The Tattoo Murders (1949) by John Russell Fearn

Philip Harbottle is the editor, writer and literary agent who has written extensively on an amazingly productive, pulp-era mystery and science-fiction writer, John Russell Fearn, whose voluminous bibliography has a complicated, maze-like publication history – strewn across numerous genres, publishers and an infantry of nom de plumes. Harbottle has learned how to navigate this maze over many decades and told me the story of an unpublished, presumably lost manuscript. A presumably lost detective story that may be in print today!

In 1947, Fearn wrote to a writer friend "to say that he had completed a detective novel," entitled Partners in Crime, on which nothing is known beyond that the manuscript was "promptly sold" to an Indian publishing house. Harbottle has spent years trying to find if it had ever been published in India, but was never able "to make contact with any Indian biblio buff" to verify or dispel this possibility.

So it looked as if the manuscript was either lost or had an extremely obscure existence in India. And than he stumbled across a copy of one of Fearn's many little-known detective novels.

While reading Murder's a Must (1949), Harbottle noted that the book-title didn't fit the story and had probably been altered by the publisher ("a common practice at the time"), but Partners in Crime actually "fits the storyline perfectly" – deciding they were the same story and gave up on trying to find it in India. Some time later, Harbottle arranged to have Murder's a Must/Partners in Crime reprinted by Wildside, but they insisted the title to be changed to The Tattoo Murders. Last year, it was reprinted a second time, as an ebook, by Endeavour Media.

The Tattoo Murders opens on a similar note as Except for One Thing (1947) with Derek Cantrill attempting to break his engagement with Vera Bradmore, who's known to the customers of her Gown Salon as Madame Luchaire, but hardly everone knew she came from "the London gutter" of the East End. Cantrill has met a charming, educated and refined society woman, Mary Hilliard. However, Bradmore has no intention to get rid of her big diamond engagement ring and threatens to drag him into a courtroom for breach of promise. A second plot-thread introduced in this is chapter concerns the head saleswoman of Gown Salon, Claire Wilton, who was unceremoniously dismissed by Bradmore. Wilton warned her that she hasn't heard the last of this.

When Bradmore arrives at her home, a dark shadow comes into the apartment through the window and asks her about the whereabouts of her two sisters, who are triplets, after which she's smothered to death with a pillow and has her pajama ripped apart – revealing the name "MARY" tattooed on her back. A medical examination showed that "the tattoo was put on Vera's back in her childhood." It's an intriguing premise, to be sure!

Divisional Inspector Davidson grapples with the case for a while, but eventually has to hand it over to "a queer sort of chap" from Scotland Yard.

Chief Inspector Hancock is a gimmicky policeman very much like the brick-red complexioned Chief Inspector Douglas Gossage from The Crimson Rambler (1947). Hancock is an easy going man who likes "to talk more about gardening than anything else," but by the time he had gone, suspects or witnesses had told him "everything he wanted to know." Some criminals had assumed he was a fool, misled by his easy going geniality, but they were doing years in the cooler for "underestimating the enemy." Hancock is a pretty bland character and only there to play the role of detective, however, he plays that role decently enough. And even deduces the gender of the murderer long before identifying this person.

So, The Tattoo Murders is not really limited by its flat characterization, a common weakness in Fearn's detective stories, but that this time he was unable to deliver on any of the good or promising ideas he introduced – from the coded tattoos to teasing an impossible crime. I'm being very kind by referring to the three tattoos as a code. The triplets were tattooed as little girls by their father, but you have to be pretty close to a single digit IQ to tattoo such as simple and general reminder on your own children. Why? Now if there had been tattooed lines, along with the names, forming a map when overlaid or placed next to each other that would have made all the difference.

Unfortunately, this was not the case, but I did liked the final lines of the book that resolved this plot-thread.

A second, unfulfilled promise was the murder of the second sister, Elsie Jackson, who was found drowned on the beach without any footprints around the body, but Hancock almost immediately destroyed my hopes for an impossible crime. A good, well thought out no-footprints-in-the-sand puzzle, wedged in the middle of the book, would have probably elevated this otherwise average, second-string detective novel into at least a title-of-interest for fanatical locked room readers. Fearn's clumsily handling of one of the primarily clues was adorable, but telegraphed the murderer's identity the moment it was introduced, because the reader has seen the murderer at work – making this a rather unsuccessful detective story.

And on a slightly unrelated note, how is it possible that the husbands of two of the sisters either had only glimpsed their tattoo by accident when swimming or completely unaware of it? Did they still have bed sheets with holes in them in the late 1940s?

Still, I enjoyed my time with this relatively short, briskly written crime story, which stands closer to Lonely Road Murder (1954) than any of Fearn's purer detective fiction. I suppose you have to be fond of Fearn to enjoy his lesser work like The Tattoo Murders. So a fairly minor novel recommended to readers of Fearn or pulp mysteries.

But wait, there's more! I'm sure a very specific segment of my readers have impatiently waited for me to finally bring up Shisei satsujin jiken (The Tattoo Murder Case, 1948) by Akimitsu Takagi. There's more to this comparison than just a passing resemblance between the book-titles, but it's impossible that one could have influenced the other. That being said, it surely is interesting that two mystery writers, one in England and one in Japan, wrote novels around the same time about a father who tattooed their three daughters. But that's where the similarities end. Most notably, the books display very different attitudes towards tattoos. The Tattoo Murder Case is deeply entrenched in the Japanese world of tattoos, which are deeply ingrained in the cultural and historical backdrop of the story. It's a world were tattooed skin of dead people are collector items. And on the other hand, the tattoos in The Tattoo Murders are merely a feature of the plot. Hancock even remarks "no woman would ever allow her back to be disfigured with a tattoo."

So there you have it. Two books, written around the same time and idea, but worlds apart. This is why even an average, second-string mystery can turn out to be a rewarding read.

The Rattenbury Mystery (1955) by John Russell Fearn

During the forties, John Russell Fearn wrote an introduction to his science-fiction novel, Other Eyes Watching (1946), in which he "revealed that his favorite mystery and detective writer was John Dickson Carr," famously known as the master of the locked room conundrum, but Fearn was as productive in the field of impossible crime fiction as the master himself – e.g. the very Carr-like The Five Matchboxes (1948). Robert Adey observed in Locked Room Murders (1991) that the only mystery novelists who continued to produce locked room puzzles, "in any quantity," after World War II were Carr and Fearn.

So this made me very curious about one of Fearn's little-known, standalone mystery novels, The Rattenbury Mystery (1955), which was originally published as by "Conway Carr." Was it an overlooked locked room novel? According to Philip Harbottle, the plot definitely has some "nice impossible crime resonances." Well, that was more than enough to get me aboard!

The Rattenbury Mystery opens with a young, beautiful woman, named Dorene Grey, leaving the London office of a well-known movie-and theatrical agent, Amos Rattenbury.

Dorene Grey is a country girl who has dreams of entering "the charmed world of Filmdom" and came to London when she saw an advertisement in the local newspaper, but even she can hardly believe the brief interview ended with Rattenbury casually offering her "a small part in a forthcoming film" – walking out of his office immersed in "pleasant daydreams." However, a handsome-looking stranger, Terry Hilton, accosts her on the street and urges her "to beware of Amos Rattenbury."

Hilton tells her there's a reason why Rattenbury is looking for young woman without previous experience in the film industry, because there are hundreds of actresses in the city looking for work. Only they know too much about his "rotten business" practices. So he preys on "innocent young simpletons" who can be dazzled with "the prospect of becoming a shining star," but Hilton's lack of tact is not entirely appreciated. And she decides to go back later that day to sign the contract. They parted with Hilton giving her a silver-plated whistle with "Metropolitan Police" engraved on it. Yes, he handed her a rape-whistle.

Terry Hilton is actually a widely known actor, whose name has topped "the bills from one end of the country to the other," but is also the younger brother of the Assistant Commissioner of Police, Sir Digby Hilton. He immediately drops by his brother to ask his help with prying Dorene Grey from the Rattenbury's clutches. Regrettably, there's very little Sir Digby, or the police in general, can do to help him with his mission, but, when he's about to take his leave, the desk telephone rang with dire news about Rattenbury – who has been found stabbed to death in his private-office. And the last person to have been with him was the now missing Dorene Grey. Even worse, she left a blood-smeared glove behind!

So the police is out in full force to track down and apprehend the angel-faced Dorene Grey, but the plot takes an unexpected turn into the bizarre world of the pulp detective when Terry and Sir Digby attend a movie-screening of Hamlet at the Pantheon Theatre.

Terry plays the leading role and Sir Digby was completely absorbed in the tragedy on the silver screen when the film was suddenly cut short. A figure in an old-fashioned Inverness overcoat, a wide-brimmed felt hat and black mask appeared on the screen against a gray background. This apparition introduced himself to the cinema audience as The Phantom of the Films, "a shade as unsubstantial as the pictures," who confesses to the murder of Rattenbury, but warns to let no man, police officer or private citizen, seek to discover his identity – because he's nothing more than "an elusive figure from the realms of romance" fleeting across the stage before vanishing. This is where the plot of the story slowly began to morph from a traditional, straightforward detective story (c.f. One Remained Seated, 1946) into a pulp-like crime novel akin to Account Settled (1949) or The Man Who Was Not (2005).

During the second half, Terry Hilton and Dorene Grey are reunited. She goes to an old friend of her late father for help, Professor Niccolo Dangelli, who's one of "the foremost scientific criminologist of the present day" and plans on producing his own movie that will reveal the truth to the British public. However, Professor Dangelli turns out to be as much a suspect as detective and appears to be part of vast, far-reaching conspiracy. So I was starting to get a little worried at this point, but more about that later.

I quoted Harbottle, in the opening, saying The Rattenbury Mystery has some nice impossible crime resonances and the murder of Amos Rattenbury can only be described as a quasi-impossible murder. Some would even qualify it as a full-blown impossible murder.

The private-office, where the murder was committed, hardly resembled the proverbial locked room, but, had Dorene not fled the room, she would have witnessed Rattenbury being stabbed by an invisible man! There is, however, an indisputable impossible crime very late in the book: a murdered woman is found in the middle of a patch of ground, of newly turned soil, which was "soft enough to take the lightest footprints," but the only traces the police found were the footprints of the victim – adding another Fearn title to the list Adey overlooked when he compiled Locked Room Murders. The tricks employed here were not too bad, for a pulp-style impossible crime novel, but hardly, as the story claims, "a method hitherto unemployed in the annals of crime." I've seen numerous variation on this particular trick and there's one well-known short story that pioneered it. Still, it was put to good use here and have no complaints about it.

I preferred the first half of The Rattenbury Mystery, as it somewhat reminded me of a Christopher Bush novel, with Terry playing the Ludovic Travers to Sir Digby's Superintendent George Wharton. I wish Fearn had continued to develop the plot along those lines. Nonetheless, the second half, messy as it may look, safely landed on its feet in the final chapter with an ending that was more in line with a traditional detective story. And included the explanation for the (quasi) impossible murders.

The Rattenbury Mystery was an uneven, but fun, detective novel covered with Fearn's (stylistic) fingerprints. Not only did the plot betray his pulp roots, but also laid bare his love for the cinema and film making. Fearn was an amateur cineast who made his own movies and this reflected in the reconstruction of Rattenbury's murder in Professor Dangelli's movie (The Phantom Stabber). So definitely a recommended read for fans of Fearn and the fanatical locked room reader, like yours truly.

Murder's a Must: My Top 5 Favorite Detective Novels by John Russell Fearn

There are prolific writers and then you have John Russell Fearn. An astoundingly productive genre writer with a fertile imagination, producing science-fiction, westerns and detective stories at a rapid rate, who frequently contributed to some of the well-known periodicals of his day – such as the Toronto Star Weekly, Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories. A vast amount of Fearn's novels and short stories was published under an army of pennames he had at his disposal. Nearly fifty in total!

Over the past three years, I have reviewed more than twenty of his detective novels and short stories. And they fall in a number of sub-categories of the genre: impossible crime tales (The Five Matchboxes, 1948), pulp-thrillers (Account Settled, 1949), a detective western (Ghost Canyon, 1950), science-fiction mysteries (The Master Must Die, 1953), regular crime novels (Lonely Road Murder, 1954) and a short story collection of juvenile detective stories (The Haunted Gallery, 2011).

So I decided it was finally time to compile a list of the five best mystery novels from my favorite second-stringer. The entries are ordered chronologically.

Thy Arm Alone (1947) is a normally-looking, apparently dime-a-dozen village mystery novels revolving around "the belle of the village," Betty Shapely, who has three principle admirers and she loves to pit "one against the other" with complete disregard for their feelings – which makes it hardly surprising when one of them is found inside the wreck of a burning car. What makes this novel stand out is its audacious, one-of-a-kind solution.

A "once in a lifetime" opportunity the culprit immediately pounced upon and this gave the book a most satisfying conclusion.

My fellow locked room fanboy, "JJ" of The Invisible Event, "really did not like this book" and called it "a shunpike on the roads of detective fiction." It goes without saying that he's wrong, but wanted to include his review here as a contrast because Thy Arm Alone is one of those stories that will divide opinion almost right down to the middle (i.e. are you willing to overlook flaws in the story-telling in exchange for genuine originality?). The book is still in print. So you can decide for yourself.

Except for One Thing (1947) is a splendid inverted mystery novel, à la Columbo, pitting Chief Inspector Mortimer Garth of Scotland Yard against a wealthy and distinguished research chemist, Richard Harvey, who had been engaged in secret to Valerie Hadfield – a beautiful, blonde actress with an icy heart. Harvey has come to regret his decision, but Hadfield refuses to take her heart balm and is determined to make him her trophy husband. So he's left with only one alternative. Valerie Hadfield inexplicably disappears and a cat-and-mouse game between Garth and Harvey ensues reminiscent of the best Columbo episodes.

However, Fearn saved his best for last and came up with a shocking, but devilishly ingenious, explanation as to how Harvey disposed of the body. A clever and inventive plot written as an inverted mystery with a classic cat-and-mouse game between detective and murderer.

Death in Silhouette (1950) is a locked room puzzle with a two-pronged solution and the last novel of the Miss Maria Black series, in which one of her former students invites her to an engagement party. But when she arrived, the groom-to-be was found dangling from a rope in the cellar with the door locked from the inside. A classic locked room situation with two explanations, a simplistic and a complex one, which play out at the same time. You have to read for yourself how this is handled, but Fearn has to be complimented for revitalizing a simplistic, shop-worn old trick. A locked room trick complimented by the more intricate and involved plot on which it intervered. And this second locked room trick uses a pulp magazine as a clue!

A second aspect about Death in Silhouette that has to be pointed out is that the story takes place in a working class family populated with ordinary people. This gives the book a very different atmosphere than you would expect from a detective story with an engagement/wedding-theme.

Flashpoint (1950) introduced one of Fearn's most iconic series-detectives, Dr. Hiram Carruthers, who resembles "the traditional bust of Beethoven" and "a sort of general specialist" often consulted by Scotland Yard on crimes of a scientific nature – comparable to the many series-characters created by Arthur Porges. Dr. Hiram Carruthers' first recorded case takes place in his backyard, Halingford, where a fishmonger's shop explodes. The shop owner is killed in the explosion and Dr. Carruthers is asked to help the police explain this apparently impossible explosion. And this is not the only miraculous explosion or fire in the book.

This is very mature novel, for Fearn, with better than average characterization and a murderer who's more difficult to spot than usually, but particularly memorable for the gruesome motive for the destruction of the fishmonger's shop. A cruel, cold-hearted crime, if there ever was one, worthy of a judicial hanging.

Pattern of Murder (2006) is an inverted mystery novel, like Except for One Thing, which can only be described as the finest detective story Fearn ever crafted, but inexplicable remained unpublished until twelve years ago. Fearn drew from his first-hand experience as "an inveterate cinema goer" and briefly worked as chief projectionist during the Second World War. So the background of the story feels authentic, but even better is the plot that is, as John Norris aptly described it, a fascinating "mix of traditional and inverted detective novel plot techniques" with an original murder method – resulting in an unheralded classic of the genre. And that murder method is an impossible crime tailor made for a cinema setting.

Terry Lomond is the chief projectionist of the Cosy Cinema and has a two-hundred pound debt to a horse-racing bookie, which is why he stages a burglary at the cinema, but is practically caught in the act by one of the usherettes. This was the first step on a road of no return. Terry is slowly brought to the decision he has to kill this pesky witness to unsure his own safety. The murder Terry puts together is a technical achievement and unintended left a gem of a clue: pattern of beautiful circles, whirligigs and crescents in the dust. This book stands with head and shoulders above every other title on the list. Fearn may have been a second-string mystery novelist, but here he briefly played first string. Highly recommended!

Lastly, I have to give the previously mentioned The Five Matchboxes an honorary mention, because I think skeptical readers of Fearn, like JJ, will be able to appreciate it. The Five Matchboxes is an obvious homage to Fearn's favorite mystery writer, John Dickson Carr, but the story personally reminded me more of Paul Halter. The solution to the locked room shooting of Granville Collins is pure Carr, while the link to a fifteen-year-old murder case, known as The Clothes Cupboard Mystery, is something you typically find in a Halter novel. In any case, the result is something fans of Carr and Halter can enjoy. Even if it isn't a top-drawer locked room mystery.

One Way Out (2012) by John Russell Fearn and Philip Harbottle

John Russell Fearn is my favorite second-stringer who tragically passed away in 1960 at age 52 and left behind an unfinished manuscript of a detective novel, entitled One Way Out (2012), which had "a very brief cryptic scribble" on the final page "setting out his thoughts on how it finished" – except that the scribble was too obscure to envision his intended ending. Philip Harbottle was unable to make heads nor tails of it and the manuscript was shelved for decades.

One day, Harbottle woke up with "an interpretation of what the notes could have meant" and completed the novel within days, which has since been published by Thorpe and Wildside Press.

What surprised me the most about One Way Out is that it read like an unpolished, first or second draft of a Richard Hull novel. The plot had been largely worked out and it toyed with the inverted detective, which is what reminded me of Hull, but One Way Out lacked the satirical touch of The Murder of My Aunt (1934) and Murder Isn't Easy (1936). And sorely missed a clever twist or gut-punch at the end of the story.

One Way Out begins with three passengers aboard the Scots Express bound for Glasgow: a well-known London financier, Morgan Dale, who's accompanied by his chief clerk of twenty years, Martin Lee. The third person is Dale's "no-good ex-secretary," Janice Elton. Dale had dismissed Elton a fortnight ago on account of her "misplaced romanticism" and having "made love to him on several occasions," which had become "the talk of the staff" – something that could tarnish his reputation. And he has a wife and children to think about. However, Elton refuses to let it go.

Elton confronts Dale in his train compartment and tells him she has been diagnosed with leukemia. She only has a little more than a year left to live, but is determined to leave Dale something remember her by. Something that will knock him from that high perch he's sitting on. 

When Lee returned, Dale bundled him into the compartment and told him Elton had committed suicide by emptying a whole bottle of strychnine. Dale wants to pull the communication cord to immediately warn the proper authorities, but Lee urges him to think their next move through, because her death could be interpreted by the police as murder. Lee finds an incriminating letter in her purse accusing her former employer of murder. So they decide to dispose of the body and destroy all of the potential evidence.

However, Lee is "a deep schemer" who has "an insatiable longing" to turn the tables on his employer and the death of Elton handed him that opportunity, because he didn't destroy the purse or its contents – using it as a lever to begin extracting money from Dale. The first four or five chapters are good and somewhat original treatment of the phrase, "what tangled webs we weave." Unfortunately, the story is derailed when one of these two characters is killed in random, unconnected traffic accident. This effectively deflated the strong opening and intriguing premise of the story.

The place of this character was taken by a tireless policeman, Chief-Inspector Royden of Scotland Yard, who's a police-detective in the tradition of Freeman Wills Croft's Inspector French.

A competent, hardworking policeman who diligently collects fingerprints, assiduously pokes around in ash-heaps and toys with his primary suspect like a cat with a captured mouse. However, I think it would have been more beneficial, in terms of story-telling, had this been a three-way between Dale, Lee and Royden – building counterplot upon counterplot. This was now missing and killed any possible excitement the plot could have generated. It didn't help either that the character who was left behind was completely out of his league against the experienced Chief-Inspector Royden.

One Way Out has a solid premise with an interesting take on the inverted detective story format: the unsurprising consequences of turning a suicide into a suspicious-looking death, but these ideas were never fully developed and you can blame part of that on the premature death of one of the main-characters – who should not have died. At least, not that early in the story. Secondly, there's the bland, all's well that ends well ending bare of any twist or surprise, which made the plot feel even more thread-bare than it already did. As said above, Hull came to mind when I read the opening chapters and kept expecting a similar kind of ending, which made me even suspect the suspiciously innocent-looking Mrs. Dale. But the plot was really as simple as it was presented to the reader.

So this was a very short and very minor crime novel that I can only really recommended to loyal readers of John Russell Fearn. Others might be a little more than underwhelmed by it.

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.

The Master Must Die (1953) by John Russell Fearn

Back in January, 2016, I read John Russell Fearn's The Lonely Astronomer (1954), originally published as by "Volsted Gridban," which was my introduction to the work of this astonishingly prolific English pulp writer and since then have burned through twenty of his detective novels, novellas and short stories – which were as varied in nature as the many genre's he had dabbled in during his thirty-year career.

Fearn had literally turned his hand to every form of detective fiction imaginable: impossible crimes, inverted detective stories, juvenile mysteries, genre hybrids, thrillers and even an early precursor of the contemporary crime novel.

The Lonely Astronomer is "an impossible crime science-fiction mystery" and one of only two novels featuring a 22nd century scientific investigator, Adam Quirke, who's a white-maned, six-feet-nine intellectual giant prone to uncontrollable fits of laughter. A very annoying characteristic that was (thankfully) not as prominent in his first outing as it was in his second recorded case. It's this first outing that I picked as my next read.

The Master Must Die (1953) takes place in the far-flung year of 2190 and Gyron de London "one of the most powerful industrialists to ever be spewed up from the financial and industrial deeps," which made him the power behind the government of the British Federation. De London climbed to eminence over "the bodies of less of less sagacious and less ruthless people," all of them long-forgotten, but one person had not forgotten about his victims and send him a threatening letter – promising that on March 30, 2190, he would die at the hands of a sworn enemy. The letter was signed with "THE MASTER MUST DIE."

De London has "enemies by the thousand," but his suspicions run in the direction of the people from his inner circle.

Against his wishes, De London's son, Harry, has married the daughter of a high-born Englishman and an equally high-born Martian woman, named Owena Tirgard, but he intensely dislikes and distrusts Martians – descendants of the original settlers who had severed ties with their home planet and declared themselves independent from Earth. After all, the stamp on the envelope of the threatening letter was a Martian stamp. I'm not sure what surprised me more: that people were sending snail mail from Mars to Earth or that a single airmail stamp covered the cost through the variable distances and zones between the two planets.

These are, however, more suspects to consider. Miss Turner is De London's "inhumanly efficient" secretary and has "gone down the hill of acid spinsterhood" during the "sixteen grinding, pitiless years" she has worked for him. De London is very much aware that she deeply resents him and that she had recently been on holiday to Mars. Secondly, there was Rogers, De London's chauffeur and general factotum, whose father was a brilliant physical scientist who got "swindled and crushed" by the big business. Something a son would naturally resent.

So there are more than enough potential murderers surrounding the powerful industrialist and, as March 30 draws closer, De London begins to take an extreme, overly expensive measure to ensure that nothing or nobody can get to him – which includes protection from lethal cosmic rays!

De London orders his engineers to convert half of his private-office into "a radiation-proof chamber of tungsten steel" with a lining of "a new type of lead composite" used on space ships to block cosmic radiation. A group of armed guards are stationed around this so-called "cube-room" throughout the day. De London is supposed to be untouchable within that vault-like, radiation-proof chamber, but, when he failed to reemerge from the room, they had to burn through the door. Only to find his body inside without a mark on it!

I have to point out here how similar the premise and setup of the impossible murder is to one from Christopher St. John Sprigg's "Death at 8:30," collected in Miraculous Mysteries: Locked Room Murders and Impossible Crimes (2017), but the difference between the two is that The Master Must Die has a pure science-fiction solution. An ingenious, futuristic method of killing someone inside a bare, radiation-proof room of steel that even Quirke found difficult to understand and reconstruct. So the reader has absolutely no chance whatsoever to work out the locked room trick for themselves, but the identity of the murderer was interesting. And somewhat solvable.

Usually, the murderers in Fearn's detective stories are not very difficult to spot, because he was more concerned with the nuts-and-bolts aspect of murder and probably the reason why he was so surprisingly good when it came to writing inverted detective stories – e.g. Except for One Thing (1947) and Pattern of Murder (2006). Anyway, the murderer here appeared to have presented himself on a silver platter to the reader in the run up to the murder and Quirke's discoveries, regarding the method, initially confirmed this character as the killer. By the end, Fearn settled on another character as the murderer, which was perhaps not properly clued, but this person possessed the motives, means and opportunity.

So not exactly a rug-puller of a surprise, but, after reading more than twenty of his mystery novels and short stories, I found this divergence from the usual pattern interesting. And this is really all that can be said about the plot of this very short novel.

I do want to note here the fascinating and, sometimes, hilarious fact that the vision of the future these classic science-fiction authors had primarily concerned big objects, like rockets, but rarely the small, everyday things. Fearn created a world in these two books were you can take a space liner to Mars, which has "a 3-D projected orchestra" as entertainment, but the cargo of this liner probably carried sacks of paper mail. All of them properly stamped. I also noticed this in David V. Reed's Murder in Space (1944), which takes place in a fully colonized Milky Way, but courtroom photographers still used flashbulbs!

I'm not very familiar with the (classical) science-fiction genre and this could be something primarily found in the work of the second-stringers, because I believe Isaac Asimov got a lot right. However, I find it intriguing that these early science-fiction authors were able to envision space ships, asteroid mining operations and terra-forming alien worlds, but had a glaring blind spot as to how these technologies could possibly impact and innovate normal, everyday life.

On a whole, The Master Must Die is not one of Fearn's finest detective stories or even a noteworthy entry on the list of science-fiction (locked room) mysteries, but it was a fast, fun read helped by the fact that Quirke was not half as insufferable as in The Lonely Astronomer. So this one can only really be recommended to readers who like Fearn, pulpy science-fiction or genre hybrids.