The House of Strange Guests (1932) by Nicholas Brady

Last year, I came across the detective novels of "Nicholas Brady," a penname of John V. Turner, which was used for a short-lived series about a clerical detective-character, Rev. Ebenezer Buckle, who only has four appearances to his name with The Fair Murder (1933) as a high point in the series – a memorable detective story with a plot as dark as a nightmare. Rev. Buckle shined as a multi-faceted character in Ebenezer Investigates (1934) and Week-end Murder (1934) slightly underwhelmed as a detective novel. So, all things considered, a criminally underrated series and, sadly, had only one of them left to read.

The House of Strange Guests (1932) marked the debut of Rev. Buckle and was introduced to the reader under very irregular circumstances, but this is par for the course in a series with a tendency for the bizarre. Somehow this one turned out to be most orthodox of the four.

The story opens with a telephone call from Butler of The Gables to the Streatham Police Station to report that he has found his master, Maurice Mostyn, dead in his bath and it appears as if he had turned on the gas under the geyser, but Divisional Detective-Inspector Hallows is confronted with evidence that precludes the possibility of suicide – such as the lack of the tell-tale signs of gas poisoning and the peculiar sitting position of the body. However, these are relatively normal aspects compared to what Hallows learns from the butler, Summers, about the victim.

Maurice Mostyn was a bachelor of apparently independent means, but Summers never knew "a place where there were was so much entertaining." There have been guests at The Gables nearly every week for the past ten years. On the evening of his death, Mostyn had been entertaining five guests.

There is, however, a complication. Summers confides in Hallows that he has no idea who the guests really are, because he has often overheard his master address his guests by different names than the ones they gave to him. What follows is a difficult series of interviews between Hallows and the cast of characters populating the house.

Andrew Posten, Sonia Wether, Lois Welling, Alleyne Kimball and Raymond Simms are "an odd mixture" of house guests and their response to the death of their host is a spectrum of emotions, which range from glee to a mental breakdown, but Simms proved to be the oddest one of the bunch – aloofly chatting to Hallows about Pliny the Younger, Daniel Webster and William Shakespeare. Simms is no one less than Rev. Ebenezer Buckle and he summons his brother, Assistant Commissioner Stanley Buckle, to explain his position as an amateur detective. You can read that chapter as an origin story.

Rev. Buckle is "the rector of a tiny parish in Hampshire," a place called Dowerby, which only has a population of about two-hundred souls and there are only services on Sunday. So he has "a tremendous amount of spare time" that he filled with botany and criminology. Buckle began with studying criminal psychology, records and the criminal code, but eventually started to attend the Assize Courts and accosted prisoners as they left the goal. The last step in the process was pestering his brother and, one day, gave him his opinion about the Vallot murder, which proved to be correct and has since given Scotland Yard "considerable assistance" in a number of investigations – such as the Matson case, the Robbins case and the Wain murder. Sadly, these are all unrecorded cases.

John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books introduced me to this series and he accurately described Buckle as "a lively amateur sleuth" cut from the same cloth as John Dickson Carr's Dr. Gideon Fell. I couldn't agree more with this observation.

Just like Dr. Fell, Buckle is a wool-gatherer who prefers "to theorize first and prove afterwards" and pepper his speech with enigmatic remarks that appear to make no sense whatsoever. A good example of this when Hallows called in the assistance of Bonny Curley, a safe-breaker known as "The Human Key," who's tasked with cracking a safe with a double number-and letter combination lock, but when the door swings open, the safe turns out to be entirely empty – which baffled the safe-breaker. Why waste time on opening an empty safe? Buckle enigmatically says that their time would have been wasted if the safe had actually contained something.

Buckle is at his most Fell-like in the final chapter, entitled "A Study of Clues," in which he not only goes over all of the clues and red herrings, but effectively demonstrates why the murderer was the only person in the house who could have killed Mostyn. A good piece of reasoning involves the position of the body and the water-taps of the bath. So this alone makes The House of Strange Guests a must read for fans of the pure detective story with logical reasoning. However, there's one aspect of the solution that will rub some readers the wrong way.

Honestly, I groaned when my deductions were proven to be correct and Brady likely knew this part of the plot was hackneyed, even in the early 1930s, but (IMO) he somehow managed to pull it off in the end without ruining the whole book. A wire-walking act as daring and risky as the stunt Carr pulled with the solution of The Plague Court Murders (1934), but Brady and Carr miraculously made them work when they really shouldn't have. The true mark of craftsmanship! Brady really did his best to make this aspect as acceptable as possible and, considering the overall plot, I'm more than willing to give it to him.

So, all in all, The House of Strange Guest is a fascinating, old-fashioned, but lively told, detective story with splendid clueing and a daring solution that could have potentially spoiled the entire book. That it worked makes this the second best entry in this too short a series. Although it has to share that spot with Ebenezer Investigates.

Well, this closes the chapter of Ebenezer Buckle on this blog, but you have not seen the last of Brady/Turner. Black Heath has reissued the extremely rare Coupons for Death (1944), a World War II black market thriller, as well as a handful of mystery novels published under his own name. Granted, Amos Petrie is not as good a series-character as Rev. Buckle, but Death Must Have Laughed (1932) was a perfectly passable detective story. Amos Petrie's Puzzle (1933), Death Joins the Party (1935) and Homicide Haven (1935) sound like potentially good detective novels. So I'll be taking a stab at some of them in the future.

Death Must Have Laughed (1932) by John V. Turner

Last year, I read and reviewed three mystery novels by John V. Turner, published as by "Nicholas Brady," which are part of a little-known, lamentably short-lived series about a passionate botanist and amateur criminologist, Rev. Ebenezer Buckle – who shined as a gumshoe priest in The Fair Murder (1933) and Ebenezer Investigates (1934). This once expensive, hard-to-get series was rescued from obscurity by Black Heath and they recently reprinted another series of forgotten detective stories by Turner.

Between 1932 and 1936, Turner penned six detective novels, all of them published under his own name, which stars a solicitor and fisherman as its series-detective.

Amos Petrie is a short, five feet four, bespectacled man with an exhaustive knowledge of angling and has the habit of rubbing his hands on a huge, gaudy handkerchief every two minutes. He also has a proclivity of making riddles out of questions and conundrums out of riddles. Admittedly, this makes Petrie little more than an assortment of unusual character-traits and ticks without a real personality of his own, but he serves his purpose as a "Great Detective" who can get to the bottom of seemingly insoluble murder cases – such as the impossible poisoning of a boxer smack in the middle of the ring.

Death Must Have Laughed (1932) was published in the U.S. as First Round Murder and concerns the death of the middleweight champion of the world, Al Fanlagan, who has been undefeated in nearly "a hundred fights." A ruthless winning streak that earned him the moniker of "the Great Unbeatable."

The story begins on the evening of Fanlagan's title defense against Archie Polder at the Albert Hall, but the title bout is preceded by three, emotionally-charged rows in his dressing room.

Firstly, Fanlagan tells his manager, Harry "Socker" Mottram, in no uncertain words that he no longer has any use for them, which does not sit very well with the grizzled, in-ring veteran. Mottram had slugged his way to the lightweight championship in "the hazy, distant past" and had made an unbeatable prize-fighter out of his protege by teaching him how to hit "like nobody's business" with both hands, because before that he had been a right-handed, one-trick pony – who was "absolute cold meat" for any opponent with a left hand and a pair of fast feet. And now the old, broken down ex-champion is being cast aside by his golden pupil.

A second confrontation happens when one of Fanlagan's many women, Miss Doris Shannon, turns up in the dressing room. Miss Shannon had been very much in love the "coarse champion of the ring," but Fanlagan tells her he's through with her and she retorts by telling him that it would be better for everyone around him if he simply died. The third row came with the arrival of Edward Franklin, an eminent toxicologist, who demands that the boxer stops seeing his wife. Fanlagan yells at him to go to hell and Franklin tells him he'll be there long before himself.

Words that'll turn out to be somewhat prophetic when "the champion of the whole globe" goes down in the first round and doesn't get up again. At first, it looks as if Polder has slammed the champion into oblivion in less than three minutes, but then the Master of Ceremonies addresses the crowd with a grave announcement: Al Fanlagan has passed away.

So he had "three rows, one fight, and then the mortuary" on his last night and this brings Amos Petrie, who was in the crowd, to the ring and he's soon joined by his policeman friend, Detective Inspector Ripple of Scotland Yard – who are faced with a crime that "looks more like a miracle than a murder." Fanlagan's ate his last meal five hours before the fight and had his last drink three hours before he got through the ropes, but the poison that killed him acted within two or three minutes. And nothing he touched showed the slightest trace of poison. So how did the murderer administrate a lethal, fast working poison to a boxer who's in the middle of a fight?

Overall, the plot and the explanation for the impossible poisoning are pretty easy to pick apart. However, it took me a while to get around to the obvious explanation, because I was nursing a pet theory and the first quarter, or so, appeared to confirm my educated guess – which turned out to be completely wrong. You see, I assumed the poison was dabbed on the boxing gloves of Fanlagan's opponent and this pet theory looked to be confirmed when it was revealed that the poison in question can kill "whether a person smells, swallows or takes the acid on their skin." So this anchored the theory in my for the first half of the story and even pegged Polder's American manager as the murderer. Polder was too broken up about what happened and wanted to retire, but his manager had a gem of a motive.

Fanlagan was a ruthless fighter with a killer temperament and a reputation of physically, and mentally, whittling down his opponents and in the "alleyways of the boxing world were many shadows who had crossed gloves" with the champion – men with broken bodies and spirits who cursed the day Fanlagan was born. So whoever ended his winning streak would not only win a championship title, but a reputation that brings in buckets full of money. An unscrupulous manager might have seen an opportunity here and used poison-smeared boxing gloves to ensure his client's opponent would go down for the long count.

I suspected this would turn out to be a boxing murder, through and through, with all of the personal motives and suspects being nothing more than red herrings. Well, I was completely wrong, but I hope you liked my reading false solution. And I began to catch on the truth halfway through the story. Hey, better late than never. Anyway, the actual solution turned out to be more practical and less dangerous than my solution.

My only real complaint about the poisoning is that the pathologist missed that during his initial examination of the body. Particularly when looking for poison, but that's a minor offense that can easily be forgiven. What's not as easy to forgive is how Petrie conducted himself towards the end of the story, which is even worse than Dr. Gideon Fell's behavior in John Dickson Carr's Death Turns the Tables (1941), in which he allows the shadow of suspicion of the (officially) unsolved murder to fall on an innocent person – only Petrie went a step or two further than Dr. Fell. Petrie allowed one of the suspects to sacrifice his, or her, life, in order to save the murderer, only to turn around and hand over that person to the authorities. Not only that, he actually prevented the actual murderer from committing suicide. Or so it appears. Maybe I read too much into these scenes, but Petrie didn't emerge from them like an overly sympathetic character.

Regardless, this is only a small blotch on a pleasantly written, leisurely paced detective novel with a truly grand stage for an impossible murder and that's what makes Death Must Have Laughed an interesting title for every locked room reader. The story also made me wonder whether there are any detective stories from this period that take place in the “squared circle” of professional wrestling. Now that would make for an interesting mystery novel with a cast of truly unique and odd characters! Just imagine a classic detective story filled with character reminiscent of Gorgeous George, Ed "The Strangler" Lewis and Andre the Giant.

Anyway, Death Must Have Laughed turned out to be another interesting, if imperfect, discovery from the ever-expending catalog of Black Heath Crime Classics. Hopefully, they'll republish more obscure impossible novels in the future. It would be great if they would focus some of their attention on the work of a specialized locked room writer, like Anthony Wynne, because I think we would all welcome affordable editions of Sinners, Go Secretly (1928), The Case of the Gold Coins (1933), Door Nails Never Die (1939) and Emergency Exit (1941).

So, if someone from Black Heath is reading this, please consider a (locked room) writer, like Wynne, for a future run of reprints. I can assure you that I would not be the only one who would appreciate that. 

A Big Killing

"...one can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place."

- Father Brown (G.K. Chesterton's "The Sins of Prince Saradine," collected in The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911)

John V. Turner's detective stories about Rev. Ebenezer Buckle, published as by "Nicholas Brady," is perhaps my favorite discovery of 2017 and the two books I read by him, The Fair Murder (1933) and Ebenezer Investigates (1934), are shoe-ins for my best-of list of this year – which will be posted at the end of this month. So I wanted to read one more of Rev. Buckle novels before the year draws to a close and picked Week-end Murder (1934).

All four Rev. Buckle titles have been reprinted by a small publishing outfit, Black Heath Editions, who recently also reissued a fifth title with the Brady byline, Coupons for Death (1944), but that one appears to be a standalone. Nevertheless, the book used to be obscure enough that when John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books finally acquired a hardcover, dust-jacketed copy he referred to it as an "amazing coup." And if that doesn't qualify as a Stamp of Authentic Obscurity, I don't know what does.

Week-end Murder is divided into six (longish) chapters and the leisurely paced opening chapter paints an interesting picture of the story's backdrop, Bellingham Bay, which plays a key role in the plot.

Bellingham Bay had been known to generations of local fishermen as Mellerton Bay, but "decay had hovered over the bay for more than a century" and only fifty of its denizens had clung to their "desolate cottages" by the time the 1920s drew to a close. By then, the once plentiful fish in the bay had retreated when a nearby town began to use it as a sewer outlet. So all that remained for the locals were the meager catchings of herring fishing and digging for the elusive lug worms, known as the "Mellerton Lugs," which were sold at "tenpence a score" to passing anglers as delectable bait and this slow decay continued until it was accelerated by the arrival of a stranger, Percival Bellingham – who bought the ground of the village and leveled the place.

The "poverty-stricken fishermen were turned out of their homes" and the public house was knocked down, but rose only three months later as a beer palace encircled by two-hundred new bungalows. Bellingham had brought "The Eden on the Kentish Coast" to fruition and it was a unmitigated disaster. And a huge financial lost.

A year later, the "Kentish Eden" had a deficit of £24,000. Bellingham had fled from the ghost town of two-hundred empty bungalows and over three-hundred angry investors. What he left behind was a crumbling promenade and the publican of the beer hall who had remained as one of the last remaining inhabitants of the bay. So the village would had been, once again, consigned to obscurity, but the arrival of a buyer once again thoroughly transformed the character of the once ancient fishing village. 

 

Mackay Saunders bought the "flock of bungalows" and the village, like all of his places, procured a reputation that made men snicker, women blush and evoked scathing comments from the judges presiding over the Divorce Courts. Saunders doesn't give a penny for Victorian-era morals and prefers that his places are "filled at week-ends by broad-minded people." So the place, under direction of its new owner, became quickly known as "Immorality Corner." A week-end resort where nobody appeared to register under their actual name or brought their own spouse with them.

Mrs. Weatherby-Weatherby Elkin "clucked like an aggravated hen" to Rev. Ebenezer Buckle about that "terrible, pestilential spot," but Buckle is not too keen on visiting the place and, when he finally decides to drop by, he immediately walks onto the scene of a crime – living up to his reputation that he and murder "grew side by side." Fortunately, Buckle is "a man who mixes homicide with horticulture."

A man who had registered under the name of Percy Emerson is shot to death inside his bungalow. The fatal shot was fired mere minutes before Buckle arrived on the scene, which gives him a golden opportunity to immediately horn in on the case and demonstrate his "skill as a criminologist." I believe fans of the pure detective stories will take joy from Buckle's initial survey of the crime-scene. As he makes a number of (astute) observations about the direction of the shot, entrance-and departure of the shooter and the fact that the victim's collar and tie are missing. Buckle later supplements these observations with a series of cryptic, seemingly unrelated, questions directed at the woman, Dolly, who had accompanied the victim to the village. These questions are in regards to a tank of rain water outside the bungalow and the wages she earned as a waitress.

This approach is what made John Norris compare Rev. Buckle to one of John Dickson Carr's well-known series-detectives, Dr. Gideon Fell, who both prefer to be enigmatic wool-gatherers with a preference to "think in solitude" – until they've reached "definite and provable conclusions." So you can almost view this short-lived series as a (missing) link between G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories and Carr's Dr. Gideon Fell series.

At the end of the second chapter, the story takes a sharp, 180° turn when the victim is properly identified and this revelation changes the whole dynamic of the book. Inspector Dace muttered "that finishes me" and calls in the big guns at Scotland Yard.

Rev. Buckle calls in the help of his brother, Assistant Commissioner Stanley Buckle, whose familial ties has served the parson well whenever he wanted "to break through the wall of police officialdom." However, the importance of the victim's identity provided the Buckle brothers with an opportunity to collaborate on a case and the discovery of a second body, found in a garden of a vacant house in London, forces the investigators to divide into two groups. Interestingly, the shooting at the bungalow in Bellingham Bay and the murder in London are tightly linked together with little time between them, which recalls the earlier work of Christopher Bush (e.g. Dancing Death, 1931) that often hinged of the complexities of an intricately linked double murder.

Nevertheless, the London murder proves to be the weak link in a large-scale criminal operation and the Buckle brothers make quick work of tying together that second murder. They roll up practically the entire London-end of the case in record time, which places the murderer at Bellingham Bay, who's completely oblivious about what's going in London, in an ever-tighter corner.

Brady neatly fitted every component of the plot together to form a logical, entirely coherent, picture of the murders and the criminal enterprise that rested at the heart of the story. There is, however, a blemish on the story. At the end, Rev. Buckle confessed himself that it was "a most unsatisfactory case," because the pure detective-elements were lost somewhere along the way. What looked like "a mental exercise" had "deteriorated into a game of playing one human nature against another" with clues being few and far between. Rev. Buckle's deductions were primarily educated guesses that were, at times, too easily accepted as facts.

Regardless, Week-end Murder was not a bad read and how the detectives dismantled of a gang of criminals also made it an interesting read, but the overall plot simply was not as good, impressive or memorable as those Brady crafted for The Fair Murder and Ebenezer Investigates.

Sorry to have to end this review on a slightly sour note, but it is what it is and might tackle the last remaining title in this series sooner rather than later. The House of Strange Guests (1932) is reputedly a good detective novel with a locked room angle. So it's probably a better title to end this series with than Week-end Murder.

All the Fun of the Fair

"This whole affair... will prove to have a perfectly simple explanation if you don't get into a fever about it. The main thing is to get rid of these cobwebs of suspicion, these ugly clinging strands that wind into the brain and nerves until you feel the spider stir at the end of every one of them."

- Dick Markham (John Dickson Carr's Till Death Do Us Part, 1944)

John V. Turner was a British novelist of detective-and thriller fiction, published under his pennames of "Nicholas Brady" and "David Hume," who churned out nearly fifty novels during a brief period between the early 1930s and the end of World War II in 1945 – passing away before the peace was signed. I've been unable to determine how, or where, Turner exactly died, but I suspect he might have been a casualty of war during the final months of fighting on the European continent.

This lack of detailed information is endemic. All I can tell about this long-since forgotten mystery writer is that he wrote, prolifically, during a period of fifteen years, died in his mid-forties and that John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books praised his short-lived detective series about Rev. Ebenezer Buckle. A series comprising of only five novels that were published as by "Nicholas Brady."

Norris wrote three enticing reviews on his blog and described Rev. Ebenezer Buckle as "one of the more interesting least known detectives in the genre."

Rev. Buckle is "a lively amateur sleuth" and botanist, who reminds the reader of Dr. Gideon Fell and Father Brown, but equally alluring are the plots of the cases he investigates, which tend to be bizarre and even nightmarish – occasionally including an impossible crime. 

One of the titles that attracted my attention was The Fair Murder (1933), alternatively published as The Carnival Murder, which Norris called "the most outlandish and gruesome" of the Brady novels and concerns the apparent impossible stabbing of the Fat Lady at the fair. So what's not to like?

My only reservation about The Fair Murder is the comparison Norris drew with Alexander Laing's The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (1934), which did not exactly impress me. Even so, the plot of the story sounded to good to pass on and can already tell you that it lived up to its promising premise.

Twice a year, the fair came to the village of Mudford and the story opens as the August Bank Holiday Fair drew to a close, which the local inhabitants were determined to enjoy in spite of the rain, hail and lightening – plodding, ankles deep in mud, from stall to stall. A carnival barker, Ernie Clarke, tries to draw a crowd to the tent of Sandra, "The Fattest Woman the World Has Ever Known," but the special attraction awaiting the handful of people is the biggest corpse about to be deposited on the police pathologist's slab.

Sandra's hulking remains lies on a coach, behind a curtained enclosure, with a dagger embedded in "the folds of flesh that encircled her throat."

The official side of the murder investigation is in the hands of an eternally skeptical policeman, Inspector Doby, who has always "experienced a curious difficulty of believing anything." Fortunately, Doby's ingrained skepticism proves useful in keeping a level head when he begins to uncover the more peculiar aspects of the murder. One of these curiosities is that it appears unlikely that anyone, who wanted "to stick that woman in the gullet," would have entered the tent from the front, but the back entry looks out on a plot of muddy ground void of any footprints. There is, however, a "perfectly normal, entirely ordinary bucket" standing nearby. And this only the starting point of the twisty, maze-like puzzle Doby has to plot a course through. Luckily, help is on the way.

A quarter into the story, Doby is honored with a visit from the Home Office pathologist, Sir Percy Forbes, who brought along a clergyman, Reverend Ebenezer Buckle.

Rev. Buckle is the brother of the Assistant Commissionaire of New Scotland Yard and, whenever he isn't "preaching inferior sermons, maltreating flowers" or "collecting quotations," he's known "to render signal service to police" – becoming "a hell of a nuisance" once "he gets his nose down on the grindstone of crime." But he has become so successful, as an amateur criminologist, that he no longer has to lean on his brother's position to be called in on cases. However, this is only the case in the city of London. Rev. Buckle needed Sir Percy to be introduced with the policeman in charge of the delectable murder case on the fairground in the village of Mudford.

There's a splendid scene between Rev. Buckle and the antagonistic Chief Constable, Edward Melton, lampshading the fact that "the police don't allow strangers unconnected with the Force to assist in any case at all." Chief Constable pretty much showed him the door of the police station, but how the Reverend manipulated him into changing his mind reads like a parody of John Dickson Carr. You know how Dr. Fell and H.M. have a habit of driving Superintendent Hadley and Chief Inspector Masters out of their minds by speaking in a cryptic manner? Rev. Buckle takes a similar route and tells the Chief Constable that he'll never find out who killed the fat lady unless "the mystery of the bucket, the beer bottle and the boiled beef" is solved.

The final chapter, in which Rev. Buckle explains the reasoning behind his deductions, shows that the bucket, the bottle and boiled beef were key ingredients of the murderer's plan. I think that alone demonstrates what kind of detective story The Fair Murder is at heart and who would probably like it.

However, the reader should be warned not to expect a weird, quirky, but lighthearted, detective story when arriving at the (black) heart of the plot, because The Fair Murder is hands down the darkest and most grisly of all Golden Age detective stories – even Philip MacDonald's gruesome Murder Gone Mad (1931) is a mere cozy in comparison. One of these dark aspects of the plot is the truth behind Sandra's metamorphosis from a good looking, shapely woman to a monstrously-sized attraction for the freak show, but the coup de grâce is the truth behind the adaptation papers found in a locked tin box in the victim's caravan. A truth that will make you root for the murderer and boo Rev. Buckle.

I think this is where Rev. Buckle differs from Carr's series-detectives, because Dr. Fell and H.M. would never, under any circumstances, have handed this murderer over to the authorities. Dr. Fell would have burned down the fairground before he would allow that to that happen (e.g. The Man Who Could Not Shudder, 1940), while H.M. would simply keep his mouth shut and withdraw from the case (e.g. She Died a Lady, 1943). Anyhow...

Italian edition

So, purely as a detective story, The Fair Murder is a solid and very memorable mystery novel, but what about the impossible crime element, you ask? Someone did manage to cover the muddy ground without leaving any footprints, but how this apparent impossibility tied in with the murder is very different from what the premise suggested and only served to help Rev. Buckle understand the sequence of events at the time of the murder. I can only really call this book a nominally locked room mystery that should be read for the who-and why instead of the how. Or else you might end up disappointed.

There is, however, a false solution for the impossibility that came to mind when reading the opening chapters and is based on the empty bucket found at the scene.

I envisioned the murderer tip-toeing, backwards, to the back entry and obliterating the toe-imprints in the mud with splashes of water from the bucket. Remember, it had rained heavily right before the murder and the mud had no time to dry. Once inside, the murderer planted a dagger in the neck of the fat woman and hid near the entrance of the tent. When the murder was discovered, the murderer simply mingled with the people who had entered the tent or slipped out when everyone's attention was fixed on the body. Sadly, I had to abandon my pet theory almost as soon as it had occurred to me, because nothing in the story tallied with it.

In closing, The Fair Murder is a very different animal from your usual, classically-styled, detective story. From the carnival background and assorted cast of characters, including an armless-and-legless wonder, to the dark, gruesome motive that lies at the heart of the case. The result is a detective story that will probably stick in your mind for years, or even decades, to come and can understand why Norris holds this series in such high regard. And you can expect me to return to this series before too long. I'm already being tempted by The House of Strange Guests (1932), which is, reportedly, a full-fledged locked room mystery.

Yes, I know, I know. But if you think that's predictable, you should see what I have planned for my next book review. I say book review because I might squeeze in a review of Case Closed or Kindaichi. So you better not touch that dial.