The Frightened Stiff (1942) by Kelley Roos

William and Audrey Roos were the husband-and-wife writing tandem, known as "Kelley Roos," who published a lamentably short series of lighthearted, fast-paced detective novels, novellas and short stories during the 1940s – starring their irresistible amateur sleuths, Jeff and Haila Troy. Kelley Roos and the Troys were largely forgotten, until the mid-2000s, when the Rue Morgue Press resurrected the series and became the gems of their catalog. 

Why the Rooses and the Troys were so completely forgotten is somewhat of a mystery, because, as Tom and Enid Schantz wrote in their introduction, they were perhaps "a good deal better" than their more famous contemporaries.

The Troys were "funnier than the Norths, livelier than the Abbotts, often more involved in doing the actual detection than the Justuses" and "a more convincing couple than the Duluths." They were so entertaining, genuinely funny and easy to read, you almost overlook the well-crafted, structured and often fairly clued plots. There are two titles in the Rooses oeuvre that standout, The Frightened Stiff (1942) and Sailor, Take Warning! (1944), of which the former is an all-time personal favorite of mine. I rammed the book through a lot of throats a decade ago, but how well does it stand up to rereading? So after a few good to middling detective novels and one that left a lingering bad taste, I decided to finally take a second look at The Frightened Stiff. 

The Frightened Stiff is the third novel in the series and the first one in which Jeff and Haila appear as a newlyweds, who moved to a garden level apartment of an old Greenwich Village brownstone on Thirty-Nine Gay Street, but nothing goes as planned and Haila's first lines of the story sets the tone of what's to come – "jumping from a window would bring no release" in a basement apartment. Charley, the little janitor, forgot to clean up the apartment and the thick, heavy cobwebs and dust mice could "grace a Class A haunted house." A telegram arrived to tell the Troys the moving van broke down and the delivery of their furniture is delayed, but the worst is yet to come.

Jeff and Haila Troy decided to grab a bite to eat at a local restaurant where Haila overhears a shady character talking, in a threatening tone, to someone in one of the phone booths. And to her shock, she hears the man tell the person on the other end of the line to meet him in the basement apartment of Thirty-Nine Gay Street! The incident triggers Jeff memory and remembers, to Haila's horror, that their apartment used to be a speakeasy where he wasted many happy hours of his boyhood. So he assumes the man is drunk and wants somebody to meet him at his old speakeasy, but when Jeff confronts the man with a good piece of advice, he gets hold of "the most frightened human being" he has ever seen.

Next morning, Haila is drummed out of bed by the police, because the body of a naked man had been spotted in their fenced-in garden and recognizes the body as the frightened man of the previous evening. The man is identified by the Troys' new neighbors as one of the motley tenants of the apartment building, Mike Kaufman, who tended to keep to himself. But things can always get worse. And they do.

Firstly, it turns out Kaufman had been drowned in Jeff and Haila's bathtub right before they returned home. Secondly, Lieutenant Hankins has his doubts about the Troys and suspects they might be up their necks in murder (technically correct). Jeff observes Hankins strikes him as "the type of cop that is wrong, but proves he's right." So they decide to once again don the proverbial deerstalker and poke around the private affairs of their new neighbors in an attempt to find the murderer.

The tenants of Thirty-Nine Gay Street include an old friend of Haila, Anne Carstairs, whose husband, Scott, is a struggling commercial artist with a secret. Why wasn't Anne glad to see Haila? Charlotte Griffin is a middle-aged lady who has to care for her invalid, bedridden sister, Lucy, who might have been out of bed and, "pressed snub-nosed against the glass," sized up the Troys when they arrived – her overprotective sister makes it difficult to get to speak with Lucy. Polly Franklin owns the restaurant where Haila overheard the telephone call and Henry Lingle is a retired art dealer. Lastly, there's the rabbity little landlord, Mr. Turner, and the previously mentioned janitor, Charley.

A pretty good pool of potential suspects to fish a murderer from, but The Frightened Stiff is not exactly a pure, straightforward whodunit and some of my fellow mystery fans have criticized the book for the apparent randomness of the murderer's identity. Patrick, of the dormant At the Scene of the Crime, said in his 2011 review that "there is literally nothing that points in X's direction as the culprit," which was echoed more recently by The Green Capsule and The Bedford Bookshelf. So I kept this mind when rereading The Frightened Stiff and kind of have to disagree with them.

Yes, the clueing here is a little unconventional, devious, but unconventional with only one clue, or hint, pointing directly towards the murderer. However, you can still identify the murderer as Jeff and Haila begin to find answers to who Kaufman really was and start tying up all the plot-threads concerning the other tenants. Once you arrived at the final couple of chapters, there's only one character left standing who fits the role of murderer. So, yes, it's more a process of elimination rather than deduction, but you can still identify [REDACTED] before the name is revealed in the last line of the penultimate chapter and it didn't feel like it had been drawn from a hat or could have been substituted by any of the other characters – which wouldn't have made a lick of sense. If there's anything to complain about, it's that the Rooses played it very safe with their choice of murderer.

Anyway, I didn't think the murderer was randomly picked or unfairly hidden from the reader, but the who's not the only bone of contention some readers have with The Frightened Stiff.

There's a quasi-impossible, almost locked room-like aspect to the murder that nobody can't quite agree on whether, or not, it qualifies as an impossible situation. When the police go to inspect Kaufman's apartment, they're make the startling discovery that there was "not a stick of furniture" or "a scrap of paper" in the apartment. The place had been furnished the day before and Kaufman was heard turning on the radio, but how could the apartment been cleaned out without any of tenants seeing it or hearing it? The bedroom door of Jeff and Haila was practically at the foot of the main staircase. So how could the content of a whole apartment vanish without trace or sound? I can only describe quasi-impossible problem as Schrödinger's locked room. Technically, it's a locked room when you don't look to closely at it or don't notice that it actually qualifies (somewhat) as a locked room, but (sort of) stops being one the moment you take notice of it. You can put this down to the setting and circumstances of the vanishing furniture leaving room for only one logical explanation, which is why I didn't identify it as a (quasi) impossible crime on my first read, but the clueing of the furniture plot-thread was original and first-class – dovetailing beautifully with the rest of the plot and story. I also found impressive that with only one possible explanation, Hankins came up with another solution that would have been plausible enough had it not made the Troys his prime suspects.

Tom and Enid Schantz ended their introduction to their reprint editions stating that you won't find the name Kelley Roos "among the giants of genre," but their spirited contributions to, what John Dickson Carr called, the Grandest Game "deserve not to be overlooked" as they showed "what it was like to be young and in love in the New York of the 1940s" – more importantly that "mysteries were meant to be fun." A perfect summation of The Frightened Stiff. A genuinely funny, solidly plotted detective novel full with humorous, good-natured banter and a devious criminal scheme at the heart of the story, which ensured the many twists and turns that had to be smoothed out along the way. While not everything was perfectly executed, The Frightened Stiff towers over its screwball contemporaries of the murder-can-be-fun school and more than stood up to rereading. Highly recommended!

Endless Waltz

"This dance of death which sounds so musically,

was sure intended for the corpse de ballet."

- Anonymous (On the Danse Macabre of Saint-Saëns)

Last week, Mike of Only Detect and "JJ" of The Invisible Event posted reviews of, respectively, The Frightened Stiff (1942) and Sailor, Take Warning! (1944), which came from the hands of a criminally underrated pair of mystery novelists, William and Audrey Roos – who published their work under the shared penname of "Kelley Roos." I rank their high-spirited, comedic detective stories among my personal favorites and the aforementioned reviews were a reminder there still was one of their novels on my TBR-pile. A particular title I had been saving for a while.

The Blonde Died Dancing (1956) is an expansion of a 1948 novella, entitled "Dancing Death," which was originally published in American Magazine and featured their beloved series-character, Jeff and Haila Troy. However, the couple from the novel-length version were given different names, Steve and Connie Barton, but they're carbon copies of the original. You can easily see they act as stand-ins for the Troys.

Steve and Connie Barton have a similar penchant for attracting copious amounts of trouble, while bantering and wandering into unlikely situations, but they also might be separate characters who inhabit the same universe as the Troys – because both appear to be acquainted with Lt. George Hankins of the Homicide Squad. It could mean they're either a thinly disguised version of the Troys or there are two of such meddlesome, trouble-prone couples running amok in New York.

The problems in The Blonde Died Dancing begins with Connie worrying about the state of her marriage. Every Wednesday, Steve "had dreamed up a reason to be away for the evening," but the pile of excuses are as transparent as a broken window pane. So, after a thorough makeover failed to keep him home on another Wednesday evening, Connie decided to tail her husband to the fourteenth floor of an office building and there she makes a startling discovery: her husband is secretly taking dancing lessons! The place is called the Crescent School of Dancing and Steve is being taught how to waltz by "a tall, willowy and ravishing female" named Anita Farrell. But moments later another headache of a problem presented itself to Connie.

After Steve finished his lesson for the evening and left, Connie entered the music-filled Studio K to meet her husband's dance teacher, but what she found was her body sprawled grotesquely on the smooth, shining floor – a bullet hole in her back. She was grasping "a small, curiously shaped piece of heavy paper" in one hand. There is, however, one problem: she had entered the studio right after Steve had left it. Nobody else had entered the room. There were no concealed doors, camouflaged windows or hidden crevices behind the mirrored walls, which means the shooter could only have been Steve!

You guessed it! The Blonde Died Dancing is a good, old-fashioned locked room mystery and one of the reasons why I stored this away for a cold, wintry day.

Anyway, Connie is shocked and confused, but has sense enough to snatch the registry from the reception desk, which lists Steve as Farrell's last pupil, before hightailing out of there. However, this only slows down Lieutenant-Detective Bolling and Lieutenant Hankins. They're working on a clever process of elimination based on the lists of students. A process that will, eventually, reveal the last pupil and prime suspect in the slaying of the dance teacher – referred to by the sensationalist press as "The Waltzer."

I've to make one observation here: the registry noted that Steve's appointment took place between seven and eight. Steve mentioned he known his teacher for a total of nine hours. So he has been taking lessons for nine weeks, right? But absolutely nobody at the school, without the registry, remembered who was getting dance lessons at that fixed time for the past two months? And it was in the murderers best interest to remember who this pupil was.

This is an obvious weak spot in the plot. A weakness that was necessary to propel the plot forward, which happens when Connie returns to the dance school to get a job as Farrell's replacement. As the pseudonymous "Hester Frost," she uncovers hidden relationships, a blackmail racket and how an outside murderer could have penetrated the watched and closed studio, but there's also a great deal of lighthearted humor in getting identity under wraps – such as trying to avoid the police-detectives who know the new teacher by her real name. But that's not the only close shave she got and all of this makes for a pleasantly paced, humorous read.

Undoubtedly, the lighthearted, cheerful nature of the storytelling is the most attractive aspect of The Blonde Died Dancing. However, this is not to say that the plot is bad, which is not the case, but rather simplistic and will not pose a serious challenge to the experienced armchair detective. You can almost instinctively figure out how the murder was accomplished based on the black paper figure in the victim's hand and the nature of the bullet wound. Something that's confirmed when Connie stumbles across the means of the locked room trick, long before grasping how it fully worked, but, when she does, the reader is treated to a nice set-piece in the murder room. The who-and why were a bit more tricky, but not something that broke new ground or surprisingly pulled the rug from underneath the reader.

Nevertheless, The Blonde Died Dancing is a very fun and energetic detective novel, which harked back to the early mysteries by Roos. The plot never reaches the height of their best novels (i.e. The Frightened Stiff and Sailor, Take Warning!), but the attempt will be appreciated by readers who enjoyed their other work.

A note for the curious: The Blonde Died Dancing formed the basis for a French-Italian movie, Come Dance With Me (1959), starring Brigitte Bardot.

Pellets from a Buckshot

"...you planned the most hazardous of all crimes as if you were devising a harmless parlor game." 

- Nero Wolfe (Rex Stout's The League of Frightened Men, 1935)

The original plan was to have one or two more reviews up by now, but an unspecified package stubbornly persists on being delayed and, tiring of the wait, settled on crossing a handful of short stories from the ever growing list of mysteries I hope to read one day.

"Holocaust House" is a novella and a continuation of the previous review, in which I looked at Norbert Davis' debut as a mystery novelist with The Mouse in the Mountain (1943), however, I mistakenly called the book the first recorded case for Carstairs and Doan. That's not the case. The novella was published as a two-part serial for Argosy in November, 1940, which was the inaugural case for the unlikely duo. Well, sort of.

Doan and Carstairs are, essentially, the same characters from the novels. Doan is short and plumb, whose pink round face and bland blue eyes radiates with the type of innocence gullibility conmen look for in a mark – which basically means that Doan is a hardboiled, gun toting and drinking incarnation of Father Brown. However, it's the fawn-colored Great Dane, "as big as a yearling calf," Carstairs, with a pedigree of high-class ancestors as long as the arrest record of any repeat offender, who's the senior partner. "Holocaust House" is no different in this aspect and begins with Doan awaking from successfully getting drunk the night before and Carstairs, "never been able to reconcile himself to having such a low person for a master," gives him nothing but wearily resigned disgust.

The first quarter of the story consists of Doan trying to figure out who slipped him a bulky, stainless steel cigar case with deadly content (not one of the perils mentioned in the anti smoking ads, by the way) and finding a man "whose name isn't Smith and who doesn't wear dark glasses and doesn't have black eyebrows or a black mustache," before their employer of the Severn Agency, J.S. Toggery, gives him a case that separates him from Carstairs. Doan has to safeguard a gunpowder and munitions heiress, by the name of Sheila Alden, in the mountains of the Desolation Lake country – where the first snow of the winter season has begun to fall. Carstairs does not approve of mountains and stays with Toggery. And you thought Scrappy had attitude problems.

Here where's the novella begins to differ from the novels, not only because the separation breaks the fun dynamic between the protagonists, but what we get in place functioned surprisingly well as a morbidly funny take on the closed-circle of suspects stuck in a mountain lodge. There are some wonderful, evocative scenes as Doan wonders the train tracks, heads down against the blizzard, in the dark and finds a frozen corpse by match light or the encounter with the one-armed, lantern wielding stationmaster and his troupe of sled hounds – slightly unhinged and nurtures a grudge against the Alden family. The situation at the lodge is arguably worst: there's a nervous man from the bank who hired Doan, a secretary hell-bent on murder, a shady caretaker and a lost traveler.

A perfect set-up for murder, fisticuffs and emptying the remaining cartridges in Doan's revolver and, while the murderer became more and more obvious, the plot stuck together pretty well. Breezy, well-paced hardboiled story telling laced and occasionally funny, too! Well, it seems I have overused the padding to review this one story and I'll try to lay off the stuff for the next three stories.

Isaac Asimov's "Mirror Image" was originally published in the May, 1972 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, collected in The Complete Robot (1982), which marked the brief return of the Earth policeman Elijah Baley and the advanced Spacer robot R. Daneel Olivaw after their last joined investigation in The Naked Sun (1957). Baley is surprised when Olivaw turns up on Earth on a Spacer ship, but there's a professional character to his visit. There are two passengers, a pair of eminent mathematicians, accusing each other of plagiarism and the story has the potential to cause a tidal wave of scandal across the academic worlds of the Settler planets – unless Baley can sort out the mess before taking off again. They both tell the exact same story, except the names in their story are reversed, and even their servant robots repeat the conversation verbatim. Again, the names are swapped. Clearly, one of the robots was instructed to lie and exposing the truth lies in understanding how the lying robot interpreted TheThree Laws of Robotics. "Mirror Image" is a fun little quip, but one that felt immeasurable small in comparison to its monumental predecessors, The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun, in which Asimov excelled as he created entire worlds with civilizations, history, technology, infrastructure and political structures, and still remembered he was writing a detective story. But more importantly, it refuted the argument that modern forensic science killed clever, old-fashioned plotting decades before it was made. Asimov was so much more than just a Visitor from Science Fiction to the mystery genre.

I count the husband-and-wife writing tandem of William and Aubrey Roos, writing under the penname of "Kelley Roos," among my favorite mystery writers and if you're wondering why, you obviously haven't read The Frightened Stiff (1942).

"Two Over Par" is a short story, collected in the anthology Four and Twenty Bloodhounds (1950), featuring Jeff and Haila Troy – New York's meddlesome, wisecracking amateur sleuths and they were the best. Jeff and Haila Troy are indulging in their latest fad, which happened to be golf, but they are quickly drawn in their favorite past time when they uncover two bodies in the thickets of the golf course. Mrs. Carleton and her caddie, Eddie Riorden, were shot through the head and this gives rise to multiple possibilities. Based on a 1948 novella I read, "Beauty Marks the Spot," I assumed Roos needed novel-length stories to fully shine, but here we have the same, satisfying dovetailing of plot threads combined with their trademark wit and even a twist solution. My only complaint is that it wasn't a full-length novel.

G.D.H and M. Cole's "The Owl at the Window," collected for the first time in Superintendent Wilson's Holiday (1928) as "In a Telephone Cabinet," mentioned every know and then as a splendid example of short impossible crime stories, however, I found it to be a tad-bit dated. The story opens with Wilson and his friend, Dr. Michael Pendergast, stumbling on a man breaking into the locked home of his friend who failed to respond. As to be expected, the man is murdered and lies dead in the telephone cabinet of his home. His face blown apart from the discharge from a blunderbuss, which also happened to be the only remarkable feature of the story. The lack of suspects makes the solution only more obvious than it already was and I have seen this set-up done better in Arthur Porges' "The Scientist and the Wife Killer," which can be found in The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009). So a little bit of a disappointment.

Finally, it's interesting to note that I picked these stories randomly, but, nonetheless, there emerged a connecting theme: all of the culprits did too much to cover up their misdeeds and, thereby, exposed themselves to the detectives. And that explains the opening quote.

The Chiller Diller Movie Thriller

"It's all in the details."

- Hustle 

Kelley Roos' Scent of Mystery (1959) is an incredibly slender, one hundred and twenty-eight page counting booklet-ish looking novella that has a unique back-story.

The mystery writing husband-and-wife team of William and Aubrey Roos, writing under the joined pseudonym of "Kelley Roos," basically novelized a screenplay based on one of their own novels, Ghost of a Chance (1947), but the big screen adaptation only carried a ghost of a resemblance to the original plot. However, the most salient aspect of this story is that Scent of Mystery was one of the first (and last) experiments with Smell-O-Vision, which attempted to create a complete viewing experience by releasing timed odors into the movie theatre.  

I think this is why the script writer, William Rose, changed the murder from the book by electrocution on a subway track to a hit-and-run in the streets, because there's no way they would've gotten permission to have Southern barbeques in cinemas across the land.

Jeff and Haila Troy were scrubbed from Scent of Mystery and the scenery has drifted from the Big Apple to Spain, where Oliver Larker is spending a well-deserved holiday when a disembodied voice from a sentry box barks a warning at him – a woman is about to be murdered who's too beautiful to die. The voice to meet him at Bar Colombo within half an hour, but there's a note waiting there with a request to go the fountain park, however, there's only a crowd there huddled over a man in the street. A victim of a hit-and-run and Larker recognizes him from the bar, but discovers no more than a nickname, Johnny Gin, to go on to find a woman marked for murder.

The opening of Scent of Mystery is fairly close to Ghost of a Chance, with its mysterious warnings and deaths in traffic after following up on a note left at a bar, but if you're familiar with the source material you can recognize its skeleton structure through out the story. And in some parts, they were more obvious than in others. There's one chapter in the book that's a complete rewrite of a scene from Ghost of a Chance, in which our heroes get trapped in a house with an incredible, but short-lived, disappearance mystery ("a woman couldn't disappear into thin air from a sealed shaft of a dumb waiter... this was the twentieth century... this could not happen."), but it was too short (one page) and too simple to tag this post as a Locked Room Mystery.

If anything, Scent of Mystery is a chase-thriller with detective interruptions. There are clues and red herrings, but these are picked up as Larker scoots across the landscape in Smiley's taxi – a menace on the road who was played in the film by Peter Lorré. They find enough women who are too beautiful to be killed, many dead ends and have to dodge a few bullets in order to safe their unknown quarry. Larker and Smiley also gave the Rooses an opportunity to give some of the dialogue their famous comedic touches.

All in all, Scent of Mystery was a fast-paced and fun thriller to read, but as a detective story it's only an interesting curiosity because the clues in the story were odor-based and clearly written for Smell-O-Vision. The book also includes several black-and-white movie stills with captions like the opening of an Ellery Queen episode ("the mysterious woman on the right doesn't know it, but somebody's marked her for murder"). So definitely an item of interest for fans of Kelley Roos and movie aficionados.

Note for the curious: As you know, Kelley Roos was the penname of William and Aubrey Roos, but the funny thing is that their surname means rose in Dutch. And who scripted the movie? William Rose! That means twice two men with pretty much the same name rewrote the same story. Why does reality never get any flack for these unbelievable coincidences? 

Oh, and the post title comes from a Scooby Doo episode. That was all I could think of.

Divorcees in Crime

Note: I wrote this review when my concentration was completely shot, so it didn't turn out the way I wanted.

It's a well-established fact that Kelley Roos is one of my all-time favorite mystery writers, only second to the unsurpassed master of the locked room mystery, John Dickson Carr, and I'm sure that some of my fellow detective enthusiasts are probably sick and tired at this point of me pouncing at every opportunity to proselytize Roos' work – especially that unacknowledged masterpiece, The Frightened Stiff (1942), which, by the way, is still in print. Just FYI.

I adulate Roos' witty style that's usually tightly woven with the threads of a cleverly crafted plot, and I dote on Jeff and Haila Troy – one of the better bantering husband-and-wife detective teams in the genre. Considering this affinity I have for the books and characters, it was disconcerting to learn that, in their last recorded case, my favorite snooping couple had gone their separated ways!

One False Move (1966) was written after a seventeen year break from the series, in which between suspense and thriller stories appeared under the Kelley Roos byline, but before the end of the second decade, William and Aubrey Roos decided to return to the traditional detective story – resulting in an amusing romp, in which they deliver playful jabs to their own body of work, both their straightforward detective stories and suspenseful thrillers, as well as their characters.

Torn Asunder

After her divorce from Jeff Troy, Haila Rogers packs up and leaves New York City behind her to recuperate with relatives living in Carsonville, a scant town in Texas momentarily buzzing with activity as the town's anniversary nears closer and the rehearsals for a pageant are in full swing – reenacting a fairly recent and bloody piece of local history, involving a gang of outlaws and several brutal murders. But that's all stuff for the history books, and, with the era of desperados behind them, the town reclaimed its sleepy demeanor and serenity.

But they didn't reckon that with Haila's arrival, they welcomed someone in their midst who's a chronic sufferer from, what later would be diagnosed as, "Jessica Fletcher Syndrome," which especially acts up in an aggressive manner in small town environments – and before long, she just so happens to overhear fragments of a heated argument, between a blackmailer and his unidentifiable victim, naturally ending with a fatal knife thrust to the blackguard's heart.

As I mentioned earlier, the Rooses gently poke fun at themselves in this book, and they acknowledge their heroines morbid habit, of tumbling over bodies wherever she goes, in a conversation between her and the local chief of police:  

"This isn't the first murder victim you’ve discovered?"

"Well ... no"

"The second?"

"Well ..."

The chief's eyebrows rose above his steel-rimmed glasses.

"The third, Miss Rogers?"

"Well, it's been quite a few. Come to think of it, I’ve never kept count. You see, my ex-husband was always getting mixed up in murder cases. In fact, that was one of our bones of ... shall I say, contention?"

In defense of Jeff, that's hardly fair criticism when only moments ago she tripped over the still-warm and bleeding remains of the first homicide victim the town has seen in decades, but then again, maybe she has a valid point when a second murder of a local admiral, battered to death with a bronze bust of Shakespeare, coincides with him unexpectedly showing up in town – and even has a nearly fateful brush with the murderer.

This subtle way of poking fun at the conventions of the genre and their own stories is pretty typical of this book, and you have to be a little familiar with their previous work to fully appreciate it. For instance, if you contrast some of the events, concerning Jeff and Haila, with those from their first detective novel, Made Up to Kill (1940), you have to conclude that the series has come full-circle – as both the characters and readers rediscovers one another. 

The humor and zest of the earlier books are still very much a part of this late entry into the series, but the plotting, alas, seems to have suffered from the Rooses picking up the traditional whodunit format again, after having abondoned the form for so many years to write thrillers and suspense stories. Not that the plot is an awful mess or painfully transparent, but proper detection has become a secondary concern, nevertheless, the two modern murders were neatly tied-in with the towns history set against a semi-theatrical backdrop – which is worthy of at least one or two bonus points.

Everything considered, this is not a book to begin with if you're new to the series, but if you're devotee of Kelley Roos than you probably want to check up on your old friends, Jeff and Haila Troy, and find out for yourself how they will haul themselves out of this messy quagmire.

The Big Apple Chase

The witty and cleverly constructed detective novels by Kelley Roos, a joined pseudonym of the husband-and-wife writing team of William and Aubrey Roos, was one of the greatest serendipitous discoveries in my never ending quest for great-but-forgotten mystery writers – and on my list of personal favorites they rank almost alongside the unexcellable John Dickson Carr.

When they were at their best, they managed to combine a sparkling sense of humor and some risible banter, between the two protagonists, a wisecracking, mystery solving couple named Jeff and Haila Troy, with clever and well thought out plots. These qualities are most evident in their 1942 novel, The Frightened Stiff, an unsung masterpiece, in which the recently married couple move into their first apartment that turns out to be a former speakeasy (one that Jeff used to frequent, much to Haila's dismay) and comes with a naked corpse in the garden who was drowned in their bathtub. Hilarity ensues!

Ghost of a Chance (1947) is a bit different from the other Rooses I have read thus far and starts off with an ominous phone call from a stranger – asking Jeff's help in preventing the murder of an unnamed woman that is about to take place any minute. Well, the Troy's never been the ones to pass up a good mystery and follow a trail of instructions that eventually leads them to the subways, only to find the man's exanimate remains on the tracks and they are rather skeptical of the whole drunken accident theory the police cooked up. As a result, they find themselves faced with the daunting task of preventing a second murder in a city with several million potential victims!

What follows is a race against time, as the Troy's tramp about New York in search for leads that will help them safe a life, but almost everyone they meet along the way seems to be part of a sinister conspiracy and will stop at nothing to prevent them from reaching the intended victim. But despite the odds that are stacked against them, and the many dangers they have to dodge, they keep a level head and their recognizable sense of humor, which makes the book somewhat reminiscent to other humorous chase novels such as Crispin's The Moving Toyshop (1946) and Carr's The Punch and Judy Murders (1937) and The Blind Barber (1934).

Now, granted, this might not be the most ingenious detective story ever conceived, certainly not by the Rooses own standards, but tagging along with Jeff and Haila around town, sidestepping or crawling out of dangerous pitfalls and snooping for clues, is just plain fun and offers the reader a picture of a time when mysteries were allowed to be diverting and entertaining. 

If you're new to Kelley Roos, I recommend you check out some of the recent reprints by the invaluable Rue Morgue Press and make their acquaintance through The Frightened Stiff and Sailor, Take Warning! 

And on a side note: I have noticed that most of the detectives reviewed here, so far, have rather unconventional plots and therefore I promise that the next book will be a more traditional mystery.