Busybody, Beware!

"Blackmail is the most dastardly of crimes."

- Mrs. Bradley (Gladys Mitchell's The Echoing Stranger, 1952)

Margaret Lane van Patten was an American mystery novelist from Portland, Oregon, who moved to London, England, after her marriage to Frederick van Pattan in 1913 and used her adopted homeland as a backdrop for thirteen detective novels – eight of them reportedly star her cast of series-detectives. You read that correctly. She wrote a score of mystery novels, under the name of "Gret Lane," about a cadre of (semi) amateur detectives.

Kate Marsh is the protagonist of the series and the de facto ringleader of the group, who rubs her nose whenever she gets a hunch, which tells her mystery writing husband, Tony, that another body is waiting for them just around the corner. She has pair of partners-in-crime in John Barrin (late of Scotland Yard) and his homely wife, Jennie. This group is rounded out by their Chinese friend, Min Ling, who runs an antique store and Tony's foul-mouthed parrot, Blaster Murphy, who had "sailed the seas on tramps and whalers" and acquired a sailor's vocabulary – scandalizing people unaware of the bird's seafaring vernacular with a torrent of "explicit adjectives." I'm not going to the lie to you, the parrot was my favorite of the gang.

This eclectic group of detectives made their first appearance in The Curlew Coombe Mystery (1930) and would go on to appear in seven additional novels, such as The Lantern House Affair (1931), Death Visits the Summer-House (1939) and Death in Mermaid Lane (1940), but I decided to go with the last one in the series.

The Guest with the Scythe (1943) was not the only the last book about Kate Marsh and her close-knit group of friends, but also the final book Lane wrote during her lifetime as she passed away the following year. My reason for selecting this particular title was the backdrop of a residential spa, in rural England, which became a shelter for people who fled their towns and cities during the Blitz. And the war has a noticeable influence on the characters and events within this story.

White Owl Cove is the home-base of the series and the opening chapter tells how the war has affected that tiny village on the Devon coast.

All "the able-bodied men went to sea" and "the young women flocked daily to a near-by munition factory." The elderly people took care of the children and the children did their part by knotting nets for the purpose of camouflage. Barbed-wire, concealed gun emplacements and soldiers appeared on the shore and cliffs. Kate and Tony Marsh had handed over their semi-detached cottage to "six old ladies who had been blitzed from their Home for Needy Gentlewomen" and had temporarily moved in with their good friends, Mr. and Mrs. John Barrin – who live right next door. Tony had also gone to sea on a Plymouth minesweeper, but was invalided out of the army with a badly injured shoulder.

So this was an interesting snapshot of the effect the war has on a small, coastal community, but the story moves away from White Owl Cove after the first chapter. And the reason for the change in scenery is an unexpected visit from Inspector Smith, of Westbridge, who tells them they can stay at the small, but first-rate, guest house owned by his sister, Mrs. Carter. There is, however, a catch to this generous invitation.

Publicly, they'll be staying at the residential spa to get treatment for Tony's shoulder, but the reason why Mrs. Carter really wants them there is to bait a trap for a blackmailer. A ruthless specimen who drove one of her guests to take his own life. The victim was a young man, named Benson, who was terrified at the prospect of having to serve in the army and when papers were stolen from his room he went out to a field and shot himself. He was brought back in dying condition and confessed to Mrs. Carter that there was "a clever, wicked blackmailer" among her guests.

On a side note, the content of the blackmail material was never elaborated upon, but modern readers can make an educated guess based on the character description of Benson, which was of a "very handsome," effeminate young man "on whom blackmailers batten" – hinting at a personal preference that was not done at the time. Tragically, the public revelation of this secret would have probably kept him out of the army and away from the battle field. Anyway...

So the entire gang descends upon the guest-house of Waterside, in Wellwich, where they're confronted with a large, sprawling cast of potential suspects. There are, all together, sixteen guests and with all the side-and series characters you're looking at a playing field with roughly twenty-five pieces on it. What they find within this large, but closed, circle of people is more than just a blackmailer.

One of the guests they originally pegged as the blackmailer turned out to be merely "a curious busybody," who, like Don Quixote, "tilts at the windmills of rudeness in defense of civility," which he demonstrated when he employed, what could be construed as, blackmail material to publicly reprimand a pair of snobs, Mr. and Mrs. Wilson. But they also come across a potentially amorous prowler, literal kissing cousins, an invalid, two elderly, devoted twins and an old-fashioned opium-addict. Oh, they also find the murdered remains of one of their fellow guests!

Back home, Tony had prophesied that they would "bag a brace of corpses," because they "always do." He was right on the money.

One night, Kate and Tony were awakened by their dog, Taffy, who heard something outside the french windows and what they found was the body of one of their fellow guests, Mrs. Lee, laying underneath her bedroom window – twisted, bloodied and evidently very murdered. Interestingly, what immediately eliminated the possibility of an accident or suicide were not the various head wounds, but the fact that the murderer had replaced the blackout curtain after Mrs. Lee was thrown out of the window. It's one of those little historical details I always love to find in detective stories from this period and here it has some relevance on the plot.

The second, brutally murdered victim is found when the opium-angle leads our group of detectives to the rooms of a fortune-teller, Ismar the Palmist, where they chance upon a dead man in the waiting room with an ominous worded note pinned to it, which is "a warning to the curious" and ended with "busybody, beware." Obviously, this note was meant as a hint to Kate to keep both her nose and her friends out of the murderer's business. A hint stubbornly ignored by Kate and this makes the murderer want to spray death "like a machine-gun" (i.e. mass murder) at the resort.

The Guest with the Scythe is a pleasantly written, engaging and occasionally amusing mystery, but as a story of detection and ratiocination the book is not all that impressive. One of these shortcomings is the thread-bare, almost non-existent, clueing. Kate stumbled to the truth when the murderer made a slip of the tongue, but this happened in the final twenty, or so, pages of the book. A second, very minor, clue was never shared with the reader. But the worst thing is that these scraps only gave her an idea who had committed the murder. She had to wait for a written confession by the murderer to fill in the gaps.

So the conclusion to the story leaves me in two places. On the one hand, I can't say this was an unpleasant or badly written book, but the overall plot turned out to be very poor indeed. I suppose this is one of those series you have to read for the characters rather than the plot (like the Lockridges).

However, the book was written shortly before Lane's passing and the whole dying process may have negatively impacted the quality of the plot. I'll probably try one of the earlier ones, such as The Lantern House Affair, before making up my mind about this series. Something that has become very easy, because Black Heath Editions reissued nearly all of Lane's work. So I'll come back to Lane, Kate Marsh and the gang sometime in the future for a second opinion. 

Finally, allow me to draw your attention to my previous review, which is very long rundown of all the short stories in a 430-page anthology, The Realm of the Impossible (2017), that gathered more than twenty impossible crime stories from all over the world.

Tragedy of Errors

"It can only be attributable to human error."

- HAL 9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968)

Kate Wilhelm has a long service record as a fiction writer, debuting with a short story in a 1956 issue of Fantastic, who contributed to such a wide variety of publications as Cosmopolitan, Asimov's Science Fiction, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – a variation of genres that can also be found in her novels. Over a period of half a century, she penned an impressive stack of detective and science-fiction novels.

Well, I recently stumbled across one of her many detective stories and found the book in, what could be considered, an obvious place, but had not expected to it there: namely my own TBR-pile. I had completely forgotten about its existence until recently.

Last week, one of my fellow bloggers, "JJ," attempted to help me find a modern-day locked room mystery and hinted, before the blog-post went live, that the book he had been reading was originally published in the late 1980s – which activated my fanboyish curiosity and began to check my backlog. After all, there couldn't be that many impossible crime novels published on the tail-end of the eighties, right?

Apparently, there were enough of the infernal things to prevent me from correctly identifying the book, but did come across a peculiar looking locked room title, on the big pile, promising a manor house mystery covered with the fingerprints of the science-fiction genre.

Smart House (1989) tells the story of the brainchild of a computer prodigy, Gary Elringer, who founded the Bellringer Company, but the hard-and software business stopped being profitable once the boy genius began to work on his most ambitious project - "a computerized, automated house." A project that has become a deep, dark financial rabbit hole and not every one of the the nine shareholders are thrilled with Smart House. Gary's furious older brother, Bruce, is even attempting to organize "a palace coup." However, the computer genius is spoiled to the core and expects things to go his way, which is how things usually turn out.

So when Gary invites the shareholders to his futuristic home, situated on the Oregon coast, everyone turns up. And they all go along with the ridiculous demonstration he has planned for them.

A "stupid game of murder," called Assassins, in which players are assigned a designated victim by the computerized house and they have to eliminate their target "in front of a single witness" and log the kill into the computer – after which the house assigns a new victim to the successful killer. Each kill earns them one vote and the last one standing takes all. The "weapons" (i.e. toys) are kept in a showroom, inside a case with "a computer lock," which allows players to pick only one weapon for every kill. 

 

It's "a game for children," one of them complains, "grown-up people don't play such childish games," but they all go along with Gary's wishes. And that makes for some nicely imagined scenes.

The group of shareholders, and players, consists of professional, intelligent and respectable people, but Gary puts them in such a position that they find themselves sneaking around an intelligent house, logging every step they take, while being armed with children's toy – such as squirt guns, ribbons and balloons. It's reminiscent of the surrealistic quality often found in the work of Ellery Queen. A feeling strengthened when, shortly after each other, two people die under seemingly impossible circumstances.

Rich Schoen is the architect who helped design the house and his body turns up in a closed elevator, which had the air sucked out of it by the automatic vacuum system. A short while later Gary's body is found inside a sealed-off Jacuzzi. The computer logs proved nobody was near them at the time they died and the police decided there were glitches in the computer program, but an computerized, semi-sentient house that can kill its occupants would prevent the company from recuperating as much as a dime that went into its creation.

So they engage a couple of private-investigators to prove a human murderer was responsible for both deaths. Unfortunately, at this point in the book, the story experienced a slump.

Charles Meiklejohn and Constance Leidl were obviously meant to be a modern-day equivalent of Frances and Richard Lockridge, as they, too, are a childless couple with a bunch of cats, but the former misses the joie de vivre of the latter. They did, however, do some proper detective work by going over everyone's movements, and such, but these chapters were bare of any interest and the snail pace of the story-telling did not exactly help either.

What about the impossible angle, you ask? Well, I should have half expected this from a hybrid mystery, but the answer to how anyone could wander around the house without being logged is the science-fiction equivalent of a murderer using a skeleton key in a locked room mystery – which is a letdown to say least. Particularly when its given around the halfway mark. It's a real buzzkill on the rest of the story.

Smart House slightly redeemed itself in the end with a somewhat decent explanation, but it showed that the book should have been written as a novella-length story.

Well, as you can judge by my comments on the opening chapters, I really wanted to like the book, as a whole, which prevented me from skimming to the end or giving up altogether. However, the story becomes tedious drag between the discovery of the bodies and the explanation. A real shame as the ideas present in the story had real potential and some of the science-fiction elements are now reality (e.g. handheld computers and A.I. surveillance). So, sadly, I can only recommend Smart House as a curiosity of both the detective-and science-fiction genres.

No idea what I'll dig up next, but, hopefully, something good again and might pull another impossible crime story from the bookshelf, because I just noticed this is my 299th blog-post tagged as a locked room mystery!

Only Death is Immortal

"There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before."

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, 1887)

During the previous century, the detective genre became a holiday residence, or even a second home, to a number of science-fiction writers that included Isaac Asimov, Anthony Boucher, Fredric Brown, John Russell Fearn and John Sladek. One thing they have in common, as mystery novelists, is that they tended to write plot-oriented detective stories with a predilection for impossible crimes. So imagine my initial enthusiasm when discovering a modern author who appeared to have continued this tradition.

Eric Brown is a British science-fiction author, whose career took off in the late eighties, but several years ago Brown tried his hands at a detective novel and wrote Murder by the Book (2013), which is set in the mid-1950s and introduced his series-characters, Donald Langham and Maria Dupré – who reminded me of Richard Forrest's Lyon and Bea Wentworth. The second book in the series, Murder at the Chase (2014), was billed as a "classic locked room conundrum," but this claim borders on false advertisement. And what remained was not all that good either.

Murder at the Chase began promising enough and the premise of the book could have easily come from one of the better Jonathan Creek episodes, but the plot never delivered on the promises it made to the reader in the opening chapters.

The book takes place during the summer of 1955 and begins at a garden party given by a London publishing agent, Charles Elder, who has Langham as one of his clients. Langham writes violent "thrillers set in the underworld" and at the party he's introduced to the son of an old acquaintance, Edward Endicott, who's known for his "tough-guy no-nonsense stories," but the shy Alasdair is a complete contrast to his old man. And from him they learn Endicott is currently obsessing over a reputedly immortal Satanist.

Vivian Stafford was a Victorian-era Satanist, "a cohort of Crowley," who was born in 1835, but the present-day Stafford claims to be the same Stafford as the one from Victorian times, which would make him around a 120-years-old – a claim supported by an old photograph depicting a dead ringer for the present-day Stafford. He also demonstrated his occult powers that allowed him to summon the dead. During two gatherings, called "Evening of the Occult," he summoned several ghostly apparitions. Stafford's demonstrations were enough to convince old Endicott and he decided to write about a book about him, but Alasdair is afraid this plan may have lead to his father's seemingly impossible disappearance from his study. So he called the ex-detective he met at the garden party for assistance.

The door to the study, "as solid as rock," was locked from the inside and the French windows were latched, but Langham solved this extremely simplistic, incidental and very disappointing locked room mystery upon his first inspection of the room. What really annoyed me is not only how the impossibility is completely identical to minor locked room problems from such detective stories as Anthony Berkeley's The Layton Court Mystery (1925) and Agatha Christie's "Dead Man's Mirror," collected in Murder in the Mews (1937), but also that it was obviously tossed in to market the book as a locked room conundrum – because the plot would have worked just as well if Endicott had vanished from an unlocked room. Endicott and his papers simply had to disappear. This locked room angle added nothing to the story except disappointment.

So, merely five chapters into the book and my initial enthusiasm was already on life-support, but decided to trudge on. After all, there were other plot-threads that could still deliver in the end, right? Well, I was very naive and really should learn to bail on these modern monstrosities. If they suck in the beginning, they suck in the end. They never, ever, improve after a while.

I'm going to give this one a pass

First of all, there are the ghostly apparitions witnessed by the group of people attending the occult evenings. Not only would the method for making the ghosts appear be more at home in an episode of Scooby Doo, it has been used in such Scooby Doo episodes as Hassle in the Castle and The Fiesta Host is an Aztec Ghost! So not really all that believable for a historical mystery set in the 1950s. Secondly, there's the identity of Stafford, which is half-decently handled, but nothing particular clever or noteworthy. I think something more could have been done with the murder of a self-proclaimed immortal. Just think what someone like John Dickson Carr or Hake Talbot could have done with such a premise.

Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that, around the halfway mark, Stafford's body is found in the woods around the Endicott home. But who cares. This potential interesting plot-development degenerates into an old, tired and uninspired blackmail/murder plot.

Brown provided the story with a second body, which showed some imagination in its staging, but also revealed he's hardly a top-notch plotter as far as this genre is concerned. I can only conclude that the reason for introducing this second corpse was in order to shoe-horn in a false solution, which needed an innocent person who could not object to being accused. So this person simply had to die.

On top of the poorly, disappointingly conceived plot, the book was also mind-numbingly boring and I couldn't care less about any of the characters. Simply did not care about any of them. I eventually began to skim through the book, because I wanted it to be over. Hence why I'm dragging myself through this equally poorly written review.

At the beginning of this blog-post, I name-dropped a fairly recent discovery of mine, John Russell Fearn, who, admittedly, was a second-stringer, but that hardly seems fair when you compare his work to such modern-day equivalents as Richard Hunt's Deadlocked (1994), David Marsh's Dead Box (2004), Frederick Ramsey's Stranger Room (2009) and Eric Keith's Nine Man's Murder (2011) – or the subject of this blog-post. Yes, I know. Our beloved Golden Age also produced raw sewage pressed between two book covers, but their modern counterparts are usually so much worse.

Well, sorry for having brought this one up and really wish I had something more substantial to tell about the book, but I had not much to work with and, honestly, lacked the interest. I'll try to dig up something better for the next blog-post. In the meantime, I recommend my reviews of Tyline Perry's The Owner Lies Dead (1930) and Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury (1956), which were both excellent mystery novels for very different reasons. 

Endless Waltz

"This dance of death which sounds so musically,

was sure intended for the corpse de ballet."

- Anonymous (On the Danse Macabre of Saint-Saëns)

Last week, Mike of Only Detect and "JJ" of The Invisible Event posted reviews of, respectively, The Frightened Stiff (1942) and Sailor, Take Warning! (1944), which came from the hands of a criminally underrated pair of mystery novelists, William and Audrey Roos – who published their work under the shared penname of "Kelley Roos." I rank their high-spirited, comedic detective stories among my personal favorites and the aforementioned reviews were a reminder there still was one of their novels on my TBR-pile. A particular title I had been saving for a while.

The Blonde Died Dancing (1956) is an expansion of a 1948 novella, entitled "Dancing Death," which was originally published in American Magazine and featured their beloved series-character, Jeff and Haila Troy. However, the couple from the novel-length version were given different names, Steve and Connie Barton, but they're carbon copies of the original. You can easily see they act as stand-ins for the Troys.

Steve and Connie Barton have a similar penchant for attracting copious amounts of trouble, while bantering and wandering into unlikely situations, but they also might be separate characters who inhabit the same universe as the Troys – because both appear to be acquainted with Lt. George Hankins of the Homicide Squad. It could mean they're either a thinly disguised version of the Troys or there are two of such meddlesome, trouble-prone couples running amok in New York.

The problems in The Blonde Died Dancing begins with Connie worrying about the state of her marriage. Every Wednesday, Steve "had dreamed up a reason to be away for the evening," but the pile of excuses are as transparent as a broken window pane. So, after a thorough makeover failed to keep him home on another Wednesday evening, Connie decided to tail her husband to the fourteenth floor of an office building and there she makes a startling discovery: her husband is secretly taking dancing lessons! The place is called the Crescent School of Dancing and Steve is being taught how to waltz by "a tall, willowy and ravishing female" named Anita Farrell. But moments later another headache of a problem presented itself to Connie.

After Steve finished his lesson for the evening and left, Connie entered the music-filled Studio K to meet her husband's dance teacher, but what she found was her body sprawled grotesquely on the smooth, shining floor – a bullet hole in her back. She was grasping "a small, curiously shaped piece of heavy paper" in one hand. There is, however, one problem: she had entered the studio right after Steve had left it. Nobody else had entered the room. There were no concealed doors, camouflaged windows or hidden crevices behind the mirrored walls, which means the shooter could only have been Steve!

You guessed it! The Blonde Died Dancing is a good, old-fashioned locked room mystery and one of the reasons why I stored this away for a cold, wintry day.

Anyway, Connie is shocked and confused, but has sense enough to snatch the registry from the reception desk, which lists Steve as Farrell's last pupil, before hightailing out of there. However, this only slows down Lieutenant-Detective Bolling and Lieutenant Hankins. They're working on a clever process of elimination based on the lists of students. A process that will, eventually, reveal the last pupil and prime suspect in the slaying of the dance teacher – referred to by the sensationalist press as "The Waltzer."

I've to make one observation here: the registry noted that Steve's appointment took place between seven and eight. Steve mentioned he known his teacher for a total of nine hours. So he has been taking lessons for nine weeks, right? But absolutely nobody at the school, without the registry, remembered who was getting dance lessons at that fixed time for the past two months? And it was in the murderers best interest to remember who this pupil was.

This is an obvious weak spot in the plot. A weakness that was necessary to propel the plot forward, which happens when Connie returns to the dance school to get a job as Farrell's replacement. As the pseudonymous "Hester Frost," she uncovers hidden relationships, a blackmail racket and how an outside murderer could have penetrated the watched and closed studio, but there's also a great deal of lighthearted humor in getting identity under wraps – such as trying to avoid the police-detectives who know the new teacher by her real name. But that's not the only close shave she got and all of this makes for a pleasantly paced, humorous read.

Undoubtedly, the lighthearted, cheerful nature of the storytelling is the most attractive aspect of The Blonde Died Dancing. However, this is not to say that the plot is bad, which is not the case, but rather simplistic and will not pose a serious challenge to the experienced armchair detective. You can almost instinctively figure out how the murder was accomplished based on the black paper figure in the victim's hand and the nature of the bullet wound. Something that's confirmed when Connie stumbles across the means of the locked room trick, long before grasping how it fully worked, but, when she does, the reader is treated to a nice set-piece in the murder room. The who-and why were a bit more tricky, but not something that broke new ground or surprisingly pulled the rug from underneath the reader.

Nevertheless, The Blonde Died Dancing is a very fun and energetic detective novel, which harked back to the early mysteries by Roos. The plot never reaches the height of their best novels (i.e. The Frightened Stiff and Sailor, Take Warning!), but the attempt will be appreciated by readers who enjoyed their other work.

A note for the curious: The Blonde Died Dancing formed the basis for a French-Italian movie, Come Dance With Me (1959), starring Brigitte Bardot.

Crash Dive

"Yes... it's a puzzle to know just where to begin."

- Major Williams (Lynton Blow's The "Moth" Murder, 1931)

Originally, the plan for this blog-post was to be a cross-blog tag team review with "JJ," who blogs over at The Invisible Event, but he emailed me last Saturday saying he was bowing out, because he had never "hated every single aspect of a book" before - including the author. He simply refused to waste anymore time on the book.

So what was he reading, you ask? Death on the Mississippi (1989) by the late Richard Forrest, which is an impossible crime novel about a houseboat that vanishes from a closely watched stretch of river. And, as a contrast, I was going to review Death Through the Looking Glass (1978), which concerns the brief and inexplicable disappearance of the wreck of a crashed airplane.

Luckily, I fared better with my pick than the one JJ tried to battle through and it turned out to be surprisingly consistent. That's not something I can say about all of Forrest's locked room novels.

Death Through the Looking Glass is the third entry in a series of ten books about Lyon and Bea Wentworth, who first appeared in A Child's Garden of Death (1975) and were last seen in Death at King Arthur's Court (2005), but it was also the author's second impossible crime novel – even though that aspect of the plot was barely brought up. Surprising, I know. But the angle of the vanishing plane-wreck was barely given any consideration.

The story opens on Lyon's birthday, who's now in his mid-thirties and approaching an early midlife crisis, but at least he got some nifty birthday presents: the complete works of Dashiell Hammett, a six-foot doll based on one of the characters from his children's stories and a new wicker basket for his hot-air balloon. He got the last one from his wife and she also insisted he stopped getting them involved in dangerous murder cases, but during the first flight in the new balloon he personally witnesses the beginning of another one.

A low-flying aircraft, "a garishly painted Piper," approached from the east, "directly out of the sun," which Lyon recognizes as the plane of Tom Giles, a long-ago classmate and real-estate lawyer, but the rush of childhood memories are disturbed when he sees "a plume of black smoke curling" from the craft – after which it plunges in the waters below. However, a search of the supposed crash site, pointed out by Lyon, failed to find any sign of wreckage. Or even a simple oil slick.

The wreck of the airplane has simply disappeared, but the situation becomes even more inexplicable when Lyon receives a phone-call from Giles!

Giles tells Lyon he has good reasons to believe someone is attempting to kill him and asks his old friend to come and see him at his lakeside cottage, but when he arrives the place is completely deserted and there a signs of foul play: the phone line has been cut and there's a suspicious stain next to an overturned chair. On the following morning, Lyon awakes to the news that the plane-wreck has been found with Giles inside it! A bullet in the head and the purse of woman by his side, which belongs to a certain Carol Dodgson.

After this, the story "normalizes" and turns into a regular whodunit: the official police, Captain Norbert of the State Police, favor the wife of the victim, Karen, and her pilot-lover, Garry Middleton. Lyon sees more in the Giles' membership in a tontine, in which the last surviving member makes five million on a hundred thousand dollar investment. There are some colorful characters part of this tontine scheme such as Sal Esposito, an Italian-American, who owns a string of adult-movie shops and massage parlors but, privately, he's a complete weeb. He even has a Japanese houseman. An equally colorful personality is Reverend Dr. Toranga Blossom, leader of a doomsday cult, who believe "the world will die in 1982" in "a multitude of brilliant blossoms" - i.e. atomic warfare. So they can use every penny they can get to prepare by buying abandoned mines and provisions.

Luckily, any person storylines from the regular characters were kept at a bare minimum, because there was red flag in the first chapters of the book. Lyon was silently approaching his early midlife crisis when the eighteen-year-old daughter of a friend began to show interest in him, but that plot-thread mercifully fizzled out. It had the potential to become a total cringe-fest. So the characterization could have been far worse.

As far as the plot is concerned, it is (as I said before) the most consistent detective novel I've read by Forrest. Usually, he has a good (locked room) ideas buried in an uneven, sometimes padded narratives and this has me convinced he should've written his impossible crimes as short stories. It might not have made the same kind of money as a series of full-length novels, but a short story collection of locked room mysteries might have been better for his reputation within in genre in the long run.

How good was the impossible situation in this one? Well, I think the best aspect of this plot-thread was how well it tied-in with Lyon's hobby as a balloonist. His eye-witness account of the crash was a key element of the trick, but the problem is that the nature of the trick gives the entire game away. Once you know how it was done, you know by who it was done. Because the trick fits one of the characters like a glove. I guess that's why the clues were thinly spread around in this surprisingly short novel, but the method for the vanishing plane-wreck is very guessable and from that point out you can figure out everything else.

Yes, Death Through the Looking Glass is one of Forrest's most consistent detective novels, but also one that's very easily solved. Even without any significant clueing.

So, while my overall experience was somewhat better than JJ, I fully acknowledge Forrest was not one of the top-tier mystery novelists from the post-GAD era and some of his better (locked room) ideas were probably better served had they been written down as short stories or novellas. And this relatively short novel shows that in his case less was more and improved the overall quality of the story and plot.

Well, thus far this lukewarm blog-post.

Kingdom Come

"On a lonely sword he leaned,

Like Arthur on Excalibur."
- G.K. Chesterton (The Ballad of the White Horse, 1911) 

Recently, I reviewed A Child's Garden of Death (1975) by Richard Forrest, which marked the debut of his husband-and-wife detective team, Lyon and Bea Wentworth, as well as the first one to feature an impossible crime – of which there are five in this ten-book series. Some of them have very alluring sounding premises (e.g. inexplicable vanishing of an airplane and a disappearing houseboat).

So, naturally, I felt attracted to the series and A Child's Garden of Death, in spite of its imperfections, deserves praise for attempting to bridge the gap between detective stories from the Golden Age and those from the post-World War II era. In any case, the book warranted further investigation and almost immediately decided on which one would be next in line: the last one from the series, Death at King Arthur's Court (2005), which was published posthumously.

Inferring from the dated plot-thread about the fax machine, I strongly suspect the manuscript was initially rejected by his publisher and spent the next decade as drawer stuffing.

Nevertheless, the summary of the plot was promising a story with a solid locked room problem, one with "a medieval twist," involving a hooded figure wielding a broadsword and the shadow of suspicion falling on Lyon – who could end up on death row. So how I could possibly resist? But let's start at the beginning.

Lyon is an author of children's literature and created the Wobblies, "a pair of benign monsters," while his wife, Bea, is an "unflappable state senator." One whose rising star is starting to get noticed across state lines. They live in an eighteenth century house, called Nutmeg Hill, which stands in the Connecticut town of Murphysville, but the small, deceivingly peaceful town has a homicide rate that competes with that of Cabot Cove and Midsomer County. Usually, they find themselves involved in these local murder cases.

During their first recorded case, Lyon and Bea were drawn into an official police investigation by a close friend, Police-Chief Rocco Herbert, but in their final outing as detectives they find a problem in their own driveway – inurned inside a completely sealed, armor-plated RV!

Warren Morgan, a professor at Middleburg University, has been receiving death threats from "a bunch of disgruntled college dropouts," who refer to themselves as the Brotherhood of Beelzebub, which went as far placing "a hundred grand bounty on Morgan." So the professor went full A-Team on an old RV and turned the vehicle into "a rolling fortress." The front doors had been strengthened with interior braces, the windows were replaced with "the special safety glass utilized on armored cars" and could be covered steel shutters. A steel shield had been welded under the chassis and a giant air-conditioning unit was sunken into the roof, requiring the combined strength of "four or five very strong guys," which has an air-filtration system built into it – making it impossible to gas him through the air vents. Finally, the only door has a combination lock and there are only two people with the right combination: Morgan and Lyon. 

The final result is a vehicle with "all the protection of an army tank" and "the interior comforts of hedonist's house trailer," which was parked for extra security on the driveway of the Wentworth home. However, every effort to protect himself proved to be wasted money and energy: someone penetrated a seemingly impregnable fortress and butchered the professor with his own broadsword. He used the sword as a prop in one of courses in Arthurian legends.   

Around the same time as the murder, Lyon found himself in the nearby woods, dazed and confused, but he also feared for his life: a hooded figure, in a robe, wielding a medieval-looking sword was pursuing him with the clear intention of separating his head from his shoulders. Strangely, the figure of his executioner "disappeared into the darkness as quickly as it had appeared."

When Lyon emerged from the woods, hunched, bloody and dragging a long sword across the grass, he tells a waiting Rocco Herbert that something had happened to him, but he was "not sure what." However, Captain Norbert of the State Police suspects Lyon of murder. After all, Lyon was covered in blood, carried a broadsword and knew the combination of the lock on the door. So you would expect that, from here on out, the plot would center on exonerating Lyon, but here is where the book began to flip-flop – shifting the focus of the story into a different direction.

Lyon avoids immediate arrest and the next couple of chapters have him recounting the events from the day and evening, which introduces a number of potential suspects.

First of all, there are two feuding literature professors from Middleburg University and Margon's half-brother and sister, twins, who are under his financial control, but there’s also a redheaded stripper from Boston and mother of Morgan's son – who wants to secure a future for their child. This gave the narrative an entirely different tone and the story never returned to the one set forth in its opening chapter, in which Lyon was attacked by the sword-wielding figure. It turned the book from a dark persecution story into a more lighthearted whodunit in less than two chapters.

Actually, the opening of the book and the chapters recounting what happened on the day preceding the murder recalled some of the Jonathan Creek episodes from the 1990s (e.g. Danse Macabre, 1998).

After these chapters, the State Police receives a letter, written in red ink, which claimed responsibility for the murder ("Satan has been gloriously revenged") and Lyon is let off the hook. Once more, this changed the tone and direction of the story: there are a number of additional murders, one by sniper fire, and the reader learns of a person who has designs on Bea. First by stabbing or shooting her in public and eventually by planting a car bomb. On top of that, Lyon and Rocco have to deal with the slightly unhinged personality behind the threatening letters, which involved the plot-thread about the fax machine, but this was basically a side distraction and an excuse to introduce some thriller-ish material – such as tossing around a hand grenade. I actually liked that fun little scene, but there's no way they could've pulled that off in less than four seconds.

Anyway, this moves a great chunk of the second half of the book into the territory of the modern thriller and crime novels, which was reflected in the poor and disappointing conclusion of the book. The murderer was both obvious and slightly mad. So don't expect too much from the who-and why part of the plot.

There is, however, one aspect of the plot I loved: the explanation for the locked room murder. If you want something different in a locked room mystery, you'll find it in this part of the plot. The solution wonderfully uses such aspects as the weight of the armored vehicle and some, eh, external factors. Forrest excellently clued and foreshadowed how the trick was pulled off, which he subtly spelled out to the reader in the opening chapters, but you've to be very alert and perceptive to put one and one together. Sure, the idea behind the locked room trick is simpler than its execution, but that does not take away from the fact that Forrest found a fairly original way to enter and leave a sealed environment.

So, yeah, Death at King Arthur's Court has a strong opening, a shaky, uneven middle section and a disappointing ending, but with a good and solid impossible crime plot. I guess I can only recommend this one to locked room enthusiasts. Other wise, you can safely skip this one.

Well, I'll try to find something better and more classical for the next blog-post.