The Killing of Katie Steelstock (1980) by Michael Gilbert

Back in January, I returned to the work of Michael Gilbert and looked at his first mystery novel, Close Quarters (1947), which introduced his series-detectives, Chief Inspector Hazlerigg and Sergeant Pollock, in a commendable debut full of promise – marred only by a somewhat wobbly ending. Close Quarters is nonetheless a praiseworthy first stab at the detective genre with a skillfully handled plot in which all the suspects have seemingly interlocking alibis. So decided to move a few more of his novels up the big pile. 

The Killing of Katie Steelstock (1980), originally published in the UK as Death of a Favourite Girl, is a standalone and reputedly is one of his finest pieces of detective fiction. A classically-styled and structured detective novel subversively presented as a fairly typical, modern police procedural that "pulled off quite a few gasp inducing twists in the final chapters." While I've been aware of The Killing of Katie Steelstock ever since reading The Danger Within (1952), I'm glad I held off with reading it until now. I would not have appreciated it half as much without having sampled the work of other traditionalists in contemporary garb, like Douglas Clark and Roger Ormerod.

Katie Steelstock is a young, good looking village girl from West Hannington whose modeling career in London began landing her small, well paid parts in commercials and eventually became the face of The Seven O'Clock Show. An all-family quiz show that "combined general knowledge, popular music and a touch of sex" that turned Katie into "the two-dimensional friend of a million three-dimensional families" and "pin-up for a million adolescents." Katie's "bubbling, self-confident, friendly extrovert personality" transformed her into a nationwide TV celebrity, but she had a darker side to her character as "she liked to have people on the end of a string" that "she could give it a twitch from time to time and watch them dance." A pastime that can be very dangerous when done to the wrong people.

Although she works in London, Katie mostly resided in West Hannington with her mother Olivia and her two younger brothers, Walter and Peter, where she converted a former coachman's cottage into a private living quarters – giving her "that bit of privacy that all real artists need.” The Killing of Katie Steelstock begins on the day of the Boat and Tennis Club dance, which gave the story a hint of that old-world atmosphere of the Golden Age village mystery, introducing most of the important players in the tragedy discovered later that evening. The body of Katie is found lying near the boathouse with her head bashed in and it immediately becomes clear the local Chief Inspector Dandridge is completely out of his depth. An outraged Olivia Steelstock, sister of the Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions, pulls some strings and only takes a few phone calls for Detective Chief Superintendent Charlie Knott to be dispatched to West Hannington.

Superintendent Charlie Knott, "one of the self-appointed stars of the Murder Squad," appears on first glance to have a passing resemblance to the Great Detectives of yesteryear ("squat white-haired figure" with "an orchestration of grunts which could mean anything"). But appearances can be deceiving. Knott is one of those fallible police detectives ("...not an intellectual man"), like Inspector Morse, but "he could grasp the shape and outline of any crime he was called on to investigate." Was the criminal of professional or amateur or the nature of the motive, which is an instinct which had very rarely let him down. Knott's instinct points towards a local journalist, Jonathan Limbery, who uses the weekly Gazette as a pulpit for his outspoken views on authority ("he dislikes everybody who's older than he is, or better off"). Something that made him very popular with the schoolboys of the village whom he taught at Coverdales, before getting sacked. He was also involved with Katie and his alibi is not exactly fireproof. Knott is not the only the policeman investigating the case. Detective Sergeant Ian McCourt, "a cocky type who would be inclined to strike out a line on his own," which he does as he begins to investigate a big name in the village, George Mariner, while Sergeant Esdaile attempts to track down a typewriter – used to type the note that lured Katie to the boathouse. There's always the London end of the case and the scumbag photographer, Rodney "Rod the Sod" Ruoff, who helped Katie get her big break in show business. Not to mention two additional bodies drifting along in the background that (needlessly) muddy the waters even further. 

The Killing of Katie Steelstock is unmistakably told in that dark, gritty tone of the modern crime novel and presented as an up-to-date police procedural with the detectives taking fingerprints, making plaster casts of tire tracks and throwing out now quaint little references to 1980s computer technology. Novels from this period involving computers (e.g. Ellen Godfrey's Murder Behind Locked Doors, 1988) have acquired this historical quaintness over the past few decades, but meshes well with the traditional, Golden Age-style plot hidden underneath its modern-day trappings and characters. A plot that eventually culminating in a very brief, but intense, roller coaster of a courtroom drama with some unexpected, truly tragic turn of events. Gilbert invested in his characters to get this payoff, before telling the reader who really killed Katie Steelstock in the last chapter. A very well hidden murderer and somewhat of an old dodge, but you can work out the murderer's identity and motive from the clues and information dropped throughout the story. Admirably, Gilbert made the reader sympathize with the murderer, as a person, without condoning or minimizing the murders. Katie was hardly an angel, but even her worse actions hardly justified bashing in her skull. On the other hand, I didn't think Limbery deserved any sympathy as he's the only character who really deserved a caning by the end. Gilbert not only knew his way around a tricky plot, but a maze of human emotions as well. It gives a glimpse of what the Golden Age detective story could have turned into had it been allowed to evolve naturally pass the 1950s.

There are, however, one or two technical imperfections that need to be mentioned as they kept the book from a place in the first rank. One such problem is the mysterious murder weapon linking two of the murders, "a hole in his head which had been made by the same weapon which killed Katie," but the weapon in question is never even identified! I suspect the second body with an identical head wound was included to even the playing field for the defense later on in the story. That was a mistake. Just having Katie's murder would have stacked the odds in favor of the prosecution and added more tension to the courtroom scenes, but no matter how strong their case looks, the prosecution's case would have collapsed no matter what. So why not take advantage of it by making it look like the defense has no chance whatsoever? And it would have given that tragic twist even more of an impact. I also frowned a little at the fingerprint business towards the end, but liked how Gilbert foreshadowed it (SPOILER/ROT13: “Lbh bhtug gb xrrc hc gb qngr va gur grpuavdhrf bs lbhe cebsrffvba”). I think it would have helped, if the reader was shown part of the ending instead of being told about it afterwards.

But regardless of those minor, plot-technical imperfections, The Killing of Katie Steelstock is an excellent, updated take on the good, old British village mysteries of the past (c.f. Nicholas Brady's Ebenezer Investigates, 1934) told as a then contemporary police procedural – one that did not shy away from being uneasy or downright unpleasant. It's sole drawback is that it could have been an even tighter story with a bigger impact had the two other murders been cut out of the plot, but, as it stands, it can match the best works from the previously mentioned Douglas Clark and Roger Ormerod.

Close Quarters (1947) by Michael Gilbert

Michael Gilbert was a British solicitor, author, schoolteacher and veteran who, beginning in the 1930s, served with the Royal Horse Artillery and joined a reserve regiment, the Honourable Artillery Company, during the Second World War – effectively putting his writing ambitions on hold for nearly a decade. Gilbert began working on his first detective novel in 1938, while working as a teacher, but the wacky shenanigans of the Axis Powers delayed the publication of Close Quarters (1947) by nine years.

So, while the war postponed his entry into the genre, Gilbert made up for lost time over the next five decades with twenty-five novels and several short story collections published between 1947 and 2002. There were also a number of posthumously published collections of short stories and radio-plays with The Man Who Couldn't Sleep and Other Mysteries (2011) being the most recent one. Gilbert's output covered everything from traditional detective stories and courtroom dramas to police procedurals and spy-thrillers. A highlight from his work and my personal favorite is Death in Captivity (1952), alternatively published as The Danger Within, which is based on Gilbert's experiences in an Italian POW camp. One of the best World War II mysteries ever written, but Smallbone Deceased (1950), Death Has Deep Roots (1951), The Night of the Twelfth (1976) and The Killing of Katie Steelstock (1980) are generally regarded to be among his best detective novels.

Despite a nine-year delay, Gilbert ended up being one of the longest-lived and published Golden Age mystery writers when he died, aged 93, on February 8, 2006.

Michael Gilbert's apprentice effort, Close Quarters, has been stuck on the big pile for an ice age and I've always been a little hesitant about it, because I remember opinions of the book being a bit dismissive in the late 2000s – comparing it to a glacially slow, overly elaborate Freeman Wills Crofts-style novel. So very talky and too much timetabling. At the time, I only knew of Crofts' tarnished, undeserved reputation as the mystery writer who cured insomnia, but a lot has changed since then and we know better now. What I perceived as criticism at the time was actually a glowing endorsement for a careful, meticulously-plotted detective story with a croft of alibis. It was about time I heeded those old recommendations! 

Close Quarters entirely takes place inside the confides of a cathedral close, Melchester Close, which has recently been plagued by a series of thoroughly unpleasant incidents. Firstly, Canon Whyte had fallen from the gallery on the roof of the cathedral, "a hundred and three measured feet," on to the flagstones below. There was "nothing mysterious or really sensational" about the death of Canon Whyte, besides it being upsetting for all concerned. Secondly, the extraordinary persecution of the head verger, Daniel Appledown. For over a week, the members of the Close community have been receiving anonymous letters, "typewritten and uniformly abusive," decrying the head verger as inefficient and immoral. More of such messages were left all over the Close. The Dean of Manchester is convinced the wolf is within the fold, but finds the thought of getting the police officially involved unpleasant. So he turns to his young nephew, Bobby, who's a member of the Metropolitan Police Force and the right hand man of Gilbert's series-detective, Chief Inspector Hazlerigg.

Sergeant Bobby Pollock comes to Melchester Close to conduct an "extremely unofficial" inquiry under the guise of a short holiday to visit his uncle, but he has been there barely a day when Appledown's body is discovered. Someone bashed his brains in near the shed housing the electric motor which supplied the power for the famous Melchester organ. There are an abundance of potential clues, possible red herrings and plenty of suspects to found within the cathedral close. Pollock described the scene of the crime and the case ahead, "an assassin who walked across the grass backwards, clothes which were too wet, and a bowler hat which was much too dry" and "sixteen little holes in the ground" – "a case after his own heart." Not to forget about the ghost who appeared prematurely! The cast of suspects, witnesses and other characters is very large and thankfully the story comes with a dramatis personae of all the principal clues, which comes with mini-biographies. Something that should be included in every detective story with a sprawling cast of characters, but what Gilbert accomplished with all these characters in regards to their alibis is fascinating. Nearly everyone appears to possess "carefully, interlocking alibis" and only one person was not vouched for the whole time by one or more independent witnesses. Chief Inspector Hazlerigg is not prepared to go as far as to believe in "a complete canonical conspiracy," but finding an alternative explanation requires some good, old-fashioned alibi-busting.

I should mention here Close Quarters is erroneously listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), "murder in a guarded area where those present are generally alibied," which is probably due to the setting. The Dean points out to Pollock the reason why he believes the anonymous letter writer is closely connected to the cathedral is that "after seven o'clock it is impossible to get in or out of the Close unobserved," because of the twelve-foot high walls and the guard posted at the main gate. A textbook example of the closed-circle of suspects situation and the alibis do not qualify as an impossibility. Not according to my definition of what constitutes an impossible alibi, which also happens to be correct one. Nonetheless, the problem of the alibis is well handled and perhaps, as a whole, closer to the alibi-crackers of Christopher Bush than Freeman Wills Crofts. I can easily imagine Ludovic Travers and Superintendent Wharton marching into Melchester Close to go to work on the parade of clues and alibis (The Case of the Cathedral Close?).

Gilbert reportedly complain in later years that Close Quarters ended up being somewhat cluttered and wonder if he meant the last quarter of the story, which became a bit messy towards the end. It felt like the clear, straightforward narrivate went a little wobbly all of the sudden. A hidden crossword puzzle is discovered with an entire chapter dedicated to solving it. A late and tragic second murder throws the solution Hazlerigg had pieced together out of the window and had to resort to some scheming plotting to trap the murderer, but how much of that slightly wobbly ending can be blamed on a then inexperienced author or what can be blamed on later alterations. For example, the murderer turning out to have been too clever by half, who "started to elaborate on two or three of the points," which is an admittance more in line with the post-war period than the 1937. Just like the murderer refusing to obey the rules of fiction and politely coming clean, before committing suicide.

Either way, Close Quarters is a promising and prodigious first stab at the detective story from an author who would go on to deliver on this promising debut with novels like the all-time classic WWII mystery, Death in Captivity. Particularly recommended to fans of Christopher Bush, Freeman Wills Crofts and Rupert Penny.

Death Has Deep Roots (1951) by Michael Gilbert

Last year, I reread one of my favorite detective novels, The Danger Within (1952) by Michael Gilbert, alternatively published as Death in Captivity, which is best described as a semi-autobiographic wartime detective-cum-thriller novel about British soldiers in an Italian POW camp – who find a body in one of their secreted tunnels. A brilliant novel reminiscent of The Great Escape (1963), but the book preceded the movie by more than a decade.

I ended my review with the promise to airlift more of Gilbert's novels from the snow-capped tops of Mt. To-Be-Read. However, this promise never materialized in 2017 and sounded incredibly hollow in 2018, but there was still time left. So, on the threshold of the new year, I decided to take Death Has Deep Roots (1951) down from my bookshelves. I really should have gotten to it sooner.

Death Has Deep Roots is a marvelous detective novel in the tradition of Carter Dickson's The Judas Window (1938) and Anthony Gilbert's The Clock in the Hatbox (1939).

Mademoiselle Victoria Lamartine was engaged in resistance work, in occupied France, where she came into contact with a British officer, Lieutenant Julian Wells, which resulted in a pregnancy, but she arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and had to give birth in a prison – a boy who died of malnutrition two years later. Wells was never seen or heard of again. So, when the war ended, Lamartine came to England to work at a residential hotel and used her spare time "pestering the War Office" for news of Well and a Major Eric Thoseby.

Major Thoseby is a tough, crafty and diligent investigator for the Tracing Staff, an international team tasked with finding victims of the war, but in 1943 he helped run the French resistance in Lamartine's district and has agreed to meet her at the hotel. However, Major Thoseby is stabbed to death shortly after he arrived at the hotel and Inspector Partridge arrests Lamartine for the murder.

Inspector Partridge believes Major Thoseby was the father of Lamartine's dead child and his hypothesis is strengthened when a kitchen-knife was found in the room with her fingerprints on it, but there's also "an element of what you might call" a sealed box mystery – because "the only means of access to Major Thoseby's room" is a flight of stairs closely commanded by the reception desk. The desk itself was under observation from the lounge and a map of the situation is included. So "the closed box" was sealed, "not by locks, and bars, and bolts," but by human observation. However, the sealed box has "a number of cracks or loopholes in it" and the solution practically disqualifies it as a locked room mystery. This was hardly enough to spoil an otherwise excellent detective story.

Only real weakness of the plot is the weak, circumstantial case of the prosecution. You have to wonder why Lamartine's defense wanted to plead guilty, under provocation, with "a strong plea for leniency of the court," but wisely refused and engaged another lawyer.

Noel Anthony Pontarlier "Nap" Rumbold, the junior partner in his father's firm of Markby, Wragg and Rumbold, Solicitors, of Coleman Street, decided to take the case and assembles a team of professional and amateurs detectives.

Mr. Hargest Macrea has argued law, in every kind of courtroom, for a quarter of a century and is hired to argue for the defense. Major Angus McCann is a publican and a friend of Nap, who helps with the legwork, but McCann and Nap got more than they bargained for when they followed a lead to a bad side of town. And these exciting, thriller-like scenes makes Death Has Deep Roots one of the more lively courtroom mysteries. There are even brief appearances from Chief Inspector Hazlerigg at the beginning and end of the story. This group of amateurs and professionals have two lines of attack: the people who were staying at the hotel and finding out what had happened to Lt. Wells in 1943.

On the England end, they have the hotelier, Honorifique Sainte, who came from the same Basse Loire province as Lamartine and had been aware of the story of her capture in occupied France. Ercolo Camino is the waiter, porter and general factotum of the hotel and was charge of the desk on the evening of the murder. The only two guests in the hotel at the time were Colonel Trevor Alwright, who was getting drunk in lounge and had a view of the receptionist desk, while Mrs. Roper turns out to have a double life – which plays out on "the fringe of the law." Across the channel, they have to piece together what happened to Lt. Wells after the Gestapo raided the farm where he was hiding and arrested Lamartine.

As, as usually with these channel-crossing mystery novels, there's a smuggling angle involved, e.g. Christopher St. John Sprigg's Death of an Airman (1935), Basil Thomson's The Milliner's Hat Mystery (1937) and John Bude's Death on the Riviera (1952).

The private investigation of McCann and Nap is interspersed with the cross-examination of police experts and witnesses in court, which slowly, but surely, unearth the deeply tangled roots of the case. These roots lead all the way from war-torn, occupied France to a quiet residential hotel in London. I think the plot fitted nicely together, notably the who and how of the crime, but the motive and the answer as to what happened to Lt. Wells could have been better clued. Or more strongly hinted at. Regardless, Death Has Deep Roots still stands as an excellent and strong example of the courtroom detective novel. And highly recommend it, if you like courtroom dramas and mysteries.

Lastly, I have some good news about Michael Gilbert. British Library Crime Classics is reprinting Smallbone Deceased (1950), Death Has Deep Roots and Death in Captivity in 2019! So more people get to read my personal favorite and gem of a classic, The Danger Within a.k.a. Death in Captivity. Yes, I used the BL cover of Death Has Deep Roots for this review. 

So I wish you all a Happy New Year and hope to see you back in 2019.

The Great Escape

"We have in effect put all our rotten eggs in one basket. And we intend to watch this basket carefully."

- Colonel Von Luger (The Great Escape, 1963)

Recently, Dan of "The Reader is Warned" compiled a two-part list, titled "5 Impossible Crime 'Thrillers' to Try” and "5 More Impossible 'Thrillers' to Try," which made a decent attempt at listing all the notable, high-paced thrillers with a locked room or impossible crime element, but both lists omitted the best specimen of this particular blend of crime-fiction – namely Michael Gilbert's outstanding Death in Captivity (1952). After littering Dan's comment-section with recommendations for the book, I decided to take down my copy from the shelves to see if it could stand re-reading. And it absolutely did!

Death in Captivity was reprinted in 2007 by the now defunct Rue Morgue Press, under its US title The Danger Within, which came with a foreword by Tom and Enid Schantz briefly going over Gilbert's personal experiences as a prisoner-of-war in Italy during World War II.

The foreword is titled "The Escapes of Michael Gilbert" and gives the modern reader an idea just how extraordinary this piece of detective-and thriller fiction truly is. Not only are the plot and setting practically unique within the genre, but many of the events in the book were inspired by Gilbert's first-hand experiences as both a POW and an escapee in enemy territory – which gave everything a chilling veneer of authenticity. Particular the depictions of everyday life at the prison camp, the secret tunneling activities in the various huts and the occasional pestering of the Italian prison guards ("a bit of sentry-baiting").

Another aspect that sets this book apart from other World War II mystery-and thriller novels is that it deals primarily with the Fascisti of Italy rather than the Nazis of Germany.

The Danger Within takes place in Campo 127, "easily the best camp" one of the prisoners had been in, but perhaps the most "comfortably lodged" group of prisoners are the six men held in Room 10 in Hut C. As a rule, the rooms were designed to hold eight men and usually overflowed with "ten or even twelve less fortunate prisoners." Captain Benucci had ordered the men, all of them notorious escapees, to occupy the same room. Reasoning that if he had "six dangerous criminals to watch, it was easier, on a whole, to have them together," but that only pooled all of their knowledge and experience in one place – resulting in "the oldest of existing undiscovered tunnels in the camp." A tunnel Colonnello Aletti, Commandant of Campo 127, claimed simply could not exist.

The entrance to this tunnel lay in the kitchen of Hut C and in the middle of this cookery, set in a six-foot slab of concrete let into the tiled floor, stood a stove. A huge cauldron, shaped like "a laundry copper," which hid a trapdoor to the tunnel and could only be revealed by the combined effort of four strong men with assistance of double pulleys – effectively evading discovery by being "too big to see." I thought this was a nice little Chestertonian touch to the all-important secret tunnel that will play a key role throughout the entirety of the story.

One day, the protagonist of the story, Captain Henry "Cuckoo" Goyles, crawls down to the tunnel to continue work, but discovers that during the night part of the roof had come down. Inexplicably, there's a body underneath the pile of fallen sand at the end of the tunnel. Something that should not be possible, because this person could not have gained access to the tunnel on his own nor could an outside group have entered the locked Hut C after nightfall. Even more troublesome is that the victim is identified as a Greek POW, Cyriakos Coutoules, who's suspected by everyone of being a stool-pigeon for the Italians or even a double-agent in the employ of the Nazis.

Two of the special detainees in Hut C, Captain Roger Byles and Captain Alex Overstrand, had previously uttered threats to lynch Coutoules. However, their immediate problem of Hut C and Colonel Baird, head of the Escape Committee, is how to tackle the problem of a dead man cluttering the best tunnel they had. So they decide to dump the body in a smaller tunnel, located in Hut A, that had been "allotted low priority by the Escape Committee" and stage a roof collapse there, but how they move the body from one hut to another, under the nose of the guards, is one of my favorite and funniest scenes of the entire story – something of a cross between 'Allo, 'Allo (war-time setting) and Fawlty Towers (the episode Kipper and the Corpse, 1979).

You occasionally get these brief burst of typical British humor. Such as when some of the prisoners are preparing a stage-play and they pick one in which one of the characters, rapturously, exclaims "Italy! Oh, it's hard to take in even the bare possibility of going there. My promised land, Doctor, which I never thought to see otherwise than in dreams." Needless to say, that line brought the house down.

But, on a whole, the story-telling tends to be serious in tone, because the myriad of (potential) problems facing the POWs of Campo 127 are no laughing matter.

The events at the POW camp take place against the backdrop of the impending invasions of Sicily and the Italian mainland by Allies, eventually culminating in the disposal of Benito Mussolini, but the consequences of an Allied victory in Italy is a double-edged knife for both parties at the camp. On the one hand, the POWs fully realize the Germans aren't going to set free the sixty thousand prisoners in Italy and that, one day, they could simply find themselves being put on a train "to Krautland." On the other hand, the card-carrying members of the Fascist Party, such as Captain Benucci and the sinister Mordaci of the Carabinieri Reali, know they'll be put in front of a military tribunal when the Allies arrive – which would probably end with them having to face a firing squad.

So the inexplicable death of Coutoules and the accompanying cloud of suspicions does very little to improve the slightly strained situation at the camp, but the situation becomes rather serious when Captain Byles is charged by Benucci with the murder of the Greek POW and is placed in solitary confinement – condemned to die in several days time. Captain "Cuckoo" Goyles is asked by the Escape Committee to investigate who killed Coutoules, why and where. And, most importantly, how his body ended up in the tunnel.

In my opinion, the explanation for the impossible appearance of a body in a hermetically sealed, air-tight and blocked tunnel is as simplistic and logical as it's original. A one-of-a-kind impossibility in a completely unique crime novel that performed a perfect juggling act with its detective story elements, thriller components and spy material. Gilbert never allowed one of those elements to overshadow the other, but neither were they diluted. They worked in perfect harmony with one another. For example, the clues that will help you solve the detective story elements are provided by some of the more gruesome, thriller-ish aspects of the plot. You'll know what I mean when you get to it.

The Danger Within is an impressive and perfect latticework of differing genres, which is what makes it impossible to pigeonhole the book, but the climax of the story is a fine piece of wartime fiction as the inmates of Campo 127 prepare themselves to make "The Great Crawl." A fitting end to this semi-autobiographical wartime crime story. An ending that fitted like the final piece of the puzzle that completed the whole picture of this marvelously clever and exciting story. I simply can't recommend this one enough.

I'll end this review by saying that re-reading The Danger Within has inspired me to finally airlift my other Gilbert titled from the snow-capped tops of Mt. To-Be-Read. I'm not sure which titles actually reside there, but I believe they were Close Quarters (1947), Death Has Deep Roots (1951) and The Killing of Katie Steelstock (1980). So you can look forward to a review of one of those titles in the hopefully not so distant future.

Finally, Kate at Cross Examining Crime and Mike of Only Detect also reviewed the book (here and here), while Sergio of Tipping My Fedora reviewed the 1959 movie based on the book (here).