Black Edged (1939) by Brian Flynn

So far, March has not been the month of the traditional detective story with reviews of 1970s retro-pulp, vampire murders, pastiches and Dutch and French pulp fiction from the 1960s, which wasn't done intentionally, but wanted to return to the regular whodunits and locked room mysteries of yore – decided to randomly pick one of my unread Brian Flynn novels. However, I forgot Flynn wasn't strictly a traditionalist himself. 

Flynn belongs to that rare group of prolific fiction writers who can boost he never wrote the same novel twice. Steve Barge, of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, who rediscovered Flynn and pens the introductions to the new Dean Street Press editions noted how Flynn "shifts from style to style from each book." You get a 1920s drawing-room mystery or Golden Age courtroom drama in one novel and a Victorian-era throwback or a hunt for a serial killer in the next. On more than one occasion, Flynn dived head-first into the thick, murky waters of the British pulps where John Russell Fearn and Gerald Verner lurk. Only things linking all of his work together are his series-detective, an undying love for Sherlock Holmes and simply wanting to write engaging and entertaining detective stories. And, more often than not, he succeeded in that a goal. Such as the book under review today. 

Black Edged (1939) is the 23rd entry in the Anthony Bathurst series and another example how willing Flynn was to experiment with the genre to produce something entirely different from the previous novel (The Ebony Stag, 1938). This one puts a spin on the inverted detective story and chase thriller.

The story is divided into four-parts, "The First Escape," "The First Chase," "The Second Escape" and "The Second Chase," beginning with Dr. Stuart Traquair's suspicions about his wife involvement with an acquaintance, Rupert Halmar – overhearing them say that "he must be got rid of" when "the time comes." So the doctor steeled himself "to the inevitable ordeal that was close at hand" and confronted Madeleine with a pack of playing cards and a loaded revolver. Dr. Traquair is going to give Madeleine a chance of living by cutting cards and "the winner of the cut may take and use the revolver," which sounds reasonable enough. But it ends in a messy shootout in which Madeleine is shot and killed. Dr. Traquair has precious little time to make his getaway.

So pretty much what you would expect from an inverted mystery that turns into a chase thriller with the detective and murderer playing a game of cat-and-mouse, but early chapters makes it clear more is going on in the background. What did Dr. Traquair mean that Madeleine knew his secret? Why was Madeleine armed? Who's Armitage and why does the doctor need to see him? Who's Halmar and why had he house surrounded on the night of the murder? Which naturally made escaping an even more precarious undertaking, but, throughout the story, Dr. Traquair proves himself to be a resourceful man as slips through closely-drawn nets and dragging red herrings across the trail. And that makes his parts of the story all the more fun.

The chase-parts reunites Anthony Bathurst with Chief Inspector Andrew MacMorran, of Scotland Yard, as they join the local Inspector Rudge at the scene of the crime. While the reader knows what happened there, the police has to try to make sense of "the sight of Madeleine lying dead on the floor with the scattered playing-cards around her" and the story of the frightened maid, Phoebe Hubbard, who had locked and barricaded herself in the bedroom during the night – hearing noises on the stairs and voices in the house until early morning. Opening the door to more than one interpretation of the doctor's disappearance on the investigative side. So there's genuine detective interest in the chase-parts. Such as when Bathurst deduced the meaning of the disturbed dust on the lid of a hatbox and its content, but, even the best detectives, sometimes needs "the finger of Fate" to help guide them in the right direction. Well, either the finger of Fate or a cold, dead hand protruding from beneath a bed ("the dead hand speaketh"). Yes, there are more murders along the way. It helped keep the story engaging and moving along. 

Black Edged gives the reader two novellas, a pursuit and a detective story, which Flynn tightly intertwined and knotted together in the last couple of chapters. Even trying to spring a surprises, or two, on the reader, but you should be able to anticipate in which direction story is heading. However, I was briefly on the wrong track and suspected Madeleine either survived the gunshot wound or had replaced the bullets in her husband's revolver with blanks. Dr. Traquair says in Chapter II Madeleine "had gained access to my private drawer and had read my private papers." Since the story was evidently going to be on the pulpier side of Flynn's work from the start, I thought Madeleine had somehow survived, shot the maid and traded places to play for time and hunt down her husband. While my initial solution was wrong, it still headed in the same direction as the actual solution.

So I have to echo's Steve's opinion on Black Edged, "a tale very much of its time," but the ending shouldn't take away Flynn wrote an entertaining, very well executed chase thriller with detective interruptions and alternating viewpoints. It simply worked. While not one of the top-tier titles in the series, it's another fine example of Flynn's versatility as a mystery writer and his dedication to simply entertain his readers. I'm really curious now to see how different the next one is from either The Ebony Stag and Black Edged. I guess The Case of the Faithful Heart (1939) just got a fast pass to the top of the pile.

Apocryphal Plots: "Omar Khayyam, Detective" (1960) by Theodore Mathieson

A few years ago, I reviewed Theodore Mathieson's "Leonardo da Vinci, Detective" (1959), one of the more well-known, reprinted stories from his standalone "Great Detectives" series, "in which a famous person of the past acts as detective just once at a critical point in his career" like Captain Cook, Alexander the Great and Florence Nightingale – published between 1958 and 1973 in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The first ten stories were collected as The Great Detectives (1960). 

What became clear from my reading of "Leonardo da Vinci, Detective" and comparing it to John Norris' review of The Devil and Benjamin Franklin (1961) is that Mathieson was a better storyteller than plotter. A well intended mystery writer who had a good idea, but his handling of plot and clues were clumsy at best. John even said that the plot of The Devil and Benjamin Franklin would "rankle the hairs of any traditional detective novel fan."

There is, however, an allure to Mathieson's historical detective fiction. Mathieson was not the first to write historical mysteries or even use historical figures as characters, but "most of these had been infrequent or isolated instances" and Robert van Gulik had just began publishing his Judge Dee novels – which made him one of the first to create a series of historical mysteries. While the "Great Detectives" is a series of standalone stories, they are presented as newly discovered and hitherto unchronicled feats of detection revealed by literary archaeologist, Theodore Mathieson. It also helped Mathieson has more than one impossible crime story to his credit. So you can probably guess what brought me back to the series. 

"Omar Khayyam, Detective" was originally published in the February, 1960, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and takes place over 900 years ago in the Seljuk Empire. 

Omar Khayyam was a Persian astronomer, mathematician and poet who garnered the patronage of the Sultan, Malik Shah, through his childhood friend and current Vizier, Nizam al Mulk. The story opens with Malik Shah summoning the astrologer with a request to talk to his Vizier, who's terribly afraid of something and has locked himself away in a turret room, but only tells Omar why he's fearful of his life. Rahim Zaid is the leader of the Assassins, "a fanatical, murderous group of revolutionaries," who's believed to possess magical powers "to be in two places at once" or "walk through stone walls." He has a cast-iron grip on his minions as he's the only one who can supply them with hashish. Nizam had ordered the execution of Zaid's only son and has reasons to believe he's already within the palace. So the Vizier stays behind the heavy, iron-bound and bolted door of his turret room with guards posted outside.

During a performance in the courtyard, the Sultan and Omar witness Nizam in the turret window, "as if struggling with some unseen assailant," before plunging down to the broad stone passageway below the level of the court – a foot-long dagger stuck out of his back. But when they break down the door, no murderer is waiting for them inside! Only a dying message Nizam had circled with wine in a copy of the Rubáiyát. Omar not only has to figure out who killed his friend and how, but he has a three-day deadline to do so. Malik Shah says to Omar, "bring me proof, star-gazer, that the murder was not committed by magic" or he will be exiled.

On a historical side note, I remembered having read something once about proto-detective stories from the Middle East and a quick search did turn up an interesting result. What I remembered turned out to be correct. The earliest known example is "The Three Apples," from One Thousand and One Nights, in which the Sultan orders his Vizier to solve a murder within three days "or be executed if he fails his assignment." So you can say early Arabic detective stories were more like the hardboiled private eye tales of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, while ancient Chinese mysteries represented a more traditional style. The more things change, I guess. :)

Anyway, Omar's handling is not without interest and experiments with the drugs to understand what the Assassins experience under the influence of hashish, which recalls M.P. Shiel's Prince Zaleski (1895) and Joseph B. Carr's The Man With Bated Breath (1934). But the presence of drugs in combination with the setup of the locked room problem had me worried. There's a prosperously bad type of solution to the problem of a murderer vanishing from a locked room in which the victim is slipped a hallucinogenic substance and (accidentally) gets killed during a fit of madness. Somehow that solution has turned up more than once in my locked room reading and the setup would have allowed for it.

Fortunately, Mathieson had something a little better and more traditional in store, but the overall solution, while good in theory, is not entirely spotless and you can write that down mostly to (ROT13) gur cerfrapr bs gbb znal nppbzcyvprf – even though the story (sort of) accounts for it. But it comes across as cheap, needlessly complicated trickery. There are two other aspects of the solution that raised an eyebrow. Firstly, it was extremely risky (more ROT13) gb unir bar-unys bs gur gevpx eryl ba gur cebzvfr bs na rgreany, qeht-vaqhprq cnenqvfr gb gur nqqvpgrq snxr ivpgvz va beqre gb znxr uvz pbzzvg fhvpvqr. Secondly, why did nobody notice (even more ROT13) gung Avmnz'f obql qvqa'g fubj nal fvtaf be jbhaqf lbh jbhyq rkcrpg gb svaq ba n obql gung jnf guebja bhg bs n gbjre gb n fgbar cngu orybj. Even back then that must have stood out, right?!

So, despite my misgivings about the plot, I actually did enjoy reading the story. Mathieson was a better storyteller than plotter and you should approach this series as historical fiction dressed up as detective stories. But, purely as a plotter, he can be very frustrating to the plot-technical (locked room) mystery reader.

The Darkest Fathoms: "Caribbean Crisis" (1962) by Desmond Reid

The Derek Smith Omnibus (2014) is one of the most important publications to have come out of John Pugmire's Locked Room International as it collected the classic locked room novel Whistle Up the Devil (1954), the exceedingly rare Come to Paddington Fair (1997) and the previously unpublished Model for Murder (1952) – a long-lost contribution to the massive Sexton Blake Library. Pugmire speculated Smith's Model for Murder was probably "too cerebral for the audience" and thought it very unlikely I would ever read another Sexton Blake novel or short story. 

Less than a year later, I came across an anonymously published short Sexton Blake story, "The Grosvenor Square Mystery" (1909), which turned out to be a surprisingly decent locked room mystery for the period. Suddenly, I began to notice how many Sexton Blake novels and short stories were listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). One title in particular beckoned my attention. 

Caribbean Crisis (1962) is a novella, a chapbook really, representing the first published work by noted science-fiction and fantasy author Michael Moorcock, which he co-wrote with Jim Cawthorne and published under a house name, "Desmond Reid" – a name that was shared between at least thirty authors for SBL. Adey's Locked Room Murders described a fascinating impossibility concerning a murder and disappearance from a submerged bathysphere (diving bell)! I also found it interesting Caribbean Crisis was published in the same year as Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962).

I naturally tempered my expectations, as it would be unfair to expect something along the lines of Joseph Commings' "Bones for Davy Jones" (collected in The Locked Room Reader, 1968), but the presentation and explanation to the impossible murder and disappearance were unexpectedly good. Something that deserved to have been in a better (detective) story. 

Caribbean Crisis opens on the research ship of the famous "boy-professor" and marine biologist, Hoddard Curtis, who perfected a new kind of bathysphere and is ready to explore "the deepest marine valley known to man." Curtis hopes to find evidence at the bottom of the Tanangas Deep of "a prehistoric fish," or creature, because stranger things have been found in the lower ocean ("fragments of bone and scales the size of dinner plates"). So he spent years and thousands of dollars to find out what "lurks down there unknown," but, the moment his dreams began to be realized, tragedy struck in the most unexpected way.

During his time away from the research ship, two of his assistants, Jules Harben and Jim Linwood, took the bathysphere for "a joy-ride in the deep," but, when they reached a depth of seven hundred feet, the radiophone began to crackle with frantic calls to pull them back up – in between screams of "it's awful" and "it's going to kill us." Shortly followed by unearthly sound, like "the bellow of some enormous sea-beast erupted from the ocean," and the bathysphere being torn from the fine, woven cords of steel. The bathysphere began to sink to the bottom of the Tanangas Deep! But it gets better.

Curtis puts on a large, heavy and untested deep-sea diving suit in an attempt to find his brainchild and this diving scene is the best one of the story. Miraculously, the damaged bathysphere is resting on a rocky ledge and can be salvaged, but, when Curtis shines his torch through the porthole, he discovers "one of its two occupants had disappeared." The body of the other man was floating in the sphere with a knife in his back! The hatch could not have been opened, or closed again, at that depth and the pressure would have killed anyone who tried to escape the sphere. And the newspaper called it "a mystery worthy of a Holmes or a Blake."

What a marvelous and original setup for a double barreled impossible crime story with a diving bell serving as a claustrophobic sealed room slowly descending into a silent, alien-like world of slime-green, swirling darkness where only God knows what may be lurking – ready to strike at anyone, or anything, disturbing its peace. I truly wish the name on the cover had either been Theodore Roscoe or Hake Talbot. The premise and locked room-trick would have turned into gold in their hands!

Unfortunately, Caribbean Crisis is not that kind of detective story. Sexton Blake reads about the bathysphere mystery in the newspaper and makes a personal inquiry, but what brings him to the island Republic of Maliba (where the ship is anchored) is a rich client. Sir Gordon Sellingham is a sugar millionaire who owns "a great deal of the Maliban sugar industry," but the current, potentially explosive political situation in the Caribbean is threatening both his business and his idealistic son. Peter Sellingham is using his mother's inheritance to bankroll a rebel group who want to overthrow the government and there might be a communist element to the impending rebellion.

Blake is not only a private detective, but also a Special Service Operative of the British government and it falls on him to prevent "a repetition of the Castro business in Cuba" and stop Maliba from becoming another Russian satellite. So the poor man's Sherlock Holmes becomes some kind of Poundland James Bond as he goes undercover as an insurance investigator and gets caught in a three-way dance between the government of Present Nonales, the rebel outlaws in the hill and communist infiltrators – tangling along the way with double agents and dodgy allies. I can't say these chapters were a chore to read, but the Cold War spy thriller is not my kind of crime fiction. I love pure, undiluted detective stories crammed with double-edged clues, treacherous red herrings, dying messages and locked rooms solved by either competent policemen or a clever amateur.

For me, the only time Caribbean Crisis came close to matching its opening chapters was Blake's explanation of the miraculous murder and disappearance, "when the impossible has been eliminated, what remains must be the truth," which turned out to be so much better than expected. A good, fairly original idea that was wasted on this otherwise run-of-the-mill, Cold War-style pulp thriller.

So, on a whole, the first chapters and locked room-trick had all the ingredients and potential necessary to craft a classic, timeless detective novel, but Caribbean Crisis allowed all of that to go to waste and therefore can only recommend it to the fantastical locked room reader as an interesting curiosity.

Stratagems in the Snow: "The Spy and the Snowman" (1980) by Edward D. Hoch

Edward D. Hoch's "The Spy and the Snowman" originally appeared in the November, 1980, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and is the 41st short story in his long-running, espionage-centered mystery series about the head of the British Concealed Communications department, Jeffrey Rand – a code-breaker who appeared in nearly 85 stories published between 1965 and 2008. So the hook of the series is breaking and deciphering coded messages, but, like so many of Hoch's series-characters, every now and then Rand came up against an impossible crime. 

Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) tantalizingly described the problem in "The Spy and the Snowman" as a murder in one of the smallest, most crammed locked rooms on record. You know me. That's more than enough to catch my full attention. 

"The Spy and the Snowman" opens with Jeffrey Rand, now retired, meeting with Hilda Nelson, who's the daughter of an old nemesis, in the lobby of a London hotel during "the snowiest January in many years." Hilda has a particular strange story to tell to the former spy master that could be "a national-security problem." She lives comfortably in a gardener's house, in Swindon, bordering on a secured estate that will host a NATO foreign ministers' conference later in the week. Two nights ago, Hilda noticed from her bedroom window that someone had built a snowman a hundred yards from the main house, but the next morning, the snowman had disappeared without a trace and there was no thaw – so it couldn't have melted away during the night. Hilda asks Rand to come out of retirement to investigate the peripatetic snowman.

So is there "a snowman spying on the NATO conference" or is Hilda trying to lure Rand into "a trap of some sort" with a wild story she knew would intrigue him?

Rand contacts an old friend to arrange a covert stakeout of the estate and, lo and behold, they see someone, dressed in white to blend with the snow, crawl inside the obviously hollow snowman and began to inch towards the house. When they pounced on the snowman, they discover a dead man inside with a bloody neck wound and a blood-covered knife next to him! The equipment discovered on the body confirms they're dealing with a dead spy, but it's "either suicide or a damned strange murder" because he was stabbed inside the snowman and there were no footprints to account for the presence of a murderer. 

"The Spy and the Snowman" is a fine example of Hoch's mastery of the short detective and impossible crime story who dealt a more than fair hand when it came to clueing, which strengthened and reinforced the sealed snowman-trick – as the trick is at its core a bit of a throwback. Some of the clues, and one in particular, turned it into a minor gem and loved how disposing the obvious, John Dickson Carr-like solution didn't remove the story from Carr territory. How the murder came to be viewed as an impossible crime was a thing of beauty!

Needless to say, I very much enjoyed reading this unusual, but very well done, blending of the locked room mystery with the Cold War spy tale and is another Hoch short story, like "The Case of the Modern Medusa" (1973) and "Circus in the Sky" (2000), anthologists should keep in mind for any future impossible crime anthologies.

The Complete Cases of Inspector Allhoff, vol. 1 (2014) by D.L. Champion

Back in January, I reviewed D.L. Champion's "The Day Nobody Died," a richly plotted locked room mystery from the pages of Dime Detective Magazine, which resembled one of those clever short stories by Ellery Queen, but as good as the plot were the cast of series-characters – spearheaded by an angry, bitter and unhinged former police detective. Deputy Inspector Allhoff of the New York Police Department was "the NYPD's ace detective" until "bullets from a mobster's machine gun robbed him of his legs."

Allhoff was too good a detective to lose and the department creatively doctored the books to keep him, unofficially, employed and refer to him "such cases as the department couldn't or wouldn't handle." Lamentably, the consequences of that botched arrest and shootout would continue to extract a heavy toll on everyone involved.

Deputy Inspector Allhoff lost not only his legs and a promising career, but had to move into a filthy, cockroach infested flophouse across from headquarters. As a result, his sanity buckled under the traumatic injuries to both his mind and body, turning him into "a bitter misanthrope," who delighted in verbally abusing and mentally torturing the man he personally holds responsible for his situation, Patrolman Battersly – who Allhoff demanded be assigned to him as his personal assistant. Battersly is routinely bullied by Allhoff with "grotesquely embellished" accounts of his "momentary cowardice." This has left the young policeman in a constant state of anxiety.

Stuck between this rock and a hard place is the narrator of the series, Sergeant Simmonds, who had been "dragged down from a good desk job" to take care of the paperwork, but is to ensure Allhoff and Battersly don't kill each other. And he was slowly going nuts as he had to watch Allhoff's "cunning mind devise new methods of torturing the younger man."

A few years ago, Altus Press began reissuing this series, seventeen of the twenty-nine stories, which were collected in The Complete Cases of Inspector Allhoff, vol. 1 (2014) and The Complete Cases of Inspector Allhoff, vol. 2 (2018) with an introduction by Ed Hulse. I'm not overly familiar with the pulps, but, going by what little I have read, this series was certainly better than "the typical penny-a-word prose found in the Bloody Pulps." So let's take these stories down from the top.

I'll try to keep the reviews of the individual stories as brief as possible to prevent this blog-post from becoming a bloated mess.

This collection opens with "Footprints on a Brain," originally published in the July, 1938, issue of Dime Detective Magazine (hereafter, DDM) and brings Detective-Sergeant Carrigan, of the Chicago Police, to New York when the person he had been assigned to protect died under suspicious circumstances – which could have either been a suicide or murder. Richard B. Hadley was dying of cancer and had been working on a tell-all memoirs, but, when he had completed the manuscript, he apparently turned a gun on himself and pulled the trigger. However, Carrigan believes he had been murdered. Allhoff agrees with his opinion and deduces part of the truth from such clues as a pack of razor blades, a postage stamp and the chattering of Chimney Swallows. The other part, namely ensnaring the murderer, requires the setting of a clever little trap.

So, as the introductory story in this series, Champion had to establish his series-characters and their bizarre, borderline sadomasochistic relationship. This means there's more abuse here than normally. Allhoff really goes to town on poor Battersly and, by the end of the story, he's reduced to a broken, sobbing mess of a human being. Allhoff deserves sympathy for having lost his legs, but makes it impossible to give him any, because he's a first-ballot Hall of Fame piece of shit.

The next story, "I'll Be Glad When You're Dead," originally appeared in the September, 1938, issue of DDM and this time it's not Battersly who takes the brunt of Allhoff's abuse, but one of "the smartest and crookedest lawyer" in town, Philips – who had "bought more juries than Jim Brady had diamonds." Philips made the mistake to call Allhoff a legless, smug little gnome and proceeded to throw coffee in his face. So now he's determined to nail the lawyer for the murder of his business partner, Gregory L. Somers, who was found with a bullet in his head on the floor of his office.

Don't worry, this is an inverted detective story, of sorts, in which Allhoff plays a risky game of cat-and-mouse with a crooked, but highly influential, lawyer. Sergeant Simmonds even remarks that, if he can think his way out of this mess, he'll "go down in history as Machiavelli, the second." Allhoff undeniably has a Machiavellian streak and a complete disregard for the rule of law, which is a fatal combination that planted Philips in the electric chair. So a good how-to-catch'em type of crime story.

The third story, "Lock the Death House Door," was originally published in December, 1938, issue of DDM and is the second impossible crime in this series listed by Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991). But I hope there are more in this, until recently, incredibly obscure and hard-to-get series.

Battersly has had a date with Ruth Manning and she happens to be the daughter of a convicted murderer, Morris Manning, who Allhoff put on death row and is less than twelve hours removed from his execution, which Allhoff sadistically use as cudgel – telling Battersly to remember he put her father on the chair when he's wiping away her tears. However, Battersly has an unpleasant surprise for Allhoff. The D.A. office is “digging out a pardon for Manning” on the strength of evidence Battersly has uncovered. Someone even confessed to have been the murderer. Allhoff is beyond himself with fury and vindictively sets out to destroy the newly surfaced evidence, because Manning must and shall burn in the hot seat – a problem complicated when the man who had confessed is murdered in locked and guarded prison cell. This is another how-to-catch'ems with a simplistic locked room mystery thrown in the works.

So not quite the classic locked room story, like "The Day Nobody Died," but still a good story.

The next story is "Cover the Corpse's Eye," first published in the July, 1939, issue of DDM, which began on a positive note for the downtrodden, browbeaten Battersly. He was instrumental in the arrest of a notorious murderer, Ronnie Regan, who appears to have shot and robbed a well-known banker, Alfred Sontag. Allhoff was livid and relentlessly started to rain on his parade by finding someone else to put in the electric chair. The solution is not entirely original and very pulpy, but it was adeptly handled here by Champion.

"Dead and Dumb" was originally published in the October, 1939, issue of DDM and opens with the absolutely impossible, not a murder in a hermetically sealed room, but peace and tranquility reigning in the slum office of Allhoff, which has miraculously persisted for five days. Sergeant Simmonds even heard him singing fragments of The Missouri Waltz! This changes the moment a cab-driver staggered into the room, supporting a mortally wounded man, who had demanded to be brought to Allhoff instead of the hospital.

Unluckily, the victim is a deaf mute and he dies before he can communicate with them, but Allhoff is clever enough to link this murder to a reported suicide at the Rickerts Institute, on Long Island, which is an asylum for deaf mutes – where a third murder is committed right under Allhoff's nose. A suicidal move when you're faced with an unforgiving, vindictive and merciless opponent, like Allhoff, who only finds pleasure in cornering people. And watch them squirm. Another good story with an interesting background and a clever take on a very EQ-like motive.

The next story, "A Corpse for Christmas," was originally published in the December, 1939, issue of DDM and is, without question, the standout story of the collection.

The story opens two days before Christmas and Allhoff is bah-humbugging the merriment of the season. A merry period in which "a million morons get drunk" and go home "to beat their wives" or the Nazis who'll "undoubtedly blow thousands of British into little pieces," but the demented Ebenezer Scrooge in deerstalker is visited by his very own Ghost of Christmas – who becomes one of his most formidable opponents in this series. A breathtakingly beautiful woman visits the slum apartment on behalf of the Society League's Holiday Aid Organization. She brought a covered basket with "a real old-fashioned Christmas dinner to the worthy poor."

Allhoff is furious at this kindly offer, but exploded when the woman tells him not to let his "foolish pride" stand in the way of a delicious turkey, because why would he deprive himself of "two fat legs." That remark was the proverbial match that lit the powderkeg. However, Allhoff has not seen the last of this unflappable woman. She turns up again in a bizarre murder/suicide case on Long Island, but she possesses a cast-iron alibi. At the time of the double shooting, she was in the apartment getting yelled at by Allhoff. So, if she did it, how could she have been in two places at the same time. An excellent detective story with an alibi-trick worthy of the alibi-breaking stories by Christopher Bush. 

 

The next story is "Sergeants Should Never Sleep" was originally published in the March, 1940, issue of DDM, which turned out the be only dud in the collection. The story began promisingly with Sergeant Paul Hamtrack requesting to be temporarily assigned to Allhoff, in order to study his method's first hand, but Sergeant Hamtrack is notorious career yes-man. Adding an additional strain to the torturous, daily routine of Battersly and Simmonds. Unfortunately, the apparent problem of "a killing done by a sneak thief" degenerates into a World War II spy tale with an obvious solution.

The next story, "Turn in Your Badge," was culled from the pages of the June, 1940, issue of DDM and opens with the news that the body of Lieutenant Mike Arnold, of the Racketeering Squad, had been pulled out of the river with his feet in a block of concrete and his tongue cut out – complemented by nine bullet holes. Allhoff is shocked by the news and annoyed that his daily reports from Headquarters are late, but this has a very good reason. Acting Commissioner Blakely has decided to sever their "unofficial connection" and gives him a week to sort out his affairs. Allhoff was fucking furious.

Blakely arrested a well-known gangster for the murder of Sergeant Arnold and Allhoff is convinced the murderer disguised his work as a mob killing, because it was complete overkill. So he wants to find the real murderer and uses the life of an innocent man to mercilessly destroy Blakely and secure his unofficial standing within the department. Battersly and Simmonds were not happy with this outcome, to say the least. And they were so close to freedom they could actually taste it.

"There Was a Crooked Man" is the penultimate story, originally published in the August, 1940, issue of DDM and has Allhoff rudely turning down a huge fee to privately investigate a murder, but accepts an offer to investigate the very same murder when a crippled man asks him to. Champion used a lot of handicapped characters in his stories and, in this volume alone, there are blind characters, deaf mutes and cripples, which also play some part in the solution. So I was able to foresee which direction the plot was taking. Still a very well put together story, but the solution was not difficult to anticipate.

Finally, the collection closes with "Suicide in Blue," first published in the October, 1940, issue of DDM, which is a quasi-impossible crime about a series of threatening extortion letters demanding money and refusal to pay has fatal consequences – accurately predicting the date and time of their date. One of the victim's a policeman, Sergeant Wheeler, who apparently committed suicide with his own Service Revolver. Obviously, this turned the suicide into a murder, but Allhoff disagrees and sets out to prove a suicide and find a murderer. And, of course, he pulls it off. However, Allhoff pulls one of his nastiest trick to date on poor Battersly. Something that could have easily pushed him over the edge. What can I say? Allhoff is a bit of a dick.

So, all in all, The Complete Cases of Inspector Allhoff is an excellent volume of high-quality pulp detective stories full with grotesque, broken characters, sordid murders and often clever plots, but not every reader today will be able to put up with the vindictive, acid-tongued Allhoff. A truly sadistic, mentally unhinged character and the ultimate anti-hero. In my opinion, the only true weaknesses is that every single story goes over the series origin story, which becomes repetitive after the third or fourth story. You can easily skip these endlessly rewritten passages after the first story. My second complaint is that only one of the stories, "A Corpse for Christmas," came close to the superb "The Day Nobody Died." Most of the stories here were pretty good, but not anywhere near that classic short story.

However, this will not deter me from getting the second volume. Despite the sadistic, broken and weary main-characters, Champion created an original and unforgettable series like no other in the genre. Simply fascinating and highly recommended, if you think you can stomach Allhoff.

The Further Side of Fear (1967) by Helen McCloy

Early last year, I dispensed with the oh-so clever, but confusing, blog-post titles and faintly related opening quotes, which I shamelessly copies from Ho-Ling Wong – whose blog was a model for my own back in 2011. Hey, you know the old classroom rule: if you're going to copy your homework, copy it off an Asian.

So my first, normal-looking review was Helen McCloy's The Man in the Moonlight (1940) and ended with the promise to look at her other work in 2018. As to be expected, this didn't pan out as planned. Nonetheless, there was one particular title that had been on my mind the entire year and have referred to this book in a number of reviews (e.g. Donald E. Westlake's Murder Among Children, 1967).

The Further Side of Fear (1967) is one of McCloy's lesser-known detective novels and the only person who appears to have discussed it is Mike Grost, of A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection, who described it as a combination of suspense, mystery and espionage with an impossible crime plot – noting that the late sixties was "an atypical era in mystery history" for a writer "to develop an interest in locked room puzzles." Surprisingly, The Further Side of Fear was McCloy's first formal, traditionally-styled locked room mystery novel.

The impossibility from her earlier and much lauded mystery novel, Through a Glass, Darkly (1950), concerned the inexplicable appearances of a döppelganger. The Further Side of Fear offers an authentic locked room conundrum in the spirit of MacKinlay Kantor's "The Light at Three O'Clock" (collected in It's About Crime, 1960), but with a better explanation for the impossible problem.

Lydia Grey is an American who has come to London to write a series of magazine articles on British furniture and has taken a small flat in Belfast Square.

Lydia is a very light sleeper and the story begins when she's awakened in the middle of the night by footsteps, muffled by the carpet, around the corner of the L-shape room of the flat. She pretends to be asleep, while intruder silently moves around the dark flat like "a stealthy animal," but catches a glimpse of this person as the silhouette drew a curtain to look out on "the lamplit London square" – which is an odd thing to do for an intruder. However, this presence vanishes as mysteriously from the pitch-black apartment as it has appeared and this is where the impossibility comes into play.

There's only one door, locked and bolted from the inside, "the windows were eight floors above the ground," sliding panels of glass, which were tightly locked against "the winter night." So how did the uninvited, night-time visitor enter and leave the dark flat? The second chapter is a treat for the overly enthusiastic locked room reader.

Lydia immediately called the police and the responding officers eliminate every possible point of entry and exit. The intruder could have wormed a forearm through the letter slot in the door and turned "the knob that releases the snap lock," but the bolt was "too far from the slot." And the door with its lock is a modern one, which makes it impossible to use one of those old-fashioned thread-and wire tricks that manipulate the keys and bolts from the outside. Lastly, there's a rubbish hatch with a powerful compressed air spring designed to hold it tightly shut once it's closed. A brief experiment shows the flat could not have been entered through the rubbish hatch.

So they establish it's "physically impossible" for anyone to get in, or out, of the flat when the hall door was locked and bolted from the inside! Nevertheless, you don't have to be Dr. Gideon Fell or Jonathan Creek to figure out how the trick was worked. The trick is a relatively simple one, but notable because it's set in a modern, post-WWII building with doors, locks and bolt that appeared to preclude any of the old, time-worn tricks or gadgets. And this gave it a glimmer or originality.

Although some would probably argue McCloy reversed a time-honored principle of locked room trickery and applied it to a modern setting, but that would be taking a sledgehammer to a butterfly. It's a good, acceptable, if simple, locked room-trick.

The seemingly impossible entering of a tightly locked and secured flat is only one facet of the plot and the book, as mentioned previously, is primarily a novel of suspense with a dash of espionage, which McCloy neatly linked to the locked room problem – not forgetting to plant a clue or two in the narrative. I also liked how the setting was used. A lion's share of The Further Side of Fear takes place in the flat and not only gives you the idea that you're reading a novelization of a stage-play, but it drives home the fact Lydia is a very isolated woman. A woman far away from home with really nobody around her who she can trust.

There's the house steward, John Erskine, who had been making his nightly round of the premise at the time the intruder was in Lydia's flat. She had a shipboard acquaintance, Gerald Denbigh, over as a guest that evening and her only friend in England is Alan MacAlan of the Foreign Office. The only ones she can trust are her two teenage daughters, but they dragged along two young boys, Jimmy Gregg and Tony Ffolliott, who have a talent for getting into trouble.

Needless to say, there are a number of complications in the case, such as an unexpected murder, anonymous telephone calls and a kidnapping, which finds its climax on the European continent – bringing Lydia to France and Italy.

On a whole, The Further Side of Fear is a fairly minor and short novel, but the plot pleasantly blends dark, nightmarish suspense with espionage and framed it as a locked room story with an unusual impossibility. And deserves much more attention than it has gotten until now. Especially from us locked room readers.

The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel (1942) by Christopher Bush

Christopher Bush's The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel (1942) is the twenty-fourth novel in the lengthy Ludovic Travers series and the second of three mysteries, book ended by The Case of the Murdered Major (1941) and The Case of the Fighting Soldier (1942), that together form a trilogy of war-themed detective stories – branded by Curt Evans as "the most notable series of wartime detective fiction." I think the first of these three wartime mysteries definitely lived up to praise, but what about its second one? Let's find out, shall we?

Reprinted by Dean Street Press

Previously, Captain Travers was assigned to an internment camp as its Adjutant Quartermaster and became, yet again, embroiled in a murder case. However, this time he was upstaged by his policeman friend, Superintendent George "The General" Wharton of Scotland Yard.

The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel is the first book in the series to be narrated by Travers, promoted to the rank of Major, who's transferred to Camp 55 near the city of Dalebrink in Derbyshire. Major Travers is placed in charge of the camp and the place is tasked with guarding two factories, tunnels, a bridge and "a certain hush-hush establishment."

Wharton happens to be in Derbyshire on "special hush-hush work" and Travers begins to suspect Wharton is the reason why he was transferred to Camp 55, which involves vitally important research work for the defense department and a leftist group of pacifists, New Era Group (N.E.G.) – locally known as "Neggers." A wily lot of "cranks and intellectuals" planning a New Order and there are people who want to see "the whole collection of Neggers" under lock and key.

Dalebrink Hall is the home of Colonel Brende, a gunnery expert, who uses the place as a facility to research a method to detect night-flying aircraft. Colonel Brende is assisted in his work by three experts: Heinrich Wissler, formerly Professor of Physics at the University of Prague, who resembles Albert Einstein as a young man. Francis Newton, Professor of Physics, and a research student, George Riddle. The well-born and alluring Hon. Penelope Craye, a distant cousin of Colonel and Mrs. Brende, fulfills the duties of private secretary, but before the war, there were whispers that "she was one of the set of Hitler's apologists." So there you have some of the important pieces of the plot, but, before they can be moved into action, we get to see some of the effects of the war on the local community.

The town is bombed during a nighttime air-raid and the bombing demolishes a number of houses, killed twelve people and left some forty injured.

Rev. Lancelot Benison, an Anglican minister, is the moving spirit behind the Neggers and published a fiery letter in the Clarion holding the authorities responsible for those twelve souls as "surely as if they had cut their throats" – coldly countered by Travers that you can't have an omelet without breaking an egg. He also has his duties as Commandant of Camp 55 and one of his jobs is having to deal with Howard Craye, "a lounge lizard in uniform," who's Mrs. Brende's nephew. And he can't even be bothered to salute properly. Than there's a mysterious background character, Major Passenden, who turned up in Lisbon and had hinted at "incredible adventures in France," but the fat hits the pan when Colonel Brende is inexplicably taken from his home.

Once again, Bush created here a quasi-impossible situation. There was a cordon of sentries around the house and "they were all keyed up to the highest pitch of alertness," because the Home Guard had setup an exercise with the aim of entering certain spots the camp was guarding as mock German para-troopers. This placed the guards on high-alert. So how did the kidnappers passed through this cordon? Not once, but twice! I think the solution strips this locked house mystery of its status as an impossible crime, you'll know why when you read it, but this is why I have become so fond of this series.

Up to this point, the story appeared to be dominated by the intrigues of the spy genre, but the traditional detective elements slowly overtake the plot when Penelope Craye's champagne is doctored with "a strong solution of veronal" – which will furnish the book with an ending befitting a mystery novel of this vintage. I needed some time to penetrate through the fog of far and piece together (most) of the puzzle, but eventually, with only a quarter left to go, I had a good, nearly complete picture of what had been happening.

There is, however, one thing I need to mention about the identity of the murderer (no spoilers). Bush was not the first one to use this specific solution and only came across it once before, but the plot was handled very poorly in that novel. Resulting in one of the most transparent mysteries ever written. I think it's a testament to Bush's talent as a plotter that he only could make this trick work, but even fool a reader who has seen it before! Honestly, the comparison didn't occur to me until I had figured parts of the solution out. Well played, Mr. Bush. Well played.

You know what else I really like about this series? You'll never know who's going to provide the solution. More often than not, the unraveling of the plot is collaborative effort between Travers and Wharton. As each of them find the various pieces of the puzzle. Sometimes, one manages to completely upstage the other. This is the second time in row Travers is reduced to the rank of supporting character by Wharton. This is an interesting and original way to humanize your series-detective without having to resort to the fallible detective trope. Travers and Wharton are simply ordinary human beings who pool to talent and knowledge to solve a problem.

By the way, if Wharton goes 3-0 in The Case of the Fighting Soldier, I'm going to refer to this wartime trilogy as the Superintendent George Wharton series. He deserves it.

So, yes, this was definitely one of the better Bush's, regardless of period, and comes highly recommended to fans of the series and mystery readers who love detective stories with WWII as a backdrop. Or if you simply enjoy a good detective yarn.