Framed in Guilt (1947) by John Russell Fearn

John Russell Fearn unexpectedly passed away in 1960, aged 52, when he suffered a heart attack. A fate he unfortunately had to share with his father, Percy Slate Fearn, who died under similar circumstances and influenced Fearn to write a detective novel around "the consequences of early deaths from heart problems."

Framed in Guilt (1947) was originally published under the penname associated with his Maria Black series, "John Slate," but this is a standalone with Superintendent Henshaw on duty and was praised by Philip Harbottle as one Fearn's "most realistic" and "best locked room novels" – a very personal novel for more reasons than one. The backdrop and characters of the story were drawn from his days as a part-time typist for a solicitor's office in Birley Street, Blackpool.

William Barridge is a sober, quiet and meek man of forty-four, but looked "a good twenty years older," who has been married for twenty years and has three "obstreperous children."

However, it has a marriage that has gone cold and loveless, because he's stuck in a dead-end job as head clerk to a solicitor and has neither "the wit nor the courage to attempt anything better." So luxury, such as a maid, eludes them and even his children have just enough respect for him to say goodbye before going to school. And it's not much better at work.

The dingy offices of Henry Minton, solicitor and Commissioner-of-Oath, is located on the first-floor of a converted Georgian dwellinghouse, "smelling of ink, dry parchment, cold air and Monday morning," which is as cheerless as it sounds – brightened only by the presence of the office boy, Jimmy Elgate. A young lad who constantly has his nose buried in an American pulp magazine. Other two people working there are the junior clerk, Arthur Standish, and the typist, Sally Higson.

So they slip into the dull, grinding routine of yet another work day, but the routine is broken when Jimmy, Sally and Arthur Standish return from lunch and find the place locked up. Barridge is nowhere to be found.

One thing you need to know, before going on, that there are two different locks on each office door. A modern Yale lock and underneath it "preposterous keyholes" dating back to the days when a dungeon-like key was needed to (un)lock the doors, which were now redundant except to peek through. Jimmy decided to take peek through the ancient keyhole of Minton's locked office and spotted a body lying on the floor with a large knife protruding from the back.

The body belongs to the meek and mild head clerk, Barridge, but the only key to the door is in the constant possession of Minton and, at the time of the murder, he was in Liverpool on business. So how did Barridge enter the locked office of his employer, or how did his murderer get out, but what baffles Superintendent Henshaw even more is why anyone would want to kill a "harmless, spineless man" – even when evidence emerges casting the shadow of suspicion on two people. One of these two suspects, Mrs. Jennifer Carr, surprisingly falls into the category of cherchez la femme. Or does she?

The detection here is combination of plodding police work, combing over the crime scene, checking alibis, questioning people, musing over clues and possibilities, complimented with bits and pieces of forensic detective work. Henshaw regularly calls upon the forensic experts to analyze the dirt under the victim's fingernails, ink on a letter in order to determine its age and make them do a microscopic examination of the murder weapon. Fearn was a pulp writer who had a tendency to indulge in the fantastic (e.g. Account Settled, 1949), but, sometimes, there are streaks of the Realist School in his work – both in characterization and setting. Such as the undistinguished solicitor's office and the normal, everyday people who work there from the opening chapter. You can also find these traces in Death in Silhouette (1950), Flashpoint (1950) and Pattern of Murder (2006) with its working class characters and backdrop.

Needless to say, the opening chapters and Henshaw's investigation are the best parts of the story, but the plot and solution has its problems.

My first problem is that the gist of the solution is kind of obvious and the only reason why it didn't kill the story are two red herrings, which are used here as roadblocks to that obvious answer. But you can still figure it long before Henshaw has worked out all the details. Secondly, the core idea of the plot is something I detest in detective stories, because, more often than not, it's just a lazy cop-out on the writer's part. So it's to Fearn's credit that he succeeded in whipping something decent and acceptable out of this otherwise hack plot-device, but it forces me to disagree with Harbottle that Framed in Guilt is Fearn's best locked room novels.

Admittedly, Fearn tries to do something else with the locked room mystery here, but he has written better and much more original impossible crime novels, such as Thy Arm Alone (1947) and Vision Sinister (1954), which doesn't mean I didn't appreciate what he was trying to do – especially when juggling with two of my big no-noes. But he has done the locked room better. And when you take a step away from the locked room angle, you have an overall well-done plot put together by "a weaver of a perfect crime." Someone with "the mind of a contortionist" that you can't help but feel a pang of sympathy for. The personal back-story also helped me appreciate the book more than I would otherwise have done.

So, all in all, Framed in Guilt is an interesting and unusual take on the locked room mystery, but by no means a classic of its kind. I think impossible crime fanatics and fans of Fearn will get the most out of this story.

A note for the curious: Philip Harbottle told me about the personal aspects of Framed in Guilt and provided this endearing image of Fearn as a part-time typist as told by a man who was a junior office boy at the time: "...this man was from another world... he showed no knowledge of law, no interest in the clients of the practice and he seldom spoke to anybody. At regular intervals he just was there, hawk-nosed, smouldering eyed, apparently unaware of his surroundings. Usually a cigarette dangled from one corner of his mouth, and one eye was half-closed against its rising smoke, as two fingers of each hand pounded the keys of the big, brief-carriage typewriter... faster than the girls could type with five fingers." Even when doing a part-time job, Fearn was the consummate pulp writer!

The Murdered Schoolgirl (1945) by John Russell Fearn

John Russell Fearn's The Murdered Schoolgirl (1945) is the second of five titles in his lamentably short-lived series about Miss Maria Black, or "Black Maria," who's the "crime sensitive" headmistress of Roseway College for Young Ladies and educated herself on criminology by ransacking the school library – as well as patronizing her local cinema whenever they're screening an American gangster movie (e.g. One Remained Seated, 1946). During her first case, Black Maria, M.A. (1944), made an unlikely ally, "Pulp" Martin, who's an American ex-thief and confidence trickster. Martin is as loyal as a dog to the headmistress and she often engages his services to do the legwork in an investigation.

Initially, the series was published under one of Fearn's innumerable pseudonyms, namely "John Slate," but were reissued during the 2000s under his own name and that's not the only (cosmetic) change to be found in the series.

The Murdered Schoolgirl was originally titled Maria Marches On and retained its original book-title when it was first reprinted in 2003, by Wildside Press, but when Philip Harbottle submitted it to Thorpe (Linford Mystery Library) he gave the book "a more exciting generic title" – hoping that it would help "clinch the sale." Obviously, it did. Harbottle later appropriated the title for one of the Ernest Dudley short story collections he compiled and sold to the same publisher (i.e. Dr. Morelle Marches On, 2010).

As some of you probably gauged from my previous reviews, Miss Maria Black is my favorite Fearn series-character, closely followed by Chief Inspector Garth, but my reason for waiting almost a year to finish the series has nothing to do with saving the best for last. Oh, no! Our mutual friend, John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books, took the wind out my sails in the comment-section of my review of One Remained Seated.

According to John, I left "the least appealing" title in the series for the end and recommended I moved on to the Dr. Hiram Carruthers series, which bristled with seemingly impossible crimes and locked room murders (e.g. Vision Sinister, 1954). Admittedly, I was aware the book had a plot-thread about an invisible ink tattoo and an invention that could be of great value to the war effort. So I feared that the detective-element was diluted by tacky, pulpy spy material, but this turned out not to be the case and the plot actually reminded me of Agatha Christie's Cat Among the Pigeons (1959) – which also takes place at a girl's college and they even share a very specific plot-point. Something that made me wonder if Christie had read the book herself and the idea had stuck with her. Anyway...

The book begins with Miss Black receiving two guests, Major Hasleigh and his daughter, Frances, who are faced with a problem. Major Hasleigh has been widowed and has been ordered to join his unit abroad immediately, but their house has already been sold and now has nowhere to leave his daughter. So he asked if she could be enrolled into Roseway College, even though the new term had already began, but Miss Black accepts Frances as a student. And the problems begin before Major Hasleigh has even left the premise. Miss Black notices something peculiar about the military man who had appeared before her and he had given her contact information of relations that appear to be nonexistent, but Frances also turns out to be a handful.

Frances is domiciled by the Housemistress, Miss Tanby, in Study F with Beryl Mather and Joan Dawson, but she's not very sociable and "broke bounds" by sneaking away to ask an unusual question to the science teacher, Robert Lever. She wants to know "the exact position of the star Sirius." However, they get caught by Miss Tanby and she drags them to the desk of Miss Black, because fraternity between pupils and teachers of the opposite sex is strictly verböten. Frances falsely accuses Lever of attempting to kiss her against her will, which forces Miss Black to unceremoniously sack her science teacher and ground Frances for a week.

However, she keeps sneaking out in the middle of the night and gets into a scrap with the head girl of the Sixth Form, Vera Randal, who's "a vindictive bully" and decides to teach Frances, Byril and Joan a lesson leaving them in Bollin's Wood – all tied-up and without their shoes. When the three girls failed to reappear, Vera returned to the spot, but what she found was two of the girls, Byril and Joan, bound and gagged on the ground. They're both unconscious. Frances is hanging from a tree branch by the neck! So that leaves Miss Black with a dead student and a possible murderer sneaking around her college.

Miss Maria Black's double role as an amateur detective and the responsibilities that comes with being a headmistress of a college are the true highlight of this entry in the series.

The position of Miss Black, as headmistress of a girl's college, has always been in the background of the other four novels, but here the reader got to see her in the role of stern headmistress who disciplines her pupils and has to brave "a whole host of parents" after the murder – all of them loaded. She also has a Board of School Governors to please and take on such duties as arranging the funeral of Frances. A position Miss Black tries to combine with her own private investigation and such clues as silk shreds in the hanging rope, triple knots and a lack of footprints in the clearing where the hanging took place greatly occupy her mind. And then there are such complications as who stole the body or why the body-snatcher horribly burned her left arm.

As to be expected, her duties as headmistress and indulging her hobby as an amateur criminologist intertwine on more than one occasion.

I was pleasantly reminded of when Reverend Ebenezer Buckle had to pull double-duty, in Nicholas Brady's Ebenezer Investigates (1934), when a member of his flock is murdered and he had to play detective without neglecting his duty as the spiritual leader of the community.

Unfortunately, the overall plot is rather weak and easily seen through. The murderer becomes painfully obvious after the girls are discovered in the clearing, but Fearn deserves props for giving it the old college try, because he did everything he could to convince the reader to remove this character from the list of suspects. The best red herring he planted was separating the obvious motive from the murderer, but I did not slip over it. Granted, the motive did puzzle me for a while. However, there really was only one person who could have done it. So that did not deter me from solving this one long before Miss Black.

So, I would not recommend readers who are new to the series, but start with Black Maria, M.A. or Death in Silhouette (1950). Or Thy Arm Alone (1947), if you want a truly original ending for a detective story (your slanderous opinion is not wanted on this flawless gem, JJ). If you take a liking to Miss Black, you'll be able to appreciate how she plays her roles here as headmistress and amateur detective, because the plot is, regrettably, one of Fearn's weaker efforts.

A stronger plot would have been nice, but, as a fan of the series, I do not regret having saved this one for last. Sadly, I do regret that this is the last time I got to follow Miss Black around as she poked her nose where it usually doesn't belong. On the bright side, my stack of Fearn's detective novels has not subsided. On the contrary! So you can expect much, much more Fearn on this blog in the future. 

Postscript Feb. 3, 2018: Philip Harbottle emailed me the following relevant background information about the book: 

"The only thing I would add to your review (which you couldn’t have known)  is that the patriotic second world war plot—irrespective of whether or not it was a little weak—was one that Fearn deeply believed in. He wrote the book during the war and had been inspired by the death in action of his cousin (a great family friend). The Rich and Cowan edition was “Dedicated to the Memory of my Cousin, Flying Officer "Rusty" Baker." 

Closing Credits

"A film is a ribbon of dreams. The camera is much more than a recording apparatus; it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world that is not ours and that brings us to the heart of a great secret. Here magic begins."

- Orson Welles

Last week, I reviewed The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (1941) by Stuart Palmer, which used a film studio as a backdrop and there are several detective novels that take the reader behind the scenes of a movie shoot, such as Carter Dickson's And So to Murder (1940) and Edmund Crispin's Frequent Hearses (1950), but seldom is a cinema the scene of the crime – where a murder is committed in front of the silver screen. One of the last victims in Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders (1936) was stabbed inside a movie theater, but that murder was only a minor cog in the machine of the overall plot.

So the only example I can present you with is the subject of today's blog-post: John Russell Fearn's One Remained Seated (1946), originally published as by "John Slate," in which a movie-goer never made it to the end credits. However, I should mention that Palmer wrote a short story about a similar kind of murder, namely "The Riddle of the Whirling Lights" from Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles (2002), but the setting of that story was a Planetarium and not a movie theater. Well, that filled my quota of Palmer references for this Fearn review!

One Remained Seated is the third in the Miss Maria Black series and the plot draws on one of her hobbies that was mentioned in her debut, Black Maria, M.A. (1944), which are American gangster movies. Miss Black always patronizes a local movie theater, Langhorn Cinema, where "crime films hold sway," but on her latest visit several things go horribly wrong: a crime picture was advertised, Death Strikes Tomorrow, but the renters made a last-minute switch and gave them a copy of Love on the Highway – which she disliked and called her experience "a glaring case of taking money under false pretenses."

Oh, and there's also a dead man slumped in seat A-11, inside the circle, with a small, neatly drilled hole in his forehead and the deadly projectile was "a slug of solid copper." Apparently, the metallic-like pellet was homemade and fired with an air-rifle.

Well, the first observation that has to be made about the book is that, unlike the other entries in the series, this is not an impossible crime story. John Norris said in his blog-post about this series, "Neglected Detectives: Maria Black, MA," that the plot concerned "a man found stabbed in a movie theater," while "no one was sitting or seen anywhere near him," but, as you now know, that's not the exactly the premise of the book.

Surprisingly, the book turned out to be strange amalgamation of the Realist School and Intuitionist School. It has a leg in a classroom of both schools.

First of all, there's the location of the story, Langhorn Cinema, which is the linchpin of the plot, but also offers the reader a peek behind the silver screen and shows the work floor atmosphere of the cinema – both of them closely tied to the how-aspect of the murder. A look at the inner workings of institutions (e.g. universities) and companies are a hallmark of the Realists School. However, the plot was not completely immersed in the minutia of the day-to-day work routine of a late-1940s cinema, but you get a fairly good idea what the place is about. And there are some technical tidbits strewn throughout the plot. Such as when they tried to determine the exact position of the rifleman, which brought Miss Black and Inspector Morgan behind the actual projection screen.

I also have to give a nod to the portrayal of the ordinary people who there and the role they played in the murder. Particularly, the young projectionist of the place, Fred Allerton, who's engaged to one of the usherettes, Nancy Crane, but also has a talent for making himself suspect in the eyes of the police – because he ran into the victim with his bike on the night of the murder. So, in that regard, One Remained Seated is yet another piece of classic crime-fiction showing that the Golden Age was not just about the upper classes encountering murder in their Victorian mansions. You can say that about the entire Maria Black series. Well, the ones I have read.

A second, if somewhat slight, aspect of the Realist School is the breakdown of the identity of the murdered man. The police suspects very early on in the story that the name he used in the local hotel is a false one, but his name and full back-story is not revealed until they re-watched the movie.

Originally, the intention was to determine when the shot was fired, because it had to coincide with the shots fired in the movie, but Miss Black notices something about one of the characters. This also reveals the true identity of one of the on-screen characters. But there's yet another character in the story with an alter ego: a pot-bellied man with an Old Bill mustache who has been asking favors from the young man who work at the cinema (no, not those kind of favors).

So there's more than enough detective work to sort out for Miss Black and the reader, which includes the rather original clue of the movie poster and a craftily conceived alibi. One that's used for a second, brutal murder of an usherette, but the alibi really fitted the movie-theme of the book. It's exactly what you'd expect from a murderer who hangs around a cinema. The only real drawback is that the murder is very obvious. You can hardly ignore this character in the role of murderer once you begin to grasp the main lines of the plot. I was also slightly annoyed by the vague details about the past crime that was buried in the heart of the plot, but, otherwise, I liked it as much as the other titles from this series.

The Maria Black series:

Black Maria, M.A. (1944)

Maria Marches On (1945)

One Remained Seated (1946)

Thy Arm Alone (1947)

Death in Silhouette (1950)

I also reviewed Fearn's The Crimson Rambler (1948) and The Lonely Astronomer (1954).

On a final, semi-related note: I began this blog-post without any real examples of detective novels with a movie theater setting for their murders, but one suddenly occurred to me, P.R. Shore's The Death Film (1932). Curt Evans (who else?) mentioned the book in a 2010 blog-post on MysteryFile. However, it is, apparently, an extremely scarce title and the only thing we know about it is that someone is killed during the screening of a movie. So that makes a grand total of... two cinema mysteries? Two and a half, if you count the one by Christie?  

Death's Shadow

"We can't say for certain this is murder. Not at the present stage of the game."

- Superintendent Hadley (John Dickson Carr's Till Death Do Us Part, 1944)

Last year, I began to exhume the work of an incredibly prolific British pulp author, John Russell Fearn, whose legacy consists of an enormous pile of science-fiction, westerns and detective stories, which were published in various magazines under a number of different pennames – such as "Thornton Ayre," "Frank Russell" and "John Slate."

A good, sizable chunk of Fearn's detective stories are locked room mysteries and this should come as no surprise, because he was a self-admitted fanboy of John Dickson Carr. However, Fearn never really played in the same league as the great master himself and was very much a second-tier mystery writer, but he has become a personal favorite among the second stringers. One of his series, saturated with impossible crime material, managed to touch the ceiling that separated the second stringers from the top-tier writers. Only one of the books from that series seems to have managed to break through that ceiling (i.e. Thy Arm Alone, 1947).

I'm talking about the Maria Black series, which sadly, covered only five books and commenced with Black Maria, M.A. (1944), in which the Principal of Roseway College for Young Ladies, Miss Maria Black, got an opportunity to put her knowledge as an amateur criminologist into practice by solving the murder of her own brother – who was shot to death inside his locked library. The book can best be described as what would have happened if Carr had written one of Stuart Palmer's Miss Hildegarde Withers mysteries.

It was an auspicious and promising start of a series that appears to have peaked with the previously mentioned Thy Arm Alone, but, luckily, there are still three titles left to enjoy. Well, now that I'm writing this review, there are actually only two left.

Death in Silhouette (1950) is the fifth and last entry in the Maria Black series, which has a weird whiff of realism lingering in its opening chapters. The story introduces the reader to a young working class couple, Patricia "Pat" Taylor and Keith Robinson, who respectively work modest jobs as a restaurant cashier and a costings clerk at the railway goods station, which does not allow for a lavish wedding or lifestyle, but they sealed engagement before the end of the first chapter – running off to their families to spread the happy news. Pat's parents could not be happier, but her brother, Gregory, was less enthusiastic with congratulating his sister and future brother-in-law. But the father of the groom-to-be was even less celebratory.

Ambrose Robinson is a religious fanatic, who spouts "yards of memorized scripture," but his objections fall on deaf ears. So he eventually finds himself attending an engagement party at the home of his future in-laws and one of the invitees is Pat's old head mistress, Miss Maria Black, but car troubles delayed her arrival and when she finally pulled up on the curb of the Taylor home "she felt an old-fire horse" which "has heard the bell" - as there was a police-car outside the house. 

 

During the party, Keith went missing and he was not found until someone noticed the door to the cellar was not only locked, but it was locked from the inside. Nobody responded to the knocking. So the door was broken down and they Keith hanging from a rope tied to the staple in a beam that crossed the ceiling.

According to the evidence, Keith went down to the cellar, lock himself in, and then hanged himself. Right in "the middle of celebrating his engagement to Pat."

Maria Black's "singular gift of walking into tragedies" has not deserted her and, initially, does not want to get involved, but Pat wants to know what was behind her fiances sudden death. Naturally, this quickly turns into a full-fledged murder inquiry and one that has some interesting aspects. One part of the investigation concerns Keith's character and background. Keith had some jealously issues and was prone to mood swings, who could be "up in spirits one minute" and "down in the dumps the next," which is a mental complexion he might have inherited from his mother – who died in a rest-home were she was staying for mental problems.

However, the most intriguing part of the plot is the step-by-step reconstruction of what happened in the sealed cellar and how a potential murderer could have been involved.

Slowly, Miss Black gathered the pieces of the intricate jigsaw puzzle around the Taylor home, which consist of a shadow cast on a whitewashed wall, traces of candle grease and a torn cover from an American pulp magazine (Super Crime Stories). She also calls on her hardboiled legman/bodyguard from the States, "Pulp" Martin, who tasked with tracking down a lamp that was thrown in the trash, but also has to use his fist on a couple of occasions. I guess his presence is one of the reasons why this series always feels like reading an American-style mystery, but the role the pulp magazines played in the murder also helped and recalled some of Bill Pronzini's impossible crime stories (e.g. "The Pulp Connection" from Casefile, 1983).

So the plot of Death in Silhouette offers a genuine detective problem, but where the book really excels is the double-barreled solution that manage to co-exist simultaneously. One part of the solution is very clever and complex, which might not even have worked. Something that is fully acknowledged, but then the Merrivalean cussedness of all things general intervenes and throws an alternative explanation into the works. A solution that is simpler and far more elegant than the previous one, which may disappoint some readers, but it works.

How this solution can simultaneously exist is something you should discover for yourself, but the how of the crime gelled marvelously with the who. Fearn had me playing ring-around-the-rosies with the small pool of suspects and still missed the actual murderer. I came very close to the correct murderer, but not quite close enough.

So Death in Silhouette demonstrates why Fearn is becoming one of my favorite mystery writers among the second-stringers and why this particular series deserves to be better known among mystery readers. They're pure detective stories that are tremendously fun to read with plots that always try to give the reader its absolute best. I might pick off another one of Fearn's mysteries from the big pile before too long, but whether it's going to be another Maria Black novel or one of his locked room standalone is something I still have to decide on. So stay tuned!

Once in a Lifetime

"It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet," collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1891)

Back in June, I posted a review of John Russell Fearn's Black Maria, M.A. (1944), originally published as by "John Slate," which was brought to my attention in a blog-post penned by John Norris – titled "Neglected Detectives: Maria Black, MA." The post closed with some enticing comments about the fourth book in the series.

In his blog-post, Norris described the central plot point of Thy Arm Alone (1947) as "one of the most bizarrely executed" and "ingeniously planned murders in all of detective fiction." I agree Fearn constructed a very imaginative and practically unique plot. One that would force Sherlock Holmes to eat his own words when he proclaimed there "was nothing new under the sun" and how "it has all been done before."

Betty Shapley is "the belle of the village," a small English place called Langhorn, where she "assumed the position of sub-post-mistress" in the general store-cum-post office owned by her parents – which she felt was a comedown from her education at Roseway College. However, Betty is very beautiful and always basks in male attention, but she three principle admirers vying for her affection: Vincent Grey, Tom Clayton and Herbert "Herby" Pollitt. She played "one against the other with sublime disregard for their feelings."

So you would expect Betty Shapley to fulfill the role of lovely murder victim, while her three beaus assume the part of suspects, but, instead, a cruel turn of fortune teaches her "a costly lesson."

During a late-evening date, the car of Herby broke down underneath a deep purple sky, heralding the approaching night, which is streaked that evening with the tails of shooting stars, but Betty finds that her companion is not exactly in a romantic mood. He does not even want to make a wish. So they decide that she goes back to the village to fetch Tom, who runs a garage, to tow the stranded car from that dangerous spot in the road, but that's where one of the strangest sequence of events begin to unfold – something she gets a first glimpse of when she sees Vincent cycling "like a madman." A madman "who has seen unimaginable horror" and is "fleeing from it as fast as he can go," which happened to be from the spot where she left Herby. But she does not learn what took place on that dark stretch of road until a pair of coppers appears on her doorstep.

Inspector Morgan and Sergeant Claythorne tell her that, upon his arrival, Clayton found the car ablaze and had to drag the body of Herby out of the flames of the burning wreckage, but he had been dead before being positioned in the car – top and left side of his skull had been battered to a gruesome pulp. It was an injury that had obliterated or scorched half of his face, which is what provided the murder with an impossible angle: what kind of heavy and jagged weapon could do so much damage with a single blow?

In any case, the police want to know the whereabouts of Vincent Grey, which is when Betty decides Vincent is the one she always loved. Only problem is that he's now a wanted man. Regardless, Vincent manages to get a message to Betty, which resulted in a minor cat-and-mouse game between Betty and Police-Constable Rogers, but her most important move was returning to Roseway College for Young Ladies – to ask help from her old school teacher and amateur criminologist, Maria Black. A woman often referred to as "Black Maria." Or a nosy old dragon. Depending on who you ask.

Maria Black has (successfully) meddled in murder cases and Betty wants her to interfere in the investigation, which she does in a number of different ways: she consults her collection of scientific literature in the hope of finding a possible explanation for a bunch of peculiar clues. Some of these strange pieces of evidence include inexplicable "traces of a metallic element in the wound," a blackened patch of soil not far from the blazing car and a pier of burned pliers. She also employs the services of an old friend, "Pulp" Martin, who pokes around the house and ash-cans of one of the suspects, which pretty much took care of the required legwork in the case. And the pages are scattered with Maria's helpful case-notes.

All of this makes for a very lively and interesting mystery novel, but the genuine star of the story is Fearn's ingenuity and originality. I'm very proud of myself for having figured out the general idea behind the death of Pollitt very early on in the story (there was some nice foreshadowing), but I was craftily lead away from the simple, but unbelievable, truth by the layers of subterfuge – wickedly spun around the problem by the guilty party.

Admittedly, not everyone is going to swallow the root-cause of Pollitt's death, which I can understand, but you've to admire how Fearn took the ball and ran with it. As the culprit explained towards the end, "a chance like that only happens once in a lifetime" and "I made full use of it." I agree! If there's anything to be said against this story, it’s that it lacked a Carrian-style notes for the curious. The last sentence of the book kind of begged for such a feature, but other than that, I absolutely loved it. Thy Arm Alone is an original piece of work. Even after seven decades! 

So if you think you've seen all the dirty tricks... you should definitely give this one a shot.

Death Duties

"You mean, you want me to play detective?" 

- Miss Hildegarde Withers (Stuart Palmer's Murder on the Blackboard, 1932)

John Russell Fearn was a prolific British author and a regular contributor to the American pulps, including such illustrious magazines as Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories, which were dedicated to speculative fiction on the science-fiction spectrum, but he also penned a whole slew of crime-fiction under many different pennames – such as "Thornton Ayre," "Hugo Blayn" and "John Slate." The name of interest to this blog-post is the last one.

In late March of 2011, John Norris from Pretty Sinister Books published an interesting post on his blog, entitled "Neglected Detectives: Maria Black, MA," in which the work that was originally published under the name of "John Slate" is discussed. John concluded his post by remarking that "it is the unusual and imaginative ideas," such as the reportedly original murder method from Thy Arm Alone (1947), "that make the Maria Black books worth tracking down and reading." But what really piqued my interest was the apparent abundance of impossible material in this series. Nearly all of them were listed by the late Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991)! But first thing first!

The leading character and inquisitive mind in this series is an English school mistress, Miss Maria Black, who teaches at a girl's college and Fearn said about her creation that she was conceived from "a childhood memory of a distant relative" with "the logical mind of an analyst" – which he molded until she emerged as a middle-aged headmistress with "a fund of knowledge" and "understanding of human nature."

She drew for this insight into human nature on her hobby and guilty pleasure: the study of criminology, crime-fiction and the movies. Miss Black refers to her well-stocked bookcase as "the skeleton in my educational cupboard" and barred the schoolgirls from one specific movie theatre in town, which she patronages herself and prefers to enjoy American gangster pictures unobserved. I should also note that the character and personality of Miss Black seems somewhat reminiscent of Stuart Palmer's crime-solving schoolteacher, Miss Hildegarde Withers.

Miss Black is even referred to by one of her own relatives as "a nosy old dragon," which sounded similar to the accusation often leveled at Miss Withers of being "a meddlesome old battle-ax." There are portions in her debut novel, Black Maria, M.A. (1944), that read as an imitation of Stuart Palmer. So let's finally take a look at one of her cases.

Black Maria, M.A. was Miss Maria Black's first recorded case and it is a personal one: her now late brother, Ralph Black, accumulated a small fortune by selling canned broccoli and founding a flock of chain stores – giving him no reason to shoot himself. But that's what apparently happened. One evening, he locked himself inside his private-library and shot himself.

The police treated Ralph's death as an open-and-shut case of suicide. However, his son, Richard, believes otherwise and communicated his suspicions to his aunt in England. Miss Black has already received an urgent summons from her brother's lawyer and she learns from him that her brother shared his son's opinion. A sealed envelope is given to her and contains a handwritten letter from her dead brother, in which he explains the possibility of him dying from a cause other than a natural one and he wants his sister to track down his potential murderer. He instructed his lawyer to hand over a thousand bucks to her, which is meant to cover the expenses of her investigation, but, in case of success, she can look forward to a huge reward – an inheritance of a whopping five-hundred thousand dollars!

John Russell Fearn

One of her first leads involves a dangerous criminal, Hugo Ransome, a gangster whose "methods go right back to the rip-snorting 1920s Gangsterism" and generally considered to be one of the slimiest scoundrels in the city of New York. This plot-line also involved an escaped convict and one of the female members of the Black household. It is this strand of the plot that gave the book a distinctly Withersian touch, because I could easily imagine Miss Withers as Miss Black when using her thousand bucks to secure herself a bodyguard from the underworld. A tough, but honest, criminal, known as "Pulp" Martin, who seems to love the well paid jobs Miss Black has for him, which include staging a riot at a music-hall and pointing a gun at one of the suspects while Miss Black interrogated him.

All of these scenes, including the one at a joined simply called "ICE CREAM SODAS," could have easily come from the pens of Palmer or Craig Rice. On that account alone, I would recommend the book to fans of that pair of mystery writers, but to enthusiasts of Palmer's work in particular. Anyhow...

As Miss Black is busily "knitting together the threads" of "a web with numberless strands," she has to slowly come to the sad conclusion that her brother grossly abused his wealth and influence. Ralph Black wrecked a number of lives and some of those lives had lived very close to his own household, which, to some, made him "worthy of death." The explanation to the who and why is a clever variation on a well-known story by Agatha Christie, but the final twist obviously took its cue from a John Dickson Carr novel from the early 1940s.

Note that Fearn had named Carr as his favorite mystery writer and the whole premise of the locked library, as well as its explanation and surprise twist, struck me as a conscious attempt to imitate and improve upon the ideas set forth by Carr in that one novel – in which Fearn was not entirely unsuccessful. The locked room is clever enough, somewhat original and decently presented, but the problem with these kinds of tricks is that it's very hard to pull them of convincingly. However, it pulled off fairly well here. Hell, it was good enough for the French crime-fiction expert and locked room enthusiast, Roland Lacourbe, to include the book in 99 Chambres Closes (99 Closed Rooms, 1991).

I also have to mention that the story includes a plot summary for one of Richard Black's stage-plays, which gives an ingenious murder method for bumping off a crystal gazer. I suspect David Renwick borrowed this method for one of the plot-threads for his Jonathan Creek television-special The Judas Tree (2010).

So, all in all, Black Maria, M.A. proved to be a good, if second-tier, mystery novel and was pleasantly surprised to discover this was basically a clever piece of fan-fiction from a fellow JDC-fanboy. Definitely worth investigating further.   

Finally, I previously reviewed The Lonely Astronomer (1954), which was an interesting blending of science-fiction and mystery elements, but, overall, not as clever as this one. And the detective-character was rather annoying.