Death of a Village Troll

"Do you know, Watson... that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there."

- Sherlock Holmes ("The Adventure of the Copper Beeches")

The Voice of the Corpse (1948) launched Australian-born Max Murray's career as a mystery novelist and published twelve detectives altogether, uniformly titled, but lacking a series characters – accounting for his neglect in this day and age. A familiar name running through your books has proven itself to be one of the requisites to give your name some shimmer of immortality. 

After having previously read The Neat Little Corpse (1951) and The Sunshine Corpse (1954), I had pegged Murray as a transitional fossil between the traditional whodunit and the modern-day crime novel – grouping him with Juanita Sheridan as a storyteller of crime in the guise of a detective story. Not a very apt description for The Voice of the Corpse, which stands as a very decent and well-done village mystery.

Angela Mason Pewsey is a spinster in her late forties, who managed the fill the emotional void in her life by scattering the village of Inching Round with poison-pen letters and feeds off the fear they generate. However, it's not the taunting or threatening tone that's causing sleepless nights in Inching Round, but that their content is grounded in truth. Someone in the village has been digging around for dirt, and now, that same person has uncovered their secrets – and using it to torture them. Of course, casting furtive smiles at your victims or brazenly informing them face-to-face, is not an advisable course of action when you write poison-pen letters as a past time. So it's not a surprise when someone actually took a whack at her with the proverbial blunt instrument.

Death came when Pewsey was seated behind her spinning wheel, converting a heap of chow dog hair into a pullover, while singing a folk song, which prevented her from hearing the intruder sneaking up from behind. Her black notebook is missing! Constable Wilks and Sergeant Porter are convinced that a passing tramp or gypsy killed Angela Pewsey and that's the angle they're focusing on. This (tiny) aspect of the plot is a bit class-conscience.

Anyway, Mrs. Sim, a local lady, does not share the opinion of the police and asks her family attorney, Firth Prentice, to investigate and he becomes a reluctant amateur detective. There are two well-drawn small boys, Jackie Day and Alfie Spiers, who practically force their valuable assistance on Prentice – even presenting him with a scrap from Pewsey's elusive diary. They've also witnessed several events preceding the murder, but Prentice remains unproductive and sedentary. Not what Jackie and Alfie expected from a real-life detective. In Prentice's defense, nobody seems particularly interested in the identity of the murderer anyway. Prentice wonders at one point how many murders you have to commit in Inching Round before you become unpopular. The story is laced with these humorous observations and bantering comments, usually between Prentice and Celia, Mrs. Sim's daughter, which made a well-written story even more fun to read.

Here’s as good as any place in the review to mention that I was strongly reminded of some of Gladys Mitchell's more conservative village mysteries, like The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop (1929) and Dead Men's Morris (1936), and the only elements that were missing was a pig farmer and a local legend. And maybe a drowning. Everything else was present. Even faint ties to folk song and dancing. Back to the review.

The investigation enters its final stage when Inspector Tom Fowler from Scotland Yard arrives and he's able to pry loose more information and penetrate deeper, even if the villages themselves aren't aware that they helped the inspector. Fowler eventually makes his moves and secures a conviction, but the ending has an excellent twist packed away and was so much more than I expected from Murray. However, the solution works as a double-edged sword, because, morally, it's a highly ambiguous resolution. But, then again, whoever said that all village-themed mysteries were cozies?

The Voice of the Corpse is one of many, many detective stories and novels weaving a pattern around villages and poison-pen letters, but I think Murray's first foray in the genre produced an above average example that stands out due to it unusual ending. The only feeling of disappointment I have now is realizing how much distance Murray had placed between himself and the traditional detective story after this debut novel. I would love to have read more mysteries from Murray written in this vein.

On a final note, one of my favorite poison-pen stories is "The Possibility of Evil" by Shirley Jackson, collected in Murderous Schemes: An Anthology of Classic Detective stories (1996), in which poetic justice strikes down a writer of poison-pen letters.  

Still Life

"When the scheming, indomitable brain of Sigsbee Manderson was scattered by a shot from an unknown hand, that world lost nothing worth a single tear; it gained something memorable in a harsh reminder of the vanity of such wealth as this dead man had piled up—without making one loyal friend to mourn him, without doing an act that could help his memory to the least honor."

- E.C. Bentley (Trent's Last Case, 1913).

Max Murray (1901-1956) was an Australian mystery novelist, who began as a bush boy

and did odd jobs in American lumber camps and on freight yards, before he began to work his way up in the world of journalism – holding positions as a foreign correspondent for News Chronicle and during WWII he was the writer/editor of Radio Newsreel for the BBC. When the war ended, Marruy devoted most of his time to writing fiction and cranked out a dozen detective novels, all but one of them hoisted in a uniform title, but they have individual personalities as they lacked a series detective. As Xavier Lechard remarked on the GADgroup last week in reference to Pat McGerr, "not having a series character may often be a good thing artistically but it never does wonders in terms of sales and recognition," which is why Murray is referred to nowadays as Max Who.

The Sunshine Corpse (1954) is Murray's eight stand-alone mystery and opens with Arnold Emeny, a traveling marine biologist, wandering into a fruit stall in Florida, the Sunshine State, to buy a oranges – only to find a corpse sprawled in a chair, amidst souvenirs and fruit, and a man, the artist Bignal Hycer, busy sketching the body. This is probably the best part of the book, soaked in juicy, imaginary scenes and touches of humor (e.g. Arnold's staring match with the corpse, which he lost). 

Lattimer Kell was the name that went with the body and was regarded as an outsider, who did very little to make himself agreeable or blend in with the community. On the contrary, as even his son, Bill, and the woman he wishes to marry, Lili, turn out to be in possession of some very good motives, but then again, everyone seems to have wanted him dead. Like Sarah Jo Chansey and her brother, John, two members of one of the regions oldest family and the preacher Sherman Jones, whose rifle was used to shoot Kell, and his two charges: two young boys named Palmer and Willie.

Normally, I wince when children are introduced into a mystery, because, most of the time, they are portrayed as either miniature adults or as a character from Children of the Corn (i.e. unhinged), which, luckily, was not the case here and Murray appears to have had the same knack as Gladys Mitchell when it came to characterizing children – making it less of trial when they regularly appeared after the sheriff began printing wanted bills with Sherman's face on it. The direct result of a second murder of one of the locals, who was found floating face-up and staring at the sun.

Sherman's escape from town shows that Murray could plot, but this never carried over into the solution, which was a bit muddled and a lot of things were withhold from the reader (and the clues were already thin on the ground to begin with). Signs that a new era was dawning and characterization was beginning to take president over plotting. So I can't really recommend The Sunshine Corpse to Golden Age aficionados, unless they want something different for a change. But don't expect too much from it as a proper detective story.

A year or two ago, I read The Neat Little Corpse (1951) and that one I can recommend, even if it's not exactly a paradigm of Golden Age plotting either, however, it's a cracking good yarn involving a sunken pirate ship, off the coast of Jamaica, stuffed with treasure, local superstition and dark secrets as unfathomable as the depths of the sea itself. I really enjoyed it and was tempted to put it in my list of favorite mysteries, but it just wasn't good enough no matter how enjoyable the story itself actually was. But decide for yourself if you ever happen to stumble across a copy. 

Well, I hope this one was obscure enough.

Max Murray bibliography:

The Voice of the Corpse (1948)

The King and the Corpse (1949)

No Duty on a Corpse (1950; a.k.a. The Queen and the Corpse)

The Neat Little Corpse (1951)

The Right Honourable Corpse (1952)

Good Luck to the Corpse (1953)

The Doctor and the Corpse (1953)

The Sunshine Corpse (1954)

Royal Bed for a Corpse (1955)

Breakfast with a Corpse (1956; A Corpse for Breakfast)

Twilight at Dawn (1957)

Wait for a Corpse (1957)