"Seems to have put a curse on the fishing, that woman."- Dr. Roberts (Harriet Rutland's Bleeding Hooks, 1940)
A
semi-regular item on the blog
of my fellow locked room addict, JJ, is "A Little Help for My
Friends – Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat," which
comprises, as of this writing, of four blog-posts covering a sundry
of impossible crime fiction from the past thirty years – like
Elliott Roosevelt's Murder
in the Oval Office (1989) and Robin Stevens' First
Class Murder (2015). So it was about time I returned the
favor and cast a line of my own in the dark, murky waters of the
contemporary crime-fiction.
The
title I reeled back in happened to fit another semi-regular blog-item
by JJ, "Adventures
in Self-Publishing," in which he looks at writers who decided
to circumvent the barrage of rejection slips and simply published
their own work. Admittedly, JJ did uncover a couple of interesting
self-published authors and hope to have found him a name that can be added to his list.
Michael
Wallace is a public relations and publications consultant, with a
background in journalism, who has been an avid fly-fisher for the
past thirty years and got hooked himself on detective stories when he
read Agatha Christie's Murder
in Mesopotamia (1936) at the age of 12. Wallace worked his
two passions into an ongoing series of fly-fishing themed mystery
novels about his aptly named series-character, Quill Gordon, who's
also a veteran angler. Yes, the fact that he shares his name with a
famous fishing-fly is acknowledged.
Wash
Her Guilt Away (2014) is the second title in the Quill Gordon
series and is billed as a mystery about "a seemingly impossible
crime." Needless to say, I was skeptical about this
self-published detective novel, but there were a couple of promising indicators
that gave me hope.
Firstly,
Wash Her Guilt Away opened with the statement that the story
had been written "in the spirit of John
Dickson Carr" and inferred from this that Wallace had a
refined taste when it came to detective stories. Secondly, there's a "Notice to the Reader," which assures that the "descriptive
and detailed passages about fly-fishing" are for the benefit of
those who fish, enjoy the outdoors or want to learn about the
pastime, but readers who do not fall in those categories are free to
skip past them – as they're not "germane to the solution"
and do not contain any "vital clue." So that suggested
Wallace was also aware of the concept of clueing. And that's not
always a given with modern-day crime writers.
I
should also point out that Wash Her Guilt Away, unlike the
preponderance of self-published books, has actual production values.
The cover looks fairly professional and they made a nicely
put-together video trailer,
but, more importantly, an editor went over the text and "caught
hundreds of mistakes." So that helped the overall readability
of the story and in particular the buildup to the murder during the
first half of the book. Yes, this is one of those detective novels
with a slow fuse.
Anyway,
my impression was favorable enough to go ahead and take the plunge
with this self-published mystery novel, but did it live up to the
promise? Let's find out!
Wash
Her Guilt Away takes place in early May of 1995 and the setting
is Harry's Riverside Lodge, "a legend in Northeast California,"
which was originally owned by Harry Ezekian until his passing in the
late-1970s, but up till then the fishing resort was a popular "getaway destination" and rich, powerful men flocked the
place during its heyday – rarely with their own wife at their side.
A veritable honey hole!
However,
the place steadily declined when his son, Bob, took over the place
and locals began to whisper that his restless wife had started a
coven of witches in the vast woods surrounding the area. So one day
she picked her suitcase and simply left, but not without leaving an
ominous note, which placed a curse on the place ("there will be
no love at Harry's..."). A year later, Bob took a small boat
down the river and "blew his head off" with a shotgun.
After Bob's suicide, the place passed through half a dozen owners,
but none of them were able to cling on to the place for longer than
two seasons. And by then, Harry's had lost all of its illustrious
glory and splendor.
 |
| A real-life "Quill Gordon" |
Quill
Gordon had vowed never to return to the rundown resort, but Harry's
had reopened under new owners, Don and Sharon Potter, which got
recommended to the long-time angler by a friend and decided to give
the place another chance. And dragged along one of his friends and
fellow fisherman, Dr. Peter Delaney.
Gordon
and Delaney are among the first guests of the season, which also
includes a member of the Oakland City Council, Rachel Adderly, who's
there with her husband, Stuart Bingham, who's a museum director.
There a two friends, Alan Sakamoto and Drew Evans, who work in
Silicon Valley for a software company. The most important ones are
the elderly Charles van Holland and his much younger (second) wife,
Wendy, who's "quite the personality" and has a restless
personality that begged for trouble – which gave her a talent for
making enemies. She even got into a cat-fight with one of the girl's
working there, April.
Naturally,
this becomes a problem when the increasingly worsening weather throws
this group of people ever closer together and the consequences of
this will prove to be fatal.
One
morning, Wendy's body is found inside her log cabin, strangled to
death, but the problem is that the windows were all locked and the
chain-lock only the door was secured from the inside. The murder
coincided with an unexpected snowfall and the cabin was surrounded by
a blanket of snow, which showed no footprints going or out of the
crime-scene. It's "an impossible murder inside a locked room."
The
solution to the impossible murder is two-pronged: how the murderer
managed to leave behind a crime-scene that was locked up from the
inside hardly breaks any new ground and the experienced armchair
detective should be able to figure out how that part of the locked
room trick was accomplished. But this part of the trick also laid
bare a weakness of the overall plot. Gordon remarked towards the end
that knowing how it was done told him who had done it, which is
absolutely true in this case, but the solvable locked room problem
also functions as pretty much the only clue you'll get to help you
figure out the murderer's identity. Only other real hint you get is a
discrepancy in the time of death. However, I'll admit that the
anomaly in the time of death is nicely tied to the (simplistic)
locked room trick and would probably have worked better had it been
used in a short story format.
 |
| The third book in the series |
On
that account, I have to remark that the book, or rather the plot,
felt closer to the short (impossible crime) stories by Edward
Hoch than the locked room novels by Carr. The locked cabin with
the time-of-death distortion is a trick he would have pulled and even
the detective has a name that's in line with many of Hoch's
series-characters (e.g. Simon Ark, Harry Ponder, Nick Velvet, Ben
Snow, etc).
Anyway,
there's also the apparent impossibility of the absent footprints in
the snow that surrounded the log cabin and Gordon labeled it "a
neat little trick."
Well,
I'll give Wallace this much: the no-footprints method is certainly an
original one and, personally, never came across it before, but
there's a good reason why a relatively simple trick, like that, has
never turned up before it. It's an extremely silly one and
felt completely out-of-place between the pages of this novel. I
suppose it could work in a madcap mystery where every character is as mad as a hatter, but here it simply did not work. The stage was all wrong for it.
You
can compare this to the equally unusual, almost daffy, explanation
for the impossible footprints in Samuel W. Taylor's "Deadfall,"
collected in The
Realm of the Impossible (2017), but it worked (better)
because the stage had been properly set for it.
I
feel somewhat divided on Wash Her Guilt Away. It was a
pleasant enough read and the overall quality was far better than one
would expect from a self-published novel, but, on the downside, the
plot hardly posed the challenge I had hoped from the plot-description
– especially the double-pronged impossibility. So you should not
pick this one up with too high of an expectation, because this is
(sadly) not the next Carr. Regardless, it can still be enjoyed for a
nicely worked out, leisurely paced mystery novel with a locked room
chugged in for good measure.
Yes, I know this is a very wishy-washy
conclusion, but, despite its short comings, I did not dislike the
book as a whole.
I'm
not sure whether JJ would appreciate the story, as a whole, but no
doubt he'll award points to Wallace for not shoving his book on the
open market with the interference of an editor. And the wholehearted
attempt to write in the spirit of the great mystery writers of the
past is also something to be appreciated and encouraged.
On
a final, semi-related note, I reviewed two fishing-themed mystery
novels in the (recent) past: Vernon Loder's Death
by the Gaff (1932) and Harriet Rutland's superb Bleeding
Hooks (1940). I would also like to point your attention to my
previous review of Szu-Yen Lin's Death
in the House of Rain (2006) and the guest-post from Philip
Harbottle about "The Detective Fiction of John Russell Fearn."
