Death of a Tall Man (1946) by Frances and Richard Lockridge

Richard and Frances Lockridge were a mystery writing couple who, more or less, accidentally created one of the most endearing American detective series when Richard decided to combine his comedic characters from his short stories with the detective plot Frances had cooked up – mixing them together as The Norths Meet Murder (1940). Pam and Jerry North originally appeared in a series of vignettes in the New York Sun and were later revived for The New Yorker (collected in Mr. and Mrs. North, 1936), but the characters achieved as the bantering, martini sipping New York society sleuths in twenty-six mystery novels. A series that ended with the passing of Frances Lockridge in 1963.

I wanted to return to the series for a while and there were two titles on the shortlist, Death of a Tall Man (1946) and Murder Within Murder (1946). Someone particularly recommended Murder Within Murder to me a long time ago, but can't remember who or why. Synopsis of the Mysterious Press promised an impossible murder in a watched room. So guess which one I picked? 

Death of a Tall Man opens in the offices of a well-known, well regarded oculist, Dr. Andrew Gordon, in the Medical Chambers, East Fifty-Third Street, on compensation day. Two days a week, mornings and afternoons, groups of five or six men who were referred to Dr. Gordon by insurance company physicians came to the offices, which resembles a rabbit warren of doors and examination rooms – easily confusing everyone unfamiliar with the building. Fortunately, the story includes a floor plan as the movement of the various characters through the building is relevant to the plot.

Dr. Gordon is found slumped over his desk with "a deep depression" in the back of his head following the examination of Monday's last group of compensation cases. Lieutenant William Weigand, of the New York Homicide Squad, has no shortages of suspects to pick from. Daniel "Dan" Gordon is Dr. Gordon's stepson who learned from his uncle, Nickerson Smith, that his stepfather squandered the lion's share of his mother's inheritance, but is it an explanation for his unusual behavior? Behavior that everyone around him try to excuse to the police. Debbie Brooks used to be the "female nuisance" who lived next door to the Gordons when she was child, but, when her parents passed away, she was welcomed into the family. She's now engaged to Dan and works for Dr. Gordon as his receptionist. Miss Grace Spencer is Dr. Gordon's nurse and has her desk in the corridor with the six examination rooms at her left and Dr. Gordon's office at the end, which means she could have possible seen something without realizing. She might have been in love with her employer. Mrs. Evelyn Gordon is Dr. Gordon's second, much younger wife and people are talking about her spending "a good deal" of time with a neighbor, Lawrence Westcott. A classic case of a wife and lover getting rid of a pesky husband? Not to mention the six compensation cases.

Understandably, Lieutenant Weigand is happy when Pam North turns up out of nowhere. She was out and about when she spotted a growing crowd of disaster tourists and the Homicide Squad car from Centre Street, which she knew spelled "a certain kind of trouble." Pam North really is the shining star of this novel as both a detective and comedic character. She has the best scenes and lines of the story. Such as her describing the nature of New York taxicabs and drivers as if they're the subject of a wildlife documentary or her telephone call to Jerry to explain she got caught up ("it isn't fair to say I look for them") in another murder ("it would be silly to tell a taxicab man to drive straight to the nearest murder"). I thought this was very reminiscent of the best by Kelley Roos, but, unfortunately, the same can't be said about the plot. 

Death of a Tall Man has a plot riddled with botched and missed opportunities or good, but poorly, executed ideas. I hardly know where to begin!

Firstly, the plot-threads not directly tied to the solution were only there to pad out an already very short novel, like the "combat fatigue" (PTSD) thread, which felt out-of-place and only served to make an obvious innocent person look guilty. You have a murder of an eye doctor in a practice full of people with damaged or failing eyesight. So why not play around with unreliable eyewitness trope instead of this side distraction? The circumstances of the murder and solution would certainly have allowed for a damaged, unreliable eyewitnesses to be a focal point of the investigation. The tall man of the title is not Dr. Gordon, but who and why that dead man is relevant to the solution is the cleverest idea of the whole story and there was some satisfaction in the murderer crying "that god-damned freak," but comes not into play until the last stretch of the story and, by then, it has lost most of its effect – because the solution is so painfully obvious. Lockridges made the murderer very conspicuous and left very little to the imagination as to the possible motive, which also distracted heavily from the how-was-it-done aspect. When you know who, you can make a pretty educated guess how it was done. So the rabbit warren of watched corridors, examination rooms and doors became less of an obstacle than if the murderer had been better hidden from the reader. Oh, and no, this is not an impossible crime in any shape or form. No idea why it has been advertised as one.

So, on a whole, I'm sure loyal, long-time fans of the series will love Death of a Tall Man from start to finish, but, purely as a detective story, it's nothing more than goodnatured, lighthearted fluff with a paper thin plot. Well, it was worth a shot.

A Tough One to Lose (1972) by Tony Kenrick

Tony Kenrick is an Australian author who started out in advertising and worked as a copywriter in America, Britain and Canada, but abandoned his career in advertising in 1972 to become a full-time writer specialized in comedic capers and heist thrillers – which earned him a favorable comparison to the work of Donald E. Westlake. A number of his novels were optioned or bought by Hollywood with only Faraday's Flower (1985) making it to the big screen as Shanghai Surprise (1986). 

So not a likely writer to wash up on this blog, but Kenrick's A Tough One to Lose (1972) is listed and highlighted in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). Praising it as "a pacey, often humorous novel in which the author successfully de-and re-materialized a Jumbo Jet full of passengers." If memory serves me correctly, I have come across a vanishing aircraft only once before in Richard Forrest's Death Through the Looking Glass (1978). When a copy came my way, I snapped it up to see what it's all about.

First of all, Kenrick completely subverted my expectation of how the story would play out. I expected an all out, blockbuster-like heist thriller with the lives of 360 missing passengers and a multi-million dollar ransom at stake, but the story turned out to be surprisingly small scale, almost a traditional detective story, reminiscent of the comedic mysteries by Kelley Roos – like you're following around two side-characters away from the action. There's also this weird balance between the darker, thriller-ish aspects mixed in with the shenanigans of the two protagonists. Somehow, it worked better than it should have done.

William Verecker is a down on his luck lawyer who had been a junior partner in an old, conservative established firm until an embarrassing incident with a society hostess ended up in the paper. The "firm hadn't accepted the explanation and neither had his wife," Annie, who thought Verecker was a better boss than husband. So she came back to work as his secretary in his newly established law firm and mostly spend her working day "being sweet to the many people they owed money to and tough with the handful who owed them." This all changed when Verecker is contacted by an old Air Force buddy, Phil Rinlaub, who now works as a troubleshooter for one of the domestic airline giants, Calair. Rinlaub wants him to identity a pair cuff links belonging to a client of his. A client who's one of more than three hundred passengers caught up in the crime of the century, which is kept under tight wrap by the authorities.

Rinlaud tells Verecker in confidence that "Friday night somebody pulled a stunt that makes the Brink's job look like kid stuff" and called it "the Great Plane Robbery." A 747 Jumbo Jet going from San Francisco to New York vanished from radar about thirty minutes after the flight took off and the authorities quick began to suspect something was up. They couldn't get the passenger list out of the computer, duplicates of the tickets were missing and all the copies of the flight manifest had disappeared, which meant there's "a missing airplane full of people" they "had no record of" – a situation that went from bad to worse. Calair receives a package with items belonging to some of the passengers and a ransom demand of $25 million in uncut diamonds! How do you hide something the size of a Jumbo Jet and where do you store over three hundred hostages? The disappearance of the plane seems like an insoluble problem, but Verecker sees an opportunity to net a huge reward from the insurance company that would solve all their money problem. Verecker unwittingly has a clue in possession that the authorities are unaware of.

On the morning of Rinlaud's visit, Verecker played golf with a client and there was a row of holes on the fairway with burnt-out fireworks at the bottom, but, going back to the golf course to have a second look, he discovers a dozen holes set at ten-yard intervals. Like a makeshift landing strip with flares for a small airplane. A suspicion confirmed by the discovery of twin ruts and an oil slick. Excitedly, Verecker returns to Annie with a branch ("Wonderful. We can use it to beat off creditors") which he uses to make a clever deduction how they can figure out who landed there. So they have an inside track the authorities are unaware of. But don't expect a serious thriller.

William and Annie Verecker begin to follow up on their lead and get caught up absurd, sometimes hilarious situations throughout their investigation. Verecker's discovery at a supposedly empty school would not have been out of place in an episode of Jonathan Creek, while Annie's attempt at an undercover operation would have made Haila Troy proud. Their shenanigans are interspersed with the introductions of the hijackers who are referred to as "The Skycap," "The Bookie," "The Pilot," "The Stewardess" and two baggage men, but there's also a dark horse lurking in the background, "The Bomber." A character who deserved his own novel, because he has a very novel motive. Whenever they appear, together or alone, the story becomes more serious in tone. Such as some of their background stories or when they feel drastic action have to be taken against that meddling lawyer and his ex-wife/secretary, which should have struck a jarring note with the comedic stylings of the Vereckers. But didn't.

So what about the plot? That's a mixed bag of nuts and bolts. Firstly, Kenrick came up with a good solution how (theoretically) a giant airplane with more than three hundred people aboard can disappear and stay hidden, while everyone from the FBI to the insurance investigators are combing the state with a fine tooth-comb, but a few details of the plan were a little hard to swallow – mostly to do with numbers. However, it was something different from what you might expect, because there's only so much you can do to explain away vanishing rooms, houses, streets, trains and airplanes. I appreciate the Vereckers were bouncing false-solutions back and forth throughout the story. Some were more seriously than others ("a 747 was too big to disguise as a diner"), but I thought the half-serious suggestion the hijackers "dug a hole in the desert big enough to take a 747" was as interesting as it was impractical. And the one with a foreign hijacker being flown in to disguise a mass murder as a skyjacking/kidnapping was as practical as it was dark. That trick would probably have worked better (especially in 1972) than the one they settled on.

So that's something the more traditionally-minded mystery reader can enjoy, but don't expect too much from everything surrounding the mystery of the vanishing airplane. Not every detail is fully explained, one plot-thread is left unresolved and the fascinating clues that were introduced during the second-half turned out to be of little relevance to the solution. But, then again, A Tough One to Lose was not written and plotted like a full-blown, traditional detective novel. Kenrick wrote a crime caper that went for both laughs and thrills. In addition to the impossible crime at the center of the plot with all its false-solutions certainly makes it an item of interest to obsessed fans of locked room and impossible crime fiction.

Stone Cold Dead (1995) by Roger Ormerod

My previous reviews took a closer look at two of Roger Ormerod's detective novels, One Deathless Hour (1981) and When the Old Man Died (1991), which were published a decade apart and represented two distinctly different periods in his writing career – respectively his private eye and neo-traditional periods. Only thing that both novels have in common is Ormerod's creative and often original bend of mind when it comes to plot-construction. So I decided to go for the hat-trick and pick another one of his nineties mystery novels, but don't worry. I'll return to the Golden Age in my post. 

Stone Cold Dead (1995) is listed online as the final entry in the Richard and Amelia Patton series, but The Night She Died (1997) is the title that closes out the series. This is almost a pity as Stone Cold Dead is Ormerod's most traditionally-styled mystery from this period with a surprisingly uncomplicated plot.

There are no shattered clocks, fabricated alibis, apparent impossibilities or messing around with cars and target pistols. Just a deceivingly simple murder in a small, tightly-knit community "firmly and delightfully living in the past" in a (socially) isolated location. A place that resisted and shown the modern world the door for two centuries. 

Stone Cold Dead begins with the Pattons traveling to Flight House to visit Amelia's goddaughter, Amelia "Mellie" Ruby Fulton, who's celebrating both her eighteenth birthday and her engagement to a young police constable, Raymond "Ray" Torrance – who spend £800 pounds on an engagement ring. Mellie is the daughter of Amelia's old school friend, Ruby Fulton, who's married to an old-fashioned, old-world country lawyer, Gerald Fulton. But his household situation is a little out of the ordinary. Gerald Fulton pays his son, Colin Fulton, a nominal rent to live there. Flight House looks down on a canal basin with locks, pounds and an old toll booth with people living "all the year round in their houseboats" on the canals. So there has to be a permanent lock-keeper, Colin, who was preceded by his uncle and grandfather.

The canal is privately owned by "three old dears," Adolphus, Alexandra and Victoria, who buried themselves even deeper into the past than the people populating their farms, villages and canals. Nowadays, Flight House is presented rent free to the lock-keeper with no salary, but the tradition is to tip the lock-keeper for helping the boats through. So they lived and worked in "an environment established over 200 years before" with "the physical isolation" cutting "them off from the present pace of life." There's "no radio, no TV set, no CD player" at Flight House, which are deemed to modern, but the outside world sometimes seeps into this isolated community. And having values, modern or old-fashioned, doesn't automatically mean you always live up to them. Something the Pattons begin to find out before they even arrived at the house.

Richard and Amalia drive to Flight House during snowy weather and come across an abandoned, unlocked car with the engine still warm and the keys hanging from the ignition lock – fuel gauge indicated half a tankful. What happened to the driver? A question that will be answered later that night.

They receive a warm welcome when they arrive, but there are some undercurrents during the birthday/engagement party. Gerald is not exactly charmed by his future son-in-law as "the young foul" thinks it's humorous to take constant digs at Gerald with his "really very immature authority." Ray comes to the party in his uniform and a joke ready ("is this bar licensed, may I ask?"), but Richard notices he has been "drinking as one who sought oblivion." And he refused to show Mellie the ring. So the stage is set.

Later that evening, while taking a stroll around the promise to smoke his pipe, Richard sees a human hand sticking out of the water of the pound. However, I can't reveal anything about the victim, because the victim's identity is a genuine "Ooh, the plot thickens" moment. A very well done effect considering the victim is somewhat of an outsider who has not been mentioned, or named, until the body was discovered. Ormerod tried to repeat this trick when Richard finds someone in very poor condition on one of the houseboats along the canal, but not quite to the same effect as the murder. Although it definitely thickened the plot even further and it made me look in a completely different direction for an answer.

So, while the case appears to be relatively simple and straightforward on the surface, the local policeman in charge, Inspector Ted Slater, had "nothing of a routine nature that he could pursue" with means and opportunity being the same very everyone involved – numerous motives were "jealously guarded." Richard Patton is more than a little guilty of guarding all the motives and keeping evidence from the local authorities. This is both a strength and a weakness of the plot. As noted above, Stone Cold Dead has a very simple, uncomplicated crime without the problems of broken windows, smashed clocks, faked alibis, impossible crimes and toying around with firearms. So there's less physical evidence and clues to betray the murderer or obscure the trail, which is probably why Ormerod didn't dare to go all-in with the puzzle surrounding the missing murder weapon. A very clever idea that could have been on par with the brilliant, double-edged central clue from The Key to the Case (1992) had been properly clued. Now you can only make an educated guess, if you can spot the murderer, that is.

Technically, the plot is sound enough and Ormerod told a fascinating story with a very well realized setting, memorable set-pieces and some good pieces of reasoning, but, purely as fair play mystery, Stone Cold Dead lagged behind his other novels from the same period. The Key to the Case, A Shot at Nothing (1993) and even And Hope to Die (1995) are shimmering examples of what could have been had the Golden Age never ended in the 1960s and continued to develop. Stone Cold Dead started out as something resembling a throwback to the old-fashioned, traditional detective story, but rapidly began to change into a more character-driven, modern crime novel. And not a bad crime novel at all. But hoped to find another one of his sublimely plotted, neo-Golden Age mysteries in Stone Cold Dead. So only recommended to readers who are already a fan of Ormerod and the series. 

A note for the curious: there's a very small, unsolved slice-of-life mystery in Stone Cold Dead. During the second-half of the story, the police begin to drag the locks in the hope of finding the elusive murder weapon. The locks had not been pumped dry in one, or two, centuries and the police collected "piles of sundry junk," which included everything from pram wheels to "a complete chandelier." There were also two shopping trolleys. Patton wonders how they got there, because "no canal user would load a trolley on to his boat" as it would be a devil of a nuisance and no shopper too idle to return the trolley to the store "would have walked it at least two miles to reach these locks." I know this is not as big of a mystery as who killed the chauffeur in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939), but I'm Dutch. And this little waterway mystery fascinates me. My solution is that some holidaymakers or canal boat residents went to the village to stock up on supplies, but their car broke down on the way back. So they fetched two trolleys to get their supplies to the boat and then dumped the trolleys into the lock.

When the Old Man Died (1991) by Roger Ormerod

Previously, I reviewed Roger Ormerod's last novel in the David Mallin and George Coe series, One Deathless Hour (1981), which ended his run as an author of British private eye novels and ushered in a more traditional period – during which he refined and polished his plots to almost perfection. More importantly, Ormerod succeeded in updating the traditional, plot-oriented detective novel and finding a balance between the classic and modern style. The Key to the Case (1992) is a great example of combining a good, old-fashioned locked room mystery with the grit of today's crime novels. 

So thought it would be a nice idea to skip a decade ahead and read one of his novels from the early nineties, which gave me about five titles to pick from. I randomly settled on When the Old Man Died (1991) and couldn't have picked a better title. John Dickson Carr would have found much to enjoy about this curious, almost out-of-time detective story! It has everything from antique clocks and quasi-impossible situations to a traveling fair. Step right up, step right up! 

When the Old Man Died is listed online as the eighth title in the Richard and Amelia Patton series, but several of Ormerod's series novels, like the previously mentioned The Key to the Case, are listed as standalone mysteries. So don't pin me down on the exact chronology of his books. 

When the Old Man Died begins with ex-Detective Inspector Richard Patton getting a visit from a former colleague, Chief Inspector Wainwright, who wants to speak with him about a ten year old murder case – which represented Patton's "first big case as an inspector." A decade ago, Patton was called to the town of Markham Prior where an old, dreary and unkempt farmhouse surrounded untended fences and outbuildings became the scene of a very peculiar murder. The owner of the home is the grouchy, anti-social Eric Prost, "suspected of writing scurrilous letters to all and sundry," but poison pen letters lost their power to "to bring about any shivers of apprehension" in modern times. Nonetheless, this didn't prevent Prost from writing abusive letters and had been writing one at the time of his death.

A milkman on his early morning rounds arrived at Winter Haven, as Prost called his house, to find no empty bottles on the steps. So he walked around the house to peek through to the windows and discovered Prost's body, head down on his desk, in his study, but the doors were locked and the windows, upstairs and downstairs, were latched. Some of the latches were "rusted solid." But was the house really locked up as tightly as it appeared? The "side door was so floppy in its frame" that Patton "could slip the latch easily" and two shots were fired through a small, but "critically important," hole in the corner of the pane of the study window – clearly done years before and never replaced. One bullet struck a small, vulnerable spot in the nape of Prost's neck. The second bullet had struck the face of an old, valuable grandfather clock, or long-case clock, standing by the side of the door. Apparently, the bullet stopped the clock at eight-ten and "the shattered glass from its face had been all over the floor" where the door opened. So "nobody could have entered or left the room" without disturbing the carpet of glass. The door had swept a wide arc in it when Patton entered the room.

Patton was hardly fooled by the smashed clock ("who's going to fall for that, these days?") and suspected a faked alibi, but the shots were precise and exact that required the practiced hand of a marksman. Enter the antique dealer and gun enthusiast, Mr. Julian Caine, who's name was on the license of the murder weapon. He had a motive of sorts and a laughable alibi. So he was arrested and received a life sentence on his day in court.

Chief Inspector Wainwright informs Patton one of his then underlings, Detective Constable Arthur Pierce, died last month following a car accident, but he made a statement before passing away. A statement that opened an old, timeworn can of worms. Arthur Pierce climbed to the rank of Chief Superintendent, but "one tiny error in his whole career" had haunted him. He had mishandled the murder weapon and, as a consequence, "the evidence, as presented to the court, wasn't safe." So the conviction was quashed and Julian Caine was released from prison. Four months later, Caine appears on the Pattons doorstep to ask the man responsible for putting him behind bars to now prove his innocence.

While the courts quashed the conviction, Caine is still guilty in the eyes of the town and he already had threats stuck through his letterbox and a brick through the window. Caine admits he was angry enough with Prost to have shot him, but not that precious, nearly 300-year-old Tompion long-case clock. And he could never have brought himself to harm it.

This is easier said than done, because ten years have passed and, every time Patton searched for a way out for him, Caine became "almost frantic to prove that nobody else but himself could have done it" – covering everything from his alibi and motive to access to his pistols. There are many more curious, almost impossible, aspects of the case revealed during this part of the story. Firstly, the pistols were kept in "a room almost as secure as a bank vault" with a cleverly hidden key, but Patton discovers the hiding place was to deceive burglars and crooks. Not friends or anyone else who came over to his home. Secondly, there was something weird and explainable that Patton didn't put into his report. Every clock in the house, "the whole collection," had stopped at eight-ten! This brings to mind old stories of "clocks stopping at the time of their owner's death," but even stranger is that the clocks were started up again after the house had been locked and sealed by the police. A particular bizarre aspect when you consider the bullet made "no more than a dent" in the brass face of the clock. Just a shame Ormerod didn't delve deeper into the lore surrounding old clocks.

Naturally, there are many more problems and side issues complicating Patton's investigation even further. Eric Prost lost his wife in a terrible car accident and the woman who caused the crash was seen fleeing the scene, but remained elusive unidentified. Arthur Pierce car crash very likely was murder and his deathbed statement resulted in an internal investigation, which is going to leave a reputation in tatters and Wainwright can only imagine what the media is going to do when the story gets out. So this means Patton has to lock horns with another ex-colleague, which is one of Ormerod's personalized tropes. Another one is his interest in cars and how they can be used by criminals and murderers in all kinds of different ways. Yes, there's a third victim of the four-wheeled menace when one of the characters is seriously wounded when he/she is rundown in the street. You can already see his interests and pet ideas being turned into personalized tropes in One Deathless Hour and An Alibi Too Soon (1987). Lastly, Eric Prost was related to the people of a traveling fair and Winter Haven was the nerve center where everything's organized and doubled as their winter quarters. When Patton returned, the fair had returned to their winter quarters to refurbish and repair their attractions and sideshows.

Admittedly, the story sags a little in the second-half, which is why think the clock-lore was underutilized, but the story and plot picked up again during the final quarter. A sudden change of pace that begins with one of the most unusual, but original, "courtroom" scene on the books. Patton has a stubborn, unbending sense of right and wrong, which forces him to interfere in "a kangaroo court" that took place in complete secrecy. Even though the accused was guilty of what he had been accused of (not murder), but without being able to defend himself. Patton elbows his way to the stage to do an improve impression of Perry Mason, but, during his improvised defense, he finally saw the complete truth that had eluded him for so long.

I pieced together most of the pieces except for two, not wholly unimportant, key-pieces of the puzzle. I had a pretty solid idea who had a hand in the (attempted) murders, but not quite as I imagined and therefore technically incorrect. Neither did I appreciate, or understand, how craftily and ingenious Ormerod combined the strands of the locked room mystery with old-fashioned alibi-trickery, which strongly reminded me of the short stories in Tetsuya Ayukawa's The Red Locked Room (2020) – which also used the tricks and techniques of one trope to create the other. Ormerod created a hybrid of the locked room and alibi with the murder in that puzzle box house with clocks that stop and start on their own volition. This is another personalized trope as Ormerod doesn't appear to have been interested in conventional alibis. My impression is that Ormerod was more interested in the difficulties of fabricating alibis and the problems that can arise from them, because they had unforeseen consequences or were misinterpreted.

So, while Ormerod had some favorite tropes and hobbyhorses, he also possessed a creative and imaginative mind capable of producing some original ideas, which prevented him from repeating himself. He simply found new ways to use or look at them. When the Old Man Died is no different with only a slower, less imaginative middle part of the story preventing me from ranking it alongside The Key to the Case and A Shot at Nothing (1993) as one of Ormerod's best retro Golden Age detective novels. But its not all that far behind. Just remember that the strength of the book is in its first-half and an ending as solid as it's satisfying.

A note for the curious: I only noticed this while working on my review and reading back what I wrote about One Deathless Hour, which made me realize how much synergy there really is between One Deathless Hour and When the Old Man Died. While Malling and Coe were on their last recorded case, Patton was solving his first unrecorded case around the same time. Both stories involve murders with a twenty-two target pistol, smashed clocks, apparent impossibilities and a flimsy alibi involving a shooting club. Yet, they're two very different detective stories. Ormerod was criminally forgotten and deserves to be rediscovered as showed what could have been, if the Golden Age never ended.

The Three Taps (1927) by Ronald A. Knox

I obliquely referred to Father Ronald A. Knox's "Ten Commandments for Detective Fiction" (1929) in my review of Ton Vervoort's Moord onder toneelspelers (Murder Among Actors, 1963), which played with one of his commandments without breaking it and suddenly reminded that Knox represents a glaring blind spot in my Golden Age reading – like Josephine Bell, R.A.J. Walling and the Coles. So far my sole exposure to Knox's detective fiction has been his Chestertonian short story "Solved by Inspection" (The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories, 1990), but somehow, his novel-length mysteries never left the big pile. Why not do a little penance by reading his first Miles Bredon mystery? 

You can definitely chalk Knox's The Three Taps (1927) up as another detective novel I should have gotten to a lot sooner, because it was a fine and immensely enjoyable detective yarn. A detective yarn that possibly had some influence on such lauded mystery writers like Anthony Berkeley, Leo Bruce, Christopher Bush and J.J. Connington. 

The Three Taps could just as easily have been titled The Three Detectives, The Three Suspects or The Three Possibilities. All of which would give the reader a better idea what kind of game Knox has in store. Well, perhaps not in 1927, but 21st century Golden Age mystery reader certainly would prick reading a title like The Three Detectives or The Three Possibilities.

Knox sets the tone, right off the bat, with a humorous introduction to Miles Bredon's employer, Indescribable Insurance Company, whose fabulous reputation promises that "every step you take on this side of the grave" can be ensured with "handsome terms as the step which takes you into the grave" – guaranteeing "the man who is insured with the Indescribable walks the world in armour of proof." Even in the case of practical difficulties, the Indescribable would "somehow contrive to frank your passage into the world beyond." So many humorous wags have been made at the company's expense alleging "a burglar can insure himself against a haul of sham jewels" or "a client who murmured 'Thank God!' as he fell down a liftshaft." The whole story sparkles with witty and satirical descriptions and dialogue like that.

Indescribable Insurance Company most popular product is the so-called Euthanasia policy, which is potentially disastrous to any scheming relatives weary of waiting for nature to take its course. 

A Euthanasia policy comes with very heavy premiums ("that goes without saying") and, if the policy holder dies before the age of sixty-five, a small fortune is paid to the heirs. But, if the policy holder outlives that crucial age, he becomes a pensioner of the company with every breath they take being money in their pockets. Their heirs assigns, normally looking forward to cash-in their inheritance, conspire to keep their "body and soul together with every known artifice of modern medicine." I wish this Euthanasia policy had become a shared-universe object turning up in the works of other British mystery writers. Such a waste it was used only here. Anyway...

Jephthah Mottram is a successful and wealthy businessman from Pullford, a large Midland town, who, two weeks before sixty-fourth birthday, was told by a Harley Street specialist he's suffering from a malignant disease – giving him no more than two years with increasing pain. Mottram needs ready money to pay doctor's bills, treatment and foreign travel, but all his wealth is tied up and money is pretty tight. So he went to the Indescribable to try to negate on his Euthanasia policy with a business-like offer. Indescribable pays back half the premiums from the time the policy started and, if he dies before his sixty-fifth birthday, pay no insurance. And, if he lives, no annuity. Naturally, they refuse to cancel the original contract, but it would not be long until they have send out their in-house detective to investigate their clients untimely passing.

Indescribable retained its own private detective, Miles Bredon, who's introduced "a big, good-humoured, slightly lethargic creature still in the early thirties" whose excellent mind is "the victim of hobbies which perpetually diverted his attention." There were, however, two events, or interventions, that stirred his mind in the right direction. One is that his brilliant wartime record as an intelligence officer allowed him to accept the position as an insurance investigator on his own terms. Namely that he didn't have to sit in an office all day and play around at home until he was needed. Secondly was his marriage to Angela who had no illusions other than spending her life with "a large, untidy, absent-minded man who would frequently forget that she was in the room." A man who needed a nurse and chauffeur as much as a wife, but I don't think there was a better and funnier husband-and-wife detective until Kelley Roos' Jeff and Haila Troy arrived on the scene in the 1940s.

So, one day, Miles Bredon is asked to go with Angela to Chilthorpe, a small town, where Mottram always spends his annual, two-week fishing holiday and always stays at the same inn, the Load of Mischief. Mottram appears to have met with an unfortunate accident with the gas, but some of the silent witnesses suggest it could have also been suicide or murder.

Mottram went to bed the previous night, took his sleeping-draught and either turned on the gas-tap or forgot to turn it off, but, when the door was broken down, they discovered that the windows were wide open and held by its clasp – which means "there could have been no death." So that means a person or persons unknown interfered with the scene, but there are "iron bars on the inside to protect it from unauthorized approach" and the door was locked with the key on the inside. This adds another impossibility to the problem whether it was an accident, suicide or murder. When the body was discovered, the main gas-tap was turned off, but there were "no marks of fingers turning it off." A fact that in case of suicide is utterly impossible and in case of murder needlessly stupid and inexplicable.

So there you have thoroughly puzzling and inexplicable death buzzing with contradictory facts and evidence with the main question being whether it was an accident, suicide or murder. This approach strongly reminded me of Connington's The Case with Nine Solutions (1928) and Bush's The Case of the Tudor Queen (1938), which center on finding the right combination of accident, suicide or murder to explain double deaths. John Rhode turned this combination-lock style of plotting on its head in Death in Harley Street (1946) with a fatal poisoning that neither have been an accident, suicide or murder. You can see how Knox may have influenced Connington's 1928 novel which, in turn, provided a model for Bush's The Case of the Tudor Queen and Rhode added a twist to it. However, you can't really compare Knox or The Three Taps to any of those big bugs and giants of the so-called humdrum detective story.

There's a technical aspect to the plot typically associated with Crofts and Rhode, but The Three Taps stands much closer, in spirit, to Berkeley's The Case of the Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) and Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936). A third detective enters the story when Bredon discovers that the investigating policeman is an old army friend, Inspector Leyland of Scotland Yard, who take opposite views of the case. Bredon naturally prefers "suicide masquerading as accident" while Leyland favors "murder masquerading as suicide," but there's a litany of clues and red herrings that keep messing with their pet theories. Most importantly, the gas-tap, the locked door and open windows, but there's also an half-finished document, a guestbook signed on arrival, a letter to a local rag attacking Mottram and a wound-up, eight-day watch – coming on top of shocking lack of motives or opportunity. Leyland and the Bredons have only three potential suspects to work with.

Firstly, there's the victim's anti-clerical, diminutive secretary, Brinkman, who may have been in the best position to have done some tampering, but lacked a motive. Simmonds is Mottram's disinherited nephew who disliked his uncle very much and possible had a foot inside the door of the inn, but would not have gotten a dime out of his uncle's death. Mr. Pulteney is a schoolmaster on holiday with no apparent link to the victim, except staying at the same inn, but "shows rather too much curiosity" as he acts almost like a fourth detective. Pulteney even draws an interesting comparison between schoolmasters and detectives as part of his function is having to figure out "who threw the butter at the ceiling, which boy cribbed from which, where the missing postage-stamp has got to." This was echoed more than a decade later by Dr. Gideon Fell in John Dickson Carr's The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939).

There's an element to the story, a core component of the puzzle plot, clearly betraying the influence G.K. Chesterton had on Knox. Mottram had been pestering the local bishop whether it's "lawful to do evil in order that good might come." I don't think he handled this good-evil paradox as good as Chesterton would have done, but it was put to good use as an important puzzle-piece.

Miles, Angela and Leyland throw themselves at these contradictory problems with all the zest and zeal of spirited amateur detectives instead of salaried employers. A discussion of detective stories is used to check which brand of cigarettes everyone is smoking and a fake conversation is staged for the benefit of an eavesdropper, but some of their questions prove to have unexpected answers and even the best laid plans can backfire. Slowly, but surely, they work towards a solution. Well, there actually are three solutions with two of them being false-solutions in the tradition of Berkeley. However, the three solutions is also where the only flaw of the story is revealed. 

The Three Taps is one of those detective novels in which one of the false-solutions is better and more inspired than the correct solution. Not that the correct solution is bad, or unsatisfying, but not as clever or inspired as the first false-solution. What the solution lacked in brains was made up with guts, because it was very gutsy to use it as an explanation. And it worked!

So, all things considered, The Three Taps is a cut above the average, 1920s detective novel and portent of things to come with its sparkling dialogue, rich storytelling and a complicated, puzzle-driven plot – crammed with clues, detectives and false-solutions. And perhaps had a bigger hand in shaping the British detective story of the 1930s that it has gotten credit for. So, in short, a mystery reader's detective novel! 

A note for the curious: Robert Knox's older sister, Winifred Peck, wrote two detective novels herself, The Warrielaw Jewel (1933) and Arrest the Bishop? (1949), which were reissued in 2016 by Dean Street Press. She well worth a read to everyone who has a taste for those alternative Crime Queens who have been unearthed over the past few years. Another thing... did you know Knox may have influenced Orson Welles' 1938 radio-hoax with his January, 1926, broadcast of "a simulated live report of revolution sweeping across London." Knox was somewhat of an originalist, wasn't he?

An Alibi Too Soon (1987) by Roger Ormerod

Together with Kip Chase, Douglas Clark, Charles Forsyte and Jack Vance, Roger Ormerod belonged to the Lost Generation of detective novelists who attempted to conserve the genre's past as a foundation for a modern interpretation of the traditional, more plot-oriented, detective story – enjoying varying degrees of success and longevity. But they all arrived on the scene a good three, four decades too late. And they're practically forgotten today. 

Ormerod would never have appeared on my radar, if it weren't for Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) listing three of his impossible crime novels. Well, you know me. I dived down that rabbit hole head first and found not only a criminally forgotten, unexpectedly prolific writer of locked room mysteries, but a writer who perfected the modernization of the traditional, Golden Age period mystery with his best novels feeling like a natural continuation of that era. The Key to the Case (1992) and A Shot at Nothing (1993) are two great examples of Ormerod building on the past with a distinctly contemporary touch. That's not just me saying it.

John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, succumbed to the temptation of my previous reviews and tracked down a copy of Ormerod's The Hanging Doll Murder (1983), which he praised as "an engaging and devilish bit of detective fiction" and "a throwback to the heyday of detective fiction" – when plotting and storytelling superseded "character study and grim psychological probing." John has since joined me on an genre-archaeological expedition to unearth this too quickly forgotten, retro GAD author. So keep an eye out for his reviews.

I've previously read six of his nine, perhaps ten, confirmed locked room titles and wanted to keep the remaining three on the pile, for now, to see what else Ormerod did with the genre. Since I appreciate a good alibi-puzzle as much as a deviously-plotted impossible crime, An Alibi Too Soon (1987) was a logical place to start as I cherry pick my way through his work. 

An Alibi Too Soon is the third entry in the series about ex-Detective Inspector Richard Patton and his wife, Amelia, who are two highly reliable murder-magnets.

This story finds Richard and Amelia Patton in Welshpool, Wales, where they've come to view a converted water-mill with an option to buy it, but Richard remembered a former colleague, ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Llewellyn Hughes, retired to his beloved Wales to write his memoirs. And he decides to give him a call. Richard is surprised when he hears Llew Hughes has frantically been sending letters to his cottage on the south coast, while Richard was within a few miles of him "admiring a water-mill." Hughes has come across something in his memoirs about "a most important case" and believes they might have gotten it wrong, but he can't make any sense out of it.

So he promises to drop by with Amelia, but, when they arrive, the wooden barn house is ablaze and Richard only just managed to drag out a badly burned, dying Hughes clutching a manila envelope – name "EDWIN CARTER" printed cross its face. The envelope contained his notes on the Edwin Carter case. A case that was closed a decade ago and ended with a conviction, but Hughes spotted something in his notes that provides the story with its central puzzle. I think it's save to assume An Alibi Too Soon was intended to be Ormerod's take on the so-called "Humdrum" detective school of Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode.

Edwin Carter was a playwright who made a lot of money with his social-comment comedies, but flopped as a stage director and lost all of his money. Carter was an eccentric manic-depressive, "way up one minute, way down the next," who threw a party, "a kind of wake," to celebrate his failure and ruin. During the party, Carter announced he was going to drive out to get "a fresh supply of booze." Later that evening, Carter's body is found in one of the two closed garages, belted into the driving seat, with a crate of beer and bottles of spirits on the backseat. So everyone presumed he committed suicide upon his return, but the police figures it was murder. This is where a technical piece of the puzzle comes into play.

There are two garages on the estate with up-and-over doors that can be either opened, or closed, with a radio transmitter or manually with the two buttons between the two doors. One of these garages was Carter's and the belonged to his niece and secretary, Rosemary Trew. But, for the system to work, "they had to keep to the correct garage for the correct car." And that's where the suicide became a murder. Another car had been parked in his garage and he was found in his niece's garage. So he had to push the outside button to close the door, run back under the door as it came down and belt himself into the driving as he waited for the car fumes to overtake him – which comes on top of an ugly bump on his forehead. However, the local police doesn't have to look very far to find someone who fitted the role of murderer like a glove.

Only person at the party without one of those "positive alibis" and a hint of a motive was Carter's nephew, Duncan, who came out on parole a few months ago. Duncan served ten years and is keen on getting pardoned in order to claim damages.

Richard Patton first has to figure out what incongruity Hughes had found that placed the case in a new light and he does notice something in a crime scene photo, which would give Duncan an alibi while removing all the others. But would his late colleague be driven half-crazy by a reversal of those "blasted alibis" or is there something else in the evidence? A stone cold, long-closed case is not the only problem he has to overcome.

Detective Chief Inspector Grayson was one of the original investigators of the Edwin Carter case and has diligently worked on his inflexible career ("he succeeds, you see"), which he's determined to protect by presenting Hughes death as an accident and frustrating Richard's private investigation. So they lock horns a few times over the course of the story, but he also comes across another, murky death of a blue movie actress, Glenda Grace, who had falling from the balcony of Carter's London flat during a house party – apparently sozzled and high on drugs. Some people believe she had been pushed. Several blackmail attempts had been made on various party guests. Richard also come to respect one of his suspects, Rosemary, who still lives at her uncle's estate where she used her "paltry inheritance" to produce plays and hold dress rehearsals. The theatrical crowd who hangs out there hasn't changed all that much from the time of those two tragic deaths.

So how well does Ormerod's An Alibi Too Soon stack up as a modern interpretation of the Crofts and Rhode-style detective story? Well, that's a bit of a mixed back of tricks.

Firstly, the two past murders of Carter and Grace were easily the best aspect of the plot with all the clues in place to give the reader a fair opportunity to figure out who, why and (mostly) how, which admittedly is not too difficult to do. Just like with Crofts and Rhode, the tricky part is putting all the pieces in the right place to get a complete and correct picture of the case. Something that was nicely complicated by the technical monkeying with the garage doors, a single word on the side of a beer crate and the premature alibi that gave the story its title. Ormerod gave some much needed weight to this part of the plot and his reputation as a retro GAD writer with a double-reversal of how the alibi-trick was perceived. A double-reversal nicely tied together with these other past plot-threads.

Unfortunately, the two present-day murders (a second body is found in a millrace) felt inconsequential and unnecessary. I think this story would have worked as well, perhaps even better, had Hughes not died. Grayson told Richard that Hughes' brain was going and Richard gently probing Hughes failing memory would have allowed for more engaging storytelling. This would have introduced a vital clue much earlier into the story. Now we have a murder that came about by pure change that's quickly shoved aside as an side-plot and used only as a reason to have Richard cross swords with Grayson. Oh, the Pattons become the new owners of Hughes' dog and they rename her Cindy (short for Cinders). I don't know why the second murder was necessary except to add some darkness to the story, but you can put down to the rushed ending giving the impression that a lot was left unanswered. 

An Alibi Too Soon is not one of Ormerod's best or strongest detective novels, but the story has a solid, competently plotted core with a clever play on the always tricky problem of arranging an alibi which makes it a worthwhile read to fans of Crofts and Rhode. But perhaps even more important that that, An Alibi Too Soon is another confirmation that Ormerod may have been one of the most anomalous mystery writer to have ever appeared on the scene. Not only was he a mystery writer who was both out-of-time and with the times, but his plots became stronger and his storytelling clearer as he neared the end of his career with his earlier novels, like The Weight of Evidence (1978) and More Dead Than Alive (1980), coming across as clunky compared to the previously mentioned The Key to the Case and A Shot at Nothing – published during his last active decade. I know writers are supposed to improve over time and maintain a certain standard, but, more often than not, there's an inevitable drop in quality in the work of prolific mystery writers. Not so with Ormerod.

I know my reading of Ormerod has been very limited to date, but my impression is that he spend his whole career honing and sharpening his skills. Beginning to show drastic improvement in the mid-to late 1980s and reaching his zenith in the 1990s. That's why When the Old Man Died (1991), Third Time Fatal (1992), Mask of Innocence (1994) and Stone Cold Dead (1995) have moved up a few layers on the big pile. So, yeah, expect more Ormerod in the coming months!

Murder's a Swine (1943) by Nap Lombard

Earlier this year, British Library Crime Classics reissued an obscure, long out-of-print and intriguing-sounding mystery, Murder's a Swine (1943), written by the husband-and-wife team of Gordon Neil Stewart and Pamela Hansford Johnson – who produced two detective novels under the name "Nap Lombard." Martin Edwards wrote an insightful introduction with the most surprising bit being that Pamela Johnson's second husband was C.P. Snow. 

Murder's a Swine was published in the United States as The Grinning Pig and belongs to that British dominated sub-category of the genre dealing with the Second World War. A period in history that gave the British home front detective story a new and distinctively unique flavor that can never be replicated again. 

Murder's a Swine is set during the so-called "Phoney War," an eight-month period of restless inactivity on the battlefield, which began with the blitzkrieg on Poland and ended with May 1940 invasion of the Low Countries – proverbial calm before the storm. Someone remarks in the story that another character must think it's "a rum show to the last war," but the Phoney War completely upheaved British society. There were enforced blackouts, sandbag barricades, gas masks, children being evacuated to the countryside and the general effects of mobilization.

This is the backdrop of Murder's a Swine. A story that begins with a young ARP Warden, Clem Poplett, accidentally stumbling across a decomposing body behind the sandbags of an air-raid shelter. The body is that of a man dressed in ARP overall and Wellington boots with a bullet hole in his back. Poplett was not alone when he made the gruesome discovery in the shelter. A resident of a nearby block of flats, Agnes Kinghof, had accompanied him into the shelter and she has together with her husband tangled with murder before. Agnes and Andrew Kinghof solved their first case in Tidy Death (1940). Much to the annoyance of Captain Kinghof's cousin, Lord Whitestone, who's "someone of considerable importance at Scotland Yard."

Lord Whitestone prefers the Kinghofs go to "one of those dreary, disgusting leg-shows" or the Yellow Chicken before they're "compelled to raid it" instead of getting involved with police business again. But in their defense, the murderer doesn't leave them much choice.

Firstly, the victim is identified as a long-lost relative of one of their neighbors and the residents become the target of a series of sick pranks. A stick with a pig's head is fixed to the service lift and frightened a woman into hysterics when it appeared at her bedroom window, "all shining and blue," snout pressed against the pane – before disappearing again. This is followed by more pranks and a mocking letter, "greasy fellow aren't i," signed "the pig-sticker."

So they have to take a closer look at their own neighbors to see if any of them might be the murderer, which is easy as half of the flats stand empty, but still enjoys enough occupancy to fill out a decent-sized pool of suspects. Mrs. Rowse is known to the public as the author of popular stories for growing girls, "Phyllada Rounders," who shares a flat with her friend, Mrs. Adelaide Sibley. Mrs. Sibley who was frightened by the pig's head at the window. Madame Charnet is a doddering, deaf old French woman who came to England right before Germany stopped caring about borders. Felix Lang is a medical student with an unclear background and no means of identification, while George Warrender worked late nights at a government office and was seldom seen by the tenants. A potentially significant fact as another suspect is the unknown, long-lost prodigal son of the victim and he might be in England under a new name. There's also the presence of the Free British Mussolites whose goal is to tear "filthy veil" of Democracy from "the fair face of England." Apparently, the FBM hate the Scotsmen ("who wear women's skirts in the streets of their Babylonic cities") more than communists, socialists, unionists, bureaucrats, atheists, the Freemasons and even the Jews. Yes, the FBM are played as a joke. Like a comedically inept counterpart of Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts who bristle when learning nobody locally has heard of their "influential organization."

There you have all the ingredients for an engrossing, first-class World War II detective story, but, regrettably, the quality became split between the writing and plotting. And it's a notable split.

Let's get the good out of the way first. Gordon Stewart and Pamela Johnson knew how to write and set a scene, which is the strength of Murder's a Swine. There are several very well written, memorable set pieces strewn throughout the story. Such as a second pig head, "a red Punch's cap set between the ears," appearing during an illegally-staged street show of Punch and Judy or the murderer with pig mask terrorizing and trying to add another body to score – like some demented Scooby Doo villain. There are the snippets of life under wartime conditions like the fire-precautions committee meetings, the big ARP casualty exercise and the secret FBM meeting with the hayloft scene. What elevated the story is that the dark, depressing wartime atmosphere and thriller-like bits were brightened with flashes of humor and lighthearted banter from the Kinghofs that can stand comparison with Delano Ames and Kelley Roos.

But, purely judged as a detective story, Murder's a Swine turned out to be a poor showing as the murderer stood out like a scarecrow. I thought it was so thickly laid on and obvious that I half-suspected it was a red herring and began to cast suspicious glances in another direction. There's another character who would have fitted the role of murderer much better (Pyrz Cbcyrgg). That being said, the unmasking of the murderer was very well handled and how this person was compelled to confess was unusual, to say the least!

So here we have a classic example of a detective novel that was better written than plotted and therefore, as someone to whom plot is the foundation of any detective story, I can only recommend it to fans of bantering, mystery solving couples or WWII era crime fiction. Sorry, Kate, but my vote is certainly not going to Murder's a Swine for 2021 Reprint of the Year Award. My purist streak doesn't allow it.

Nevertheless, while the plot of Murder's a Swine failed to win me over, Martin Edwards noted in his introduction that he was sure it "helped its original readers to forget, for an hour or two at least, the miseries of wartime," because "to lose oneself in an enjoyable, unserious book is an under-estimated pleasure" – especially during an ungoing pandemic and lockdowns. I agree as it was an enjoyable read with some very memorable scenes. So, in that regard, it comes recommended without hesitation.

The Key to the Case (1992) by Roger Ormerod

I reviewed two of Roger Ormerod's late-career novels in January, A Shot at Nothing (1993) and And Hope to Die (1995), which he wrote during his twilight years, but the writing and plotting were as clear and ingenious as ever – crafting some of his strongest, modern GAD-style novels. My ramblings tempted John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, to try one and raved about The Hanging Doll Murder (1983) as "an excellent example of the modern mystery that honors the traditions of the Golden Age" with "several amazing twists." Something that appears to have been a hallmark of Ormerod's detective fiction. 

From my limited reading and playing internet detective, Ormerod seems to have experimented a lot with ways to frame the traditional, plot-oriented detective story as a modern crime novel. An ambition to link the past with the present to create a new kind of detective story for the future. Some of Ormerod's earlier novels are less than perfect in this regard (e.g. The Weight of Evidence, 1978), but drastically improved during the '80s and became amazingly good at in the '90s. Ormerod could very well have been the best mystery writer of the nineties and today's subject did nothing to persuade me away from that premature conclusion. 

The Key to the Case (1992) is erroneous listed online as a standalone novel, but it's the ninth title in the Richard and Amelia Patton series. More importantly, The Key to the Case is a textbook example of how to consolidate the traditionalist and modernist approach to the detective story.

Richard Patton is an ex-Detective Inspector who continues to get involved in murder cases and "the recent affair of the clocks," presumably a reference to When the Old Man Died (1991), had received too much media coverage for his liking, which had given people the idea Patton sorted out personal problems – having already been approached about boundary disputes and lost dogs. The Key to the Case has a treble of much more serious and confrontational problems for Richard and Amelia to deal with.

Firstly, Richard is approached by a small-time, but expert, burglar, Ronnie Cope, who's out on bail and facing an aggravated burglary charge. Ronnie is not known to be violent and claims to have "an unprovable alibi," but Richard initially has no interest in getting involved. Secondly, a former crook and current owner of a gaming club, Milo Dettinger, asks Richard to prove that his son, Bryan, was murdered. A death that had been filed as a suicide on account of the whole house being a locked and bolted from the inside. Milo had to smash the front door and the bathroom door to find his son hanging by a length of rope, but Richard has to do a little detective work to find out why the place was "well-nigh impregnable to an outsider."

Every day, before going to his club, Milo ensured Bryan locked and bolted all the doors and windows behind him. Milo would also make a midnight call to ensure everything was alright and they agreed on a coded message with the doorbell. Milo fixed this "complicated system of security" to protect his son from an outraged community. Bryan had served two years of six-year prison sentence for raping three young women and he wasn't exactly welcomed back with open arms by the community, but a month after he got out, a woman was raped and murdered. So plenty of abuse and death threats started pouring in. Richard reluctantly gets pulled in, but, once he gets started, he can't stop and this places him at odds with his former colleague and friend, Chief Inspector Ken, who's in charge of a troublesome inspector, Les Durrell – who's "is not simply anti-rapist, but violently so." Meanwhile, Amelia has to face her own demons to help her husband and she's the one who talks with Bryan's victims.

So not exactly the frame you expect to find around a classically-staged locked room mystery, but the touches of the modern crime novel were expertly used here to further a very tricky, complicated and puzzle-oriented plot.

Richard's investigation revealed that the house was not only "completely sealed" with keys, bolts and double-glazed windows, but closely-tightened by a narrow, two-or three minute window of time. That's simply not enough time to have done the murder and vanish from a sealed house. Richard also considers two false-solutions based on the smashed front door with a dash of morbid psychology, which required either a particular hardhearted or cruel murderer. I can't say much about the actual solution and, purely as locked room mystery, the trick is not one for the ages. So don't expect anything in the grand manner of John Dickson Carr or Paul Halter, but it's quite clever and novel in its own unique way. A cheeky play on the cussedness of all things general with a dark undertone and severe consequences.

Where the plot really excels is the clever clueing, red herrings and the double-twisted ending. Ormerod played his cards brilliantly as it was not until the penultimate chapter that everything began to click inside my head, but was still unprepared for the shining radiance of the central, double-edged clue. A clue that was in plain sight, but ingeniously rendered invisible and the explanation how that was accomplished is worthy to be compared with the best from the Golden Age! Simply marvelous! 

The Key to the Case is, plot-wise, Ormerod's best detective novel to date with a great and trickily-done solution, which also succeeded in balancing the old-fashioned, puzzle-oriented locked room mystery with the darker elements of the modern character-driven crime novel – adding a new dimension to both styles. Not to mention an impressive feat of dovetailing making it a highlight of the 1990s (locked room) mystery novel. 

A note for the curious: the writing, characterization, dovetailing and balancing between the classic and modern style in The Key to the Case strongly reminded me of the detective novels by M.P.O. Books, a.k.a. "Anne van Doorn," who took a very similar direction as Ormerod in his stories. The Key to the Case especially reminded me of De laatste kans (The Last Chance, 2011; the dovetailing), Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013; an impossible crime) and De man die zijn geweten ontlastte (The Man Who Relieved His Conscience, 2019; the surprise).