Death in the Grand Manor (1970) by Anne Morice

I've mentioned in the past how the sheer size and scope of detective fiction, published between 1920 and 1960, never ceases to astonish me as every time I think I've got a pretty good idea what's out there a never-heard of writer, novel or series gets unearthed – which has been the only constant in my genre excavations. This has been increasingly spilling over into other periods, regions and sub-genres of the detective story proper. 

Over the past few years, I discovered a lost generation of traditional, 1960s mystery writers in Kip Chase, Charles Forsyte and Jack Vance. I tumbled down the fathomless rabbit hole of the old-school, juvenile detective story and there's a growing tide of translations of originally non-English mysteries.

Recently, Dean Street Press reprinted the first ten mystery novels by Felicity Shaw, published as by "Anne Morice," who was completely unknown to me, but she made a splash upon her debut in 1970. Morice's maiden novel garnered praise from such luminaries as Anthony Berkeley ("a modern version of the classical type of detective story") and Edmund Crispin ("a charming whodunit"), which was encouraging and profitable enough to continue writing mysteries until her death in 1989. During those two decades, Morice wrote twenty-five mystery novels with most of them starring her actress and amateur detective, Tessa Crichton, but the series faded into obscurity upon her death – remained out-of-print for the better part of three decades. So it was a welcome surprise when DSP announced they were planning to reprint this forgotten series and their new editions come with an informative introduction by genre-historian and professional fanboy, Curt Evans. Let's take a look at her first mystery novel. 

Death in the Grand Manor (1970) introduces Tessa "Tess" Crichton as she's traveling down to an unspoiled, out-of-the-way hamlet, Roakes Common, where her eccentric playwright cousin lives with his teenage daughter, Emma, and second wife, Matilda. Toby Crichton had invited Tessa to spend a few weeks at his house, but a two-week long invitation "boded something more than normal cousinly give and take." She doesn't have to wait very long to find out what's behind the generous invitation.

There's a snake in every Eden and in Roakes Common "the snake took the form of a whole family," the Cornford, who lived in the large Manor House. Douglas Cornford had recently bought it as a home for himself, his wife Bronwen and their two boys, but their "surly manners and urban attitudes" began to grate on everyone. General opinion is that Douglas Cornford is quite harmless when left to his own devices, but they hold the foul, anti-social Bronwen responsible for all the trouble – usually perpetrated by her "wretched boys." Interestingly, the Conford boys appear only two, or three, times, but when they do it's as "humpty-dumpty figures" peeking over a wall to make "obscene and cheeky gestures" or bolting from a garden with a frightened kitty in it. Like they were two pestering demons tormenting the villagers.

I thought the Cornford boys were an effective and lively background detail, but Morice had to fade them out of this sparkling, lighthearted mystery because they likely had a hand in killing Emma's dog with a barbed-wire trap.

So an anti-Cornford League had began to form and one of Toby's neighbors want him to join, but he, always willing to be contrarian, always defended them "like a brave little Lord Fauntleroy whenever they were attacked." He finally accepted a dinner invitation to hear them out under the condition that he could bring his cousin along. Tess is there on a peace keeping mission of sorts.

While in Roakes Common, Tess gets to experience firsthand Bronwen's personal brand of rudeness and the family's little ways of pestering their neighbors with pungent bonfires or planning to ruin their garden view with the building of some hideous monstrosity. She's also one of the half-a-dozen witnesses of Douglas viciously assaulting his wife and "would have murdered her if he hadn't been prevented in the nick of time." All of this nicely sets the stage for a classically-styled village mystery with a few modern touches, but, as the story progresses, a problem began to emerge. Death in the Grand Manor is undeniably a bright, lively and polished story or, as Crispin described it,"a remedy for existentialist gloom," but Morice used it primarily to introduce her characters to the reader – relegating the plot to a secondary role. Such as Tess meeting the love of her life, Detective Inspector Robin Price, who she marries in the second novel.

So, in detective story terms, the book is mostly padding to couch and stretch out a relatively simplistic plot. Yes, it was quality padding, but padding nonetheless. The plot doesn't really begin to stir until roughly the halfway mark.

When a body finally turns up, face down in a ditch, Tess doesn't begin to act as detective until the last quarter of the story and then only halfheartedly. She tabulates the motives, opportunity and the psychological probability of the suspects, but decided to redo the list with different value when the first result revealed her cousin had "the best opportunity and the flimsiest alibi." She didn't really shine as a detective here and the fact that the story acknowledged it didn't miraculous improve a rather simple and routine plot. Now, I did think the murderer's identity, alibi-trick and motive were a nicely done nod to a very well-known mystery writer, but nothing too complicated and wouldn't recommend it as a continuation of the pure, Golden Age detective story. Just a spirited imitation of one.

However, Death in the Grand Manor was Morice's first novel and she obviously wanted to establish her cast of characters, which came at the expense of the plot, but, hopefully, Murder in Married Life (1971) will have a meatier plot. That one is already on the big pile and the premise sounds promising. So stay tuned!

The Frightened Stiff (1942) by Kelley Roos

William and Audrey Roos were the husband-and-wife writing tandem, known as "Kelley Roos," who published a lamentably short series of lighthearted, fast-paced detective novels, novellas and short stories during the 1940s – starring their irresistible amateur sleuths, Jeff and Haila Troy. Kelley Roos and the Troys were largely forgotten, until the mid-2000s, when the Rue Morgue Press resurrected the series and became the gems of their catalog. 

Why the Rooses and the Troys were so completely forgotten is somewhat of a mystery, because, as Tom and Enid Schantz wrote in their introduction, they were perhaps "a good deal better" than their more famous contemporaries.

The Troys were "funnier than the Norths, livelier than the Abbotts, often more involved in doing the actual detection than the Justuses" and "a more convincing couple than the Duluths." They were so entertaining, genuinely funny and easy to read, you almost overlook the well-crafted, structured and often fairly clued plots. There are two titles in the Rooses oeuvre that standout, The Frightened Stiff (1942) and Sailor, Take Warning! (1944), of which the former is an all-time personal favorite of mine. I rammed the book through a lot of throats a decade ago, but how well does it stand up to rereading? So after a few good to middling detective novels and one that left a lingering bad taste, I decided to finally take a second look at The Frightened Stiff. 

The Frightened Stiff is the third novel in the series and the first one in which Jeff and Haila appear as a newlyweds, who moved to a garden level apartment of an old Greenwich Village brownstone on Thirty-Nine Gay Street, but nothing goes as planned and Haila's first lines of the story sets the tone of what's to come – "jumping from a window would bring no release" in a basement apartment. Charley, the little janitor, forgot to clean up the apartment and the thick, heavy cobwebs and dust mice could "grace a Class A haunted house." A telegram arrived to tell the Troys the moving van broke down and the delivery of their furniture is delayed, but the worst is yet to come.

Jeff and Haila Troy decided to grab a bite to eat at a local restaurant where Haila overhears a shady character talking, in a threatening tone, to someone in one of the phone booths. And to her shock, she hears the man tell the person on the other end of the line to meet him in the basement apartment of Thirty-Nine Gay Street! The incident triggers Jeff memory and remembers, to Haila's horror, that their apartment used to be a speakeasy where he wasted many happy hours of his boyhood. So he assumes the man is drunk and wants somebody to meet him at his old speakeasy, but when Jeff confronts the man with a good piece of advice, he gets hold of "the most frightened human being" he has ever seen.

Next morning, Haila is drummed out of bed by the police, because the body of a naked man had been spotted in their fenced-in garden and recognizes the body as the frightened man of the previous evening. The man is identified by the Troys' new neighbors as one of the motley tenants of the apartment building, Mike Kaufman, who tended to keep to himself. But things can always get worse. And they do.

Firstly, it turns out Kaufman had been drowned in Jeff and Haila's bathtub right before they returned home. Secondly, Lieutenant Hankins has his doubts about the Troys and suspects they might be up their necks in murder (technically correct). Jeff observes Hankins strikes him as "the type of cop that is wrong, but proves he's right." So they decide to once again don the proverbial deerstalker and poke around the private affairs of their new neighbors in an attempt to find the murderer.

The tenants of Thirty-Nine Gay Street include an old friend of Haila, Anne Carstairs, whose husband, Scott, is a struggling commercial artist with a secret. Why wasn't Anne glad to see Haila? Charlotte Griffin is a middle-aged lady who has to care for her invalid, bedridden sister, Lucy, who might have been out of bed and, "pressed snub-nosed against the glass," sized up the Troys when they arrived – her overprotective sister makes it difficult to get to speak with Lucy. Polly Franklin owns the restaurant where Haila overheard the telephone call and Henry Lingle is a retired art dealer. Lastly, there's the rabbity little landlord, Mr. Turner, and the previously mentioned janitor, Charley.

A pretty good pool of potential suspects to fish a murderer from, but The Frightened Stiff is not exactly a pure, straightforward whodunit and some of my fellow mystery fans have criticized the book for the apparent randomness of the murderer's identity. Patrick, of the dormant At the Scene of the Crime, said in his 2011 review that "there is literally nothing that points in X's direction as the culprit," which was echoed more recently by The Green Capsule and The Bedford Bookshelf. So I kept this mind when rereading The Frightened Stiff and kind of have to disagree with them.

Yes, the clueing here is a little unconventional, devious, but unconventional with only one clue, or hint, pointing directly towards the murderer. However, you can still identify the murderer as Jeff and Haila begin to find answers to who Kaufman really was and start tying up all the plot-threads concerning the other tenants. Once you arrived at the final couple of chapters, there's only one character left standing who fits the role of murderer. So, yes, it's more a process of elimination rather than deduction, but you can still identify [REDACTED] before the name is revealed in the last line of the penultimate chapter and it didn't feel like it had been drawn from a hat or could have been substituted by any of the other characters – which wouldn't have made a lick of sense. If there's anything to complain about, it's that the Rooses played it very safe with their choice of murderer.

Anyway, I didn't think the murderer was randomly picked or unfairly hidden from the reader, but the who's not the only bone of contention some readers have with The Frightened Stiff.

There's a quasi-impossible, almost locked room-like aspect to the murder that nobody can't quite agree on whether, or not, it qualifies as an impossible situation. When the police go to inspect Kaufman's apartment, they're make the startling discovery that there was "not a stick of furniture" or "a scrap of paper" in the apartment. The place had been furnished the day before and Kaufman was heard turning on the radio, but how could the apartment been cleaned out without any of tenants seeing it or hearing it? The bedroom door of Jeff and Haila was practically at the foot of the main staircase. So how could the content of a whole apartment vanish without trace or sound? I can only describe quasi-impossible problem as Schrödinger's locked room. Technically, it's a locked room when you don't look to closely at it or don't notice that it actually qualifies (somewhat) as a locked room, but (sort of) stops being one the moment you take notice of it. You can put this down to the setting and circumstances of the vanishing furniture leaving room for only one logical explanation, which is why I didn't identify it as a (quasi) impossible crime on my first read, but the clueing of the furniture plot-thread was original and first-class – dovetailing beautifully with the rest of the plot and story. I also found impressive that with only one possible explanation, Hankins came up with another solution that would have been plausible enough had it not made the Troys his prime suspects.

Tom and Enid Schantz ended their introduction to their reprint editions stating that you won't find the name Kelley Roos "among the giants of genre," but their spirited contributions to, what John Dickson Carr called, the Grandest Game "deserve not to be overlooked" as they showed "what it was like to be young and in love in the New York of the 1940s" – more importantly that "mysteries were meant to be fun." A perfect summation of The Frightened Stiff. A genuinely funny, solidly plotted detective novel full with humorous, good-natured banter and a devious criminal scheme at the heart of the story, which ensured the many twists and turns that had to be smoothed out along the way. While not everything was perfectly executed, The Frightened Stiff towers over its screwball contemporaries of the murder-can-be-fun school and more than stood up to rereading. Highly recommended!

The Two Hundred Ghost (1956) by Henrietta Hamilton

Hester Denne Shepherd was a British book dealer who used her first-hand experience of antiquarian bookselling as a foundation stone for five detective novels, published as by "Henrietta Hamilton," which center on "bookshop murders, stolen and forged books" and "protagonists who meet in antiquated bookshops" – making her "a master of the bibliomystery." Last year, Agora Books reprinted two of her novels, The Two Hundred Ghost (1956) and Answer in the Negative (1959), as part of their (relatively) recently launched Uncrowned Queen of Crime series. 

A few months ago, Laurie, of the Bedford Bookshelf, reviewed Hamilton's The Two Hundred Ghost and the title sounded mighty familiar to me. So I looked in the most obvious place, what do you know, the book is listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). 

The Two Hundred Ghost is the first title in the Johnny and Sally Heldar series, but in their first novel they aren't even engaged yet. Miss Sally Merton is happily employed with Heldar Brothers, Booksellers, 200 Charing Cross Road, which is commonly referred to as Two Hundred. The bookstore has been in Johnny's family since the days of his grandfather, Grand Old Man, but Two Hundred has a dark, bloody history stretching back to the early years of the 19th century when it was a pub with "a bad name" – where people where disappeared for money. Legend has it the victims were "quietly stabbed" in their bed, always in the same room, before they were disposed of. During the early 1800s, an intended victim, George Swan, woke up in time and tried to flee, but only got to the corner of the passage before "the hired bully caught up with him and stabbed him in the back."

So the ghost of George Swan began to walk from the bedroom to the passage and was allowed to walk until one of the owners, in the 1850s, had "the thing exorcised."

The Two Hundred Ghost remained dormant for a century, but, when a copy of English Ghosts turns with an account of the old ghost story, the entity begins to walk again and badly frightened the typist, Liza. She witnessed "a sort of white figure" at the corner where the passage goes round to an office, which used to be the murder room more than a hundred years ago. But when they search the place, nobody is found hiding anywhere!

Adey's Locked Room Murders described the ghostly manifestation promisingly as an "appearance and disappearance of the Two Hundred ghost in an area of an old building from which disappearance seemed impossible," but locked room readers are strongly advised not to expect too much, because the locked room-trick was hardly original 1956 – let alone in 2021. However, it didn't feel out of place in this story and the renewed activity raises the question whether someone is playing the ghost or was it stirred from its slumber by "new thoughts of murder in someone's mind."

The old murder room, where the ghost was seen, is now the office of a bookstore clerk, Victor Butcher, who's neither a very pleasant person or particular popular. Butcher tried to put his hands on Sally and got into a biting argument with Fred Malling, of the Packing Department, when he came to her rescue, but there's also a poorly done attempt at blackmail and some shady book dealing in the background. So there are suspect aplenty when his body is found slumped over his desk, handle of commando knife sticking out of his back, which came on the heels of another ghostly visitation. When the youngest member of the Heldar family, Tim, gets himself in the cross-hairs of Chief Inspector Prescott, Johnny and Sally decide to turn amateur detective.

I don't know how well read Hamilton was in everyone's favorite genre, but The Two Hundred Ghost suggests to me Hamilton took inspiration from other writers with mystery solving couples as their series-detectives. Such as Delano Ames and Kelley Roos. The Two Hundred Ghost is very similar structured as their first novels, Made Up to Kill (1940) and She Shall Have Murder (1948), in which the detectives haven't yet committed until a work related homicide brings them closer together, but Hamilton had a much lighter touch when it came to plotting. She reminded me much more in that regard of Margaret Scherf and her Manhattan-decorator sleuths, Henry and Emily Bryce (like Glass on the Stairs, 1954).

So, plot-wise, The Two Hundred Ghost is not a terribly complicated affair, even with thinly-spread, none-physical clues, but it all stuck nicely together with the relationship between the victim and murderer, together with the motive, the most interesting and creative aspect of the solution. Not really a contender to anyone's crown, but a good, solid and well written second-string mystery novel that made me curious enough to toss Answer in the Negative on the big pile. To be continued...

If someone from Agora Books, or any other publishing, is reading this, I would like to suggest a series of reprint 'Till Death Did Them Part. A series reprints of unfairly forgotten, long out-of-print mystery writing couples. I already mentioned Kelley Roos, a pseudonym of William and Aubrey Roos, who were the greatest rediscovery to come out of the defunct Rue Morgue Press, but their untimely closure also put an end to their revival – which has been a great lost to us. The Frightened Stiff (1942) was their masterpiece. Last year, I discovered Gordon and Vicky Philo who wrote a handful of first-rate, classically-styled detective novels, like Diplomatic Death (1962) and Diving Death (1962), as "Charles Forsyte," but undeservedly out-of-print for decades. There are rabid locked room fans, like JJ, who would give someone's arm and leg for a reprint of Rosa and Dudley Lambert's Death Goes to Brussels (also published as Monsieur Faux-Pas, 1928 or 1937). What about Darwin and Hildegarde Teilhet's tantalizingly obscure Death Flies High (1931) and Murder in the Air (1931)? I think it would make for a terrific series of reprints and suggest it here purely for the benefit of my fellow mystery fans.

And Hope to Die (1995) by Roger Ormerod

Last week, I reviewed Roger Ormerod's A Shot at Nothing (1993), a splendid tribute to the great detective stories and locked room mysteries of yesteryear, which convinced me to explore this modern, but already forgotten, author further – who tried to marry the traditional detective story with the contemporary crime novel. Some attempts were more successful than others. But what matters is that he tried to keep the plot-driven detective story alive during a period when something else was expected from crime writers. More importantly, Ormerod had an undeniable fondness for locked room mysteries and impossible crimes! 

Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) listed three novels, A Spoonful of Luger (1975), The Weight of Evidence (1978) and An Open Window (1988), but have since then identified More Dead Than Alive (1980), One Deathless Hour (1981), A Shot at Nothing and And Hope to Die (1995) as impossible crimes. But there's more! I recently discovered Face Value (1983; published in the US as The Hanging Doll Murders) and The Key to the Case (1992) can be added to the list. Time to Kill (1974) has David Mallin handing the murderer a cast-iron alibi, which could possibly translate into a quasi-impossible situation.

So that makes about nine, or ten, of his fifty-odd novels impossible crimes and you can bet there are probably a few more that remain unidentified, which is very promising, because Ormerod had a magic touch when it came to fabricating miracles – making him one of the most important and prolific (British) contributors of the period. During the 1980s and '90s, the impossible crime story had become to domain of American and yet to be translated, non-English writers. These writers include Edward D. Hoch, Bill Pronzini, Herbert Resnicow, Paul Halter, Soji Shimada and his shin honkaku movement, but only a few Brits carried on the tradition during the 1970s, '80s and '90s. I can think of only three names, Douglas Clark, Paul Doherty and Roger Ormerod, who wrote impossible crime fiction in a significant quantity during those decades.

You would assume locked room readers would treasure a writer, like Ormerod, but he appears to have been forgotten the moment he stopped writing in 1999 and passing away, aged 85, in 2005. Not even Adey and Brian Skupin were aware how much he actually contributed to the locked room mystery. Fortunately, I've some experience tumbling down these rabbit holes of obscurities. 

And Hope to Die is listed online as a standalone mystery, but it's the fifth Philipa Lowe and Oliver Simpson novel with Third Time Fatal (1992) being the third title that's listed as a standalone. So the series counts six, not four, novels in total comprising of Hung in the Balance (1990), Bury Him Darkly (1991), Third Time Fatal, A Shot at Nothing, And Hope to Die and Landscape with Corpse (1996). I've read two novels from this series and think I can safely state that it likely represents Ormerod at his most traditional, slanting heavily towards the classics, but with the characterization having a distinctly modern flavor. And Hope to Die gave a much clearer picture of our dating detectives in its opening chapter.

Philipa Lowe is the daughter of Chief Superintendent Lowe and is the widow of Graham Tonkin, a well-known water colorist, who left with her modest income, but that becomes a bone of contention in her relationship with the ex-police inspector, Oliver Simpson – whose career "disappeared in one flash of shot" when he tried to wrestle a shotgun from a madman. A shower of shotgun pellets to his right arm ended his career and the opening chapter revealed it will "gradually going to deteriorate" over time, which proves to be an obstacle to getting married. Oliver doesn't want to live on Philipa's money. So he hasn't set eyes upon for weeks as he secretly got a job with a security firm.

Philipa is soon reunited with Oliver through a bit clever maneuvering by her solicitor and family friend, Harvey Remington, who asks her to go to an in situ auction to gauge the authenticity of a water color painting. A portrait reputedly painted by her late husband, but he had painted only one portrait and that one was sold to a collector. Oliver will be there as part of the security team. There reunion at Mallington Hall is only slightly dampened by discovering the painting is a partially nude portrait of her on a bath stool, but notices that a very distinctive birthmark is missing. Something her late husband would certainly have included, but this plot-thread is eventually brushed aside (technically, that's not a pun, please don't bludgeon me) when it served its purpose, as a clue, to the main problem of the plot.

Mallington Hall is the old, neglected home of the demure Mrs. Drew, her dark, saturnine son, Derek, and his younger sister, Pattie. There's also their "sort of cousin," Wilfred Lyle. Under the rule of Richard Drew, they lived a far from happy existence as old-world country gentry folks, but nine months ago, Drew shot himself in the library. The thick, solid door was locked on the inside, key still in the locked position, while the metal catches of the old bay window "had long ago rusted solid" with decades old layers of paint sealing the opening section – whole "now had to be considered as one solid window." So the police concluded it couldn't have been anything else except suicide, which spelled disaster for the family, because his life insurance had a suicide clause in it. Consequently, the family were forced to auction the content of the home and move to farmhouse to keep chickens.

Pattie has heard of Philipa's reputation as an amateur meddler in police cases and asks her to prove her father was murdered in exchange for a brass paraffin lamp. A beautiful piece of antique that would look great in her cottage, but the offer comes with a caveat. She wants her to prove it was "murder by somebody from outside the family." This is not easy when everything points towards suicide.

A noteworthy moment from her investigation is when she shows the old-fashioned library door key to an expert (i.e. a career criminal) to see if he can detect any traces of tempering, like scratches on the stem, which would indicate the key was turned from the outside with pliers. This was not the case and the story from here on out quickly turns into a much darker, character-driven crime novel with all the trappings of a 1920s whodunit. Solution to the problem is hidden in the actions and personalities of the characters, which comes with a packet of depressing and sordid back stories. And in particular of Derek and Pattie. However, the key to the case is the character and story of their late father.

Richard Drew was "all dignity and gentlemanly superiority" living "in a world that disappeared long, long ago," but he had his personal set of principles and, when an grim incident ten years ago broke his civility (to put it mildly), he locked himself away from the world in his personal library. A decade later another incident apparently resulted in him taking his own life, but Philipa slowly becomes convinced it was actually murder. 

So far, so good, but let the reader be warned: the answers to these questions don't show Ormerod's usual creative and original approach to the detective story and locked room mystery, but it speaks volumes that he still succeeded in dropping me off at the final page without really being disappointed.

Firstly, the small pool of suspects and a second murder makes the murderer stand out like a scarecrow and the locked room-trick is an old dodge that you shouldn't get away with today or in 1995, but Ormerod played it serious with a straight face – oddly enough it made it much more convincing. Usually, these modern send ups of the country house/locked room mysteries that trot out this particular trick feel like a novelty store item, but And Hope to Die (despite the contemporary touches) felt like the genuine article. It reminded me in that regard of Michael Innes' final novel, Appleby and the Ospreys (1986).

All in all, And Hope to Die was a little disappointing, because Ormerod has written much better and more ingenious detective stories, but it was rather interesting to see a modern, character-driven crime drama being played out as a Golden Age mystery – adapting to it (locked room-trick). But if you're new to Ormerod, I recommend you start with More Dead Than Alive or A Shot at Nothing.

A Shot at Nothing (1993) by Roger Ormerod

Over the past few years, I've read four novels by Roger Ormerod, a jack-of-all-trades and second-string mystery writer, who evidently tried to find a balance in his stories between the traditional detective stories of yore and the contemporary, character-driven crime novels of the 1970s, '80s and '90s – which he did with various degrees of success. So it's understandable why Ormerod hasn't stood the test of time and is not as well remembered today, but locked room readers should take note of him. Ormerod was not impartial to the locked room mystery and, when it came to manufacturing miracles, he was not bereft of talent either! 

The Weight of Evidence (1974) is a little clunky, as a whodunit, but the synergy between the solutions to a strange disappearance from a construction shed and the discovery of two bodies in a bolted cellar room made for an original, one-of-a-kind impossible crime. More Dead Than Alive (1980) is a grand, old-fashioned and rambling detective novel littered with multiple, false solutions and a daringly original final explanation to the locked room problem. The Open Window (1988) is the weakest of the lot that withholds clues from the reader, but the locked room-trick still had flashes of ingenuity and probably would have worked better in a short story. 

A Shot at Nothing (1993) is the third title in the short-lived Philipa Lowe and Oliver Simpson series and it's a more conventional, relatively simplistic, locked room mystery. But, in every other regard, it's his clearest written and most consistently plotted detective novel I've read to date.

Philipa Lowe is the daughter of Chief Superintendent Lowe and is somewhat of a "lady sleuth," having been "successful two or three times in sorting out other people's problems," who's currently in a relationship with a former policeman, Oliver Simpson – whose career ended prematurely with a shotgun blast. A Shot at Nothing opens with them haunting for a house and Philipa eye caught Collington House. An over sized bungalow with a sprawling estate with a hedge maze blocking the front door and the father of the present owner had the place "laced with alarms" connected "to the nearest police station." Surprisingly, the place is dirt cheap and she soon finds out why Oliver has his objections to the place.

During his time as an inspector in the district, Oliver had an illicit affair with the lady of the manor, Clare Steadman, who's currently serving out a life sentence for murdering her husband, Harris Steadman. Oliver happened to be nearby when the burglar alarm was triggered and dispatched to the house.

Six years ago, Clare and Harris had a spousal spat over money. Clare refused to cough up the money to pay his debts and he angrily stormed into the gunroom, where her late father's collection of valuable shotguns reside in glass cabinets, locking the door behind him. And through the locked door of solid oak, Harris began to taunt Clare, smashing the glass cabinets and flinging the guns through the french windows onto the lawn. Yelling how much "they'd be worth after a dose of rain." So she armed herself with two twelve-bore cartridges, ran outside and started tossing the shotguns back into the room, but Harris closed and locked the french windows. Clare picked up a shotgun, loaded both barrels and blasted the lock.

A shot that did three things: it jammed the lock, blasted a hole in one of the double glazed window and Harris was showered in glass splinters. Clare saw him through the hole in the glass, slumped against the wall, assumed he was dead and called the police, who were already on their way, but this is where the story begins to fall apart – because her story is that she fired one barrel outside. Harris was showered in glass, but what killed him was a second shot fired at close range. There were two emptied barrels in the shotgun and the spread makes it "damn near impossible" the second shot was fired through the hole in the window. Oliver found the door the gunroom unlocked, but what sank Clare was her insistence that she heard "an unexplained third shot." So, naturally, the police doesn't buy her story.

Oliver asks Philipa if she "could prove her innocence for her," which doesn't go over well, but she can't help being fascinated and in particular about that unnecessary, illogical third shot that went against all the evidence. Or how it can be linked to a shotgun missing from the collection. Not to mention whether, or not, the gunroom was locked from the inside. She knows that if "something happens that's illogical in the known circumstances" then "there have to be different circumstances in which it is logical," but this case is not going to be purely an intellectual exercise.

Clare is released early, out on a license, returned to her home when Philipa and Oliver were there, which made for an awkward reunion, but Philipa quickly realizes she's dealing with "quite a personality." She needs to break down the walls of lies and false fronts Clare had erected all around to get to the truth of those three mysterious shotgun blasts six years ago. Something that's easier said than done. Harris was despised in the district and Clare received a hero's homecoming complete with a village fête on the estate, but her first day back ends with another murder!

As stated as above, A Shot at Nothing is Ormerod's clearest, most consistently plotted and written detective novel with a lot to recommend to connoisseurs of the traditional, puzzle-oriented detective story, but there are one or two things that need a little nitpicking – mostly concerning the clash of the old and new school of crime-and detective fiction. Philipa and Oliver are a far cry from the bantering, lighthearted mystery solving couple found in Delano Ames, Kelley Roos and the Lockridges, but their relationship tensions and troubles were actually tied, or relevant, to the plot. So it didn't bother me too much. However, their characterization and Oliver's personal involvement showed Ormerod tried to frame the story as a modern crime novel/quasi-police procedural. I think this took away a little from an otherwise solid detective novel with some ingenious and inspired plotting.

The solution to the impossible shooting is at it's core an elaborate reworking of a locked room-trick vintage mystery readers have seen before, but it was very well done and expanded with all the confusing and complications surrounding the various shots. Solution to that third, unnecessary shot was a clever touch and gleamed with the ingenuity, but not as much as the unexpected and surprising truth behind the second murder. The original motive behind this murder elevated the whole story to something worthy of the great mystery writers of the past. I can easily imagine Brian Flynn pulling a stunt like this and made up for some minor smudges on the plot. Such as the vague and obscure clue to the motive for the first murder or not treating it as a locked room murder until very late in the story.

But when you take A Shot at Nothing as a whole, it's only true flaw is that it was published in 1993 and not 1933 or 1943, because it would likely have been better and more fondly remembered by locked room readers and classic mystery fans. A highlight of an otherwise meager decade for good, old-fashioned detective fiction.

On a final, related note: A Shot at Nothing has convinced to return to Ormerod before too long and see what he did with his other locked room and impossible crime novel, which all have intriguing sounding premises. A man is shot and killed in A Spoonful of Luger (1975), but the gun was locked in a box and the victim had swallowed the key. One Deathless Hour (1981) has two murders, miles apart at the end of an hour's drive, but carried out with the same gun and within minutes of each other. And Hope to Die (1995) tackles the classic murder in a locked library scenario. There possibly more of them hidden among his various series and standalone novels. I'll find them, if they're out there. To be continued...

The Penny Murders (1979) by Lionel Black

Dudley Barker was a British journalist and literary agent, who turned to fiction, becoming a full-time writer in the 1960s and wrote seventeen crime, detective and spy novels over the next twenty years – all published as by "Lionel Black." One of his books is listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), but, believe it or not, the impossible crime element is not what attracted my attention. Not entirely, anyway.

The Penny Murders (1979) is the fifth of seven novels in the Kate and Henry Theobold series, a modern interpretation of the husband-and-wife detective teams of Frances Crane, Kelley Roos and the Lockridges, which takes place in the world of rare coin collectors. Everything I read about The Penny Murders suggested it was an English precursor to the very distinctive locked room mysteries penned by Herbert Resnicow in the 1980s. And my impression was pretty much on the money!

Kate Theobold is a nosy reporter for a London newspaper, the Daily Post, while her husband is barrister and a humble collector with a "coin cabinet he coos over." So when a coin collection comes up for auction, one of the biggest in over fifty years, Kate decides to cover it for her newspaper and takes along her husband to watch how a tray of old coins is sold for "twelve thousand smackers" – followed by a bidding war over a Charles I Oxford crown. Henry identifies the bidders as Cornelius Ball, one of the best-known coin collectors in United States, who is going at it with a with a well-known London dealer, Harvey Foskett. Henry suspects Foskett bidding on behalf of Ball's long-time rival, Miles Cabral. A millionaire who made his pile during the newspaper takeover games of the '60s and survived the crash in the '70s.

Cabral is reputed to have one of the finest collection of coins in England and particular a so-called 'small change' collection ("Athenian fractions of the obol, the first English pennies, rare United States dimes, that sort of thing"). And they have been at each other hammer-and-tong for years.

So, when Kate learns Henry's father is an old acquaintance of Cabral, she asks Henry to introduce her to him and they get invited to his house for drinks at six o'clock, but they arrive at a silent and locked house! Kate decides to enter the home through the unlocked garage door, assuming Cabral has fallen ill, but, when she goes into the coin-room, she finds his body sprawled on the floor – a gunshot wound to head and a gun lying nearby. The house has "one of the most elaborate and effective burglar alarms in London," which got triggered when Kate opened the garage door, immediately summoning the police when the alarm goes off.

Cabral died in "the best-locked house in London," locked electronically with the keys in the corpse's pocket, which can only mean he died by his own hands. Nobody else could have entered, or left, the premises without setting off the alarm system. However, Kate is convinced he had been murdered and launches a journalistic investigation with Henry helping out in the background.

The main focus of the investigation is the coin collection and Henry, who examined the collection, noticed Cabral had left open "a few very optimistic spaces" in his cabinets that even he can never seriously have expected to fill. A spot had been reserved for an Edward VIII twelve-sided three penny piece and two placed for the 1933 and 1954 English pennies. The 1954 penny is the rarest coin of them all and the possible existence of a second specimen is a central plot-thread of the story.

Black's The Penny Murders is not solely concerned with the tug-of-war between two collectors with deep pockets, but there are also the various plots, and counter plots, between the characters and victim – such as the battle with his ex-wive and her soon-to-be husband. They both have enough pull, or incriminating material, at their disposal to destroy each other. And there are some other possibilities to consider. Who's threatening Kate to stop writing articles on Cabral and why? Does it have any connection with the Lebanese silversmith who's always lurking in the background? And did Cabral help himself to some rare coins from the collection of his former mistress's dead uncle? And does it give the girl, or her boyfriend, a motive for murder?

Whoever pulled the trigger, the problem that has to be solved before the murderer can be apprehended is figuring out how this person entered, and left, the house that was equipped with a sensitive, high-tech burglar alarm. This is where the story becomes a little frustrating and difficult to explain.

You see, Black found a way to break an unwritten, but cast-iron, rule of the locked room mystery, a really big no-no, without actually breaking it. Something you'll probably never stumble to. Just to give you an idea, imagine a locked room with the murderer exiting through a secret passage, but the passage was created by the murderer when he was locked inside with the victim – somehow finding a way to cover the passageway behind him. This is the kind of locked room-trick Black cooked up here, but slightly more ingenious and frustrating. A solution that left me torn whether to applaud the infernal cheek of it or toss the book across the room in disgust.

Anyway, the solution to the locked house did give the story a much needed punch in the end, because the who-and why were either a letdown (who) or obvious (why), but the how certainly made it memorable. It successfully pulled the wool over my eyes. I had reasons to believe that the solution to the electronically locked house was a modern redressing of an age-old trick, which is why I suspected a completely innocent person. And than the explanation revealed something else all together. Sometimes, I'm just a really shitty armchair detective.

All in all, Black's The Penny Murders is an enjoyable mystery novel with an interesting background milieu of numismatics and coin lore, but the overall solution isn't perfect or particularly exciting. So I can only really recommend it to fanatical locked room readers on account of the bold solution, because it would probably generate some discussion among fans.

Dead Weight (1946) by Addison Simmons

Addison Simmons was an American writers described by our resident genre-historian, Curt Evans, as "a prolific professional writer of both short stories and radio plays" who produced two detective novels, Death on the Campus (1935) and Dead Weight (1946), which had been withering away in obscurity – until Coachwhip Publications decided to reissue them in 2018. And, as to be expected, Evans penned an excellent introduction to those brand new editions.

Years ago, I came across a short reference to Dead Weight in The Anthony Boucher Chronicles: Reviews and Commentary, 1942-47 (2009), praising the book as a small town mystery with "quite a bit of ingenuity," which earned it a notation on my wishlist.

Needless to say, I was glad to see this little-known novel returning to print, but the due to the deluge of reprints, translations and my crippling impossible crime addiction, it took me more than a year to get to it. So my only regret is that I didn't read it sooner. What an enjoyable and interesting little piece of detective fiction!

Dead Weight centers on the creators of "a nice quiet little radio serial," Ed MacIntyre and Walt Tuttle, who formed "a perfect combination" with Walt cobbling together the plots and Ed writing the dialogue, but Home Town became "the top ranking serial on the air" – playing havoc on Ed's digestive system and nerves. For years, Ed and Walt have been battling their sponsor, Slade Lattimer, who's "one of the wealthiest men in the country" with the habit of treating his employees as stooges who have "to be beaten into line." And every single day, for two years, Lattimer interfered with the scrips and direction of the show. So when an opportunity presented itself to get out, Ed and Walt eagerly grabbed it.

Walt returned to his old home town, Hamsted, where he bought a drug story that came with two full-time registered pharmacists, a store manager and a girl at the soda fountain. Only thing they have to do is learn how to sell the patent medicines, candy and hardware, which will land them a comfy 75 bucks a week!

Shortly after they arrived, Ed discovers Walt's slumped body in one of the ice cream booths at the pharmacy, clutching a torn piece of paper, with an overturned glass of strawberry soda next to him. Someone had shot him! Curiously, on the night of the murder, there were several people from their Chicago past in town. One of them was their old radio-executive, Harry Leibowitz, but also the hotblooded, short-tempered daughter of their former sponsor, Sandra Lattimer, who's passionately in love with Walt and nearly killed him back in Chicago – when she confronted him with a loaded gun. There are also potential suspects closer to home who warrant some consideration. Such as the strawberry soda guzzling village idiot, "Dodo," who's holding something back and the "tight and bitter" Forsythe family. Years ago, 19-year-old Calla Forsythe was murdered and her body dumped in Hamsted Wood, but the murderer was never caught and Ed discovers Walt used the case as a story-line in Home Town.

So, together with his wife, Binnie, Ed decides to get to the bottom of this business, but that's easier said than done when you're dealing with a missing dying message, lying witnesses, hostile suspects and a growing bodycount.

There aren't any references in Dead Weight to other mystery writers, or detective characters, but the plotting and writing suggests Simmons admired Ellery Queen and Craig Rice. Dead Weight has the type of characters and background recalling Queen's Hollywood and Wrightsville novels, but, as Evans described it, "baroque in plot" reminiscent of the earlier, more puzzle-driven, Queen novels. I think the presence of a dying message was the clearest evidence Simmons aligned himself with Queen, but Dead Weight also has a dreamy, slightly surrealistic quality. Ed has some very strange dreams, "like Alice Through the Looking Glass," which actually help him get closer to the solution. Something that reminded me of the often dreamlike detective stories by Rice. Another mystery writer who also greatly admired Queen.

But how well was this Queen-Rice style detective executed in the hands of Simmons? As usually, Anthony Boucher was right when he wrote that Dead Weight has plenty of ingenuity, but this doesn't come into play until the final quarter of the book when the dying message turns up and an alibi-trick came into play – skillfully blindsiding this unsuspecting armchair detective. So I was very pleased with how the story and plot developed and turned out.

Dead Weight is not a shimmering, long-lost classic of the Golden Age detective story, but it's a tremendously enjoyable, well written and handily plotted novel with good ideas, memorable scenes and served with a slice of small town Americana. A fine example of "the entertaining legacy" left behind by those "young detective fiction enthusiasts of eighty and ninety years ago." Recommended, especially if you have a special fondness for the classic American detective stories of writers like Queen and Rice.

Demons' Moon (1951) by Colin Robertson

I promised in my review of Jerry Coleman's Action Comics story, "The Super-Key to Fort Superman" (1958), that I would done with trimming down my stack of newly acquired locked room mystery and impossible crime novels by the end of the month – bringing back a little variety to the blog. This post marks the end of the deluge of locked room and impossible crime reviews that have flooded this place since February.

I've already lined up some non-impossible crime novels by Christopher Bush, Moray Dalton and E.R. Punshon, but my to-be-read pile and wishlist remain infested with locked room stories. So expect that variety to be heavily seasoned with miraculous murders and insoluble problems. But for now, I bring you a curiosity that has been hermetically sealed in obscurity for nearly seven decades.

Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) has pages filled with entries of obscure, long out-of-print titles, oddities and some apparent anomalies.

You have genuine rarities such as Eric Aldhouse's The Crime at the Quay Inn (1934), B.C. Black's The Draughtsman's Pen (1948), Nigel Brent's The Leopard Died Too (1957) and Sinclair Gluck's intriguing, somewhat familiar, sounding Sea Shroud (1934) in which a murder is committed in a locked and bolted room with barred windows – one window has "a hole from a rifle shot" in it. When it comes to the oddities, you have the previously mentioned "The Super-Key to Fort Superman" and Stephan M. Arleaux's plagiarized edition (The Locked Study Murder, 2017) of A.A. Milne's The Red House Mystery (1922). There's even some odd praise for David Louis Marsh's Dead Box (2004), an atrocity on the level of the living conditions in the trenches of the First World War, but Skupin admitted "the solution is a terrible letdown." So there's that. And there were a couple of entries that looked anomalous.

Skupin spotlighted Maisie Birmingham's The Mountain by Night (1997) in his introduction as a 1990s locked room novel "worthy of note" and was published only twenty-three years ago, but there are less than a dozen references to it on the internet. No copies! Something tells me The Mountain by Night was privately published, because she published her three previous mysteries in the 1970s and Amazon gives "M.P. Birmingham" as the publisher of The Mountain by Night – explaining the lack of copies. So perhaps an interesting title for John Pugmire, of Locked Room International, to reprint in the future as a companion for Derek Smith's Come to Paddington Fair (1997). Esther Fonseca's The Thirteenth Bed in the Ballroom (1937) is another weird one, reportedly reprinted in 2012, but only found a short review and have to assume the 2012 edition belonged to another entry. Christopher Fowler has a number of entries on the opposite page.

Lastly, we have the subject of today's rambling review. A locked room mystery novel from the early 1950s that, at first, didn't appear to exist at all!

Entry #2955 in Locked Room Murders: Supplement is Colin Robertson's Demon's Roost, published by Forge in 2004, but this time the internet came up with zero results. The book was not mentioned, or listed, anywhere on the internet and that would have made for a record-setting death plunge into obscurity, but noticed that Demon's Roost was the last entry on page 160 and Madeleine Robins' Petty Treason (2004) was the first title listed on the next page. Yes, it was published by Forge. So that cleared up that problem, but what about the title? Some detective work brought me to the profile page of a prolific, British mystery novelist, Colin Robertson, who wrote detective, pulp and thriller novels under several different names – one of the novels published under his own name is titled Demons' Moon (1951). I focused on that title and discovered that the names of the detectives listed in Locked Room Murders: Supplement were the same as in Demons' Moon. Never underestimate the tenacity and laser-focused autism of a rabid fanboy! :)

So, after all that detective work, I wanted to know what the book was about and the description of the impossibility, "a dead man seen in a room through the keyhole" and "only moments later the body is gone," had me intrigued. What I found was a little out of the ordinary for a locked room mystery.

Demons' Moon begins with a sickly, middle-aged spinster, Rowena Penhaven, who lost her domineering mother six months ago and now lives all alone behind "the grey, moss-covered walls of the Penhaven estate." Beechwood Close even has the family crypt cozily standing on its uninviting, fenced-in grounds. Rowena was "bound hand and foot" to "her tartar of a mother" as an unpaid servant, but the death of Mrs. Penhaven snapped the chains of her mind and she began to suffer from lapses of memory and hallucinations – seeing ghosts, snakes and the Thing. Every so often, the key to her mother's old bedroom goes missing and when she looks through the key-hole, the Thing is always there. A "macabre tableau" of a man lying on a bloodstained carpet with "a hideous, gaping wound in the back of his head" and "an ugly stain" on the front of his shirt. Scene is always the same!

Eventually, the key is returned and when Rowena goes into the bedroom, the dead man has "vanished without leaving a trace." Only to reappear in the locked bedroom days, or weeks, later. And this has been going on for months!

So, during one of her lucid moments, Rowena decides to call in outside help and picked a detective agency from the telephone directory, but the detective who answered the call, David MacLeod, found a crazy woman coming out of the family crypt. Rowena is rambling about a ghost "wearing a shroud" and "things in the house." But there's no ghost. No blood. No body in the bedroom. MacLeod promises to come back the next day, but reads in the morning newspaper that the body of Rowena Penhaven had been pulled from a small stream running through the estate. She had died shortly after he had left her behind!

Unfortunately, he needs a client before he can make himself "a thorough nuisance" without risking his license and one unexpectedly comes to him with a hundred a week paycheck. Sadie MacLeod soon joins her husband on his investigation.

You can't deny Demons' Moon has a solid premise. A tale of domestic suspense, in the style of Anthony Gilbert, with a strong, Gothic flavor and the problem of the ghostly scenes in the locked bedroom, but the second and third act of the story convinced me Robertson had no idea where the story would end when he penned the opening chapters – making it up as he went along. Second part of the story is pure, pulp-style dime thriller with a scheming villain who keeps cobra's as pets and idiotically wastes his time with drugging or playing games with MacLeod. Just not as good or engaging as the pulp detective/thriller yarns by, oh let's say, Gerald Verner (e.g. Terror Tower, 1935). Robertson than attempted to walk back on this second act with a horrendously botched play on the least-likely-suspect gambit, but the twist only pulled the rug from under the plot and the whole story fell flat on its face. So not a pretty ending to a story that began so promising!

Honestly, the only good things I can say about Demons' Moon is the original, strangely compelling way in which MacLeod was brought into the case and Robertson updated a locked room-trick that was famously used in a short story from the 1930s. Sadly, the problem of the locked room is not given any thought until Chapter XXIV when briefly a number of possibilities are considered and eliminated ("...and can't believe that a dummy was used either"). And they accidentally stumble across the solution in Chapter XXVI. You say about John Russell Fearn what you want, but he would have wrested a good pulp story out of this locked room-trick. A detective story that would have given the reader a hint of the possibilities of this new marvel.

So, yeah, Demons' Moon is a good example why some novels and writers are forgotten today, but, every once in a while, you have to read one to appreciate the truly talented and entertaining mystery writers all over again.