Fallen Idols

"Scene of the crime—well, what's wrong with the good old library? Nothing like it for atmosphere. As for the weapon—well, it might be a curiously twisted dagger—or some blunt instrument—a carved stone idol..."

- Captain Arthur Hastings (Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders, 1936)

Last month, I reviewed The Scarlet Macaw (1923) by Gladys E. Locke and the absence of as much as a profile page from the hive mind of the modern mystery reader, Golden Age of Detection Wiki, attests that your name on a book cover isn't always an inked guarantee of its immortality.

Locke's second, exasperatingly titled mystery, The Red Cavalier, Or, the Twin Turrets Mystery (1922), was reported as one of the better mysteries of the year, but, what struck the critics' fancy at the time, it sure as hell wasn't innovation. If you could spread out the plot material, of The Red Cavalier, like the content you'd likely find in a suitcase from the era, it would be as plain and familiar as a straight razor, a bank book and black-and-white photographs.

The backdrop is a castle in the country side of Yorkshire, dating back to the Wars of the Roses, which comes with a ghost garbed in the costume of the days of the Merry Monarch and the unresolved death of the previous owner, Sir Roger Grainer – stabbed in the library with a poison smeared, Hindu dagger. Sir Roger had stocks in the ruby mines in Burma and applied this wealth to fill Twin Turrets with a collection of Hindu curios and idols. Statues of foreign deities line the hallways and the neighborhood has recently been plagued with burglaries reputedly done by the spectral cavalier of the castle, wrestled free from the gibbet cage to plunder once again.

Twin Turrets can be regarded as a problem on the market and not a property that can be easily foisted on a proper, English lady. However, it's Miss Egerton who snatches the lease from under the noose of Prince Kassim Bardai and even matched the outrageous sum he was willing to pay for it. Miss Egerton wants the place for the summer to couple her nephew, Maxwell "Max" Egerton, but he has plans of his own and they involve another woman. And, somehow, Max is acquainted with Bardai, who never stopped pressuring his aunt to hand over the lease, but manages to secure an invitation for the prince.

Meanwhile, at Twin Turrets, statues of Eastern idols are toppled from their base in the dark of the night and a friend of the Egertons, Lord Reginald Borrowdean, watches how the events and cross-relationships culminates in another murder committed in the library – while a fancy dress party was in progress. On the surface, the motive of the murder appears to have been the possession of the Azra-El-Kab ruby, a ball of fiery red fire, which was stolen from the body and the red cavalier had been seen at the scene of the crime, but they also discovered a piece of spangled dress clasped in the hand of the victim. There's much to do about who locked and unlocked the library door, and when, and who was possession of a spare key, but there's hardly any ingenuity about it and painfully lays bare how overwritten the story and outdrawn the plot are. The chapters covering the inquest and the explanation seemed to never come to an end. I still feel like I haven't quite got there yet.

The Red Cavalier didn't profit elsewhere, either, because the setting with its homegrown legend furbishes the story with the same amount of ghostly, suspenseful atmosphere as a science lecture hall and Locke also failed to capitalize in the characters department. There was an interesting contrast between the English and East Indian characters, and their views on their inter/national "ties," but it never went beyond mere racism. Locke might as well have gone all the way and called the book Dark Are the Moors. It fits the setting, color-theme titles and, you know, the racism. 

By the time (well into the story) Borrowdean calls in a private detective from London, a "young woman professionally known as Mercedes Quero" who build herself a "reputation as a solver of unsolvable mysteries," it's too late to safe the book. Quero showing-off her cleverness and dexterity with a tiny pocket revolver falls horribly flat and the overdrawn explanation, euphemistically entitled "Gathering Up the Thread," didn't do much help either. Nor did surprise twist. Long story short, the premise was better than the end product. 

Well, that could've been a great post, if you could measure greatness in a hack review by hack reviewing an extremely hacky mystery novel. Anyhow, I hope to be back after Christmas with a more jolly review and I'll probably be returning to more regularly to some modern mystery writers. Any locked room mysteries? Well, that's a possibility. Sure, sure. Let's wait and see. And in meantime, I hope you have a merry what-ever-it's you happen to be celebrating around this time of the year. 

The Scarlet Thread of Murder

"We balance the probabilities and choose the most likely. It’s the scientific use of the imagination."

- Sherlock Holmes (The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902) 

I have often maligned the Golden Age of Detection Wiki as a virtual Who's Who of who the hell are these guys, but you begin to appreciate that long list of obscure names even more when you're confronted with a writer that even the GADWiki draws a blank on – such was the case with Gladys Edson Locke.

A more profitable source of information, however, was the website of the Dorchester Atheneum, which revealed a scholar and teacher was behind the Locke name who had nurtured literary ambitious from the time she was a child and penned a biography of Queen Elizabeth I as a college student. Locke moved to America in 1924 and earned a Master's degree in English at Boston University, which led her to becoming a teacher of Latin and English at a high school in Mildford, New Hampshire. In her personal life, Locke was an active Unitarian Universalist, member of both the church and the Republican party, and belonged to the Boston Society for Psychic Research – a rich background to draw from for less than a dozen mystery novels.

The Scarlet Macaw (1923) was Locke's second stab at the detective story, preceded by The Red Cavalier (1922), apparently lauded by critics at the time as one of the best mysteries of the year, but here there are a few faults in the structure of the plot that could not justify such a comment. Not that The Scarlet Macaw is a bad detective story. It's just that Locke's plotting seems to bow nostalgically to the detective stories of her youth and not always done effectively. 

The story opens with Mr. Arnold Percival Inderwick, attached to the banking house of Palford Brothers & Palford, receiving a distressing phone call from Jasmine Holland, secretary of a famous playwright and treasured client of the firm, Genevra Tressady, begging to come to Pomander Lodge. They've heard Genevra's agonizing and crying accusations, "you have poisoned me, you have poisoned me," before everything went silent in her private and windowless study, but the door is locked from the inside and the skylight barred. And when the door is (finally!) pried open, they're confronted with a dying Genevra pointing to a tiger-skin rug and muttering the dying words, "the tiger's eye," and the titular macaw shrieking out the words "Nella, Elfinella."

A play Genevra was working on, Titania's Flight, an extravaganza involving fairies, is missing from the study and traces on the body show her assailant violently wrenched the rings from her fingers, but the instrument of murder in order to inject the poison also fails to turn up in the room – precluding suicide from the outset. Inspector Burton from Scotland Yard and Inderwick discover Pomander Lodge to be funk hole of distorted-and cross relationships, false identities and professional criminals lurking in the background. There's even a character shipped in from Australia and the poison is a "little known East Indian drug, Purpurus Somnus, or the Purple Sleep, so called from the purple discoloration of the skin of its victim," which is voluminous verbiage to say you're still very British in spirit.

But for all their work, Burton and Inderwick are only the legman of the investigation and halfway through the story, Mercedes Quero, one of the early female private detectives of fiction, is introduced to the reader – only to disappear until it's time to tie together all the threads at the end and a lot of her work is done off-page.

The solution to the locked room mystery and the identity of the murderer betrayed Locke's interest and passion for history, because they both felt out of place and belonged to the time of medieval court intrigues and robber barons. The method for the impossible poisoning would be perfect for one of Paul Doherty's historical mysteries, which is exactly the problem with a mystery novel set in contemporary 1923. I think Locke's name would have echoed more today had she written historical detective stories. The Scarlet Macaw and it's locked room trick had been of more interest, today, if the locality of the story had moved a few hundred years into the past – leaving no room for the some of the shop-worn tropes from the 1920s and the even older sensationalist novels we feel somewhat ashamed of now. It is, in fact, the exact opposite of what Peter Dicksinson successfully attempted in The Poison Oracle (1974), in which modern civilization encroaches on the ancient costumes of a small sultanate and happens to also include an impossible poisoning in the plot.

But the new-fangled crimes committed were harmoniously balanced with the old customs of the country, while in The Scarlet Macaw, the old-school crimes struck a decidedly false note in the modern-day setting. It's almost the same feeling as when you plough through a contemporary locked room mystery and discover the author was under the impression that small, but deadly, animals, hidden passageways or a suicide disguised as a murder are acceptable explanations. No. You have to do better than that. Luckily, Locke was not that bad, but, altogether, the solution was better fitted for a historical setting and, overall, I can't say I didn't enjoy this little curiosity and I'll return to Locke to see what all the fuzz was about with The Red Cavalier.

I'm on still on the trail of obscurity! Not as much in these past few weeks as I wish I could've been, but I'm still going.