Fatal Flaws: A Short Overview of Ruined Detective Stories

"These little things a very significant."

- Miss Marple (Agatha Christie's Sleeping Murder, 1976)

Earlier this month, I reviewed Family Matters (1933) by Anthony Rolls, which took an unconventional approach to telling an inverted detective story and the narrative had all the elements of a genre-classic, but was unable to sustain itself and ended with a whimper – an open-ending that managed to be simultaneously lazy and pretentious. So hardly a satisfying and rewarding read. However, the book made me reflect back on similar detective novels that were on their way of becoming (minor) classics, but slipped with the finish-line in sight.

It has been a while since I slapped together a filler-post and thought doing a quick rundown of a handful of them would make for a nice fluff piece. You may abandon this post, if you want, and come back for one of my regular review, which should be up within the next day or so. Or stick around. It's entirely up to you.

I'll be running through this short list in non-specific order and will begin with Agatha Christie. Or rather with an observation about one of her series-characters, Miss Jane Marple, who's one of Christie's two iconic detective figures, but there's remarkable difference between the Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot series – namely a severe lack of classic titles in the former. Miss Marple never handled a case of the same caliber as Murder on the Orient Express (1934), The A.B.C. Murders (1936) and Death on the Nile (1937). However, there's one Miss Marple novel that came close to matching the brilliance of her Belgian counterpart.

The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (1962) has an American starlet of the silver screen, Marina Gregg, descending upon the sleepy village of St. Mary Mead, but soon learns that an English village can be as dangerous as a dark, grimy back alley in the States. One of her house-guests dies after drinking a poisoned cocktail and the explanation for this specific murder was one of Christie's last triumphs.

The relationship between the victim and murderer, combined with the powerful and well-hidden motive, stuck together with simplistic brilliance, but the equally powerful effect the explanation could've achieved was ruined when Christie allowed the murderer to become completely unhinged – committing several additional murders along the way. It cheapened and lessened the impact of the reason behind the first murder, which robbed the series of a book that could've stood toe-to-toe with such Poirot titles as Peril at End House (1932), Sad Cypress (1940) and Five Little Pigs (1943).

Logically, the murderer should've been stone cold sane, completely unrepentant and never went pass that first murder, which had a solid, original and very human reason behind it. I've always wondered if a much younger Christie would've made the same mistake. A textbook example that sometimes less can be more.

You can also ruin a potential series-classic by punctuating the plot of the story with sheer stupidity. Case in point: The American Gun Mystery (1933) by Ellery Queen.

The American Gun Mystery had all the potential to be one of the best entries from Ellery Queen's plot-orientated nationality series, which has a great premise and a memorable backdrop: a sports arena, the Colosseum, where a horseback rider is gunned down during a rodeo show with twenty thousand potential suspects and eyewitnesses in attendance – topped off with the impossible disappearance of the murder weapon. I distinctly remember how much I had been enjoying this slice of old-fashioned Americana, presented as an original puzzle detective, but all of that enthusiasm dissipated upon learning how the gun was made to vanish. It was one of those rare instances I actually wanted to fling a book across the room in frustration and the hiding place of the gun seems to be a stumbling block for most readers.

And that's why The American Gun Mystery is never mentioned in the same breath as The French Powder Mystery (1930), The Dutch Shoe Mystery (1931) and The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932).

Sometimes you can be on the right track, but simply bite off more than you could chew and a good example of this is Herbert Brean's still beloved Wilders Walk Away (1948).

Curt Evans described the plot of the book as "a fusion of Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr," which is an apt description, because the story is basically one of Queen's Wrightsville novels as perceived by Carr. The protagonist is a freelance photographer, Reynold Frame, who travels to Wilders Lane, Vermon, which is named after the founding family of the place. A family with a peculiar tradition dating back to eighteenth century: members of the Wilders clan have the tendency to escape the yawning grave by simply vanishing into thin air.

So what's not to like, you might ask? Well, the solutions to all of the impossibilities have some of the most routine, common-place explanations you could imagine. It stands in stark contrast with everything that came previous in the book. Barry Ergang hit the nail on the head, in his review, when observing that Wilders Walk Away appeared as "a companion to The Three Coffins (1935) and Rim of the Pit (1944) for ultimate greatness," but that "degree of feeling didn't sustain itself" and that's how I felt when reading the book. A very likable and readable detective story, but the wasted potential is painful to behold. Everything about the book screamed classic... until you reached the ending.

Brean would go on to redeem himself with the superb Hardly a Man is Now Alive (1952), the equally good The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954) and the very amusing The Traces of Brillhart (1961), but they (sadly) never garnered the same attention as Wilders Walks Away.

Finally, I have a prize-winning book, Kay Cleaver Strahan's Footprints (1929), which could have become a personal favorite of mine, but shot itself in the foot in a way that's very similar to Rolls' Family Matters.

Footprints garnered some attention upon its publication for toying with conventions and plot-devices that were not very well established or popular at the time. One of them is that the book qualifies as a semi-historical mystery novel and this past story is entirely told through a series of old, crumbling letters. A story that took place on an Oregon farm in the early 1900s, which has, rather originally, a murder that could one of two types of impossible crimes: either the murderer escaped from a locked room to get to the victim or passed over a field of snow without leaving any footprints.

So you can imagine I was completely hooked by the halfway mark. I loved the depiction of family life on an American farm in the early twentieth century with an apparently innovative impossible crime plot at its core, but the vaguely written ending only hinted at the murderer's identity. And not a single letter was wasted on attempting to explain the impossible situation. A postmodernist would no doubt love such an ending in a structured genre like us, but I wanted, as Carr would say, strangle the author and lynch the publisher. They were really lucky they had already kicked the bucket when I finished the book.

Cleaver did redeem herself with her second locked room novel, Death Traps (1930), which was a competent, if rather conversational, piece of work with an actual ending!

So far my lamentations on several detective novels I really wanted to like, but proved to be a let down, in one way or another, when the final chapter rolled around. I hope this will be, for now, the last blog-post with my whining about bad or disappointing detective stories. My next review looks to be that of a good mystery novel and have something interesting (and untranslated) for the one after that. And both of them fall in the locked room category. Please try to act a little bit surprise about that!

Trouble Next Door

“Talking's something you can't do judiciously unless you keep in practice.”  

- The Fat Man (The Maltese Falcon, 1930)

The award-winning curiosity, Footprints (1929), was my first foray into Kay Cleaver Strahan's writing, and while it was an engaging story depicting life on a Oregon ranch during the early 1900s, it lacked finesse as a proper detective story – i.e. neglecting to supply the full solution. We learn the name of the murderer, in an off-handed way, but not how this person escaped from one of the locked bedrooms or walked over a field of snow surrounding the house without leaving the titular footprints.

However, as little known as Strahan is today, she was known as a versatile mystery writer who penned variegated detective stories, varying her approach to the genre with each novel, which seems tenable after having read Death Traps (1930). Footprints may have been a more captivating story, but in the end, Death Traps proved to be a better mystery novel! The main protagonists in Death Trap are two old codgers, a Mr. Lucky and a Mr. Fisbee, and large portions of the story consists of conversations between the two discussing the crimes that have taken place in their respective homes, "death traps," as Mr. Lucky calls them, situated in an exclusive residential district, Calla Heights, in San Francisco. 

Mr. Bezaleel "Uncle Buzz" Lucky is a self-styled millionaire and retired green grocer from Yoncalla, Washington, and a guest at the home of Judge Amos Dexter where a mysterious shooting takes place in the sunroom: Gerald Dexter, son of, is shot and wounded, and his brother, Bob, is presumed guilty. A cover-up, of sorts, takes place. Guns are taken or turn up. A French window that may have been latched suggests a locked room problem, but there's no mistake about the impossible circumstances surrounding two deaths next door. Mr. Timothy Fisbee is a fidgety, suspiciously-minded old man who stays with relatives, Mr. and Mrs. Justin Veerneg, both of whom, one faithful morning, fail to answer the persistent knocking on their bedroom door (locked from the inside, of course!). The police had to cut a hole in the window screen and found the two peacefully slumbering in their bed, dead for several hours and many more to come! The house wasn't piped for gas and poison seems unlikely, but how then did the Veernegs die?

Strahan's series detective and seasoned crime analyst, Lynn MacDonald, provides an answer for this locked room conundrum, but otherwise, she's a non-entity who only really appears towards the end as a deus ex machina – just not exactly as we mean when we use that phrase. Just read the book.

Anyhow, the solution to the locked room is a good one and I did a bang-up job at solving it too, but than again, I had an almost identical idea for a similar impossible situation. So I caught on fairly quickly. Unfortunately, there's one method now that I have to dump from my bag of dirty tricks and murderous ideas! 

I guess the rest of the story is somewhat marred with many irrelevancies and prattle from the main characters, but I rather enjoyed how they were engrossed in the problems facing them and came up with false solutions and dummy cases – in the spirit of the dodgy characters populating Christianna Brand's detective stories. Death Traps may not be the best mystery novel produced during the 1930s, but with its excellent locked room and good enough solution, a fairly well played hand with the least-likely suspect card, it was a mountainous improvement that looms over its predecessor. I think I'll give Strahan another shot somewhere down the line.

On a completely unrelated note, but halfway through writing this review, I came to the stunning discovery that "unwakeable" is not a word, which makes me want to find a detective story about a murdered lexicologist so I can use the post title, "The Unwakeable Lexicographer." Childish, I know. 

Snow Blind

"The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

- Albert Einstein. 

As the days that lead up to the one year anniversary of this place dwindle down, crossed off the calendar, one after another, like names on the guest list of Mr. U.N. Owen, it slowly began to morph back to its original incarnation – a blog that is dedicated to the great old detective stories of yore! There was a stretch of time when this place resembled a shrine for new-fangled, neo-orthodox mysteries, but it appears that the ghosts of past writers, such as Anne Rowe and Willy Corsari, reclaimed this digital mausoleum from the living. Well, they are about to welcome another revenant spirit, whose memory has faded like a neglected black-and-white photograph, in their midst. 

Kay Cleaver Strahan is one of those names that has been accumulating dust in the attic of our collective memories for decades, but nobody seems to remember why, exactly, this author was stored up there. I guess it was a convenient, spacious spot when they began tidying up the genre.

Strahan was a writer who designed a number of plots that functioned as the structural skeletons for seven mystery novels, which were, in turn, craftily deconstructed by a seasoned crime analyst, named Lynn MacDonald, and, from what I gathered, there was a different approach in storytelling in each of these narratives. Her endeavors at finding new and fresh perspectives, to put a detective story on paper, were rewarded when her novel Footprints (1929) became the recipient of the Scotland Yard Prize – handed out by 100 independent booksellers that were affiliated with the Collins Crime Club for the best mystery of the year.

Footprints opens in the present time, which, in this novel, is 1928, but spends most of its pages on looking back at a murder that was committed in the year 1900 and we are almost immediately confronted with a rather dubious and shaky confession. Neal Quilter confesses to his sister, Judy, that he has come to believe that it was him who was responsible for the death of their father, all those years ago, but the circumstances, in which the murder was carried out, won't allow this admission of guilt to stand.

The Quilter's are among the best-known families in Oregon, whom transplanted their lives and family tree from the South during the Civil War, and lived together, as an outwardly happy and caring family, on a big farm known as Q 2 Ranch – until the report of a pistol shot ripped through their lives and awakened that ogre known as suspicion. This one shot was enough to wrench them all from their peaceful slumber, but they found themselves unable to leave their bedrooms – as their doors were all locked from the outside. The keys were later found in a pile on a table in the bedroom of Richard Quilter, who was dying in his bed from a gunshot wound in the chest, next to an open window with a rope dangling out of it.

Richard Quilter, with his dying breath, murmured the words, "red mask," as he inclined his head towards the window, however, when the shot rang out it had stopped snowing for some time and the house was marooned in an expanse of unbroken snow – and there were rolls of undisturbed snow on the windowsills. This literarily threw the possibility of an intruder out of the window, but the absence of a gun in the room makes suicide as unlikely a possibility as murder and the case went unsolved for three decades.

That is, until Dr. Joe Elm, the likeable family physician and friend, who shares the concern of his friends over the mental well being of Neal, decides to consult Lynn MacDonald – a renowned criminologist. Nearly thirty years have elapsed since the fatal bullet was fired and there's little left for her to go on. The house has been remodeled and refurnished several times, family members have died off and the intervening years have made the memories of those who are still alive unreliable, but the family does have in its possession two parcels of letters that were penned by the youngest members in the house, Neal and Lucy, to their sister Judy – who lived away from home at the time. 

Based on these scraps of paper, written by a child and disturbed young man, MacDonald has to come up with, not only, a possible murderer, but also gauge for a motive and figure out the method. The picture that emerge from these letters is refreshingly different from your usual, stock-in-trade dysfunctional family and showed a relatively normal family who are attempting to deal with problems that life throws at them. There's a less-than-popular in-law making an entrance into the family and there are financial problems that may force them to sell their ranch, but no stereotypical patriarchs ruling over the private lives and clutching the purse strings of the family with an iron first or fooling around with changed wills.

It's a fairly realistic portrayal of a family during the early 1900s, or, at least, I imagine it is not an entirely unrealistic representation of such a family during that period in time and the biography of the Quilters, provided by Dr. Elms, is equally fascinating – placing this book in the Van Dine-Queen School of Detection. This detailed description traces the family history of the Quilter's all the way back to the settlement of America and their exodus from the South because of their commendation of slavery. Not to mention that it also introduces several plot devices that would resurface in the succeeding decades: Q. Patrick's S.S. Murder (1933) also uses a series of letters to relate the story, the retrospective look at a murder from the past foreshadows Agatha Christie's Five Little Pigs (1943) and Sparkling Cyanide (1945) and Ellery Queen (who debuted in the year this book was published) would make the dying message their trademark.

The only thing that mucks it up is the almost Gladys Mitchell-like vagueness where the solution is concerned. There's an interesting false solution proposed towards the end before the actual culprit is revealed in the final sentence of the book, but this impressed me more as a guess than as a statement of fact. This last moment "surprise" left absolutely no room whatsoever to explain how this person was either locked into the bedroom or trodded over snow without disturbing its surface, although, if you know who is fingered for the murder you can pretty much guess the method. But it's a sloppy writing/editing job on the part of both the writer and editor. This is a shame, because up till the final pages this has been an excellent read and could easily become a favorite of mine – even with a routine solution to the impossible nature of the murder.  

All in all, this is a nicely written story that must have seem like a breath of fresh air at the time and some of its originality still shines through, which makes it worth picking up when you come across a dirt-cheap copy of the book, but the ambiguous (read: sloppy) ending should not make this one of your top-priorities on your wish-list.

K.C. Strahan's bibliography:

The Desert Moon Mystery (1927)

Footprints (1929)

Death Traps (1930)

October House (1932)

The Meriwether Mystery (1932)

The Hobgoblin Murder (1934)

The Desert Lake Mystery (1936)