The Other Bullet (1930) by Nancy Barr Mavity

Nancy Barr Mavity was an American biographer, reviewer and journalist, who wrote for such publications as The San Francisco Chronicle, Oakland Tribune and Sunset Magazine, but between 1929 and 1933 she produced six detective novels about her series-character, Peter Piper – an ace reporter for the Herald. A final, non-series, mystery appeared in 1937.

I was recently reminded that one of her detective novels, The Other Bullet (1930), was listed by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991) and the book happened to be on my shelves. I left it there to collect dust after my disappointing 2012 read of Mavity's The Case of the Silver Sandals (1930), but that was nearly six years ago and the time had come to give her work a second look. However, Adey had incorrectly labeled this book as an impossible crime story. So the string of non-impossible crime reviews continues for now.

The Other Bullet is set in the Californian village of Hangtown in the Sierra foothills where Peter and Barbara Piper are spending their holiday panning an exhausted stream for its last crumbs of gold, but a "tragedy that had crushed in upon them" put a halt to their holiday fun – beginning when an out-of-breath housekeeper, Mrs. Coak, announces that a man had been shot at the ranch-house office. Don Mortison had been hired by Max Everett, a construction engineer, to manage the ranch when he's away to work on an irrigation dam project. This meant he was away from home most of the time and left his urban wife, Aline, behind in Hangtown like an Englishman in the jungle.

So, naturally, Aline felt attracted to the well-read, equally out-of-place ranch-hand and they got involved with one another, but a witness claims he saw Aline shooting her loves. She does not even deny that she killed Mortison. However, Aline claims she only shot Mortison once. Not twice.

On a side-note, the aspect that earned The Other Bullet its spot in Adey's Locked Room Murders is the early onset of rigor mortis shortly after Mortison was shot. So I expected trickery where the time of death was concerned or perhaps even something along the lines of the rapidly-decaying body from Hake Talbot's The Hangman's Handyman (1942), but the problem of early rigor mortis turned out to have simple, natural explanation – which came to light during the postmortem examination. I've no idea why Adey included it in Locked Room Murders.

Anyway, there are a number of potential suspects and one of them was criminally underused. Hermann Schnitzler is a retired farmer from Pennsylvania and he's convinced that Mortison had hexed him, preventing his crops from growing, which is a superstition that was once rife in Pennsylvania and was used in Alexander William's The Hex Murder (1935).

Aline Everett is put on trial for Mortison's murder and the courtroom scenes constitute the best parts of the story. One scene in particular was very memorable. As an outsider, Aline was not very popular with the people of Hangtown and she came to court dressed like "an advertisement out of Vanity Fair" flourishing a "cigarette-holder at the jury the minute court adjourned" – an action that was akin to "a red rag to a bull." So her own lawyer felt compelled to wrench the cigarette-holder from her hand and "grind it under his heel on the courtroom floor." A great scene! Sadly, the story went rapidly down hill after Aline was acquitted of murdering Mortison.

The first half is undoubtedly the best part of the book, but there were also hints in this portion that the plotting was as shoddy as the police work.

Mortison had two bullet-holes in him: a fatal shot in his neck and a bullet in his lung, which was fired after he had already been shot and killed. This should have come to light during the postmortem examination and should have prevented Aline from going to trial. This was shoddy plotting, to say the least.

The Other Bullet is best described as a tale of two bullets with the victim as the only link between the two stories. So, once the trial is over, Piper tries to figure out who really shot Mortison and follows a trail of clues that includes a mutilated photograph, a signet ring and an 11-year-old murder case. The plot of the second story struck me as an imitation of some of the Sherlock Holmes novels (e.g. The Sign of Four, 1890), but an imitation that was as pale and poorly done as Joseph Bowen's The Man Without a Head (1933) – only difference between the two is that Mavity was better writer than Bowen. You should not expect too much from the eventual solution, which was hardly fair and the only surprise is that neither of shooters turned out to be legally murderers.

My impression is that Mavity constantly wanted two different things at the same time, but failed to deliver on any of them. The story of the first bullet had potential, but ended with a disappointing, anti-climatic acquittal and the second bullet-story simply harked back to the works of Conan Doyle. I think this part was not half as interesting as the first leg of the story. Another example is the forensic aspect of the plot. Mavity made a point of ballistics and the early onset of rigor mortis, but completely ignored that an autopsy would have revealed that Aline's bullet was not the fatal one.

If you look to whom Mavity dedicated the book (Edward Oscar Heinrich, scientific crime analysis), I suspect she willfully ignored the postmortem gunshot wound, because she wanted to write those courtroom scenes.

So, as said, my impression of The Other Bullet is that Mavity wanted to have her cake and eat it to. Unfortunately, this resulted in a mess of a detective story that began promising, but ended up frustrating and annoying me to no end. I can't really recommend this book to anyone. I'll probably abandon this series altogether unless someone can give me a recommendation with an iron-clad guarantee that the plot can pass the muster.

Well, I try to dig up something good for my next post to make up for this. Probably a good, old-fashioned locked room mystery. So stay tuned!

The Wicked Witch is Dead!

Nancy Barr Mavity's The Case of the Missing Sandals (1930) was one of two novels that I was able to procure from this now forgotten mystery novelist, which served as my introduction to her series detective, journalist Peter Piper, who has more than just a professional interest in the murder of the leader of a peculiar cult – who settled down in the unfrequented hills of San Francisco.

Peter Piper is sketched as a preposterously tall man with a long, ugly, intelligent face and a black head of hair that should've been planted in a barber's chair, but his eyes, imprisoned behind thick glasses, are illuminated by an incorrigible enthusiasm. He's also in possession of a brain that constantly processes and analysis information, which makes him perfect as both a journalist and as a detective. As a matter of fact, Piper functions through out the story as both journalist and private investigator, forcing him to make decision on what knowledge to share and with whom – as well as keeping rival journalists at bay. I think this dual conflict between jobs was the most interesting aspect of his character and gave some justification to his actions (like stowing away the prime suspect from the police).

When the story opens, Piper is in the company of Hubert Graham, District Attorney, discussing one of their recent success stories, when Graham tells him of a man whose wife gave away their money to a woman going by the name of Luna – a cult of personality with her own following. However, they have no grounds to launch an investigation and Graham hopes that Piper finds something that can be of mutual use, but the body of Luna a day after his first, tentative steps in this case was not part of the plan.

Unfortunately, the next quarter of the book consists of hounding the main suspect, a young man named Earl Vincent, to whom all the clues point. This took away from a potentially interesting and eerie setting (a cult of witches on a desolate hill) with an intriguing murder (stabbing and shooting of a witch laid out over a bench and the titular sandals missing, etc.) that was not looked at until the race for Earl Vincent was run. Ironically, all that running around did end up being the most exciting and interesting part of the book and was not devoid of merit, which included a semi-impossible disappearance from a ship – but we've seen tricks like that one before.

More interesting was Piper pleading/threatening Graham not to expose Vincent to a third-degree, which he was convinced would break the spirit of the kind-hearted, but frightened boy, even if turns out that he did kill Luna in a rage. I got the impression from the story that third-degreeing a confession out of a suspect was still a standard practice at the time, but Anthony Abbot's The Murder of Geraldine Foster (1930; same year as Missing Sandals!) noted that a third-degree confession was already inadmissible in court by that time – not that Commissioner Thatcher Colt let the law stop him from experimenting on a suspect. And I suppose the acceptability of a third-degree still differed from state-to-state in the early 1930s.  

Piper's follow up investigation only went to show indubitably that the story had run its course, as one interview followed another, reminiscent of some of Ngaio Marsh's lesser efforts, but continued to lumber on undisturbed for another 170+ pages – and the eventual revelation does not make up for lost time. There are some interesting bits and pieces in this last portion of the story, like the portrayal of the old blind gatekeeper, Jackson, who's dismissed by the police as a superstitious illiterate, but Piper sees in him a person of towering goodness who sincerely believes in the forces of good and evil intervening in every day life and sets out to out-wit the Prince of Darkness himself, but as a detective story, this one leaves a lot to be desired.

I have read some encouraging comments about Mavity and have the feeling that I should've started off with The Other Bullet (1930), which appears to have been her most popular book, but I'll safe that one for next month.

Well, that's another disappointing read that churned out a mediocre review.