Shoot, Duck and Cover

"Geez awfully quiet, dang, I wonder if there anymore hunters out here this mornin'"

- Elmer Fudd

In the final days of 2014, I wrote a blog-post, "The Renaissance Era of Detective Fiction," proclaiming that the dawn of a new era peeked over the horizon and the subsequent twelve months has shown an invigorated interest for the Golden Age detective novel – an interest shared by both readers and publishers.

A whole slew of obscure and long-forgotten mystery writers were unearthed in 2015: John Bude, J. Jefferson Farjeon, Annie Haynes, Ianthe Jerrold, Lenore Glen Offord, E.R. Punshon, Harriet Rutland and HarperCollins' re-launch of The Detective Club. One of the lesser-known, unfairly forgotten names in this deluge was that of an Australian mystery writer, named June Wright, who finally had one of "lost" novels published last year: Duck Season Death (c. 1955). 

June Wright was a mother of six children and combined a career as a spouse with that of a mystery novelist, which is an occupation she crammed in the two or three hours that were left to her in the evening. The results were six books, published during the tail-end of the Golden Age, which began with Murder in the Telephone Exchange (1948) and ended with Make-Up to Murder (1966). But there were two more mystery novels that were never published in Wright's lifetime: Duck Season Death and The Law Courts Mystery.

Unfortunately, The Law Courts Mystery was never published and the manuscript is now considered to be the lost, but Duck Season Death was saved from a similar fate and appeared in print for the first time 2015 – courtesy of Verse Chorus Press. 

Duck Season Death, alternatively titled The Textbook Detective Story, was rejected on the basis over several critical reports from so-called test readers, who labeled a purposely classically-styled, somewhat tongue-in-cheek detective story as a "stock-box novel of the whodunit house party variety" with "mechanics" that "follow the old lines of the country house murder." Well, it's this kind of utter nonsense that led to irrevocable lost of a number of unpublished manuscripts by the likes of Joseph Commings, Glyn Carr, C. Daly King and Hake Talbot, which can not be tolerated in this new Golden Era. I suggest we find these court jesters, whether they are dead or alive now, coat them with tar and toss them into a gibbet cage. Anyhow, on to the story at hand!

The tragic hero of Duck Season Death is Charles Carmichael, the crime-fiction reviewer for Culture and Critic, which is a small, but influential, literary quarterly owned by his uncle – the detestable and hateful Athol Sefton. Lamentably, Carmichael finds himself shackled to his uncle's company for a spot of duck shooting at the Duck and Dog Inn, but Sefton has made himself a target of the scorn of every guest at the hotel. As the readers knows from the introductory chapters, some of them had a motive to take a shot at him before they bumped into him at the place. 

So is at any surprise when a stray bullet puts an end to Sefton? Carmichael is convinced that his uncle was "deliberately and cleverly murdered," but here is where the plot begins to diverge from your dime-a-dozen country house murder mysteries with a closed-circle of suspects: nobody believes Carmichael. The authorities and locals assume Sefton came to his end as a result of a shooting accident, because "every season there is some fatality or other like this" and is often reprimanded for insisting a murder has taken place – even publicly by the corner during the inquest.

Of course, it's suggested that Carmichael has read too many detective stories. As if there’s such a thing as reading too many detective stories.

Well, as you can see, I enjoyed reading Duck Season Death, but I have to fulfill my duties as a dreary, disgusting armchair critic by pointing out that the fair play factor is a bit dodgy. The motive is foreshadowed, but not revealed until the final part of the story and this makes it very difficult to settle on a murderer. However, when it's revealed and you keep some of the clues in mind, you should be able to foresee the final twist. So technically it's a completely fair play mystery, but it took some time in getting there. 

Stylistically, I also have to note that the book differed in one aspect from other Australian mystery writers I've read, namely Arthur W. Upfield and S.H. Courtier, which strongly evoked the backcloth of their stories and made you believe the sort of crimes they wrote about were indigenes to Australia – and could have only taken place down under. I did not have that feeling with Duck Season Death, which could have just easily been set in England or America, but that's a minor and personal quibble. 

Finally, in spite of having reissued this forgotten, nearly lost detective novel, I have to castigate Verse Chorus Press for not re-titling the book as A Rejection of Murder, because it would've perfectly fitted both the back story of the book's publication and the plot.
 

However, you should not allow the probing and nitpicking from dismal critics, from past or present, to spoil the fun of this book, because I'm sure seasoned mystery readers will enjoy this unusual ripple in the traditional closed-circle of suspects story. But judge for yourself. I'll certainly be returning to Wright's work in the near future to see what she was capable off in her debut novel.

The Spy Who Played Clue

"I mean, it does say 'hotel' outside. Maybe I should be more precise, 'Hotel for people who have more than 50% chance of making it through the night'!"

- Basil (Fawlty Towers)

Christopher Kelman Dalgety Frost (1899-1972) has proved to be somewhat of an elusive figure in the realm of mystery fiction, but on the printed pages of children and juvenile stories, he left us enough clues to reconstruct a picture of the man. On the report of Jane Badger Books, Frost began writing at the age of sixteen in the trenches of France, however, Book Palace Books notes that his earliest known work were the adventures of 'Don Conquest' for Mickey Mouse Weekly – which ran from 1954 to 1957.

His entire bibliography seems to be a bit of a mess, consisting of a lot of unconfirmed and unaccredited stories, which is mainly due to being a freelance writer who anonymously churned out stories to fill the pages of D.C. Thomson's boys paper, but Something Scandalous at Lilac Cottage (19??) was supposed to be published under the name of Kelman Frost and I have only found a mention of the book in Death Registers at the Eagle Arms (1947) as "in preparation." Was the Oberon Press dissatisfied with the end result/sales of the previous novel and cancelled its publication? Or was it simply retitled before publication?

I'm intrigued whether it suffered the same, horrifying fate as Hake Talbot's third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness, or collecting dust somewhere as an unpublished manuscript, like Christianna Brand's The Chinese Puzzle and Anthony Boucher's The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, or just insists on being one of those ridiculously rare mystery novels. Any info would be appreciated! 'Cause curiosity can be an agonizing thing. 

Death Registers at the Eagle Arms is a Kelman Frost novel that did wound up in my covetous hands and it's set in a dreary, depleted hotel on the Scottish coast during the blackouts of WWII and the grounds of the Eagle Arms teems with stationed military men, fascists and secret agents from both sides of the enemy line – all that without degenerating into a run-of-the-mill spy thriller. Frost kept it a plain and simple mystery, which commences when Malcolm Woodley, a prolific mystery novelist without literary pretensions, and his wife Isobel notice that the bathroom opposite of their room has been occupied for quite some time. A second key from the upstairs bathroom, which is almost identical to the one they're unable to locate, is fetched and upon opening the door, they find that the tub is filled with what remains of Mr. John Hood.

Enter Inspector Hynd, who's one of those bland policemen whose character is only defined by his job and a rather unimpressive figure to tangle with spies, but he has to think in that direction when Mr. Hood turns out to have been a Security agent. What's more, one of the maids, Poppy, who saw light signals when rendezvousing with her lover, is found decapitated near the train tracks. But Hynd has more threads to pick from: Dr. Inglis is relieved from a bottle of strychnine and subsequently an attempt is made on his life with that same poison. Another maid disappeared without a trace. And Colonel Wylie-Smith appears to have a much more personal motive for wanting to see Hood dead.

Admittedly, Death Registers at the Eagle Arms is not an overlooked treasure from the shelves of biblioblivion, but it's a charming enough and uncomplicated mystery whose strength lies in an idea rather than the execution of it. I anticipated the solution in spite of the sparse clueing (some of them even being withheld from the reader), which can be done by every observant and seasoned mystery reader, and enjoyed the idea. The ending also upheld a fine old tradition without being trite. Great image to end a novel on, and to be honest, the only proper way to have done it. But it also showed that Frost was more a writer of adventure stories as opposed to mysteries (i.e. interviewing suspects can indeed be a dull routine) and I think an amateur detective would have been a better option for him as a writer – like A.A. Milne did in The Red House Mystery (1922). Granted, it's eventually one of the guests that turns up with the corrects solution, but the investigation was done by Hynd and he could've easily been reduced to a background character doing the tedious police work while one or two amateurs are enthusiastically running around the place. I really think it would've made for a better story.

Two things: 1) Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991) dated this book at c. 1948, but the online sources I found all give 1947 as the original publication date – so I went with that. 2) Death Registers at the Eagle Arms is not really a locked room mystery. The original key of the door is found inside the bathroom and they immediately deduce that the murderer threw the key under crack of the door back into the room that could be opened with different key anyway. An impossible crime in name only.  

Kelman D. Frost's mystery fiction:

Death Registers at the Eagle Arms (1947)
Something Scandalous at Lilac Cottage (19??)
The Riddle of the Caid Jewels (1969; a juvenile mystery?) 

Short fiction (published in Clues during the late 1920s):

"By Special Delivery"
"A Blot on the Landscape"
"The Clue of the Busy Bees"
"The Death Dog" a.k.a. "The Dog of Doom"
"The Late Edition" (mentioned in Adey)
"The Man with a Load of Chaff"
"Sonata in Flat B"