Golden Rain (1980) by Douglas Clark

In my previous two blog-posts, I reviewed Douglas Clark's The Libertines (1978) and Roger Ormerod's An Alibi Too Soon (1987), two British genre conservationists, who attempted to modernize the great detective stories of yore during the post-WWII decades and why I grouped them together as modern, neo-traditionalists – which may need a small correction or footnote. Having read two of their novels back-to-back, I noticed a subtle difference in the way they tried to mix the traditional with the modern. 

Ormerod evidently was closer aligned to the modern, psychological and character-driven crime novels (e.g. The Key to the Case, 1992) than Clark, but with unmistakably traditionalists bend. And reveled in the use of double-edged clues, red herrings, twisted alibis and locked room mysteries (e.g. A Shot at Nothing, 1993). Clark was much more covert in his approach and his novels not only masquerade as modern police procedurals, but apparently tend to underplay the traditional elements of the plot a little. Or, to be more accurately, disguising his plots as pharmaceutical mysteries and poison-puzzles. You can do and get away with a lot of trickery that involves poisons, medicine or the victim's medical condition. An approach that allowed so much room that Clark was even able to wrote something as incomparable as The Longest Pleasure (1981).

However, I've only read a handful of Clark's novels and my observation could be completely wrong. So why not read another one to see if the pattern repeats and what better to use than one of his reputed, uncatalogued locked room mystery novels? 

Golden Rain (1980) is the thirteenth title in Clark's Master and Green series and takes place at Bramthorpe College for Girls, "always referred to simply as Bramthorpe," where Miss Mabel Holland reigns in her double role as beloved headmistress and benevolent dictator – as "discipline was strict and punishments were few." She reformed the school most diplomatically, economized without austerity and was very cross when learning one house had saved money on catering one term. Because "the school was not in business to make a profit out of the girls' food fees." Everything was done under her watch to ensure the girls could realize their full potential that, in turn, raised the academic standard of the school. So nobody could have possibly have had a reason to kill her, but Miss Holland becomes the subject of a precarious murder inquiry. An inquiry in which even Scotland Yard has to tread carefully.

Miss Holland lives in the School House and shares the place with a housekeeper, Mrs. Gibson, who has Tuesday as her day off, but, upon her return, she smelled vomit. A trail lead to the bedroom where she discovered the body of Miss Holland. An autopsy revealed she had been poisoned with laburnum seeds, which grow from a poisonous plant with pea-like, yellow flowers commonly called Golden Rain. Miss Holland was "chock full of the seeds," but the local police is more than willing to settle on an accidental poisoning or suicide. She was alone the house, locked up tight, with "no signs of forcible entry," but some people close to her have good reasons to believe she neither committed suicide or accidentally poisoned herself.

Miss Holland was a level-headed, cheerful and happy woman who looked forward to her holiday in Malta and had written her mother to tell she had "a lovely surprise" that would overjoy her, which hardly suggests a suicidal frame of mind. Secondly, Miss Holland was a biologist and botanist who would be able to identify laburnum seeds and know of their toxic qualities. But how do you force a spoonful of crushed laburnum down someone's throat in a locked house without a struggle or a trace of poison anywhere? So what they needed was a big bug from Scotland Yard to clear up this messy case.

Funnily enough, I've read some recent reviews criticizing Clark's overstaffed cast of police characters as a massive waste of resources and manpower, which made me wonder if he faced similar criticism during his lifetime – because it becomes kind of plot-thread in the first-half of the story. The local police is divided with Detective Inspector Lovegrove intending to squash the case at the inquest to get a verdict of suicide or accidental death. Detective Superintendent George Masters and Detective Chief Inspector Green with Detective Sergeants Reed and Berger arrived less than a day before the inquest, which gives them precious little time to come up with evidence to the contrary. And the prickly, autocratic coroner wants plain facts to bring in any other verdict. The presence of a specialized Scotland Yard team "cost money and time," which makes an exhaustive investigation hard to justify without a shred of evidence in "the face of a coroner's unfavourable verdict."

Unfortunately, this angle is only used to pad out the first-half with Clark holding back all the good and clever bits for the second-half.

First of all, the locked room situation is, as expected, completely underplayed and barely acknowledged, but the locked doors and windows were, sort of, incidental. Some of you likely would not even label it as a locked room mystery or impossible crime. Miss Holland was poisoned in a locked house, but the deviously clever piece of plotting is in the poisoning-trick that's almost as good as the one from Detective Conan's "The Loan Shark Murder Case." But it's not merely a trick. Clark skillfully dovetailed the poisoning-trick with all the other facets of the story and employed something common in schools as an original piece of camouflage. Something that threw me off the scent and was initially a little disappointed as it introduced an until then unknown character into the solution. There was no reason to be disappointed. Clark used it to give the murder something "strange for a major crime" like murder, which revealed the camouflage the murderer draped across the poisoning-trick.

I was equally impressed with the late problem of three sets of fingerprints discovered at School House and particular the third set poses a tricky problem, but the explanation either makes you want to slap Clark's shoulder like a good sport or strangle him with his own necktie – nicely fitted the setting and period. Only problem is that it didn't give enough room to be used to its full potential and give the solution more of a punch. But, other than that, the ending and solution placed Clark back on the same footing with Ormerod as a top-tier, neo-traditionalist mystery writer.

Where they differ is Clark's clandestine alliance to the classics as he tries to sneak all the good stuff pass the reader (or critics?) without trying to draw attention to them like a closeted alcoholic lacing his coffee with booze. Almost like he felt it was necessary to lure the reader in with the premise of a contemporary police procedural before hitting them with the more traditional stuff disguised, or presented, as a pharmaceutical or poisoning mystery. Death After Evensong (1969) appears to be an exception to the rule, but than again, there's nothing subtle about shooting someone point blank with a magic-bullet. However, it showed that his work could have been even better had he continued to embrace and indulge in the traditional, plot-driven side of his detective novels.

So, all things considered, Golden Rain begins slowly and delays the most important plot developments and clues until the second-half, but the end result is an excellent, first-class take on the classic, college-set mystery novel and an admirable dovetailing act. Recommended to everyone who appreciate a good, old-fashioned puzzle plot or detective stories that take place in the world of academia.

Just a heads up, I might bookend these two Douglas Clark posts with reviews of Ormerod. So the next one might be one of Ormerod's 1990s mysteries, but haven't made up my mind yet. However, I'll will return to the Golden Age in one of the next two posts. So don't touch that dial!

The Libertines (1978) by Douglas Clark

In my previous review, I mentioned several modern classicists like the pharmacist of crime, Douglas Clark, who specialized in medical mysteries and ingenious, sometimes impossible poisonings that were quite popular in the 1970s and '80s – only to disappear into obscurity upon his death in 1993. Strangely enough, these retro mystery writers tended to vanished quicker and more thoroughly from popular culture than their Golden Age counterparts. But they, too, are being rediscovered today. 

Douglas Clark has been fortunately enough to have all twenty-six of his Detective Superintendent George Masters and Detective Chief Inspector Bill Green reprinted over the past five years by Lume Books (formerly Endeavour Media).

So, technically, the series is available again to the public, but they're very much hidden in plain sight. Lume Books is a small indie publisher that pumps out novels ("...over 3000 books written by 800 authors"), but settled on a bleak, unimaginative style of generic and uniform cover-art that gives the impression Clark wrote dark, psychological crime thrillers – which couldn't be further from the truth. Clark wrote traditional, fairly clued detective novels posing as a police procedurals with a pharmaceutical gimmick. And eschewed cheap thrills or plunging the murky depths of the human psyche. For example, the most rounded and fleshed out character in The Longest Pleasure (1981) is the botulism bacteria. Clark simply wrote pure, Golden Age-style detectives and howdunits.

The Libertines (1978) is the tenth title in the series and takes place on Samuel Verity's Ravendale Farm, situated in Ravendale Bridge, Yorkshire, which hosts a yearly cricket fortnight during high summer. Versity is one of the founding members of a cricket club, the Libertines, when none of the members had much money. So they were determined that it should not become a rich man's club, but "a cricket club anybody could afford to join" with everyone contributing something to hold the Libertines' fortnight. A tradition that began right after the war ended.

Three decades later, there are only three original members left. Samuel Verity and his long-time friend and London solicitor, William Dunstable, whose family will become intertwined as his son, Stephen, is dating Sarah – who's the daughter of Samuel and Sally Verity. But not everything is roses and sunshine. Old Tom Middleton, "an irascible old devil," is the third surviving member whose behavior is tolerated because he's a wine-shipper and furnishes the bar for the fortnight at wholesale rates. But he has become worse as his health declined. And very venomous.

Last year, Tom advised Sally Verity to keep "a motherly eye" on her daughter, because he had witnessed Sarah and Stephen "misbehaving at nights in the copse" when he was out on a light night walks. She called him "a dirty old peeping-tom" and Sarah not only denied it, but she was "quite willing to have old Dr Michaelson examine her to prove she was still intact." Stephen is less than pleased when he learns of this a year later and her brother, Teddy, also gets the Middleton treatment. Soon the younger members of the team are talking among themselves about "breaking the old bastard's neck" and that "the best place to dispose of the body would be the dung tank," which sets the stages for murder. Tom is not the first to bow out of the story with his nose in the air.

Nick Larter is an elderly, ailing and retired window cleaner who's not a Libertine, but he's been barman for the fortnight ever since it began. A fun, exciting summertime job that earned him a few extra pounds, but his health has been deteriorating rapidly and, while shaking Middleton's customary three drops of bitters in a gin glass, he collapses behind the bar – dying a few minutes later. A death that hardly surprises his doctor and unhesitatingly signed the certificate, but, three days later, Middleton dies in the wake of the first cricket game. So the local authorities order post mortems on both bodies, which revealed the presence of the quick-acting poison nicotine.

Superintendent George Masters and Detective Chief Inspector Bill Green are dispatched to Ravendale Bridge to untangle this poisonous puzzle.

A double poisoning Green described as "one by a chance which is mathematically impossible" and "the other by a means which is physically impossible," but whether or not they count as impossible crimes depends on your generosity. I don't think Middleton's death has any claim to it, but Larter's poisoning is a different story. While serving behind the bar, Larter slipped with the bottle-opener and snagged his right forefinger on the serrated edge of the crown top, "a trifling cut," but he died minutes later with "a qualified doctor and a score of others as witnesses." But nobody could daub nicotine on a crown top expecting the victim would touch it, "let alone scratch his finger on it." However, the trick here is figuring out how the two poisonings can be linked together. Don't read it solely for the impossible crime element.

Clark excellently contrasted the death of the "poor old retired window cleaner" with the murder of the "well-heeled wine importer who lived hundred of miles apart" and "the only possible link between those two was this annual cricket lark." This makes it a double murder that could have only taken place at Ravendale Farm during those two weeks of summer. A very well done and convincing closed-circle of suspects situation.

You can say contrast is the overarching theme of the story with the older characters struggling to keep up with a changing world and social mores, while the younger generation try to live up to the standards of the old-world while trying to find their own way and voice. Good examples of this are the conversation between Sally and Sarah concerning Middleton's accusation and Sam and Teddy trying to balance traditional and modern methods to run the family farm. I thought that made for a more interesting backdrop than the cricket scenes, which I don't understand and everything related to it completely went over my head, but I know it's supposed to be a boring, excruciating slow-paced game with older players taking naps – which doesn't seem like a sport that can be played with "a savage intensity." Playing cricket savagely sounds like a brutal game of curling or a grueling round of golf. Anyway...

So the characters, setting and setup are good and sound, but what about the plot, you ask? Not too bad. Admittedly, the clueing is a little sparse, but Clark's approach here wasn't without interest. Masters and Green begin to hunt for "anomalies in the conversations" conducted with the club members in lieu of physical clues to see if they can "explain away that which is odd or out of character." When they've sniffed out such anomalies, they "look very closely at those involved." Not wholly unlike Agatha Christie with one remark unmistakably echoing one of her 1940s mysteries ("Guvf qevax vf svygul"), but Masters and Green also have to search for a piece of physical evidence hidden somewhere on the farm. Where this piece of evidence was hidden points straight to the murderer, because only the murderer could have hidden it there. You can figure out where it's hidden and, in combination with the anomalies, identity the murderer with only the motive requiring a bit of educated guesswork. The whole puzzle is pretty solvable without being too obvious from the beginning. If you pay attention to what's being said and done, you can see where and how all the puzzle pieces fit.

There are, however, two (minor) drawbacks. The ending felt a little flat with Masters cutting a deal with the nonthreatening and even sympathetic murderer, but rather liked the final lines of the story. I already said Clark created a murder mystery that could only have taken place at Ravendale Farm during those summer weeks, which turns out to have been 100% preventable. Secondly, I don't think The Libertines is a good title for this kind of detective story. I don't think it really fitted the story. The Libertines' Fortnight or the more genre-driven Sudden Death would have been better titles. Looking at a glossary of cricket terms, Contrived Circumstances or Farm the Strike would have been even better titles for this cricket-themed detective novel.

But all things considered, The Libertines stands as a good, rock-solid and competently plotted continuation of the British Golden Age detective story with a poisoning-trick that would have received the nodding approval of the Queen of Crime herself. However, if you're new to the series, I still recommend you begin with the excellent Death After Evensong (1969).

Premedicated Murder (1975) by Douglas Clark

Last year, I reviewed Douglas Clark's The Longest Pleasure (1981), an odd duck of a detective novel, which blended elements of the medical thriller, scientific mystery and serial killer story and presented as a modern police procedural – centered on a manufactured outbreak of botulism. Amazingly, for a modern police procedural, the botulism bacteria emerged as the best fleshed out character of the story. 

An anonymous comment left on my review pointed out The Longest Pleasure is a story where "a scientific idea is the center of idea" and "closer to being a science fiction novel than some readers might like." I was reminded of that comment when reading the subject of today's review. 

Premedicated Murder (1975) is the sixth novel in Clark's series of pharmaceutical mysteries about Superintendent George Masters and Inspector Bill Green. At this early point in the series, Masters and Green can't stand the sight of one another with a "long overdue, flaming row" hanging in the air, but until the storm breaks, they have to find a nasty poisoner in "one of the most lovely villages in the commuter belt," Lowther Close. Roger Harte was a war hero who was severely injured in France, which left him crippled and a promising engineering career in ruins, but he still managed to make a living as a consultant and electric expert. And even had his own workshop where he labored on a prototype of "a mechanical heart."

Roger Harte was "the little tin god" of the village, "albeit a pleasant, benevolent sort of god," who went out of his way to help his neighbors. Such as the unpopular newcomer, Milton Rencory, who has an almost natural gift to offend the villagers. If the beloved Harte had not asked everyone to be decent to Milton and Maisie Rencory, they would have been shunned by the whole community.

On the day of his death, Harte visited the Rencorys when he began to show symptoms of poisoning, dying in their house about three hours later, which puts Rencory in a tight, prejudiced spot – reason why the local authorities called upon Scotland Yard. So who poisoned "an apparently good-hearted, popular man" and why use such a rare, slow-working poison like ricin? A toxic agent extracted from castor oil seeds and there's a chapter explaining why it's difficult to produce and hard to obtain. Very unusual to come across a case of ricin poisoning in murder cases.

The bits and pieces with the man-made heart and the poison reminded me of that anonymous comment, but the quickly recede in the background to make place for a much more straightforward detective story.

Masters and Green begin dragging-the-marsh and interview everyone involved about the universally beloved Harte and the cordially disliked Rencordy, which revealed a delightful array of bizarre clues. Such as the snowy reception on a brand new TV set, a sealed hedge gate, a garden trash fire, a rubbery smell and a very subtle, low-key kind of kindness. Some of these clues a very nasty, double-edged clues that cleverly utilized to hide the murderer from the reader and the nicely done twist at the end didn't over strain credulity, which can be put down to the clueing – demonstrating Clark was the genuine article. A man out-of-time who would have been more at home in the 1930s than '70s or '80s and slipped through the filter by disguising his traditionally-plotted, Golden Age-style detective novels as police procedurals with a pharmaceutical gimmick tacked on. And it worked!

There are, however, two minor imperfections that makes Premedicated Murder not quite as good as Death After Evensong (1969) or even the very late Plain Sailing (1987). Premedicated Murder is closer to a novella than a novel with only seven relatively short chapters, which prevented the story and plot to develop to its full potential. Not every single clue is handled with the same skill, or attention, as others and kept my attention on another possibility suggested by the clues that were given more consideration. Yes, I completely failed to spot the murderer. Secondly, there was a four-year gap between Premedicated Murder and its predecessor, Sick to Death (1971), which would explain why the story was so rough, unpolished and so much shorter in length than his other novels.

Nevertheless, if Clark wrote Premedicated Murder as a warmup exercise to knock off the rust of a four-year hiatus, it's an impressive flexing-while-stretching tune-up act and can understand why it was recommended to me several times. A small, flawed gem of the British village mystery novel and comes recommended unless you're new to the series. In that case, I advise you to begin with Death After Evensong.

The Longest Pleasure (1981) by Douglas Clark

Last year, I tumbled across the work of Douglas Clark, a British mystery writer, who wrote, what appeared to be, typical post-World War II police procedural novels, but with classically-styled plots crammed with medical puzzles, ingenious poisoning methods and the occasional impossible crime – closely aligning himself with R. Austin Freeman and John Rhode. So you can argue that Clark was the last true Golden Age mystery writer to arrive on the scene.

An anonymous commentator left a handful of insightful comments on my review of the excellent Death After Evensong (1969) and recommended two specific titles, Premedicated Murder (1975) and The Longest Pleasure (1981).

I had already been looking at such promising-sounding novels as Sweet Poison (1970), The Gimmel Flask (1977), The Libertines (1978) and The Monday Theory (1983), but The Longest Pleasure had an unusual and intriguing premise. Curt Evans praised it in his 2016 review as "a smartly designed and original police procedural." So, for once, I decided to listens to my peers instead of diving head first for one of the impossible crime novels in the series and moved The Longest Pleasure to the top of the pile.

The Longest Pleasure could easily have been one of the oddest detective stories I've come across in a long time had it not been for my recent reading of Edward D. Hoch's "The Cactus Killer," collected in Hoch's Ladies (2020), which found a weirdly compelling way to combine a medical and scientific mystery with the serial killer story – poured into the mold of a modern crime novel/police procedural. The focal point of the plot is a string of manufactured outbreaks of botulism that either made people gravely ill or killed them!

The first outbreak occurred on Exmoor where Mr. and Mrs. Burnham with their two children, aged eight and ten, were taking a camping holiday and ate a tin of ham with their tea. On the following day, two students on a walking tour found the family lying around the campsite and their serious condition is aggravated on account that "no medical help had been given until thirty-six hours after the suspected ham had been eaten." And two of them pass away. A second and third outbreak rapidly follow each other and they can all be traced back to strip-cans of beef and luncheon meat. All three of the infected tins came from the same chain of stores, Redcoke Stores.

Detective Chief Superintendent George Masters and DCI Bill Green, of Scotland Yard, have been handed the investigation, but they hardly know where to begin as this particular has a dazzling array of possibilities and avenues to explore – without giving them a proper foothold to get started. One of the first hurdles they have to take is a quasi-locked room mystery and deals with how the culprit was able to send "dollops of botulism bugs" into a can of meat "without puncturing the skin." Botulism spores are "totally anaerobic" and can't tolerate any oxygen, which is why they a can of food from which all air has been dispelled before "they can thrive and produce their exotoxins." There's also the questions how the culprit had been able a pure and rare type of botulism, why this person has been targeting Redcoke Stores and how many more contaminated strip-cans are still on the shelves or residing in "the larders of unsuspecting housewives."

Masters wants to alert the public and warn them against the Redcoke strip-cans, but the higher-up refuse to comply and believe such "a warning would cause a panic" and "a consequent breakdown of medical services," because everyone who has recently eaten from a Redcoke strip-can (potentially millions) would immediately start filling sick. And their demands to be tested would swamp the laboratories. On top of that, Masters doesn't want to help the culprit with vilifying and destroying Redcock Stores ("a national asset"). So they have to work hard and fast to get to the bottom of the case before more people fall ill or die.

The Longest Pleasure has all the ingredients of a modern thriller with dangerous bacterium or killer virus on the loose, but Clark's treatment can almost be described as cold and clinical with research being the primary method used to tackle the problem – which covers a large swath of this relatively short novel. I suppose some would call The Longest Pleasure a fictionalized textbook with Clark acting more as a lecturer than an author. However, the subject matter and how it was cultivated to act as pure and dangerous poison is fascinating enough to keep reading. An approach that betrayed how incredibly close Clark's detective fiction is linked to such scientific mystery writers as R. Austin Freeman, Arthur Porges and the Radfords.

Around the halfway mark, Masters decides to sprint towards a resolution with "a long shot" that reduced the number of suspects from tens of millions to a small and select group of people. A long shot that would have been a decidedly unfair shortcut had the reader not been prepared for it early on in the story.

But, however you look at it, The Long Pleasure is an anomaly that can not be compared to anything that qualifies as a traditional detective story. A detective story in which the victim's are names in newspaper articles or police reports and the murderer does not appear until the end, which also reveals a motive that would actually been more at home between the pages of a serial killer thriller. Instead, the lion's share of the attention goes to a primitive micro-organism and what makes that little rod-shaped bacteria tick. You can safely say that the botulism bacteria is best fleshed out character in the story.

So I don't know whether, or not, to like The Long Pleasure. The book has a fascinating premise and an oddly compelling, if a little dry, approach to the multifaceted problem, but, on a whole, it was not even half as satisfying as Death After Evensong or Plain Sailing (1987) – two genuine neo-classical detective novels. This is why the next stop in the series is going to be The Libertines. A novel promising two poisonings of which one is mathematically and the other physically impossible.

Plain Sailing (1987) by Douglas Clark

Back in October, I read an excellently written and plotted post-Golden Age detective novel, entitled Death After Evensong (1969), which constituted my introduction to the work of a pharmaceutical executive turned mystery novelist, Douglas Clark – a specialist in medical puzzles and inventive methods of poisoning. Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) listed Death After Evensong as Clarke's sole contribution to the impossible crime sub-genre, but I found two more titles to add to the list. One of these titles is Clarke's penultimate novel.

Plain Sailing (1987) is the twenty-sixth entry in the Detective Chief Superintendent George Masters and DCI Bill Green series. A lot of has changed between them since their second outing in Death After Evensong eighteen years previously.

All of the animosity and antagonism, permeating and poisoning their professional relationship, has not only completely dissipated, but they have become close friends outside of work. Masters was introduced as a tall, vain and unrepentant bachelor, but is now married to Wanda Masters and they have a young child together, Michael – who has Bill and Doris Green as "honorary grandparents." A very close relationship that was unthinkable two decades earlier. The opening of Plain Sailing has them even going on a much deserved holiday together, but, barely a day has gone by, when a patrol car pulls up in front of their cottage with terrible news.

Jimmy Cleveland is the 26-year-old son of a colleague and friend of Masters, DCS Matthew Cleveland, who has just found himself a good job, a nice flat and "a steady girlfriend," Janet. He also has a passion for sailing and took part in the King's Cup Week, but died unexpectedly under seemingly inexplicable circumstances "a mile or two out to sea in a small dinghy."

Jimmy had been out on the water for an hour and a half when the only other occupant of the dinghy, Harry Martin, raised the alarm and an American doctor answer the call for help. This doctor immediately recognized the symptoms of cyanide poisoning, which is where the problems begin. Cyanide is "the sort of stuff that works immediately," but Jimmy hadn't eaten or drank anything on board and gelatin capsule would have dissolved within twenty minutes. Suicide is very unlikely and Martin has no conceivable motive to kill him. So how did the murderer administer a dose of cyanide to a man isolated in a small boat out at sea? A situation somewhat like "one of those locked room mysteries."

A rather interesting aspect of the investigation is the reversal when it comes to emotional attachment to the case.

Generally, the detectives are the impartial outsiders, especially when they're police detectives, but the suspicious death of the likable young man, like Jimmy, seems to have made no impact on the large gathering of sailors, because they're "chattering about everything else under the sun" – except Jimmy's sudden death. This situation gives the story an unusual atmosphere befitting the strange circumstances of the murder. 

However, the clever little poisoning-trick acts as the single support column for the entirety of the story and plot. And to be quite honest, the who-and why of the murder weren't as good, or inspired, as the how with exception of the tragic mistake that lies at the heart of the story. Something that wasn't helped by some obvious padding of the page-count.

Masters states early on in the story that they have to "soak in everything" and get "to know all there is to know about sailing." So we get some technical details and, in combination with the weakly handled who-and why, it became evident that the trick had come before the story. And the whole story was erected around it. Showing that Clark had lost some of his story-telling ability since the early Death After Evensong, which was as well written as it was plotted without any stretching to pad it out.

All of that being said, the poisoning-trick of the impossible crime was fairly original and fitted the sailing theme of the story. The kind of impossible poisoning Paul Doherty began to specialize in during the 1990s (e.g. The White Rose Murders, 1991) or you can find with some regularity in the Case Closed series (e.g. "The Loan Shark Murder Case"), but the idea and setting would probably have been better served had the novel been whittled down to a short story – which might have resulted in a classic sporting detective story centered on an impossible crime. Such a tale could have been an anthology staple!

Everything considered, Plain Sailing wasn't a bad detective novel, particular for its time, but it was a step, or two, down from the much earlier Death After Evensong. So my next read in the series is going to be a title from the early-and mid period with such promising sounding, poisonous puzzles as Sweet Poison (1970), Sick to Death (1971) and The Gimmel Flask (1977). Dread and Water (1976) has a premise reminiscent of one of those mountaineering mysteries by Glyn Carr. So my exploration of this series will be continued.

By the way, the quality of my reading appear to have taken a drop when I sidelined Harriette Ashbrook for a moment. A sign she'll be ignored no longer and have to return to the Spike Tracy series the moment 2020 rolls around?

Death After Evensong (1969) by Douglas Clark

Douglas Clark was an English author of twenty-seven traditional, puzzle-oriented detective novels of the typical, post-World War II police procedural variety and, reportedly, the plots often employed ingenious poisoning methods – a heritage from his days as an executive of a pharmaceutical company. Clark used to be a popular writer and his books were easy to come by.

The late Noah Stewart noted in a 2015 blog-post, "200 authors I would recommend (part 4)," that "you couldn't be in a used bookstore without finding a stack of them," but "now they seem to have disappeared." Curt Evans discussed Clark in 2016 and gave as a reason that the books "having been out-of-print now for over a quarter-century." Somehow, mystery writers from the second half of the 20th century, no matter how good or popular they were, seem to fall harder and faster into obscurity than their Golden Age counterparts. At least, that's how it looks to me.

Last year, Endeavour Media reissued a large chunk of Clark's Superintendent George Masters and Inspector Bill Green series, but, while certainly praise worthy, the editions from this publishers come with a drab, gloomy and generic style of cover-art – which they slap on all their crime-and detective novels. These uniform covers makes it very hard to differentiate between their classic reprints and the more contemporary stuff. Or mistake one of their classic reprints for a modern thriller. Just take a gander at the covers of their editions of John Russell Fearn, Roger Ormerod, Shelley Smith and Gerald Verner. So you have to know what exactly you're looking for when delving into their catalog, but enough complaining for one day.

I picked up the second title in the series, Death After Evensong (1969), because Robert Adey listed it in Locked Room Mysteries (1991) with an intriguing sounding impossible crime and seemed like an interesting follow up to my previous read, Christopher Bush's The Case of the Dead Shepherd (1934). Well, I wasn't wrong.

The setting of Death After Evensong is a bleak, desolate and isolated village, Rooksby-le-Soken in East Anglia, which (surprisingly!) turned out to be a Dutch enclave, who are the descendants of the Dutch that introduced land-reclamation methods to the English – only they have clung to the austere, Calvinistic Protestant traditions of their ancestors. A village of frugal, gloomy and often rude, but hard working, people with "an unenviable reputation for early, shot-gun marriages" and a deeply ingrained distrust of outsiders.

Herbert "Gobby" Parseloe was the devious-minded, universally unpopular and even hated vicar of Rooksby-le-Soken. A practically penniless clergy who "stooped to the meanest and dirtiest tricks to gain his own ends." Usually, Parsloe's schemes were related to money, or rather, how not spend a single dime. But the tradesmen of the village were simple, hard-headed people that "wouldn't wait for money from Father Peter himself." So there were more than enough people who could drink his blood.

The old Church School was closed down after Christmas and had moved to a new building, but the former school was let to a potato factory as a dispatch store. So there were local tradesmen busy with turning classrooms into offices and making a loading bay out of the school hall, but, when they return to work on Monday morning, they discover the body of the hated Parseloe in one of the classrooms with a gunshot wound to the chest – a single bullet had gone right through him. The wall behind the vicar was a mess of blood, tissue and bone, but "bore no sign of a bullet hole or pock mark of any kind." As if the bullet had vanished into thin air when leaving the body. A magic bullet!

So the local police immediately called Scotland Yard for assistance and they dispatched their two best men, Superintendent George Masters and Inspector Bill Green. However, they're a little different from most protagonists you find in these kind of post-WWII police procedural series.

Masters and Green have, what you might call, incompatible personalities and there's no love lost between them. It was their misfortune always "to be officially paired for murder enquiries."

Masters is a tall, intelligent and vain man who, as a bachelor, can afford to spend money on clothes as a way to fly "a personal flag among a group of conformists," which made Green feel inferior and awkward. So they were uncomfortable in each other's company and very few words were wasted between them. This is a good way to (slightly) alter the dynamics between the detective-characters without dragging their personal demons, kicking and screaming, into the story and their animosity has all the potential for them become rival detectives (of sorts) – something seldom used in Western detective stories. Something I referred to in my previous review.

However, the dislike for each other does not negatively affect the case and they diligently begin to sift through the evidence, suspects and a dozen motives. Not always a difficult task when you're the ultimate outsider in an isolated community.

Firstly, there's the small, but dysfunctional, household of the victim. Cora Parseloe is the youngest daughter of the vicar and generally considered not to be very bright, but the poor girl was used by her late mother and murdered father as a house slave. The eldest daughter, Pamela, works as a teacher in a nearby town, but, during his trips home, she acquired a reputation as a relationship wrecker. She's basically a chip of the old block. And then there are the various victim's of Parseloe's schemes and dirty tricks.

Dutch edition

Arn Beck used to be the church warden, but resigned in disgust over vicar's schemes to pocket as much money from the church as possible. Jim Baron was the headmaster of the old Church School, but Baron refused the vicar a highly unethical favor and Parseloe ensured Baron wasn't to continue as headmaster at the new school, which took a big chunk out of his income. Harry Pieters is simple carpenter who also got screwed out of his job and the ironmonger, Percy Jonker, had an order for an expensive, custom made gate canceled. And he had vowed vengeance as recently as Christmas. There are a number of other villagers, like the proprietors of the Goblin and the father-and-son doctor team, who all have a role to play in the tragedy. 

 

Masters and Green have to lay bare a lot of well-kept secrets and some painful motives to finally arrive at the truth and, purely as a whodunit, Clark stubbornly stuck to the traditions of a bygone era when most of the genre had moved into a different direction – which makes him perhaps the last true Golden Age writer to arrive on the scene. I've referred to Kip Chase as a next generation GAD writer, but Chase seriously attempted to resettle the classic detective story in a modern-day setting. Clark had no such pretensions and you can find precious little of the then modern world of 1969 in this story.

Death After Evensong is dressed up as a police procedural, but acts as an old-fashioned detective novel, reminiscent of Freeman Wills Crofts and Francis Vivian, with an excellent and genuinely original impossible crime. The explanation as to how a bullet can vanish in mid-air is one of the few modern intrusions upon the story, but what an intrusions (particularly on Parseloe)! Something John Rhode would have approved of.

So, all in all, I've practically nothing to complain or nitpick about. Personally, the bleak, desolate backdrop of a Dutch enclave, frozen in time, fascinating and appreciated that not all of the Dutch names were butchered. A pesky habit of Americans. The who-and why of the murder were satisfyingly worked out, but the solution to the problem of the magic bullet is what makes Death After Evensong truly noteworthy as a detective story. Highly recommended!

Well, I have been on a hot streak these past two months when it comes to picking mystery novels and short detective stories. There were one or two duds, but overall, the last months have been golden! Hopefully, I haven't jinxed my next read with this acknowledgment. :)