Death of a Tall Man (1946) by Frances and Richard Lockridge

Richard and Frances Lockridge were a mystery writing couple who, more or less, accidentally created one of the most endearing American detective series when Richard decided to combine his comedic characters from his short stories with the detective plot Frances had cooked up – mixing them together as The Norths Meet Murder (1940). Pam and Jerry North originally appeared in a series of vignettes in the New York Sun and were later revived for The New Yorker (collected in Mr. and Mrs. North, 1936), but the characters achieved as the bantering, martini sipping New York society sleuths in twenty-six mystery novels. A series that ended with the passing of Frances Lockridge in 1963.

I wanted to return to the series for a while and there were two titles on the shortlist, Death of a Tall Man (1946) and Murder Within Murder (1946). Someone particularly recommended Murder Within Murder to me a long time ago, but can't remember who or why. Synopsis of the Mysterious Press promised an impossible murder in a watched room. So guess which one I picked? 

Death of a Tall Man opens in the offices of a well-known, well regarded oculist, Dr. Andrew Gordon, in the Medical Chambers, East Fifty-Third Street, on compensation day. Two days a week, mornings and afternoons, groups of five or six men who were referred to Dr. Gordon by insurance company physicians came to the offices, which resembles a rabbit warren of doors and examination rooms – easily confusing everyone unfamiliar with the building. Fortunately, the story includes a floor plan as the movement of the various characters through the building is relevant to the plot.

Dr. Gordon is found slumped over his desk with "a deep depression" in the back of his head following the examination of Monday's last group of compensation cases. Lieutenant William Weigand, of the New York Homicide Squad, has no shortages of suspects to pick from. Daniel "Dan" Gordon is Dr. Gordon's stepson who learned from his uncle, Nickerson Smith, that his stepfather squandered the lion's share of his mother's inheritance, but is it an explanation for his unusual behavior? Behavior that everyone around him try to excuse to the police. Debbie Brooks used to be the "female nuisance" who lived next door to the Gordons when she was child, but, when her parents passed away, she was welcomed into the family. She's now engaged to Dan and works for Dr. Gordon as his receptionist. Miss Grace Spencer is Dr. Gordon's nurse and has her desk in the corridor with the six examination rooms at her left and Dr. Gordon's office at the end, which means she could have possible seen something without realizing. She might have been in love with her employer. Mrs. Evelyn Gordon is Dr. Gordon's second, much younger wife and people are talking about her spending "a good deal" of time with a neighbor, Lawrence Westcott. A classic case of a wife and lover getting rid of a pesky husband? Not to mention the six compensation cases.

Understandably, Lieutenant Weigand is happy when Pam North turns up out of nowhere. She was out and about when she spotted a growing crowd of disaster tourists and the Homicide Squad car from Centre Street, which she knew spelled "a certain kind of trouble." Pam North really is the shining star of this novel as both a detective and comedic character. She has the best scenes and lines of the story. Such as her describing the nature of New York taxicabs and drivers as if they're the subject of a wildlife documentary or her telephone call to Jerry to explain she got caught up ("it isn't fair to say I look for them") in another murder ("it would be silly to tell a taxicab man to drive straight to the nearest murder"). I thought this was very reminiscent of the best by Kelley Roos, but, unfortunately, the same can't be said about the plot. 

Death of a Tall Man has a plot riddled with botched and missed opportunities or good, but poorly, executed ideas. I hardly know where to begin!

Firstly, the plot-threads not directly tied to the solution were only there to pad out an already very short novel, like the "combat fatigue" (PTSD) thread, which felt out-of-place and only served to make an obvious innocent person look guilty. You have a murder of an eye doctor in a practice full of people with damaged or failing eyesight. So why not play around with unreliable eyewitness trope instead of this side distraction? The circumstances of the murder and solution would certainly have allowed for a damaged, unreliable eyewitnesses to be a focal point of the investigation. The tall man of the title is not Dr. Gordon, but who and why that dead man is relevant to the solution is the cleverest idea of the whole story and there was some satisfaction in the murderer crying "that god-damned freak," but comes not into play until the last stretch of the story and, by then, it has lost most of its effect – because the solution is so painfully obvious. Lockridges made the murderer very conspicuous and left very little to the imagination as to the possible motive, which also distracted heavily from the how-was-it-done aspect. When you know who, you can make a pretty educated guess how it was done. So the rabbit warren of watched corridors, examination rooms and doors became less of an obstacle than if the murderer had been better hidden from the reader. Oh, and no, this is not an impossible crime in any shape or form. No idea why it has been advertised as one.

So, on a whole, I'm sure loyal, long-time fans of the series will love Death of a Tall Man from start to finish, but, purely as a detective story, it's nothing more than goodnatured, lighthearted fluff with a paper thin plot. Well, it was worth a shot.

Death's Mannikins (1937) by Max Afford

Malcolm Afford was an Australian newspaper reporter, playwright and radio scenarist, "considered somewhat of a pioneer of the whodunit in radio broadcasting," who had a brief as a mystery novelist during the 1930s and '40s – producing half a dozen novels and a few short stories under the name "Max Afford." Afford's novels and short stories were clearly aligned to Van Dine-Queen School with his series-detectives, Jeffery Blackburn and Chief Inspector William Read, closely resembling Ellery Queen and Inspector Richard Queen. Particularly during the first couple of novels. More importantly, the series is peppered with locked room murders and quasi-impossible crime material with The Dead Are Blind (1937) and his two short stories standing as his most notable contributions to the locked room sub-genre. So it was high time to return to Afford, Blackburn and Read. 

Death's Mannikins (1937), alternatively published as The Dolls of Death, is the second title in the series and carries the long subtitle, "being a sober account of certain diabolical happenings, not untinged with the odour of Brimstone, which befell a respectable family at Exmoor in this present year."

Jeffery Blackburn is a mathematician who had "relinquished the Chair of Higher Mathematics at Greymaster University in favour of the more fascinating pastime of criminology," which gave him a rising reputation as an amateur detective specialized in puzzling cases. One day, Blackburn meets an old friend, Rollo Morgan, in the lounge of the Akimbo Club. Morgan is the private secretary of Professor Cornelius Rochester, a demonology scholar, who lives with his family in an ancient, medieval looking house situated in a lonely, isolated valley – where "all the fogs in the world seem to roll up from the Bristol Channel." A three-story house complete with battlemented tower, a miniature observatory left by the previous cockamamie owner and a small, timeworn chapel on the grounds. The widowed Professor Rochester lives there with his two sons and daughter, Roger, Owen and Jan, who were taken care off by their aunt, Beatrice Rochester. Aunt Beatrice has "a bitter tongue" and "an almost uncanny faculty of prying into other people's business," but also the beating heart of the household as "she managed the business affairs, handled all finances, paid the bills, and acted as parent, housekeeper, and general adviser to the household." And at the time of the diabolical happenings, there are three guests staying at Rochester House. A journalist by the name of Philip Barrett and two of Jan's friends, Dr. Brian Austin and his fiancee, Camilla Ward.

Morgan tells Blackburn "there's been a death in the family," Aunt Beatrice, who tumbled down a flight of stairs and broke her neck, but strange incidents have occurred right before and after her death.

A year ago, a wood-carving friend of Professor Rochester presented him with six hand-carved miniatures of him, his family and the butler, Michael Prater. A set of six wooden dolls, which were placed in a box and forgotten about, but nearly a year later the box had vanished. Nobody knew what happened to the box or the dolls. And nobody claims responsibility when Aunt Beatrice receives a parcel with her replica in it, which is dismissed as a practical joke and ignored. Several days after the funeral, Roger receives a parcel containing his replica with "a thin, sharp spike" driven through the doll's back and now there's a private detective, Trevor Pimlott of the Argus Detective Agency, to guard and follow Roger around like a shadow – which turned the atmosphere in the house "rather turgid." Morgan has the feeling there's something ugly behind it all and came to London to pursued Blackburn to come back with him to Rochester House. But things have already been happening when they arrive.

Roger has gone missing and is not found until the following morning when the stone chapel is unlocked for the Sunday morning service. Roger lays sprawled in front of the altar with a knife thrust up to the hilt in his chest, but the details surrounding his death and the crime scene raises a ton of questions. 

Death's Mannikins is listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) and described the murder as "death by invisible agency," which is a fair description, but, plot-technically speaking, it's not an impossible crime. The murder of Roger Rochester is very reminiscent to the central murder from Rupert Penny's Policeman in Armour (1937) in which the scene of the crime wasn't locked or under close observation, but resembled an obstacle course that made murder appear like an impossible one. The obstacles in Death's Mannikins consists of "a patch of soggy clay some six inches deep" at the chapel entrance and Roger wearing slippers without a trace of mud. The availability of the chapel key in combination with the time of death and an unholy downpour on the night of the murder, which marooned a few members of the household in the nearby village. The murder weapon was taken from the professor's private museum of medieval weapons and the black arts, which is kept locked. And the powerful thrust needed to sink the knife up to the hilt into the body.

So, while not a proper locked room mystery, or impossible crime, there's definitely a touch of John Dickson Carr to the plot. However, I think that touch is much more notable in how the second murder is presented to the reader. The house has an unusual timepiece ("baroque ornamentation") with mechanical features and tiny figures popping out as it strikes away the hours. This clock is effectively put to use to announce the second murder as it strikes midnight. More often than not, Carr depicted clocks as harbingers of death or associates of the Grim Reaper. Death Watch (1935) and The Skeleton in the Clock (1948) come to mind, but there's also the shop window clock and church bells in The Three Coffins (1935) and the clock handle from the psychological experiment in The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939). So a very well done Carr-like scene and even better is how it was used (ROT13) ol gur zheqrere gb perngr n pnfg-veba nyvov gung jbhyq abg unir orra bhg-bs-cynpr va n Puevfgbcure Ohfu abiry.

Despite the comparisons to Carr, Penny and Queen, Death's Mannikins is not merely an imitation of the author's favorite mystery novels and detective characters. Afford tried to do something with the premise and cast of characters whom proved themselves to be one of the unwilling group of suspects and witnesses from a 1930s detective novel. Jeffery Blackburn realizes after while that "the people with whom he was dealing would yield more to the influence of the iron hand rather than the velvet glove." You can't imagine 1930s Ellery Queen heavy-handedly dragging the truth out of his suspects. Sgt. Velie? Yes. But not EQ. Or how the second murder generated a new puzzling question regarding the first murder. Why was Roger stabbed in the chest and the second victim in the back? I appreciated how the murderer managed to obtain the key to museum (clever and simple) and the last-minute attempt to throw sand in the eyes of the reader. So, while not batting in the same league as Carr or Queen, Death's Mannikins is not without some merit of its own.

Only reason why it failed to translate into a minor classic is Afford's shortcomings as a second-stringer. One of the better, more inspired and capable second-stringers of the period, but a second-stringer nonetheless. So the murder of Roger is not half as mysterious as he tried to present it (e.g. the knife wound) nor is the murderer as cleverly hidden as the solution likes you to believe. Death's Mannikins is an entertaining, spirited, but unmistakably second-string, detective novel that tried to live up to the greats of the genre. While it didn't success, plot-wise, the book succeeded in being a kindred spirit of Carr and Queen. And, to quote Jim, of The Invisible Event, to have your second detective novel "held favourably with those grand old men of the genre is no small feat." What do you know... he was right for once!

The Case of the Faithful Heart (1939) by Brian Flynn

The Case of the Faithful Heart (1939) is Brian Flynn's twenty-fourth Anthony Bathurst mystery and picked this particular title as the next stop in the series to see how different it's from the previous novel, Black Edged (1939), which braided an inverted mystery and chase thriller into a single narrative – forming a fun, pulp-style romp with detective interruptions. So, as to be expected, the always versatile Flynn shifted style for his next novel by doing a complete 180 as there's nothing pulpy or thriller-ish about The Case of the Faithful Heart. 

The Case of the Faithful Heart is best described as a scintillating, character-driven whodunit reminiscent of some of the alternative Crime Queens, like Moray Dalton, who were also brought back into print by Dean Street Press. But with a sturdier puzzle-plot at the heart of the story.

The story takes place in the village of Lanrebel, in Glebeshire, where two incidents happened on the 8th of June, but the incidents is an evening dinner party at one of the two houses of any real size within the village, "Hillearys." Paul and Jacqueline Hillier are the hosts of the party and the table is filled by their son and daughter, Neill and Ann Hillier. The hosts brother, Maurice Hillier, and his wife, Belle. The dinner party is rounded out by the Vicar of Lanrebel, the Rev. Septimus Aylmer, who's accompanied by his wife, Mildred. So a normal dinner party with family and friends without any dark, palpable undercurrents except that the hostess is not her usual self, but that was explained away by "a wretched head" – retreating from the rest of the party until she feels a bit better. Flynn ends the chapter by pointing out to reader that the state of the household at half past eight is an important fact.

Later that evening, Neill notices a car standing at the front gates of "Hillearys" and goes out to investigate, but is shocked to find his dying mother sitting behind the wheel. Jacqueline's face was bruised and bloody, her wrists were "scratched and torn" and her clothes ripped, muddy and looked as though it was grass-stained. She used her last breath to utter a cryptic sentence, "the Mile Cliff. Two...," before dying in the arms of her son. An autopsy revealed Jacqueline had died from an overdose of chloral hydrate.

Fortunately, the well-known "human magnet" of crime, Anthony Bathurst, is on holiday in the village. Wherever he goes, even in a tranquil place like Lanrebel, murder has a habit of running him down to earth and pinning him down – guaranteeing he always gets "a sort of 'busman's holiday.''' Bathurst calls it punishment for having dipped his fingers "so often into the crime pie." This makes The Case of the Faithful Heart the earliest example to date of the detective being referred to as a "murder magnet," which predates Anthony Webb's Murder in Reverse (1945) and Francis Duncan's Mordecai Tremaine series from the late 1940s and '50s. But that's just an aside for the curious.

This time, Bathurst is accompanied on his unofficial investigation by a holidaying novelist from Blackstock, Keith Annesley. So the detection is very much in the detective-on-hobbyhorse tradition, but the strange death of Jacqueline Hillier doesn't provide them with a routine village mystery with more suspects, motives and dodgy alibis than you can shake a truncheon at. There's an almost unsettling lack of serious suspects ("we all liked each other") and no discernible motives ("...there are no shadows in her life"), but who strewn her grave with violets? And why? What's the link between Jacqueline's dying words and the pieces of burned cardboard found at place known locally as One Mile Cliff? However, the case takes an unexpected, dramatic turn when another member of the family dies under suspicious circumstances followed by another "floral tribute" on the freshly filled grave. Just like the last time, there's no hint of a motive or serious suspect to be found. 

The Case of the Faithful Heart is not your typical whodunit and nowhere is this better demonstrated than by the weird, uneven kind of clueing and misdirection. One part of the story almost plays too fair with the (suspicious-minded) reader as it makes a certain something, or someone, standout before it was really necessary. Another part of the plot, which concerned the hidden pattern between the death, is played almost perfectly and I didn't begin to see the light until the third murder – clicking perfectly with the part that played it a little too fairly. Even if you piece together the larger parts of the plot, what happened, why and by whom, you still need Bathurst to fill in the finer details. For example, Jacqueline's dying message is unsolvable and one or two points about the solution raises an eyebrow. Such as how the second death happened or why Jacqueline was found all bloody with torn, muddy clothing. Something that conveniently needed to happen to obscure something else.

So the story and plot The Case of the Faithful Heart comes with its fair share of flaws, but a flawed gem is still a gem. This is a small gem as it found a fresh angle with emotional depth to tell the village mystery with the hidden pattern formed by the deaths being a novel, perhaps even original idea in 1939. This all translated into a compelling detective story that had my full attention from beginning to end. While some details remained obscure until the end, Flynn provided the reader with more than enough information and clues to draw the same conclusions as Bathurst. That made it easy to forgive its imperfections. An honest candidate for my top 10 favorite Brian Flynn mysteries.

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.

Night Terrors: "The Empty Coffins" (1984/2009) by John Russell Fearn

2021 saw the publication of two so-called hybrid mysteries, Yamaguchi Masaya's Ikeru shikabane no shi (Death of the Living Dead, 1989) and Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017), which introduced the living dead into the environment of the traditionally-styled detective story with two vastly different outcomes – ranging from the horrifying to the philosophical. Imamura's Death Among the Undead is a classic locked room mystery cast like a zombie survival horror flick, while Masaya's Death of the Living Dead simply blurred the lines that once separated the dead from the living. And they are both awesome! 

A successful blending of the traditional, fair play detective story and genres like fantasy, horror and science-fiction is very difficult to pull off without compromising one or the other. Masaya and Imamura showed it can be done even with something as fantastical as the walking dead. There happened to be a (very short) pulp novel on my TBR-pile that tried to play a similar game with vampires. But how successful was it? Let's find out! 

John Russell Fearn began "what was to become a fateful association with a new firm of publishers in London," Scion Ltd, in 1948 and first commissions were for romantic novelettes and later novel-length Westerns, but, during the early 1950s, Scion took the leap to science-fiction and played with the idea of a horror-detective line – which was scrapped in favor of their science-fiction line. Several decades later, Philip Harbottle gained access to Fearn's study, untouched since his untimely death in 1960, when his widow, Carrie Fearn, passed away in 1982. The study proved to be "an Aladdin's Cave of manuscripts, books, and cans of films written and produced by Fearn himself." One of the manuscripts was of an unpublished horror-detective, entitled No Grave Need I (c. 1950), which Scion returned and was put away to collect dust. Harbottle published a small chapbook edition of the novel in 1984 followed twenty-five years later by a professional edition under the title "The Empty Coffins" (2009) "along with all of the other unpublished mss" he salvaged. Harbottle is the only one who just walks in and out of the Phantom Library with his arms loaded with lost books and unpublished manuscripts.

Fearn's "The Empty Coffins" takes place in a small village on the south coast, Little Payling, which comprises of two, tightly intertwined plot-threads. One of these threads concern a young widow, Elsie Timperley, who had married a drunk brute, but she put up with George Timperley's abuses to ensure she inherited everything he owned. A small fortune which would open the way to marry her childhood friend and true love, Peter Malden, who's the local motor dealer and garage owner. Little Payling is a small village populated with typical village people "eager to seize on the slightest hint of scandal" and they found it indecent Elsie has been seen the company of Peter so many times George was "barely cold in the grave." Elsie has a good reason to get married as soon as possible, because a well-known mystic and seer, Rawnee Singh, told her she has "no future beyond the next eight months." And that can only mean death.

The second plot-thread is introduced when a local girl is attacked in the cemetery. Madge Paignton used the cemetery as a short cut one night when a barefooted creature in a funeral shroud attacked her and left "two gashes close to the jugular" on her throat. The country GP and student of the occult, Dr. Meadows, believes it was the work of a vampire, which belongs to the realm of "folklore and legend." But the situation has gotten from bad to worse during Elsie and Peter's honeymoon. A farmer and a local builder were brutally murdered within the span of a week and their bodies were "almost drained of blood." This is not the last deadly attacked in the village with everything pointing to Elsie as the next victim.

What about the detective aspect of the story, you ask? Fearn's "The Empty Coffins" actually did a good job in keeping the reader guessing which events have a supernatural origin and which are faked, but eventually it becomes evident "there's a human hand" behind some of the attacks – one of "the worst criminals ever, apparently." Consequently, "The Empty Coffins" turned out to be crammed with impossible crimes and locked room mysteries, but let the reader be warned, the ending plunges the story deep into pulp territory. So don't expect anything too much from their solutions, because, even by pulp-standards, not everything stands up to scrutiny. Such as (ROT13) vzvgngvat n jryy-xabja fcrpvnyvfg va urneg naq oybbq qvfbeqref jura gur arjfcncre urnqyvarf ner fpernzvat nobhg “Gur Yvggyr Cnlyvat Ubeebe” jvgu nyy gur rlrf va gur pbhagel sbphfrq ba gur ivyyntr or gur cercbfgrebhf tenir fvtug zrpunavfz erirnyrq ng gur raq, which was a little too much. The plot was further marred by gur cerfrapr bs n ahzore haxabja nppbzcyvprf, frperg cnffntrf naq ulcabgvfz with the human culprit standing out like a tombstone on a front lawn.

So not one of Fearn's most inspired attempts to create a hybrid, pulp-style mysteries or his most original impossible novel, which he combined in a much better in fashion in novels like Account Settled (1949) and What Happened to Hammond? (1951). There is, however, a brief shimmer of brilliance in how the (incredibly pulpy) motive and some of the (even more pulpier) methods that explained why the corpses had to be sucked bone dry. And the horror-elements of the story were put to good use to create a couple of good scenes. I particularly liked the illegal, moonlit exhumation of George's grave and Peter's nighttime visitor to his bedroom ("...was foul, unclean—something dead yet still alive"). This helped the faked phenomena blend in with the real ones. You'll probably be surprised to learn which were real and which were fake.

The horror aspect of the story is often very well done and, on a whole, "The Empty Coffins" is a readable, pulp-style mystery centering on the activities of a vampire and that's always going to be a different beast from your regular whodunit or locked room mystery. So adjust your expectations going in and remember "The Empty Coffins" is not Fearn at his best or most creative. Just a quick, dark-light and atmospheric read making a spirited attempt to incorporate vampires into a detective story. 

A note for the curious: So, while Fearn was not entirely triumphant, he unwittingly provided a blueprint on how to do it. Dr. Meadows explains "a vampire proper is the ghost of a suicide, or some such excommunicated person, who seeks vengeance on the living by attacking them and sucking away their blood" – which gives him a pretty good idea who the vampire in their cemetery is. This also gave me an idea how a proper, fair play detective story with real vampires could play out. Just imagine one of those small, ancient English villages where over the span of a year half a dozen people have died from various causes. But no murders or suicides. Or so everyone assumes until villagers get attacked and killed by, what appears to be, a real vampire. So the detective has to discover the vampire by delving into the past of the six recently deceased village to see if the country doctor misdiagnosed a suicide as natural causes or accident. A subplot can be added with someone using the activities of the vampire as a cover to commit a murder and stages a locked room/impossible crime to blame the vampire. Anyway, I'll try to pick something a little more conventional next time.

These Names Make Clues (1937) by E.C.R. Lorac

Edith Rivett was a British mystery writer who prolifically produced detective novels and short stories under two different pseudonyms, "E.C.R. Lorac" and "Carol Carnac," but she was a second-stringer with her seventy some novels being very uneven in quality – contributing to their decent into obscurity following her death in 1958. If you asked about Lorac, you usually got a mixed response.

A few years ago, I reviewed Death Came Softly (1943) and Nick Fuller commented Lorac is like "a cross between John Rhode and Ngiao Marsh" with "the worst aspects of both," while JJ countered that he remained "curious about Lorac purely on account of the uncommon ways she approaches what should be fairly standard problems." Lately, I have noticed a shift and you can likely put it down to the recent run of British Library Crime Classic reprints. Martin Edwards and the British Library have slowly been rehabilitating Lorac's reputation by cherry picking her best detective novels to reprint. Checkmate to Murder (1944) was good enough, in spite of some of its obvious flaws, to reintroduce Lorac to my to-be-read pile. Bats in the Bellfry (1937), Murder in the Mill-Race (1952) and the once lost, now posthumously published, Two-Way Murder (2021) currently reside on the big pile, but one of the more recent reprints sounded too intriguing to ignore or put off for too long.

Martin Edwards described These Names Make Clues (1937) in his introduction as "an intriguing detective novel" closely "in tune with the mood of traditional detective fiction of the kind we associate with 'the Golden Age of Murder’ between the two world wars," but had been practically forgotten until British Library reprinted it. There were no secondhand copies for sale on the internet nor any critical commentary in the reference books. Only a very short review from 2008 on the GADetection Wiki. Going into the book, I half-expected something along the lines of Agatha Christie's Cards on the Table (1936), but These Names Make Clues struck me as a conscious imitation of Christopher Bush's detective novels from the same period – like Dead Man's Twice (1930), The Case of the April Fools (1933) and The Case of the Bonfire Body (1936). It's not just because of how the plot was structured with two closely-timed murders, but there were several references to the characters having "the cross-word mind." A variation on a phrase I have only come across in Bush's novels to describe his series-detective, Ludovic Travers. But let's get to the story! 

These Names Make Clues begins with Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald going through his correspondence and finding an invitation from Graham Coombe and his sister, Miss Susan Coombe, to a Treasure Hunt at Caroline House on April's Fools Day.

Graham Coombe is a celebrated publisher whose firm had produced the bestseller Murder by Mesmerism, which Macdonald had sharply criticized during a diner with Coombe without being aware he had published the book. So the invitation challenges Macdonald to pit his "wits against those of the thriller writers, and others, who are competing" in a Treasure Hunt with "clues of a Literary, Historical and Practical nature" provided to the contestants. Coombe gathered eight writers to participate in the game. Nadia Delareign, Andrew Gardien, Ronile Rees and Denzil Strafford represent the so-called "thriller merchants" and Valerie Woodstock (history), Louise Etherton (romance), Digby Bourne (travel) and Ashton Vale (economics) the straight writers. All of the contestants, who have never met before, is given a pseudonym and "a clue to unravel," which has to be deciphered to get to the next stage in the game. The library and telephone-room with guides and timetables is at their disposal. The hunt ends with a final test during which each guest will be allowed to ask six questions in an attempt to deduce, or guess, the identities of their fellow guests.

Macdonald finds himself in the hospitality of a publisher "who turned the other cheek to the smiter" and "who at the same time challenged the critic to use his wits in practical combat against those whom he had derided," which makes him feel like he was hoist with his own petard, but set to work – working his way through a variety of clues and running ahead in the Treasure Hunt. The whole evening begins to acquire "a Mad Hatter quality" when the main fuse blows and the house is plunged into darkness. When the lights are finally restored, the body of Andrew Gardien is discovered in the telephone-room. Apparently, Gardien died of heart failure following a shock, but marks on his hands and a minute fraying of copper wire makes Macdonald suspect the thriller writer had been cleverly electrocuted. And the murderer had removed the gadget that did the trick. Interestingly, Gardien earned the nickname "Master Mechanic" due "to his ingenuity in inventing methods of killing based on simple mechanical contraptions" involving "bits of cord and wire and counterpoises."

Now the "Lights Out, Murder!" trope tends to be one of the genuine hacky and trite cliches of the genre, which actually would be more of obstacle to the murderer than a cover, but These Names Make Clues is an exception to the rule. Lorac had a very simple, but good, explanation why the house went dark. Particularly liked how the blown fuse ended up affecting the murderer's plan. One of Lorac's more ingenious and inspired pieces of plotting. So with a good reason for the blackout in place, the movement of everyone involved becomes much more interesting with several of the guests swearing they saw an uninvited person in the house leading up to the murder. A gray-haired, flat-footed gentleman who's nowhere to be found when the lights come back on, but this mysterious interloper is not the only complication Macdonald has to contend with.

Macdonald has a potential murder on his hands with a victim who had completely obscures his identity and past life, which becomes even more mysterious when Gardien's literary agent is shot in his private office. Gardien's name was accusingly written on the blotting paper and a gun is discovered entangled in the mechanisms of a grandfather clock, but the timing between the two deaths simply don't add up for them to have killed one another. So what really happened to those two mysterious men that lead to their equally mysterious deaths? 

These Names Make Clues is a tremendously enjoyable mystery novel in which Lorac tried to rise above her status as a second-stringer with a tricky plot attuned "attuned to the cross-word method, anagrams and reversals" with several cleverly contrived death traps. There are, however, some of Lorac's usual flaws show up like her roundabout way (like JJ said) in which she approached what should have been a fairly straightforward problem. I think the second death needlessly complicated the case and it would perhaps have better if that death had been immediately explained, which would have then added another layer of mystification to Gardien's murder. Like a lot of second-stringers, Lorac's strength was not in creating misleading, double-edged clues or even more treacherous red herrings and reasoning your way to the solution requires a bit of inspired guesswork – which is normally a serious flaw in any detective story. But the story and characters were so enjoyable, I found myself in an extremely forgiving mood. Martin Edwards noted in his introduction Lorac was elected to membership to "the world's first social network for detective novelists," the Detection Club, in 1937 (same year as Bush) and she likely "drew inspiration from her experiences and encounters on becoming a member of the Detection Club" for These Names Make Clues. For example, Miss Romile Rees, who writes as R. Rees, is "accepted by the critics as a man" on account of her dry, mordant style. Something that has happened to Lorac herself as there were not many female mystery writers who toyed around with mechanical death traps. A toy commonly associated with the technical-minded writers of the humdrum school. Speaking of the humdrums, I think Lorac subtly namedropped a few of John Rhode's pavement-themed names (like "Major Road ahead" and "just off John Street").

Something else I always admired about Lorac's novels, which is very much present in These Names Make Clues, is her awareness of what was happening in Britain and Europe before, during and after the Second World War. Checkmate to Murder and Murder by Matchlight (1945) depicted the squalor of blackouted London during the Blitz, while Fire in the Thatch (1946) takes place among the bombed-out houses of a scarred, post-war London. These Names Make Clues was written several years before the outbreak of the war, but the possibility of war is already present here with several characters being convinced pacifists and members of the Peace in our Time campaign. You can fill entire bookshelves with detective novels and short story taking place during or after the Second World War, but very few mystery writers were prescient enough to tackle a potential war during the 1930s. Only names that come to mind are E.R. Punshon (Crossword Mystery, 1934) and Darwin L. Teilhet (The Talking Sparrow Murders, 1934). This gives Lorac's novels a kind of unintended historical flavor that I can always appreciate. 

These Names Make Clues has some of the flaws you come to expect from Lorac, but the overall package of characters, plot and storytelling made it something very much worth resurrecting from the depths of biblioblivion. And, if these British Library reprints are representative of her best novels, Lorac could very well secure a place among my favorite second-stringers of the genre.

Dead Men's Guns: "The Cold Winds of Adesta" (1952) by Thomas Flanagan

Thomas Flanagan was an American university Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, who specialized in Irish literature and wrote an award-winning historical novel, The Year of the French (1979) – which was turned into a TV-series in 1982. Flanagan also made a modest contribution to the detective genre with eight short stories that were published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The most well-known of his short stories is perhaps is "The Fine Italian Hand" (1949), collected in The Locked Room Reader (1968), but four of the eight stories form a short-lived, almost entirely forgotten series of detective stories with an intriguing and original premise. 

Between 1952 and 1956, Flanagan wrote four stories about a military policeman, Major Tennente, who lives and works in an unnamed country ruled over by a dictator, the General. Mike Grost suggests that the unnamed country "seems to be Franco's Spain." The unifying theme of the stories is Major Tennente trying to be a decent, upstanding policeman who nonetheless serves a corrupt and totalitarian regime. A tricky balancing act of morals and personal convictions that foreshadow Josef Skvorecky's Lieutenant Josef Boruvka series from the 1960s (e.g. The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka, 1966), which takes place in Communist Czechoslovakia. The series kicked off with a prize-winner! 

"The Cold Winds of Adesta," originally published in the April, 1952, issue of EQMM, won the magazine's annual short story contest and eventually ended up with the other First Prize winners in Ellery Queen's The Golden 13 (1970). More importantly, the story is listed and described as a very good impossible smuggling problem by Brian Skupin in Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019).

Major Tennente is dispatched to a border post located in the lonely, mountain pass near the town of Adesta, five minutes from the border with a neighboring, unnamed Republic. Lieutenant Bonares suspects a wine merchant, Gomar, is smuggling weapons into the country through the deserted, rarely used pass of Adesta. A peculiar merchant who drives his own truck, loaded with caskets of wine, every night to a country that produces more than enough wine on its own, which had been going on for two weeks – attracting the suspicion of the authorities. However, the border patrol of two countries were unable to find as much as a single shell casing inside the truck or casks.

Gomar is "first searched by the border guards of the Republic" and then, while "his truck visible at all times to Bonares," moves down the mountain road to the next checkpoint where "he is searched a second time." So without finding a hidden cache of firearms, they have to let him go through every night and watch on as Gomar drives down "the twisting, dangerous road toward the lights of the town of Adesta." There's a historical mystery, of sorts, adding another layer to the impossibility.

During the Revolution, or "the war of liberation," the last remaining Government army that remained intact tried to cross the border to the Republic, but they were turned back and returned to surrender themselves to the General. But they returned without their arms. Presumably, they buried their guns and rifles somewhere along the border and mountains of Adesta. When the war ended, the General sent a commission to the region to comb the area. They erected a hut and moved outward, inch by inch, but they came up empty handed. So the impossibility is that either the border guards would have discovered the guns in Gomar's truck or the military commission would have found them fifteen years ago. Major Tennente has reasons to believe the smuggled weapons came from this long-lost arms cache with enough guns for an entire regiment, but where were they stashed away and how were they sneaked pass the border?

The solution is impressive in how it tied every aspect of the story together and satisfyingly dovetailed the smuggling operation with the political background and history of the country to the duality of the detective. Major Tennente is an interesting detective character whose situation allows him to act a little differently from detectives from more democratic countries. Such as shooting one of the casks of wine or cultivating a short temper, but someone "noticed that Tennente's infamous temper was his servant" and "it exploded only when he chose." A necessary facade for someone who fought in one of the armies opposing the General and without any friends in high places.

But, purely as an impossible crime story, the solution to how the guns are smuggled into the country was not all that impressive with exception how the historical plot-thread tied into it all. So, on a whole, "The Cold Winds of Adesta" is a very well written detective story with an at the time fresh and original premise, but, in the end, more impressive for its storytelling than plotting. 

A note for the curious: a completely different solution occurred to me while writing this review. The story is careful to point out "the pass of Adesta is almost never used," where rumors tell of a hidden cache of arms from the days of the Revolution ("an old wives' tale fifteen years old"), but what if Gomar used the pass and its history as a smokescreen? What if he wanted the border guards to think he was smuggling guns and rifles? So he begins making the trips without anything on him until enough suspicion has been aroused. Once they begin to search his truck and casks for guns and rifles, Gomar begins to smuggle something a little smaller and easier to hide. That could be everything from money, gold or precious stones to documents or simply drugs. All things that are a lot easier to hide when the guards are only interested in finding weapons.

The Village of Eight Graves (1949/50) by Seishi Yokomizo

Two years ago, Pushkin Vertigo published an eagerly anticipated, second translated novel by one of the giants of the classical, Japanese detective story, Seishi Yokomizo, whose Honjin satsujin jiken (The Honjin Murders, 1946) introduced his famous series-detective, Kosuke Kindaichi, as well as creating an authentic Japanese locked room mystery – ushering in the original, Golden Age-style honkaku era. Pushkin Vertigo reprinted Inugamike no ichizoku (The Inugami Clan, 1951) next under a slightly different title, The Inugami Curse, which was first published in English in the early 2000s. And, as of this writing, the well-known, promising-sounding Gokumontō (Gokumon Island, 1947/48) is scheduled to be released in March or June. 

Late last year, Pushkin Vertigo released another, brand new translation of an iconic Yokomizo's novel, Yatsuhakamura (The Village of Eight Graves, 1949/50). My review is going to be a little more upbeat than some of the rather disappointing reviews I've read and that needs an explanation. 

The Village of Eight Graves was originally serialized in Shinseinen (March 1949 to March 1950) and Hôseki (1950 to 1951), but the story would not be published in book form until 1971. A period known today as "The Yokomizo Boom" that ended with 40 million copies of the series sold by the end of the decade and presaged what was to come in the 1980s. Ho-Ling Wong described The Village of Eight Graves as the Japanese counterpart to Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934) as it's "the one that is parodied most often" and thus "best known to the general public." For example, I reviewed The Headless Samurai from The Kindaichi Case Files series in 2018 that borrowed the historical backstory of The Village of Eight Graves.

So I have probed the Japanese detective genre a little deeper than most people who follow this blog, which helped manage my expectations of this third Yokomizo translation. What you should not expect is another The Honjin Murders or The Inugami Clan. Ho-Ling likened the book to The Murder on the Orient Express, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) is probably a better comparison as The Village of Eight Graves feels like a throwback to those turn-of-the-century crime-and suspense mysteries – both of which pushed their famous detectives to the background. Kosuke Kindaichi is largely a background character in the story that, sort of, unravels itself and he admits at the end that "the criminal would have been exposed even in my absence." I can see why readers unprepared of what to expect end up somewhat underwhelmed or even disappointed. So my advise is to read it on autopilot and enjoy it for what it is. Let's dig in!

The village of Eight Graves is "perched amid the desolate mountains on the border of Tottori and Okayama prefecture," which has a long, tragic and eerie history that drenched its soil in blood.

In 1566, the great daimyo Yoshihisa Amago surrendered Tsukiyama Castle to his enemies, but one samurai refused to give up and fled the castle with seven faithful retainers and rumoredly packed three horses with 3000 tael of stolen gold. They hoped to continue their fight another day and "after enduring many hardships, fording rivers and crossing mountains" arrived at the village. The villagers received the eight warriors "hospitably enough," but the efforts to find the fugitives, the glittering reward and the reputed gold made the village rethink their hospitality. So they not only betrayed the warriors, but outright hacked them to death and beheaded the corpses. The leader of the samurais cursed the whole village with his dying breath, "vowing to visit his vengeance upon it for seven generations to come," which apparently came true when the villagers were "plunged into an abyss of terror." A terror that began with several deadly accidents and exploded when the ringleader of the attack on the warriors lost his mind, picked up a sword and went on a murderous rampage. Cutting down several members of his household and felling every villager who crossed his path in the streets.

So the villagers dug up the dead warriors, "whom they had buried like dogs," to reinter them with all due ceremony, erecting eight graves, "where they were venerated as divinities." But how long can you appease homemade Gods you have wronged? Eight Graves only managed to do it for a few centuries.

There two important families in Eight Graves: the Tajime family ("The House of the East") and the Nomura family ("The House of the West"). During the 1920s, the head of the House of the East was 36-year-old Yozo who, despite having a wife and two children, became obsessed with the young daughter of a local cattle-trader named Tsuruko. Yozo was "a man of violent inclinations" who, one day, simply abducted the 19-year-old girl, imprisoned her in a storehouse and subjected her to "the unremitting torments of his crazed desires" – until she and her family consented to Tsuruko becoming Yozo's mistress. Tsuruko eventually gave birth to a son, Tatsuya, but Yozo's abuse continued. Yozo went as far as branded Tatsuya's thighs, back and buttocks with fire tongs in a fit of rage. Tsuruko fled with Tatsuya to hide with relatives in Himeji and she refused to return. Yozo's "madness finally exploded" and went on a midnight killing spree with a rifle and sword that left thirty-two dead, before disappearing into the mountains never to be seen or heard of ever again. Tsuruko never returned to Eight Graves and moved to Kobe where she married and raised a son completely unaware of his family or tragic origin in that remote mountain village.

After the end of the Second World War, the now 28-year-old, demobbed Tatsuya is contacted by a lawyer on behalf of his long-lost family. His estranged family wants him to return to his ancestral village to accept his inheritance as the rightful head of the family, but the first of many tragedies strikes when he meets with his grandfather for the first time Kobe. When they have been introduced to each other by the lawyer, Tatsuya's grandfather begins to cough blood and dies mere moments later. This is not the last time is too close for comfort when someone is poisoned or strangled, which brings him not only in trouble with the police, but also places him on the wrong side of the community. The villagers are "terrified that another tragedy is about to occur" and were naturally less than thrilled he had come back to Eight Graves. And the murders continue as soon as Tatsuya entered the village.

The murders is not the only problem this voluminous novel has to offer. Firstly, there's the historical mystery of the stolen gold, which was never located and the secrets Tatsuya's mother carried with her to the grave. Some of which was rather predictable, but (ROT13) gur vqragvgl bs Gngfhln'f erny sngure was something I completely missed. There's also the peculiar behavior of some of his relatives, like his elderly, twin aunts, but there was also two very slight, quasi-impossible problems. Tatsuya gets a room, or annex, in the house where items were moved around when it had been securely locked up. So a local who was fond of a drink was asked to spend a few nights in the room in exchange for some sake, but he fled the room in the middle of the night claiming a figure depicted on the folding screen had come to life. Apparently, this figure was "so startled that he turned away and vanished in an instant." Tatsuya gets to witness this ghostly apparition himself. Secondly, there's a discovery of a very old, almost miraculously well preserved corpse clad in the decaying armor of a samurai. However, these were so marginal as a locked room mystery/impossible problem, I decided not to tag this review as one. But they added to the atmosphere of the story.

Admittedly, there are some very hoary, even by 1949, timeworn genre clichés at the heart of the plot replete with secret passages, coded treasure maps and a hunt for the gold with lovers meetings (past and present), murders and life-or-death chases through labyrinth of dark caverns and passages – which stretch out beneath the village. However, they were all put to good use as it made the second-half the most memorable and striking part of the whole story. Not exactly groundbreaking or particular original, but effectively utilized to tell a brooding story fraught with danger and dripping with history. This story comes to a rapid conclusion when everything around Tatsuya seems to come crashing down, but, as said previously, this is the point where the story kind of sorts itself out. Kosuke Kindaichi spend most of the time on the sideline, scratching his head and warning Tatsuya to be honest with the authorities or he will find himself in a difficult position. And at the end, he comes around to explain and tidy up all the loose ends.

So, yeah, The Village of Eight Graves is not another The Honjin Murders or The Inugami Clam. Fortunately, I didn't expect it to be and that allowed me to enjoy it as a well-down, moody throwback to the time of Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles. I'm just glad to finally have gotten an opportunity to read this famous novel that left such an indelible mark on the Japanese detective genre. However, it's undeniably the weakest of the three Yokomizo novels currently available in English and one of the weaker Japanese detective novels that made it across the language barrier. So try to manage your expectations.

That being said, I can't wait for the publication of Gokumon Island, which has been described as "the most respected Japanese mystery novel."

The Case of the Three Lost Letters (1954) by Christopher Bush

I enjoyed Christopher Bush's The Case of the Green Felt Hat (1939) so much, I decided to take down another title in the series, The Case of the Three Lost Letters (1954), which Bush wrote during a time when "fashions in mystery fiction were decidedly afoot" as "authors increasingly turned to sensationalistic tales" – like international espionage, psychological suspense and hardboiled action. Bush adapted to the changing winds by transforming his series-character, Ludovic Travers, from an unofficial associate of Scotland Yard in the 1930s to a genteel private inquiry agent in the 1940s. And, by the time the fifties rolled around, Travers owned a controlling interest in the Broad Street Agency. 

Travers began to resemble "an American private investigator rather than the gentleman amateur detective," but elements of the conventional British mystery remained. Although the baroque-style, elaborate plots and tricky, minutely-timed alibis had either been toned down considerably or scrapped altogether. Travers had become a working class, licensed detective who now had to contend with the "implied superiority and the faint suggestion" from polite society his daytime job "is just a bit beyond the pale." But, even with the plots becoming less complicated, the series produced soundly-structured detective novels like The Case of the Counterfeit Colonel (1952) and The Case of the Flowery Corpse (1956). 

The Case of the Three Lost Letters was recommended to me at one point or another as a perfect fusion of the old-fashioned, 1930s British whodunit and the post-war private eye novel. I have to agree as it turned out to be one of the better Bush novels from this period in the series.

Ludovic Travers is summoned to the house of Henry Baldlow, The Croft in Seahurst, who wrote to the Broad Street Detective Agency to send down a responsible member of the firm. Travers went down himself and finds a man suffering from emphysema, which is why he's ready to move to South Africa in about a fortnight's time, but needs a live-in bodyguard until then. Baldlow had found God through the Oxford Movement, or Moral Re-armament, which made him regard money as the root of all evil and the disposal of his personal fortune "a sacred trust" – certain possible heirs had already been subjected to "guarded enquiries." But he expects to do certain unpleasant things that might provoke an equally unpleasant reaction. So asks Travers to provide him with a bodyguard to act as a companion during those two weeks. Travers had "rarely been so distrustful of a client," disliking Baldlow's "almost nauseating smugness" and "parade of religion," but drew up a pretty stiff contract that put no onus, whatsoever, on the agency. This is how Patrick Nordon came to The Croft as a companion/bodyguard and his written reports fills half of the second chapter. But trouble was already brewing.

One of Travers' freelance operatives, Luke Layman, whose car pitched over a cliff about eight miles west of Seahurst and drowned in the submerged car. There was an empty, quarter bottle of Scotch in the car with his prints on it and "he died with some of it in his belly," but was it really open and shut case of accidental death? What happened with Layman's diary book that he used to keep a record of his jobs? Travers soon has something else on his mind as Grainger, the Seahurst Chief Constable, asks Travers what he would do if had the idea a client was about to commit felony. Suspecting the Chief Constable was referring to Baldlow, Travers decided to pay his client a visit and bumps into Nordon who had been sent out by Baldlow to buy a Last Will and Testament form. Nordon suspects it has something to do with three visitors expected to drop by that day, but, when they arrive at The Croft, the housekeeper finds Baldlow's body in the upstairs snuggery. Smothered to death with a pillow! And that's when the visitors begin to arrive.

First one to arrive is Baldlow's niece, Mrs. Jane Howell, followed by her brother, Charles Tinley. The last visitor is the dead man's stepbrother, Francis Lorde. They all received a letter from Baldlow, asking them to come see him "most urgently," but none of the three knew the other two received a similar letter nor can they produce the letters in question, which they threw away or destroyed as unimportant – even when it's quite obvious the letters had disturbed them. And who's Maurice, or Morris, who Baldlow told over the telephone (overheard by Nordon) not to come to the house? Travers has to root around the cupboards of the three visitors and the people around them to find out what skeletons Baldlow had gotten a hold of, which has sidetracks into the jewelry business, the theater world and the previously mentioned Moral Re-armament Movement.

Travers' investigation shows a lot had changed since his days as a bright-eyed, crossword puzzle obsessed amateur detective in the '20s and '30s with his work sometimes getting very seedy. For example, Chapter IX ("Temptation Flat") has Travers reluctantly getting snug and messy ("with lipstick and the stickiness of the Benedictine") with a femme fatale. Travers has something to explain back home (“blonde hairs, probably, that had been on my overcoat”) to his wife, Bernice. Another modern tendency found in these later novels is showing a bit more of the person behind the detective. Travers gives his religious views to Baldlow in the opening chapter (believing in God "to the extent that I can't credit the Universe as being self-made") and reflects later on in the story about the skeleton stuffed away in his own cupboard ("an affair that makes me go hot and cold at a distance of almost thirty years and about which I've never breathed a word to Bernice"). You're unlikely to find these candid snapshots in any of the pre-war Travers novels. And then there's the dark, devastating, but oh so effective ending, that was very much in tune with the changing times.

Regardless of the modern, post-war tune, The Case of the Three Lost Letters is a pure, undiluted whodunit with all the clues and red herrings in place, but, more importantly, the plot is structured around an idea that feels as fresh as it's original – even in 2022! A good enough idea that it didn't need the extra complication of cast-iron alibis or fooling around with identities. There is, however, a small caveat: The Case of the Three Lost Letters could have been superb instead of merely excellent had Bush not made one mistake. Bush should have (ROT13) vagebqhprq gur zheqrere nf abguvat zber guna n anzr/cbfvgvba jvgu uvf onpxtebhaq orvat svyyrq va nsgre gur zheqre vf qvfpbirerq. Vs jbhyq zber yvxryl unir chyyrq gur zheqrere va gur ernqre'f cflpubybtvpny oyvaq fcbg. Abj gur ernqre vf tvira gbb zhpu vasbezngvba sebz gur fgneg naq gung znqr na bgurejvfr irel jryy uvqqra zheqrere ybbx irel fhfcvpvbhf. I learned these dirty tricks from Uncle John and Aunt Agatha. :)

So, if you pay close enough attention, you can put all the pieces together and reach the correct solution long before Travers figures it out. Normally, I can take satisfaction in solving a detective story that played completely fair with the reader, but the ending and how the case was resolved made me wish Bush had succeeded in fooling me. The ending is so much better when it can take you by surprise. Something that would have been possible had it not been for that one mistake. Nevertheless, The Case of the Three Lost Letters has a very real shot of making it to my top 10 favorite Bush novels. It's definitely one of my favorites from this period in the series.