Graham
Landrum was an American college professor of English and a school
teacher in the Presbyterian Church, but more importantly, he authored
a handful of detective novels, published around the mid-1990s, that
form the Borderville series – helmed by an 88-year-old widow and
amateur sleuth, Mrs. Harriet Bushrow. A modern series of apparently
classically-styled detective stories, but with menacing hints of
coziness in the patterned book titles and cover art. Normally, I
likely would have never touched this series had Brian Skupin not
included The Rotary Club Murder Mystery (1993) in Locked
Room Murders: Supplement (2019). So the decision was taken out of
my hands.
The first thing that has
to be said about The Rotary Club Murder Mystery is that
Landrum used multiple narrators, no fewer than five, to tell the
story, which is not a revolutionary new idea, but one that has been
scarcely employed in the (traditional) detective story – only a
couple of examples spring to mind (e.g. Michael Innes' Lament
for a Maker, 1938). Two of the narrators are Rotarians, Henry
Delaporte and Dr. Frederick M. Middleton. Henry is married to the
woman who narrated The Famous DAR Murder Mystery (1992),
Helen, while Frederick has the inside dope when a body is discovered
at local motel. Maud Tinker Bradfield is the third narrator and has
been close friend of Mrs. Bushrow for over seventy years. One of the
suspects even gets a whole chapter to tell her side of the story, but
most of the chapters come from the hand of Mrs. Bushrow. No matter
how tired she gets of "all this writing."
So this makes The
Rotary Club Murder Mystery very aware that it's a mystery novel.
The suspect who gets to tell her side of the story begins with the
statement that it was "a bad idea" to include her as a
narrator, because "it removes me from the list of suspects."
Mrs. Bushrow is recognized in a public library and is asked to sign a
copy of The Famous DAR Murder Mystery. Graham Landrum has an
off-page cameo explaining to Mrs. Bushrow that "detective
stories are classical"
with "a beginning, a
middle, and an end."
Everything that happened "up
to the time when the crime takes place"
settles "what happens
all the rest of the way until the mystery is solved."
The middle part is where "everything
is developing and confused."
Yes, this marked the beginning of the middle portion of The
Rotary Club Murder Mystery.
But I'm getting ahead of myself here.
The
Rotary Club Murder Mystery
begins with the visit of the Rotary district governor, Charles
Hollonbrook, to speak at the Rotary Club of Borderville, Tennessee,
but Hollonbrook failed to emerge from his motel room and the door had
to be broken open to get inside – where his body was found lying on
the bed. A small entry wound below his chin and a bullet embedded in
the headboard correspond with the service .45 automatic near his
right hand and a suicide note on the bedside table.
So
with the only door locked and securely chained on the inside and a
heavily draped, plate-glass window, "incapable
of being opened," it
could have only been suicide. Dr. Middleton is suspicious of
the strangely worded suicide note and the fact that he apparently
shot himself in the middle of a good book. And he has a point there.
Mrs. Bushrow is encouraged
to shake the mothballs out of her deerstalker and carry out a private
investigation with the (financial) support of the Rotary Club's
version of the Baker Street Irregulars. She travels between Tennessee
and North Carolina to collect alibis, clues and motive, which is easy
enough, since Hollonbrook had an insatiable sexual appetite and an
expensive taste. A lifestyle that came with a hefty price tag and a
lot of resentment.
So everything was present
to craft a good, old-fashioned and conventionally plotted locked room
mystery with a modern backdrop, but the whole structure collapsed
once it became apparent Landrum had committed a grave, unpardonable
offense – first degree aggravated cheating with intent to
underwhelm or disappoint! You see, Landrum didn't merely withheld an
important piece of information, which would have been bad enough. He
not only tried to be sneaky about it, which would have been much
worse. Oh, no. What makes it unforgivable is that he had the gall to
be cute about it!
On the cover of the St.
Martin's edition, Mrs. Bushrow is examining the chain-bolt on the
motel room door, which is how the bolt is presented in the story,
until one of the last chapters reveals the bolt is actually "a
loop of brass." A U-shape screwed into the door "in such a
way that the loop swivels back and forth." This unfairly
changed the whole locked room problem during the final stages of the
story. Mrs. Bushrow had shown that the locked door was not the
problem, but had no answer how the bolt could have been engaged, or
disengaged, from the outside. So my solution was that the murderer
was hidden in the motel room, laying low until Hollonbrook had taken
his sleeping pills, before emerging and shooting him – arranging
everything in the room to make it look like a suicide. Then unscrewed
the plate of the bolt, stepped outside, and used the small crack that
the chain-bolt allowed to superglue the plate back in place. And than
closed and locked the door behind him/her. But the U-shaped loop
destroyed that theory.
Nonetheless, I still had a
small flicker of hope that Landrum, who had shown some imagination in
storytelling, had played his cards too close to the chest because he
had come up with an original and ingenious locked room-trick – a
trick he intended to be a genuine surprise. Even if he had cheat the
reader. So do you know what was waiting for me in the penultimate
chapter? A big, unapologetic fuck you, that's what.
Skupin mentioned in Locked
Room Murders: Supplement that the 1990s was a lean decade for the
English-language locked room mystery novel as Herbert
Resnicow had abandoned it in the late 1980s and Bill
Pronzini only wrote short impossible crime stories during that
period. But even by the standards of '90s, The Rotary Club Murder
Mystery stands as an astonishing disappointing and unimaginative
locked room mystery. A lean decade that still produced such notable
titles as William L. DeAndrea's Killed
on the Rocks (1990), Nicholas Wilde's Death
Knell (1990), Mary Monica Pulver's Original
Sin (1991), Peter Lovesey's Bloodhounds (1996) and
Paul Doherty's A
Murder in Thebes (1998).
The who-and why had some
interesting ideas, but they were also bugged and diminished by
similar fair play issues that plague the last quarter of the story.
The Rotary Club Murder
Mystery began interesting with its multiple narrators, locked
room murder and the promise of something good, or even original, but
the solution was enraging and left me with slight homicidal
tendencies. So not recommended to mystery readers with an easily
irritated purist streak lurking underneath their civilized facade.
The reader has been warned!
