Original Sin (1991) by Mary Monica Pulver

Back in December, John Pugmire, of Locked Room International, published the long-awaited Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019), edited by Brian Skupin, adding over 1150 short stories, novels, TV episodes, movies and anime/manga to Robert Adey's own revised edition, Locked Room Murders (1991) – which enlarged the original 1979 publication with 801 titles! I've burrowed my way through this new edition, like a miner with gold fever, but was surprised at how many titles had been overlooked. So a third, revised and expanded version would be a nice supplement to this edition. ;)

Even so, the 2019 supplement succeeded in bloating my impossible crime wishlist to the point that I started calling it Dr. Gideon Fell. Skupin underlined some fascinating-sounding stories in his preface.

One recommendation that stood out was listed under "post-1991 stories and the Renaissance," Original Sin (1991) by Mary Monica Pulver, which was spotlighted for its "considerably surprising solution." An ultimately simple explanation that "casts the entire tale in a new light" and Skupin recommended the book to those "who haven't found a locked room mystery they like." Color me intrigued!

Mary Monica Pulver is an American novelist, lecturer and educator who wrote a handful of mystery novels under own name, but Pulver penned nineteen cozy mysteries as "Monica Ferris" and co-authored a series of historical detective novels with Gail Frazer – published as by "Margaret Frazer." One of their collaborative short stories, "The Traveller's Tale," was anthologized in Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (2000). Original Sin is one of her contemporary novels, but the distant past is so finely ingrained into the plot that I decided to tag the review as a historical mystery. You can almost say that the story and plot are channeling and interacting with the spirits from the Golden Age!

Original Sin is the fourth title in the Peter and Kori Brichter series, commencing with the equally intriguing-sounding Murder at the War: A Modern-Day Mystery with a Medieval Setting (1987), but here we have a truly clever, deeply satisfying homage to the snowbound country house mysteries of yore.

Peter, Kori and their newborn son, Gordon "Jeep" Peter, planned a "Christmas among friends" at Kori's ancestral home, Tretower Ranch, situated just outside of Denver, Colorado. A merciless blizzard already stranded two of their friends in Denver and is going to cause more problems for them in the days ahead, but the people who made is their oldest friend, Gordon. An ex-policeman and former colleague of Peter, Frank Ryder, who remarried his ex-wife, Mary, upon retiring, but the blizzard forced them to postpone their honeymoon and stay with the Brichters. There's a maid/nanny for the baby, Jill, and Kori's groom/stable hand, Danny Bannister. Lastly, there's the elderly, long-lost and last-living relative of Kori, Evelyn McKay Biggins.

Ever since Kori became a mother, she has been rooting around her family tree and the murky, fragmented history of the house and found there was a "living link" left to her ancestral home, Evelyn, but she had been warned about poking around in its history – because "there's sour apples on many a branch of the family tree." First sign of trouble is Mary indigently refusing "to sit down and be pleasant to Evelyn McKay" and tells Frank to start packing their bags, but the blizzard prevents them from leaving. So they decide to keep the peace by keeping them separated as much as possible. Fortunately, this gives Kori an opportunity to take Evelyn aside to ask her about the history of the house.

Original Sin is as much a genealogical detective story as it's a country house mystery with the ties of blood and history being central to the plot.

The gathering goes from slightly strained to an unmitigated disaster when the power lines go down in the snowstorm and plunges the house in darkness, which is only partially relighted by a backup generator. All other rooms, "including the library," remained in darkness. The library is where they found the body of Evelyn Biggins with the top of her skull resembling "a smashed egg." Someone had murdered the elderly woman, but the isolating blizzard ruled out an outsider. And that means the murderer has to be someone in the house!

A seemingly classic premise, but not entirely, as this is a family home filled with normal, likable people who genuinely care for each other and the victim, practically stranger, is an outsider – whose murder places the specter of suspicion among friends. This makes me suspect Pulver may have read and admired Christianna Brand (c.f. London Particular, 1952). Although the characterization here is not of the same caliber nor does Pulver take the story to the same dramatic conclusion, but the plot is technically sound and meets the gold standard of a 1930s detective novel. So what about that surprise solution and locked room-angle of the murder?

Skupin described the impossibility in Original Sin as "death by powerful blunt instrument of a woman on her own in a library" with "no weapon strong enough to have smashed her skull found." The way in which Evelyn was murdered is elegantly executed how-dun-it that found a new application for an old, time-worn idea, but not an impossible crime. There are, however, two (underplayed) impossibilities that are difficult to describe without giving anything away, but I'll give it a shot.

As they poke around in the distant past, Peter and Kori track an unlikely trail to a long-held, well hidden secret. Physical evidence tells them the circumstances of the secret were known only to Evelyn, which raises the question how something could have been repeated sixty years later when only the victim was privy to the details. A second (minor) impossibility, linked to this long-hidden secret, concerns a [redacted] that appears to have broken "a long time ago" and [redacted] only recently, which left behind "a freshly-broken trail of dust" – giving the impression [redacted] was in suspended animation for decades. You got that right. These are time-locked mysteries! An original and novel impossible crime idea that deserved more consideration than it received it here.

All the same, Pulver created a beautiful and logical synergy between the past and present-day plot-strands, which are inextricably linked and adhere to the laws of cause-and-effect. Even when separated by the better part of a century! I pieced together the whole puzzle well before the end, but the quality of this good, old-fashioned piece of craftsmanship made it impossible to be left disappointing. An immensely satisfying ending! So I echo Skupin's recommendation of Original Sin as not only a standout locked room title from the 1990s, but also as a surprisingly serious and respectful treatment of the traditional, snowbound country house mystery. And the dark, snowy Christmastime setting makes it a perfect addition to everyone's 2020 holiday-themed reading lists.

So my first pick from Skupin's Locked Room Murders fared a lot better than my first pick from Adey's Locked Room Murders, which wasn't even a locked room mystery! Hopefully, this bodes well for the future and everyone better prepare for a tidal wave of rambling impossible crime review, because there's more on the way. So much more! 

They Walk in Darkness (1947) by Gerald Verner

Gerald Verner's They Walk in Darkness (1947) is the second novel in a very short-lived series about a thriller writer and his wife, Peter and Anne Chard, who debuted in Thirsty Evil (1945) and rapidly descended into the catacombs of obscurity after their second outing – which was only dimly remembered as a locked room mystery. Astonishingly, this obscure, barely remembered detective novels reprinted three times in the past ten years!

Ulverscroft published a large print edition in 2011 as part of their Linford Mystery Library and Ramble House reissued the book in hard-and paperback in 2016, which was followed this year with an ebook version from Endeavour Media.

Regrettably, these various reissues seem to have done precious little to bolster the profile of the book and that's a shame, because honestly, it's one of Verner's best detective/thriller stories – certainly of the handful of titles I've read to date. I believe this has to do with the fact that Verner gave himself the space to tell the story. They Walk in Darkness is twice as long as, for example, The Royal Flush Murders (1948), Noose for a Lady (1952) and Sorcerer's House (1956), which showed Verner was closer aligned with the pulp-style thrillers than with the pure Golden Age detective stories. Verner evidently attempted here to write something more in line with the traditional mystery novel. Something that's more evident in the first than the second half of the book.

They Walk in Darkness opens on a cold, snowy evening, in late October, when the Chards are traveling to a small, East Anglia village to visit a close relative of Peter, Aunt Helen.

Fendyke St. Mary used to be "a hot-bed of witchcraft in the Middle Ages" and "the abominable orgies of the Witches' Sabbath," attended by Satan himself, were regularly practiced at a place known as Lucifer's Stone. There's also an old, derelict cottage, Witch's House, which used to belong to leading light of "a particularly virulent coven" and was burned to death in 1644. So with such a long, ancient history and tradition in devil worship, it's hardly surprising many villagers are only too ready to explain anything "strange and inexplicable" as witchcraft. A belief they apply to the terrors that has plagued the village for the better part of two years.

During a dinner party, Peter and Ann learn that a child murderer is roaming the village, but "the prelude to the baby murders" was the theft of several lambs, at various intervals, which were found back as cadavers – all of them had their throat savagely cut. And then the children began to disappear. One of them was taken from his pram in the garden and another never returned home for tea, but their bodies were eventually found in clumps of reeds somewhere on the edge of Hinton Broad. Only suspect the police has seriously considered is a mentally undeveloped man, Tom Twist.

However, the dinner party's response to the wanton child killings going on in the village is extremely cool, level-headed and very British. They shake their heads in disapproval, mutter something about a maniac and chide the local police for their lack of progress.

John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, reviewed They Walk in Darkness back in March and commented on the British stoicism of the characters "this wholesale murder of helpless children." I left a comment suggesting he read Paul Halter's L'arbe aux doigts tordus (The Vampire Tree, 1996) and compare it with Verner's They Walk in Darkness, but had no idea at the time how apt my comparison really was.

The Vampire Tree is also set in a small village with a dark, bloody history and has become the playground of serial killer targeting children. This killer has pretty much the same modus operandi as the child murderer from Fendyke St. Mary and the characters have the same cool, detached response to the murders as they do here. I remember the children in Halter's story were allowed to continue to roam the woods, where the bodies were found, but Verner was even colder and had one of his characters suggest they use one of the village children as living bait ("like the old hunter's trick, eh?") by leaving the child in a lonely spot under discreet observation – a "tethered kid to attract the lion." One of those subtle hints that the English are, in fact, completely insane. The only reason they have been able to hide it so well is that they happen to share this continent with the French and Germans.

There's also the curious coincidence that both They Walk in Darkness and The Vampire Tree have characters named Twist and an impossible crime of the no-footprint-in-the-snow variety.

After the Eve of All-Hallows, a group of four people from Fendyke St. Mary briefly go missing from their home and their bodies are found, seated around "a very old worm-eaten table" laid for five people, in the dirty Witch's House. They sat "strangely contorted" with their eyes turned towards the empty chair at the head of the table with an "expression of horror." A considerable quantity of cyanide was found in the wine glasses and one of the bottles, but the cottage had been locked and there were four tracks in the snow outside. However, the tracks only went in the direction of Witch's House, but there was none coming back!

So, this situation presents the Peter and Ann with two possibilities, which are both utterly impossible: the four people either committed suicide and the door magically locked itself, before the key miraculously vanished, or there was a fifth person present in the cottage – who somehow managed to lock the door and disappeared with the key from "a house surrounded by snow without leaving any tracks." An intriguing premise and the solution was only slightly soiled by the clumsily handling of an important clue, which has always been weakness of Verner. Yes, "the snow trick" is not terribly original and have come across a very similar solution recently, but, somehow, I didn't mind that here. That has very much to do with the identity of the murderer and strong motive.

I thought I would never come across characters more deserving of murder than the "victims" from Nicholas Brady's The Fair Murder (1933) and Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Orient Express (1934), but Verner served his reader four of such human abominations. This aspect reinforced many of the weak points of the overall plot and held the story together in the end.

The no-footprint-in-the-snow is, as mentioned above, hardly a classic of its kind and the second half of the book is written in the lurid style of the sensational, pulpy occult thrillers littered with adjectives (beastly, blasphemous, diabolically, horrible, etc), but the murderer and motive made up for a lot. I thought the vigilante mob scenes and the Biblical event that ravaged the region towards the end was a nice touches to the story.

They Walk in Darkness stands as one of the darkest, highly unconventional and spellbinding village mysteries, written by a professional story-teller, but not everyone is going to appreciate what Verner tried to accomplish here – either because the plot has its weaknesses or the unpleasant subject matter. This makes hard to unhesitatingly recommend the book to everyone. That being sad, if you liked Gladys Mitchell's The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935) and Ellery Queen's The Glass Village (1954), both equally unconventional, you'll probably find They Walk in Darkness a fascinating and rewarding read.

And on a final, related note: when reading the book, I came up with an alternative solution to the impossible murders in Witch's House. An alternative solution that in no way resembles the actual explanation and wanted to share it with you. My solution placed two people inside the cottage, before the snow began to fall, which are the murderer and one of the four victims. They are preparing the cottage for their devil's banquet. When the snow stops falling, the other three arrive and, when they're dead, the murderer leaves the cottage by walking backwards – creating a fourth track of prints in the snow. Yes, I know walking backwards in the snow is an old, tired and hacky trick, but, usually, this trick is done by retracing a previously created trail of footprints. In this case, the murderer leaves an untempered track that's simply misinterpreted.

An Open Window (1988) by Roger Ormerod

In my review of Douglas Clark's Death After Evensong (1969), I briefly referred to a now obscure, post-WWII mystery writer, Roger Ormerod, who carried on to write detective stories grounded in the traditions of the Golden Age during the seventies and eighties – a period when the genre had moved towards realism and psychology. Somehow, I remembered reading The Weight of Evidence (1978) and More Dead Than Alive (1980) only last year, but my reviews date back to 2017. So it was high time to tackle another one of Ormerod's locked room mysteries!

An Open Window (1988) is the fourth entry in the Richard and Amelia Patton series and the story begins with an explosive opening chapter!

Richard and Amelia have been traveling around England in a fourteen-foot caravan, more out of necessity than pleasure, but they secured a regular spot on a caravan site and arranged with the owner he would try to keep plot 13 empty. When they return, they find a woman has taken their spot. Nancy Rafton had been there for three days and had been making inquiries about Amelia, but Richard learns this after Rafton's caravan explodes – which killed her and put Amelia in the hospital. However, an unexpected windfall swiftly diverts Richard's attention to an entirely different set of problems.

Amelia has an estranged uncle, Walter Mann, who recently died and his solicitor, Philip Carne, tells Richard Mann had altered his will two days before he died. A will that practically disinherited his children, Clare, Donald and Paul, who each get ten thousand pounds.

The residue of the estate goes to his niece, Amelia. This residue comprises of a furnished house, several cars, a portfolio of investments and 51% of the shares in Walter's company, Mann Optics. A factory that makes photographic equipment with an estimated capital value of around half a million. Richard is not only Amelia's acting power of attorney, but a former policeman. And he becomes interested in the circumstances under which Walter Mann died.

Two months before he died, Walter become convinced his family was trying to kill him and not only altered his will as a precaution, but began to lock himself inside a wide, lofty third-floor suite of rooms with a lock on the door that was "virtually un-pickable" – one of only two keys was around his neck on a chain. The second key was in possession of his loyal housekeeper, companion and surrogate mother of his children, Mary Pinson. So when he tumbled from the open window of the third-floor room, through the conservatory roof, everyone assumed it was an accident.

After all, the door of the room had been locked from the inside and the key was still on the chain around Walter's neck. And his dog had been with him in the room. So, if anyone had raised a hand to him, Sheba would have had "it off at the wrist."

The Weight of Evidence and More Dead Than Alive proved Ormerod had an original bent of mind when it came to constructing locked room puzzles. The former handily linked the solution for an impossible disappearance to the presence of two bodies in a bolted, long-forgotten basement room on a construction site, while the latter is a galore of false solutions to the problem of a vanishing magician from a locked tower room. And an unusual true solution. By comparison, the impossible crime from An Open Window is much more conventional and falls squarely in the tradition of John Dickson Carr, G.K. Chesterton and Edward D. Hoch. So the locked room-trick still has some flashes of imagination, but there were parts that were slightly unconvincing and the clue of the blood in the conservatory was unfairly withheld from the reader. Richard also missed two obvious possible (false) solution for the locked room.

So, purely as a locked room mystery, An Open Window is decent enough, but hardly outstanding or noteworthy. However, I do think the trick would probably have worked better in a short story or novella.

The murder of Walter Mann was not the only death in the family. Three months previously, Clare's husband, Aleric Tolchard, fell down an iron staircase at the factory and broke his neck, but the local police are treating his death as a potential homicide – eyeing Chad Leyton as the main suspect. Chad is the son of Walter's best friend and shareholder, Kenneth Leyton, and the boyfriend of Philip Carne's sister, Heather. All three were present at the factory when Aleric fatally tumbled down those stairs, but only Chad has a strong motive. A dispute over a brand new innovation in 3D photography Chad had developed in the photographic laboratory of Mann Optics. This reminded me of the revolutionary new formula for color photography from Maurice C. Johnson's sole locked room novel, Damning Trifles (1932), but here the 3D photography was merely used to provide one of the suspects with a motive.

So probably assume by now that I was completely unimpressed and An Open Window is certainly the weakest of the three I have read, but the story was not entirely devoid of merit.

An Open Window is completely focused on disentangling the various plot-threads and Richard has to be persistent to get even an atom of truth out of the suspects, because they either lie to his face or avoid him all together. There are very little side-distractions. The locked room-trick may not have shown the same ingenuity as in his previous novels, but the way in which he handled the altered will did have that spark of originality. Why the murder was committed two days after the change, is one of the central questions of the plot. Finally, Ormerod skillfully dovetailed the solutions of the explosion, the death at the factory and the locked room murder together.

An Open Window is an unevenly plotted, slightly overwritten and not always fairly clued detective novel, but the unwavering focus on the plot and some clever plot ideas balanced out some of its flaws – making it a serviceable, instead of a terrible, detective novel. So don't make this your first brush with Ormerod, but don't cross it off your list in case you like his work.

On a final, related note, Ormerod is listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) with three titles, A Spoonful of Luger (1975), The Weight of Evidence and An Open Window, but Adey missed More Dead Than Alive and And Hope to Die (1995) was not published until four years later. Recently, I found Ormerod wrote at least two more impossible crime novels, One Deathless Hour (1981) and A Shot at Nothing (1993), and there may be more! This makes him a notable locked room novelist during a period when impossible crime mostly figured in short stories. Yes, I'm going to take a look at all of them... eventually.

Hardly a Man is Now Alive (1950) by Herbert Brean

Herbert Brean was an American journalist, editor and writer, who wrote the widely acclaimed How to Stop Smoking (1951) and edited The Mystery Writer's Handbook (1956), but the bulk of his work comprises of seven detective novels and ten short stories – published in such magazines as Thrilling Detective and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. These short stories include the elusive impossible crime tales "The Man Who Talked with Spirits" (1951) and "Nine Hours Late On the Opening Run" (1954).

So, while Brean hardly was one of the most prolific mystery writers, he produced one detective novel that garnered somewhat of a reputation among locked room readers.

Wilders Walks Away (1948) was described by Curt Evans as "a fusion of Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr" in his 2014 review and you could described the plot as Queen-style Wrightsville story with a Carr-like plot. A plot concerning a series of seemingly impossible disappearances, stretching across many generations, in a historical, beautifully preserved New England town. Wilders Walks Away is a very well written, ambitious and imaginative debut with all the hallmarks of a classic, but ended in disappointment with an underwhelming solution.

Barry Ergang's wrote in his 2003 review, which alerted me to Brean, he thought he had found in Wilders Walks Away a companion to Carr's The Three Coffins (1935) and Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944) for "ultimate greatness," but that "degree of feeling didn't sustain itself" – which didn't stop him from "enthusiastically" recommending it. My fellow Carr Cultist, "JJ" of The Invisible Event, had a similar response and even awarded the book four-stars in his 2017 review.

So, in spite of its weak, underwhelming conclusion, Wilders Walks Away remains Brean's most well-known mystery novel, which I find depressing. There are three mysteries from his hands that are superior to Wilders Walks Away.

The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954) is an excellent detective-cum-thriller set on an isolated island during a potential outbreak of a deadly, weaponized bacteria. The Traces of Brillhart (1960) is an amusing romp about a sleazy musician who appears to be impervious to death, but his true masterpiece is Hardly a Man is Now Alive (1950). A truly Carr-like detective story about a quasi-impossible disappearance, ghostly manifestations and a historical mystery as a sub-plot, but, more importantly, has a solution that delivered on its premise – which is why it deserves the reputation Wilders Walks Away still enjoys. So, I decided to reread the book to see if my high opinion on it has changed. Nope. :)

Hardly a Man is Now Alive is the third novel about Brean's series-detective and freelance photographer, Reynold Frame, which has been published in the UK as Murder Now and Then in 1952. Somehow, that year is listed on some places as the original year of publication, but it's 1950.

The story begins with Reynold Frame and Constance Wilder, who met in the now too often mentioned Wilders Walks Away, driving a battered convertible to the historical town of Concord, Massachusetts, where they plan to get married by Dr. John Annandale – a one-hundred and four years old man who "knew Ralph Waldo Emerson personally." When he was a boy of twelve, he heard from "the lips of a man who was in it," a 98-year-old Ben Tick, the story of the Concord fight in 1775. But their path to the altar is littered with obstacles.

Firstly, when they arrive at the home of Constance's Aunt Kate and Uncle Bowler, circumstances left them with only a single spare bedroom. So they booked him a room with Tom Satterthwaite down the street.

Frame learns that a previous roomers, J.J. Walmsley, who had his room disappeared six weeks ago under peculiar circumstances and left behind a baffling question: how could Walmsley "walk down an uncarpeted stair," carrying a number of traveling bags, and go past "a room in which other people are sitting" without being heard or seen? And then there's the haunting history of the bedroom itself with its ghostly manifestations.

During the Concord fight, a British soldier was mortally wounded and had died in the bedroom of the Satterthwaite house with "a betty lamp" besides him. The lamp mysteriously disappeared as the soldier took his last breath.

On his first night, Frame wakes up to find a small, sardine can-sized metal box on his bureau with a chain, hook and "a sort of sprout from which the wick protruded" – burning wick gave off a fishy smell. Next morning, the whale-oil lamp has disappeared from the room. More than once, the ghostly, disembodied sounds of "an army marching to a fife and drum" can be heard in the room. Brean's handling of these quasi-impossible situations shows he had learned from the mistakes he made in Wilders Walks Away.

The disappearance of Walmsley and the ghosts of the Revolutionary War are simply another layer of an incredibly stacked plot, instead of the focal point, which were properly clued and explained well before the final chapter rolled around. This really helped. I also think it helped that they were presented, not as impossible crimes, but simply as tricky problems and were put to good use. Even when they were already explained and dismissed. For example, in the final lines of chapter 13, Brean briefly rose to the height of Carr when he superbly used "the sound of the British detachment marching." A cliffhanger that would made any writer of magazine and newspaper serials see green with envy. However, this is still only about half of the plot.

Dr. John Annandale tells the first-hand account he heard as a boy of the battle of Concord, which is a "factual account" except for "the incident of the fleeing officer" and "the presence of Job Wilder," presenting the story with a historical mystery from nearly two-hundred years ago – why did the British officer broke and ran? The fleeing officer, Lt. Percy Nightingale, was the same officer who died and haunts the bedroom at the Satterthwaite house. This is another well-done, properly clued plot-thread with a delightfully simplistic solution that has been "staring everyone in the face for almost two centuries." Only reason why nobody noticed it until now is because "the individual bits of knowledge" were divided between several people. And it took an outsider, like Frame, to put them together. I liked it. And there's a second historical plot-thread, tied to one of the present-day mysteries, involving a long-lost secret from two of the luminaries of Concord's rich past. Still, there's more. So much more.

A badly decomposed body of a man is found in an old, disused well behind the Satterthwaite house. Dr. Annandale disappears before the wedding without a trace. A ghost is seen peeking from behind a tree. A spiritualist is very anxious to switch rooms. A séance is held and the missing ghost lamp turns up again.

On the surface, Hardly a Man is Now Alive appears to be an incomprehensibly complex, maze-like detective novel with numerous, interconnecting plot-threads stretching across two centuries, but Brean untangled them with ease and the result is very satisfying – showing how childishly simple everything looked beneath all those layers of obfuscation. Nearly every plot-thread, except for the second historical mystery, were adequately clued or hinted at and the chapters are littered with opening quotes and informative footnotes. Really, the only things missing were one or two floor plans and a challenge to the reader.

Admittedly, all of the individual plot-threads are pretty average by themselves, particular the problem of the murdered man in the well, but, when pulled together, they form a pleasantly busy and satisfying detective story. A detective story you can breeze through in one sitting and not feel like you wasted even a single second. This makes Hardly a Man is Now Alive the mystery novel Brean should be remembered for.

The Corpse Steps Out (1940) by Craig Rice

Georgiana Ann Randolph is best remembered by her penname, "Craig Rice," which she adopted in the late 1930s when creating a triumvirate of hard-drinking, morally ambiguous, but comical, detective-characters as memorable as Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason and Rex Stout's Archie Goodwin – earning her the title of Queen of the Screwball Mystery. An honorary title nobody to date has disputed and with good reason.

Rice was one of those rare mystery novelists who could write genuinely funny detective stories and her second effort, The Corpse Steps Out (1940), is arguably her best screwball mystery.

The Corpse Steps Out takes place one and a half year after 8 Faces at 3 (1939) and John J. Malone, Jake Justus and Helene Brand have gone their separate ways. However, they have a knack for attracting copious amount of trouble and this destined them to meet again, which happens when a client of Justus becomes involved in a blackmail plot with multiple murders and bodies being lugged around the city of Chicago – which makes this a darkly comedic, madcap chase story in the spirit of Carter Dickson's The Punch and Judy Murders (1936) and Norbert Davis' The Mouse in the Mountain (1943). All of this running around begins with the lead star of the Nelle Brown Revue finding the body of the man who tried to blackmail her with a stack of embarrassing love letters.

Jake Justus appeared in 8 Faces at 3 as a newspaper reporter, but has since gone into business for himself as a press agent and manager. When the reader meets him again he wonders why, with untold billions of people in the world, "everything had to pick him to happen to." Nelle Brown is a client of Justus and he sees it as his duty to keep her out of trouble. Even if it turns out she shot her ex-sweetie to pieces.

There are, however, complication and they crop up at an ever-increasing pace: one of these complications concerns the removal of the body from the kitchen of the crime-scene and the person responsible left a note for the landlady – asking her to sent the belongings to Honolulu, Hawaii. So that took care of one problem, but the love letters are still out there and these letters pose a greater threat for Brown's radio career than a potential murder rap.

According to Justus, radio reaches every household in America and "you've to keep it clean," because their sponsor would cancel the contract in "a minute if this thing broke the wrong way."

As you would expect by this point in the story, a second blackmailer rears his head and wants Brown to sign a personal-management contract, which means that he collects all of her income and pays her a weekly salary. A nice, legal way to apply an inescapable vise-grip on a blackmail victim, but this is not the only thumb-screw this second blackmailer tries to apply on the radio star. Brown is forced to perform in a secret audition for a prospective buyer of her revue, an out-of-town soap manufacturer, but at the end of the show they discover his body in the private room where he was listening to the show – slumped in a chair with a bullet in his head. So they did the only sensible thing you can do in such a situation. No, no, no. They did not phone the police. That would be silly. They dragged the body out of the studio, drove it to Lincoln Park and dumped the body on a bench. But the various blackmail schemes and rising bodycount is not the only source of comedy in this story.

After Justus is reunited with Helene Brand, a famous beauty, socialite and heiress, they decide to get married, but getting to knot tied is easier said than done and every time they determined to go to Crown Point to get married a monkey wrench, or two, is thrown into the work – such as getting chased by a squad car full of police officers with a body in the backseat. She even has to go into hiding until Malone can get an arson charge off her neck. Not to mention a case of body snatching, obstruction of justice, falsifying evidence and resisting arrest.

Well, you get the idea. The Corpse Steps Out is a fast-paced, rip-roaringly funny detective story, but this does not mean that all of the outrageous plot develops are played merely for laughs. There's method to Rice's madness.

There are three, convincingly motivated, shooting deaths in the story and the second murder, one committed in the radio studio, comes with a nifty, unexpected twist in the tail and this makes the plot rewarding as well as funny. But even the more serious aspects of the story are not devoid of humor. Rice mercilessly pokes fun at the type of 1920s detective novel John Dickson Carr criticized in his famous essay, "The Grandest Game in the World," in which the author makes the scene of the crime resemble a bus terminal at rush-hour as characters wander in and out of the room – leaving behind cuff links, bus tickets, handkerchiefs and cigarette ends. Justus observed at one point in the story that the first murder "seems to have been one of the major social events of the year," because "everybody was there." Everybody was walking in and out of the apartment as the victim was bleeding out on the kitchen floor.

My only complaint is that my favorite shady lawyer-detective, the incomparable John J. Malone, only has a very small role in the book.

Malone is basically just there to provide a solution when the time comes to wrap up the show, which is why some editions bill The Corpse Steps Out as "A Jake Justus Mystery." However, this does nothing diminish the sheer joy and clever aspects of the story. I would actually recommend readers who are new to Rice to begin with The Corpse Steps Out instead of 8 Faces at 3, because it gives you a good idea what Rice was capable of doing when she was in top-form.

Anyway, in my case, I'm glad that for once I saved one of the better entries in a series for last, which is not something that happens very often. There are, however, two posthumously, ghostwritten novels, The Picked Poodles (1960) and But the Doctor Died (1968), but they're considered to be piss-poor in quality and the latter was reputedly written as an attempt to cash in on the spy craze – except that this last "official" title in the series is completely devoid of Rice's trademark sense of humor.

So this only leaves me with a collection of short stories (The Name is Malone, 1960) and the three mystery novels she wrote as "Michael Venning," but those are stories I'll get to another time.

Within That Room! (1946) by John Russell Fearn

John Russell Fearn's Within That Room! (1946) is a novelette originally published in the Toronto Star Weekly and is an expansion of a short story, "Chamber of Centuries," which appeared in a 1940 issue of Thrilling Mystery and was reprinted in a modern anthology – titled More Whodunits: The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories (2011). I was not entirely sure what to expect from this story, as it concerns mental assaults, evil influences and demonic manifestations in a haunted room, but the plot turned out to be just fine. Somewhat reminiscent of the better, earlier episodes of Jonathan Creek with a nod to a well-known Sherlock Holmes story. 

Star Weekly, Jan. 19, 1946

One of the two protagonists of Within That Room! is a young woman, Vera Grantham, who had emerged from the A.T.S. (Auxiliary Territorial Service) full of hopes and plans. During the war, Vera had courageously "defied shells and bombs," but the post-war world had so far defeated her. She had dreams of becoming a commercial artist, but she's buried in debt and then, to make things worse, her landlady announces an unexpected visitor, Mr. Jonathan Thwaite – a solicitor from Manchester. Vera is afraid that Thwaite has come to see her on account of the pile of unpaid bills and bolts before he can serve her with a summons.

However, Thwaite eventually catches up with Vera and informs her that her eccentric uncle, Cyrus Merriforth, has passed away and left her an unusual inheritance.

Cyrus Merriforth was "a very famous entomologist and botanist," who had read of Vera's "gallantry in the A.T.S." during the war, which prompted him to add a codicil to his will leaving her a hundred pounds and his home, Sunny Acres, but the place is more than a mere residence. Sunny Acres was once a feudal castle and has a room in it haunted by "an emissary of the devil." The legend is well-known in the area and not a single person from the nearby village of Waylock Dean dares to go near the place. Vera experiences this first-hand when she decides to inspect her inheritance.

She's unable to find anyone in the village willing to drive her all the way to Sunny Acres and has to make the journey by foot, but, along the way, she's offered a ride from a young man, Dick Wilmott, a former R.A.F. guy – who currently runs a radio repair shop in Godalming. After spending the night at Sunny Acres, Vera calls Dick back to the place to help her figure out what's going on behind its walls.

The former servants, Mr. and Mrs. Falworth, are still present and Mrs. Falworth tries to convince her to never open "the horror-room," which has a door sealed shut with heavy screws. This is the room haunted by an evil entity, a member of the devil's retinue, who's "only visible once a year." But even when the room is empty, there's an overwhelming sense of evil that will blast your senses and reason. Something that has happened to her uncle. Cyrus had entered the room to lay the ghost and had emerged from the room on "the borderline of insanity," which may have landed him in an early grave.

A demon-haunted room that can rob you of your sanity recalls Paul Halter's La chambre du fou (The Madman's Room, 1990), but with a slight hint of John Dickson Carr's atmospheric radio-play, "The Devil's Saint," which can be read in The Dead Sleep Lightly (1983). Or listen to it here.

However, a haunted room is not the only unsettling part of Sunny Acres. During her first night, Vera is roused by strange sounds and she did what so many heroines do in these kind of detective stories: get out of bed and investigate, which brought her to a locked door at the bottom of the basement stairs – where she hears clanking and swishing sounds. Not to mention the awful smell that is coming from behind the locked door. When she lays down on the floor, to look through the crack under the door, she sees the feet of a man and a woman moving about. Presumably of the two shifty servants.

I have to point out here that the story is not a traditional, Golden Age whodunit, but has a plot that moves along the lines of a Conan Doyle story with a couple of impossible crimes thrown in for good measure. Anyway...

Vera decides to ask Dick to help her figure out what's going on and installs him in the house as her fiance. So there you have your romantic sub-plot and Fearn's take on the snooping, bantering mystery solving couples of Kelley Roos, Frances Crane, Delano Ames and the Lockridges.

Dick and Vera discover that a floor-plan of the castle and a map of the district had been torn from a book in the library, The History of Sunny Acres, which makes them suspect that Uncle Cyrus had been cleverly murdered, but they also have a face-to-face encounter with the entity haunting the place – beginning with them getting mentally assaulted when they enter the room for the first time. They enter the room a second time, on the day the ghost is reputedly visible, which is when they see the following: 

"A strange, incredible caricature of a being hung in the dusty air, a haze of blurry light surrounding it from the back. There was the pointed tail, the simian ears, the long, needle-chinned face, bent arms flexed as though to pounce forward. He seemed to be grinning horribly. Yet he was in mid-air, and through him the ancient stone wall could be distinctly seen."

As a devout devotee of the impossible crime story, I appreciate these scenes, depicting the apparent disintegration of the fabric of reality, as much as a clever and original locked room trick. And if I have any complaints, it's how easy it was to figure out the ghost-trick. Not only did I figure out how the ghost "materialized into a locked room with solid walls, floor, and ceiling," but I did so based solely on the plot-description of the story. I actually emailed Philip Harbottle to tell him I was going to review Within That Room! and asked him how close my solution was to Fearn's explanation for the apparition, which he answered "you really are a perceptive and ingenious fellow."

Well, it's hard to deny the perceptive and ingenious part, but I have to admit that it helped that I have become somewhat familiar with Fearn's plotting technique. And who he was as a person. This ghost-trick has his personality written all over it and wish I could point it all out, but that would thoroughly spoil the solution.

So, all in all, Within That Room! is perhaps not the best detective story ever written in this sub-category of the locked room genre, namely haunted rooms that kill or do harm, but it's an amusing read harking back to the days of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and tremendously enjoyed reading it – demonstrating once again why Fearn is my favorite second-string mystery writer. I'll be taking a look at the short story that served as the bare-bones for this novelette, "Chamber of Centuries," along with two other little-known locked room short stories. So stay tuned.