Sergeant Lane is glad to have his old friend, Inspector Hugh Collier, staying with him over the holidays and assists him in the initial stages of the investigation, but, after interviewing everyone, the story takes a departure from the conventional country house mystery – resulting in Collier exiting the case on two separate occasions. Normally, in a Golden Age mystery, the local authorities tend to be grateful to have the good fortune to have a reputable inspector or famous amateur detective in the neighborhood when a body turns up, but Dalton broke with that tradition in The Night of Fear.

Colonel Larcombe is the Chief Constable and he sends Collier packing, because he prefers to run his own show with his own men. Only to call him back the following morning when Sergeant Lane is found gassed in his bedroom, but he's again removed from the case after a complaint from Sir Eustace. Collier was replaced by Chief Inspector Purley, a policeman of the treat-'em-rough school, who immediately makes an arrest. And his take on the case was nearly identical to my (incorrect) solution.

I assumed the murder of Stallard was the result of an unfortunate set of circumstances that started with the suggestion of a game of hide and seek in the dark.

You see, Darrow drew a pension as a disabled veteran and my suspicion is that he shammed his blindness, which was discovered by Stallard when he saw the supposedly blind man stumbling around in the dark when the lights went out and this was grist on his mill – because Stallard was a sensationalist who dabbled in blackmail. So he had to be silenced. Dalton provided Purley's case against Darrow with a more tangible motive, but either way, Darrow is placed in the dock. This adds one last name to the list of detectives working on the case.

In his introduction, Evans compared Hermann Glide, a private inquiry agent, to an obscure, little-known Agatha Christie character, Mr. Goby, who appeared in The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928), After the Funeral (1953), Third Girl (1966) and Elephants Can Remember (1972). A wizened little man who looks "like a sick monkey" and is constantly kneading "a lump of modeling clay." Collier recommended Ruth Clare, who's in love with Darrow, to engage Glide to help her prove his innocence. And the clock is ticking!

So, after my first, incorrect solution, I spotted the murderer, but there was a surprising, final twist in the tail of the story. A twist that would have been more effective had it been fairly clued or foreshadowed. Now this bolt out of the blue stands as the only flaw in an otherwise excellent detective story.

All in all, I found The Night of Fear to be a more accomplished detective novel than The Strange Case of Harriet Hall and one of the better Christmas-themed country house mysteries from the Golden Age. Highly recommended for those darker, longer days of December.

On a final, semi-related note: The Night of Fear was published in the same year as Molly Thynne's seasonal mystery novel, The Crime at the Noah's Ark (1931), which made me wonder if these two novels started the tradition of Christmas mystery novels – since every single example I can think of were published after these two mysteries. I know there are some short stories predating them, but not full-length mystery novels.

Just run down the list: Anne Meredith's Portrait of a Murderer (1933), C.H.B. Kitchin's Crime at Christmas (1934), Pierre Véry's L'assassinet du Père Noël (The Murder of Father Christmas, 1934) Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1936), Mavis Doriel Hay's The Santa Klaus Murder (1936), Constance and Gwenyth Little's The Black-Headed Pins (1938), Georgette Heyer's Envious Casca (1941) Francis Duncan's Murder for Christmas (1949), Gladys Mitchell's Groaning Spinney (1950), Cyril Hare's An English Murder (1951), Ellery Queen's The Finishing Stroke (1958) and Ngiao Marsh's Tied Up in Tinsel (1972). So are there are any seasonal mystery novels from the 1910s or 20s that I overlooked?