Flashpoint (1950) by John Russell Fearn

John Russell Fearn's Flashpoint (1950) was originally published as by "Hugo Blayn" and introduced "a little man who looked like the traditional bust of Beethoven," Dr. Hiram Carruthers, who's "a sort of general specialist" often called upon by the police to help them with the scientific end of a murder case – earning him the moniker of "the 'Admirable Crichton' of scientific specialists." Sadly, Flashpoint was the last of the Dr. Carruther novel on my big pile, but hey, I closed this series on a high note. You could almost say it ended with a bang!

The story takes place in a small, unassuming town, named Halingford, where a young man by the name of Gordon Drew returned to after an absence of eight years.

Upon his arrival, Drew takes a leisurely stroll down memory lane and observed the changes the town underwent during those eight years. He was also able to reacquaint himself with a childhood friend, Janice Lloyd, who he meets again as an organizer of "a social sale-at-work" in a shabby, empty shop with tables loaded with "a miscellany of objects" – hovering over these tables were elderly, needy and "surprisingly genteel" men and women. An embarrassed Drew reflected he was "too well dressed for this sort of affair" and "perhaps too well nourished."

A very brief, but interesting, glimpse at one of the bottom rungs of society of post-war Britain, which now even included the once well-bred, upper-class gentry. This is a side of the detective story too often ignored by so-called scholars of the genre who primarily look at the remnants of the Golden Age that are still standing, but that's a topic for another time. So let's get back to the story at hand.

One of the stops Drew makes in Hallingford is "the residence where he had been born and reared," a Georgian house, but as he stands and looks at it, lost in thought, an extraordinary figure emerges from the place. A man of small stature, like a boy, with the head of Ludwig van Beethoven and tells Drew not the loiter, because his house was a private residence and not a museum. The name of the man is Dr. Hiram Carruthers.

Surprisingly, this confrontation ends with Drew being invited inside and is offered a position as Carruther's secretary.

So, a pretty nice beginning without a hint of the coming calamities, but, a day or two later, the local greengrocer and fishmonger, Oscar Bilkin, receives an anonymous letter with an ominous warning – telling him to "GET OUT BEFORE TOMORROW. YOU ARE ALL IN DANGER." Superintendent Clifford Denning promises Bilkin that his shop will be searched, top to bottom, and one of his men will stand guard that day. However, the next day the shop is leveled by a huge explosion and the fishmonger is killed. Here's where the problems really begin to manifest themselves.

As a brief aside, I have to say that the destruction of the fish and fruit store is one of the most cold-hearted crimes I have come across in a detective story. Not only why the store had to be destroyed, but why its owner had to die and the method employed to achieve this was pure evil. This murderer is more than deserving of an eight o'clock appointment with Albert Pierrepoint.

The smoking crater that once was the Bilkon shop is closely examined by police fire-experts and fire assessors of the insurance company, but they're unable to find any remnants of "an infernal machine or gadget for fire-raising." Nor did they find any trace of "a prepared chemical nature." 

An original impossible situation that was surprisingly easy to solve based on such clues as the funeral pace of the ice delivery van and the yellowish color of the block of ice that was delivered. These aren't spoilers. All of this was described and pointed out before the explosion. I assume Fearn was confident enough that most readers lacked the scientific knowledge to figure out "this ingenious little trick," but here he severely underestimated the repository of arcane knowledge of detective readers. Luckily, there were two more quasi-impossible fires and explosions.

Rupert Granwell is the manager director and owner of a chain-store, who received a similar anonymous warning, which brought in the police who, once again, searched every floor of the department store and surrounded the place with policemen – only to see how the building inexplicably catches fire and is consumed by the flames. A salient detail is that the dissatisfied head dispenser of the in-store pharmacy, Clayton Ross, walked out on Granwell without giving his notices and simply disappeared. A third and final incident happens when an explosion kills the local florist.

Superintendent Denning enlists Carruthers to help him figure out the secret behind these mysterious fires and explosions, or else the case might go to Scotland Yard, but Carruthers only provided a scientific explanation for the (quasi) impossibilities. It was Denning who found the motive and colored the murderer. And this is where Flashpoint distinguishes itself from Fearn's other detective novels.

Usually, the impossibilities are the focal point of the plot and the murderers tend to be fairly easy to point out, but here it was exactly the other way around. The impossibilities were more than solvable, especially the first one, but the murderer this time was not as easily spotted. On the contrary, it took me a while before I caught on! If I remember correctly, this is the first time that happened with Fearn. I also have to give him props for the ambitious motive of the murderer. A nifty twist on one of the age-old motives people have killed for throughout the history.

So, all in all, I would group Flashpoint together with Thy Arm Alone (1947), Except for One Thing (1947), Death in Silhouette (1950) and the posthumously published Pattern of Murder (2006) as one of Fearn's triumphs. I commented in the past that Fearn was probably closer to Arthur Porges than to John Dickson Carr and Flashpoint gives the reader an idea what a novel-length detective story by Porges could have been like. So what more do you want?

On a final note, John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books reviewed Flashpoint before it was reissued by Endeavour Press earlier this year. It's well worth a read as he touches on things I passed over.

What Happened to Hammond? (1951) by John Russell Fearn

Robert Adey observed in Locked Room Murders (1991) that there were only two mystery writers, John Dickson Carr and John Russell Fearn, who regularly produced impossible crime novels during and after the Second World War. While Fearn was not as prolific as Carr, he was able to match the master when it came to the sheer ingenuity of his impossible situations and the answers he conjured up to explain all those criminal miracles – which is a contribution that deserves to be acknowledged. Fearn is a fun, pulpy second-stringer with a repertoire of (scientific) locked room stories that should delight fans of Arthur Porges, Paul Halter and Jonathan Creek.

A ghost and a demonic entity physically manifest themselves inside a cursed room in "Chamber of Centuries" (1940) and Within That Room! (1946). A house that kills appears in Account Settled (1949) and a whole laboratory vanishes from a watched room in Vision Sinister (1954). The Silvered Cage (1955) has a woman gradually fading into nothingness during a stage performance and Pattern of Murder (2006) uses the inverted mystery format to show how an impossible murder is engineered, which is unusual, but the method is brilliant. And there are a host of regular locked room mysteries such as Black Maria, M.A. (1944), the Halter-like The Five Matchboxes (1946) and Death in Silhouette (1950). 

What Happened to Hammond? (1951) plays with a rarity of the impossible crime genre, a possible case of teleportation, of which I only know one other example: the Kaito KID heist story from Case Closed, vol. 61.

Before taking a crack at this book, I have to point out that the splendid cover of the 2006 Borgo Press edition was commissioned by Philip Harbottle during the 1980s from Ron Turner, because he had done covers for Fearn in the 1950s and Harbottle envisioned new editions of Fearn's work with old-school Turner covers – placing the commissioned art work in cold storage for when he was able "to get the books reprinted in the future." Harbottle also provided me with a scan of the book cover of the original and rather rare edition of this book. Yes, I'm using the poor man as my personal, interactive encyclopedia on all things Fearn. Just try to stop me! :) 

What Happened to Hammond? was originally published as by "Hugo Blayn" and begins with a shipping-yard tycoon, Benson T. Hammond, consulting Chief Inspector Mortimer Garth of Scotland Yard on a string of weird notes he has received. The latest note read, "Any Moment Now," implying without being actually threatening, but Hammond has a good reason to fear "the lingering threat" of physical violence. Hammond suffers from fragilitas ossiumtarda, an abnormal brittleness of the bones, which makes him "a walking glass ornament" and a series of blows could make him a bedridden invalid for life – or end him permanently. So Garth decides that the strange complaint and his standing in the community entitles him to police protection. Hammond also has trouble brewing at home.

Harvey Dell works as a senior electronic engineer at the Noonhill Teleradio Combine and wants to formally ask Hammand permission to marry his daughter, Miss Claire Hammond, but as soon as he consented to the engagement Dell asked him for a business loan of two million pounds! A quarrel erupted and Claire caught snippets like "some high-flown notion," a chance "to beat the airlines at their own games" and "cuts in shipping rates." The quarrel ends with Hammond branding Dell as a fortune-hunter and kicks him out of the house. Later that evening, Dell sends a letter to Claire, asking her to come to 9 Stanton Street and to destroy the letter, but she only tears it up and throws it in the waste basket – where her father finds it and pastes it together. And, naturally, he goes after her.

When Claire arrives at the house in the dilapidated Stanton Street, the door is answered by a servant who tells him he has never heard of Harvey Dell and closes the door in her face. However, the next part of the plot took a sudden, unexpected turn into the Twilight Zone.

Hammond arrives at the home with two policemen on his tail and they, alongside with Hammond's chauffeur, witness how he entered the 9 Stanton Street, but he never came back out again. But when they enter the house, they found it completely empty. Not "a stick of furniture" and dirty, defaced walls. Even more astonishing is that the place is covered with "a thick, even layer of dust on the floor of the hall" and nowhere was it broken by the marks of where furniture might have stood – nor where there "a trace of a single footprint." Previously, lights have been seen in the house and the door had been answered twice by a servant. So how did a house that had been occupied only moments previously turned into a rundown, abandoned home with a thick carpet of unbroken dust on the floor?

This apparent miracle is compounded when the body of Hammond is found lying on a road between Shoreham and Worthing, sixty miles away from Stanton Street, but only ten minutes had passed since Hammond was seen entering the house and his remains being found on the road! A gruesome detail is that every bone appears not only to be broken, but shattered, which make the body like a partially deflated inner tube.

Chief Inspector Garth has his work cut out for him and the investigation by the police takes up three quarters of the story. This part of the book reads like an early police procedure and has Garth, alongside with his men, doing all of the legwork as they attempt to put together all of the pieces of this complicated puzzle. They figure out the dust-trick and find all of the bigger pieces of the puzzle, but the insurmountable wall they keep bumping into is the problem of a body traveling sixty miles in a mist-enshrouded winter night. So they call upon Dr. Hiram Carruthers, who looks like the bust of Beethoven, to help them figure out scientific end of the investigation.

I think the first three quarters make up the best parts of the story, because the last quarter exposes the same mistake that ruined Robbery Without Violence (1957). I like it when a pure, fair play detective story is placed in a science-fiction setting, but hate it when a science-fiction solution is used in a regular looking detective story. It's plain cheating!

There are, however, mitigating circumstances. Firstly, there's proper foreshadowing and even clueing that the plot is slowly inching towards science-fiction territory (e.g. the autopsy report). Secondly, the science-fiction element, weirdly enough, didn't feel like a cop-out explanation and this probably has to do that the method, like most new sciences, was in its infancy – therefore imperfect and unrefined. Something that needed fine-tuning. This treatment was very different from the way the science-fiction element was handled in Robbery Without Violence, which even had a bad, comic book-like villain who talked about getting delivering the world into the palm of his hand. However, this didn't diminish my disappointment that the teleportation problem didn't have really clever and original solution.

This makes the problem of the empty, dust-covered house bare of any footprints the only real impossible problem of the story. Interestingly, the idea behind this trick is not entirely new and have come across two variations on this trick, but Fearn applied it here to an entire house.

So, on a whole, I was not too let down by What Happened to Hammond? The first three solid quarters read like an early police procedural without the troubled cop trope and a good stand-in impossible crime, but hated that the second impossibility relied on pure science-fiction – which simply does not work for me. I'm too much of a purist to go along with it. Still, I appreciated Fearn clued his way to this U-turn and the book is a decent, middling effort in his body of work, but not one you'll find on my inevitable list of favorite Fearn mystery novels.

On a final note, you might also be interested in reading John Norris' take on this book, which he reviewed here.

The Leading Light

"We've lost a room."

- Ronald Denham (Carter Dickson's "The Crime in Nobody's Room," collected in The Department of Queer Complaints, 1940)

Vision Sinister (1954) revived two of John Russell Fearn's popular series-detectives, Dr. Hiram Carruthers and Chief Inspector Mortimer Garth, but the return of these two characters to the printed page was not entirely spotless. The background details behind the original publication of "this long-lost impossible crime" was supplied to me by the sage of all things Fearn, Philip Harbottle.

During the early 1950s, Fearn signed "an exclusive 5 year contract" with Scion, which obliged him to deliver them two science-fiction novels every year and nothing else – legally forbidding him "to write any other kind of fiction" or work for another publisher. Only exception is that Fearn was allowed to continue writing (short) novels for the Toronto Star Weekly. A very lucrative deal for a full-time writer of popular fiction, but the downside of this "manacling agreement" is that it "put the kibosh" on the detective novels he was putting out as "John Slate" and "Hugo Blayn." Harbottle accurately described this as "a criminal act."

This contract lasted until the Autumn of 1952, when Scion was "fined for gangster obscenity" and the financial strain forced them to default on Fearn's payment. Fearn canceled the contract and briefly freelanced in all genres. Even reselling some of his older material.

Scion eventually recovered and asked Fearn to resume his old contract, but he cleverly renegotiated the terms and was allowed to write whatever he wanted, as long as he delivered them two science-fiction novels every month, which proved to be no problem whatsoever – writing all kinds of fiction for various publications and publishers. A year later the contract changed again when Scion asked Fearn to take over the editing of Vargo Statten Science Fiction Magazine. Fearn would now deliver "one issue of his magazine in lieu of one SF novel," but, more importantly, the second book in his contract were now allowed to be westerns, romances or detective novels. And only occasionally a science-fiction novel.

So Carruthers and Garth were brought back out of retirement and, as "Hugo Blayn," Fearn delivered a manuscript to Scion of Vision Sinister, but was horrified when they slapped "the Nat Karta sleaze detective label on it." A house-name that originated with Muir-Watson and was sold to Scion. The house-name was used "on more than 40 lurid American gangster novels."  On top of that, the printer erroneously placed "Phil Casey Crime Reporter Plays It Tough" as a banner headline on the front-cover. It was "a template they were using at the time on the previous Nat Karta title."

Fearn "played hell" over these mistakes and the Blayn name was restored on his next book,
The Silvered Cage (1955), but when the contract with Scion's successors, Dragon Books, expired in November, 1955, he "refused to renew it."

Like nearly all of his work, Vision Sinister drifted into obscurity upon Fearn's passing in 1960 and the only person who appears to have discussed the book in recent years is John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books. This persistent obscurity is despite two relatively recent reprints. Vision Sinister was reissued as a (limited) large-print edition by the Linford Mystery Library in 2005 and a regular paperback edition was published by Borgo Press in 2012.

So how does the plot stack up? The central problem of the plot, a witnessed murder in a room that vanishes alongside its occupants, recalled the impossibilities from two novels by two of Fearn's fellow fellows of the locked room master, John Dickson Carr – namely the visions from Paul Halter's La ruelle fantôme (The Phantom Passage, 2005) and the impossible murder from Jean-Paul Török's L'enigme du Monte Verita (The Riddle of the Monte Verita, 2007). John Norris even called the trick behind the disappearing room "the closest thing he came to matching his idol in sheer ingenuity," but with an explanation that is more in line with the scientific (locked room) stories by Arthur Porges. A writer he's perhaps closer related to than Carr

Vision Sinister begins when Cynthia Harwood takes her friend, Janice Worthing, to the photographic laboratory of her fiance, Terry Hewlett, which is located in a basement room in "a dismal neighborhood of fitfully winking gaslights and damply gleaming pavements." The door to the laboratory has a small plate screwed to it with the following message and instruction:

"Terence Hewlett, Photographer. Dark Room. Please look through Inspection Shutter and if Red Light is On there will be delay in answering door."

Cynthia drew back "a small eye-width slide set in the door" and peered through it, but what she say beyond the locked door horrified her. A slim, mid-blonde girl in an amethyst-colored evening dress is laying across a heavy table and is struggling with a man in a white overall who's towering above her. Cynthia recognizes the man as her fiance, Terry, while Janice has to see how the glittering knife he was holding is plunged into the girl. Their subsequent screams attracts the attention of the caretaker and he immediately fetches a policeman, before opening the door with a spare key, but what they find behind the locked door astonished the two women – a bare and empty room!

So "two perfectly sane young women" observed a fully equipped photographic laboratory in which a murder was committed and, while they never moved an inch from the spot at the door, the murderer, his victim and "the whole works" had simply evaporated from existence.

A short time later, the body of a young woman, clad in an amethyst-colored dress and a stab wound in the chest, is found partially buried in a place McCarthy's Slag.

The dead woman is identified as a model and amateur actress, Sandra Melbrane, who was "one of the leading lights" in a local cine club, of which Hewlett was the chairman, as well as being connected to the Yellow Room Players – a local dramatic group. So this established a link between the various characters involved, but left the police with a pretty puzzle of how she, along with her murderer, vanished from a locked and guarded basement room. Or how every piece of equipment disappeared alongside with them.

The dyspeptic Chief Inspector Mortimer "Morty" Garth is completely baffled and decides to call in the help of the ex-boffin "who looks like a bust of Beethoven," Dr. Hiram Carruthers, but his initial inspection of the basement room even puzzles him. Carruthers even briefly shows a human emotion known as self-doubt ("it surely isn't possible that I—Carruthers—can be wrong in my theory?"). Nevertheless, he slowly, but surely, pieces together an answer to the vanished room based on such clues as a curve in the wall, a broken bell and a plug socket. An this answer is as ingenious as it's original, which is both a strength and a weakness of the plot. 

I think the case-hardened armchair detective, or simply an observant reader, can discern the shapes and shadows that outline the truth. You should not have too much of a problem with identifying the murderer or this person's motive. You can probably even make a good guess as to the nature of the locked room trick, but the exact, technical, details is a different story altogether, but the fantastic illusion is certainly possible and the founding principle behind this technique has very deep roots – which extend as far back as the early-and mid 1800s. My only qualm is how this trick was introduced into that basement room. Was this really possible in the 1950s?

Anyway, the locked room trick is not the only aspect of the plot that betrayed Fearn's credentials as a science-fiction author who had a finger on the pulse of scientific and technological progress.

Fascinatingly, the story features an early model of an answering machine with a tape recorder, which is used by Carruthers to match the voice of the murderer with the person who left a message on the answering machine. A technique that involved a film projector and photo-electric equipment, which showed whether two different voice recordings were by the same person when "the jumping lines on the screen" exactly synchronized. So this book is not only a locked room mystery, but also qualifies as a scientific detective story.

Agatha Christie once said in one of her books that "crime is terribly revealing" and this is definitely the case with Vision Sinister, because the fingerprints of Fearn's personality are all over the plot and writing.

Fearn wrote Vision Sinister after he had been absent from the genre for several years, due to his contractual obligations, but upon his return, he sank his entire heart and soul into the plot. There's the elaborate, ambitiously constructed (impossible) crime and the presence of then cutting-edge technology. This really is what distinguishes Fearn's work from other mystery writers. And then there's the presence of a cine club in the story's background, which is a personal touch as Fearn himself stood at the head of a similar club (c.f. my review of Pattern of Murder, 2006).

All in all, Vision Sinister is, plot-wise, perhaps not the most perfect example of the traditional, fair-play detective story, but agree with John Norris that the sheer ingenuity of the (locked room) plot is something to be admired. And the same goes for the technological aspect of the story. Something that can only be described as visionary and the analyses of voice recordings anticipates modern-day forensic detective-series such as CSI. So, yeah, I found this to be an interesting and engrossing read for all of those reasons.

I read and reviewed three of Fearn's detective novels, back to back, but I'll be taking a break from his work for the moment. However, you've not read the last about him on this blog, because there are a ton of his titles cluttering my TBR-pile and wish list, but I'll probably save most of them for 2018. Yes, that leaves open the possibility for one before this year draws to a close. Who knows. So stay tuned.

Update 13-12-2017: Philip Harbottle emailed me to kindly point out a number of mistakes in my post, which have now been corrected. And, in my own defense, I reconstructed the back-story of Fearn, Scion and Vision Sinister from a scattershot of sources and emails. A piss-poor defense, I know, but it's the only one I have to offer.

Turn of the Screws

"The perfect crime cannot exist because of these little unexpected factors."

- Miss Maria Black (John Russell Fearn's One Remained Seated, 1946)

John Russell Fearn was a prolific, full-time writer, who dabbled in a medley of genres, but, as busy as he was, he always found the time that could be carved out of his writing schedule and redistributed those precious hours to his cherished hobby – homemade movies and the cinema. Fearn was "the proud owner of a 9.5 film projector" and used to show silent, black-and-white movies from the 1920s to his friends at his home. I suspect those friends were a part of the cine-club he had founded.

A club of early movie buffs who made and acted in their own (homemade) film productions, which included a silent movie, titled Unfinished Journey, based on a long-since lost manuscript by Fearn about "an impossible murder on the railway." Lamentably, only "a few pages of the script survive." Fearn was also "an inveterate cinema goer in the 30s" and patronized the cinema twice a week. A habit, or character-trait, he passed on to one of his literary children, Miss Maria Black, who even investigated a murder at her local cinema in One Remained Seated (1946).

I would not be surprised if Edna May Oliver's portrayal of Stuart Palmer's Miss Hildegarde Withers influenced the creation Miss Maria Black. After all, Fearn probably saw the movie adaptations of The Penguin Pool Murders (1931) and Murder on the Blackboard (1932) in the thirties. I commented on the possible connection between Miss Withers and Miss Black in my review of Black Maria, M.A. (1944).

Arguably, the most important chapter in his life as a film whizz and cinema-goer came during the darkest days of the Second World War. 

Fearn was declared medically unfit for combat and began to work at an aircraft factory in order to contribute to the war effort, but an opportunity landed in his lap during the second year of the war when a befriended cinema manager had began to lose projectionists "like wildfire" to the war-machine – eventually offering the position of (chief) projectionist to his well-known patron. Needless to say, Fearn was only an amateur with his roots in the silent movie era and had to spin the manager a tall tale about his experience, but the bulk of the technical work came down on the shoulders of his invaluable assistant. A sixteen-year-old trainee projectionist, Robert Simms, who ran the projection room once the door closed behind them.

This cross-generational relationship could have been a problematic one, but Fearn "freely confessed his lack of knowledge" of the modern equipment and was only too happy to allow Simms to be in charge behind the scenes. Simms recalled that the eccentric author was "utterly disarming" and they got along "like a house on fire." And added that, while he ran the projection room, Fearn often entertained "the staff with his astonishing feats of prestidigitation." Fearn was also an amateur magician and a member of the Magic Circle. No wonder I like the man so much! 

You can find more details of Fearn's time as chief projectionist at Blackpool's down-market Empire cinema in Philip Harbottle's introduction to his science-fiction novel The Voice of the Conqueror (1954). 

So you can say safely state that Fearn was an experienced amateur when it came to film in all of its aspects and his knowledge, as well as his personal experiences, turned up several times in his work. I already referred to One Remained Seated and noted in my review of the book, which dates back to February of this year, that the story is fairly unique where its background is concerned, because at the time I only knew of two detective novels that (partially) took place inside a cinema – namely P.R. Shore's obscure The Death Film (1929) and the fourth victim in Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders (1936) was murdered inside a movie theater. However, I have learned since then that Fearn penned a second detective novel with a cinema as setting. And it's an absolute gem!

Last week, Harbottle had a guest-post on this blog, titled "The Detective Fiction of John Russell Fearn," in which he recommended the posthumously published Pattern of Murder (2006) and provided a back-story to the book that had existed as an unpublished manuscript for almost half a century! 

Fearn had originally titled the manuscript Many a Slip and was bylined as by "Hugo Blayn," which he had previously used for his Dr. Hiram Carruthers and Chief Inspector Garth novels, but the manuscript was rejected by his old UK hardcover publisher in 1957 – presumably on account of the shrinking lending library market and "publishers were tightening their belts." Thankfully, the book eventually got published, under its brand new title, by the Linford Mystery Library and Wildside Press. 

Pattern of Murder is a very well-written, shrewdly plotted inverted detective story that can stand comparison with the best titles of this particular form of crime-fiction. Specifically the technical aspects of the plot are incredibly clever and the murder itself can be considered an impossible crime.

The story's antagonist, whose cunning mind and impulsive actions drive the plot, is the chief projectionist at the Cosy Cinema, Terry Lomond, who has been making money on the side by "buying and selling substandard movie equipment" – all of it property of the cinema. It's "quite a racket with some projectionists" and netted him a tidy sum of two-hundred pounds. Foolishly, he gambles his profits away at the horse races, when he over heard a hot tip, but the horse (with the great name Pirate's Cutlass) came in second. And worst of all, Terry phoned in his last-minute bet to his bookie and the money he now owed him got pick-pocketed at the racetrack. So he's now two-hundred pounds in the hole and no apparent means to scrap the money together.

Once "a chap starts going on the wrong track" he has "a habit of getting deeper in" and Terry is running down that track like the devil was on his tail.

Terry happened to be present in the owner-manager's office when the head cashier, Madge Tansley, put away a cash-box containing over two-hundred pounds and surreptitiously obtained the safe combination. So he decided to stage a burglary at the cinema, but Murphy Law's is dogging his every step and is practically caught in the act by one of the usherettes, Very Holdsworth. However, she isn't exactly squeaky clean herself and this, initially, compelled her into silence. Only problem is that the burglary places the second projectionist, Sidney "Sid" Eldridge, in an awkward position and Vera told Terry she would not allow Sid to take the fall for his crime. And this placed him on a road of no return. 

As an usherette, Vera always occupies a tip-up seat fixed to the paneling at the side of the staircase during screenings. This position allowed her to see people approaching up the second half of the stairs, but Terry notices that the rearmost house-light hung directly over the tip-up seat and muses that if a house-light globe came down it would hit Vera dead on – which gave him a terrifyingly brilliant idea. I won't go into exact details, but the basic is that he would "loosen the screws to danger point" and uses vibrations to give the screws a final turn. And bring down the house-light globe at the exact moment of his choosing. A truly diabolical scheme! 

I've debated with myself whether it would've been better had Fearn plotted Pattern of Murder along the same lines as his other excellent inverted mystery novel, Except for One Thing (1947), which showed the reader who the culprit was, but not how the crime was committed or what had happened to the body. This approach would have turned the book into a full-blown impossible crime story, because Terry was in the projection room with Sid when the globe came crashing down and the light-fixture was bare of any traces of sabotage. Only thing Terry had to do was loosening the screws and use sound-manipulation to do the rest. There would have been a scintillating array of clues to help you pick apart the how of the murder. 

On the other hand, part of the attraction of the story is that the reader is shown every step Terry takes towards his own doom and the preparations for this apparently perfect murder is the absolute highlight. You get to see the germ of the idea form, watch the experiments and fine-tuning of the plan. And, finally, appreciate the less-than-perfect execution of the plan, because (of course) something almost goes wrong and Terry's intervention would provide another clue to Sid that not all is what it seems.  

You see, Sid was very fond of Vera and becomes convinced there was more to her death than a mere accident. Slowly, he begins to piece together the aforementioned clues, which consist of a sliver of glass, a vandalized sound-track and a doctored film, but the gem-stone clues are the patterns in the dust discovered on the top of a still-case – a "queer beauty of circles, whirligigs and crescents." All of them perfectly formed.  

As you probably deduced from my description of the plot, the last chapter ends with a final confrontation between Terry and Sid, but how that pans out is something you'll have find out yourself. Only thing I'll say is that (IMHO) the ending could have been more powerful had Terry, sort of, gotten away with it. The manager-owner of the cinema, Mark Turner, knew of Terry's criminal tendencies and sworn to "shift heaven and earth to get rid of him." So after his confrontation with the second projectionist, Terry should have been turned out on his ear into the rainy darkness in a way that would make the reader say, "yeah, you got away with murder, but what have you got to show for it?" That being said, the ending Fearn went with was not bad at all. And neatly cleaned everything up for the characters who were left behind. I just thought the ending was a little bit standard for such an excellent and original crime novel.

So, all in all, Pattern of Murder is an ace crime novel with an authentic background and an inventive murder method, which qualifies as an impossible crime, showing that the author was as adept at writing (character-driven) inverted mysteries as he was at (plot-focused) tales of detection. I recommend this one without hesitation and as a particular treat for fans of the inverted detective story. 

Just a heads up for my next post... I'm going to take a stab at another title that was recommended by Harbottle in his guest-post from last week.

An Almost Perfect Crime

"If ever you make up your mind to commit a murder, don't make the mistake of trying to be clever."

- Dr. Benjamin Trancred (G.H.D. & M. Cole's "Too Clever by Half," collected in Detection Medley, 1939)

Except for One Thing (1947) seem to have been the debut for one of John Russell Fearn's myriad of pennames, namely "Hugo Blayn," which he used for two of his series-characters, Chief Inspector Garth and Dr. Hiram Carruthers, who occasionally worked together on the same case – e.g. Vision Sinister (1954) and The Silvered Cage (1955). So the book also marked the first appearance of Garth.

There is, however, a structural difference between Except for One Thing and the subsequent titles published under the Blayn byline, such as The Five Matchboxes (1948), which were all impossible crime novels. All except for this first one.

Except for One Thing can best be described as a Columbo-style inverted detective story with some of the trappings of an Anthony Berkeley crime novel (c.f. Trial and Error, 1937). And the plot is about as good as anything associated with two names. I've only read less than ten of Fearn's detective novels, but this one ranks as one of his best and has a killer twist in the tail regarding the disposal of the body.

The opening of the book introduces the lead character, Richard Harvey, who finds himself with two lives on his conscience before too long, but some readers today may find his motive to be wholly unconvincing – since it would hardly be a reason to kill someone in today's society. However, you could be sued for "a breach of promise" when you broke your promise to marry and this could have ruined a man in the past.

So this could lead to a very unpleasant situation when the woman in question refuses her "heart balm," or severance pay, and insists on trapping her reluctant fiance in a loveless marriage.

Valerie Hadfield is a beautiful blonde, but ice-cold, actress playing a lead role in a long-running musical comedy, which is where Harvey saw her for the first time. Harvey became completely enamored with her, but had to come to the sad conclusion that the woman he had seen laughing, singing and making love on the stage was in actuality "carved out of a glacier." Slowly, Harvey came to the realization that had fallen for the role she was playing and that their (secret) engagement was a mistake, but Valerie simply refuses to break the engagement and has enough to potentially ruin his reputation – such as a pile of passionate love letters and an inscribed cigarette box. She's determined to marry him in order to climb the social ladder in polite society.

You see, Harvey is a wealthy and distinguished research chemist, who occasionally works for Scotland Yard, but Valerie promises to start a scandal that'll tarnish his name "in every club and scientific association in town." And this would effectively prevent him from marrying the girl he has been seeing for the past eight months, Joyce Prescott.

So "an insidious thought" began to fester in his mind. A thought that, ironically, germinated into tangible plans after a chance encounter with his policeman friend, Chief Inspector Mortimer Garth. At the Stag Club, Garth was explaining to a follow member the difficulties of committing "the perfect crime" in an age of science, because "it's impossible to be rid of a corpse so completely that nobody can find it" and referred to several celebrated failures – like the gruesome murders committed by Dr. Crippen and William Sheward. Harvey is of the opinion that "perfect crimes do exist" and we never hear of them "because they're perfect."

Harvey has known Garth for many years and has come to look upon him as a machine, "a brilliant analytical thinker," but the inspector himself admitted he was not infallible. So could he lead Garth down the garden path?

What follows gives the reader a front-row seat to the planning, and execution, of a carefully plotted murder, which has both flashes of brilliance and nuggets of utter stupidity. One of the more cleverest aspects of the plan is his creation of an alter ego, named "Rixton Williams," who's cast as Valerie's secret admirer and prime-suspect in her disappearance. Harvey had a pretty clever reason for using such a rare and unusual name like Rixton, but the observant armchair detective will also pick up on some of his first small mistakes.

Like the withdrawal of two thousand pounds and depositing the money at a different bank under the name of Rixton Williams. However, the real mistakes begin to pile up the moment he finishes strangling Valerie.

Someone saw him, as Rixton, carrying Valerie's body to his car, but told this witness that she was blind drunk. There is, however, only a single bottle of champagne found at the home he got under his alias and the place where the murder was committed, but Garth, astutely, observed that's impossible to get dead drunk "a third of a bottle of champagne." A second witness, Valerie's chauffeur, forces Harvey to improvise a "second and entirely unrehearsed murder," which both provide all the material for a good, old-fashioned cat-and-mouse game between the Scotland Yard detective and the well-known research chemist – recalling the best from Columbo. A comparison strengthened when Garth tries to involve Harvey in the investigation. And the latter is never quite sure how much Garth really knows.

There is also a human aspect to the story, as Harvey is seriously suffering under the strain of having snuffed out two lives, which causes him to lose a lot of sleep and slowly his mind begins to deteriorate. When the story began, you could still sympathize with his situation, but, by the end, he has become functionally unhinged and even began to taunt Garth by sneakily showing him the truth. And gloated over how he had outsmarted the man from Scotland Yard. One component of his plan definitely warranted some gloating on his part.

I alluded to this at the beginning of the blog-post, but what really helped made this book standout is the answer to the only question readers have to figure out themselves before reaching the end of the story: how did Harvey manage to dispose of Valerie's body without leaving "an atom of proof that murder was done." The solution is fairly clued and the method is as clever as it's inventive. You'll never forget where the body ended up. I would rank this aspect of the plot alongside the John Dickson Carr's classic "The House in Goblin Wood" (collected in The Third Bullet and Other Stories of Detection, 1954). The solutions for the disappearance of a body are very different in both stories, but you'll never forget either explanation!

I guess that's what attracts me to Fearn's work. He may have been a second-string pulp writer, but he evidently was very fond of constructing plots and always seemed to try to be as original as possible. Or, at least, attempt to find a different angle to an old trick. Occasionally, this resulted in a plot elevating one of his books above what a second-stringer should be capable of doing. Thy Arm Alone (1947) is one example of this and Except for One Thing is another. 

Highly recommended to everyone who loves Columbo, inverted detective stories or a good and original how-dun-it. So you can expect more reviews of Fearn in the future. 

A Skeleton in the Cupboard

"...Once any dunder-headed investigator tumbles to the trick, the murderer's done for. Of course, he's done for whatever trick he uses, once they know how he faked his alibi or concealed his weapon; but he's finished, tied, and triple-damned when the impossible situation is shown not to be impossible at all."

- Sir Henry Merrivale (Carter Dickson's The Peacock Feather Murders, 1937)

Last month, I posted a review of John Russell Fearn's The Silvered Cage (1955), originally published as by "Hugo Blayn," which was a late entry in the author's Dr. Hiram Carruthers series, but the official policeman from that book, Chief Inspector Mortimer Garth, cleared up at least two cases on his own – appearing solo in Except for One Thing (1947) and The Five Matchboxes (1948). Dr. Carruthers only seems to have appeared unaccompanied in Flashpoint (1950). So that would make What Happened to Hammond? (1951), Vision Sinister (1954) and The Silvered Cage crossovers between two different (series) characters.

From what I gathered, Carruthers becomes entangled with Garth's investigations when a problem has all the hallmarks of an impossible crime, however, this is not a rule set in stone. One of Garth's solo cases concerns a fatal shooting inside a locked and guarded room that he managed to explain without the assistance of the scientific consultant of Scotland Yard.

The Five Matchboxes opens with a domestic scene in the middle-class home of a modest stockbroker, Granville Collins, who's quarreling with his wife, Beatrice, over him scolding their 12-year-old son, Derek. So a pretty normal household by all accounts, but the underpinning reason for Granville's irritation will reveal itself to be a key element in his impending death. A crime that has not yet been committed, but already is giving a certain police inspector indigestion.

Someone has dispatched an ominous letter to the Assistant Commissioner, warning the authorities that Granville Collins, at a specific time, will "be shot in his office in Terancy Street," which ended with the suggestion to "guard the place carefully" - a task the A.C. delegated to Chief Inspector Garth and Sergeant Whittaker. Well, they keep a close eye on the place during the period indicated in the letter, but they can only sit and watch as a plainclothes policeman, "detailed to watch the inside of the building," hears a gunshot emanating from the locked office. A glass pane of the door has to be smashed to gain entrance and found the stockbroker sprawled beneath one of the windows. Shot through the heart! On the desk blotter, set down neatly in a row, are five empty matchboxes.

Fearn was a great admirer of John Dickson Carr and nowhere is his adoration for the undisputed master of the locked room ploy more apparent then here. Obviously, the explanation for the apparent impossible murder of Collins leans on plot-ideas from a number of Carr's Dr. Gideon Fell novels, but Fearn has to be complimented for the way in which he repurposed these ideas – using the victim's dyspepsia, the empty matchboxes, a sash window and a freak occurrence to explain how the murder was committed. So the locked room angle does not break any new ground. However, the elements were used very well indeed.

Something else that shows Carr's influence on Fearn is the eccentric behavior of the victim when he was at his office: Collins used to walk sedately up, and down, the stairs of the building, but would ran along a dark corridor like a bat out of hell. The explanation is easy enough, but helped to give the story a "sense of ghostliness" and strangeness often found in Carr's own work. And the behavior tied-in with a secondary plot-thread that was woven into the main plot.

After the halfway mark, Garth uncovers a link with a fifteen-year-old murder case, known in the newspapers as "Clothes Cupboard Mystery," in which a rich recluse, Mrs. Beryl Cleveland, was found "suspended by the neck from the roof beam of a hall clothes cupboard" in somebody else's home – who turned out to be closely associated with Collins. Garth reasons the truth behind this murder based on grass stains on the victim's clothes, the cupboard and Collin's behavior. A good and solid example of Fearn's preferred method of plotting he called webwork, or webworking, which is a technique that should please plot-oriented mystery readers.

I suppose this makes The Five Matchboxes also a predecessor of a present-day adherent of Carr, namely Paul Halter, who wrote some locked room mysteries with links to past murders.

So the plot, while not a classic of its kind, is still a pretty competent job by this second-stringer among the Golden Age mystery writers, but the book has one notable weakness: the who-dun-it aspect of the crime is underwhelming. The pool of genuine suspects is very shallow and barely leaves any room to actually surprise the reader with the revelation of the killer's identity. You should not pick this one up if you're looking for something along the lines of Agatha Christie. However, the previously mentioned webwork plotting, which makes a pretty conundrum out of the how of the crime and how the characters are connected with one another, is pleasing enough to make up for that weakness.

Lastly, I have to point something out about Fearn's various series-characters: he seems to have been better at creating normal, down-to-earth detectives than he was at creating odd and eccentric sleuths.

Adam Quirke from The Lonely Astronomer (1954) must be one of the most annoying characters in both the mystery and SF genre. Chief Inspector Douglas Gossage from The Crimson Rambler (1947) is only memorable for his unhealthy, brick-red complexion and the previously mentioned Dr. Hiram Carruthers is considered to be obnoxious, but the colorless Garth and Miss Maria Black (the Miss Hildegarde Withers of England) are very normal characters – who are far more convincing as detectives than the more eccentric counterparts. However, you have to keep mind that Fearn wrote under forty-some different pennames. So not every single one of his creations is going to be top-drawer stuff.

All in all, I found The Five Matchboxes to be a competent detective story with some clever aspects about it, but you have to keep in mind that Fearn was a second stringer and does not quite reach the same heights as his more famous contemporaries. However, by his own standards, this was vastly superior to such novels as The Silvered Cage and only a step or two behind the best titles from his Miss Maria Black series, e.g. Thy Arm Alone (1947) and Death in Silhouette (1950).

By the way, am I the only one, alongside John Norris, who has not only read Fearn, but did so with some enthusiasm? Even as a second-stringer he's grossly underrated and deserves to be remembered as a high-spirited player of, as Carr described it, the Grandest Game in the World.