The One-Man Book-Club

"To read of a detective’s daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy."

- Rex Stout.

Until a few years ago, the message board of the John Dickson Carr collector website was not entirely unlike a disreputable alleyway, tugged away in an obscure gas-lit street of Sherlock Holmes' Victorian London, where the fugitive shadows of the city gathered to tell and boost of tales of haunting crimes and murder most foul. However, crime has the tendency to spread and soon we were absorbed by the blogosphere, which provided us with the tools necessary to brainwash the masses indoctrinate your children promote classically-styled mysteries, but it turned the JDC forum into a ghost town – and one thing I do miss, from time to time, are the one-man book-clubs.

A One-Man Book-Club is exactly what its name implies: you read a book and post your thoughts and theories as you go through the story. This resulted in some interesting "reviews," at least I think so, and because I have nothing else at the moment I decided to revisit a few of them.

One month before I began blogging, I read Lenore Glen Offord's The Glass Mask (1944) for one of these One-Man Book-Club threads and the first thing I noted that it was the kind of detective story that American mystery writers reputedly never wrote – set in a remote small-town unaffected by the passage of time and echoes the sleepy, country-side village of Miss Marple's St. Mary Mead. The problem is also one that could have been torn from the pages of an Agatha Christie novel: was an ailing and inoffensive matriarch murdered by her grandson to inherit her property and an opportunity to get married? According to the local gossip machine, he did, but it's impossible to proof as the remains were cremated and there are many other unanswered questions.

Offord's main characters, however, are not stock-in-trade and even ahead of their time. Georgina Wyeth is a single mother of an eight-year-old girl and has relation with her semi-official fiancé, pulp writer Todd McKinnon, but she's not your quintessential dunderheaded heroine entering dark cellars or abandoned houses on her own – and the book has its "Had-I-But-Known" moments. But the biggest triumph of this book is how the solution to the "perfect murder" is handled.

S.S. van Dine's The Dragon Murder Case (1934) was a disaster of a story that I had to abandon midway through, but not before taking a peek at Vance's explanation and discovered not only that I was partially correct but also that I was being to logical. If you’re curious, you have to read the original post where my observations are hidden behind proper spoiler-tags.

Darwin Teilhet was one of the first writers to address the atrocities committed by the nazi's, when Hitler rose to power, and used the detective story as his vehicle. The Talking Sparrow Murders (1934), set against the rise of the Third Reich, opens with the unlikely sight of a talking sparrow, imploring an elderly man to help him, moments before the man himself is shot. A cover-blurb pointed out that the book, atmosphere-wise, suggests the work of another American mystery writer, John Dickson Carr, and I agree. The story has a few nice touches of the macabre, the sparrow that spoke like a human and nazi officials going out of their way to bow to a lone pine-tree, but also a young American hero who's caught between a blitzkrieg of crime and the efficient Schutzmännen of the German police force.

Unfortunately, The Talking Sparrow Murders merges the spy-thriller with elements of the detective story, which left me in two minds, where I wanted more from the plot, but was nonetheless intrigued that it was published years before Hitler began WWII. This makes me want to give less weight to its shortcomings as a mystery. I mean, it's not an historical novel – it was written in 1934, and it turned out to be a glimpse of things yet to come!

My fall as a snobbish, cynical purist began to pick up momentum after reading William DeAndrea’s The HOG Murders (1979), which has a wonderfully conceived plot that connected the past with the present. A serial killer is bumping people off at random in a small town and sends taunting messages to the police, who turn to the famous criminologist Nicolo Benedetti, who I described at the time as a cross between Hercule Poirot and a hand tame Hannibal Lecter, and Ronald Gentry – a private-eye Benedetti personally trained. The plot has an original take on the serial killer story and I was on the right track, before DeAndrea effectively pulled the wool over my eyes.

It's follow-up, The Werewolf Murders (1992), was also subject of discussion in a One-Man Book-Club thread. The book was written and set during the waning years of the Twentieth Century and a French baron has organized the first Olympique Scientifique Internationale, a year-long gathering of the world's most prominent scientists, in preparation of the new and hopefully more enlightened millennium at the ski resort of Mont-st.-Denis. But then an astronomer is murdered and his body is draped across the eternal flame, situated in the town square, another scientist is brutally attacked, and before long, logic and reason begins to dissipate among the scientific community as the rumors of the Werewolf of Mont-st.-Denis begins to leave footprints on their nerves.

When the local authority with the assistance of a detective from the famous Sûreté fails to turn up any leads or even a viable suspect, everyone, once again, turns to that philosopher of crime and human evil, Professor Niccolo Benedetti, who also shows Nero Wolfe how to collect an enormous fee and still come across as the embodiment of generosity and patriotism. 

I was able to grasp the most significant parts of the solution, only missing out on some of the finer details and motive, and missed one very obvious clue.

Well, that’s it for this week’s filler and hope to back soon with a regular review. And beware, I have stocked up on locked room mysteries... again. 

The Man Who Explained Miracles

"Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

- The White Queen (Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, 1871)

A furnished room, alongside with the corpus delictis, vanishes from an apartment building, a burglar traverses a stretch of snow without leaving footprints and a man witnesses how a floating glove snatches up a gun and shoots a man point blank in the chest. These are only a few examples of problems brought to Colonel March's attention, who, as the head of Department D-3 of Scotland Yard, has to decide whether these implausible stories are either gross exaggerations, elaborate hoaxes or perhaps cleverly disguised crimes.

If such a department would exist in our everyday world, its sole task would be to keep the confused souls, who occasionally feel the urge to confess that it was them who surreptitiously stole the Crown Jewels when nobody was looking, from bothering the regular police, however, this is John Dickson Carr's mad, mad, mad universe – and not everyone raving feverishly about disappearing rooms and invisible men is a head case. The Department of Queer Complaints (1940), published under the byline "Carter Dickson," collects seven of the nine-recorded cases that passed through the office of Colonel March. 

The New Invisible Man

Colonel March finds a confused man, named Horace Rodman, sitting on the other side of his desk, relating a bizarre story of a disembodied glove who shot a man in the apartment across the street, which had an even more unlikely follow-up when he stormed the apartment with a policeman in tow – only to discover an empty room and a broken window "magically" restored. March never leaves his desk to the make the invisible marksman emerge from our blind spot and it did not disappoint. It's perhaps a tad-bit over elaborate, but that's smoothed over once you learn of the motive. Great ending that was very much in the Carrian spirit.

Part of the plot of this story was used for the radio play "Man Without a Body," which also recycled the impossible crime from the stage-play "Thirteen to the Gallows."

The Footprints in the Sky

Dorothy Brant loathed Mrs. Topham and the fact that her footprints where the only traces in the snow, leading to and from the doorstep of Mrs. Topham, makes her the only suspect when the hated woman was brutally beaten and robbed on the evening when Brant visited her. Luckily, Colonel March noticed the footprints in the sky. The solution is something Clayton Rawson might have come up with (e.g. The Footprints on the Ceiling, 1939) and the circumstances of the crime recalled Paul Halter's The Lord of Misrule (1994), which isn't necessary a good thing (in this case it's kind of corny), but overall, it was a fun story and loved the idea of the metaphorical footprints left on the night sky.

The Crime in Nobody's Room

An entire room, harboring the body of a dead man, vanishes from an apartment building, but it's not a very good or clever story – I'm afraid. The solution to the disappearing room was blindingly obvious and the overall plot only so-so. Oh well, every short story collection has its duds.

Carr rewrote this story as the radio play, "Five Canaries in a Room."

Hot Money

Unusually, for Carr, this story opens with a messy bank robbery, more reminiscent of the hardboiled writers who described the seamier side of life than a cerebral puzzle, but one is eventually deposited on the desk of Colonel March – and involves locating an invisible piece of furniture. The bank robbers were caught, but the money was probably dropped off at a fence, who specializes in laundering dirty money, and the police have a pretty good idea who this guy is, however, the only proof (i.e. the stolen money) vanished from a locked room. The room was strip-searched without finding as much as a snippet of cash, but Colonel March believes they might have overlooked a big piece of furniture that nobody ever seems to notice. 

A big, chunky piece of furniture that everyone has in his home, but never notices, resonated the "Judas Window," which every room has but only murderers could look through, and "The Silver Curtain," from which they can cut a figuritive invisibility cloak. Carr loved to create domestic horrors! The only weakness in thia story arises if you reject the launderers hiding hole as a piece of furniture.

"Hot Money" was also rewritten as a radio play and broadcasted under the title "Nothing Up My Sleeve." Arthur Porges' collection of locked room mysteries, The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009), has a lot of impossible situations like this one – c.f. "The Scientist and the Invisible Safe."

Death in the Dressing Room

A pick-pocket has been looting the wallets of the patrons of The Orient Club and one the dancers is stabbed to death in her dressing room, but Colonel March is on the scene (originally to look into the unusual pick-pocket case) to take charge of the case and turns a cast-iron alibi into scrap metal. A well-written and deftly plotted story.

This story was rewritten for Murder Clinic, instead of Suspense, and, IIRC, March was replaced with H.M.

The Silver Curtain

A young man looses everything, except his ticket to return home, in a French casino and is approached by a shady characters who offers him a wad of money in exchange for a favor: he has to sneak a bottle of pills pass custom services. However, the entire plan collapses like a house of cards when he witnesses how an invisible assailant stabs his new employer in an empty cul-de-sac. Upon re-reading this story, first read in the anthology The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room and Impossible Crimes (2000), I have to come to the conclusion that this is perhaps one of my favorite tricks for this kind of impossible crime. So simple and effective.

Error at Daybreak

The final case for Colonel March in this collection offers a similar problem as in his previous outing: a man is stabbed to death while standing alone on a remote, rocky spot of the beach, under observation of three witnesses, who see him waving at one of them before he collapses – stabbed in the back with something like a thin, old-fashioned hairpin. It's a decent enough story that did nice job of leading me up the garden path. I was convinced that the victim was stabbed (without noticing it because of the nature of the weapon) before he had reached that desolate spot and had either a) succumbed at that place from internal bleeding or b) waving had ruptured the wound. This would have been a neat method for the murderer to (accidentally?) finish off the victim after he didn't die instantly from the stab wound. Just imagine, murdering someone by waving at him or her. I think I would've let Colonel Race wave at the victim and accidentally create the impossible situation.

All in all, this was a solid collection showing Carr as one of the most versatile and inspired writers of his generation, who was not satisfied with merely explaining who dented the skull of Sir Ivan Pale in his windowless séance room with a crystal sphere, but also finding a way for the murderer to aparantly phase through a solid oaken door that was locked and bolted from the inside. Carr purposely placed hurdles in front of him to make things more interesting and fun, and that he tripped once or twice did nothing to lessen that effect. Carr simply was one of the best and most enthusiastic players of the Grandest Game in the World and that rubs off on the reader. 

Even in the Best Families

"But, my family being what it is, even those short periods furnished plenty of incidents that might have been the prelude to a murder..."

- Sally Bowen (The Seven Deadly Sisters, 1948)

When you closely scrutinize the list with names of novelists that have one or more detective stories to their credit, it's not always an inexplicable enigma how a bunch of them ended up, knee-deep, in the boggy mire known as biblioblivion and are sinking ever deeper with each passing year. They may have had a feeble grip on their plots or sketched their characters without turning them into portraits. Their dialogue may have reverberated with the buzzing of insipid babbling or they were competent, but lacked that modicum of originality necessary to stand out in the crowd. On the other hand, if you see a writer trudging through that slough and bog who had everything, from a way with words that gave the illusionary thumbing of a heartbeat to their characters to a surprisingly effective and novel way to tackle plotting, you can't help but stare in disbelief as they slog pass you.

Pat McGerr was one of those mystery writers who had the ability to draw convincing characters, construct ingenious plots without being over-elaborate and presented them in an unconventional way – which also had a surprising touch of realism. McGerr reasoned that the basic formula, for penning a traditionally-styled whodunit, hinges on figuring out whom of the suspects planted a dagger in the neck of the body, but what if a detective story kicks-off with divulging the identity of the culprit and you have to work your way back in order to figure out who was murdered? This simple reversal allows a writer to turn even the simplest of crimes into genuine puzzlers and her first effort with this plot device, Pick Your Victim (1946), is one of the authentic masterpieces of the genre, but McGerr outdone herself with her second novel, The Seven Deadly Sisters (1948), in which we are unaware of both the identity of the murderer and the victim – an absolute gem of a who-was-done-in-and-by-whom!

Sally Bowen has moved with her newly acquired spouse, Peter, back to his native England to settle down and start a family of their own, but a frantic letter from a friend, expressing condolences and sympathy over the fact that her aunt committed suicide after poisoning her uncle, throws a sizeable peddle in the tranquility of her mind – especially since the letter neglects to mention any names. The problem is that Sally Bowen has seven aunts who are all, more or less, unhappily married and equipped with adequate motives to act on the "till death us part" line from their wedding vows.

Here's how the titular sisters are introduced in the dramatis personae in the Dell edition:

Aunt Clara:

The oldest sister, a determined matchmaker. Her domineering tactics force all of her sister in more or less unhappy marriages.

Aunt Tessie:

The schoolteacher sister, remains a spinster into her thirties. She finally marries a man younger than herself.

Aunt Agnes:

The shrewish sister, is a redhead who makes life miserable for two husbands.

Aunt Edith:

The weak sister, was maneuvered into an unhappy marriage and finds solace in the "magic bottle."

Aunt Molly:

The beautiful sister, is a free-lance artist. Too much prodding toward matrimony has made her afraid of men.

Aunt Doris:

The glamorous sister, very frankly likes men, and she doesn't let the conventions cramp her style.

Aunt Judy:

The youngest sister, is only a few years older than Sally. She has been spoiled by too much indulgence.

The knowledge that one of her aunts poisoned her husband without knowing which one prevents Sally from immediately establishing contact with the home front, but the uncertainty wages a war with her peace of mind and begins to tell her husband all about her family during an all-night conversation – from which a picture emerges of a family that could've been a happy one if one of them didn't do all the wrong things for all the right reasons.

This on-going flashback covers a period of several years and tells how most of the sisters were married off to the wrong husbands, recounting heated domestic disputes and uncovers underlining relationships that could've been lifted from the storyline of a second-rate, mid-day soap opera, but the way in which McGerr exploits these elements is everything but corny – and would make for a great television drama! But within this narrative there are also a few neat clues tucked away, accompanied with some clever misdirection, but I have to beat my own drum, once again, for being extremely lucid in picking up on all the hints and pointing the finger at the murderer before arriving at the final chapter, however, this took nothing away from a very effective conclusion – which felt both logical as well as an inevitability.

The only part that gave me pause for thought was the feasibility of Sally being able to give her husband an accurate, detailed and uncolored account of events stretching back several years that provided him with the information needed to positively identify the murderer and her victim, but if you can accept that premise you have a brilliantly executed and original detective story on your hands. I recommend this one without hesitation.

I have one more Pat McGerr novel on my to-be-read pile, Follow As the Night (1951), but I will safe that one for the one-year anniversary of this blog – which began with a review of her first novel.

Sunday Mourning

"Died on Thursday, buried on Saturday, mourned on Sunday."

Helen Reilly was a copious writer of detective stories, publishing more than thirty novels and a smattering of short stories during a career that stretched out over three decades, in which she accentuated proper police work and forensic methodology – making her a progenitor of the modern police procedure. This modus operandi is embodied in her main character, Inspector Christopher McKee of Centre Street, who "never soloed" and holds "that what he did he did with the backing of a great organization and the help of disciplined and trained men," which at the time was an innovative divergence from the norm.

Mourned on Sunday (1941) reads like a hybrid between a classically styled whodunit and a modern-day police procedure, in which an efficient and expeditious team of New York policemen find themselves relocated to the small town of Silverbrook – in order to disentangle an innocent woman from an attempted murder charge.

The maiden in distress turns out to be an attractive young widow, Nora Dalrymple, who walked down the aisle into the arms of an older, well-heeled gentleman in order to replenish her fathers bank account, but this came at the expense of a broken heart – as the marriage made it impossible for Nora to be with her one true love, Roger Thew. To prevent further heartache, Nora took off with her newly acquired spouse and broke off every line of communication with her former sweetheart.

Nora endured the prolonged agony of an uneventful marriage to an older man before he croaked and the nearly broke, but reinvigorated, widow decides to move back to Silverbrook, but coming home proves to be an disenchanting experience when Roger turns out to have married Sybil Cornwell during her absence – a local girl whose mother recently came into a lot of money.

This is a situation that is ripe for a death within the towns tightly-knit community and someone is reaping its nefarious fruits, as Sybil's mother plunges from a 10th floor window of a hotel in New York City unto the glass roof of the cocktail lounge, which is credited to Nora by the towns people – and they resent her for it. They nearly succeeded in their campaign to drive Nora from their town until someone drove into Sybil Thew on the Devil's Gorge Road and the silent witnesses all seem to point an accusing finger at Nora.

Enter Inspector Christopher McKee of Centre Street, who read the news of the attempted murder of Sybil Thew and the incarceration of Nora Dalrymple in the morning papers, making his mind drift back to Alice Cornwall fatally tumbling from a hotel window, which was filed away as an accidental death, but he simply refuses to believe that mother and daughter both had brushes with the specter of death within a month of each other – especially when a large sum of money is involved and promptly reopens the New York end of the case.

Stylistically, this story bears some resemblance to some of Ngaio Marsh's mystery novels, featuring Scotland Yard's very own Roderick Alleyn, in which the opening section sets-up the background décor and introduces the main players to the reader. The first act also sets out the problem to be investigated by the detective who's waiting in the wings for his cue. Unfortunately, the second act of this story suffers from pretty much the same problems you stumble across in a lot of Marsh's novels: the first act was driven by inspiration, while the second half was bogged down by routine.

Nevertheless, this was more than made up with a smashing finale, set at an abandoned log cabin, where a clever and surprising solution was sprung on an unsuspecting reader – at least a reader who wasted his time laboring arduously on an Agatha Christie-like solution and failed epically! I still find it hard to believe that I overlooked some really, really obvious tell-tale clues!

Sure, you can argue about the fairness or feasibility of this ingeniously executed, perhaps overly ambitious, plot, but it has to be admitted that it was cleverly and skillfully handled – which makes me want to give less weight to the fluctuating quality of the overall story.

So while this book is not eligible for a landmark status within the genre, it still has one or two neat ideas tucked away between its covers with a resolution that wrapped up the story on the same high note as it embarked on.

By the way, a question for everyone with an intimate knowledge of Helen Reilly's body of work: the story ends with McKee getting a message that a man has been shot on the steps of the Public Library at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue. Is this a set-up for the next book or one of those unrecorded cases?

Will-o'-the-wisp

"It's a pity," he said, "the walls can't talk. They could tell us a tale of a bold and intricate woman. A clever woman too—a woman who had figured the last evening of her life to the minute and second, a woman who thought she had covered everything."

- Inspector Chant (The Strawstack Murders, 1939).

After an extended excursion to explore the unfathomed nebulas of classically styled, post-1950s detective stories, I decided to take a well-deserved break from that period and head back home – to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

Dorothy Cameron Disney's The Strawstack Murders (1939) showed itself to be an exemplary specimen of that prosperous, illuminating era – in which a rich and complex plot is expertly constructed around a fair distribution of clues and red herrings. And if I were still unenlightened about the contributions made by contemporary, neo-orthodox mystery writers, such as William DeAndrea, Marco Books and Herbert Resnicow, I would've been tempted to lament the fact that detective stories like these followed in the pawprints of the dinosaurs. 

The moving spirit of this novel is a spinster, Margaret Tilbury, who lives with an assortment of relatives at a Maryland estate, known as Broad Acres, and lends her voice to the narrative of this bloody tale of murder and intrigue. The events Miss Tilbury depicts in the opening chapters, from an intensive bout with typhoid fever and the arrival of her nephew to in-law relationships and the entry of an unpopular nurse in the household, have the appearance of unimportant, domiciliary episodes and problems. But in true "Had-I-But-Known" fashion, these purely domestic events form in reality a cleverly disguised prelude to murder!

Dorothy Fithian, an unlikable live-in nurse who temporarily took up residence at Broad Acres to look after Miss Tilbury when she was struggling with the specter of death, becomes the first stiff to be carted-off to the city morgue when, one fateful evening, the household notices a glow emanating from the fields behind the house. When they go out to investigate, they discover the straw stack burning like a friar's lantern and during their attempts at dowsing the fire they drag Dorothy Fithian's limp body from underneath the smoldering stacks – where her nightly assailant left her to die an agonizing death after chocking her into semi-unconsciousness.

But when they return to the house, they find that someone has cut the telephone wires and drained the gasoline from their cars – effectively delaying the proper authorities from taking charge of the crime-scene and gaining valuable time for other nefarious activities. This makes it very clear to the members and friends of Miss Tilbury's family that they have a murderer among them and do everything within their power to sabotage the official investigation, from simply withholding information to burning possible evidence, much to the chagrin of Inspector Chant.

Crime Map on the Back Cover

Back in April, Disney favorably impressed me with her debut novel, Death in the Backseat (1937), which I delineated as a big knotted ball of plot threads that slowly unravels in front of a captivated reader, but during her second outing into the genre she crafted a novel that is nothing less than a minor masterpiece of plotting and misdirection. The plot simply bursts with activity, as characters are constantly moving around and bumping into more trouble as they go along, while clues are inconspicuously dropped along the way – which results in new developments in every odd chapter that ramifies the problems facing them and the reader.

But the greatest achievement here is perhaps the clever and original treatment of a stock-in-trade situation of the detective story that is cleverly hidden at the core of this book. I can't go into exact details, without giving away a vital part of the solution, but it makes you want to stand up and applaud the author for this ingenious display of creativity!

I've become a bit fearful at this point that I might have over praised this story, but I find the flaws, IMHO, negligible. Yes, the HIBK allusions can be annoying or even intrusive at times and most of the characters function more as chess pieces on a playing board than as actual human beings, but these are trifles compared to the quality, ingenuity and originality of the overarching story.

Dorothy Cameron Disney has completely faded away from popular view, which can be partly attributed to the fact that her mysteries are standalones, but that's hardly a justification for this criminal negligence on the part of the reading public. A good detective story is a good detective story, even if it lacks a catalyst such as Hercule Poirot or Dr. Gideon Fell, and The Strawstack Murders is an exempli gratia of the Golden Age Detective novel – in which Disney spun fine meshes from the multitude of plot threads and ensnared both characters and reader in it.

Simply put, The Strawstack Murders provides you exactly with the type of plot that you hope to find when opening a detective story from the 1930-and 40s. A (minor) masterpiece, plain and simple!

Bibliography:

Death in the Backseat (1937)

The Strawstack Murders (1939)

The Golden Swan Murders (1939)

The Balcony (1940)

Thirty Days Hath September (1942)

Crimson Friday (1943)

The Seventeenth Letter (1945)

Explosion (1948)

The Hangman's Tree (1949)

An Obituary for a Poet

"Nothing is simpler than to kill a man; the difficulties arise in attempting to avoid the consequences."

- Nero Wolfe (Too Many Cooks, 1938)

One of the drawbacks of roaming the remnants of a genre whose memories have become a fading echo in the recollection of the populace, is that's it difficult to keep your aim focus on one specific name or phase for an extended period of time. The map of the genre, for me, is still dotted with stretches of terra incognita, just waiting to be rediscovered and explored, which makes loitering almost a criminal offense – and a convenient excuse to explain away why it took me nearly a year to get back at Jack Iams after a favorable first impression.

Just about a year ago, I pored over one of his standalone novels, The Body Missed the Boat (1947), which was a very quick, but nonetheless amusing, read and left me wanting to sample more work from this little known author – so I ordered Death Draws the Line (1949) and What Rhymes with Murder? (1950). But it took me until this week to finally pick one of them up. The book I selected and finished reading yesterday was the enigmatically titled What Rhymes with Murder? 

As a detective story, it was interesting enough but not entirely satisfactory as the plot was very uneven in quality. But before examining the pros and cons, I have to drop a line or two here on how similar everything felt to one of William DeAndrea's Matt Cobb stories. It wasn't as good, of course, but the tone was very much the same – just like the voice that guided the readers through the events as they went down. The narrator, Stanley "Rocky" Rockwell, even holds a somewhat similar position as Matt Cobb as the fighting editor of one the cities biggest newspapers, The Record, and the problems he has to tackle arises from this job. Just for that, devotees of William DeAndrea and Matt Cobb should hunt down a copy for their collection. But on to the story.

In the opening chapter, Rocky relates how their only competitor, the Eagle, went into suspended animation after the local dynasty, who owned the news outlet, unexpectedly tipped over, but was brought back into circulation by a chain of rag sheets with a reputation for sensationalism and yellow journalism – and the first one to receive a treatment with their acid-based ink is a British poet en route to the United States. 

Ariel Banks was definitely a polarizing figure, a Bohemian versifier known as The Great Lover, but the editor of The Record hardly finds this to be sufficient justification for the Eagle to mobilize masses of self-righteous drones to protest his arrival and picket the train station – and since the poet has been invited to speak at the Tuesday Ladies' Club there's a double-edged stake in it for Rocky. First off, his long-time fiancée, Jane Hewes, is a leading member of the club and has to take care of the amative pen knight, which sits not well with him, to say the least, but at the same time he's obliged to oppose their rival competitors in what's rapidly shaping up to be a paper war.

Crime Map on the Back Cover

But when Monk Sparle, the callous editor of the Eagle, and his female field operator Amy Race, give Rocky the multiple choice option to either ascend the career ladder at their outfit or be trodden under foot everything becomes far more personal than a contact ad in a lonely hearts column – especially after a dead-shot plugs the poet's ticker with a slug in front of his fiancée.

What Rhymes with Murder? has a lot going for itself, from the crisp narration of the protagonist to the astute plotting on the authors part, but the clues impressed me as a trifle weak and the coincidences just made it come up short from being front page material – but the only real erratum was the trivialization of Rocky's presence when a secondary character suddenly donned the deerstalker for the dénouement aboard a night train bound for the Capitol.   

All in all, this is a very decent effort at crafting a detective story and a fascinating example of a work published at the tail end of that prosperous, golden era when the puzzle orientated stories were receding into the background to make place for the action-filled, hardboiled private eye tales that ran mainly on booze, cigarettes, gunoil and testosterone. You can find elements from both epochs tucked away between the pages of this book, making it sort of a transitional fossil of paper. So even though this is not a prime example of the classic detective story, it still has enough to offer to us fans to make it worth our time.

Now only one question remains: how long will it take me before I get around to reading Death Draws the Line? Place your bets now!

On a final, unrelated note: I hate it when one review, more or less, writes itself while others put up a real struggle when it comes to finding the right words and phrases – like was the case with this one. After the first paragraph, I started to blank out. The above is what I was able to churn out after numerous rewrites. Yeah, I blow.

Bibliography:

The Body Missed the Boat (1947)

Girl Meets Body (1947)

Prematurely Gay (1948)

Death Draws the Line (1949)

Do Not Murder Before Christmas (1949)

A Shot of Murder (1950)

What Rhymes With Murder? (1950)

Into Thin Air (1952)

A Corpse of the Old School (1955)

Too Many Skeletons, Not Enough Closets

Sgt. Scott: "Is the body count always this high around here?" 

DCI Barnaby: "It's been remarked upon."

- Midsomer Murders.

Well, how do you open a review when you have literarily nothing to set it up with? The book under review today, Peter Hunt's Murders at Scandal House (1933), was randomly selected from my mountainous pile of unread detective stories by slingshotting rocks at its top, and whatever toppled down from its lofty heights would be my next read. What? It's an absolutely flawless method, but, admittedly, left me this time with a tiny problem: Peter Hunt is so obscure that he doesn't even have a page on the GADwiki – which is a who's who of who the hell are these guys? So I have decided not to bother with a cutesy introduction and dig right in.

Murders at Scandal House starts off with Alan Miller, Chief of Police of Totten Ferry, who's on holiday in Adirondacks, when a local game warden drags him along to a swamp island – above which buzzards soar suspiciously. They expect to stumble upon animal carcasses, left behind by poachers, but are instead confronted with the body of a naked man, tied to a tree, who's been eaten alive by a swarm of mosquitoes – and a track of mysterious, elephantine paw prints are leading away from the body into the drassy swamp. Here's where the problems with the story begin to manifest themselves. The author evidently understood that a detective story needs good, intriguing and puzzling plot threads, but seems to have been clueless as to how to follow up on them. He actually explains the otherworldly paw prints a few pages later by ascribing them to the murderer walking on swamp shoes, and gives a similar, premature and mundane explanation to the origin of a ghostly prowler!

 

In fact, it's almost as if this book was written by someone who suffered from dual personality: with one individual being a reasonable gifted writer, equipped with enough imagination to churn out a half decent mystery, and the other a second-rate hack who couldn't plot his way through a lunch appointment. This dualistic personality also strongly reflects in the fluctuating quality of the chapters. Some of them were very readable, interesting even, while others were dull at best – and tempted me to skim through them to the next one.

But let us return to the story, and the victim who has now been identified as the private chauffeur of the Burrell clan, who are local royalty around those parts, with the elderly and opinionated Lydia Whyte-Burrell as their matriarch – reigning over her relatives with a firm, but generous, hand. And like nearly all families, particular ones with a long pedigree like theirs, they have embarrassing secrets that are best forgotten or ignored – but the murder coincides with the bursting of their overstuffed closets and all of the family skeletons come pouring out to parade their past sins in front of them. From illegitimate children to an unresolved death, which, in turn, leads to the creation of new skeletons and will leave a trail of half a dozen or so fresh bodies.

In general, I'm afraid that this is not a very good detective story at all. There are some good and even absorbing excepts to be found between the covers of this book, but they're hardly enough to elevate the story even slightly below an average attempt – which is also partly due to the fact that Hunt neglected to emulate his murderer who spend a lot of time and effort in putting out a trail of red herrings. If only Hunt had been as liberal with sowing actual clues this could've been a passable endeavor by a second-stringer. The motive, however, has one interesting feature, but, again, nothing to make up for the annoying fluctuation in quality of the chapters and the lack of actual clues or a stunning conclusion. This one is for collectors of Dell Mapback editions only!

This has been a rather depressing review, but the next detective story on my list promises to be gem and coincidently seems to continue the theme of this book: skeletons in the closets. Oh, and it has a locked room mystery!

Which Witch is Which?

Journalist and author, Zelda Popkin, is today better remembered, if she's remembered at all, for her novel The Journey Home (1945), selling close to a million copies, in which she sets forth the story of a chance meeting between a homeward soldier and a career woman against the backdrop of a catastrophic train crash.

But she also wrote a series of detective novels featuring one of the first professional female detectives, the independent-minded Mary Carner, who works for a large department store as a security detective – looking out for their merchandise and tackling shoplifters. In Murder in the Mist (1940), her second recorded case, she also demonstrates a very feminine mindset, that was definitely ahead of her time, by humiliating and verbally burning an incompetent police chief to a crisp and leaving her newly acquired spouse at the hotel, to take care of a child, while she goes on the hunt for a murderer.

A touch gal who should go over very well with a contemporary reading audience and scholars.

The Wicked Witch of Laneport

When Mary Carner and Christopher Whittaker, New York City's most credible department store detectives, take a wrong turn on their honeymoon, they end up in the picturesque New England coastal town of Laneport – a flocking place for two-bit artists and gossipy old coffin dodgers.

The newlywed couple decides to check into the local hotel, The Rockledge, for the night, but after snugly turning in, Mary is awakened by a little girl tugging at her arm – whispering complainingly that it's chilly and how she's unable to rouse her mommy. What follows is a powerful scene, in which Mary discovers the marble-white, stone-cold body of the girls' mother in the next room. A black metal spike is projecting from her bare chest.

The child is inconsolable with grief when she learns why her mother didn't respond to her calling and tugging, but after they managed to calm her down a bit they learn that she actually saw the assailant who killed her mother, however, how tenable is her statement when the only description she's able to give is that of a cloaked witch with a broom. These moments, in which reality and fantasy seem to merge for a brief moment, are the best aspects of the plot.

Crime Map of Laneport

Zelda Popkin shows plenty of imagination and has a flair for telling a fascinating story, in which she smoothly blends fantastic plot elements, such as murderous witches, cloven hoof-prints and a deserted village, with a sincere, down-to-earth effect of murder (the orphaned kid of the murdered woman) while also going through the motions of a proper detective story – lining up, some usual and unusual suspects, ranging from a sculptor and his jealous wife, an ex-murderer in hiding, a fleeing millionaires son and an elfish old codger, who, at times, gets wrapped-up too much in his daydreams.

However, the professed solution, and the events leading up to the unmasking of the murdering witch, leaves a lot to be desired for the self-proclaimed armchair detectives whose only desire is a fair shot at cracking the case before the detective does – and the fact that Mary doesn't work out the solution by logical reasoning from clues, or even a single flash of intuition, either, but by pure happenstance, as she witnesses the murderer accidentally recreating the tell-tale hoof-prints, doesn't do much to uplift the disappointing feeling.

In many ways, Murder in the Mist, reminded me of a Gladys Mitchell novel, in which she interestingly underplayed her wildly effective imagination, but with her greatest weakness, a penchant for weak, ineffective and muddled endings, in full-swing.

That's why I can only recommend this book to mystery readers who don't care about the puzzle element or fans of Gladys Mitchell, who want to contrast her work with this book.

Not What You'd Expect From a Disney

Contrary to what the title might suggest, this is not a belated rant on Disney's inane scheme for a modern rendition of the Miss Marple character – plucking her from a quiet village in the British countryside and dumping her in the Big City in the guise of a present-day version of a 1920s flapper.

I will not drop any embittered comments on how Agatha Christie's grandson is pimping out her estate and that everyone with a pocketful of loose change can take Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple for a ride. Nor shall I make poor attempts at sarcasm by saying that the next major announcement will probably be that Harlequin Publishers has acquired the rights to The Mysterious Mr. Quin (1930), and are in the process of revising them into full-length romance novels – with all the detective stuff cut out of them, of course, but to make up for the lost of authenticity they will slap the name of Mary Westmacott on the covers. Nope. Not a peep out of me on that subject.

The Disney I'm referring to is Dorothy Cameron Disney, one of the many shamefully neglected names in the field, who specialized in blending detection with atmospheric scenes of suspense and eerie foreshadowing sequences – commonly referred to as "Had-I-But-Known." This term is used to describe the books of Mary Robert Rinehart and her followers, who usually have their heroine reflecting back at the start of their novels, "had I but known that my surprise visit to my Great-aunt Agatha would expose a dark plot leading to the death of four people, I would never have gone to Rockport." Or something that runs along similar lines.

To be fair, this particular sub-genre never really appealed to me, sounding just a little bit too much as cozies with some doom and gloom added to the mix, but the descriptions and reviews of Dorothy Cameron Disney's mysteries, suggesting complex plotting wrapped up in a thick, atmospheric blanket, did catch my attention – and after reading her first book, Death in the Back Seat (1936), I'm glad that, once again, I succumbed to temptation.

Death in the Back Seat opens with a young couple, Jack and Lola Storm, taking a break from their expensive New York lifestyle, and settle down for while in the quiet town of Crockford, situated in rural Connecticut, where they rent a small cottage from the unsociable Luella Coatesnash – a stout, old-fashioned woman who's somewhat of an unofficial sovereign of the region.

But peace and quietness simply cannot be allowed to reign long in a detective story, and when a mysterious telephone call, more or less, orders the Storms to pick up a business acquaintance of their landlady, who, at that moment, is visiting France with her companion, they're unwillingly dragged into a vast and dark plot – leaving them with a corpse on the rumble seat of their car and a bag in the front seat stashed with cash.

And that's just for starters. Crockford, being the small town it is, are prejudiced against the suspicious outsiders and it doesn't exactly help that their cottage, and the grounds immediately surrounding it, are the center of all the criminal activity in the region – from a burglar, his face blackened with charcoal, stumbling from their closet and fleeing into the night to charred fragments of bone in a furnace.

Crime Map on the Back Cover

However, they're not making things exactly easy for themselves, either, purposely stumbling from one dangerous situation into another – all the while finding clues, uncovering hidden relationships, and, more importantly, not trying to get themselves killed. The only thing you can say against them is that they don't do it with the same joie de vivre as the Troys and the Browns, but then again, this not that type of mystery.

This book is really one big knotted ball of plot threads that slowly unravels in front of a captivated reader, and the best part is that you can play with it yourself, by trying to unsnarl it before Jack and Lola do, or, uhm, just sit back and enjoy the ride.  

On a final note, Mike Grost notes on his excellent website that Disney completely ignored one of Van Dine's sacred rules, and I have one thing to say about that: good for her!

There are, IMHO, only two rules for writing a good detective story: it has to play fair with the reader and there has to be a plot (or at the very least an attempt at creating one). I see no discernible reason why a detective story should exclude sinister societies, monstrous conspiracies, tough gangsters or a genuine love interest. It just depends on how well an author can work these elements into a story, and some do it better than others. Disney is one of them and scores full marks for this effort.

The Prevaricatory Hangman

Apparently, the year Twenty-Eleven insists on being a year of discoveries. Not since the primordial days of my fandom, when the habit hadn't yet developed to the stage of a chronic addiction, have I sampled so many new and different authors – which is partly to blame for the fluctuation in quality of the books I discuss here. And that bums me out a bit, when only a few months before opening this blog I was reading such classic locked room stories as Alan Green's What a Body! (1949), Anthony Boucher's Nine Times Nine (1940) and Herbert Brean's The Traces of Brillhart (1961).

I guess I can always re-read them, right? *a loud, grumbling protest rises up from my to-be-read pile* Shuddup! you cannot dictate my life any longer! You cannot force me to... what... a-are those t-teeth?!

OK, here's a short review for you to read, while I deal with this situation (if I'm not back before the end of this week, avenge me!):

The Death of a Sham Hangman

Matthew Head's The Devil in the Bush (1945) starts off with Hooper "Hoop" Taliaferro (pronounced Tolliver), a young professor of botany at an American university, touring the Belgium Congo as part of an economic mission to determine the status of the agricultural stations, and decide which of them are valuable enough to the war effort to receive financial backing from his government. During his wanderings through the infernal region, from Colonial settlements to the more uninhabited spots that lead to the stations, he meets a rugged, scared man with a crooked nose who becomes really chummy and boosts how he once strung up a native who killed a sub-administrator during a brief uprising. But when Hoop tells him he's on his way to inspect the facility of one André de L'andréneau, his friendly demeanor pales and takes off in a hurry, which isn't surprising, as it turns out, he was André and lying through his yellowed stained teeth. The next time Hoop sets eyes on the prevaricatory hangman, after arriving at the station, he's stuffed in a primitive coffin – ready for burial!

The disease he succumbed to, by all appearances, seems normal enough, especially for that region, but the broody atmosphere and relationships of the station people hint at a darker reason for his death. And then there are the blatant lies he told Hoop when he had no idea who he really was.

Among his potential murderers, if it was murder, which dwell the Congo-Ruzi station, are his brother, Gérôme, and his wife Jacqueline, another Belgium couple and their beautiful daughter, who longs to escape from the bush, and the resident botanist Henri Debuc. There's also a medical missionary, Dr. Mary Finney, who possesses a sulphurous tongue and crude manners, who acts as the story's detective. But before she's able to point out the responsible party there will be a second, far more gruesome, death, in which one of them gets his throat cut and the flesh ripped off his back.

Head paints an intriguing, but despairing, picture of life in the Congo, and intertwines it with a clever little detective plot, with a few interesting clues thrown into the mix, however, I felt that some of the story's impact was lost by its length. The plot would've been a lot more tighter, and effective, had it been a novella.

The Devil in the Bush was brought back into circulation by Felony and Mayhem back in 2005, and is still fairly easily obtainable online.