The Listening House (1938) by Mabel Seeley

Mabel Seeley was an American writer from Herman, Minnesota, who was known as "The Mistress of Mystery" and considered by the eminent critic, Howard Haycraft, to be on equal footing with the headmistress of the "Had-I-But-Known" school of detective fiction, Mary Roberts Rinehart – promising to "pilot the American-feminine detective story out of the doldrums out of its own formula-bound monotony." A promise that earned her debut novel, The Listening House (1938), a place on "The Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones of Detective Fiction."

Curt Evans, of The Passing Tramp, has discussed Seeley on his blog several times and praised The Listening House as a "spirited updating of the old HIBK novel" with "a much grittier edge" than its Van Dinean floor plans suggests, but well plotted and managed as a pure detective story. Anthony Boucher even called the book "one of the best of all first mystery novels" twelve years after its original publication! So there was more than enough promise and expectations were high.

Regrettably, the promise remained largely unfulfilled as she only wrote seven novels between 1938 and 1954. The general opinion appears to be that none of them lived up to The Listening House, which has been out-of-print for decades with secondhand copies being "extremely tough" to find. Until recently. Back in mid-June, Berkeley finally published a new edition of this obscure, hard-to-find gem and since the book has an intriguing entry in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019), I immediately pounced on a copy. I never claimed I was original. 

The Listening House is narrated by a young divorcee, Mrs. Gwynne Dacres, who gets unceremoniously let go from her copy-writing job and has to look for both work and cheaper rooms, which brings her to the lodging house of Mrs. Harriet Garr at 593 Trent Street – situated in the fictitious Gilling City. According to Curt, Gilling City is a thinly disguised St. Paul, Minnesota, where Seeley lived and graduated university during the 1920s. Mrs. Garr can let Gwynne a spacious living room and kitchen for four dollars a week for the summer, which would leave her almost eighteen dollars a month to eat on. More than enough time and financial breathing room to get back on her feet. But she quickly begins to wonder if she had moved in with "a deranged old semi-lunatic" with "delusions of persecution."

Mrs. Garr spends her days rotating between her parlor, hallway and a basement room with a rocking chair, three cats and a dog while keeping a suspicious eye on each of her lodgers. She believed some "went snooping around the house at night." Gwynne began to see Mrs. Garr as "an evil-eyed old woman with lovely white hair" who has "three big cats sitting on her lap or rubbing against her chair" and "the black dog parked alongside," but, during the night, she gets the unnerving feeling that the whole house was "holding itself tensely awake in the dark, listening." Either the house or something was listening to every breath she took! And then the trouble really began.

During a morning stroll, Gwynne discovers the body of man who has been shot and dumped down a cliff side, which Mrs. Garr's lodging house overlooks. Several weeks later, a squad of policemen, revolvers drawn, enter the house to arrest one of the lodgers on a possibly related and shocking crime. Gwynne is attacked for the first of several times when she goes to investigate quiet, furtive sounds during the night and Mrs. Garr apparently goes missing during a trip to Chicago. Some days go by before they decide to call the police to help break open the door of the locked basement room. Mrs. Garr had locked her cats and dog in there, but, when the door is opened, they found her body, clothes and hair scattered about the floor – torn to pieces like a scavenger's meal! So definitely one of the grittiest locked room mysteries on record! And there's another one. But more on that in a moment.

Where the story, in my opinion, earned its stripes as a classic of its kind is not how it revitalized the time-worn HIBK formula or its eerie, well sustained atmosphere and general sense of mystification. Not even the impossible situations secured that status. What makes The Listening House standout is how perfectly Seeley balanced the pros and cons of being an amateur detective to carefully manage the progression of the story, plot and character backstories.

Gwynne reflects how "the reporters in the newspapers and the characters in the fiction always seemed to comprehend what the police were working toward," but, in the case of Mrs. Garr, she "never knew what the police were going to do or think, and when I did find out, afterward, I usually disagreed strenuously." The police did all the routine work with her eventually learning the results in due time. So there are certain important aspects and plot-threads alluded to in the first-half, but not examined until the second-half. Such as the locked room status of Mrs. Garr murder, which is eventually confirmed during a well written and reasoned inquest scene. But there's also Mrs. Garr seedy past with an incident from 1919 that made the entire city tremble to its core. Nothing is rushed with every aspect and character of the story getting an opportunity to breath. It also gives Gwynne ample to time to recover from the various assaults. Lieutenant Peter Strom, of the Homicide Squad, remarks at one point, "I don't see how you've kept alive this long."

The most serious attack happens when Gwynne is knocked out in the middle of the night and a big wad of cotton, "sopping with the God damn dry cleaner," is placed on her face, but the double doors to her room were not only locked from the inside – a chair had been hooked under the doorknobs. The windows were closed, covered and fastened both inside and out. So how did the murderer entered and leave the room? This second locked room problem has a far better solution than the first one, which is so incredibly simplistic you immediately know how it was done once you learn why it's a locked room mystery. While there's nothing flashy about the second locked room-trick, rather workmanlike in spirit, neither is it overly simplistic or merely routine. I thought these locked room puzzles nicely placed their little part in a busy, complicated and ever-evolving story crammed with shifty characters, happenings and long buried secrets. The Listening House is always moving forward with new things occurring or being discovered. Even after the case is solved, the plot continued to twist and turn until its last pages.

So my review gives you only a very small sample of what to expect from Seeley's The Listening House, which also include a domestic treasure hunt, a developing romance, a quasi-historical plot-thread going back to 1919 that's as dark as a modern psychological crime thriller and so much more. Everything nicely folded together in the end with all the clues and information fairly on display. Or, to quote the lady detective herself, "it's bad enough having another amateur find a murderer you've been hunting yourself, without having it pointed out to you that you should have jolly well known it all along." Only drawback, if you can call it that, is that neither the who or how will pull the rug from underneath your feet. But, on a whole, The Listening House is one of the better written, cleverly structured debuts from the genre's Golden Age. I can completely understand why expectations were so high. Nonetheless, Seeley has earned more than enough credit with The Listening House to give The Whispering Cup (1941) or Eleven Came Back (1943) a shot. 

Notes for the curious: 1) Lieutenant Strom half-mockingly called Gwynne “a finder-outer,” which sleuth slang I've only seen used in Enid Blyton's The Five Find-Outers series and nowhere else. Did she read the book and sort of remembered it? 2) Some websites, like the GADwiki, lists an eight, tantalizingly titled, mystery novel, Sealed Room Murder (1941). Besides a few mentions, it appeared as if the book simply didn't exist. But then I noticed one website noted it was supposedly published by the Collins Crime Club. What contentious locked room mystery novel did they publish that same year? Rupert Penny's Sealed Room Murder (1941). So don't drive yourself mad trying to track down Seeley's Sealed Room Murder.

Sudden Death (1932) by Freeman Wills Crofts

This year, the Collins Crime Club imprint, of HarperCollins, reissued six long out-of-print novels by Freeman Wills Crofts in two batches of three with the second batch comprising of Mystery on Southampton Water (1934), Crime at Guildford (1935) and the novel that has been on my wishlist for ages, Sudden Death (1932) – which is Crofts' take on my beloved locked room mystery. Inspector Joseph French has build a reputation on being "invariably sceptical of alibis" and breaking them down with painstaking work and dogged determination. Sudden Death demonstrated French is as adept at tearing down locked rooms as he is at disassembling faked alibis with no less than two impossible murders coming his way!

Sudden Death also showed Crofts could be more, if he wanted to be, than a plot-technician with the story's viewpoint alternating between French and a young woman, Anne Day.

Anne had spent most of her early life in an old Gloucester parsonage attending her reclusive, scholarly father, Reverend Latimer Day, but when he passed away, she was left homeless with "an income of barely thirty pounds a year" – only lucky enough to find a job as a companion to an elderly lady. But when she died, a then 28-year-old Anne was forced back to the registry offices of London with no special qualifications while "shoes and gloves, and latterly even food and lodging" becoming "more and more hideously insistent problems." One day, Anne is offered a position in the home of Severus Grinsmead to help his sick, semi-invalid wife, Sybil, run the household. A well paid position with a very generous advance. Naturally, not everything is as rosy as it seems.

Surprisingly, coming from Crofts, there's a hint of The Had-I-But-Known School in the opening chapter with the line "had she known all that awaited her at Ashbridge," she "might well have drawn back in dismay" from "the agonies of fear and horror and suspense which she was fated to endure with the Grinsmeads."

Sybil is a sickly, cold and deeply suspicious woman and it takes Anne some time to gain her confidence, but she didn't need it to understand that the relationship between husband-and-wife resembles that of an armed truce between two hostile nations. Sybil is aware her husband is having an affair with the local grass widow, Irene Holt-Lancing, which convinced her that they want her dead and biding their time for the right moment – ensuring Anne there will be an accident or "it may look like suicide." Puzzling, Anne becomes privy of evidence and information both confirming and contradicting Sybil's deadly fears. I think False Impressions would have been a better title than Sudden Death, because it fits so many aspects of the plot and story.

Nevertheless, not everything is laden with impending doom or suspicion. Anne comes to find out that the governess to the Grinsmead children, Edith Cheame, shares a similar life story to her own and that Severus Grinsmead's mother is not quite as stiff or censorious as Sybil made her out to be. She also strikes up a friendship with the children and gets on with the chauffeur/gardener like a house on fire. So she could almost forget her employers unhappy marriage, infidelity and suspicion, but that all changes one morning when Anne went to her bedroom to bring her tea. Anne's knocking remained unanswered by the invitational click of the electric, push-button operated bolt. She then noticed that there was "an odd smell of gas" in the corridor and quickly realized "gas was simply pouring out" of the keyhole of Sybil's room. A hammer and chisel were needed to demolish the lock and open the solid door, but help had arrived too late. Inspector Kendal, of the local police, goes over the room with a fine tooth comb, but finds "an enclosed affair" that "you couldn't very well temper with." So concludes it was a suicide and that's the verdict at the inquest.

There are, however, some minor details bothering Kendal and Scotland Yard assigned Inspector Joseph French to the case to go over all the details again and give them a second opinion. I suppose this is where people who dislike Crofts will very likely stop liking Sudden Death.

Crofts tried to write a novel of character (singular) with Anne Day as in the lead during the first third of the story, but French's thorough and painstaking investigation of the locked room problem proved his heart lay with the nuts and bolts of the plot – coming up with a number of ways to gas someone behind a locked door. My fellow impossible crime enthusiast and Crofts aficionado, "JJ” of The Invisible Event, suggests in his review that "dazzling array of options" can be counted as "a Locked Room Lecture that predates that of The Hollow Man (1935) by John Dickson Carr," but Crofts is "less showy" about it. For once, I've to agree with JJ. Crofts doesn't break the fourth wall to acknowledge the reader and it's not presented as a lecture, but it can be read as a proto-Locked Room Lecture. Something that will no doubt please anyone with a special affinity for impossible crime fiction.

Another thing that occurred to me while reading is Crofts might have created the most convincing and believable of all so-called fallible detectives. Anthony Berkeley usually made an ass out of Roger Sheringham (e.g. Jumping Jenny, 1934) and Ellery Queen too angsty (e.g. Ten Days' Wonder, 1948), but Crofts created a competent, intelligent and imaginative Scotland Yard inspector, which are admirable qualities, but they come without cast-iron guarantees of success attached to them. French is not an enigmatic detective who can deduce the truth from a bowl of daffodils or the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime, but he does use the Sherlockian inspired method of rejecting the impossible and "see what is left." A thorough, painstaking process of elimination and fine-tuning of possibilities that has many dead ends and constant second guessing whether, or not, he was building his theories on "an foundation of sand." And it was a nice touch by making French sink his teeth in the case with a future chief inspectorship in the back of his mind.

You can, however, argue French came up a little short on this occasion with only a second death preventing a terrible mistake when one of his main suspects committed suicide in a room with all the doors and windows locked, or fastened, on the inside – forcing him to go back to the drawing board and start over again. So how good is Sudden Death as a locked room mystery novel with its two murders-disguised-as-suicides in completely locked rooms? Well, not too badly!

The solution to Sybil's murder in her locked bedroom is, to my knowledge, original and don't believe it has been used since, but, as you can probably guess, the trick is a technical, semi-mechanical nature. Not everyone is going to like it. The solution to the second impossibility is an old dodge of the locked room story, but it was put to good use and provided the story with a last clue to the murderer's identity. So, on balance, Sudden Death is not a classic of its kind, but as a good and solid take on the impossible crime novel. And not one that should be solely judged on the content of its locked rooms.

Crofts was one of the often maligned, so-called humdrum writers who were more interested in the how than the who-and why, which means that their murderers tend to be easily spotted. I wrongly assumed that the case here, but the murderer and motive were cleverly hidden with "the closed room as a blind." Crofts knew what makes a sound plot tick and that makes it the more baffling he left a small aspect of the first locked room murder unexplained. I can accept that from a mystery writer who's more interested in character or storytelling or a second-stringer, but the Chief Engineer of Crime should have known better and it seriously detracted from, what would otherwise have been, the best Inspector French novel to date. Now I have to reluctantly place it slightly below The Sea Mystery (1928), Mystery in the Channel (1931) and The Hog's Back Mystery (1933).

Omission not withstanding, Sudden Death is a fine piece of old-fashioned, Golden Age craftsmanship and it was fun to see the master of the unbreakable alibi apply himself to the locked room mystery while dabbling a little in domestic suspense and HIBK. Sudden Death shows Crofts is as deserving of being revived as he was undeserving of his old reputation as the writer who cured insomnia. Now all I want is a reprint of Crofts' second locked room novel, The End of Andrew Harrison (1938), but until then, my next stop in the series is probably going to be Sir John Magill's Last Journey (1930). So stay tuned!

The Triple Bite (1931) by Brian Flynn

Last year, the indispensable Dean Street Press reissued ten detective novels of one of the unsung, long-forgotten mystery writers of the past, Brian Flynn, who was unearthed by the Puzzle Doctor, Steve Barge, when he found a copy of The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928) among his Christmas presents in 2016 – he has been beating Flynn's drum ever since. Fast-forward two years, Flynn got his long overdue reprints and these new editions came with introductions written by the newly-minted crime fiction historian, Steve Barge.

The Triple Bite (1931) is the tenth novel in the Anthony Bathurst series and, "out of all of the first ten Brian Flynn novel," it was by far the rarest of the lot. A novel which had never before been reprinted and only a single copy was located outside of the British Library! So this might be the rarest title DSP has reprinted to date.

The introduction aptly describes The Triple Bite as a "love-letter to the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" with a mysterious cipher, hidden treasure and a villain who could have been member of The Red-Headed League.

Young Cecilia Cameron is the story's narrator and she relates the unbelievable events that took place in "a big, ten-roomed bungalow" in Dallow Corner, Sussex, which Colonel Ian Cameron was prompted to buy by a friend of his son, Nigel Strachan – who had a very peculiar reason for doing so. Strachan is a barrister and six months ago, he was called upon to defend "a born thief," Sam Trout, who got a reduction in sentence. Something the old career criminal gratefully remembered when he was dying of pneumonia. Trout wrote a letter to Strachan telling him he had been one of only two people who ever lifted a finger to help him and gives them "an equal chance of a fortune."

An opportunity encoded in "a piece of doggerel" and the only part Strachan had been able to decipher is a location, Dallow Corner, which is why he brought the bungalow to Colonel Cameron's attention. But there are pirates on the horizon!

Colonel Cameron and Cecilia caught whispered fragments of a conversation in a restaurant mentioning Dallow Corner and salmon-fishing, but there's not a stretch of water big enough for such a thing as salmon-fishing within ten miles of Dallow Corner. Someone else is looking for Sam Trout's fortune is confirmed when they're visited by a red-headed giant of a man, "Flame" Lampard, who introduced himself as "the bearer of a warning" and advises Colonel Cameron to immediately leave Dallow Corner. Otherwise, it may be too late. What treads on the heels of this ominous visit is best described as a siege on the bungalow and echoes the plot of Flynn's tremendously enjoyable Invisible Death (1929).

Shots are fired at the bungalow in the middle of the night. The housekeeper is tied to a chair and gagged, while the intruders excavated the garden, which culminated in the apparently death by heart failure of Colonel Cameron – whose body was found lying against the hedge between the bungalow and their neighbor's house. Cecilia is convinced her uncle had been murdered and "send for Anthony Bathurst first thing in the morning." Bathurst not only agrees with her opinion Colonel Cameron had been murdered, but found the page that had been torn from his notebook curled against the hedge. A piece of paper with the dying man's "last message to the world" scrawled on it, "for God's sake, mind the red thing that flies." More than once, this last message is referred to as "the dying message of Colonel Cameron."

Brian Flynn

The dying message is a trope closely associated with Ellery Queen, but this association began with two novels post-dating The Triple Bite, namely The Tragedy of X (1932) and The Siamese Twin Mystery (1933), which makes Flynn's novel one of the earliest examples of the dying message story. There are, however, a number of short stories and novels predating The Triple Bite, but I believe Flynn was the first to use the phrase "dying message." Interestingly, Flynn was perhaps the first to use another trope inextricably linked to another American writer, S.S. van Dine, who introduced to concept of a collector's private museum in The Bishop Murder Case (1929). Something that became somewhat of a trope with Van Dine and his followers, such as Clyde B. Clason (e.g. The Man from Tibet, 1938), but Flynn was there first with The Case of the Black Twenty-Two (1928). Flynn was a little ahead of the curve when it came to the Golden Age mindset!

A second, typical American aspect of The Triple Bite are the brief, but unmistakable, "Had-I-But-Known" moments in Cecilia's narrative. A very specific brand of suspenseful mysteries almost exclusively written by American female novelists such as Mary Robert Rinehart and Dorothy Cameron Disney.

You can find the clearest example of HIBK in the final lines of the opening chapter when Cecilia writer, "had I known, however, what lay in store for us," from "the coming of "Flame" Lampard" to "the night of horror in the darkened room" when the last scene was enacted, she would not have responded so flippantly to salmon-fishing. So not style you expect to find among the works of a male, British mystery writer who debuted in the 1920s.

Anyway, Colonel Cameron's dying message is one of the practically unusable clues to the fanciful method employed to dispose of two men in the story, which also includes "the puffy pink marks" on the bodies, a pink smear of blood and "a ghastly whirring kind of noise" – like "something was zipping through the air." I gathered from these clues and the many allusions to fishing that the murderer was fooling around with a rod and a hook smeared with some kind of exotic poison, but the solution was something else altogether! John Norris described this utterly bizarre method as something "right out of the weird menace pulps." I agree!

Fascinatingly, the method was based on an obscure line from a Sherlock Holmes story, which helped Bathurst tumble to the solution, but he refers to Holmes and Dr. Watson as actual people. And not as fictional characters like he did in The Billiard-Room Mystery (1927). Flynn was such a massive fanboy!

The who-and why were much easier spotted and the coded message, or parts of it, can be deciphered by the reader, but everything is draped in the style of the 19th century detective story and pulp-thrillers. Some bits of the plot might be hard to swallow for the Golden Age purists, but The Triple Bite stands as a warm homage to Conan Doyle and is as enjoyable as the previously mentioned Invisible Death. Just pure, pulpy fun! I think pulp readers and Sherlockians will get the most out of this classic rendition of their favorite reading material.

Well, this leaves me with only two more of Flynn's novels, The Five Red Fingers (1929) and The Creeping Jenny Mystery (1930). So, hopefully, we don't have to wait too long for DSP's second serving of Anthony Bathurst cases.

They Never Checked Out

"You're all too busy sticking your noses into every corner, poking about for things to complain about, aren't you? Well let me tell you something - this is exactly how Nazi Germany started!"

- Basil (Fawlty Towers, Episode: Waldorf Salad, 1979)

One year ago, I posted a review of Anita Blackmon's There is No Return (1938), who wrote over a thousand short stories for such publications as Love Story Magazine, Detective Tales and Weird Tales, but only published two full-length mystery novels during her lifetime – which were highly regarded by the eminent crime-fiction critic, Howard Haycraft. Nevertheless, they swiftly faded from popular memory and were completely forgotten about once their author passed away in 1943.

Back in 2010, Curt Evans began to blog about Blackmon's long-forgotten mystery novels and have since then reappeared in print as both paperback editions and e-books.

Murder à la Richelieu (1937) was the first of only two novels about Blackmon's short-lived series-character, Miss Adelaide Adams, who has a "crusty disposition" and has been referred to as "a nosy old maid," but she has a good and even generous heart – snappy as she may be at times. Miss Adams also has a traceable sense of humor and this makes her narrative a dark, grim and bloody parody of the "Had-I-But-Known" crime stories of Mary Roberts Rinehart and Dorothy Cameron Disney.

A good example of the nature of the book is this, often quoted, line from the opening page of the book: "had I suspected the orgy of bloodshed upon which we were about to embark, I should then and there, in spite of my bulk and an arthritic knee, have taken shrieking to my heels." So she immediately sets the tone and the old-fashioned battle-ax is actually a pleasant narrator of the dark events unfolding at the Hotel Richelieu.

The Richelieu is a quiet, respectable residential hotel in a southern town in the United States (Curt suggested Little Rock, Arkansan) and has its own social hierarchy consisting of several layers. One of them are the resident guests, or "the old guard," who make up the inner circle of hotel-life and rarely allow outsiders (i.e. temporary guests) to be admitted to their closed group – prompting the observation that it was easier "to enter the Kingdom of Heaven" than "to be admitted among the elect at the Richelieu Hotel." A third layer consists of the people working at the hotel, such as the waitresses and the droopy-eyed night clerk, but they're not socially involved with either group of guests.

So pretty much what you would expect from a place where human beings congregate for an extended period of time. It's like a pass-through village.

Recently, Miss Adams, who is described herself as "a close student of the human comedy," began to notice slight disturbances in the regular interactions between the people at the hotel. Even though she failed to foresee the significance of her mislaid spectacle case.

Anyway, she did noticed the hostile attitude of Kathleen Adair towards James Reid, of New Orleans, when he happened to step inside an elevator with her clumsy, scatter-brained mother. She also noticed how the niece of respectable widow and hotel guest, Polly Lawson, who, "practically overnight," began to behave in the most reckless manner – which came at the cost of her budding relationship with a promising young man, Howard Warren. So now Polly is flirting with a carefree, traveling salesman, Stephen Lansing, who loves to tease Miss Adams. Lansing also took a young wife, Lottie Mosby, on a whirlwind ride. She has a husband who has taken to drinking and she gambles away their money on the race track in the hope of hitting it big.

Finally, there's a professional gold-digger, Hilda Anthony, who had come to the town to make use of their new state law to procure a legal separation from her fourth husband. But why did she stick around in the small, quiet conservative town once she secured the divorce. After all, the town is not exactly rich in "gilded playboys."

Once again, you should probably expect entangled relationships, emotions and problems even in a small community such as a residential hotel, but when that community becomes the backdrop of a string of gruesome murders they might harbor a potential motive for a killer.

The first victim is found when Miss Adams entered her darkened suite and discovers the body of one of her fellow guests, namely James Reid, who is hanging by his suspenders from the cross-arm of a chandelier. Someone had slit his throat from ear to ear!

One observation that has to be made is that all of the murders are particular grisly and graphic in nature, which you would expect to see in a slasher movie from the 1980s. But here you have a murderer who choked the second victim to death and tossed her body out of a top-floor window to an ugly mess on the pavement below, while the third victim had her neck violently broken and biting acid poured over her face! A fourth murder by throat-cutting is revealed during the killer's feverish confession in the penultimate chapter of the book.

However, the grisly killings are not the only dark and disturbing aspects of Murder à la Richelieu, because the plot slowly reveals that the hotel was used for a particular kind of crime rarely, if ever, associated with detective novels of this vintage – making the book somewhat of an original and standout title within the genre. On top of that, the plot is serviceable enough and managed to be complex without becoming a horribly mangled mess of plot-threads. Blackmon nicely tied every plot-thread together to form a logical pattern and only the murderer's identity proved to be a slight letdown. You can say the hints to this person's guilt were present in the background, but they were a trifle weak and the revelation of this person, as the deranged killer, was a little underwhelming.

But then again, I just might have been disappointed because my murderer turned out to be pretty dead. After the acid-murder, it was revealed a minor side-character had gone missing from the hotel and immediately assumed I had solved the entire case there and then. As it turned out, I definitely had not solved the case there and then.

In any case, Murder à la Richelieu is a splendid compound of grisly murders, dark motives and rampant blackmail, which is told from the perspective of a delightful narrator who you can't help but like in spite of her crusty personality and imperfections. Miss Adams alone makes you wish Blackmon had continued the series pass the two titles she left behind, but she also knew how to write and was not entirely inept when it came to handling an intricate, multi-layered plot.

So, in closing, I would rank the book only slightly below the two best hotel-set detective stories ever written: Harriet Rutland's Bleeding Hooks (1940) and Cornell Woolrich's novella "The Room With Something Wrong" (collected in Death Locked In, 1994).

Red Flash

"After all the risk and labour of cremating the body... there had still been left clear evidence that a man had been murdered."

- Dr. John Thorndyke (R. Austin Freeman's The Stoneware Monkey, 1939)

Margaret Armstrong was an American magazine illustrator, book designer and author of three standalone mysteries, which garnered praise from the eminent Howard Haycraft, but she also caught the attention of a present-day genre-historian, Curt Evans – who called her most famous detective novel "a worthy enrollee in the Mary Roberts Rinehart school of crime fiction." But the story, pleasingly, "emphasizes detection over the inducement of shudders and shivers."

The book in question was Armstrong's debut mystery, Murder in Stained Glass (1939), rapidly followed by The Man with No Face (1940) and The Blue Santo Murder Mystery (1941), for which she drew on her own family legacy. Armstrong's father and sister, David and Helen Armstrong, were well-known artists in the field of stained glass. So the plot has a whiff of authenticity.

Murder in Stained Glass begins with a traditional reflection that gave the "Had-I-But-Known" school of detection its name: the protagonist, Miss Harriet Trumbull, ponders how the weather "often made a lo of difference in people's lives" and if "the sun had not been shining on one particular Monday afternoon," last March, events would have taken a different course or not have happened at all – since she would have been present in Bassett's Bridge. A quaint, rural town in Connecticut, USA.

Miss Trumbull was invited to the home of an old friend, Charlotte Blair, who lives in the New England countryside, in a rather gloomy place, where she also has a cousin, Phyllis Blair, staying as a guest. She's also the one who drove Miss Trumbull to the family home and on their way they pass the glass shop of the famous stained glass artist, Frederick Ullathorne. The famous artist used to have his studio in New York, but moved shop to Bassett's Bridge, because he hates publicity and visitors kept walking on him after he secured a commission for a cathedral window – which threw the short-tempered artist into a rage.

A temperament that also manifested itself in a quarrel between the artist and the man in charge of firing the glass, Jake Murphy, who, according to Ullathorne, used some red flash, a sort of glass they rarely use, in the big cathedral window. It would be "ripped out as soon" as possible and Jake would be docked for what it cost, but Jake told his boss "he'd see him in hell first." We also learn that Ullathorne not only has a temper, but also petty, as he's jealous of his own son, Leo.

Ullathorne never wasted much money on educating his son and used the good-looking boy as a model, but recently, he began to see Phyllis. A woman his father is interested in. So these are exactly the kind of disturbing undercurrents one expects to find in a detective with a small village setting and not long after Miss Trumbull's arrival a young worker from glass shop announces he has found charred bones in the kiln. And here I have to point out an amazing coincidence.

Murder in Stained Glass was published in the same year as R. Austin Freeman's The Stoneware Monkey (1939), which also dealt with an artist's studio and the cremated remains of a murder victim in a kiln. The similarities end there, but the circumstances in which the victims were disposed of by the murderer were very unusual and the only two (known) examples were released in the same year. However, the time between the writing and publications of both novels were too short for one to have influenced the other, but still a noteworthy coincidence and you have to wonder if something at the time gave both authors a similar idea – such as an article about a real-life case or simply a book we're not aware of. Who knows?

Anyway, the evidence in the glass shop, a bullet-hole in a window and a recently washed axe, suggests the victim was shot, chopped to bits and stuffed in the kiln. The floor slopes down to the drain, in the corner, which would have made it very easy to clean up the whole mess in mere minutes. But who was killed? Ullathorne has not yet returned from New York and Jake seems to have disappeared.

Miss Trumbull showed herself to be "a regular gadfly," or a "Meddlesome Matty," when she decides to stick her nose into official police business. She pokes around for a mysterious figure from Ullathorne's sketchbook, "the dark lady," which proved to be skillfully tied to a second murder. Usually, these additional murders, occurring late in a story, turn out to be filler material and the overall plot could easily do without them, but here such a late body proved to be very important to the plot. A plot that was cleverly constructed and pleasingly toyed around with a classic trick, which was applied here with some originality. There was also an interesting and late clue of a vandalized, stained glass window.

But as good as the plot was the writing, pacing and some of the characters. I particular loved Armstrong's depiction of Bassett's Bridge, which is awash with rumormongers and the village is described as "having a grand time" - as they have not "enjoyed themselves so much since McKinley was shot." A very honest description of the gossip-and rumor mill of a such a small place as Bassett's Bridge.

She sketches an interesting, if unlikable, portrait of the policeman in charge, Skinner, who seems to have a severe lack of scruples. Early on, he tells Miss Trumbull he first success came when he jailed, a presumable innocent, man on an arson charge, because the old guy was "better off in jail than anywhere else." At one point, he rushes off to "third degree" a tramp, but later admits it was "a washout" and, "what was left of him," was let go in the end.

So, all in all, I found Murder in Stained Glass to be a solid mystery novel, which had a pleasant balance between plot, characterization and setting. As a bonus, there was the specialized background about stained glass casting the story in "a blaze of colour and light." It give the book itself a bit of character. My sole complaint is the rather short length of the book. A little more than a novella, which made for a quick, fast-paced read. A very, very quick read.

Regardless, the praise Armstrong received is well-deserved and I can recommend Murder in Stained Glass as a nice little example of the Golden Age detective story.

Risen from the Grave

"All I shall beg leave to murmur, gently, is: rubbish. You cannot mix the two worlds like that. This was a human crime, planned by a human being."

- Dr. Gideon Fell (John Dickson Carr's "The Black Minute," collected in The Dead Sleep Lightly, 1983)

Anita Blackmon was an American schoolteacher who turned to fiction and penned over a thousand short stories for the periodicals of her day, which included such publications as Love Story Magazine, Detective Tales and Weird Tales, but she was also the author of two highly regarded mystery novels – i.e. Murder à la Richelieu (1937) and There is No Return (1938).

One of the genre's eminent critics, Howard Haycraft, listed Blackmon as one of the premier writers from the Had-I-But-Known, often shortened to HIBK, school of mystery fiction, which was founded by Mary Roberts Rinehart. After she passed away in 1943, Blackmon's work dropped out of the public consciousness. She seemed to be destined for obscurity, but, as the saying goes, the internet never forgets and some prominent connoisseurs of murders, like Curt Evans, started writing about her – which resulted in her work being reissued. Now there are several different editions available of her two mystery novels.

Murder à la Richelieu is regarded by Evans as the better of those two novels and perhaps the most logical point of departure, but I decided to start with the second and last book from this short-lived series – because the description of the plot suggested something along the lines of Carter Dickson and Hake Talbot. There were promises of ghostly possessions, fake spiritualism and a gruesome killing during a séance. Well, I was not entirely disappointed about what I got.

There is No Return was alternatively published as The Riddle of the Dead Cats and has Blackmon's series character and narrator, Adelaide Adams, coming to the aid of an old friend, Ella Trotter, who found herself in a "macabre and sinister tangle at Mount Lebeau."

Lebeau Inn is a mountain resort in the Ozarks, located on Mount Lebeau, which is the highest spot between the Cumberlands and the Rockies, but the place "had gone steadily gone to seed." It was in a far-flung, difficult to reach corner of Arkansas and this largely contributed to its decline. So it was inevitably that the shabby-looking, tumbledown place fell into the hands of the bank and this brought one of their stockholders to the inn, Mrs. Trotter. Adelaide knows her friend is probably doing everything in her power to drum up business, but, recently, events were unfolding at the inn that made her reflect that if she had "foreseen the train of horrible events" she would have "left Ella to lay her own ghosts" – which is in the best tradition of the HIBK-school.

Mrs. Trotter tells Adelaide how several cats had been found dead, "cut all to pieces with a sharp knife" and "left to die like that in agony," which is unsettling enough, but the cat-killings coincided with a series of séances and an apparent case of possession.

The séances are conducted by professor Thaddeus Matthews, a self-professed spiritualist, but Mrs. Trotter calls him "a fraud of the cheapest rank" and impresses Adelaide as a vaudeville-type charlatan, but, regardless, he has one firm believer. Don Canby is the wife of a wealthy business magnate, Thomas Canby, who suffered a terrible lost when their daughter, Gloria, took her own life. Gloria was not a very balanced person and her father wanted to put her in an institution, which is assumed to have been her motive for suicide. And it is said that "suicides cannot rest in their graves."

Gloria's ghost seems to be very present and not only as a voice in the medium’s head, playing a game of twenty questions, but manifests herself by possessing the body of Matthew’s stooge, Sheila Kelly – who is a dead ringer for the dead girl. A resemblance that grows stronger whenever she lapses into one of her trances. Or when she found a dead canary in her bedroom, because Gloria had "a mania for wringing their necks."

Even for a stooge, Kelly seems to be absolutely frightened about being possessed and this aspect of the story is turned into a persecution plot-thread, which turned out to be somewhat reminiscent of the pall of suspicion that hang over Fay Seton in John Dickson Carr's He Who Whispers (1946). Seton was accused of both a murder and acts of vampirism, while Kelley is looked at as if she acted as a vessel for a vengeful spirit and one of the characters remarked how she "should have been buried with a stake in your heart to pin you down forever." This plot-thread began to unwind in the wake of a gruesome death: one of the guests had his throat slit when the lights went out during a séance and the sheriff has her confined to her room as the prime suspect.

Regardless of this measure, the inn continues to be plagued by misfortunes, death and the ghost Gloria. The pontoon bridge is washed away, which isolated them on the mountaintop, while two more people get their throat cut open or stabbed in the heart.

All of this makes for a dark, atmospheric novel of mystery and suspense, which does justice to the largely empty, worn-out hotel that's used as a backdrop. You can easily imagine a knife-wielding killer rubbing shoulders with malevolent ghosts in the squalid corridors of the Lebeau Inn. On top of that you have the wonderful, snappy narrative voice of Adelaide Adams, which makes me want to pick up Murder à la Richelieu one of these days. The plot was also pretty fair: the murderer and motive were logical, but the clues pointing to this explanation were a bit scarce. Nevertheless, they were present in the story and there's one clue, if you spot it, that points straight at the murderer. So this definitely a fair-play mystery.   

However, I do have one or two minor complaints about the overall plot: after the premise of the plot was presented, the story became slightly repetitive and the second half of the story used everything from the first half. I'm not sure if that makes any sense, but the best way I can describe is by saying that all of the creativity and ideas were in the first half of the book. Secondly, I did not like the hypnotic-angle of the story. That's not a spoiler. It revealed shortly after the murder this may've played a part in the murder, but that’s pretty much the only bad part of the plot.

Otherwise, There is No Return is a splendidly dark tale of murder, suspense and fake spiritualism, which gave a Carrian touch to a classic Had-I-But-Known mystery novel. There are some slight imperfections in the plot, but these smudges hardly deteriorate the overall quality of the book.

On a final note, it looks as if I've a genuine, old-fashioned classic from the Golden Age for my next read, but the review of that book might be preceded by a filler-post. Because I had not done one of those in ages.