A Tough Nut to Crack

"What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer."

- Hugo Gernsback.

Raymond Chandler once said of Dashiell Hammett, one of the trailblazers of the Hardboiled School, that he returned murder in the capable hands of those individuals who were not faced by the seamier side of life – committing crimes for a reason and not to provide a body to reinvigorate the reader's interest in chapter XII. The mean streets supplied them with the simply means for murder that excluded the hand wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish, however, quite a few of their literary decedents tugged the hard-bitten private eyes on their sleeves into a more classically furnished environment.

Over the course of forty books and stories, Bill Pronzini drew a detailed picture of the life of his nameless gumshoe, resulting in one of the most realistic and well-rounded characters in the genre, but he still stumbles over murders that could have sprang from the imagination of John Dickson Carr (c.f. Hoodwink, 1981). Henry Kane's The Narrowing Lust (1955) has his "private richard," Pete Chambers, confronted with an apparent suicide in a secured room with all the doors and steel shutters locked from the inside and Michael Collins' one-armed shamus, Dan Fortune, grapples with the handle of quite a different locked door problem in the short story, "No One Likes to Be Played for a Sucker."

Manly Wellman's Find My Killer (1947) is another excellent sample of taking the tough, street hardened private eye, with a take-no-nonsense attitude, and assign him to a case that should've been entitled The Pistol Murder Case signed by S.S. van Dine.

Find My Killer opens with Jackson Yates, an ex-policeman operating on a free-lance basis, dropping by at the office of J.D. Thatcher, a lawyer who turns out to be a woman with eyes that are two different shades of blue, hoping to procure an open spot as a bodyguard for one of her clients. Unfortunately, for him, the services of a bodyguard are no longer required and he's not the only one who's miffed about it. Yates finds one of his would-be-contenders for the job harassing Thatcher and quickly disposes of him in a good, old-fashioned bare knuckle fist fight. Impressed with his quick and effective performance, Thatcher offers Yates a partnership on a job that could very well put a $5000 check in their pockets.

Richard Ealing offered this bounty, written down in an official codicil that was attached to his will, to everyone who can find his killer and deliver the proof needed to secure a conviction, but the problem is that his death is being written-off as a suicide – which is sort of a problem when you intend to tag someone for murder. Consider the facts: Richard Ealing drew his last breath in the gunroom, after a slug from a derringer, a short-barreled pistol, hit him in the chest and the weapon was still clutched in his hand. Paraffin tests showed the presence of gunpowder residue on the dead man's hand and the door of the room was locked from the inside. A tough nut that has to be cracked if they want to slap either his much younger wife, her lover, his personal physician or any of the other stock-in-trade suspects with a murder charge and cash in their just reward.

Wellman delivered with this novel a text book example that shows how to intersperse hardboiled sequences, in which, for example, our narrator has to go to blows with a dunderheaded homicide cop, with a cleverly conceived plot that contains big chunks of clues – both real and false. Although the clue to the murderer's motive wasn't given until quite late in the book.

Anyway, what makes this book, IMHO, special is that the structure of the plot rests on forensic science, such as ballistics and pathology, placing the story somewhat awkwardly in the Scientific School of Detection. But these scientific elements or cleverly exploited, on both sides of the table! As a matter of fact, it's done so well that I can almost forgive him for the routine solution and off-hand explanation of the locked room angle, which was the only plot thread that did not came true to the promise that its premise made and a bit more originality, in combination with the forensic portion of the solution, would've turned this into an impossible crime novel to take notice off. 

Otherwise, it comes recommended for being a perfect specimen of what was conceived before the shotgun wedding between the Golden Age Detective Novel and the Hardboiled Private Eye Story.

All That Remains

"Art is in the eye of the beholder."

It's remarkable the extent to which enthusiasm is contagious, especially within a closely-knit network of blogs, message boards and mailing lists – populated with adherents of the grandest game in the world. As I scribble this, Curt Evans is putting the final touches to his manuscript with which the erudite gladiator will enter the intellectual arena to defend the often, and unjustly, undervalued humdrum writers. This rallying cry for an upcoming battle impelled Patrick to unsheathe his sword in defense of John Rhode, Freeman Wills Crofts, Henry Wade and R. Austin Freeman, which, in turn, provoked me into action and pulled a copy of Freeman's The Stoneware Monkey (1939) from my cluttered bookshelves. 

One of the genre's most well-known pricks, Julian "Bloody" Symons, condemned Freeman as a penman of negligible talents, whose stories are the figurative equivalent of chewing on dry straw, but after finishing The Stoneware Monkey I have to ask if he actually bothered to read his work in-depth before passing judgment – since this book contained both wittily written sections as well as a fairly realistic approach to the detective story. But, of course, realism in Symons'

book has nothing at all to do with scientific accuracy, or any such nonsense, but with whether or not a detective has a sex life. I had written here an example of how Freeman could've earned the demagogue's nodding approval, but deleted it since nobody wants to be stuck with a mental image of an amorously Dr. Thorndyke sneaking into the city morgue and smothering the cadavers with kisses. Oh, wait...

The first portion of the book is narrated by Dr. James Oldfield, one of Dr. John Thorndyke's former pupils, who relates the story of his involvement in two, seemingly, unconnected crimes – which cumulated in a third. The ruinous seedlings of the case were planted in a countryside village, where Oldfield was looking after a small practice of a vacationing medico, when, after returning from a late house call, he hears the alarm of a police whistle – and promptly spots a mortally injured police constable who was slugged with his own truncheon. There's no question that the perpetrator was the same person who, mere minutes before, swiped a parcel of diamonds from the home of a local merchant and the constable was in pursuit of the pilferer. But despite an incriminating thumbprint, left on the murder weapon, no viable suspects turned up to secure a match – and the case went unsolved.

Dr. John Thorndyke

The purloining of the diamonds and subsequent murder of the police constable only take up the first thirty pages of the book, before receding into the background, after which the story picks up again in the city where Dr. Oldfield has set-up a new medical practice. One of his first patients is Peter Gannet, a pottery maker who suffers from incurable abdominal pains, but a consult with his ex-mentor, the famous medico-legal forensic investigator, results in diagnosis of arsenic poisoning – and together they foil the plans of a scheming poisoner. However, the potter refuses to bring in the police, because the would-be-murderer can only be one of two persons: his devoted wife or a live-in friend – who shares Gannet's studio to make hideous, artsy jewelry.

Here's where my favorite part of the story begins. Dr. Oldfield becomes a regular visitant to the Gannet home and strikes up sort of a friendship with the artist, but quivers at the primitive monstrosities the potter molds from hunks of clay and the crude, barbaric jewel-studded ornaments, crafted by the annoying Frederic Bowles, aren't up to the conventional tastes of the medico, either – resulting in one or two delightfully, witty observations and potshots at the expense of the modern art movement at the time.

In one particular chapter, Dr. Oldfield kills off some time by visiting an exhibition of Gannet's work and a pompous art critic is erratically rattling on about how art is not meant to be understood and how verbal language is inefficient in conveying the abstract qualities that are to be felt rather than described. This amusing parody turns into a merciless mockery when the arbiter begins describing the qualities of a decorated jar as the masterpiece of the collection, possessive of the artistic personality of the potter, but it was Oldfield who made the jar during one of his visits to the studio – and Gannet fraudulently passed the object off as part of his own work. Hey, you can't blame a Classicist/Romanticist for snickering at that... or at any of the other jokes!

But there's also a simplistic, but effective, detective plot, which centers around the two modernist artisans – who live as two warring countries under a temporarily suspension of arms and the doctor prevented one of their fights from escalating into a declaration of war with one of them as the first casualty of the ensuing onslaught. It's therefore no surprise when the two men disappear simultaneously and evidence is uncovered that a body was cremated in the pottery kiln, but who of them assumed the role of murderer and who was the victim?

The final quarter of the book, narrated by Jervis, provides the answer as he relates how his associate, Dr. Thorndyke, reconstructs the crime and links it with the pernicious diamond heist a few months earlier and expounds on the importance of the titular stoneware monkey. However, the observant reader won't find a bombshell revelation in this part of the book, but then again, it was evident from the outset that the interest of the plot lay in reconstructing the events rather than identifying the perpetrator – and very few played that game better than Austin Freeman.

In short, if Julian Symons' description is accurate than the taste of dry straw has been grossly underrated.

She Looked So Startled

I'm certainly no authority on Anthony Abbot, having read only two of his novels, About the Murder of Startled Lady (1935) and The Creeps (1939), but according to the introduction of the former Abbot was the alias of a well-known novelist, Fulton Oursler, who turned to detective stories in the early 1930s – and what I gathered from them was that he was an early practitioner of the police procedural in the Van Dine-Queen mold. Just like the aforementioned writers he was a plot-orientated writer who casts himself in the role of Thatcher Colt's narrator – a debonair Police Commissioner, who can be seen as a combination of Ellery Queen and his father. And all but the last two titles in the series begin with About the Murder of [a Person], which is akin to Van Dine's The [Six Letter Word] Murder Case and Queen's The [Country] [Noun] Mystery novels.

However, that's where the similarities end: whereas Van Dine and Queen have detectives who make incredible deductions based on mathematics and arcane knowledge, Thatcher Colt has an entire police department at his disposal for proper, methodical police work and early forensic methodology.

The case at hand begins as a simple, straight forward and routine police job of pulling in a couple of self professed spiritualists, a wife and husband, who were giving private séances and exhibiting ghosts at three dollars per exhibition, but when frisked the police exorcized a ghost from the mediums bosom – i.e. forty yards of cheese cloth daubed with luminous paint. But in the face of this overwhelming and damnable evidence, they maintain that they're legitimate mediums with a direct line to the spirit world. Not only that, but recently they have been making contact with the ghost of a murdered woman whose body has never been found.

Thatcher Colt is more than a little skeptical, but lets himself being persuaded by their champion, a professor turned psychic investigator, to give them the benefit of the doubt and an opportunity to vindicate their assertion of mediumship. The result is a spook show at Centre Street, in which Colt apparently receives a first hand account of a gruesome murder from the Great Beyond – detailing the horrifying circumstances in which a murdered woman, named Madeline, was dismembered and put into a watery grave.

She's even able to give an exact location of the spot where the murderer dumped her remains, and, to everyone surprise, they find a heavy box filled with a skull and bones. Unfortunately, for the police, the girl was shot through the head and therefore her ghost is unable to remember her last name or identity of her butcher (convenient, eh?). But Colt does a bang-up job at identifying the girl in less than two days by employing a skilled forensic sculpture to reconstruct the face on the skull, and from here on out the story concentrates on fishing the murderer from a small pool of suspect – ranging from her religiously fanatical father and a unbalanced half sister to a swinging boyfriend and his dominating sister, and the two spiritualists who knew more than they were letting on.

The apparent supernatural knowledge of the mediums is a neat variation on the impossible crime story and is adequately, if a bit dully, explained. Its main problem is that I have seen other writers propose more inspired solutions for this type of miracle problem, but otherwise it's an excellent and competently plotted detective story with a great dénouement – set in an operating room where the doctors are in the progress of stitching together the second victim.