The Mystery of the Hidden Room (1922) by Marion Harvey

I've a long-standing affinity for the American detective story and in particular those who belong to the Van Dine School of Mystery Fiction, which was founded by S.S. van Dine when he introduced his snobby, upper-class sleuth, Philo Vance, who appeared in twelve novels – starting with The Benson Murder Case (1926) and ended with the partially-finished The Winter Murder Case (1939). A series that served as a model or influenced many of my favorite American mystery writers. Such as Harriette Ashbrook, Clyde B. Clason, Stuart Palmer, Ellery Queen, Kelley Roos, Herbert Resnicow and Roger Scarlett.

So my curiosity was piqued when I stumbled across a potential forerunner of the Van Dine-Queen School detective story.

Marion Harvey was a Brazilian-born American lawyer and, unlike the name suggests, a man who turned to writing detective stories, stage plays and pulp fiction, but the only magazine publication I was able to find is the novel-length "The Gramercy Park Mystery" – published in the December, 1929, issue of Complete Detective Novel Magazine. Nothing else is known about this elusive writer except that he penned at least six detective novels during the 1920s and two mystery plays in the 1930s.

Three of Harvey's mystery novels were listed by the late Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991), of which two are the extremely rare, hard-to-get The Arden Mystery (1925) and The House of Seclusion (1925). Fortunately, Harvey's first locked room mystery is now in the public domain and you can grab a digital-copy from the Project Gutenberg website.

The Mystery of the Hidden Room (1922) looks to also have been Harvey's debut as a novelist and is narrated by a young stockbroker, Carlton Davies, who recently had his heart broken when his fiance, Ruth Trenton, married the director of the Darwin Bank, Philip Darwin. But money was not the reason behind their break. Ruth has a "handsome, spoiled" brother, Richard, who "she had mothered almost from the time he had been born" and had been given everything on silver platter by his doting father. So no wonder Richard possessed "no moral strength" to resist temptation as an adult and, under Darwin's tutelage, he became "a devotee of the twin gods of gambling and of drink" – which had a dramatic consequences when they visited "a questionable gambling den." During an argument, a drunk Richard pulled a gun and killed someone.

As the shell-casings were still falling to the floor, Darwin extinguished the lights and in the confusion got Richard back home. And his father packed him out West.

There was, however, a price to pay as the devil demanded his due. Darwin had always admired Ruth and was "quite willing" to rat out her brother to the police unless she agreed to become his bride. Reluctantly, she acquiesced and Davies promised to honor her decision. They agreed to sever all ties with one another.

Six months later, Davies receives a note with a brief, but urgent, message from Ruth, "will you return at once with my chauffeur? I need you." So he immediately sets off to the New York mansion of the Darwins. A black bulk of a house, "like some Plutonian monster," modeled after "a type of dwelling" popular when the English held a sway over the Island of Manhattan and basically "a replica of the relic of a bygone era" – reminiscent of the dark mansion stories by Van Dine and Scarlett. Ruth lived a lonely, miserable existence since she got married and in a weak moment she had written a love-letter to Davies, but tore the letter up and threw it away. However, Darwin got his hands on the letter and has threatened Davies. This is why Ruth summoned him to their home.

Davies tells Ruth to get him the letter from Darwin's study, "the den of a sybarite," but this is the point where everything goes horribly wrong.

As the old time-piece in the hall announced the midnight hour, the sharp report of a gunshot emanated from the direction of the study and Davies finds Ruth standing over the body of her husband with a gun in her hand. Davies had seen Ruth enter the study and had the only door under constant observation. The windows were not only securely locked on the inside, but were equipped with burglar-alarms! Nobody else had been in the room unless this person vanished into thin air after shooting Darwin. So nobody, except for Ruth, could have pulled the trigger and the jury of the inquest, covering six chapters, found that "the deceased had come to his death by a pistol shot fired at the hands of his wife." A trial date is set giving Davies only two months to prove her innocent.

This brings Davies to the doorstep of a gentleman detective, Graydon McKelvie, whose hobby is solving problems of crime and only takes cases he finds interesting or pose a challenge. McKelvie is a devotee of Sherlock Holmes (referred to as a real person) and, as to be expected, he makes such comments "you see and hear without observing" or "eliminate the impossible, you see" – even performing Holmes' mind-reading trick on Davies. But as Van Dine remarked in The Great Detective Stories (1927), "the deductive work done by Graydon McKelvie is at times extremely clever." McKelvie makes his entrance in Chapter XIV, but hits the ground running with a list of fifteen questions that need to be answered in order to name "the person who committed the crime."

However, while the story acknowledges Sherlock Holmes and M. Leqoc, McKelvie is the prototype of the American detective-character from the Golden Age.

There are the obvious features of the Van Dine school: an upper-class, amateur detective operating in New York City and on friendly terms with an official homicide detective, Jones. A welcome departure from the stubborn, bumbling Lestrade-type of policemen from the Gaslight-era of crime fiction. The scene of the crime is closely scrutinized and the peculiar architecture of the house plays a key-role in the solution, but more on that in a moment. Another interesting aspect is how McKelvie's investigative-style sometimes anticipated Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason (e.g. taking a peek inside a locked strong-box stored in a bank vault without a warrant).

The intricate, maze-like scheme of The Mystery of the Hidden Room is indeed delightfully complicated with multiple twists and shines with the first glimmers of the Golden Age, but the plot is not a flawless diamond. Firstly, there's the titular room that gives the locked room a disappointing explanation. Harvey gave the hidden room a little more thought than merely placing an invisible door inside the room, but not the kind of solution you want to find in a locked room mystery. Secondly, in order to succeed, the murderer had to take an enormous risk that would not have dissipated along with the gun smoke, which would have collapsed the whole scheme had only person, such as Ruth, had noticed it – which was a very serious risk. This is one of the things that the murderer look like a hard-to-take, omniscient arch-manipulator.

Finally, as Kate of Cross Examining Crime pointed out in her 2015 review, The Mystery of the Hidden Room is probably what Monsignor Ronald Knox had in mind when he compiled his Decalogue, because the story breaks a number of his commandments.

So the plot is unquestionable flawed with a disappointing locked room-trick, but there's more to the plot than mere a shooting a locked and watched room. There are many complications, clues and an odd bunch of suspects to content with. How did a decorative lamp in the study turned itself on? Was there a second bullet and what happened to it? Who's the woman supposedly to be the sole beneficiary under Darwin's new will? Why did he kept a stoneless ring in his safe? Who unlocked the door and why did one of the suspects commit suicide? These clues have to be fitted to a cast of suspect befitting such a dark, gloomy place. A disinherited nephew, Lee Darwin. A prowling, eavesdropping private-secretary, Claude Orton, who has no problem with helping the police strapping Ruth to the electric chair. A brother-in-law who already has committed a murder and a father-in-law who had been humiliated.

Harvey genuinely wanted to give his readers an opportunity to solve the problems for themselves and you can read, between the lines, how he tried to spell out the truth without giving anything away in an too obvious a fashion. Only problem is that the plot is perhaps a little too involved to expect the readers to figure out everything for themselves, which isn't helped by that previously mentioned risk that needed an illogical line of reasoning to arrive there. Nonetheless, the solution to the who-and why were much better than the potential suicide-disguised-as-murder-trick that some of the clues began to suggest.

So, on a whole, I tremendously enjoyed The Mystery of the Hidden Room, in spite of some of its shortcomings, which is still very readable today and full of historical interest. A detective novel showing the genre transitioning from the Gaslight-era of Conan Doyle to the (American) Golden Age of Van Dine and Queen.