The Gypsy Detective

"Is there anything that I can do for you?"

- Hagar (Fergus Hume's "The Sixth Customer and the Silver Teapot" collected in Hagar of the Pawn-Shop, 1899)

The late Edward D. Hoch was arguably the most prolific mystery writer of short stories from the previous century, producing nearly a thousand stories during his lifetime, which were published in such publications as Famous Detective Stories, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine – most impressively is the unbroken string of monthly appearances in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine that lasted from 1973 to 2008. A streak that will likely never be broken.

During his fifty-three year career, Hoch wrote more than a dozen series and created a whole host of memorable, and popular, detective-characters.

Simon Ark is one of his most iconic series-character, who claims to be a 2000-year-old Coptic priest, but equally popular are his thief-for-hire, Nick Velvet, and Dr. Sam Hawthorne – a country physician specialized in solving seemingly impossible crimes. One of Hoch's lesser-known series-character is Michael Vlado, the Gypsy Detective, who was specially created for an anthology from the mid-1980s.

Bill Pronzini invited Hoch to contribute a short story to The Ethnic Detective (1985), a collection he was editing with Martin H. Greenberg, which might have given us "an Eskimo detective," but the choice fell on a Romanian Gypsy.

Michael Vlado is a leading member of a tribe of Gypsies who stopped wandering the globe over a century ago and settled down in the foothills of the Transylvanian Alps in Central Romania where they farm the land and breed horses. Formally, King Carranza is the leader of the tribal village, named Gravita, but the elderly man is crippled and unable to rule. So the power was exercised by Michael and this meant that he presided over "an informal court," called a kris, but his decisions were usually honored by the community and as a community leader he was often consulted on all kinds of problems. Surprisingly, a good portion of Michael's cases are brought to him by Captain Nicol Segar of the Government Militia.

You can say the series brimmed with potential and the fact that they were written by Hoch should've been a guarantee seal of plot-quality, but sadly, the characters, settings and political background of Communist Romania and the political upheavals in Eastern Europe during the late 1980s were used as a gimmick – a crutch that the plots heavily leaned on. Consequently, the plots are notably weaker than those found in the short stories about Simon Ark or Dr. Hawthorne.

On the bright side, the fifteen short stories collected in The Iron Angel and Other Tales of the Gypsy Sleuth (2003) contained only one real stinker and two (minor) gems, while the remainder of the stories managed to be consistent in being pretty average at best. So maybe the overall quality of the stories is not as bad as I made it out to be, but the series is definitely a notch, or two, below Hoch's other work, but for now, let's take the stories from this collection down from the top!

"The Luck of the Gypsy" is the series-opener and was originally written for the previously mentioned anthology, The Ethnic Detective, which introduces the reader to the two main characters, Michael Vlado and Captain Segar – who descended upon the hillside village on official business. A caravan of Gypsies had crossed the border into Romania and underneath one of the trucks several gold ingots were found, but by that time most of the caravan had been ushered through the checkpoint. And now the Communist government fears "counterrevolutionary activities" are brewing and that the gold might have been smuggled into the country in order "to foment unrest."

Captain Segar has been ordered to stay in the area, in case the caravan passes through the village, which is exactly what happens only an hour later, but not an ounce of gold is found inside the vehicle carrying two strange Gypsies. However, the occupants are gunned down a short while later and Michael figures out the culprit based on a dirty license plate. This is actually not too bad a story with a decent enough plot that made good use of an opportunistic murderer who's in possession of a better motive than simply personal greed.

"Odds on a Gypsy" was the first story from this series to be published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (hereafter, EQMM), which appeared in the July, 1985 issue and can best be described as a travelogue. Captain Segar has a brother in the Agriculture Ministry in Moscow, Konrad Segar, who's one of the government officials in charge of running the only horse race track in the capital – a place famously known as the Hippodrome. So a young Gypsy farmhand, named Tanti Slatina, with a passion for horse-riding is given a golden opportunity to race Michael's horse, Rom Way, at the Hippodrome.

Michael accompanies the young member of his tribal village to Moscow and the best aspect of this story is its depiction of "squalid grandeur" of the once magnificent race track, which has badly worn marble steps and soiled walls. A mere shadow of what it was when the building was erected in the 1800s. However, a body is eventually found in the stables of the race track, but the explanation for this murder was rather obvious and this killed the effect the revelation was trying to aim for. Not a bad story, but nothing special either.

"Blood of a Gypsy" appeared in the January, 1986 publication of EQMM and is the first locked room mystery of the series.

Once again, Captain Segar travels to the hillside village of Gravita and asks Michael "to represent his people at a state function in Bucharest," but Michael suggests another respected and educated member of the Gypsy community, Nicolae Gallipeau – who had attended school in Bucharest. Nicolae is also a controversial person who took a younger lover after his wife had passed away, which placed him at odds with his brother and a much younger rival. So there are several potential suspects when Nicolae is found in his home with his throat slit, but the problem is that Michael and Captain Segar were standing in front of the house at the time of the murder. And the backdoor, while unlatched, opened on a field of unbroken snow. How did the murderer managed to do the dirty deed without being seen or leaving footprints in the snow?

Well, the murderer had to improvise the locked room trick, on account of the witnesses at the door, which is well done for the most part, but the last act of the trick is hardly credible.

"The Gypsy Treasure" was first printed in the May 1986 issue of EQMM and takes place a month after the previous story. Michael has taken the place of the murdered Nicolae as a representative of his people at the state function in Bucharest, but longs to return to his wife and home village. However, the journey back home has to be put off when "the daughter of an old Gypsy king" approaches him with news that her uncle, Greystone, had been fatally stabbed. And this compelled Michael to attend a Gypsy festival on the Hungarian border where a long guarded secret from World War II will be revealed.

At the outbreak of the war, the Gypsies of Hungary and Romania "banded together" to "keep their gold and jewelry from falling into the hands of the Nazis." The treasure was hidden on the grounds of the festival and the whereabouts was entrusted to five men, "each of whom was given a portion of the secret." A secret encoded in five worn playing cards with the name of a location scrawled across it and you can actually crack this code, but you have to be observant and know your card games. And in case you were wondering, I embarrassingly failed to notice the obvious and crack the code.

"Punishment for a Gypsy" was originally published in the January 1987 issue of EQMM and is one of the two gems of this collection, which, technically, also qualifies as an impossible crime story!

Michael relates a story to Captain Segar about the day he took a shortcut and passed through a small mountain settlement, a village called Bistritz, where local superstition is compounded by Gypsy lore and vampire myths – which Michael learned first hand when he stopped his pickup truck in the center of the village. A small group of people had gathered at the crossroad and they immediately pulled him out of the truck, while yelling "we have us a Gypsy." One of the men informs Michael that a Gypsy, Arad Bercovia, is to be executed for murder at high noon and they were following an "ancient law" stating that "the first Gypsy met on the road is to serve as his executioner."

Barcovia had seduced the daughter of the local shopkeeper, Marco Rapnell, who swore he would kill the traveling Gypsy, but it was Bercovia who was seen throwing a knife through the open window of the shopkeeper's house and the locals believed "a Gypsy curse guided around a corner to its target" - since the victim was found in the kitchen next to the room with the open window. And all of the other doors and windows were locked and bolted from the inside. So that leaves Michael with only an hour to find a way out of this dire situation and the ending is an unexpected twist in what is arguably the best story from this collection. That's all I can say about this story without giving anything away.

"The Gypsy Wizard" made its first appearance in May 1987 issue of EQMM and brings Michael to the Italian city of Milan. One of the former inhabitants of Gravita, Josef Patronne, left the region of the Carpathian Mountains forty years ago and settled in Northern Italy after the war – where he became known as a wizard. Patronne's brother saw his picture in the newspaper, under the headline "FIFTY WIZARDS KEPT FROM THE POPE," which prompted him to ask Michael to go and check up on his brother.

Patronne claims the power of flight and, not long after Michael's arrival, the wizard's body is found at the Galleria Vittoria Emanuele and the first impression is that he fell to his death after attempting to fly. However, the autopsy shows he had been drugged and could not have climbed to the roof by himself. So not really a bad story, but the ending tore a page from a very famous and celebrated detective novel.

"Murder of a Gypsy King" was first published in EQMM of July, 1988 and is an important story on account of the brutal murder of a relatively important side-character, King Carranza, whose death allows Michael to take his place – officially becomes the Gypsy King of Gravita. The story also introduces a character, Jennifer Beatty, who will return in one of the later stories.

Jennifer Beatty had been touring the Balkans on the backseat of her boyfriends motorcycle, but "the inevitable finish" came and she simply took Peter's ride. She was directed to the village of Gravita by Captain Segar and shortly after arriving there the King is found beaten to death in his home. Plot-wise, the story is not very complicated and the truth behind the murder is a very sordid one. Nevertheless, the story is not without interest, providing an outsider's perspective of Michael's village, and the consequences of King Carranza's death makes this an important entry in the series.

"Gypsy at Sea" comes from the December 1988 issue of EQMM and is a spy-cum-detective story with a predictable sequence of plot-twists. Michael receives a letter from a woman who had known long ago in Greece, but she had drowned in the Aegean Sea twenty-five years ago and he had identified the body himself. So he travels down to Athens to see her and learns she had been working as a spy for a private information gathering agency. As to be expected, shortly after their reunion, she ends up being murdered. The truth behind her death, and the subsequent, twist were very predictable and made for a rather bland crime/spy story.

"The Gypsy Delegate" was originally published in the October 1990 issue of EQMM and takes place mere weeks after the Romanian Revolution of 1989. So Captain Segar now serves the new government, who placed him in charge of the region, but they also have a special mission for Michael.

King Michael I of Romania was forced to abdicate at the end of 1947, when the Communists took over, but the King is still alive (even today at age 95) and has been living in exile in Geneva, Switzerland. The new government wants to send an unofficial delegation to the disposed king and Michael, who was named after the king, was picked as a representative of the Gypsy population of the country. A five-men delegation boards a train to Geneva, but en route a delegate is found stabbed to death in his compartment and Michael's explanation foiled a terrorist plot. However, the solution was balanced on a single clue. So, once again, not a terribly bad story, but not a particular good one either.

"The Iron Angel" came from the October 1992 issue of EQMM and is the second story to involve the American tourist, Jennifer Beatty, who arrived at the village when the previous leader, King Carranza, was murdered in his own home. But this time, she's a person of interest in a drug-related stabbing death of a Gypsy in Bucharest. She was in a cellar, or drug den, getting high when a mortally wounded man stumbled into the place and mumbled something about "the three eyes on the iron angel."

A story with some potential, but hampered by its short length. I believe the story could have been expended into a novella or even full-length novel with the titular angel being as unnerving a presence as The Golden Hag from John Dickson Carr's The Crooked Hinge (1938).

"The Puzzle Garden" was first published in the February 1994 issue of EQMM and involves a treasure hunt in a long-neglected, overgrown garden on an estate that has been returned to the family of the original owners after the overthrow of the Socialist government in 1989. Before the Communists began the collectivization, the Sibiu family buried a valuable statue in the Garden of the Apostles and the only clue mentioned the last Apostle. So this makes for a fun little tale about the search of a hidden treasure and the plot-patterns created when they start digging are pleasing, but the presence of the dead Gypsy, who was found in the garden with a knife in his back, was an unnecessary addition to the plot – slightly spoiling the effect of what was found in the whole they had dug. And the subsequent discovery.

"The Gypsy's Paw" was published in the September 1994 issue of EQMM and is one of the two gems in this collection, which is best described as an impossible crime story reminiscent of John Dickson Carr and Hake Talbot – with a dash of G.K. Chesterton.

Michael learns from his wife, Rosanna, that there's "a Rom with magic powers" plying her trade in the neighboring village of Agula. She is an elderly woman, Esmeralda, who carries around an old, severed bear's paw and takes money in exchange for wish-fulfillment, which might lead to trouble down the road. So Michael decides to drive down to the village and, as a local leader, have a talk with the old crone, but what he gets is a front-row seat to a first-rate miracle. She's about to call on "a wealthy couple with a missing son" and Michael accompanies her as an observer.

The demonstration does not work as Esmeralda had planned, because the missing son does not return when he's called upon with the bear's paw and a telephone call tells them their son had drowned several days ago. Suddenly, the loud knocking on the front door freezes everyone solid and the other son of the couple grabs the bear's paw to wish his brother in his watery grave. And when the distraught mother tore open the door, the only they saw was "a line of recent footprints leading to the front door." Whoever made the footprints either walked through "the bolted door" or simply "vanished without a trace."

A splendid story rich in both atmosphere and clues with an eerie impossible situation worthy of the previously mentioned artisans of the locked room story.

"The Clockwork Rat" originally appeared in the May 1996 issue of EQMM and is an unusual, bizarre and colorful tale that takes place in post-Soviet Moscow, which at the time was dominated by the Russian mafia. Michael is visited by Old Caspian who tells him about his grandson, Maksim, who's a dwarf with a talent for training rats. But the debts incurred by his father made him practically a slave to the mobsters who run a fancy nightclub. So Michael has to come up with a way to free Maksim from forced servitude, but that's easier than done and even becomes complicated when mobster dies when a windup toy-rat explodes in his hands.

Not much else I can say about this entry except that it has a decent enough plot and some excellent, almost surrealistic, story-telling that begs to be compared to the detective stories by Craig Rice.

"The Starkworth Atrocity" was published in the September-October 1998 double-issue of EQMM and the story is an absolute train-wreck. An uncharacteristically bad and sloppy job by Hoch.

The political upheavals in Eastern Europe maneuvered Michael in a position that he was constantly "summoned to a faraway place" to plead "the cause of Romanies seeking political asylum." Lately, he was acting on behalf of the European Union to observe the stream of Gypsy refugees pouring into the British Isles. At first glance, the story shaped up to be a politically-tinged narrative, which would have been bad enough, but the plot quickly degenerated when over fifty refugees were gassed to death at the nursing home where they were temporarily stored – which turns out to have been deliberately. Michael does some parrying with the press and solves a throat-cutting that had been thrown in for good measure, but the solution for the mass murder makes no sense and is even incomplete! One of the characters even says, "I suppose we'll never know any more." Really, Hoch?

Finally, "A Wall Too High" from the June 2000 issue of EQMM is more of the same, but with a coherent, if obvious, plot. Michael is commissioned by a human rights organization to go down to the Czech Republic and plead that the wall separating the Roma section in Masarak Street to be torn down. So he simply has to play the role of Ronald "Tear Down This Wall" Reagan, but the situation becomes volatile when a policeman is killed at the wall and authorities issued a twenty-four hour ultimatum for the murderer to surrender – or else the police and militia will clear all Gypsies from Masarak Street. Unfortunately, the plot was rather predictable and my suspicion was confirmed when Michael was told that the body of police lieutenant had been cremated.

Well, that's the end of The Iron Angel and Other Tales of the Gypsy Sleuth, which left me internally very divided. On the one hand, the collection contained two lovely gems and the quality of the remaining stories were consistent throughout. However, as you probably noticed, I was not exactly smitten by the series as a whole and had I read any of the stories beforehand, I probably would have opted for one of the short story collections about Nick Velvet, Jeffery Rand or Ben Snow.

So, yeah, sorry for this lukewarm, overlong and probably poorly written blog-post, but it was cranked out when I was running low on enthusiasm. I guess I'll pick one of those other collections, before too long, to make up for this one.

An Invasive Species

"Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools."

-  Napoléon Bonaparte

Back in October, "JJ," posted an open invitation on his blog, "John Dickson Carr is Going to Be 110 – Calling for Submissions," which gave everyone who wanted to participate a two-month notice and this was sufficient time to prepare – as even I managed to write and schedule this review well ahead of the deadline. Yes, I actually prepared a blog-post in advance! I'm that much of a fanboy for John Dickson Carr.

And picking my Carr-related subject was even easier than preparing this blog-post: the habitually overlooked and criminally underrated Captain Cut-Throat (1955), which is a thunderous blend of ghostly murder, espionage and adventure set in Napoleonic France. Regardless, the book never managed to emerge from the shadow of Carr's better-known historical work (e.g. The Devil in Velvet, 1951), but (at least) deserves to have its existence acknowledged. So let's put some polish on its name recognition!  

Captain Cut-Throat takes place during the warm summer days of August 1805, when "the shadow of the new Emperor lay long across Europe," who has been amassing an invasion force, called the Armée d'Angleterre, "along the whole length of the Iron Coast" – restlessly awaiting the Imperial order to begin the invasion of England. Their stationary position made the soldiers bored, fidgety and restless, but their attention was soon to be occupied by a murderous, wraithlike creature sneaking around the military encampments at Boulogne.

On the night of the 13th August, this shadowy figure began to murder sentries "like a ghost," because he couldn't be seen "even when he walks in the light." It began as a series or relatively ordinary stabbing deaths, but, "step by step and murder by murder," the killer moved from "a point far outside the camp to its very center," which culminated in a seemingly impossible murder. Grenadier Émile Joyet, of the Marine Guard, was one of the sentries patrolling the lighted, oblong enclosure round the Emperor's cliff-top pavilion, but he suddenly shouted, doubled up and collapsed – stabbed through the heart. The other sentries, who could observe "the whole lighted space," both inside the fence and outside, swear they had not seen a soul anywhere near the spot where the stabbing took place. As if the murderer had been invisible!

After some of the killings, the weapon was left behind, namely bloodstained daggers, but in every single instance there was a scrap of paper: signed "Yours sincerely, Captain Cut-Throat." Since the night of the second murder, the Grand Army has talked of nothing else.

The murders came to the attention of the Emperor himself and he has two options: launch his invasion at once, "which would cure everything by curing inaction," or " he must crush Captain Cut-Throat before another murder can be committed." So the Emperor gives Joseph Fouché, the Minister of Police, an impossible task: he has less than a week to ensnarl the cut-throat with his talent for Machiavellian maneuvering. 

M. Fouché has a large, far-reaching network of agents and spies, which captured a foreign agent, named Alan Hepburn, who operated in France under the Lupinian nom de guerre of "Vicomte de Bergerac." He wants to use this British agent to trap a British agent and involves Hepburn secret wife, Madeleine, whom he deserted for unknown reason. But they're not the only ones send into the encampments by Fouché: Hepburn involved himself with another woman, Ida de Sainte-Elme, who's one of Fouché agents and helped to capture Hepburn and they're closely followed by a Prussian horse-rider – Lieutenant Schneider of the Hussars of Bercy. 

Admittedly, a good portion of the first half of the book is one or two paces slower than the rest of the story, because Carr takes the time to introduce the characters, explain their situations and giving the details about the "series of ghost-murders" of Napoleon's sentries. But after these opening chapters, the story becomes somewhat atypical for Carr. One of the most notable examples of this is how he treated the impossible crime element of the story, which does not take the center stage of the plot and is easily explained by Hepburn around the halfway mark of the book. I found this to be a minor mark against the book, but I can understand why it was done as Captain Cut-Throat is more a novel of adventure and intrigue than one of detection and ratiocination. And that may be a problem for even some of Carr's most loyal readers. 

However, purely as a historical novel of romance, intrigue and adventure, Captain Cut-Throat allowed the cavalier attitude of its author to roam freely and let his swashbuckling, adventure-hungry spirit off the chain. This resulted in what is, arguably, Carr's best action scene: Hepburn's night-time flight through the field of balloons. A scene that would, by itself, be justification enough to make an expensive period film out of the book. It's simply that great! 

Of course, even an unapologetic JDC-apologist, like myself, cannot deny all of this running around and adventuring did not came at the cost of the detection, which has some shaky reasoning and fair play, but these elements are still far stronger than your usual run-of-the-mill historical spy-thriller – because this is a Carr novel after all. And the final revelation of the omnipresent villain is perhaps one of the most original plays on the least-likely-suspect gambit. I actually figured out the identity of Captain Cut-Throat the first time I read the book, but (admittedly) arrived to that conclusion instinctively rather than deductively. 

Captain Cut-Throat is not a perfect piece of fiction, but it's tremendous fun with an intriguing premise and plenty of excitement with a dusting of mystery and romance. On top of that, the first half has a good, if simplistic, impossible crime. So Carr really threw everything he had at the plot and the most impressive accomplishment is how he managed to simultaneously use elements of the spy-thriller, adventure story and an impossible crime tale, inside a historical narrative, without reducing the impact or effectiveness of any of them. Therefore, the book really should be better known within the ranks of readers of both Carr and historical mysteries. 

In closing, I would like to wish the ghost of John Dickson Carr a grand 110th birthday. Long may he haunt us!

Outlaws of the Forest

"When as the sheriff of Nothingham

Was come with mickle grief,

He talk'd no good of Robin Hood,

That strong and sturdy thief."
- Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow (Joseph Ritson's Robin Hood: A Collection of the Popular Poems, Songs and Ballads Relative to That Celebrated English Outlaw, 1826)

The Assassin in the Greenwood (1993) by Paul Doherty is the seventh entry in his chronicles of Sir Hugh Corbett and takes place in 1302, which was one of those historic, tumultuous period in Europe's history and King Edward I is besieged by problems – such as the expansionist tendencies of France and the return of an infamous outlaw.

A covert war of intelligence, counterintelligence, and espionage is being waged on the continent of Europe. The chess pieces in this war are spies and double-agents, either in the employ of the English or the French, who dance around important crumbs of information pertaining to the situation on France's northern border – where an army is amassing. King Edward's intelligence network is aware they're waiting for the signal "to cross into and destroy the Kingdom of Flanders," but not if these plans extended to England's southern coast.

So it is interest of King Philip IV of France to keep the English in the dark and for this purpose he has dispatched one of his best assassins across the Channel. His target? The Keeper of the Secret Seal and devoted emissary of King Edward I of England, Sir Hugh Corbett. However, Corbett is on a mission himself. A mission that brings him to the dark, dense and dangerous thickets of Sherwood Forest surrounding the castle of Nottingham.

One of the King's principal tax-collectors, Matthew Willoughby, was leading an armed convoy to the forest and they followed a secret route, which went across obscure pathways and tracks, but they were halted by a "volley of arrows" – courtesy of a band of roughly fifty robbers. The iron-bound chests were taken from their covered wagons, the tax-collector was horrible maimed and his entire retinue was massacred.

As shocking as the brutality of this massacre is the identity of the man who acted as the leader of this group of outlaws: an archer clad in Lincoln green who claims to be none other than the legendary thief, Robin Hood! He even has Little John by his side.

King Edward is in a black rage, as he had given the outlaw a King's Pardon in the past, and he has one simple task for Corbett: "go to bloody Nottingham and see Robin Hood hang." But upon his arrival in Nottingham, Corbett discovers that not all of Robin Hood's crimes are simple mugging cases. The Sheriff of Nottingham has passed away under very mysterious and seemingly impossible circumstances inside his chamber.

The body of Sir Eustace Vechey was "in the blackest pit of depression" when he and his manservant, Lecroix, retired to his room, which was locked from the inside and key was left in the lock. There were two guards posted outside of the door and the windows are mere arrow slits. As someone remarked, "not even a rat could squeeze in there," but there must have been an invisible agent in the room to administer a very potent poison to the sheriff – which was not found or tasted in the goblet of wine and pieces of sweet meat that were left in the room.

Doherty is a bit of a specialist where (impossible) poisonings are concerned and the locked room situation, and its explanation, was somewhat reminiscent of the one used in The White Rose Murders (1991), but different enough to stand by itself. It also had a fairly clued explanation and one that you can piece together yourself long before Corbett stumbles to the truth. So that was a nice element of this very eventful novel of thick, braided plot-threads and there are many plot-threads in this book.

First of all, there are the previously mentioned cases of a forest teeming with murderous outlaws and the baffling poisoning of the sheriff, but there's also the question of why Robin Hood has returned and why he has become so cruel. He used to be a champion of the common man (i.e. the poor), but now he seems to be suffering from a severe case of bloodlust. These come on top of a complicated cipher Corbett and Ranulf have to break and an unknown person who shoots three burning arrows over the castle wall on the thirteenth of every month. And then there are the bodies. Doherty has never shied away from stacking up a body count (e.g. The Plague Lord, 2002), but here we have murders, executions and deaths in every single chapter – often more than one body at a time. Death is literally all around Corbett and Ranulf in this one!

One advantage of the bustling plot of The Assassin in the Greenwood is that it makes it a very eventful story, in which the plot is always on the move and events are constantly unfolding. It makes for a very readable story. However, the downside of this is that, to prevent the ending from becoming a convoluted mess, the solution had to be as simple as possible. And that was the case. You don't have to be a particular genius to deduce the identity of the mastermind behind all of this bloody chaos, but, overall, it was competently done and loved the motivation of the killer. It nicely intertwined with the presence and legend of Robin Hood. But the real draw and eye-catcher of this historical mystery is having Robin Hood as one of the main suspects/antagonists.

So, a pretty good, fun and eventful read, but not one of the best entries in the series. I suspect The Demon Archer (1999) was Doherty rewriting this story from scratch and cutting out all of the extraneous matter, because the both stories shares some resemblances, but the plot is a lot leaner and overall better executed – which is a good example that sometimes less is more.

On a final note, Robin Hood seems out-of-time in this novel, because he's typically portrait as a figure from the days of Richard the Lionheart and King John, but Doherty addresses and explains this in author’s note.

A Veiled Threat

"Sure, it's dangerous. It's been dangerous, it is dangerous, and it's going to be a whole lot more dangerous."

- from Ianthe Jerrold's There May Be Danger (1948)

Patricia Wentworth is primarily remembered as the author of thirty-three novels about Miss Maud Silver, a governess who became a consulting detective, which made her "one of the mystery genre's most prominent spinster sleuths," but her casebook only covers half of Wentworth's contribution to crime-fiction – which further consists of several short-lived series and a large pile of standalone novels. It's a part of her output that has long been overlooked, but, recently, the gang from Dean Street Press has dragged them from the bowels of obscurity. So let's take a look at one of them.

Weekend with Death (1941) appeared in the United Kingdom under a different title, namely Unlawful Occasions, but both editions of the book became rare, high-priced items on the secondhand book market. The price of a secondhand copy still hovers between sixty bucks and a full grand. Fortunately, you don't have to be a deep-pocketed collector of first-edition hardcover books to explore this new series of reprints.

Speaking of explorations, the plot of Weekend with Death roams across the neighboring borders of several sub-categories of the large, outstretched territory of the crime and mystery genre. There are components of suspense, thriller and espionage stories, but the plot also employs (faked) supernatural phenomena and this element is used to good effect – elevating the story above the usual fare for a spy-thriller. However, the story begins on a fairly traditional note.

The book opens in a small, cold waiting-room of a mist-enshrouded train station where the heroine of the story, Sarah Marlowe, finds herself in company of Miss Emily Case. A neat, shabby little woman who spend five years in Italy as a private nurse, but the shift from the pleasant, Mediterranean climate to the dreary weather of England is not the only shock Miss Case encountered upon her return home. She confides in Sarah how she found a wounded man, "looking just like death," in a railway carriage of a London train and the young man pressed a oiled-silk packet into her hands – urging her to not allow to "let them get it."

Well, that's enough to throw everyone off-balance, but Sarah is very skeptical and is not interested in getting "entangled with stray lunatics babbling of murdered men and mysterious packages." After all, she has to think of her position as the private-secretary to the President of the New Psychical Society, Wilson Cattermole, which largely consists of typing out letters about haunted houses, listening to his monologue and taking an interest in his wife, Joanna – who's convinced she has made contact with the ghost of a genuine eighteenth-century smuggler. So not exactly a line of work begging for an additional layer of mystification, but that's exactly what Sarah finds when she leaves Miss Case in the waiting-room to board her train.

Sarah discovers the mysterious, oiled-silk wrapped packet inside her handbag and the people who are after its content seem to be already on her tail. But that's not even the most distressing part. She reads in the newspaper about Miss Case's murder and the police is looking for the woman who talked with Miss Case in the waiting-room of the train station, which is accompanied by a good description of Sarah. A good and solid premise for detective-cum-thriller story, but at this point the story slowly begins to harkening back to the days of the sensational novels from the Victorian Era.

Mr. and Mrs. Cattermole gave Sarah a five seconds' notice to pack her bags and accompany them, in her capacity of secretary, to an old, gloomy and reputedly haunted house, which is called Maltings and the occupied part of the home dates back to only the seventeenth century. The wing that leads to the oldest part of the house is securely locked and apparently rife with supernatural occurrences. It's an excellent place to tell a ghost story or two and their host, Reverend Peter Brown, has plenty of them involving shape-shifting creatures, werewolves and vampires, but Sarah quickly learns a lesson we all learned from Scooby Doo – some of the most terrifying monsters are just mortal human beings underneath. But in this case that does not make the monsters any less dangerous or deadly.

This second half of the novel is an old-fashioned tale of suspense with the trappings of the thriller and spy story, but they are framed as a sensational tale from the Victorian period. You can find the influences from that period in the old, labyrinthine house and Sarah wandering through its dark passages at night. She even uncovers a secret passage! There are also some excellent, atmospheric set pieces in this portion of the book: a séance manifesting the ghost of Miss Case, a daring, ill-fated late-night attempt to escape from the place and the villains of the play coming up with a particular nasty and cruel way to rid themselves of Sarah.

So it leans heavily on some very old, time-worn tropes and a handful of incredible coincidences, such as how Sarah (unwittingly) brought the packet closer to its intended destination, but Wentworth knew how to write a yarn. I also believe the ghost-hunting angle lifted these tropes above themselves and helped make Weekend with Death a fun, captivating read. Only the ending and how the events were wrapped up was slightly underwhelming.

I'm not really good at reviewing crime stories that lack the proper structure of a traditional, fair-play and clue-filled mystery novel, but I liked this atmospheric suspense-cum-spy thriller and I think I begin to prefer Wentworth's standalone work to her Miss Silver novels.

I previously reviewed Silence in Court (1945) and The Benevent Treasure (1956).

Busman's Holiday

"It is peaceful. The sun shines. The sea is blue. But you forget, Miss Brewster, there is evil everywhere under the sun."

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun, 1941)

Recently, I have made several references to Martin Edwards, an award-winning crime writer and genre-historian, who has been providing the Poisoned Pen Press with introductions for their line of British Library Crime Classics, but Edwards also edited a number of themed anthologies for them – such as a collection of detective stories that take place in the countryside and one about crimes perpetrated in the city of London. 

So I thought, why not take a stab at one of those anthologies and Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries (2015) seemed like a good place to start.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle opened this anthology with a story taken from His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (1917), "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot," which was originally published in 1910 and is set on the Cornish coast. Holmes has been advised to "lay aside all his cases" and "surrender himself to complete rest if he wished to advert an absolute breakdown." So he finds himself on an holiday excursion to Cornwall where he roams through the "traces of some vanished race" that "left as its sole record strange monuments of stone" and "curious earthworks which hinted at prehistoric strife" – which is something that seemed to appeal to his imagination. Nonetheless, Holmes and Dr. Watson are quickly drawn back to old, familiar territory when a devil of a case occurred in the neighborhood.

On his early morning walk, Mr. Mortimer Tregennis crossed paths with the local physician, Dr. Richards, who informs him he has received an urgent call to hurry to Mr. Tregennis' old family home, Tredannick Wartha, where they make an unsettling discovery: his two brothers, Owen and George, acted as madmen and gave the impression of having "the senses stricken clean out of them." His sister, Brenda, "lay back stone-dead in her chair," but there's nothing in the home that could explain who or what "dashed the light of reason from their minds." The explanation belonged to the pages of the sensational crime/horror stories from the nineteenth century and breaks one of the sacred tenants of the Golden Age, but the old-fashioned murder method seemed to fit the ancient atmosphere of the setting. So that's a minor complaint and the story, as a whole, is still a pretty solid entry in the canon.

The second story comes from Conan Doyle's brother-in-law, E.W. Hornung, who's best remembered for his rogue stories about a gentleman-burglar, named A.J. Raffles, but the characters he created to enforce the law appear to be all but forgotten today – such as the rather unique character who appeared in a collection of short stories entitled The Crime Doctor (1914).

Dr. John Dollar presents himself as a crime doctor and prefers curing criminals, "while they’re still worth saving," to traditional detective work and the story Edwards picked for this anthology, "A Schoolmaster Abroad," is an interesting example of the doctor's philosophy. Dr. Dollar is on holiday in Switzerland when he hears about a medical scandal: a local practitioner has been caught "prescribing strychnine pills warranted to kill in twenty minutes," but the practitioner is the same doctor who once saved Dollar's life. There's also the matter of a once promising young man who has become very sullen, downcast and apparently prone to near death experiences. Luckily, Dr. Dollar finds a commonality between the medical and criminal problem, which allows him to stave off the hand of a would-be murderer and this concentration on crime-prevention is what gives this story a rather unique angle – somewhat comparable to Agatha Christie's "Wasps' Nest" from Poirot's Early Cases (1974).

One of Arnold Bennett's short stories from 1927, simply called "Murder," is the third entry for this anthology and the story was far better written than it was thought out. The plot of the story revolves around two men, Lomax Harder and John Franting, who the reader meets in a gun store: one of them legally buys a firearm, while the other steals one. However, the stolen gun is used to commit, what is called is described in the story as a "justified murder as a social act," which leads the murderer to contemplate his act and flee from the possible consequences – helped by shoddy police work and Bennett's attempt at thumbing his nose at "the great amateur detective." I guess Anthony Berkeley, Leo Bruce and Ellery Queen have spoiled me when it comes to the fallible detective. Oh, and the story took place at seaside resort, which justified its inclusion.

M. McDonnell Bodkin was an Irish barrister, journalist, politician and writer of detective stories from the Doylean Era and his legacy consists of having created the first family of meddlesome snoops: the protagonists from Paul Beck, the Rule of Thumb Detective (1898) and Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective (1900) married and had a son – who followed in his parents footsteps in Young Beck, A Chip Off the Old Block (1911). The story from this anthology, "The Murder on the Golf Links," was lifted from the pages of The Quests of Paul Beck (1908) and largely takes place on the titular link of a seaside hotel. Miss Meg Hazel takes Paul Beck into confidence about her engagement to Mr. Samuel Hawkins, a diamond merchant, but she has second thoughts about her promise and a young electrical engineer, Ned Ryan, probably influenced this change of mind.

As to be expected, one of them is found battered to death "in the great, sandy bunker that guarded the seventeenth green" and Beck seems to have stumbled across the evidence needed to secure a conviction, but did that piece of evidence he found point to the real murderer? The story is well written and the plot passable for its time (a bit iffy on fair play), but what endeared this story to me was the fact the final act (surprisingly) was played out in my country!

Hey, I love it when fictional detectives visit my country and, one day, I’ll get around to reading Gladys Mitchell's Death of a Delft Blue (1964) and Patricia Moyes' Death and the Dutch Uncle (1968). Just you wait!

Anyhow, the next story, "The Finger of Stone," comes from G.K. Chesterton's The Poet and the Lunatics: Episodes in the Life of Gabriel Gale (1929), which takes place during a walking-tour in France as a group of three men arrive in the small town of Carillon – a place "famous for its fine old Byzantine monastery" and "having been the scene of the labours of Boyg." Professor Boyg is considered to be "a great discoverer," but recently has disappeared and some assume him to be dead. Murdered even! The explanation is typical of a Chesterton plot and the only that can be said against the story is that it was not Father Brown who came up with an answer for this conundrum.

Only two months ago, I reviewed Richardson's First Case (1933) by Sir Basil Thomson, who has recently been resurrected from the slumber of literary oblivion, but one snippet of his legacy has always lingered in the subconscious of popular culture and concerns the plot of one of his short stories – namely "The Vanishing of Mrs. Fraser" from Mr. Pepper, Investigator (1925). The story revolves around Mrs. Fraser and her daughter, Mary, who "had been passing the winter in Naples," but her mother fell ill on the way home and they stopped at a respectable looking Parisian hotel. Mary is asked by the local doctor to fetch medication, but when she returns her mother has disappeared and nobody seems to remember them. The hotel room in which she had left her mother has completely changed and their name does not appear in the hotel registry!

I already knew the explanation to these problems, but I was still glad to finally have had an opportunity to read this historically important and influential story that has inspired (or fine-tuned) a famous urban legend as well as providing a premise for several detective stories – ranging from John Dickson Carr's famous radio-play, "Cabin B-13," to Simon de Waal's Spelen met Vuur (Playing With Fire, 2004).

The next stop in this rapidly expanding post is R. Austin Freeman's "A Mystery of the Sand-Hills," which is originally included in The Puzzle Lock (1925), but the story is not representative of his best work. Dr. John Thorndyke is taking a stroll down the beach when he comes across several "impressions of bare feet in the sand" and "a heap of clothes." It's the beginning of a curious case and Dr. Thorndyke uncovers the truth by closely examining grains of sand, which helped him understand "the character of the cliffs, rocks and other large masses that occur in the locality," but that was more interesting than the eventual explanation – which was extremely disappointing and unsatisfying. So lets move on to the next story.

H.C. Bailey is represented here by a short story, entitled "The Hazel Ice," taken from Mr. Fortune Speaking (1929) and has a plot reminiscent of the mountaineering mysteries by Glyn Carr. You can consider the story as a literary ancestor of Carr. The story takes place in an Alpine resort in Switzerland, where Reggie Fortune is holidaying, but he ends up helping the local police, represented by Herr Stein, when an injured hotel guest returns without his climbing companion – who was lost in a sudden rockslide. Bailey's descriptions of the Swiss mountains, possible dangers mountain-climbers have to face and the nature of the crime is what brought the work of Glyn Carr to mind, but also has solid characterization and interaction between Bailey and Stein, which made this a fun and fairly clever story. Even if it lacked basic fair play. But still a well-written and excellently told story.

The next tale was a bit of a rarity: Anthony Berkeley's "Razor Edge" was published only once in a short story collection, The Roger Sheringham Stories (1994), which was "an edition limited to a mere 93 copies." So this is really the first time a wider audience got to read, what is essentially, a brand new story by Berkeley!

Roger Sheringham is spending a couple of days at the seaside resort of Penhampton, where bathing in the sea is "notoriously dangerous" and as a consequence the local mortuary is larger than usual, because "swimmers are obstinate people." It's no surprise to anyone when the police has remove a body from between the rocks of a sunny, seaside cove and everyone assumed the man had simply drowned, but Sheringham reminds his host, the chief constable of Penhampton, that people had been murdered by drowning before – even though the small district had never seen a murder in modern times. Sheringham is proved to be correct and his hunch was based on some astute deduction about victim's cut lip, chin stubble, scratches on his back and his bathing suit, which makes this one of his triumphs as an amateur detective. A nice change of pace from being one of those fallible detectives and glad the story was rescued from complete obscurity, even if it was not as grand as one of his full-length mystery novels. And, hey, it's basically a brand new Sheringham story, which is definitely a huge plus in favor of this story!

The next stop is a short-short by Leo Bruce, "Holiday Task," which came from Murder in Miniature and Other Stories (1992) and takes place on the coast of Normandy, France. Sgt. Beef is described as "deliberately enjoying his holiday" when he meets an old friend, Léotard of the Sûrété, who's investigating the apparently accidental death of reputedly "the most detested man in the French prison system," but when one assumes the prison governor was murdered the case becomes an impossible one – because the question has to be answered how the governor and his car vanished from a guarded prison complex. It has a simple, elegant explanation, but one locked room enthusiasts has seen before in a story that's well known to us.

Helen Simpson follows Leo Bruce with a short-short of her own, "A Posteriori," which takes a comedy-of-manners style of approach to the espionage genre and the ensuing result is a very funny, scandalous and original story. You have to read it for yourself, because it's very short and going into details would probably spoil it.

The following story from this collection, "Where is Mr. Manetot?," was penned by Phyllis Bentley and was salvaged by Edwards from the pages of a long-forgotten anthology, Missing from Their Home (1936), which is filled with missing person stories. I have no idea about the overall quality of that anthology, but Bentley's contribution proved itself to be a small, shimmering gem of crime-fiction. The story opens with a brief report on Mr. Manetot, who has gone missing from his home, before moving to an unknown man in the lounge of a seaside hotel who has been listening to the report on the radio and pulls several sheets of papers from an envelope and begins to read them.

It's a written account from an unknown person who tells a story of how favor to a friend placed him in a position "to hang a murderer" and story gets progressively unsettling from there on out. There's one particular evocative scene, when the narrator peeks through a window of a locked door at a train station, showing Bentley would have made a good scenarist and especially loved how the whole world around him seemed to snap back to normal when he stopped looking. Conclusion of the story is well done and the open-ended conclusion worked even better. One of my favorite stories from this anthology!

The next story, Gerald Findler's "The House of Screams," was extricated by Robert Adey from an issue of an extremely obscure, illustrated publication called Doidge's Western Counties Annual and included it in Murder Impossible: An Extravaganza of Miraculous Murders, Fantastic Felonies and Incredible Criminals (1990) – which he co-edited with Jack Adrian. Adey’s introduction to this story from that anthology noted Findler's tale showed "inventiveness and originality," combined with "a flair for the dramatic," which "leaves one wishing he had written more." I agree with the opinion of the late Adey. It's an excellent story that can be read as a ghost story with a logical explanation. The nameless narrator of the story finds a rundown, overgrown house that's "wrapped up in solitude" and has a "To Let" sign on it, which is exactly a place he has been looking for the escape from modern life. He only wants "to write, write, and write," but one night his peace of mind is disturbed by the ghostly screams of a woman echoing through the house. The answer for the disembodied screaming is found in a locked attic room and in the local cemetery, which makes for a nice, atmospheric story.

I was reminded of John Dickson Carr's "The Dead Sleep Lightly," from The Dead Sleep Lightly and Other Mysteries from Radio’s Golden Age (1983), and the plot bore some resemblances to the second murder from the first story in this collection, Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot."

Finally, this collection closes with a short-short by Michael Gilbert, which is entitled "Cousin Once Removed," which can be categorized as a Hoist-on-Their-Own-Petard tale and concerns a man who wants to remove his cousin to cash in on their grandfather's inheritance. However, his scheme to commit the perfect murder proves to be a double-edged sword and he cuts himself badly.

So, all in all, Resorting to Murder is an interesting selection of detective stories that have not often found their way in similar collections, but (it must be said) most of the stories here derive their interest mainly from their historical significance or rarity. Not all that many stone-cold classics (except for Phyllis Bentley). I also missed one of the best and most famous of all short holiday mysteries: Agatha Christie's "Triangle at Rhodes" from Murder in the Mews and Other Stories (1937). Not a very original pick, but it's one of the stories of its kind.

Anyhow, I'll end the review here, because this has already been four or five pages of me sloppily typing about only a dozen or so short stories. My review of short story collections always end up being my longest blog-posts. I will try to have something shorter for my next post. So stay tuned!